The Hysteria: Book 4, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (10 page)

***

In my guest room I turned on the local news for some background noise. The blonde from a box reporter was talking about several attacks in town, three people had been rushed to the hospital, one was in critical condition.

Pater’s words struck me. We had twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours until a major event if his predictive modeling was accurate and our working hypothesis turned out to be correct.

I called Manetti.

“I heard it all. That family is cracked,” she said. “No wonder they hired you.”

She hadn’t heard it all, just the conversation I had with Turner. I’d switched the transmitter off after that. Pater hadn’t shared everything with me so I wasn’t sharing everything with him.

I was adopting the federal government model.

“You want to know how we’re going to find Megan?” I said.

“I think I’ve asked you that already.”

“Melanie is exhibiting the same symptoms. We’re just going to follow her.”

“That’s your plan.”

“Elegant in its simplicity.”

“We would have thought of that had we known about her symptoms.”

“I didn’t claim to be a genius. I just played the only card I had to get out of the vomitorium. You would have done the same thing.”

“Let’s get another thing straight.
We’re
not following her.
We’re
not a team no matter what Pater says.”

“You’re absolutely right, actually. Because you’re going to follow her.”

She laughed incredulously. “This gets better and better. What exactly are you doing while I’m doing all the work?”

“Run down the names on that list you found on Witherspoon’s computer.”

“You’re not in charge here—”

“It’s not about me being in charge, Manetti. Melanie knows who I am, what I look like. She doesn’t know you. Ergo, you should be the one to follow her.”

She couldn’t argue with my logic but she didn’t like it either. “I’ll run it by Pater.”

“Good. You do that.”             

I hung up and finally cracked my laptop. The thing was a dinosaur—already six months old. Turner had wireless so I punched in the password.

I searched the names on Witherspoon’s list. Three of them had graduated high school with Megan, four more were around her age, one was a teacher, another was a lawyer her father’s age. I pegged him as a friend of the family.

The last one was the oddity. Fifty-five year old widow by the name of Dorothy Young. Maybe another friend of the family but I didn’t see any obvious connections to the Turners. She had endured two tragedies. Her son had accidentally killed himself while playing with her husband’s hand gun. Two years later, her husband had taken his own life. Since then she’d become a staunch anti-gun proponent, leading the local political rallies against the Second Amendment.

I called Manetti. Riehl answered her phone.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you again tonight.”

“Feeling’s mutual. What can you tell me about the list of names?” I asked.

“All known friends and associates except one.”             

“Dorothy Young?”

“Did you ask old man Turner about Dorothy? I hope not.”

His saying
old man
reminded me of the youth of Turner’s online picture compared to the man in the flesh I knew. It made me think about Chester Leonard too, and how he’d seemed to age exponentially compared to his online portrait. And then it made me think of Melanie, and how she looked older than her twenty-three years.

“I’m smarter than that.”

“So you can use Google.”

I’d been hoping Riehl would treat me differently than Manetti. But apparently I was going to get it coming and going from this team.

“You wanna go see her first thing?”

“You and me?”

“Yeah, it’ll be ebony and ivory.”

“Funny.” He gave me her address. “Meet you there.”

“What were you up to tonight?”

“Let’s meet at 9.”

“Eamon still in his little room?”

“He’s watching you right now, actually.”

I thought he was lying. But an iceberg slid down my spine and I couldn’t help but look around the room, as if that would help.

I held up my middle finger. “Ask him what I’m doing now.”

Riehl chuckled. “See you tomorrow.”

“I’ll be the good-looking Irish dude in the corvette.”

At 4:30 in the morning somebody knocked on my door. I was having a dry dream about a girl named Ana, whom I’d met not so long ago on a big job in northeastern Pennsylvania. She’d been interested in romance but I’d nobly turned her down because I was ten years her senior and she was a sweet, innocent young woman who didn’t need to deal with all my problems immediately after getting out of a bad relationship with a depressed deadbeat loser. It was the right call, but that didn’t mean I didn’t regret making it. I still thought of her often.

Ana and I were walking hand-in-hand along an icy lake shore, not talking but communicating plenty. She gave me a funny look at the sound of the knocking, like she couldn’t figure it out either. The dream world dissolved and transformed into my guest room at Turner’s place.

It was dark, just some silvery moonlight coming in through the window and hitting the floor in front of the TV.

I rolled out of bed and went to the door.

The somebody knocking was Mia, youngest of the three Turner girls.

“Melanie snuck into my room earlier.”

I was still half-asleep. “When?”

I didn’t want her to come in. If Turner found her in here with me, not only would I not get paid. I might get dead.

But she pushed past me and shut the door quietly. “Earlier this afternoon I think.”

Mia was twenty but looked fifteen. She didn’t have her father’s height like her sisters. She was dressed like she was going hunting in camo pants and a form-fitting black athletic shirt.

“How do you know?” I found my jeans and pulled them on. She was unfazed by seeing me in just my boxers. I keep in pretty good shape. Women used to swoon. She didn’t. It made me feel old, not for the first time.

She spoke in a whisper. “I set up a cam.”

“What was she doing?”

“Just…looking around.”

“For what?”

She ignored the last question and went to the window to peer out, almost like she was expecting to see someone wandering the grounds.

“What was she looking for, Mia?”

Mia watched out the window for a moment before answering. “I don’t know why I trust you.”

“Is Megan coming?” I said.

She didn’t answer. Translation: yes.

“When is she getting here?”

Her right hand went behind her back. She tried to make the move look casual but she was no trained magician. Either she had a gun or a blade. Those seemed to be the only two options in this crazy fucking town. She was young, petite, probably not trained. But anybody with a weapon can be dangerous.

Especially when you’re not armed.

“Mia, I’m here to help.”

“Then don’t try to find Megan.”

“Why?”

She didn’t answer.

“Are you fainting too? Just like your sister?”

“Like
Megan
. Yes.”

There was something in the way she said it. “But not like Melanie?”

“Melanie isn’t fainting.”             

I filed that away and it jived with my recollection. When I’d met Melanie in the foyer, I’d thought she was play-acting. “Your pop is paying me but I’m really working for Megan. I want to help her.”

“She went somewhere to be safe.”

“She told you that?”

Mia nodded. Her hand was still behind her back.

“What else did she tell you?”

She did something weird. Her body twitched and she stamped her foot twice. It wasn’t loud enough to wake anybody.

“She told me to watch out.”

“For who?”

“For
them
.”

She was quick. Really quick. Maybe she’d played sports in high school, or college.

But she had to get into the kill zone before delivering the blow. I just had to block her attack.

I grabbed her hand and put a foot behind me for leverage. She was quick but slight. I maybe had a hundred pounds on her. I could have snapped her wrist but figured that wouldn’t endear me to the man writing my checks.

A blue arc of electricity flashed inches from my wrist. She was holding what I took to be a taser. I didn’t know much about tasers but I’d always thought they fired some kind of projectile. Maybe not this one.

We stayed like that a moment till she let go of the trigger and the blue arc vanished.

“Give me that thing and sit down. I want to help you, Mia. In any way I can.”

The tension went out of her body and I took the taser out of her hand.

She said, “It’s okay. We can trust him.”

For a split second I thought she’d gone batty and was talking to herself. But then with that undefined sixth sense we all have, I realized we weren’t alone.

Before I whirled something bit into my neck and sent a current through my body. Somebody else with a taser. The floor didn’t give when I hit it. I couldn’t focus on anything but I sensed Mia stepping over my body and slipping out the bedroom door.

Someone else loomed over me. She crouched so our faces were a yard apart. She had brown, sun-bitten hair. Taser in hand, ready. Her eyes were fierce, but not crazy.

“Don’t try to find us,” Megan Turner said.

Then I blacked out.

It was still early when I came to, around five. I didn’t know it then but I was in for the most brutal, violent, life-changing twenty-four hours of my life.

I put on fresh jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers. I had an idea I’d be running around all day. It turned out later to be a good decision. I could have done with a shower but I had more important things to do and Megan’s showing up last night to spirit Mia away all but confirmed Pater’s predictive modeling for me.

A major event was right around the corner. This was way bigger than the Turners, though all I still cared about was Megan. But either way I needed to get out ahead of it.

I tiptoed through the house and went in Megan’s room. It looked the same. I did a quick spot check but nothing looked like it had been disturbed. Megan’s roller skates box had been put away.

I grabbed her laptop and put it in the corvette out of sight. Pater and company had admittedly impressive tech but far as I knew there was no way to search a computer’s history remotely unless Megan had been working on a secure shared server. It was worth looking at.

I went back into the house and made a pit stop in Turner’s study before finding Strongbow, exactly where I knew he would be, exercising in the garage.

“You’re up early,” he said.

He was doing sprint intervals on Turner’s probably ten thousand dollar treadmill. His shirt dripped with sweat. He’d been turning the wheel for forty minutes.

The guy was in Olympic shape.

“I need to see the video from last night.”

“What video?”

“All filthy rich people have CC feeds set up in their mansions.”

He dialed the treadmill down to what was a jog for him, and what would have been a sprint for me, if there was a bear chasing me. He wasn’t breathing that heavily for just having run his ass off for forty minutes. “Why do you need to see it?”

He was just doing his job but so was I. “Because I said so.”

“I’ll have to ask Mr. Turner.”             

“You’ll have to show me the video after you ask him anyway.”

Pissed off, Strongbow hit the STOP button on the mill and hopped off. He grabbed a towel and started mopping his face. “I’m not waking him up to ask. You can wait.”

“Megan was here last night.”

He stopped toweling, his mouth open.

“I’m just trying to find his girl,” I said.

He closed his mouth and got a determined look on his face. “Come on.”

I followed him back into the house, down a couple halls, to a tiny, almost hidden door carved into an unsuspecting wall. He pulled down his t-shirt at the neck to reveal a keychain. He took it off and fished through the keys till he found the one he wanted.

Without a word he unlocked the door. It was a tiny room with a long table holding three monitors on one side and a fridge and open door to a half bathroom on the other side. The monitors were cycling through the CC feeds that appeared to run throughout the house.

“What time?” Strongbow sat in front of the far monitor and I took a seat next to him.

“Less than an hour ago.” I held back the part about Mia.

Strongbow went to work on a keyboard. The three screens jumped and new images popped up. The time display on the screen read 04:00:00. Strongbow set the feed to play at quadruple-time.

“The cams are motion-sensored. They’ll pick her up. If she was here,” Strongbow said.

“She was here.” I pulled my shirt down at the back of my neck to show him the electrical burns.

“Did you black out?” His voice was clinical.

“Yeah.”

“Pussy.”

I put a rain-check on my bitch slap because I needed intel from him. Marine or no, he’d hear about it later.

“I’m just kidding,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I mean it.” His eyes darted from screen-to-screen as the fast-forward spooled. “Some of those tasers are strong enough to put down wild animals.”

“There!”

He paused the feeds. Megan Turner was just a dark smudge in a hallway captured on the top-right of the middle monitor. Strongbow slow-played the feed and she came down the hallway in a slow-mo hurry and in a crouch. She was holding a gun in one hand and flashlight in the other.

We lost her in the one screen and it was another ten seconds before she popped up in another.

“She knows where the cams are,” I said.             

“Doesn’t matter. You can’t beat them. There’s too many and they’re motion-sensored and the pattern is too random.”

On another job, a client had figured out how to beat a similar setup and walk through his place undetected. Megan Turner was a lot smarter than that knucklehead and understood tech better having worked with Pater.

But I kept that to myself. “No pattern is too random because it’s impossible to achieve true randomness.”

I’d read that somewhere.

Strongbow was unimpressed. “She’s outside of Mia’s room.”

I put on my poker face as Megan slipped inside Mia’s room, gently closing the door behind her. They were in there for almost five minutes before Mia snuck out, alone, and made her way to my guest room.

Son of a bitch.

Mia had come to my room knowing full well that Megan was already in the house. The charade of looking out the window had just been to get me away from the door and keep me focused on her while Megan approached.

They had been—

“Megan’s coming out now.” Strongbow pointed across the table at the far right monitor as Megan slipped out of Mia’s room.

“She’s following her sister,” I said.

“You didn’t say anything about Mia.”

“I don’t answer to you.”

He hit PAUSE and looked at me. I could tell those eyes had seen horrible things and in that brief moment they actually were windows to his soul. He was a proud and unrepentant warrior, he would always serve his king, and his personal code allowed him to do terrible things in the service of his master. I divined everything I needed to know from him in that fiery cold look and could tell he wouldn’t think twice about gutting me if I crossed Turner.

“You’re here to solve a problem, not be one,” he said.

I leaned forward and got my weight on my toes. “I needed to see this tape as soon as possible. The full debriefing can come later.”

“It better come sooner, rather than later.”

He hit PLAY and we watched as Megan came down the hall to my door. She put her ear against it and waited.

I realized she was waiting for the signal. I remembered Mia in the room now, making an awkward move and tapping the floor with her foot. At the time, I’d thought it a side effect of her illness, the same illness that had apparently taken Megan away.

The same illness that apparently Melanie didn’t have. As Mia had said,
Melanie’s not really fainting
.

“What happened in there?” he asked.

“Megan zapped me.”

He wanted more of the story but I clammed up. Thirty seconds later, two-thirds of the Turner sisters appeared in the hallway. They went back the way they came.

We followed them from screen to screen till finally they disappeared from view altogether.

“How’d they get out?” I said.

Strongbow shook his head. He backed up the feed and darted his eyes from screen-to-screen. But they were nowhere to be seen.

“Megan knew how to get in and out.” I stood.

“Where are you going?”

“To find her.”

He cuffed my arm. He could have broken it, his grip was so strong. “You have some explaining to do.”

“Mia came in. She wasn’t making any sense. Next thing I know, I’m getting juiced from behind.”

“What were you two doing? You were in there for almost two minutes before Megan came in.”

“She was talking. I was trying to make sense of what she was saying. Though she did mention you.”

His eyes narrowed. “What did she say?”             

“That I shouldn’t trust you.”

I jerked my wrist and broke his hold. The move surprised him. It was a trick I’d learned on the playground twenty-five years ago. All you had to do was move in the direction the grip was weakest as quickly as possible.

“Now you know what I know,” I said. “When Turner wakes up, tell him.”

I left Strongbow in front of the computer monitors.

***

I drove to the abandoned office complex where Pater and company had set up shop. Riehl met me outside. He wore a long-sleeved polo over a pair of khakis. He had on those cross-trainers designed to look like dress shoes.

“You’re early.”

“Things have escalated.”

He looked down at what I was holding. “What’s that?”

“Megan’s laptop. You guys need to scrub it. Where’s Manetti?”

“Getting ready to follow Melanie.” He cracked a smile. “She’s not too happy about the assignment.”

“She’ll get over it.” I smiled back at him. “I need to talk to her though.”

“Let’s get inside.”

We got in the elevator and went up to the third floor into the main room where Pater and I had talked yesterday. Eamon’s door was closed. So was the door to the computer room.

“Eddie, you look like you didn’t sleep too well.” Patterson smiled like he knew something.

“Yeah, Megan dropped by for a visit before spiriting her youngest sister away.”

Riehl and Pater met eyes.

I pointed at Riehl. “I gave Riehl Megan’s laptop. You need to scrub it.”

Pater nodded. “Good idea.”

“And I need Manetti to answer her fucking phone for a change.”

Pater folded his arms. “She’s on Melanie right now.”

“That’s what I’m calling her about.”

“What about her?”

“You going to make me say everything twice? You’ll hear when I tell Manetti what she needs to know.”

“You better take it down a notch,” Riehl said. “You’re not in charge here.”

“Yeah, Julius-fucking-Caesar over here is and can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants to let me in or not. Maybe I’ll just knock off, go back to the East Coast. I don’t need this shit.”

“You won’t leave,” Pater said.

“Oh yeah?”

Pater nodded. “Right. You see things through. You have a compulsion to set things right.”

“I’m an ex-convict just looking to get paid.”

“Bullshit,” Pater said. He must not have cursed much. The look on Riehl’s face was priceless.

Pater went on. “If that were the case you would have walked from your last job, after you helped that good-for-nothing redneck get acquitted. But you stuck around and when push came to shove you blasted one of the few good friends you had on this Earth to hell with the man’s own shotgun.”

Pater’s face had gone red. Riehl didn’t know what to do with himself.

Pater’s slippery smile returned. “Now stop acting like you’re a mercenary. You know you’re not, I know you’re not. All this playacting is an insult to my appreciable intelligence.”

I tried taking all that in stride. Normally words didn’t bother me. I’d been called a lot worse in my day, at the playground, at the pub, in prison. Usually words were just banter, exchanged by two guys to fuck with each other as a prelude to something else. They meant nothing.

But they bothered me coming from Pater’s crew. Because I was trying to help these daft federal dipshits.

I forced calm over myself. “Megan doesn’t want to be found.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her words last night after she zapped me. She doesn’t want me to find her. If she’s good, and she must be if she’s with you people, then she knows I’m working with you, or at least suspects. Which means that little injunction applied to your team as well.”

I folded my arms and decided to underscore the point. “She. Doesn’t. Want. To. Be. Found.”

Pater nodded. “I was afraid of that. But it explains a lot.”

“Yeah. It explains why you can’t find her. She’s using your playbook against you.”

“Right.” He took out his phone and speed-dialed. “How goes it?” He listened for ten seconds. I spent that time eyeballing Riehl, letting him know I wasn’t intimidated.

For six-five, two hundred and sixty pounds of solid muscle, he wasn’t that big.

“Good. Stay on her. Now Eddie would like a word. He has some information.” Pater handed me the phone.

“Manetti, where are you?”

I heard the whine of an engine and the whir of high-speed traffic.

“On Melanie. Remember?”

“Where is she heading?”

“Looks like to work.”

“Okay. Stay on her but the equation has changed a bit.”

“I don’t take orders from you but tell me what you know.”

“You know how old man Turner told me she was fainting, just like Megan?”