The Traveler: Book 5, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (25 page)

Eddie refused to go to the hospital and had Christie drive him back to the station.

“I almost saw her,” he said. “I was
this
fucking close.”

“This close to dying,” Christie said.

“I’m fine,” he lied. He was one big ache. His chest felt like it had been opened up and operated on. Each heart beat rattled his skull.

“I should be driving you to the hospital.”

He shook his head no. “We’re getting closer. That’s why the ghost attacked me. And another thing: how did they know where I was?”

Christie frowned. “There are two hotels in this town. So it wouldn’t be difficult.”

Eddie was reminded of Daria’s vision that a cop was involved with the ghost. “You sure it wasn’t somebody on the force?”

She looked over at him. He expected her to react to the accusation that somebody in her department had leaked information. But she kept her cool, like always.

“I doubt it, Eddie. But of course we should consider it.”

One of these days he was going to get a rise out of her.

“So we can rule out Mark and Jon being part of tonight’s attack,” Eddie said. “Your boys had eyes on them.”

She nodded. “Wallace is still out there somewhere, and Engel.”

He asked, “Did you find anything tying Renee to our victims or Tonya?”

Christie shook her head. “Nothing. She called out of work unexpectedly. She told her boyfriend she wanted to get away for a few days. She’s a nurse.”

Healthcare again.

“Does she work at the hospital?”

“I checked that and the answer is no. She worked at a long-term care facility.”

“You mean like a nursing home?”

She nodded. “I was about to check out her prior employment history but then I got the call that you’d almost died.”

“Healthcare,” Eddie said, suddenly back to thinking Tiffany Engel was the ghost. “I need to take a look at Engel’s file from the fraud investigation.”

“Okay.” Christie’s phone rang. “Christie.”

She listened quietly for a moment. Then she hit the brakes and made a U-turn in the middle of the road.

“What’s going on?”

She flipped her phone shut. “Wallace Schubert just popped up on the grid.”

“Where?”

“Rariville Medical Center. Suicide attempt.”

Christie drove them to the hospital but Alexis Schubert flatly refused to talk to her. She would have pressed the issue but Chief Knotts was close to the family. He met them in the waiting area outside of the ICU.

“Overdose,” Knotts said. “He called his ex-wife before he did it. She called us. EMT got out there before it was too late.”

Christie said, “We need to get into his house.”

The chief gave her a stern look. “The DA won’t ask any judge in this county for a warrant right now. You know that. We need something more solid. So what do you have?”

Eddie shared the details of his encounter with the ghost.

“When was that?” Knotts said.

“Almost two hours ago,” Eddie said.

Knotts did some mental math. “Wallace called his wife an hour ago.”

“So not outside the realm of possibility it was him,” Christie said.

“Unlikely,” Knotts said.

Christie wanted to press the issue but knew now wasn’t the time. They didn’t have enough to go on and politically-speaking, nobody in their right mind would want to make the Schubert family look bad.

Christie tried a different tack. “What did Wallace say to his wife?”

“Not much. Basically that he was calling to say goodbye.”

“Can we speak to his ex-wife?” Christie said.

Knotts shook his head. “Harney will. Alexis doesn’t want you coming anywhere near her family.”

Christie hid what she was really thinking:
since when did suspects dictate the course of a police investigation?

Knotts must have read her mind, though. He stared her down and his voice was curt. “Get me something tangible. And I’ll get you your warrant.”

***

Eddie and Christie met Stan and Daria back at the police station. Daria couldn’t sit still. He told her to go home for the night and that he’d call to check in a little later. Before they spent any more time looking at the Schuberts, he needed to know whom she’d seen in her visions.

The Schuberts would be tied up at the hospital for the rest of the night and Eddie didn’t want them to feel like they were being watched. Alexis Schubert was no doubt aching to blame the police for her son’s suicide attempt, as following the mayor’s press conference, the rumor mill had started going about the ghost and most people were saying it was Tonya.

Wallace had a history of depression, like his father, and had lived in a very dark place of late. His sister had been brutally murdered. He’d lost his job and had trouble finding another. Finally, his wife had left him. Three quick strikes and he was out. He had spiraled and had been seeing a therapist. He’d even checked himself into a psychiatric ward three months ago for his depression, where he’d stayed a few days.

Eddie feared this was going to throw a wrench into their investigation and worried that Christie was going to take heat for poking around. And the only reason she had even thought to look at the Schuberts was because he had pointed her in that direction. He felt responsible.

***

Stan gave Eddie the look. “You okay, bro?”

Eddie nodded.

It was after 1:00AM now. They were sitting in the conference room alone, amidst all the police files. Christie was briefing the chief again and working with the detective heading up the Renee Helmke murder.

Eddie was exhausted but felt like he couldn’t go to sleep. The last time he’d almost shut his eyes, the ghost had come after him and truth be told he was scared. He’d never experienced anything like that before. The ghost had peered into his soul and stirred up his darkest fears.

But he also didn’t want to sleep because every minute counted. Yeah they’d made some progress, but Eddie still felt like they were a million miles from a solution.

“What happened?” Stan said.

Eddie told him. The details were fresh in his mind. He described the psychic attack in its entirety to Stan, not leaving anything out, not even the horrifying vision of seeing Maddy dead on the floor of Stan’s living room. He wanted his friend to be prepared for the worst.

“How close were you?” Stan said.

“About ten seconds from dying.”

Stan let out a big breath.

Eddie nodded. “That’s why I can’t stop now. It attacked because we’re getting close. It has to finish the job because we’re a threat.”

“What can I do?”

“We need to know more about psychic attacks. I got lucky this time, but I won’t get lucky again. Everybody working this case needs to understand how to survive an attack.”

Stan opened his laptop. “I’m on it.”

Eddie thanked him. He was having trouble remembering what he’d planned on doing before deciding to take a quick nap at the motel. He looked around the room and saw the Engel file and it reminded him.

He pulled the lid off the box and went to work. The lead detective on the case hadn’t been Christie. It had been a guy named Kinz. Eddie hadn’t met him and didn’t even know if he was still around.

Eddie worked his way methodically through the case file, from front to back then back to front. The department had received an anonymous tip that Engel’s home health agency was engaged in fraudulent billing. They were said to have
upcoded
their claims. Eddie was unfamiliar with the term, but in a few minutes he understood what it meant. Apparently, the tip suggested that one of Engel’s nurses had exaggerated the patient’s conditions in the medical records. The upcoding resulted in a bigger payout from the insurance company on the home health claims.

Kinz had started by talking to recent patients. Most of them were older and didn’t recall their home health care in any great detail. They had all suffered from significant conditions, as far as they were concerned, so the likelihood of exaggeration to them was small.

But Kinz had stuck with it. He’d shifted gears and focused on the nurses providing care. Of course the ones still employed by Engel’s company hadn’t been very cooperative and swore six ways to Sunday no one had committed fraud. Kinz was undeterred. He eventually hooked up with one of their ex-employees, who told him that Tiffany Engel had once cornered her behind closed doors and asked pointed questions about the severity of her patients’ illnesses. According to Tiffany, this particular nurse’s patients never seemed to be as sick as everyone else’s. She recommended the nurse review some of her files. It wasn’t that out of the ordinary, according to the nurse, because healthcare providers were always looking for ways to maximize revenue, within the strict guidelines of the law of course.

The weird thing, however, was that someone else had gone through the nurse’s files and left suggestions. The nurse, whose name was Diane Chong, said that this was odd and felt like Tiffany Engel had overstepped and was now dangerously flirting with a grey area under the law.

Eddie kept reading.

Kinz tried to build his case up in different ways because Chong’s story wasn’t enough on its own to get a conviction. But he couldn’t stack anything else up against Tiffany Engel that would demonstrate, or even suggest, her billing practices were fraudulent. Kinz went back to Chong and really leaned on her for more information, but Chong had had a change of heart. She no longer felt that her discussion with Tiffany or the coding recommendations in the chart were that suspicious. She had since left Engel’s employ and was pursuing a job at a long-term care facility, which reminded him of Renee Helmke. She hadn’t gone back to work yet, though, because she had begun suffering from terrible migraines suddenly…

Eddie stopped reading. He thought he’d read the last part incorrectly.

But he hadn’t.

A chill ran down his spine.

Diane Chong had suddenly started suffering from migraines, after she had discussed Tiffany Engel’s billing practices with the police.

A migraine was the most classic symptom of a psychic attack.

Eddie ran out of the conference room and found Christie in the break room, getting herself a coffee.

“We need to talk to Kinz right now.”

***

On the way to Kinz’s house, Eddie called Daria.

She answered before the end of the first ring. Apparently she wasn’t sleeping either.

“Daria, it’s time now. I have to know the name of the cop you saw in your vision.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I understand your reluctance, but you can trust me,” Eddie said.

“I don’t know, Eddie.”

“Listen, here’s how it is. If the ghost is linked to somebody else, someone other than the Schuberts then this town is in serious danger. We have to run down every lead as quickly as possible or more people will die. Do you want that to happen?”

“I don’t even know what I saw…maybe the cop is just on the periphery, maybe he’s not even helping the ghost.”

“And that’s fine. I still need the name.”

“Eddie…”

He’d wanted her to volunteer the information, but he decided to go for it. They were running out of time.

“It’s Kinz, isn’t it?” he said.

“Oh-my-God, how did you know?”

“What else do you know about him?”

“It’s all hazy…I saw him near the ghost. That could mean anything.”

“Think back and try to remember every detail of the vision.”

“He was in a suit and trying to talk to the ghost.”

“What were they saying?”

“I couldn’t hear anything they said. But…”

“But what?”

“Kinz had something in his hand, like a notepad.”

“Was he writing?”

She hesitated. “Now that you ask that, yes. I think he was.”

“Was he asking the ghost questions?”

“I don’t know. Maybe?”

“Think about it.”

“I’m sorry, Eddie. It just looked like they were talking. That’s all I could see.”

Eddie took a deep breath. “Daria, thank you for sharing that information with me. It’s going to help us crack this case.”

“Oh-my-God, you think?”

“Yes. Now listen. Remember that ghost attacked me earlier. You and C need to be careful, okay?”

“We’re at the other hotel, like you suggested.”

“Good. That’s good. Stay there and be careful.”

“We will.”

Eddie hung up. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a breath. “It’s Tiffany Engel. It’s not Tonya Schubert.”

Christie shot him a look. “How sure are you?”

“Call it seventy-five percent.”

“But she’s alive according to her husband.”

“I know, but there’s a reason he told us that.”

“There’s a reason he suddenly seemed scared of the ghost today when he wasn’t yesterday.”

“Right.”

“We need something tangible before we confront Max Engel.”

She was right. All they had was conjecture built on a foundation of paranormal principles that weren’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt. If they showed Engel their hand, that could drive the ghost underground to bide its time until they went looking elsewhere. Everything they had on Engel and his ex-wife was theoretical.

They needed hard evidence.

Christie said, “Engel had an alibi for the night the ghost visited Felicity and Alicia. His sister was over.”

“Yeah, but he’s the perfect candidate for every other night,” Eddie said. “He’s a single guy and owns his own business, so he can come and go as he pleases at night and during a workday. He sets his own schedule.”

“But the ghost Felicity and Alicia described.” Christie made a left onto a tiny one-lane road. “It matches what the others saw. I mean, everybody except Engel.”

“I know. It’s a hole. But I’m convinced it’s Tiffany Engel.”

“But we need to put him inside, or at least near, that condominium and we can’t—”

“What?”

Christie slapped the steering wheel. “I can’t believe we missed this.”

“What?” Eddie said again.

She pulled over and took out her phone. She scrolled through her contacts and found the number she was looking for.

“Who are you calling?” Eddie said.

She didn’t answer him. “Jug, it’s Christie. Sorry to call you so late…in that case I’m glad you’re at work…quick question for you: do you know Max Engel?”

She nodded at Eddie.

“What floor?...Thanks, Jug. I owe you a beer sometime.”

She hung up and turned to him.

Eddie said, “He has a condo in Felicity and Alicia’s building.”

She nodded again. “Remember he and his wife were estranged and she kept the house? He might have moved back home after she died, but he still has time on his lease at the condo. It’s the obvious question we didn’t think to ask Jug: for a list of tenants.”

Eddie cursed. “Stupid.”

Her lips formed a thin line. “Thank God the ghost didn’t kill anybody today.”

“It might have killed Renee-what’s-her-name.”

Christie shook her head. “Strangulation. Totally different MO.”