Adriana--A Ghost Story

[greenbeing]

Adriana—A Ghost Story


Part One

A Little Off


There was fog inside the building. Inside, not outside. Detective Marty Russo wanted to write that down; Lieutenant Fisk would never believe it. He’d think Russo was hallucinating, or worse, failing under the pressure of doing his job. He’d have taken a picture, but the Polaroid camera he’d brought to snap the crime scene had failed. It was dead, or jammed, or out of batteries, or cursed; he wasn’t sure what was wrong with it, and the light in the building was so dim he couldn’t disassemble the device to fix it.

The radio squawked and fuzzed. “Russo,” he said, pushing the button, but when he released it, he couldn’t hear anything except loud white noise. “Damn it.” He clipped it to his belt, out of the way, and turned down a long hallway lit only by a bare bulb at either end, dark in the middle. He hadn’t even found the crime scene yet, and if he was a half-assed detective, he’d have turned around and gone home by now.

The building was a ritzy old hotel, built sometime in the late 1800’s he guessed. It had never been remodeled, though plumbing and electricity had been sporadically added. The carpet was as worn as carpet could be after a hundred years of feet. The halls were more like corridors in most of the building, wide enough for a troupe of circus performers to take their pet elephants on a promenade. The walls were gold-gilt wallpaper, occasionally a mural, one of which held a painting of an ancient circus with scantily clad women leading various animals around a ring, which was what got Marty thinking of that in the first place. There was another mural depicting Heaven, Hell, and some sinister place in between, with an angel reaching down for this blonde girl, snatching her up violently, painfully, while the devils coaxed quietly, and sat around smoking pipes and smiling.

Marty pulled his attention away from the walls and kept going.

Marty’s partner, Tom Selway, had stopped outside the building to talk to an officer about the body that had been found in the basement. The officer had been pretty shaken up, kept saying he’d never seen anything like it, but couldn’t go into detail. Marty’d got fed up doing the patient gig and left Tom to bat clean-up on that part of their report. He’d been more anxious to get the case started, less anxious to sit around schmoozing and cajoling.

He heard something and his heart sped up as he froze in place. He wasn’t superstitious, or easily scared; hell, he was one of the Finest, a New York police detective. He didn’t get spooked.

But that wasn’t a rooky cop sitting outside on the sidewalk, gibbering and shaking. That was one of the veterans, been there at least ten years, seen some serious shit.

Marty advised himself to be cautious.

“Hello?” a voice asked, equally cautious.

“Dunbar?” Marty laughed, relaxing. The odd sound, it had been a blind man’s can, tapping threadbare carpet, then running along the rotting baseboards.

“Marty.”

Marty couldn’t see Jim yet, just a vague reflection from the cane. He waited, feeling a little better to have Jim down there with him. Between the two of them, they’d find the scene in the basement, find the corpse, and get on with their lives.

“What are you doing here?” Marty asked. Jim still hadn’t made it to him. “And where’d you come from?” Dunbar was coming from the opposite direction down the hall.

“It was on my way.”

“On your way to where? I thought you were sick today.”

“Hank’s sick today. That doesn’t give me the day off.”

“Where’s Karen?”

“Out with Tom. I didn’t want to just sit there, though.”

“They learn anything new?”

“Not that I know of. The EMT had just given the cop a sedative.”

Jim was suddenly at his side and Marty jumped, putting out a hand to stop the detective from going any further, in case the odd lighting and acoustics had affected both of their perceptions. “How’d you get here?”

“From the front door.”

“Me, too.” Marty screwed up his forehead. But it wasn’t likely Dunbar would really know how he had made it to the other end of that hallway—one of the perks of being blind. “So…” Marty cleared his throat. “It’s dark in here.”

“And damp,” Dunbar added, taking a swipe at his forehead as if something had dripped on him.

“F*ck, Jim, it’s downright foggy.”

Dunbar just looked at him in the dim light, barely more than a silhouette.

“Yeah, I know you can’t see it…”

“It’s foggy?”

“Yes.” Marty shivered. “Give me the benefit of the doubt, okay? Just this once?”

Marty heard him shrug, a rustle of his long overcoat, more heard than seen. “I’m sure there’s a rational explanation.”

“Such as?” Marty prompted.

The shrug again. “It’s humid in here, but cold. You know how steam rises out of the sewers in the middle of the night? Maybe it just got trapped here.”

“Great,” Marty said. “A warm sewer backing up.” He shivered. It was cold in there.

“Where’s the body?”

“I haven’t found it yet. I can’t find the stairs that go down to the basement.”

“The officer said to go straight in through the front door and there’d be a long hallway. The stairs were supposed to be just past the kitchen, third door on the right. Karen even pointed me at the hallway.”

“Okay…”

“There were no doorways on the right.”

“That’s because you got turned around,” Marty said. “You’re coming from the wrong way.”

“But I never turned…”

“So we’re both lost. Let’s go back to the front door and start over. I have a flashlight in the car. That’ll make it easier.”

Jim sort of laughed, but he nodded agreement, a vague reflection bouncing off his ever-present sunglasses. “I’ll follow you, if you’re sure I’m the one who got turned around.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m used to walking around in the dark.”

Marty had to concede to that. He turned around and looked down the hallway, seeing nothing more than walls, a few closed doors, and a red and gray film hanging in the air, an orange light bulb at the end. “Then we’ll go…” He turned back. “…Your way.”

They started walking back the way Jim had come, in the direction Marty had been headed originally.

“I’d hate to see the honeymoon suite in this place,” Marty finally said.

“Foggy and dark…” Jim said. He reached a hand out and ran it along the wall. “Pretty snazzy place, huh?”

“Right,” Marty said sarcastically.

“This wallpaper feels like it was really expensive at one time.”

“But it looks like it’s been molding and decaying for some time.” Marty stayed slightly behind Jim. Jim would probably be more likely to detect an obstacle first, or fall through a hole in the floor… “You like the carpet, too?”

“It’s really worn. You can tell because it’s kind of uneven—plush near the wall, almost down to hardwood in the middle.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“You look behind any of the doors?”

“Not yet. I figure, why bother yet? Until we see the body, we won’t know what to look for. What sort of murder weapon, or snagged clothing…”

Jim paused and Marty managed to stop just before he would have run into him. “Maybe the stairs are behind one of the doors. But not labeled. It’s worth a shot.”

Marty sighed and tried the first door on his right. “Locked,” he said as the knob jiggled loosely. It would be easy to force it open, if need be.

Jim moved ahead, running his hand along the wall. He opened the next door easily and stood outside, listening, waiting. Marty peered in.

“Nothing,” he told Jim. “A bedroom. No mattress, just a frame and box spring.”

Jim leaned in and shut the door.

“This is going to take forever,” Marty complained, striding ahead.

“You got a better idea?”

Marty tossed open the door. “Yeah, we knock this sucker down and build a park. It’ll make a nice memor—” He stopped, his mouth hanging open. Sunlight beat through wispy curtains, making him blink. Somehow the light didn’t permeate the dreariness of the hall. There was another bed, and on it— “A body,” he said, voice absent of emotion.

“What do you—” Jim broke off, stopping beside him, as if he could suddenly see the body also. Then he turned his head to the side. “Did you hear that?” he whispered.

“What?” Marty asked, unable to take his eyes off the woman lying on the bed with at least three obvious gunshot wounds marring her outdated gingham dress.

“A gunshot. No… it was the echo of a gunshot.”

Marty shook his head. All he could hear was a bird chirping outside the window, as if it were spring, mating season.

Jim grabbed his arm. “Another one,” he said. “Just the echo.”

Marty finally tore his eyes away from the pretty brunette and looked at Dunbar, who’d taken off his sunglasses, as if it would help him hear better, his lips pressed together and eyes half-closed in concentration.

The hand tightened. “Another one. But I can’t tell where they’re coming from. That’s three.” Dunbar sucked in a deep breath, waiting for more.

“There won’t be anymore,” Marty said, turning back to stare at the body. A fly was buzzing around it, impossibly loud, but refusing to flit upon the dead surface.

“How do you—”

“Because the body here only has three wounds. She’s definitely dead.”

Jim tried to step in front of him, between him and the room, but Marty pushed him back. “Marty—”

“This is Room 11.” He reached for the antique glad doorknob, only half-aware of the unspoiled luxuriance of the room. “We’ll come back.” He shut the light out from the hallway.

“We’d better find some of the other cops, let them know about this.”

“I thought the body was in the basement,” Marty said, turning back toward Dunbar.

“It is. There’s a guy down there.”

“…and a woman up here,” Marty finished.

They’d only gone about five more steps when Dunbar stopped and held a hand out behind him to stop Marty. “Shh.”

“What?”

Marty didn’t hear a reply and he couldn’t see Jim well enough in the dim hallway bulbs after the sunny murder scene in Room 11 to know if Jim answered inaudibly. He felt him point and looked.

“What?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. It was just… a noise. Like a person tiptoeing.”

Marty looked harder. “Nothing. I don’t think… Like I said, I can’t see that well in here.”

This time he saw Jim nod, his eyes adjusting.

Jim pushed open the next door. Again the room was dark and drab.

“Nothing,” Marty told him.

Jim closed the door. “What’d you see?”

“Nothing. The windows were boarded up. The curtains torn. No furniture.”

“I meant in the last room.”

Marty was silent. He let Jim walk on ahead. The fog had disappeared from the hall, leaving it no brighter. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he finally said. “I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

Jim stopped walking and turned back. “What was it?”

“It was a nice room. It was bright. The bed was intact. The lady had just been shot… You couldn’t tell how bright it was?”

“No,” Jim said, his tone clipped.

Marty shook his head. It had just been so sunny, he thought even a blind man must notice that, somehow.

“Karen,” Jim said. “Karen?”

It took Marty a moment to realize Jim was trying to get someone on the radio. “Mine doesn’t work, either.”

Jim’s hand fell. “Let’s go.” He ran his hand along the wall to the left, switching sides of the hallway as they headed back the way he had come. He stopped. “Stairs.”

“What?”

“Stairs. In Braille. It’s labeled.” He moved forward a step, finding a door. “What do you want to bet this is the third door on the right and it goes downstairs?”

“Okay…”

“And… somehow… I missed it completely, along with the other two doors.”

Marty moved up next to Jim as he opened the door. He didn’t see a label in print, just the little plaque of Braille, tarnished brass that blended in with the gold of the wallpaper. “We’ll let is slide, seeing as how I was coming from the other direction altogether.”

“Gee, thanks, Marty.”

“Stairs. Going down,” Marty affirmed.

“Should we? Or should we go get Karen and Tom?”

Marty hesitated. “I bet we got so turned around and lost that they’re already down there. Let’s go.”

[greenbeing]

Part Two
Disintegrating


“Where’ve you guys been?”

Marty could hear Karen, but he couldn’t see her yet, on account of the low ceiling of the old building. He tapped Dunbar behind him. “Duck.” He ducked himself and saw Karen’s shoes, some grisly, chunky number that looked like they would hurt a perp severely if she kicked him for misbehaving. One of the shoes was tapping impatiently.

“We were about to send out a search party. Do you know how embarrassing that would be? “Be on the look-out for two detectives…””

“Thanks, Karen,” Marty said venomously. He was in a foul mood, feeling like the building was just playing with him, getting him turned around, messing with his head.

“We found another body upstairs,” Jim put in. “But the radio wasn’t working.”

Karen pushed the button on her own radio to test it. “Earth to Jim,” she said.

Jim’s radio fuzzed to life with her words. “So it’s working now. But you weren’t answering earlier.”

“How’d you get down here without us seeing you?” Marty asked, taking the last step of the long staircase.

“We walked. It’s right by the front door, just down the main hallway. Don’t tell me you both got lost.”

“I just followed your directions, Karen,” Dunbar said sweetly. “So if I got lost…”

“Never mind,” she mumbled. “Where’s the other body?”

“Just down the hall upstairs,” Marty said. “In one of the rooms.” Marty quickly perused the basement, a bricked-over cellar, a little water damage, large metal poles jacking up the floor above, broken furniture, a couple bare light bulbs. There were a couple rooms with the doors half-open, but no lights, over to the left.

“The body’s over there.” Karen pointed to a large metallic room for Marty’s benefit. “The only other exit is the other side of the basement, a second set of stairs to the back of the hotel, but the lights don’t work back there. We called in for light bulbs.”

“You’re gonna put us over budget,” Marty told her.

“If you wanna crawl around the crawl space with a flashlight, go ahead. But I’m not going in there without a spotlight.”

“And a baseball bat.”

“I have a gun, Marty. That’ll be good enough.”

“Let’s just have Jim go in. He won’t need a light.”

“Room 11,” Jim said, interrupting.

“Right. Room 11.”

“…I didn’t see any numbered rooms,” Karen said hesitantly.

“It was one of the suites.”

“There are no hotel rooms on the first floor. Just cleaning rooms, closets, and servants quarters. A couple kitchens. Were you anywhere near the kitchen?”

“We never passed the kitchen.”

“Then where were you?”

“Just upstairs.”

“Uh huh…”

“Look, Karen, dead body, upstairs, bedroom, on the bed, frilly curtains, shot three times in the chest and abdomen, large caliber weapon. Whoever it was wasn’t a very good shot. Took out the liver, the heart, and a lung, by the looks of it.” Marty rattled through everything he remembered, getting testy. “Some blonde chick, late twenties, wearing a dress and bleeding. Here, here, and here.” He pointed to the spots he’d seen the bullet holes, corresponding to his own body. “Are we going to argue about this?”

“Jim?” Karen asked.

“You’re going to ask him what he saw?”

Jim was rubbing his chin, that distracted look on his face.

“Jim?” Marty asked. He snapped his fingers at Karen when Jim didn’t answer. “Do that thing again, with the radio, that “earth to Jim” thing.”

Jim looked up impatiently. “We’ll finish up down here, then go get the girl. It’s not like she’s going anywhere. There’s cops all over the place.”

Marty nodded and left Jim by the bottom of the stairs. He lifted the Polaroid camera and tried it again, just for kicks. The flash lit the dim basement and a picture shot out, like it had been jammed, falling to the floor.

“Watch where you point that thing,” Tom complained from near the freezer, lifting a hand in front of his face, much too late to stop the flash.

“Jim? Everything okay?” Karen asked.

“Yeah.” He reached out a hand to take her arm. “Let’s take a look around.”

“It’s not pretty.”

Marty stuck the wasted photo in the pocket of his overcoat and followed Karen and Jim. Jim’s cane was loosely held in his hand, perpendicular to the floor. Karen had this almost disgusted look on her face, the likes of which he hadn’t seen since she’d lifted the sheet to see a man’s face shot off years ago, right after Dunbar joined their squad.

“He was dead when the cop got here?” Marty asked.

Tom laughed and Marty shot him a look. Tom Selway was playing with a piece of piping, or a tube of some sort, made of metal and rusting. Marty grabbed a pair of latex gloves from a box on the floor.

Karen stopped walking.

“What’ve we got here?” Jim asked.

“It’s like this huge meat freezer,” she said. “Door’d been pried open. Looks like the power’s been off for a few years. Everything inside’s sort of… disintegrating,” she carefully explained.

Marty almost laughed when he caught a look of the body, out of shock mostly, coinciding with Karen’s description. “You’re not kidding.” He hurried forward, now that the camera was no longer jammed. There was a body, half-mummified, dried out, and yes, disintegrating. No one had touched it, but the skin looked like it had lost the ability to hold the bones together. One hand was lying on the chest, but the arm it should have been attached to had fallen to the side, leaving the appendage behind.

“How long has it been here?” Jim asked.

“Let me put it this way… it doesn’t even smell.”

Parts of the skin looked like the body was made of sand and the tide had come in, wearing it away.

“Stephen Spielberg should take a look at this,” Tom said.

“No kidding,” Marty agreed.

“He’s, um, wearing a uniform of some kind,” Karen said for Jim’s benefit, trying to be helpful.

Marty looked over the red and blue uniform, and old-fashioned bellhop’s uniform. A lot of the fabric had been worn away, or chewed on, around the ankles and other seams. Like a shipwreck victim. An F was embroidered on the lapel, probably for the hotel name, the Fillmore. A bellhop would usually be a kid, someone who hadn’t worked his way up the ranks yet to concierge or doorman. But the state of the body didn’t belie an age, not even a guess. Marty was just glad, as he knelt on the dirty half-concrete floor, that the eerie feeling he’d had upstairs had pretty much disappeared, despite the emaciated look of the body.

“Nametag?” Dunbar asked.

“Not that I can see.”

“Wallet?”

“They don’t want to look, until we can get someone down here to try to stabilize the body,” Tom said. “Hate to have our only clue completely fall apart, you know?” Tom poked around the inside of the freezer, looking for clues.

“How’d he die?”

“Shot twice,” Karen said. “Once in the chest, once in the face.”

“Can you tell which one might have killed him?”

“Jim!” Karen said exasperated. She untangled her arm and moved away. “The body’s not in very good shape. Can you understand?”

Trying to keep his voice even, he said, “I’m just asking if the shot to the face was necessary, accidental, or if maybe it was to try to make IDing the body difficult.”

“I can’t tell,” Karen said.

Jim’s cheeks puffed out. “What about a murder weapon?”

“Not that we’ve found.”

“What about—”

“Jim! There’s nothing. It’s just gross.” Karen grabbed a pair of latex gloves from a box on the floor and thrust them into Jim’s hand. “Here. Knock yourself out.”

Marty snapped another picture. “You two step back a few feet? You’re in the shot.”

Jim fingered the gloves as he stepped back. “You said if we touched the body, it’d fall apart.”

Karen groaned. “I didn’t tell you to touch the body. I’m just saying, you want to look for clues, there you go. But Tom and I were down here with all the other officers for a good forty-five minutes, while we were waiting for you, and we found nothing.”

Marty took the stack of photos he’d snapped and flipped through them. He wanted one from every angle, just in case the body did fall apart.

Dunbar folded up his cane, but he just stood there, out of the way, looking grumpy, gloves in his hand balled up. “Can you tell if he was shot here?” he asked finally.

Karen grunted.

“The meat in here’s in about the same state as the body,” Tom said from the back of the freezer. “I feel like I’m in that episode of The Brady Bunch, you know, when the kid gets locked in the freezer?”

“Yeah, I remember that one,” Marty said.

“Whatever you do, don’t shut the door,” Tom told him.

“Karen, let’s let these guys finish up down here. I want to check out the other body, okay?” Jim asked.

Karen rolled her eyes. “Fine with me.” She waved to Tom and Marty. “You two enjoy yourselves.”


* * *


“Karen…” Jim stopped her halfway up the stairs and turned to her. He lowered his voice and asked, “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure? You sounded pretty… upset back there.”

“Jim, it’s just, the body’s in really bad condition, it looks like an old murder, and there’s no reason to dig too hard because we’re never going to find the guy who did it.”

“Or the girl.”

“Or the girl, yeah. Besides,” she said, but stopped.

“What?”

“You and Marty weren’t there, but I swear, I heard gunshots upstairs.”

Jim bit his lip. “I did, too.”

“You did?” She sounded more hopeful.

“I did.”

“No one else did.”

“Marty didn’t, either.”

“Just us.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay…” She trailed off. “What’s that mean? The acoustics are funny? It’s an old building?”

Jim shook his head. “Marty was standing right next to me.”

“So it means nothing.”

“Not right now. All it means is, we better find that other body.”

She laughed. “Yeah, before it gets dark.” She made a spooky oohing noise.

“Funny,” he said, then took the railing and finished climbing the steps. He unfolded his cane at the top of the stairs and led the way to the right, keeping one hand on the left wall. “There were a couple rooms before it.”

“Room 11?” Karen asked.

“Yeah.”

“Storage, cleaning supplies, WC,” she read off as they walked.

“It’s actually called a WC?”

“Yeah. Talk about opulence,” she said rather sarcastically.

The wall disappeared under his hand and Jim felt the area open up. He stopped, trying to get his bearings. “Where are we? The lobby?”

“That was the other way. This is some sort of atrium. Fake stuffed birds, broken skylights, an old chair.”

Jim focused overhead, trying to catch a glimpse of the outside world that must be up there. “Marty was coming from this way,” he said.

“He say anything about the atrium?”

“No…”

“Well here it is. Now what?”

“There was a bedroom.”

“I know, Room 11.”

“We must have missed it.”

“Jim—”

“Karen, there was a body.”

“Are you sure? I mean, maybe Marty was…” She didn’t have to finish.

Jim leaned back against the wall, playing his cane between his hands. “Why? Why would Marty tell me there was a body up here somewhere when there wasn’t?”

“A practical joke? It’s pretty easy to pull the wool over your eyes, Jim. Maybe he couldn’t resist.”

Jim shook his head. As plausible as it was, it didn’t explain the gunshots. Or the feeling of death. Or the fog… He grimaced. Maybe Marty had been pulling his leg about the fog and the body. It wouldn’t really be that hard to do; everything he got about the crime scenes he got from trusting the descriptions of the other detectives.

Bird wings startled them both. Jim heard Karen take a sudden breath. He turned his head to track the sound as the wings fluttered out through the skylight overhead, maybe fifteen or twenty feet straight up before it disappeared. He could hear the city out there, faintly.

“Look, um…” He took his sunglasses off and rubbed the back of his hand over his eyes. The room had to be there. Marty wouldn’t have kept up the charade with the other detectives if he was just punking Jim, so there had to be a body. Somewhere. “You go to the lobby at the other end of this hall, and then we’ll meet in the middle.”

She laughed. “If it’ll make you feel better.” She started off.

He hated the idea the second it was out of his mouth. It was just the only thing he could think of, trying to figure out where they had veered, where they’d gone wrong. They couldn’t just walk back and forth all night, but he knew he’d never find the room on his own. “Karen? Is it dark in here?” he called her back. That had been the only other piece of information Marty had fed him that had stood out.

“Not particularly.”

“Oh.”

“Not in here. But the hallway… it’s kind of dark in there.”

“Any fog?”

She laughed again. “Sounds like you need a vacation.” She walked off. Jim waited a good five minutes before starting off from the atrium. He ran his hand along the wall on the right. It had to be here. Unless Marty’d been waiting five years to pull a prank like this. But Marty’d never joked around about Jim’s blindness, not like this. Nor was he the type of guy to let a joke go on this long.

His cane hit something hard on the left-hand sweep and his shoulder brushed a body. Jim stepped back.

“Where’s Karen?” Marty asked, shutting a door with a click.

“We couldn’t find the room,” Jim said, stopping. “There was no body, was there?”

“What are you talking about? You saw it—” Marty grunted. “There was a body. It was back that way.”

Jim felt him point out the direction, back the way he’d come. “Show me.”

Marty grabbed his arm to keep him in place. He asked, “Why didn’t you back me up down there with Karen?”

“You want to know what I got from that scene, Marty?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Really?” Jim looked chagrined.

“Yeah, Dunbar. When I start doubting what I saw, I want someone to back me up, even if they are blind.”

Jim frowned. “There were the birds, but no traffic, like the back of the hotel opens onto a courtyard.”

“There’s no courtyard.”

“Didn’t think so…”

“What else?”

“I could hear fabric rustling.”

“The curtains. They were blowing in the breeze from outside.”

Jim nodded. “Could be. But you know what bugged me most? The gunshots. They must have been far away… It was like the echo reached us, but the shots didn’t. And I didn’t smell any cordite, so it wasn’t like the girl was shot right there recently… Maybe.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I couldn’t tell if she’d been shot there.”

“It was musty, damp, like the rest of the hotel. But kind of warm in that room, like the radiator was on.”

Marty sighed.

“Nothing added up,” Jim summed up. He shook his head, like he could clear out what was plaguing him.

“So we’ll find the room and make us all feel better.” Marty moved ahead. “It was over here, on the left. A couple doors down.”

“That’s what I said.”

“What the hell…? Storage?”

“Don’t forget the lovely WC.” Jim heard Marty trying door handles and opening them to peek into the rooms.

“Oh, yes, lovely,” Marty said, a grimace in his voice. He slammed the door.

Jim checked his watch. Karen should have caught back up with them by then. Jim cleared his throat. “Karen thought she heard the gunshots, too.”

“So you two are hearing things, and I’m seeing things.”


* * *


Officers had poured over the hotel the whole night, but turned up nothing out of the ordinary, and definitely no other bodies.

Marty, Tom, Karen, and Jim had taken up refuge in the hallway just off the atrium while the atrium flooded with a late season thunderstorm.

“I still swear by what I saw,” Marty said.

“Yeah…” Tom said sympathetically.

“Bite me,” Marty told him. “Look, this is a huge building. Dunbar was with me. Maybe we stumbled onto some old servant’s quarters or something. It’s easy to get turned around in here.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said. “Maybe tomorrow, when it’s light out…” Tom trailed off and turned away, headed quickly down the hall. “I’m out of here.”

“Jim?” Karen asked.

“I’m coming,” Dunbar said, but the look on his face said he was still busy thinking.

Karen disappeared into the dark.

Lightning illuminated the face of a stuffed crow, eyes gleaming demonically. Marty felt his gaze pulled that way, and he finally had to remind himself the eyes were just glass marbles, and he tore away. Even the ferns looked creepy in the sheet lightning. The hall lights flickered and he tapped Dunbar on the arm. “Let’s go.” That was the last thing he wanted that night, to be trapped in complete darkness in the Fillmore Hotel. The floors would probably rot right out from under them.

Jim started following. “It’s not that I don’t believe you…”

“But you didn’t see it, and now we can’t find it…”

“Where’s a body going to go, Marty?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Marty kicked at the wall as he passed, then stopped. “Hey.”

“What?”

“There are no murals in here.”

“So?”

“The hall I was in before, there were pictures all over the walls. Now it’s just the same old wallpaper.”

“So we stumbled onto some secret corridor. That doesn’t do us any good if we can’t find it again.”

A woman screamed. Marty felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. It wasn’t Karen, but if someone was there who they hadn’t found after an evening of searching, that would prove they hadn’t been everywhere yet.

“Come on,” Jim said.

Marty grabbed his arm. The sound of the scream was echoing around him.

“What?”

“A scream.”

Jim shook his head in the half-light.

Marty heard footsteps coming and turned, but he couldn’t tell if they were in this hall or the one above them, the sound was so distorted. He turned his head to follow the noise. “We should head upstairs. I heard something.” He grabbed Jim’s arm, thinking how earlier Jim had sworn he’d heard gunshots that Marty hadn’t.

“Marty—” Jim wrenched his arm away. “I didn’t hear anything.” He grabbed Marty’s elbow anyway.

Marty stopped outside the stairwell, the door marked with crime scene tape, hard to miss now, even in the dark.

“Leave him alone,” a woman yelled, but the voice, it was far away, coming through the floor, or through a wall. “You’re jealous of nothing, Dusty.” Then she screamed again.

Marty spun around, the sound disorienting.

Then he heard it, the echo of a gunshot.

Silence. He realized his eyes were closed, but when he opened them, Jim was gone. “Jim?”

There was another echo, this one farther away.

“It’s blood,” Dunbar said, kneeling on the floor next to the stairwell. He rubbed his fingers together, a dark substance on them. The door was half-open, the lights off in the basement, but a thick liquid was coating the bottom of the door frame and parts of the red carpet. The first stair was glistening with a handprint.

Marty dropped down next to him. “How’d you…?”

“Someone fell against me. I thought it was you at first, but I lost my balance and… there was no one there. Just blood.”

Marty tugged him up. “Let’s go show Karen and Tom. They’ll have to believe us this time.”

Dunbar kept his hand to the side, careful not to touch anything. Marty regaled him with a play-by-play of the footsteps and the screaming. But when they got to the lobby with the bright lights the officers had set up, Dunbar’s hand was spotless.

Jim rubbed his fingers together again. “What the f—”

“Let’s go home,” Marty said. He suddenly felt sick, like he had vertigo. The best thing to do would be to get out of there.

Jim stopped outside Karen’s car. “Marty?”

Marty looked up. “Yeah?” He stopped walking.

Jim was rubbing his fingers together, looking down at them as if that would help him see the blood that had been there only minutes before. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, then ran his hand over the top of Karen’s car and down the crease to the door handle.

“You want me to drive?” Tom asked as they watched Karen and Jim drive away.

“Nah, I’m all right.” Marty patted his pockets for the keys as he stared at the Fillmore Hotel, in all its pungent, dilapidated glory, the bricks getting darker as they soaked up the rain, blending into the night. The lights were on in the lobby, for the officers, but the place was—if he let his mind go that way—deathly quiet.

[greenbeing]

Part Three
Digging up the Dead

There can be such a thin line between love and hate. Jim had crossed it enough on his own. He could love Christie, yet hate her at the same time. Even now, years after the danger of them getting a divorce had passed, sometimes all she had to do was sigh wrong… and he could feel it, welling up inside. That longing for her not to be there. Or was it just longing for himself not to be there?

He’d seen crimes of hate plenty of times in his fifteen years as a detective. There were so many reasons people had invented to hate each other, especially in a city of this size.

Jim was already on edge by the time he lay down in bed that night, staring up, unable to close his eyes. He had spent the whole day feeling disoriented, searching a damp, dreary, airy hotel, listening to the skuttles of mice and other creatures, wracking his brain for any clue that would lead them back to the body of the young lady Marty had described.

As much as nothing made sense, he thought as he finally drifted out of consciousness, he was sure the girl was dead, that she was there somewhere, and that aura surrounding her— he’d been able to feel her presence. And he knew: she’d died of love.


Jim smiled. Marty must have done a good job describing the hotel to him, because he could see it in his dream, right down to the tiny details of the murals on the walls, the shade of burgundy in the carpet, the regal floral print, the embossed wallpaper, golden in color.

It was clear and sunny in the dream, even though he remembered the rain and damp from the afternoon. Everything here looked new, not molding, not dusty and worn and torn and collapsing. But he supposed, if his mind was sorting out the visuals, he might as well make the crime scene as pleasant as possible. Amazingly, he could even seen specks of dust in the air, clearly, shimmering.

The carpet at his feet was just starting to become worn in the center, nowhere near as worn as he’d felt it in the hotel, more like it must have been about five years after the hotel installed it.

There was an elephant on the mural he was walking past. A whole circus. He paused and leaned closer, able to make out every little detail, as if by magic his sight had been restored. A circus girl rode the elephant on the right. She was only an inch tall, but it was clear she was winking. The painter had given her a gauzy, veil-like outfit. The ring master had an overbite and a couple monkeys trailing after him, scraggly, unkempt creatures. There were hundreds of people watching—Jim noticed one of the older audience members collapsed under a palm tree as if dying from heat stroke. Behind the circus tent was a body, stabbed, the half-inch image barely hidden by the morbid muralist.

He blinked, and the images were still there. He could still see.

The wallpaper around the mural had a crisp, floral pattern inside large squares, embossed and golden, just like he’d felt under his fingertips that afternoon, the pattern tactile.

He was standing in the hallway where they had found Room 11, he was sure of it. Even the bulb at the end of the hallway was flickering as he leaned up against the wall, close enough to the atrium that he could still see sunlight puddling around his feet. A fedora adorned his head. It was five o’clock, attested to by his pocket watch.

He frowned and stared at it; he’d never actually held a pocket watch before. This one was gold, and the lid flipped closed, or open, to reveal the glass, the movement of the hinge much like his Braille watch, which was no longer on his wrist. He could hear the ticking, see the reflection of the gold and the lights as he opened the watch, closed, opened, closed, then shoved it in his pocket, drawing his hand away from the addictive, repetitive movement.

A young woman rushed past, giggling, long hair, dark blonde, flying behind her, a long gingham skirt pooling around her ankles as she stopped, barefoot, and searched around her neck for something. She pulled a chain out of her dress, and a key came with it. “Shh,” she whispered as she entered the room, as if calming someone inside. “I love you, Dusty,” she said quietly.

Jim moved closer. He couldn’t hear what the reply was, but she didn’t shut the door all the way, so he moved up against the wall to eavesdrop, able to see the girl as she moved about the room. “Love, love, love, love, love,” she sing-songed. “And there ain’t a damned thing you can do about it.”

Jim caught his breath as she stopped in the sunlight of the opulent, old-fashioned room. He could see men’s shoes, attached to men’s pants, and most likely with a man inside of them, stretched out on the bed. And her. He could see her so perfectly that it struck him dumb for a minute and he lost track of the conversation. He hadn’t seen anyone so clearly in six years, dream or no dream, not even in his memory, not even imagining his wife. Added to that clarity, the spunky nose, the green of the eyes, the hair hanging half-way down her back, moving bewitchingly, almost a sashay as she tilted her head… he’d never seen her before.

He had a habit, now that he was blind, of compiling pictures of people he met now from people he’d seen before, ones he’d known for years, even ones he’d passed on the street and dimly remembered: maybe just an arch of the back, or a glint of the eye. Pieces that would seem like a monster from a graveyard to anyone else, like Frankenstein’s monster, all torn apart and sewn together, all the perfect aspects that couldn’t match, and that became grotesque by design. Yet it was all he had—bits and pieces. It was all he had.

This girl was different—whole and real and new, full of life and emotion, so vivacious and animated that Jim found himself just watching her, mesmerized, as if until that moment he’d forgotten how to see. He could feel the love—or mere lust—emanating from the room and drawing him nearer—

Then the lights went out.

He clutched the wall, but the voices inside the room didn’t hesitate, or even comment on the sudden blackness. Like he was the only one affected.

Sound and smell and touch came rushing back. He could even taste the perfume the girl sprayed in the air.

“Where were you?” the man asked.

“The park.”

“With that boy?”

She laughed. “You always imagine the worst!” she taunted.

“You should be more careful.” There was a warning in his voice; not a worry, more of a threat.

Jim heard a grating metallic squeak: bedsprings, bodies moving. He sorted them out, the girl, lighter and barefoot, but her clothing swishing, moved quickly, running into something, a dresser, maybe, that made bottles rattle. She seemed frightened. A different tread, shoes on carpet, followed her. A kiss, hard and unimpassioned, a rattling of bottles, as if he pressed her painfully to the dresser.

Jim pressed himself flat against the wall, unable to get his bearings enough to flee, even as footsteps, heavy and masculine, came crashed toward the door. He had a bad feeling, not about being caught eavesdropping, but a feeling that ran deeper than guilt over some childish crime as spying. A danger that had been sparked by the sound of the man’s voice.

He was just blind, his mind tried to rationalize. Nothing new. All he had to do was run his hand along the wall and walk away.

The thought of moving made his legs weak, as if he’d been running too far and too long.

“I love you anyway,” the girl called.

He couldn’t leave her. All he wanted to do was see the girl one more time, consequences be damned. He didn’t move.

The door slammed, only a foot to his right. Jim clutched harder at the wall, his fingernails tearing into the thick paper. He was aware of a breathless man in front of him, several inches taller, breathing garlic and fish in his face. “Keep an eye on my wife.”

Jim almost laughed. After six years he’d developed a sense of humor when people told him to keep an eye out, or look for something. It was a private joke with himself, something that had become comfortable.

He felt a heavy fist thump him on the shoulder and he flinched, caught off-guard. He tensed again.

“You look nervous.”

Jim slipped a hand nonchalantly into his pocket, the other still tearing minutely at the wallpaper. He fingered something familiar in his pocket: a badge. He didn’t know exactly what passed in that moment. The other man was surely noticing Jim’s lack of eye contact.

“Don’t make me kill you when I take out the boy.”

The body brushed past. Jim stared hard, trying to conjure up the images he’d seen moments before, the ornate sconces of light, the mermaids in the picture across the hall, the man’s retreating back. But there was nothing, and all he could think was that he should have taken a good look at the man when he had the chance.

“Jimmy?”

Jim tried to open his eyes. He could feel his bed, his pillow, the blanket half-twisted around one leg, the down comforter clenched in one fist. His eyes were already open, still staring up, toward the ceiling.

He turned toward the voice.

“You okay?”

He tried to picture her the way he’d seen the girl in his dream, complete, down the last hair, down to the way the sunlight caught the different colors and shone back at him, as if she herself conjured the light and wasn’t merely a reflector. But all he could see was the girl; he couldn’t remember even what Christie looked like. There she was, right next to him, for all the good it did him.

His breathing tightened, shallowed, and he clenched tighter at the comforter.

Christie ran a hand over his chest, trying to comfort him, but the fabric of his t-shirt rustled, a rough sound in the silence that made him pull back and roll away from her. He didn’t want her touching him, not now, not when he couldn’t see.

It had just been a dream, but it had been so vivid. For even those few moments in the dream, he’d forgotten what it was like to be blind.

Now that everything was back to normal, lying here in bed, as always, he could feel the darkness as if it were tangible, just like he had felt it when he first found out he was completely blind. But it wasn’t the readjustment to the emptiness that was causing his chest to tighten; it was the fact that he now knew, after those few vivid moments, that he’d been forgetting what it was like to see. Worse than that, he hadn’t even noticed.

“Jimmy?”

“I love you, Dusty… and there ain’t a damned thing you can do about it.”

The dream was starting to come back. Something important, he was sure of it. If nothing else, just the visuals; he wanted them, craved them, needed them as surely as he needed the oxygen his body wasn’t getting.

“Jimmy?” That voice again. A hand on his arm.

He looked down, then pulled away, pulled free of the blankets. He had to get away from her and her prying hands. He had to be free. He stumbled away, brushing the door as he jolted out of the room.

He’d sleep on the couch, if only to reclaim that moment.

He hardly noticed the cold in the leather as it enveloped him.

“Love, love, love, love, love.”

He could almost see her, as his eyes closed, the beautiful young woman. Blonde hair swinging.

He forced his subconscious, as it wasn’t giving up the images fast enough, but as he did so, the picture became blurry, and he found the girl—suddenly she looked like Anne Donnelley. Jim gasped and sat up, staring into the darkness.

He heard a rustle. “Christie?” He turned toward the bedroom door.

“Are you okay?”

Any vestige of the dream was long gone. He felt dizzy and empty. “What time is it?”

“Almost five.”

The thought of trying to go back to sleep suddenly depressed him. Even if he did manage to reclaim that brightness he’d started to forget, he knew the second he woke up, it’d be gone again, and he’d feel worse than if he’d never remembered at all.

“Are you coming back to bed?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Might as well just get ready for work.”

“Working a case?” she asked. She moved closer and he heard her gather a blanket around her shoulders as she sat next to him on the couch. He no longer had that overwhelming desire to catapult himself away from her, so he leaned into her arms as she wrapped them around him.

“Yeah.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

He felt suddenly safe. He hadn’t realized, the day before, wandering around the hotel, how completely out of control he’d felt, not until now. He let his eyes close as he rested in her arms. It was going to be a long day, even if they weren’t working on the case, because he knew there was no way Marty was going to let it go without at least mulling it over. Jim burrowed closer to Christie. She moved, getting comfortable, as he dozed off.

For a minute, the panic gone, rationality returned, he could see her again, Christie, just as she had been when he first met her. And he remembered how much he loved her and how lucky he really was.


* * *


Marty Russo’s state of mind that night was quite similar to the one Jim Dunbar was in upon arriving home. Marty was preoccupied with the case, or lack thereof. How’d he lose a body? The only thing he could think of, without Dunbar being able to back him up, was that he had in fact imagined it.

But hallucinating on the job was the last thing he wanted to do. They’d give him desk duty, make him see a psychiatrist. He’d be worse off than a blind man. At least Dunbar couldn’t see things that weren’t there.

He told himself to be rational, to relax and think it out as he lay back in bed and stared up at the ceiling, counting the passing headlights that bounced off between light and shadow, then ran down the wall and back out the window the way they had come.

They had all been at the Fillmore Hotel. He’d left Tom out front interviewing the first officer on the scene. He’d gone down the hallway. It had been dark. He’d run into Jim. Those were facts. No one could argue with them.

There had been a girl—how sure was he of that? He was pretty damned sure. He tried to imagine her, lying on the bed as he’d last seen her, three bleeding holes in her chest and abdomen. The first one had killed her; the other two had been for stress relief, hatred.

She had long dark blonde hair that had been pooled around the pillow, around her shoulders. Her feet were bare, her dress straightened, as if she hadn’t died exactly in that position, but been moved. Not cleaned up, just rearranged, like the body had looked uncomfortable, had to be fixed.

And that little smile on her face. Even though she’d been dead for hours, she was still smiling.

He hated her as he’d never hated anyone before, like some unfaithful, ungrateful wench. Deserved to die, the bitch.

Marty wrenched his eyes open and stared back at the ceiling. Even though he hated her for disappearing and making him look bad, a detective who couldn’t find a dead person, he didn’t know where the thought had come from that she was unfaithful, or that vehemence.


Marty stood in his office. It had to be his office, right? Logic didn’t dispel the fact that he didn’t have an office. Sunny windows, a few cushy chairs that weren’t as comfortable as they looked. A low table with outdated magazines proclaiming Kennedy had been shot, Sputnik launched, and Nixon for president. Marty scratched his head. They didn’t make dandruff shampoo, not here, wherever he was.

Hate. Hate, hate, hate, hatehatehatehate. The man in front of Marty had developed a twitch, almost like he had a crick in his neck. His eyes weren’t blinking as often as they were supposed to and he looked like he was chewing on the inside of his lip.

Marty frowned and leaned back against the table.

“She’s sleeping with someone else, isn’t she?” the man finally asked. “And don’t tell me she’s not,” he spat. He was seething hatred, oozing it out his bones, along with the blood spewing from the jagged cut down his arm and the scratches on his face.

Marty’d played detective long enough he could interview in his sleep, and he did just that. He didn’t know what this had to do with any case, it didn’t seem related to anything he’d ever done before, nor did he recognize the man. In fact, he could barely distinguish the man’s features, almost like he was going blind, or had become really nearsighted. Blurred, a bundle of colors and emotion. A gray torn suit, featureless face covered in blood, a handprint of blood on the table from where he’d leaned after clutching the bleeding arm. And this awesome antagonism that Marty always associated with the irrational.

Marty didn’t like him.

“If anything happens to her—”

“You think something’s going to happen to her?” Marty interrupted. “Or you know something’s going to happen to her?”

“What?”

“Sounds to me like you’re planning something.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” the man said.

Marty gave a little snort of breath that was nearly a laugh. He thought, if only the man knew. If only he knew how little the detective standing in front of him could see.

“I’m paying you to find out what she does all day. She’s my wife; I have that right.” The man spun away from the table and stood in front of the window, the glaring overcast sky creating havoc with Marty’s view of him. Marty squinted against the painful light, but finally had to turn away, unable to distinguish even a head.

Why couldn’t he see the man? If it was important, he should be able to see him, to analyze his emotions, to prey on his anger. “You’re right,” Marty said, carelessness in his tone, but calculated to try to get the man to talk some more. To reveal himself and his intentions, and to move away from that damned window.

“Damn right, ‘bout time you realized that.”

Marty heard him turn, but didn’t look up, trying to look through the notes in front of him. He assumed the papers were filled with notes, but he couldn’t read any of them.

It was a dream, he knew that. But the vital clue could be right in front of him and he wouldn’t know it. For all he knew, the blood on the man wasn’t his own, wasn’t flowing from the scratches and cuts on his own body, but was the blood of the girl… The girl. Marty had a bad feeling about her. A jealous husband, hiring him. He must be a private eye.

A nearsighted private eye. He finally laughed.

“What?” the man asked.

Marty shook his head, still facing the papers.

The man lunged across the table. “What?!” he demanded, reaching for the papers.

Marty reacted, slower than usual, caught off-guard and shortsighted, but he managed to slide the papers just out of reach into his hand and onto the floor. Apparently he was a clutz, too.

“What’d you find out? Some secret thing you don’t want me to know?” He was breathing hard, leaning across the table.

“Just some notes,” Marty said calmly.

“I told you, you’d have no secrets from me. Anything you find out—” He broke off, nodding, his teeth grinding and he leaned into Marty’s face.

Marty blinked and the man had pulled back before he got a good look. He swore.

“You holding back?” The man was getting calm, like he was in control. “You’ve become attached to my wife?”

Marty had a bad feeling, in general. He wished he knew what was going on. Before the girl, the wife, died, or—

Yup, he’d been afraid of that. There was the glint of a gun. He’d recognize it anywhere, even an old-fashioned pistol like that one. He smiled up at the man, taller than him by several inches. “What are you going to do with that?” he asked, arrogant to the end.

Someone was screaming and shaking him. He had a vague recollection of having died… But he could feel the too-firm mattress under his body now. “Marty?”

It was Lauren’s voice.

The screaming didn’t sound human, compared to her voice.

His body was shaking.

That was Lauren’s hand on his shoulder.

“You woke the baby,” she said.

He mumbled something even he wasn’t sure what it was.

“What?” she asked.

The covers moved. That was Lauren’s M.O. She knew how to get him out of bed.

He shivered. He must have been sweating, whatever else he’d been doing, because the cold air of the apartment struck him, making goosebumps pop up on his bare arms.

Marty threw his legs over the side of the bed, feeling a little lightheaded as he sat up. He stumbled to the doorway, his eyes half-open as he tried to recall what he must have been dreaming of that could have caused him to wake up the baby.

He glanced back at his wife, seeing her already curled up back under the covers. The screaming had grown fainter, more like a little whimper. He leaned against the doorjamb as he watched his wife. Even in the dark, in the dim light from the nightlight in the hall, he could see her breathing, chest rising up and down. It surprised him a little, being able to see her across the room. Being able to see… He ran a hand over his face, trying to wake himself up. He reached for the hall light, a sudden impulse, and found he could see perfectly, as always. Curious, how he’d been so sure… Must be working with Jim too much if he’d dreamt he couldn’t see.

“Dad?” Josh, his oldest son, asked.

Marty looked down at the kid, standing in the hallway, shielding his eyes against the glare.

Josh thumbed over his shoulder at the room he shared with the baby. “I’m going to sleep on the couch,” the kid said.

Marty laughed at him and ruffled his already rumpled hair as he passed.

But holding the baby, rocking back and forth in the glider, he felt himself lulling off long before the kid. In the half-awake state, he felt the dream coming back, and he could see himself, or the man he had been in the dream, lying at his own feet, bleeding and dying.


* * *

[greenbeing]

* * *


It was morning at the precinct. Marty’d been leaning back in his chair, staring at a picture of his wife since he got there. Tom and Karen were joking around about an old case with a missing harpsichord, but Dunbar was sitting at his desk, quiet, staring at whatever it was he stared at. They didn’t have a lot going on that day, so the boss hadn’t reprimanded them about their lack of efficiency yet. Marty’s wife, wearing her favorite blue jeans, and an old shirt of his, much too big for her, giggled for the camera. He hunched over his desk, looking closer at her, trying to shut out his own thoughts. But if he had to hazard a guess, he would have guessed both he and Dunbar were mulling over everything that had happened the night before at the hotel. Marty himself had barely slept, and glancing at Jim, it looked like he hadn’t, either.

“Hey,” Fisk said, coming out of his office and commanding attention from his detectives, “ME just called. She wants us down there.”

“All of us?” Tom asked.

“You got something better to do?”

Marty watched the boss carefully to see if maybe there was something he wasn’t telling them, but he looked as out of the loop as they did. He stood up and pushed in his chair, glancing back at Dunbar and Karen, who’d moved close together in the aisle to confer privately.

“Any idea?” Marty asked.

Jim was shrugging into his tan overcoat. He reached for the corner of his desk for his cane, folded, and slipped it into an inside pocket. “Look at the state of the body, Marty. There was something going on with that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe she’ll solve the case for us.”

Marty grabbed his own black overcoat from the coat rack on the way out of the squad, following Karen, Dunbar behind him a few steps, always taking up the rear if he had a choice. “Wishful thinking.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. What if the body—”

“Had a note paperclipped inside the jacket with the name of the murderer written in blood?” Marty interrupted.

Jim chuckled. “You can always hope, Marty. I was thinking more along the lines of the same M.O. of a serial killer ten years ago.”

“Like that’s gonna happen,” Karen said.

“I’m always optimistic, Karen. You know me.”


* * *


“The wounds aren’t recent,” Dr. Taylor said.

“Excuse me?” Fisk said.

“There’s nothing I’m aware of that can do this to a body overnight.”

“How long do you think it had been there?”

“Give or take? Thirty years.” The Medical Examiner almost looked excited.

Marty let out a whistle.

“The state of the body, the type of wound, the fact that it had been in stasis inside a walk-in freezer, which would have delayed decomposition… We sent some of the fabric of the uniform out for testing, to see if that corroborates our theory. But just from the style of the uniform, I’d say that body’s been down there since the hotel closed.”

“Is there any tell-tale evidence that could lead us to a suspect?” Dunbar asked.

“Now?” Dr. Taylor shifted the sheet to show them the body in better light. “After all this time, no, I’m afraid not.”

“No bullets still in the body?”

“No. From the chipping of the ribs, and the size of the wound that destroyed half of the skull, I’d say it was a larger caliber weapon, but… If you want, I know some people who specialize in determining cause of death from bones found at archeological sites…”

Fisk shook his head. “If there’s no chance we’re going to make an arrest, we’re not interested.”

“The tabloids will be,” Tom said.

“There’s little chance we’ll even be able to ID the body. It’s practically mummified, since it had so long to slowly dry out,” Dr. Taylor continued. “Most dentists don’t keep such archaic records.”

“Thank you,” Fisk said and turned away.

Marty bit his lip. He turned to leave, finding Dunbar directly behind him, chewing on his own lip. He clapped the detective on the shoulder. “Forget about it,” he said. “Case is closed.”

Jim nodded absently.

Yet Marty knew neither one of them was liable to just push this case out of their minds.


* * *


“Boss?”

“Yeah.”

“Will you let us run with it?” Marty asked.

“Are you that bored, Russo?”

“No, just curious.” He didn’t mention that uneasy feeling of déjà vu he’d been having all day, every time he thought about the case. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but he knew there was something they were overlooking.

“What do you think you’re going to do? It’s a waste of time.”

“Just for a while,” he argued. “Let me and Dunbar dig around a little.”

Fisk shot a glance over at Jim, who’d been staring out the window at the rain for the last forty minutes. “All right, you can have the rest of the day. But if you don’t come up with anything concrete, I want this finished. No more whining, got it?”

“Got it.”

“You’ve both been worthless all day, anyway.”

Marty didn’t argue.

“Something you want to share?”

“Nope. We’ll start by running through old employee lists from the hotel and cross-referencing them with missing persons from the ‘70s. See if we can get a name on our friendly little bellhop.”

“Right.” Fisk turned around and walked off.

By the time Marty had turned around, Jim was working diligently at his computer, typing away at something. “You hear that?” Marty asked.

“Yeah, Marty. Stop yapping and get to work.” Jim pulled one hand away just long enough to roll it impatiently through the air.

Marty snickered and got down to work.

They worked in silence for a half hour, doing preliminary research on the hotel where they had found the murdered bellhop in the walk-in freezer.

“The owner is one Dustin Fillmore. He shut the hotel down decades ago after his wife ran away with the bellhop,” Jim said.

“Why didn’t they turn the hotel into something else? Or tear it down?” Marty leaned back in his chair, looking over his shoulder at Dunbar, who still had his computer earpiece in his ear.

“Because he still owned it. It doesn’t say why he didn’t sell it. But he was rich enough, he probably didn’t even notice.”

“What happened to his wife?”

“I can’t find anything else on her.”

Marty turned back to his own computer. “What was her name?”

“Adriana.”

“Classy.” He typed it in. “Shit, Dunbar,” he said, looking at the picture on the screen. He let out a low whistle. “If you could see this…”

Dunbar pulled out his earpiece and scooted his own chair closer. “What?”

“The broad from Room 11. Remember?” She was a dead ringer. There wasn’t any chance in Marty’s mind of this chick in the photo and the one in the room—they weren’t just relatives, they were the same person. No doubt.

“How can I forget the only dead body we’ve ever lost?”

“It’s her.”

“How can you be so sure? This was years ago—”

“No. I mean it. Spitting image. I knew there was something weird about that room.”

Marty jumped up, ready to go back to the hotel, but Dunbar just leaned back in his office chair, grinning. Marty stopped with his coat half on and glared.

“You almost had me going there for a minute.” Jim laughed and pointed to his head. “Blind, not stupid.”

“Yeah, Dunbar. I know.”

Jim straightened back up in his chair and put his earpiece back in. “Nice try.”

Marty peeled back out of his coat and threw it onto his chair so hard the chair swiveled, striking his desk with a thud. He leaned over Jim’s desk.

Jim looked up, surprised, the smile completely vacating his face. But he stood his ground, so to speak, and didn’t lean back in his chair.

Marty lowered his voice, aware that there were several cops milling around watching. He was glad Jim had stopped smirking, or he would have felt the need to attack the other detective to get his point across. “I don’t joke about cases, Dunbar. Even if you are blind. Even if you are a liability. I don’t care about any of that anymore. Point is, you’re the only other witness. You’re the only one who was there when I saw the girl. She was there.”

Jim’s head tilted to the side, contemplating.

Marty let his head fall, breaking eye contact.

On the floor behind him was one of the Polaroids, the one he’d shoved in his pocket when the camera had started working again. The wasted one from the basement. It must have been dislodged when he threw his coat onto his chair. But it wasn’t blank, or even just a picture of Tom. There was something there, a human image, but faint. The picture was dark, as if the flash had gone off a second after the picture was taken, the same dank dimness of the basement. Marty was scared to move, to pick up the picture, in case it disintegrated along with all the other evidence, along with the body of the bellhop, disappeared along with the body of the girl. “If you could see what I can see right now… we’d be best friends,” Marty whispered.

Jim didn’t say anything, just waited.

Marty finally squatted down and picked up the photo, gingerly, by the corner so it wouldn’t end up smudged, even though it was already bent from being in his pocket. “It’s her.” He straightened up. “In the picture I took at the hotel yesterday. I can prove it.” He looked around, feeling that apprehensive yet excited thumping in his chest. “Where’s Karen and Tom?”

“It’s lunchtime. They were hungry,” Jim said and blinked at him.

Marty’s gaze strayed toward the boss’s office. He could show him, ask him to prove to Jim that the gauzy image of the girl in the photo was the same image Marty had up on his computer screen from an old newspaper clipping. But there were just some things you didn’t share with the boss, this being one of them. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

“Where to?” Dunbar asked, but he’d already stood up and grabbed his overcoat.

Marty guessed Dunbar had had enough of his own crackpot theories over the years that he wasn’t going to argue with Marty.

“Where else?” Marty taped the picture to his computer, side by side with the newspaper image. It arrested him, this identical image, both slightly smiling.

If Tom and Karen came back, wondering where they’d gone to, this would give them a clue. And if he really was hallucinating about the picture, if the ghostly apparition was just that, an apparition, then there was no harm. Maybe he just needed some sleep. He really was feeling edgy, short-tempered.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Marty asked hesitantly as they walked out into the misty, overcast afternoon. He didn’t look over at the man he was guiding, just kept an eye out for traffic and mischief.

“I never used to, Marty,” Jim replied just as hesitantly.

“No?”

“But you just asked a blind man if he believes in the unseen.”

Marty grinned as he led Jim to the car.

[greenbeing]

Part Four
Lights Out

“I had this dream last night, might interest you,” Marty said as they meandered through the front door of the once-opulent Fillmore Hotel.

“Yeah?” Jim asked.

“About a nearsighted detective.” Marty kept an eye out for any clue about this place, looking at everything from the baseboards to the ceiling panels.

Jim smiled. “What about it?”

“I don’t remember anything else. I’m surprised I remembered that much, actually.” Marty scratched his head. He could rib Dunbar a little with what he did remember. “I couldn’t read notes on the case or see the face of the man I was interviewing. Sound familiar?”

“We gonna start this again?” But his voice was light. “What happened in the dream?”

Marty shrugged. “I think he shot me.”

Jim laughed.

“You like that, don’t you?” Marty stopped outside the door to the stairs. It hadn’t been a problem to find—this time. Jim stopped beside him, having no choice in the matter, as they’d agreed it would be best if Marty guided him.

“What?” Jim asked.

“Abandon hope, all ye enter here.”

“It doesn’t say that.”

Marty grinned. “No, but it should.” He felt better, following up on the case, coming clean about the dream. Nothing was going to get overlooked. He opened the door, and that hope he’d been talking about disappeared. He shivered.

“Let’s go.” Jim prodded him onward.

Marty took the stairs carefully, hanging onto the railing. With the lights left behind by the forensic unit, the stairs, finally well-lit, like a drab cave, looked brittle, like they could disintegrate as easily as that body.

“What’s the matter, you nervous?” Jim asked.

“No.”

“It dark again?”

“No.” It was a long way down and Marty kept an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. “You ever get a premonition?”

“Like we’re not supposed to be here?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“No.”

Marty glanced over at Jim and saw that tell-tale little smile that meant he was lying.

“What are we looking for?” Marty asked. He propped the door at the bottom of the stairs open with a rough and crumbling brick the same color as the carpet in the upstairs hallway, but without the floral pattern.

“Another body?” Jim suggested wryly. “Or how about a written confession?”

“Yeah… that’d be nice, huh?” Marty asked, looking up at the exposed beams of the ceiling.

Jim pulled his cane out of his overcoat. “I’ll go this way.” He extended the white rod to the left, his hand out to catch the wall.

“You do that,” Marty mumbled. He wandered off to the right, toward the area where they’d found the freezer and the first body. It was unlikely anything would be left there, not after crime scene had been over it, bagging everything that looked useful. He snatched a flashlight from the floor and shone the beam into the crawlspace that ran under the hotel where the basement didn’t extend. He batted cobwebs away from corners, and kept an eye on Dunbar, who had made the circuit of the room on his half, hand on the exposed brick and concrete block of the wall. He seemed to be listening for a clue. Marty rolled his eyes. Like Dunbar was going to find a clue that way. He stopped at an unfinished slab table covered in rusty tools, slowly exploring, thinking.

A pinging sound drew Marty’s attention to an old boiler, a massive octopus of a contraption. Marty meandered that way, letting Dunbar do his own thing.


* * *


Jim stopped walking, his cane falling out of his suddenly limp hand. The emptiness had opened up, and he could see—the last thing he had ever seen—the bank robbery. With that behemoth of a man standing directly in front of him, AK-47 in hand, shooting anything that moved, people, cars, a newspaper blowing in the wind. He could see it, but there was an unaccustomed silence, like he’d gone deaf.

“Marty?” Jim called, his voice only slightly unsteady at the unnerving scene before him.

There was no answer, but he noticed an odd noise in the background. Subtle, like white noise, just enough to obscure movement. He flinched, surrounded suddenly by gunfire. The shots weren’t aimed at him—yet.

“Hey, Jim.” Terry bounded over and clutched Jim’s arm, a pitying, almost bubbly tone to his voice. The scene disappeared when Jim blinked, leaving him almost relieved to be blind again, to have that whole time over with, to not have to live through it again like he had in so many dreams, night after night. The hand was still on his arm, probably Marty. “It’s okay, Jimmy, I got you,” Terry said.

Jim shook him off and bent down to retrieve his cane. “Terry, what are you doing here?”

“I thought you might want some help. It’s been a while, and maybe, you know, you’ll be able to trust me now. At least to help you look around.”

“I don’t want your help, Terry.”

Terry clutched his arm again.

“Jimmy, I know that. And I know it was my fault, everything that happened. See? I told you I’d get help.” Terry laughed, excited. “I finally moved on, Jimmy, and I’m back on the job. Everything’s okay.”

“Let go,” Jim said quietly in that no-nonsense way he had.

“See, the way I figure it, you and I can be partners again. You don’t need that broad, or the dog, not when you got me, Jimmy.” There was a sinister undertone to Terry’s obsessed babbling.

“Terry—” Jim couldn’t shake him off. He stepped back, away, but Terry’s body was right there with him, hot in the basement, face to face.

“You got me, Jimmy, what more could you need? I’m gonna prove it to you, that next time, I’m gonna step up.”

The scene at the bank flickered in front of Jim’s eyes, soundless like before, then black.

“I’ll take a bullet for you, if that’s what you want. If you ask me to, I’ll do it, Jimmy. Is that what you were asking me to do that day, Jimmy? To step out of cover and die for you? So you’d be safe behind that car?”

The scene flashed again, making Jim flinch and hunch. In the blackness he heard a gun discharge.

“Let go of me, Terry.” He didn’t know what was going on, but he had to get away from Terry, away from this place, and that street in front of the bank.

“Relax, Jimmy. You accepted my apology a long time ago, and now I’m gonna prove to you what that did.”

Jim felt himself sweating. He heard a bullet hit the brick wall next to him. It seemed irrational, but then again, what was Terry doing there? Not letting go of his arm. Not listening. Not leaving him be.

“I was pinned down—mentally, Jimmy. But I’m all better now.”

“You need help,” Jim said quietly, throat constricted with anger.

“It’s okay. I got you.” The fingers tightened on Jim’s arm.

“I don’t. Need. Help.” Jim lashed out, pushing him away, pulling his fist back, and letting fly.


* * *


Marty looked up from where he was on the floor examining the boiler. Jim had been deep in thought, leaning against a table covered in rusting old tools and an electric saw, but now he was standing rigid. If he’d heard right, the thing that had caught Marty’s attention, Jim had mentioned Terry Jansen, his ex-partner. Marty didn’t know what soap opera had gone on between those two, not even after five years of working with Jim, but he had his suspicions that Jim’s reaction was at least partly justified.

Marty sat up a little more, his hand half under the boiler, wrapped around the butt of a gun that he couldn’t get loose.

Jim picked up the cane he had dropped. “I don’t want your help, Terry.”

“I’ll be damned,” Marty whispered. Jim actually thought he was talking to someone. It might have been funny, but down here, so near the crime scene, with the crazy things he’d seen for himself last time they were there, it sent a chill down Marty’s spine. He let go of the gun, even though it was probably evidence. He could come back for it, but for now, his duty was to have Jim’s back, even against an unseen foe. Pulling his latex gloves off, he realized all of Jim’s foes would be unseen, but this was a little different.

“Let go of me, Terry,” Jim said as Marty got closer.

Marty kept an eye out, hoping to see Jim’s coat snagged, but there was nothing.

“You need help.”

Marty stopped a second. He searched the basement, just a cursory glance; he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This wasn’t the Dunbar he knew. He drew closer, two steps away.

“I don’t. Need. Help.”

Dunbar lashed out violently, throwing his cane aside and cocking his arm.

Marty ducked, just in time; he’d gotten too close, or Jim had zeroed in on his footsteps, he wasn’t sure which.

Breathing hard, face red, Jim leaned back against the table.

Marty straightened up. “Sh*t, Jim, you nearly took my head off with that one.”

Jim blinked, his sunglasses having disappeared sometime during the exchange. “Marty? Where the f^ck have you been?”

“Right over there. I found a gun. Some old mother, solid, but I can’t get it out.” Marty wasn’t sure if he could bring up the fact that there was no one there, or if Jim already knew. He decided to ignore it and headed back toward the boiler.

“Let’s get out of here. We’ll come back,” Jim said.

“Help me get this out first.” Marty froze, catching sight of the door that Jim had drawn his attention to. “Did you shut the door?” He blinked, the room swimming like he had tears in his eyes, suddenly blurred—like in that dream. He shook his head and scrubbed at his eyes, shuddering. They didn’t need two blind cops in the squad. The door, warped as the wood had been, was completely closed, wedged back into its frame.

“No.”

That was good enough for him. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Jim knelt down, his hand searching for the discarded cane.

Marty was almost to the door when the lights went out. He stopped, holding his breath.

“What? Is it locked?” Jim asked.

“I dunno—the lights went out.”

“So?”

“So,” he said, oozing sarcasm, “I imagine I’m as blind as you are.” He couldn’t even blink. Staring, nothing.

“Marty, the door was right in front of you. You were headed toward it. It didn’t move.”

“It was at least ten feet away,” Marty argued. He tried to breathe, feeling irrational. But what had he been doing, taking Jim to a crime scene? What’d he think Dunbar could do to help?

“So?”

“I’m sure you just jumped right up and got back to work as soon as you lost your sight—”

“At least you know this isn’t permanent.”

Marty rolled his eyes—a lot of good it did in the dark. The gesture was completely lost.

He swore to himself. The gesture would have been lost anyway. Jim was blind, and though Marty had always known it in theory, it seemed a little different now.

Jim was right, he’d been on his way to the door. It was only about ten feet. Marty summoned up all the arrogance he had left, lifted his head, and strode forward. One, two, three. He hesitated after the third step. Ten feet wasn’t ten steps. He did a little math. If each of his steps was about three feet, the wall should be right in front of him. He reached out—nothing. But if he’d underestimated the distance, if he really had been ten steps away… The distance in his memory swam, moving closer, farther, closer, tilting like a funhouse floor.

Marty held his hands out and moved forward slowly. After all, Jim had his cane. He always had his cane. Or the dog. Except he didn’t use them around the squad. Four, five shuffling steps. What if he’d veered? He’d turned his head when he was talking to Dunbar; what if he’d turned his body, too? It was no wonder Jim insisted they keep the chairs under the desks.

His hand touched the wall and he fumbled around.

“It’s locked,” he finally said.

Jim swore.

“Nice to know you’re optimistic,” Marty said.

“We need to find a way out.”

“Good luck. You’re the blind one.”

“Just because it’s dark doesn’t mean I suddenly know my way around.”

What if Jim wasn’t the only blind one? How could the lights have gone out? There was no one else in the building, and it was Marty’s word against Jim’s. Jim wouldn’t know. Just like Jim couldn’t vouch for the body he’d seen. What if—the blurred vision… What if he hadn’t been imagining it? What if it had been more premonition than dream? What if—blind—Marty blind Russo f@#k blind helpless blind. Bile rising in his throat he pounded on the door, couldn’t find the knob, might have missed the door, been pounding on the wall for all he knew. There was no light coming from under the door. No light from the windows. There’d been windows, right? There was no way the whole city’d gone dark, not during the day. There would have been light. A sliver. A hope. Abandon hope.


* * *


“Marty?” Jim reached out, fumbling with nothingness for a second, his hand finally landing on Marty’s arm. “It’s okay.” Marty waved his arm, trying vainly to dislodge Jim’s hold.

Marty pushed him. “What the fuck were you doing ever carrying a gun?”

Jim stepped back, but didn’t relinquish his hold. “Calm down. The door’s right here—”

“It’s locked.”

“It’s old. We’ll just—”

Marty pushed him harder. “Now we’re both blind,” he said, almost calmly.

“Until we get out of here, yeah.” Jim tried to keep his own calm, but there’d always been that overwhelming urge to spar with Marty Russo that had never quite gone away.

“The door’s locked, I can’t see, and we’re going to die down here, blind.”

Jim gripped Marty by the shoulders as hard as he could. “Relax.”

Marty broke the hold. “You know what? The playing field’s finally level.” He threw a punch, glancing off Jim’s shoulder.

“Marty, calm down. Give me a couple seconds and I’ll get the door—”

Jim felt another punch glance off to the side. Obviously, Marty wasn’t concentrating at all, just lashing out with whatever violent urge he’d had when they first met, waiting for a time when he could pound Jim without pity.

“We never got it out of our systems, did we? Five years, I’ve wanted a shot at you.”

Jim let his cane fall and spun Marty around into a weak chokehold, trying not to hurt the other detective. “I respect you as a cop, Marty. We work together. Let it go.”

Marty elbowed him and broke away, stumbling.

Jim kept his senses tuned in for Marty’s movements. “This isn’t the time. Where’d you find the gun?” If he could get Marty’s mind back on the case, distract him…

“Under the boiler.” Marty grunted, obviously running into something as he tried to find Jim. “Stay still.”

“I haven’t moved.”

Marty growled and lunged.

Jim went with the movement, catching him and falling back a few steps so neither one of them would end up with so much as a bruise. “Marty,” he said rationally, “Terry wasn’t here, was he?”

“No,” Marty leered.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but—” Jim let out an oomph as Marty finally connected with his stomach, but he didn’t let go.

A woman giggled. “Now, that’s entertainment.”

The detectives both froze.

“You hear that?” Marty asked.

“Yeah,” Jim said.

“Hear what?” the girl’s voice asked.

Marty straightened up and moved away from Jim, but kept one hand on his shoulder. Jim turned toward the voice, letting Marty move with him.

“Now this is what I like to see…” she said.

Marty’s hand clenched tighter on Jim’s shoulder. “See?” he asked quietly, “I told you—”

Jim almost laughed. “You’re not blind.” He looked up at the girl. “Who are you?”

“I just wanted to watch.”

“Watch what?” Marty growled.

“You. Although I shouldn’t. I’m a married woman; Dusty’s the jealous type, you know,” she said with all the sweetness of a young woman completely in love.

“How are you watching?” Jim asked.

“Why can’t you see me?”

“I’m blind.”

“That’s never stopped anyone before,” she said coquettishly. Jim felt a cold finger run down his cheek. But as soon as it was gone, he started to wonder what he’d really felt.

“Who are you?” Marty asked.

“Can you see me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Jim waited for Marty to answer, but all he could hear was Marty’s ragged breathing. He answered instead, “It’s dark down here. The power’s out.”

“Typical.”

“…you don’t…?” Marty asked, his voice a little strangled.

“Don’t what?” she asked, a perfect Southern Belle impression. “I was just havin’ a little fun with y’all, so don’t hold it against me now, ya hear? I really don’t mean no harm, but like Dusty’s always tellin’ me, I’m bound to do nothing but hurt people.” Her voice changed to a more wry tone, “Of course, he only means himself.”

Jim heard a bit of a click, a tiny, faraway noise. Marty let go of his arm.

“Who—” Jim started.

“Forget it,” Marty said, his voice back to normal. “She’s gone.”

Jim kept facing the spot where they’d been talking to the girl. He hadn’t heard any footsteps. “Where—”

“She just… sort of… faded away.”

Jim laughed. Marty had to be pulling his leg.

“Honest. The lights… came on, and she was sort of there, but I could see through her.”

“And?”

“She was the girl from upstairs. The girl from the newspaper photo.”

Jim rubbed his hand over his chin. “I don’t believe in ghosts, Marty.”

“Yeah, well… Looks like ghosts can see in the dark, Jim.”

Jim shifted his stance from one foot to the other, facing the floor. “You got a good look at her?” he hedged.

“Yeah.”

“It was… her?”

“Yup.”

“Guys?” Karen’s voice called from upstairs.

[greenbeing]

Part Five
Burying the Dead

“Guys?” Karen’s voice called from upstairs.

Marty looked at the half-ajar door, which he could have sworn had been wedged shut. And the girl? What was she? Some kind of poltergeist? She said she didn’t mean any harm… She was just… playing tricks on them?

Karen’s footsteps were getting closer. “You guys forget to turn the light on or something? Doing a little ghost hunting in the dark?”

“Ha ha,” Marty told her.

Jim picked up his cane.

Marty suddenly became highly aware of a flashlight sticking out of his back pocket. He’d wedged it there when he found the gun, when he started crawling on the floor. He pulled it out now and looked at it, amazed.

The door creaked open. “Having fun?” Karen asked.

“Loads,” Jim said. “Where was that gun, Marty?”

Jim looked like he’d buried whatever had just happened. Like none of it had ever happened. Marty felt his eyes narrowing as he looked Jim over. There was still a line of sweat on his forehead.

“Under the boiler over here.” He started in that direction and Jim took his arm, the cane loose in his hand. Marty stopped at the giant heating apparatus and grabbed the white cane from the detective. “How do you fold this thing?”

“Pull it apart.” Jim sort of pointed, vaguely, toward the cane and made a movement of where to pull it.

“Perfect,” Marty said as the cane folded in two, just long enough to stick under the boiler, and strong enough to dislodge the gun. He knelt down, crouched, flashlight in hand, and poked underneath until the cane caught the butt of the gun. With a little finesse he had it out in seconds.

Jim squatted next to him.

“Karen, you got an evidence bag? So I don’t have to touch it?” Marty’d discarded the latex gloves a long time ago, somewhere.

Karen, looking amused, handed one down. “So you two found something?”

“Yeah, you?”

“Yeah.” She laughed.

Jim straightened up.

Marty kept hold of the gun in the bag, but tapped Jim with the partially folded cane, which Jim folded and put in his pocket. “Better take this, too.” He handed over the flashlight.

Jim hefted it. “What am I going to do with this?”

“If anything strange happens, turn it on, okay?”

Jim grinned. “Here I thought you wanted me to hit someone with it, or blind an on-coming perp…” He jammed the light in his back pocket and cocked his head at Karen. “What’d you find?”

“Twenty to one, it’ll be a body.”

“You think you found a body? You think?”

“I left Tom up there.”

“You left Tom?” Marty asked incredulously. “We’ll be lucky to see him alive again.”

Karen laughed, as if Marty were joking.

“Talk and walk,” Jim said. He motioned Karen in front of them, then hung back and took Marty’s arm. “What exactly did you find?”

Marty stooped in mid-stride to grab another flashlight. He clicked it to make sure it worked.

“You okay?” Jim asked quietly so Karen couldn’t hear it.

“Yeah, it works, see?” Marty shone the light into Jim’s eyes just for the hell of it.

Karen practically bounced with excitement. “Looks like someone put a false wall in front of a room upstairs. Right about where you two swore you found that girl’s body. But…” She creaked the door open again and started upstairs. “…there’s no way you could have seen the body, because there’s no way anyone could have built a wall that old that fast. It’s been there for a while.”

Marty kept his eyes trained on the back of Karen’s head. He concentrated on the way the blonde streaks caught the light, and the dark brown streaks melted into the dark parts of the staircase. It had a ghost-like ephemeral quality that drew his eye and wouldn’t let go, reminding him of the way that girl had looked the second before she faded away.

“Doesn’t that sound a little… weird… Karen?” Jim asked hesitantly.

“What?” she asked, turning at the top of the stairs just enough to toss her hair over her shoulder.

Marty tore his eyes away and looked at Dunbar, who was talking more to the railing than to Karen. “That we… saw a body?”

Marty rolled his eyes. “You mean me, Dunbar. That I saw the body. That I’m the one going freakin’ nuts here, loony bin, hallucinating—”

“Marty,” Karen said, pushing open the door and stepping into the flickering light of the hallway, “get over it. I don’t know how you know what you know, but we’re behind you on this one.”

“I am, at least,” Jim said, half a step behind.

“Oh?” Marty asked, the syllable dripping sarcasm.

“Maybe we should… tell her.”

“What?”

“Everything.”

Marty almost laughed.

“Tell me what?” Karen asked from five steps ahead. “What have you two been up to?”

“We haven’t been doing anything,” Marty said.

“I just think you two stumbled on some secret entrance to this room,” Karen said reasonably.

“Where?”

“How am I supposed to know? It’s an old hotel, Marty.” Karen paused, looking up and down the hall, as if suddenly lost. “What, you going to tell me this place is haunted? One minute the wall’s there, the next it’s not?”

“Where’s Tom?” Marty asked, stopping next to her.

Jim let go of his arm, listening intently.

“He was right here, I swear. I just left him, told him I’d run down and grab you guys.” Karen swallowed audibly. “Tom?” she called.

The lights flickered, more an on-off than the bad bulb normally gave. Marty focused down the hallway, toward the end that held the atrium. In the dark looming out there, he saw a flash of light. Probably about to rain again.

“I told you we’d lose him,” Marty complained.

“Geez, Marty, he’s probably just looking around.” Karen grinned, enjoying it all a little too much.

“Did you call the boss?” Jim asked, crossing his arms as he looked at Karen.

“Not yet. We called for a CSU, though.”

“How long ago?”

Thunder rocked the ancient plaster, ran along the rivets, up through the studs, through the very fiber of the building.

“Uh, right before I came and got you…” Karen’s eyes were wide as she looked down the hall at the bare bulb, their only source of light, the only thing separating them and Jim.

“Room 11, right, Marty?” Jim asked, seemingly oblivious.

“Right.”

“You got a radio, Karen? We can call Tom, see where he wandered off to?”

Karen shook her head. “I have the radio. Tom doesn’t.”

“Lot of good that does us,” Marty pointed out.

“Where’s your radio?” Karen asked.

“I didn’t bring one.”

“Jim?”

“You always grab it,” Jim said. He gave her a well-practiced shrug.

“So what? It’s a big building, but it’s not like we can lose Tom,” Karen said. “He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”

“Can he?” Jim asked Marty.

Marty nodded, his head bobbing side to side more than up and down. “Sure. We’ve never really been in anything over our heads before, but I’m sure Tom can take care of himself.”

“Good.”

Karen let out a loud laugh. “Will you two listen to yourselves? Tom’s a detective; he can take care of himself. You make it sound like we’re about to be attacked.”

Marty shrugged at her and she pursed her lips in response, highly amused.

“By what?” she asked, one eyebrow up, lips twisting with such humor as to almost look malicious. Marty knew he’d have to watch himself or she’d end up going to the boss after all this was over, telling Fisk that Marty wasn’t fit for duty. “Poltergeists? Little green men?”

“Right, Karen,” Marty said defensively. “Be funny. You’re the one who lost Tom.”

“I did not lose Tom.” She turned around and edged past Jim. “Obviously we walked right past the room. It was right here.” She started off down the hall again, back toward the stairs to the basement.

“This seems… familiar,” Jim said.

“Yeah,” Marty agreed, keeping an eye on Karen.

She stopped two doors down, paused, threw a grin back at them, then stooped to pluck something off the ground. “I’ve been looking for this!” she said excitedly, her voice a little higher than normal.

“For what?” Jim asked, taking a step closer to Marty.

“A scarf.”

“Karen doesn’t wear scarves, does she?”

“Not that I’ve seen. How would you know?”

“Come on, Marty.” Jim gave a little laugh. “I know these things. I’d always be getting tangled up in them.”

Marty started to follow Karen. Jim must have heard him move away, or felt him, or however it was Jim got his information now that he couldn’t see, because he followed, a mere step behind Marty. “Karen?”

“And here’s the door!” Her voice was still a slight pitch higher than usual, and she slapped herself in the forehead, lightly, with the palm of her hand. “I am always missing this door and sometimes, you know, I swear it’s just not here at all,” she said, her voice taking on a slight Southern accent, almost imperceptible to anyone who didn’t know Karen well. “It’s this hotel. It’s just so weird, and I keep telling Dusty he needs better lighting down here so I don’t lose my way, but does he listen? No.” She toodled her fingers at Marty. “I guess this way he thinks no one else can find me. All those invisible suitors he’s always dreading.” She giggled.

Jim grabbed Marty’s arm. “Did Karen just giggle?”

“Yeah,” Marty said.

Jim didn’t let go, just let Marty lead the last couple steps.

“Now, you boys can’t come in here,” Karen warned, waggling her finger at them. “Dusty’s the jealous type,” she said with all the pride of a young woman in love.

“Karen?” Jim said as Marty stopped walking.

“Karen? You can’t even remember my name? Now, that is insulting.”

“Do you know who we are?” Marty asked.

“Sure,” Karen said, wide-eyed, looking a little too innocent for his taste. “You’re that detective Dusty hired to follow me,” she said, pointing her finger right in Marty’s face. “And…” She faced Jim, looking a little confused. “I think I just met you downstairs… But what were you doing downstairs?”

Marty jabbed Jim with his elbow.

“Me?” Jim asked.

“Yes, you, what, are you—oh! Right, never mind. You’re the blind guy. What was your name again?”

“Jim, remember?”

“No, not really, Jimmy. But I always like to meet new people, and sometimes I just can’t keep them all straight. Dusty thinks I flirt, but,” she paused and rolled her eyes, “why would I do that?” She giggled again.

Marty could see a change even in her silent form, something most people wouldn’t notice, but he could tell just from the way Karen’s gaze flicked across their faces that she wasn’t herself. And the shiver he felt told him she wasn’t kidding around. Her eyes landed on him again, barely recognizing him.

“And you’re Terry, right?”

Marty shook his head. He glanced at Jim, seeing how the other detective tensed, sucked in a breath, then waited. “Marty. I’m Marty.”

“Oh, sorry! See, I kept hearing him call you Terry, and I admit I was eavesdropping down there, but I guess I got it wrong.” Karen’s hand landed on the doorknob.

Marty saw an 11 in brass, slightly tarnished, not all that old, hung on the red door. The number he’d seen last time with Jim had been dirty, old, grungy, dusty, had barely reflected the dim light in the hallway.

He looked down at the carpet, which seemed newer, somehow, and the mural on the wall—there it was. The wallpaper wasn’t torn.

He looked over at Jim, who had his gaze trained on Karen, almost as if he could see her, as if he could watch her, figure this all out.

“Adriana,” Marty whispered as Karen turned the doorknob.

“You boys can’t come in, I told you that before, so you better just skedaddle.” She shooed them away.

“We’re looking for Tom,” Marty said. “You remember Tom?”

She smiled apologetically. “Nope.” She pushed the door open. “See you later,” she said and waved.

Jim pushed himself forward, bumping Marty’s shoulder as he passed.

“Hey!” Karen protested as Jim moved into the room before her.

He had the flashlight in hand as he leaned against the door, flicking it on, shining it around. Karen grabbed his arm and pulled him back, pushing him against the doorjamb. Jim kept the flashlight trained forward even as he stumbled back. “Marty? What do you see?”

Karen screamed.

She fell, backwards, from where she’d been looking at where Jim’s flashlight beam landed, on the far wall—or the fake wall. She bumped Jim’s arm, sliding down. Jim dropped the flashlight as Marty jumped forward, and together the two of them lowered Karen’s limp body to the floor.

“What do you see?” Jim asked.

“Just a storage cupboard. A couple mops, and this wall.”

“But it’s Room 11, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

Marty watched as Jim took Karen’s vital signs, his fingers pressed against her neck, the other hand smoothing back her hair from her face.

“Looks like a really old wall, but like Karen said earlier, it could be fake.” Marty left Jim to take care of her and pulled out his own flashlight, pushing a mop away. “The plaster’s cracked down here.” He knelt down, pushed away a bucket, squinted through the tiny hole. It definitely didn’t lead outside. “Yeah, this is it.”

“This is the same room?”

Marty stood back up, turning the light on the door, faded paint and tarnished numbers. “Yeah.”

“Hey!” Tom’s voice said from the hall.

Marty heard his footsteps.

“You guys okay?” Tom asked.

“Karen fainted,” Jim said.

“Why? How?” Tom knelt next to them, checking to make sure Karen was okay.

Karen gasped, sitting up quickly, backing away from Jim and Tom, pressing herself against the door. Her eyes darted around the little cupboard, landing on each of them in turn. “Jim?” she finally asked.

“Karen?” he asked right back.

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

Her eyes darted around again, her breathing not quite normal. She swallowed hard. “Someone shot me. I saw—” She patted her body down, once near the shoulder, twice more in the stomach.

Jim reached out and she grabbed his hand.

“No one shot you,” he assured her.

Her eyes searched his face. He kept his gaze steady, facing her, unwavering, unblinking, reassuring. Marty didn’t know how he managed to nearly make eye contact with her, but a moment later Jim’s gaze drifted, down and away, slowly, as if he were thinking.

Jim cocked his head to the side. “What do you remember?”

Karen let go of his hand and huddled back against the door, drawing her knees up to her chest in a modified fetal position. She bit her lip, staring Jim in the face intently. “I just woke up on the floor. I was in the middle of a dream. Some guy, my boyfriend, I guess, was yelling at me. He thought I was messing around. I saw him shoot some guy—the bellhop. He shot the bellhop. Only the uniform was new, and the face wasn’t all dried out.”

“Do you remember what the guy looked like? The guy who shot the bellhop?” Jim prompted.

“Yeah…”

“You think you could pick him out of a mug book if you had to?”

Karen laughed. She let go of her legs and kicked them out in front of her. “Jim!” She looked him over as if he’d gone far past the ridiculous.

“What else?”

She tensed. “Then I ran, and he followed me—here. Only that wall wasn’t there. It was bright, the window was open, the curtains were blowing, and… he shot me. Jimmy, I think he shot me.”

Jim reached out and patted her knee. “He didn’t shoot you, Karen. It wasn’t you. What else do you remember?”

“That’s it.”

“Before the dream.”

Karen looked down at her shoes, a vacant look in her eyes. “I remember… being happy. Being in… love.”

“With Dusty?” Jim asked.

“Yeah.” Her head snapped up. “How’d you know?”

“Go on.”

“That’s it.”

“Before that? Anything between talking to us and waking up here?”

“Just a vague feeling.” She rubbed her hand over her face. “Nothing. Why? What happened?”

“You passed out, Karen, I just want to know what you remember.”

“I…” She looked over to where Marty was standing. “I remember passing out. I came in here, and I looked down at the bed, and I saw myself.”

Tom raised his eyebrows at Marty. Jim just nodded at Karen. Marty gave Tom his best no-nonsense, don’t-interrupt look, then turned back to Karen.

“He shot me.”

“He didn’t shoot you. Was it you in the bed?”

“Yeah, it was me. I looked down and—no, I—she—the body—the girl—she was blonde.”

“And she’d been shot three times?” Marty asked.

“Yeah.” Karen looked up, surprised. Her gaze locked with his. She stood up and moved closer to him. “Three times.” She pointed to each spot on her body, drawing closer to Marty, a wondering, curious, horrified look on her face, unable to break that eye contact, moving ever closer, a connection she couldn’t make with her partner, who stayed crouched on the ground by the door. “I felt him shoot me three times. And it hurt, Marty. I felt it.”

Jim stood up, moving closer to them. “No, Karen.”

“Jim!” She spun on him. “I know what I know!”

He reached out, but didn’t touch her. “You’re not bleeding, Karen. You’re alive.”

“It was all a dream,” Marty reassured her, patting her shoulder as he moved past.


* * *


Karen leaned against the wall right outside the room, the beacon for the CSU team. They’d decided not to take any chances in misplacing any more cops, or Room 11. But Karen’s arms were wrapped around her body, she was still tense, worried, eyes wide and expression turned inward, not paying attention to what was going on around her.

Marty stayed by the basement door, half-scout, half-look-out. He kept an eye on Karen while Jim showed the forensics people the spot under the boiler where they’d found the gun. Marty’d planned to go down, but Jim had asked him to stay up and keep an eye on Karen.

Fisk strode down the hall from the atrium side, water from the storm dripping down his bald head, off the lapels of his long coat. The thing that got Marty was how sometimes they’d come from down near the kitchen, and sometimes they’d come from the atrium. Even though neither place was completely connected to the lobby, not even on the old architectural plans they’d managed to dig up, people still managed to get here from there. Like one of those old Scooby Doo reruns.

“Karen?” Fisk said. “I brought the photo.”

“What photo?” she asked, finally looking up.

“Dunbar asked me to pull up an old newspaper photo, said to bring it with.” Fisk handed the print-out to her. “Mean something?”

Karen’s mouth dropped open.

“Dustin Fillmore, the owner of this place. Used to run it back in the 70s,” Fisk said.

“He shot me,” Karen whispered.

“Excuse me?” Fisk asked, that no-nonsense tone in his voice. He leaned closer to Karen, face to face, so close she was forced to pull her eyes away from the photo and look at the lieutenant.

“I—I—dunno, boss,” Karen stuttered. She blinked up at him, avoiding the face in her hands. She glanced down the hall at Marty, only a few doors away.

Marty left his post to join them.

“What’s going on?” Fisk asked.

Marty frowned a second. “We need to pull him in for questioning. We sent off the gun to forensics, hoping to get a print off it, though it’s been down there a long time.”

“And?”

They all turned as pounding started in the small closet. The CS Unit was finally down to business knocking down the wall. Marty and Karen waited attentively. They hadn’t had a lot of time to talk, but Karen had gotten enough hints of what was going on that she was just as curious as they were. More worried, though.

“You okay?” Fisk asked, his hand on her shoulder.

She looked up at him. “Yeah, boss.”

“What’re they up to in there?”

“Looking for that body,” Marty said. “The girl we lost last time. We think she’s behind this wall. It was built up a while ago, some sort of secret chamber. The guy who found her didn’t want her found.”

Fisk nodded and moved off behind the door.

“I’m just hoping the body in there is her, not me,” Karen confessed.

Marty tried to smile reassuringly, but he wasn’t as good at that as Jim was.

“We’re in!” someone called.

Karen took a deep breath and started for the doorway, but Marty grabbed her arm. “Karen… you might not wanna look.”

She faced him squarely. “I have to, Marty.” She forced a smile. “If I don’t, I’ll never sleep again.”

Marty let go.

“This the girl?” Fisk’s voice said.

Marty took up Karen’s spot at the wall, leaning back, his hands in his pockets.

“Yeah, that’s her,” Karen’s voice replied unsteadily. “It’s like he wanted to keep her…”

Jim stepped out of the stairwell onto the worn carpet. He stepped across the hall to let the forensics team pass. He turned his head to the side while they moved off toward the kitchens, almost as if he were looking at the elephant in the mural.

There was one more bang and the sound of falling plaster. Jim’s head jerked up and he touched the wall, carefully turned himself parallel, then headed down the hall.

“Hey,” Marty said to alert him of his presence.

“Hey,” Jim said, “they find anything?” Jim stopped outside the door, listening to the bustle in the crowded room.

Karen stepped out, taking deep breaths, and stopped next to Jim. “It’s her,” she said. One hand fluttered to her chest, to the area where the first bullet hole was on the girl.

“You okay?” Jim asked, probably alerted to her mood by the waver in her voice. Marty kept his distance, stuck by his wall. He wasn’t needed there.

“I think we’re done here. Should we head back? Call in this Fillmore guy? Dusty?” Her voice wavered again.

Jim nodded and took her arm just above the elbow. Karen’s free hand fluttered over and landed on top of his hand. “Let’s go.” She kept her hold on Jim, but her back straightened, her head raised, almost looking like the old Karen. “See ya, Marty.”


* * *


“They nearly demolished that building,” Marty said, leaning back in his desk chair. “We never would have found her body. Fillmore would have gotten off scot-free. For killing his wife.”

“Don’t forget Clint the bellhop,” Tom added. Dustin Fillmore had given them the name during his long confession. “She was too young for him, anyway.”

Karen shivered. “I was afraid he’d have a heart attack while he ID’d the body.”

Fillmore had taken the hand of his young bride, who had aged more than he had, looking as haggard and dried out as any corpse kept in an airtight room. The years hadn’t been kind to Dustin Fillmore, no more than they had been to Adriana.

“But doesn’t it feel strange, arresting a seventy-year-old man in a thirty-year-old murder?” Tom asked.

“When you put it that way…” Marty said, shaking his head.

Karen played her hand over the light green scarf on her desk. “Ghost notwithstanding?” she asked, butting in. “Speaking of strange?”

“Nah,” Tom said quietly.

“I don’t think she liked seeing herself dead,” Karen said in nearly a whisper.

Jim was somehow managing to ignore them, his computer earpiece in, typing away. He’d offered to finish the bulk of the report, but they’d all decided to leave out most of the strange things that had happened.

“Jim? Marty? My office,” Fisk called.

Jim’s head fell, but he pulled out the earpiece. Marty waited until he’d pulled himself up before joining him, following to the office.

“Shut the door,” Fisk said.

Marty obliged.

“Fingerprint came back positive from the gun. That and the confession mean there’s no contest here.”

Marty nodded.

Jim just stared somewhere at the floor in front of Fisk’s desk.

“He seemed broken up about it all—”

“Yeah,” Marty said, “that he’s old and it still caught up with him.”

“Marty—”

“Boss, if we’d been working this case thirty years ago, I guarantee that bastard wouldn’t have gone AWOL so long.”

Jim tossed him a smile. “Me, too.”

“You done?” Fisk asked.

“Yeah.” Marty shifted uncomfortably. The boss hadn’t called them in there to congratulate them.

“What I want to know is, why does Karen think she got shot?”

“Oh,” Jim said, shaking his head, “she doesn’t, not really, boss.”

“Look.” Fisk leaned across his desk. “If something happened, I need to know. I need to know if I need to call psych services in for one of my detectives. You got that?”

Jim nodded. “But, lieutenant, really, she’s fine.”

“She passed out there,” Marty said.

“That’s it? She passed out for no reason and she’s fine?” Fisk prodded.

Jim and Marty both looked down at their shoes. Jim spoke up first. “Boss, with all due respect, some really strange things happened there that we can’t explain, number one, how’d Marty and I find that body in the first place when it was behind that wall?”

“Okay…” Fisk agreed.

“Some things we’re better off not knowing. And since the fingerprint on the gun came back positive, can we all just agree not to ask any more questions about this case?” Jim asked meekly

Fisk almost looked like he was going to laugh. Marty felt the corners of his own mouth drawing upward. Fisk almost never laughed, and when he did, there was good reason to do so.

“It all sounds kinda crazy, boss, but we solved the case,” Jim continued.

“And Karen’s okay?”

“If you ask her once more, she’s liable to scream.”

Fisk smiled. “Yeah, I know. That’s why I asked you two.”

“Then… we done here?” Jim asked.

Fisk’s eyes twinkled. “We’re done.”