P.S. I Spook You Read online

  “If you’re going to fire me, you could’ve done it over the phone. I was getting a good deal on some blood oranges.”

  “I’m not firing anyone,” Graycie said, clearly exasperated. “But I do have something different in mind for you.”

  “Yeah? I have no desire to fold shirts at the Gap.”

  He ignored my flippancy with effort, but the left corner of one eye did twitch. “I want you to work on one of these outstanding cold cases. We’ve had requests from all of these departments, some dating back several years. You know our department is stretched paper-thin, so cases like these don’t really get the attention they deserve.”

  Graycie picked up a stack of yellow color-coded files and held them out. After a moment of hesitation, I took them.

  “What’re these?”

  “Options. Ryan Markisson from Brighton, Michigan. He went missing from a basketball court. Tavis Ward, a six-year-old from Charleston.” Another yellow folder joined the stack. “Found dead in the woods behind his home. Carly Woodward. Sixteen-year-old from Chicago. They found her car in a parking lot behind her high school. From the amount of blood in her trunk, it doesn’t look good.”

  It was times like these that the nature of the job really struck home. Each one of those yellow folders—some thin, some thick—represented someone’s life. Someone who was missing, maybe dead, possibly murdered. It was sobering. And it might not be the high-profile serial murders in Texas that the rest of the team was working on, but it was important. I picked up one of the yellow folders. They were important.

  “I like the Tavis Ward case,” Ethan said near my ear. I barely caught my groan. I’d been so intent on the folders that I hadn’t even heard him come in. “I’ve never been to Charleston, you know.”

  You should go. Like right now. I tried to project the message with a glare toward the nosy ghost, but Ethan only took a seat in the chair next to me.

  “I’m going to need a moment to review the files,” I said.

  “Take all the time you need.” Graycie’s phone vibrated on the desk, and he picked it up. I watched his thumbs awkwardly paw at the screen. He looked like a museum display as he searched for the next letter, brow furrowed. Cro-Magnon Man Meets Samsung Galaxy.

  I bit my lip. That was my cue. I should probably get up and leave and let Graycie respond to whatever text had just winged in from God knows where. Probably from one of his nonfuckup agents telling him that he or she’d helped close the murder case of the century.

  Instead I thumbed through the files and familiarized myself with the cases. I flipped open the Tavis Ward case file and began reading. It wasn’t long before I shook my head. “1965? The first forty-eight is usually in reference to hours, not years.”

  “They recently found a witness who remembers seeing him in an ice cream shop. He’d been crying and carrying on, but she just thought he was giving his father a hard time.”

  “What made her come forward now?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? What makes any of them come forward? Sometimes those kinds of people only care when it becomes personal for them. Maybe she suffered a recent loss in the family. With the new information, they’re filming a special for them on that missing people show? The Forgotten?”

  “I haven’t heard of it.”

  “You haven’t heard of anything on television, Christiansen.”

  I shrugged. No, I wasn’t an expert on pop culture, but I had a TV. Apparently when you flubbed one game of charades, you were blackballed for life. “We lost fair and square, Grace.”

  “We had that game in the bag.” Graycie sighed and shook his head at the misery of it all. “It was Harry freaking Potter. How do you miss something like that?”

  “You drew a flower pot with hair on it.”

  “And what would you have liked me to draw?” he snapped.

  “How about a wizard hat? And, I dunno, a book?”

  He scowled at me. “The next file is a missing girl from Brickell Bay. Amy Greene. They’re not sure if she took off on her own or if she had some help.”

  I flipped open the folder and her picture smiled up at me. Reddish brown waves of hair surrounded her heart-shaped face and fell to her slender shoulders. She looked exactly like what she was—a happy, healthy teenager. Except the eyes. Those brown eyes looked… knowing, somehow, incongruous with the braced, cheery smile.

  I sighed, closed the file, and tapped it against my leg. Graycie had gone back to his phone already, as though I weren’t there. “And if I don’t choose one of these?”

  “Where is the fricking number sign?” He didn’t look up.

  “Alford.”

  “I’m not deaf, Christiansen. No matter what, you can’t be here,” he said. “Not while I’m fixing this Shawna Paul disaster. You should be thanking me.”

  “Thanking you? You gotta be—”

  “They wanted you fired.”

  Oh. Well, there was that. I swallowed. “Thank you.”

  He sent me a meaningful look. “Mmhmm. You’re not working with the team until you get your head together. And before you return to full duty, you’ll have to sit down with the departmental psychologist and get cleared.”

  “I already did that,” I protested. “You read the report.”

  “Yeah.” Graycie finally looked up from his phone, those mossy green eyes serious and soft. So unlike him. “I did.”

  I blew out a breath. Fucking Ryder. I probably shouldn’t have been quite so honest with the shrink.

  Graycie looked back down at his phone again, and whatever look I had seen was gone as quickly as it had appeared. “This one is a gimme, Christiansen. You poke around one of these cold, and I do mean ice-fucking-cold cases. You go down, investigate, make nice with local PD, and make no waves. Make it look good. You solve the case? Even better.”

  Yeah, well. Brickell Bay was also located right on the outskirts of my hometown. That also meant I would have to see my sister and have dinner with my parents at least once. That should certainly qualify me for some hazard pay, right?

  He pointed at the folder I still gripped in my hands. “Is that your case?”

  “Yeah. Amy Greene.”

  He nodded, satisfied. “I’ll email you all the details for when you meet with the Brickell Bay Police Department. They’ll have an escort waiting for you at the airport.”

  “Escort?” My eyebrows climbed my forehead. “So I don’t escape? Am I going to Brickell Bay or Alcatraz?”

  “Common courtesy.”

  I groaned inwardly as I stood and shrugged into my coat and gloves. I had to play nice with some stooge from the ancient history squad all the way back to Brickell Bay. That did it. I was officially going to have to pad my expense reports.

  “Let’s get this over with,” I sighed. “When is my flight?”

  “The red-eye tonight at DCA.”

  “No agency jet,” I said mournfully.

  “No, but I’ll book you two seats in economy.” Graycie smirked. “So you’ll have elbow room.”

  “Smug bastard. You ever heard of business class?” I stood and slung my scarf around my neck, but didn’t bother to secure it. I’d be in my car soon enough. That’s what God made heated seats for, after all. That and keeping takeout warm on the way home.

  “Oh, and Christiansen?”

  I looked back to find Graycie staring at me. Hard. “Yeah?”

  “Don’t fuck up.”

  The word again hung in the air, unspoken, and my mouth tightened before I headed out the door.

  Thanks for the vote of confidence.

  Chapter 3

  AS THE plane touched down in Brickell Bay, I stared grimly out the airline window. The small airport tarmac glittered with lights and almost looked festive in the approaching darkness. Four hours of listening to a ghost tell me about the heart attack that had taken his life midflight was four hours too many. Unfortunately I’d left my pills in my checked bag.

  Actually that was a bit of a lie. I didn’t forget them
. I’d purposefully packed them, determined that I could make it through a simple four-hour flight without self-medicating. What I concluded from that experiment? I was wrong, I was a certified nutjob, and I needed my drugs. I gripped both armrests as the plane landed with a shudder, and Airplane Ghost ramped up in volume.

  “If that idiot stewardess hadn’t taken so long calling for help, maybe I’d still be alive,” he said with a scowl as the plane moved slowly down the tarmac. I said a silent prayer of thanks as our gate came into view.

  “Ted,” I began.

  “Tom.” He shifted his glare to me. “Have you even been listening?”

  “Of course. I just wanted to ask… are you stuck on this plane?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I don’t like to leave. No.”

  Other than the plane landing safely, that was the best news I’d heard in days. It was certainly enough to propel me out of my seat as soon as the seat belt sign flashed. Thoroughly put out by my disinterest, Ted folded his arms and treated me to an icy stare as I waited, half in and half out of my seat, ready to disembark.

  Needless to say, I’d had better flights.

  It’d been a while since I’d flown commercial, but baggage claim was just the way I remembered it—a fucking nightmare. I stuck earbuds in my ears and cued up some Sia as I wandered around and tried to recognize people from a flight I’d spent mostly distracted. By the time I’d gone from one end of the concourse to the other, I too wanted to swing from a chandelier.

  Every empty space around the conveyor belt was taken. Impatient, overtired travelers had suddenly morphed into lions and lionesses on the Serengeti and watched the hole where the bags would come out with unblinking intensity.

  I finally stood next to a grandmotherly type who I may or may not have seen two rows up, and I wondered what the hell I was doing back in Brickell Bay.

  Oh yeah, that’s right. My boss thought I was crazy and firmly believed in the “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy. And I was looking for a girl who was probably living with her boyfriend in some overpriced one bedroom on Collins and working as a waitress in a place that considered ambiance a thatched roof, sticky menus, and bikini-clad women.

  Oh and bonus, I got to see my family. It was nonoptional. I might be a workaholic/recluse, but even I knew that I couldn’t skip that particular nicety. I had to see my parents and twin within forty-eight hours of debarking or things were going to get… loud. Mostly from my twin sister, Skylar.

  Yeah, you heard. Rain and Sky. Because that’s what happened when you were born of… well, let’s just cut to the chase—crazy people. Crazy, “go where the wind blows you,” good-hearted hippie people who smelled of earth and sun and patchouli 99 percent of the time. Oh, and weed, that is. Weed they thought I didn’t know about. But people in glass houses should probably mind their own pill-popping business, so I kept my mouth shut.

  It’s not that they’re bad people. They’re actually quite wonderful in their own, “march to the beat that only you can hear” way. Last I’d checked, my mother was becoming a Wiccan.

  Becoming a Wiccan was something she understood, something she was proud of. My commencement ceremony? Not so much. I snorted. My parents had seemed more confused than anything else when I’d invited them. I remembered the conversation vividly.

  My mother sounded a little befuddled. “Didn’t you already graduate, dear?”

  “Yes, but for a lower degree. That was my master’s. This is for my doctorate, Mom.”

  “Well, what’s the difference?”

  “There’s a lot of difference. There’s about four more years of difference.” I’d felt my voice getting tense, so I tempered it. My hippie mother had no idea about or respect for organized institutions, whether they were for higher learning or not.

  “You know, Sky is teaching classes at the local college about the Importance of Holistic Learning. You should sit in sometime.”

  I then briefly debated if it would be rude to ask what the hell that had to do with what I’d said. I decided upon yes—yes that would be extremely rude. “Well, if you and dad can make it, just let me know. I’ll book your flights.”

  “I don’t want you to spend your money,” she said absently. There was a distinct ripping then, and I knew she was opening the mail.

  “It’s not a problem,” I’d said through gritted teeth.

  “Oh.” Her voice brightened. “Well, we’ll get to see you, and that’s all that matters.”

  They wanted to understand. And that had been enough. To them it was odd and frankly, a little redundant that I would sacrifice more than the cost of a car to acquire a piece of paper from a university. They already knew that I was the brainy one in the family. If I waited for them to understand me or my life choices, I’d probably wither up and die. Then my intrepid, recycling mother would turn me into environmentally responsible potpourri.

  It was just as well that they hadn’t come to my graduation. I don’t know what they would’ve made of my life. My colorful folks would’ve definitely hated my sterile apartment. Hell, half the time I hated it. I’d only rented it because it was in a good neighborhood and I had nosy neighbors who watched my place when I traveled.

  My family already hated my job. And the fact that I constantly traveled and sometimes missed holidays. And working for, as my father put it, “The Man.” I really didn’t need to see their disapproval of my sterile apartment or modest, nondescript sedan. I knew they thought I was too boring. Responsible. Straitlaced.

  That may be. But wasn’t it just dazzlingly ironic that I was the one who saw ghosts. Life. I shook my head. Never boring, always surprising, and more often than not, inexplicable. The more time you spent trying to make sense of it, the less sense it all made.

  Someone jostled my suitcase, and I blinked and wondered how long I’d been staring off into space. The rude jostler sent me a glare, apparently for having the temerity to bring a suitcase to the airport, tossed a wealth of dark, silken locks, and stomped off in furred UGG boots. The elderly woman I’d thought was on my plane was gone. I sighed and began to move again.

  My music faded away as a call cut in. That certainly didn’t help my mood any. Would it really kill Siri to let people know I was unavailable for the next century? “Christiansen.”

  “You get there yet?” Chevy didn’t bother with hellos.

  “Well, hello to you too,” I said as I skirted a mother trying to corral a screaming toddler. “And yes, I just got here about fifteen minutes ago. I’m still in the airport.”

  “Stuck in baggage?” Nothing in her tone was amiss, but I could tell she was amused.

  “Yes,” I admitted with a huff. “Stop laughing at me.”

  “Sorry, dear,” she said, not contrite in the least. “You know I think you’re a genius. You just happen to be a genius who has no idea how to navigate an airport. Like Einstein lost in a Home Depot.”

  Most people would consider fellow behavioral analyst Chevrolet Sullivan an asset—a good agent and a brilliant woman. They don’t know her like I do. They don’t know she’s an annoying twerp who constantly hums Taylor Swift songs and steals lunches from the fridge. She never sleeps, never leaves the office, and clocks in at slightly a pinch over five feet tall. The last part isn’t really a problem. It just allows me to use up a lifetime cache of short jokes. It also gives her an excuse to style her hair really high. Like Dolly Parton high. She swears her Jerseylicious styling choices add the false illusion of height. I don’t know about that, but it allows me to throw in some big-hair cracks. It’s win-win really.

  “Did you just call to harass me?”

  “No. I’m actually being helpful. I called your sister and asked if you could stay with her while you’re in town,” she said briskly.

  “You did what?”

  “Well, the Holiday Inn two exits away from BBPD is booked. I tried to get you closer, but the only things in a ten-mile radius are a couple housing developments, a fruit stand, and a gator farm.”

&nbs
p; “Check the gator farm,” I demanded.

  She ignored me. “She said she’d love to have you. She also said a few more things regarding your long absence and negligible visits home, but I’ll let her deliver those in person.”

  “Awfully nice of you.” The baggage carousel I’d stopped in front of began to beep and spit out suitcases like a malfunctioning robot.

  “I had a feeling you didn’t bother to make arrangements.”

  “I had other things to take care of.”

  “Like a rental car? You did get one of those, didn’t you?”

  I would’ve loved to say that I had. “Is there something else I can help you with, dear, darling Chevy?”

  “That’ll do for now. I am your agency contact. I’m supposed to be checking in on you.”

  Smug little Napoleon.

  “I’m actually surprised you accepted this gig. I mean, last time we talked about you going home, you seemed pretty against it.”

  “That’s not true,” I denied almost automatically. It felt wrong to acknowledge such a thing. Disloyal. Besides, I couldn’t possibly have said anything that personal to Miss Teen Pop USA.

  “You said you felt like an alien fresh off the spaceship every time you visit. Your parents drive you nuts—”

  “Okay.”

  “Your sister is intrusive and nosy—”

  “I didn’t—”

  “And of course you’re still in love with Danny. Or shall I say lust.”

  “I never said any of that, you evil little Dolly Parton clone.” My face was so hot, I felt like I was going up in flames.

  I may not have said it, but I wouldn’t deny it either. The lust thing, of course, not the love. So sue me. If you could see Danny, you’d understand. And it wasn’t just about looks. He was a thoughtful sexual partner. Very in tune. Patient. Almost too fucking patient when I’d been desperately eager for him to move. Let’s just say I had uttered the term “fuck me already” more than once in our bedroom.

  We never had any discussion about who would bottom and who would top. It was a no-brainer. For once in my well-ordered life, I’d had a way to give up control. Just for a little while. I swallowed. I’d probably be better off if I couldn’t remember what it felt like to have those thick, clever fingers working inside of me as he sucked me off. Or what it felt like when he finally gave me what I wanted, my face pressed in the pillow, sheets twisted between my tense fingers as he moved with me. Steadily. Firmly. Assured.