The Downside Ghosts Series Books 1-3: Unholy Ghosts, Unholy Magic, City of Ghosts. Stacia Kane
another minute while he merged into traffic, with the stereo on quiet and the windshield wipers keeping slow time across the glass.
“So there no news in the Church about Greenwood? No way anybody there mighta found out?”
“Not unless they took it from the file. Which I guess is possible, but it would be awfully hard to do it with the library Goodys watching.”
“Like Goody Smith, Goody Jones, them type of Goody?”
“Yeah. One always sits in the library and watches. You’d have to wait until they left for something or turned their backs on the desk—they have security cameras, too.”
“Cameras?”
Chess shook her head. “They don’t record. They send a signal directly to the screens behind the desk, and that’s all.”
“So which Goody’s in the library?”
“There’s …” She shook her head.
“What?”
“Nothing, I … For a minute I thought I remembered something. It’s gone now, though.”
Her phone buzzed against her thigh as a call came in. She tilted it just enough to see the little name display on the window. TNL. The code she’d programmed in for Lex, a play on “Tunnel” she figured was subtle enough to keep secret but obvious enough that she’d remember it even if she was so high she could barely think. Damn, why couldn’t he have called earlier? What ever he wanted would have to wait. She couldn’t talk to him with Terrible sitting right next to her.
They were here, anyway. Terrible pulled into a spot and cut the engine, glancing around as he did so. “What you wanna do first? You wanna ask them people if they know anything, or you wanna go talk to the Elder?”
“I should probably go inside and see Elder Griffin first. He’ll listen to me. You’ll wait here?”
Pause. “How long you’ll be gone?”
“I don’t know. Half hour, maybe? Hour? If you want to go somewhere, I’ll call you when I’m done.”
“Naw. Think I’ll stick here, aye? Wait up, keep an eye out.”
She waited until she’d gone through the heavy double doors to call Lex back.
“Hey, tulip, where you hiding?”
“I’m at the Church. What’s up?”
“Thought you was gonna wait and I go with you. Stay there, aye? Lemme come talk.” He said something else, but static drowned it out.
“What? No, Lex, you can’t come here, Terrible’s here, he can’t see you—”
“Ain’t no fear.” Followed by a series of gulped syllables as the signal cut out intermittently.
“Yes, but, please, don’t do this. Not now—Damn it!” The phone went dead. Hands shaking, she tried to redial, but the signal was gone. Stupid rain. Stupid thick iron in the walls and ceiling. It was necessary, of course, but it made satellite signals difficult to get, and she didn’t want to step back outside. Terrible might not ask who she was calling—of course he wouldn’t ask—but the thought made her uncomfortable just the same. She’d just have to try and hurry things up and get out of here before he arrived.
The empty hall enveloped her, but the sense of security she’d always felt on entering the building had disappeared in the terrified haze of the night before. Sadness sunk through her chest into the pit of her stomach. This building and her home had always been safe. Been sanctuaries. Now neither of them felt that way and might never again.
She tapped on Elder Griffin’s door, but he was either not in or not answering, and it was locked when she tried the knob. He might be up with the Grand Elder, or maybe back in one of the other offices. Worth a try. She might as well check with Goody Tremmell, too, and see if anything new had come in on the Mortons. Sometimes the advanced computer background checks took a few days.
Voices murmured somewhere in the warren of rooms, but Goody Tremmell’s chair sat empty. Shit. Chess wasn’t in the mood for more dirty looks, but she had to see that file—had to see it now. Her life quite literally depended on it.
Most files started with a call sheet, on which Goody Tremmell took the initial complaint and ran the name through the computer. Financial, police, and employment records all came up within a few minutes, and were printed and added to the file. Then it was copied, the copies handed to whichever Debunker was next in the rota to start casework, and any information they gathered was added to the master file. All the Debunkers kept were the initial reports. It all worked very smoothly, at least in theory. In practice … not so much. Goody Tremmell famously played favorites—hence Doyle getting the Gray Towers job when it was supposed to be Bree Bryan’s turn.
Of course, that was partly how she’d ended up with the Morton file, wasn’t it? Elder Griffin had given it to her without checking whether or not it was her turn.
Chess licked her lips and pulled her thinnest lockpicks from her bag, glancing around one more time as she did. This was serious, more than stealing the key to the Restricted Room or even snorting speed on the stairs. This was a crime. A big one.
Her shoulders tense, she slid the picks into the lock. Those few seconds were the worst; expecting a heavy hand to fall on her shoulder, expecting an alarm to sound or the lights to dim or—something, anything. Expecting to get busted.
But nothing happened. The lock clicked, the drawer opened, and Chess pulled the Morton master file and started thumbing through it. She hadn’t even had a chance to analyze the photos she’d taken the other night, either before or after she dropped off the copies here.
The thick stack threatened to slip out of the file altogether, so she cleared a space on Goody’s desk and set the stack down. Her hands shook a little as she flipped through them. The living room, the kitchen … all that plasticware.
The stairs, family pictures and genealogy. Chess picked the photo up and held it under the light. Was a picture missing? A pale space showed between one of a chubby toddling Albert and Mr. and Mrs. Morton at some sort of party. A short space, as though a smaller picture had been taken down and the other two moved to hide the empty patch where it had hung.
She set that photo aside and kept going. Albert’s room, now. His porn. Horny little bastard. His science books, his film books, his camera equipment and projecter, the walls, the odd Dream safe behind his bed …
It was an odd bag, wasn’t it? Might be strange for a regular sleep charm, but if it was made to ward off something in particular, a Dreamthief, for example, an entity more powerful than a regular ghost … and thus worth more money …
She pulled her note pad out and flipped through the pages. Black salt, a crow’s talon, pink knotted thread. But in the photo it looked as if something else had been in the bag as well. Two things. A single black hair. And a tiny, almost invisible flake of copper.
It had caught the flash, which was why she noticed it now. As for why she hadn’t when she was there, she didn’t even need to think. By the time she’d photographed the Dream safe she’d been antsy, ready to leave. Only one picture followed it, a confused shot of Albert Morton’s bedside table and the space behind it.
But that piece of copper, copper like the amulet, and that black hair that didn’t match anyone in the Morton family, those were important. Just as important as the realization that the black hair in the Dream safe could have come from Doyle.
Chess tucked the Dream safe photo and the one of the empty space between pictures in the staircase into her bag and closed the file. Just the safe alone might be enough to implicate Doyle, at least enough to make the Grand Elder take her seriously when coupled with the amulet.
She turned to replace the file in the cabinet and almost tripped. Her toe caught on something heavy, something that made an odd chinking noise. Goody Tremmell’s purse, now lying on its side with its contents scattered.