Chasing Ghosts (4 page)

Padre shoved a piece of gum in his mouth and
started chomping and mashing it to death.

“
Quit smoking again?” Dagger always
knew when Padre was trying to cut down. His gum wrappers increased.
He pulled a mug from the cabinet and poured himself a cup of
coffee.

Sara busied herself emptying the dishwasher.
“I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I finish.”

“
Don’t leave on my account, Sara.
Matter of fact, you might be able to clear up a few
things.”

“
So this is an official visit.” Dagger
smiled at the detective. “And here I thought you missed us.” He
raked his collar-length hair back into a ponytail and wrapped a
band around it.

“
Sara I definitely miss. But
you?”

“
I’m deeply hurt.” Dagger actually had
a fondness for the cop. They had been in a number of scrapes
together and Padre was always watching his back. But he didn’t
doubt for a minute that Padre would toss the book at him if he
thought he were guilty of something. Padre was a by-the-book cop.
Strange friend for a guy who had tossed out the book years
ago.

“
Do you know a guy by the name of Lee
Connors?”

“
Should I?”

“
He gave our department a call a couple
days ago asking if we could recommend a private detective. I gave
him your name. Course, I respect your privacy and didn’t give him
your address. When I asked him for his number so you could call
him, he hung up.”

Dagger took a sip of coffee then grabbed the
carafe and refilled their cups. “Guess I should thank you. Did he
give any hint what he wanted?” He gave himself a mental pat on the
back for ripping out the phone book page with his name scribbled on
it in Connors’ hotel room.

“
I was hoping you could tell me.” Padre
gave that steely eyed glare Dagger had seen so many
times.

Dagger shrugged. “Never saw him.”

Sara pulled knives from the washer and dried
them with a towel before placing them in the knife holder. Her gaze
drifted from Dagger to Padre then back to Dagger.

“
Hmmmm.” Padre snapped the gum like a
truck stop waitress. “What if I told you the cab company has a
record of dropping off Mister Connors on your doorstep?”

Shit.

“
Oh,” Sara said and smiled shyly. “Was
that him?” She dried her hands on the towel and said, “I told him
Dagger wouldn’t be home for a couple hours. He never said who he
was, didn’t want to wait, and then he left.”

“
He walked back to town?”

“
I offered to call a cab but he had his
phone on him and said he would call. He never got inside the gate.
Being here all alone I didn’t want to let him in.”

“
No, no. Of course not. Unfortunately,
the cab company doesn’t have a record of picking him back
up.”

“
Maybe he hitched a ride,” Dagger
offered.

“
Hmmmm.” Padre wadded the used gum in
an empty wrapper and pulled out a fresh stick. “And this was
yesterday?”

“
In the morning.” Sara went back to
emptying the dishwasher.

“
Well then.” Padre thanked them for the
coffee and cake and stood. He started for the door then stopped,
one finger raised. “There’s just one problem with that
story.”

“
What’s that?” Dagger noticed the sound
of plates hitting the counter had ceased. He stood to walk Padre
out, to keep the cop from zeroing in on Sara.

“
Some airport workers found Connors’
body stuffed in the trunk of his rental car.”

Sara and Dagger both stared at Padre, waiting
for the proverbial other shoe to drop.

“
He had been dead for two days.” Padre
chewed, looked from Dagger to Sara and smiled. “Did he look dead to
you?”

“
Do you have his picture?” Sara walked
over to Padre. He handed her what looked like an enlarged drivers
license photo.

“
Seems to me, if he had a rental car he
would have driven himself here,” Padre pointed out. “And, number
two, how can a dead man appear on your doorstep?”

“
That’s not the man I saw on the
monitor at the gate,” Sara said. “Doesn’t look anything like
him.”

Dagger looked at the photo of Lee Connors. He
was hefty, a middleweight contender with a broad face and flattened
nose. “I’ve never seen him before.” And he hadn’t. It de?nitely
wasn’t the guy who had died on their living room floor.

Padre tucked the photo back inside his jacket
pocket. “I’d appreciate it, Sara, if you could stop by the precinct
sometime today and give our sketch artist a description of the
guy.”

“
Is it necessary to involve Sara?” Last
thing Dagger wanted was to have a sketch of Demko plastered on the
evening news so whoever had sent him would know he hadn’t completed
his assignment. That could bring all kinds of people into
town.

“
Got a problem with that?” Padre looked
from Dagger to Sara. “Or do you have something to hide?”

Dagger smiled. “Sure, Padre. The guy
threatened me, I killed him and had Skizzy dump the body in the
limestone quarry, but not before some bomb planted in the guy’s
neck blew his head off.”

Padre threw back his head and roared, a loud,
boisterous bellow. “Oh, Dagger. Always the comic.” He slowly ran
his hand from his forehead down to his chin, the smile quickly
fading as if his hand were doing the facial transformation. “I’m
not amused.”

CHAPTER 5

“
The forehead was a little higher,”
Sara instructed the artist. Jimmy Cho pounded the keyboard, a lock
of hair falling across his forehead. Sara glanced over her shoulder
at Dagger. “You don’t have to hover. You didn’t even need to
come.”

Jimmy chuckled at that comment. “If you were
my girl, do you think I would let you walk in here alone?” He
jutted his chin toward the sea of desks surrounding them. All work
had stopped. Men were seated at the desks or perched with one cheek
on their desktops, all eyes on Sara. The yellow floral dress she
wore brought out the bronze color of her skin. Her dark hair shined
with a multitude of sun-streaked highlights.

“
How sweet.” Sara smiled at her
admirers.

Dagger let out a loud huff. “Can we get on
with it?”

“
I can handle myself,
Dagger.”

“
That’s why I came.” He nodded toward
the hungry males. “To protect them from you.”

Jimmy laughed but when he saw that neither
Sara nor Dagger was laughing, his laughter faded.

“
HEY!” Padre bellowed from his doorway.
“Isn’t anyone working? Have all crimes been solved? All case files
worked?”

The detectives scurried back to their chairs
and started making calls or banging on their keyboards.

“
Yes, that looks just like him,” Sara
announced. The computer monitor showed a man with thinning hair, a
nose slightly bent, eyes a soft brown.

Padre stared at the screen, then folded his
arms. “Sara, that’s me.”

Sara checked the screen. “You think so?” She
looked at Dagger. “Does that look like Padre?”

“
Nah. Padre has less hair.”

“
He was wearing sunglasses so I’m not
sure of his eye color,” Sara clarified. “Jimmy put in whatever
color he wanted. And I only saw the face briefly on the monitor so
I’m sorry I don’t remember more distinct features.”

Padre was seething. Dagger could tell by the
way his jaws were clenched.

“
I want to see your surveillance tapes.
And don’t tell me, Dagger, that you didn’t save them.”

“
I didn’t save them.” Dagger gave a
hapless shrug. “Sorry.”

Padre pointed toward a doorway. “In my
office. Both of you.”

“
Did you want me to print this out?”
Jimmy asked. His question was met with an icy glare. “Okay. Maybe
I’ll just save it.”

“
Sit,” Padre ordered. He closed the
office door saying, “Let me get this straight. Dagger, you weren’t
home when this man showed up at the gate. Sara, you thought he
looked like me.” He sank onto the chair behind his desk and slowly
rocked for a full minute while studying them. Finally, he leaned
forward and clasped his hands on the desk. “Let me tell you what I
think happened. This guy kills Connors, maybe for the use of his
room. Robbery wasn’t a motive because Connors had his wallet on
him. So maybe he needed a place to hide out, use the hotel phone.
Although missy here says he had a cell phone and was going to call
his own cab.”

“
Did you trace the cell calls from
that…?”

Padre glared at Dagger. “Did I ask you to
speak?” He waited through several seconds of silence. “I think my
only link to Connors’ killer is through you.” He looked directly at
Dagger. “Now, I can understand you fudging the truth a little,
Dagger. But I would have never believed that you would manipulate
this sweet, innocent woman to lie for you. That is
unconscionable.”

“
I didn’t lie, Padre.” Sara’s voice
didn’t display hurt as much as anger. Instinctively her right hand
found its way to her mouth and she started chewing on a knuckle, a
nervous habit she had acquired since dipping her toes outside of
the reservation land. “He did look a little like you in the few
seconds I had to look at him. He wasn’t much taller than the
monitor so he didn’t have to bend down to speak into it. That would
make him around your height, maybe a couple inches shorter. I
didn’t see any gray hair but the receding hairline is deceiving. He
could be coloring his hair but his face wasn’t that lined, not
like…”

Padre’s raised eyebrows dared her to comment
on his age.

Dagger held up a finger. “Can I talk
now?”

Padre dragged his eyes from Sara to
Dagger.

“
What about the cameras at the hotel
and the airport parking garage? Besides, the cab company could have
lied. Your man could have driven Connors’ car with the body in the
trunk over to my place, then driven to the airport to dump the
car.”

Padre punched the intercom on the phone. “I
already have a call in for those tapes.” When the intercom was
answered, Padre told Jimmy, “You can print out a copy of that
sketch now.” He punched the intercom off just as the phone rang.
Picking up the receiver, he barked out, “Martinez…yeah, Chief.”
Padre leaned back in his chair, the receiver pressed to his ear.
His eyes studied the ceiling as he listened. “We told the
cardinal’s people we’d give him a police escort from the airport to
the hotel. They are hiring their own bodyguards for the
event…yeah…who’s going to bother a cardinal? It’s not like the Pope
is visiting…yeah… okay…I’m on it.” Padre hung up with a shake of
his head. “Chief is expecting demonstrators against pedophile
priests. Guess some people don’t feel the church is doing enough.”
Padre saw Jimmy through the glass partition and waved him in.

“
I made two copies.” Jimmy placed the
computer sketch on the desk. “I added sunglasses.”

Sara leaned over for a closer look. “Yes,
that looks just like him.”

Padre studied the image for a few seconds,
pressed his lips in disgust, then pulled out an identical pair of
sunglasses from his pocket. “Gee, they look just like mine.” He
glared at his visitors. “Now get out of here. All of you.”

Dagger gunned the Lincoln Navigator from the
parking lot. He punched the hands-free phone and listened to the
phone ring three times, five times, seven times. “Come on,
Skizzy.”

“
Hey, I’m busy here.” Skizzy’s voice
blared from the speaker.

“
Just tell me you decrypted the guy’s
Emails.” On their way to the police station, Dagger had dropped off
Demko’s computer at Skizzy’s shop.

“
Sure, and I built a high-rise in my
spare time. This one ain’t so easy. I may have to hack into one of
the anagrams to get some assistance.”

“
FBI, CIA, NSA, I don’t care which
anagram you hack into, just get me something.” Dagger punched the
END button. “I don’t like the fact that this guy was looking for
me.”

“
Who else would have given out our
address?” Sara asked. “If Padre claims he didn’t and you aren’t
listed in the phone book, who else besides Simon and
Skizzy?”

Dagger thought about that for several
seconds, then swung a U-turn on a busy downtown street eliciting
numerous horn blasts.

The Hideaway was a shot-and-beer joint.
Dagger had lived in a small apartment above the bar when he first
arrived in town. He had operated his P.I. business out of that
apartment and it was where he had first met Sara. She had walked in
with information about the murder of an undercover cop. At the time
he didn’t know how she obtained her information, didn’t know about
her unique abilities, but he followed up on her leads and
discovered a jewelry and art theft ring based inside the Cedar
Point Police Department. In the melee, a wolf had been injured, its
leg shot off. And just as Dagger was preparing to put a bullet in
the wolf ’s head to end its misery, the strangest thing happened.
Instead of a wolf, what was lying at his feet was Sara. To say he
was shocked was putting it mildly. But his biggest shock came later
as Sara lay on her grandmother’s bed. Sara’s leg had grown
back.

Dagger fingered his black cord necklace. He
could feel the turquoise stones that served as the eyes in the wolf
head pendant and remembered the filmy eyes of Ada, Sara’s
grandmother who had looked more like a great-great-grandmother. She
had been the only family Sara had left and seemed relieved that
someone else knew of Sara’s gift. Ada promptly died the next day
leaving the necklace and a note pleading for Dagger to watch out
for her granddaughter, a young woman who had barely left the
confines of their reservation land, and was as much afraid of
humans as the wolf and hawk were. Dagger had changed all that. Sara
now knew self-defense and could shoot a gun as well as he
could.