The Haunted Bones (8 page)

"You think this diary proves all this?"

I smirked. "I think it's a better lead in
evidence than ghost pictures."

Vale actually smiled. "I agree with you.
I'll follow all this up and let you know. But no mention of your
pictures, okay?"

I agreed. What else was I going to do?

"Oh," he added as he put his hand on my
shoulder again. "About the wedding—"

"Oh no. I told Myra no. I mean, Senator
Padeaus is going to be there and I think—"

Vale locked eyes with me. "Padeaus has
requested you be there. He's good friends with the Chief Of Dees
and since you did help solve his son's murder case, he's asked
personally. The COD agreed. So rent a tux and bring a date and your
camera." He turned and then stopped again. "Oh, and make sure
Brenner gets home."

"I will." I watched him leave and leaned
against the wall. My shoulder hurt and I fingered the slip of paper
in my pocket, the prescription for painkillers the doc gave me.
Truth was, I had a medicine cabinet full of them. Why add one more
bottle?

Another twenty minutes went by before Jewels
emerged from the curtains in a wheelchair. Her arm was in a dark
blue sling and her expression was just a little too happy.
Obviously they'd given her a painkiller.

I checked her out and then
grabbed my car out of the parking lot. I found out Lt. Theodore
Rosenberg, one of the detectives I used to work with, had driven it
from
The Alley Haunt
to the hospital for me. I texted him a thank you text before I
piled Jewels in and headed toward her house.

Once inside—I had a key—I
got her to her bedroom where she shut the door in my face so she
could undress. It was the same condo she and Jim had shared before
he died. She never wanted to leave it and she was only a few blocks
from my own home now. I did notice Jim's things were still spread
around amidst boxes I'd brought for her. At least she'd
tried
to pack him
away.

I grabbed a beer out of the fridge to dull
the pain and took my bag into the living room. I wasn't going to
leave Jewels alone, not yet. At least not until I knew she was okay
and not so loopy. With my feet on the coffee table, I pulled out my
tablet. It was dead. Luckily Jewels had one just like mine so I
hooked mine up to her power cord and shoved it out of the way under
the couch.

Her tablet was fully charged so I logged in
under her password and then logged into Pink's new server. I had a
few e-mails, so I checked those first. One was from Pink.

Hey, I heard you got shot! Again! Give me a
call. Got new security on the server and I pinpointed that hacker
to about a five-hundred-mile radius. Not much, but I do know they
are in Atlanta. Ciao!

How was it Pink always knew what was
happening? I made a note to take her out for pizza in Little Five
Points soon.

The next e-mail was from the bank guy,
Menivers. I told him I had the pictures but there had been an
incident at the location and for him to get in touch with Captain
Vale.

The third email was from some weird address.
Suspecting it was spam or a virus, I deleted it. Next I opened the
image of the mystery woman. Jewels' tablet didn't have the same
software as mine, so all I could do was zoom in and look. I could
do a limited amount of hue and saturation adjustment just to bring
the woman's features into clarity.

Once I had it where I could see her face
pretty clear, I made a screen cap and saved it. I pulled my phone
out of my back pocket and scrolled through the contacts.

"Hello?"

"Danielle?"

Pause. "Devan? Oh my god, is this you?"

I was happy she sounded happy to hear from
me. Danielle was an old friend at the Georgia Bureau of
Investigations. She worked in finger printing and face recognition.
When I worked with Jim, he and I depended on her. "Yeah. How are
you?"

"I'm fine! You know we miss you. When are
you coming back to work?"

And there it was, the question I always
tried to avoid. Though it wasn't as hard to answer this time. "Oh,
I'm not sure. I'm liking civilian life. But I do I have a favor if
you're up for it?"

"Anything."

"I have a picture of a woman's face and I
need find out if it matches anything in your database for missing
persons."

"You got a jpeg or png?"

"Yep."

She gave me the e-mail to send it to, and
after a promise of dinner and catching-up time, I disconnected
before I mailed it off to her.

That's just about the moment something
crashed through the living room window and exploded on the floor in
front of me.

Twelve

Instinct drove me up and over the back of
the couch seconds after the bomb went off. I forgot about my
shoulder in that instant and cried out as I used it to help me land
on the floor. The force of the explosion wasn't enough to do much
damage, but the hissing afterward, along with the acrid smell and
thick black smoke, told me this wasn't a percussive bomb.

This was a smoke bomb.

I stayed low to the floor, keeping my nose
down so I wouldn't choke on the smoke. Sometimes these things were
designed to irritate sinuses as well as blind a person and make
them defenseless. If they were blind and coughing, someone wearing
a gas mask could tell where the intended victim was by sound and
either kidnap them or off them.

And I sure as shit wasn't letting either of
those things happen to me, or to Jewels. I no longer had a gun, but
I knew where Jewels kept hers. Getting to it might prove a bit
problematic because I couldn't see a thing.

The front door came down with a loud noise
and then I heard someone's shoes on the hard wood. I squinted
through the smog and peeked around the edge of the couch. I could
make out the intruder's boots as they ran into the dining room, and
then came around through the kitchen, past me to the couch. I kept
myself flat and as I eased back—and unfortunately caught a bit of
the smoke in my lungs—I watched those boots move to the front of
the couch, and then over to the desk where Julie's computer
was.

I pressed my face into the back of the couch
to cough, then put my nose and mouth under the couch to grab a deep
breath before I got on my hands and knees in an attempt to sneak up
on the intruder. From what I could see in the smoke, it looked like
they were going for Julie's computer.

Unfortunately, they were wearing a mask and
I wasn't. I coughed and he turned in time to ram something long and
very hard into my gut. I lost my breath and footing as I stumbled
backwards and crashed into the curtain and window. The home invader
jumped on me at that point and started hitting at my face with
whatever he had in his hand. I kept my hands and arms up, my
shoulder screaming at me as I tried to grab whatever it was.

The smoke did a number on my lungs and I
couldn't breathe. When I finally managed to knock him off, I tried
crawling away, coughing my guts out. He jumped on my back and bent
the arm of my injured shoulder behind me. I yelled out and tried to
reach behind me with my other, but he pushed the injured one up
higher. "Where's the laptop?"

The gas mask muddled his voice. I coughed
and shook my head.

He shoved my face into the
floor. "
Where
is
the laptop?"

"Devan!"

No, Julie! Her voice renewed my desire to
protect her. I got my other hand on the floor beside me and used it
as leverage to push my ass into the air with enough force to launch
my attacker backward over my head. I scrambled away and went head
first into the leg of the table. I saw stars for a few seconds and
tried to call out to Julie, to warn her. But my lungs filled with
the smoke.

There were more footsteps and shouts. Two
gunshots and then nothing.

I continued coughing as a lay on the floor
beside the coffee table.

A cool hand touched my face. Jewels coughed
as she knelt beside me. Something hit the floor to my left but I
didn't look as I took her into my arm.

"I—I tried to shoot him. But I think I
missed. He—he ran back out the door."

The smoke thinned as it was
sucked through the busted door. I pulled back from her and looked
into her face. Her eyes were red and tears stained her cheeks. "Why
are you crying? You're a cop."
*Cough*
"You're
supposed
to shoot the bad
guy."

"But I was so afraid I was gonna shoot
you!"

"Brenner! McNally!"

That was Vale's voice.

"We're back here, sir," Julie called
out.

The smoke had turned to a soft haze by the
time Vale appeared like an avenging cop. He helped Julie up as two
paramedics came in with oxygen tanks and slapped masks on both of
us. I managed to stand and stagger out the front door along with
Vale and Julie. Three black-and-whites with lights flashing parked
along the street, another one actually in the front yard of the
complex. That was Vale's car.

Jewels and I sat down on the back bumper of
the paramedic truck, blankets over our shoulders, sucking on oxygen
tanks. The paramedic took our vitals, gave Vale a report as the
captain neared. Vale asked what happened so I gave him my account,
punctuated by bouts of coughing.

Julie took a deep breath, coughed. "I heard
noises downstairs. Sounded like someone was breaking the place
apart—and when I opened my bedroom door, there was smoke
everywhere. I thought the condo was on fire. And then I heard
someone yelling but I couldn't understand it. That's when I dialed
911 and said I had a fire and a home invasion. I grabbed my gun and
got to the middle of the stairs." She turned and looked up at me
before she looked back at Vale. "The smoke was clear enough that I
could see someone in a mask beating on Devan. So I distracted him.
That's when you guys showed up and he took off."

"We're combing the area for him. So you
didn't get a good look at his face?"

I shook my head. "No."

"It looks like he took your computer,
Brenner. You have anything else in there? Might want to go back and
see, take inventory."

"He kept asking me where the laptop was," I
said.

"But I don't have a laptop." Jewels handed
the medic her tank and mask, and made her way back to condo
entrance. I noticed she wasn't wearing her sling.

"Devan," Vale said in a quiet voice as the
medic moved away. "We got a match on the DMV records for the car in
the drive-by outside the haunt. We got a match."

"Oh?"

"Randall Cahan."

Thirteen

"So…whose is this?"

Mary ignored Auggie as she searched through
files. Whoever's computer this was, it wasn't Devan McNally's. She
pushed the keyboard forward and sat back. "It's not here."

He pointed to the computer. "You stole
this?"

She didn't answer.

"Are you nuts? Turn that off!" He reached
around the back and yanked the power cord out. "Don't you realize
people put antitheft software on their computers now? You go online
with this and it'll flag somewhere."

"I wasn't online with it."
She
had
intended to
go online, but was now happy she hadn't. "It belongs to some girl
cop named Brenner."

Auggie rubbed his face. "Have you gone
insane? Who's Brenner?"

She stood and moved away from the desktop,
and pulled the tablet out of her bag. The gas mask she'd used
earlier rested on the couch's arm along with the pipe she used to
try and bash that bastard's head in. She really hadn't thought it
all through, breaking in and grabbing the computers. "She's a cop.
The cop this McNally is dating." She sighed. "I followed him to a
condo and watched him go in."

"So you bought military gear and broke in
to—what? Grab the computers?" He picked up the mask and then tossed
it back down. "You are going to get caught and I am not going down
with you, Mary."

"Yes, you are." She said in a quiet voice.
"You helped me poison husband number four, and then you helped me
kill husband five." She pointed at him. "Your father. And this
military stuff belonged to dear old dad. He's got this whole box
full of it in the basement."

Auggie's complexion bleached white. "My
dad…had a box full of Army stuff?"

"Yeah. That crate by the wine cellar door. I
thought it was something he'd shipped in and forgot. Whole box full
of masks, guns, pipes like that one." She frowned at him. "Oh,
knock it off. You knew he was a paranoid redneck just like everyone
else."

The ugly little fucker sat down on the
coffee table. "You broke into a cop's house, but it was the wrong
house."

"Yeah…and I couldn't even get a good swing
at him. Those gas masks make it easy to breath, but you still can't
see anything."

"Oh, dear god, Mary." He put his hands over
his face. "You have got to get a grip on yourself. You can't go
around stealing computers and acting all crazy."

"You think what Black Angel did today was
the smarter thing to do?"

"I told you: That wasn't
him. We don't know
who
that was, but obviously they know about Angel and they wanted
to frame him. Right now, I don't think making Angel mad is such a
good idea."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "What's got
you so worried?"

"I'm afraid you're going to make a mistake,
Mary, and then what we've done will get out."

"Nothing's going to take what we have away.
One more month and we're home free."

Auggie went to the bar and poured himself a
drink. "I don't understand why Dad put that limit on the will. I
mean, we have to wait one year to inherit?"