Heath was quiet, so I glanced over at him and saw that he looked a bit apprehensive. “What’s up?” I asked.
“I don’t know that I’m in love with the idea of going it alone,” he said. “I mean, that demon thing could be anywhere.”
I smiled, really understanding how hard it was for even a medium to tackle ghost hunting alone. “I forgot to mention that we’ll both be connected to Gilley via our cameras, walkie-talkies and instruments, and we’ll both have a cameraman in tow.”
“How is that going to help me?” he asked, arching a skeptical eyebrow.
I laughed wickedly and told him, “If anything big and smoky jumps out at you, throw the cameraman at it and run like hell!”
Heath chuckled heartily and winked at me. “Now,
there’s
a plan!”
“Seriously, though,” I said, getting back to the business at hand. “You’ll be carrying a couple of our magnet grenades, and the moment you pull the cap off one of those babies no poltergeist is going to want to come near you.”
“Are you sure they work?” he asked me.
I pumped my head up and down. “Absolutely positive,” I said. “I’ve used them against one of the nastiest spooks I’ve ever dealt with, and it shut his ass down but good.”
“Something as bad as that demon from the knife?”
“Okay,” I said, conceding his point. “Maybe not
that
bad, but still, it was enough to convince me that in a pinch they really work.”
Heath and I worked out the rest of the details for the ghost hunt, agreeing that we’d take the first night to work on getting rid of the easier ghosts, which would leave us with the next two nights free to work on the more difficult ones.
We also both agreed that if any of the ghosts on our personal lists refused to move on, we would join up later and tackle them together. “What if even as a team we can’t get them across?” Heath asked. “I mean, have you ever tried to convince a suicide victim that they need to cross over? They usually put up a really good fight.”
I knew he was talking about Carol Mustgrove. “You’re right,” I agreed. “Let’s tackle Carol together.”
Heath then looked over at my paper and put a hand on my arm. “How are we going to work on her if we can’t get into her room?” he asked.
I gave him a puzzled look, and he explained. “It’s a crime scene. I’m sure it’s still sealed.”
“Oh, crap!” I said, slapping my forehead. “You’re right.” I thought on that for a beat or two, then said, “You know, she did come onto my balcony the other night. I’ll bet she’s been rattled by the mess that’s become of her room. As long as that room is sealed off by the police, no one’s allowed in to straighten things up.” I remembered the chaos of the crime scene in room 321 after Sophie had been murdered. “Which means that if Carol is upset about the mess, she’s going to be on the move, and maybe we can access her from my balcony or someplace else she might be hiding out.”
“It’s worth a shot,” he agreed.
“And if we can’t get to her, we can’t get to her. Technically Beckworth shouldn’t fault us if we’re unable to clear out Mustgrove. I mean, if we’re barred from access to the room she haunts there’s not much we can do.”
“Right,” he said. “When do you want to start?”
I glanced at my watch. It was half past five. “I think we should start right at midnight,” I said. “That’ll leave us with about five and a half to six hours of really good ghost hunting before dawn breaks and things get quiet again.”
“Cool. What should we do until then?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out some money. Laying it on the bar I said, “I’m going to go back to the hotel and fill Gilley in on our plan and give him a copy of the floor plans. Then I’m going to try to catch some shut-eye. If I were you I’d do the same, ’cause it’s going to be a long night and we’ll need to be fresh.”
“Great,” Heath agreed. “I’ll meet you in the Twilight Room about eleven thirty, then?”
“Perfect,” I said, and we left the restaurant.
I found Gil back at the conference room talking to Gopher and Tony. From the looks of it, my partner was giving them each a lesson in using the thermal imager and electrostatic meters, and also from the looks of it, both men seemed to have caught on long before and were now suffering through Gilley’s extended lecture.
“Your needle is going to bounce around a lot,” he was saying. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s something metaphysical happening. The trick is not to overanalyze it. You just need to keep your eye on the meter and your medium, and see if there are any weird measurements on your meters when M.J. or Heath gets a blip on their internal radar.”
“Hi, guys!” I said from behind Gilley. “How’s it going?”
“Swell,” said Gopher, but his voice couldn’t have been more monotone.
“Hey, M.J.,” said Gilley. “Did you guys come up with a plan?”
“We did,” I said, spreading our list of ghosts and the floor plans out on the table. “While Heath works from the top down, I’m going to work from the bottom up. We’re tackling the easier ghosts tonight and the tougher energies tomorrow.”
“Super,” said Gil. “Tony’s going to follow you with the night-vision camera, and Gopher’s going to tag along behind Heath.”
“That works,” I said, smiling at Tony, who looked really nervous about what he’d gotten himself into. “I’m going to catch some more Zs, and I told Heath that we’d start around midnight. Does that work for everyone?”
Three heads nodded back at me, and Gilley said, “That’s about perfect.”
I turned and headed for the door. “Great, I’ll see you all back here around eleven thirty.”
I was just coming out of the hallway when I heard someone call my name. I looked over and saw Detective MacDonald entering from outside and waving at me. “Holliday!” he said, his voice echoing around the empty lobby. “Can I talk to you a sec?”
“Sure,” I called back, and trotted over to him. We met in the seating area by the bar, and he and I sat down.
“I hear you’re doing some sort of séance thing tonight,” he began.
I laughed. “Not quite. We’ve been hired by the owner to do a ghostbust of the hotel.”
“How many ghosts does this place have?” MacDonald asked, looking around as though he expected to see something jump out at him at any minute.
“More than you might think,” I told him. “Are you here about Tracy’s murder?”
“I think so,” he said, reaching into a folder he was carrying and holding out a picture to me. “Do you get anything off this?”
I eyeballed the photo of a very pretty blonde with big green eyes and high cheekbones. She looked to be in her twenties, and radiating happiness, but I felt immediately that she was deceased. “She’s dead,” I said, staring at the photo intently.
“She is,” he confirmed. “Can you tell me anything more?”
“She died violently,” I said, and then a sound crept into my head and I said, “Does her name have a
sh
sound in it?”
“Her last name does,” he said. “This is Faline Schufthauser. She was murdered two months ago in Strasburg, Germany. A knife matching the description of the one that killed Tracy was found in her chest, but was later lost or stolen out of evidence.”
“The poor girl,” I said, staring down at her image and filtering through the impressions that I was getting off of her picture. Then something quite unusual floated through the ether to me, and I stared up at MacDonald in surprise. “Detective?” I said.
“Yes?”
“This is going to sound really weird,” I prefaced, “but was this girl a criminal?”
MacDonald broke into a grin and shook his head back and forth in appreciation. “She was,” he said. “You’re looking at one of Europe’s best and most elusive art thieves.”
“Whoa,” I said. “She looks so innocent, doesn’t she?”
“Which is why she was so good at it for so long,” said MacDonald. He then reached into the folder and pulled out a piece of paper. “Faline Schufthauser was born in Austria, educated in a Parisian art school, and, as far as Interpol can determine, began stealing expensive works of art right out of college. She spoke several languages, and because her parents were affluent she knew how to fit into the social scene of the rich and famous. She’s credited, or should I say suspected, in sixteen different robberies, but was never caught. She’d probably still be on the run if she hadn’t been murdered.”
“How can you tell that she was killed by the same knife?” I asked.
“Because luckily the Strasburg police got a few pictures of it before it went missing. When we plugged our own photos of the knife that killed Tracy into our database we got a possible international connection. I’m waiting on my techs to blow up the images from Germany, but so far, it really looks like they’re a match.”
“So how does a knife from a murder in Europe find its way over here?” I asked.
“It comes along with the murderer,” said MacDonald, and I felt my skin prickle with goose bumps.
“Ah,” I said after a pause. “Yeah. That would work. Are there any leads on who might have killed Faline?”
“Her ex-boyfriend was suspected at one point but was later cleared. Another theory is that one of the people she stole something from managed to track her down and get their revenge, but no one in any of the suspected robberies was anywhere near her at the time she was killed.”
I handed the photo back to MacDonald. “This just gets weirder and weirder,” I said. “I mean, you’ve got two dead girls, both with international connections.”
“Tracy has an international connection?” said MacDonald.
I shook my head. “No, not her. I was talking about Sophie. You’re still working her case too, aren’t you?”
MacDonald blinked at me as if I’d said something that stunned him. He then got up off the couch and abruptly announced, “I’ve got to get back to the station. I’ll talk to you later.” And with that he hurried out of the hotel.
I shrugged and got up myself, then headed back to my room to read a little and try to get some sleep. I had a feeling that even though we were starting with the “easy” ghosts, it was still going to be a long night.
Chapter 10
At ten minutes to midnight I was back down in the Twilight Room with Gilley, Heath, Gopher, and Tony, and we were going over things one more time. “We’ll all be connected via these headpieces,” Gilley was saying as he handed out the headgear he and I used to keep in contact during our ghostbusts, while Tony held a camera to record the footage for the TV show.
“How do these work exactly?” asked Heath, and I showed him how to put it on. By clicking a small button on the side of the earpiece he could both hear what everyone else was saying and open his mike up for communication, while the small box that he clipped onto his belt would control the channels. “Channel one will be for you, Gopher and Gilley, to keep in touch with each other,” I said. “Channel two will be for me, Tony, and Gilley; and channel three will be for everyone. We’ll have five people on that line, so use it only if you need me to hear your status or if you need my help. Because we’ll all be connected to that channel, it can get a bit jumbled if everyone’s talking at once.”
“It’s a good idea to say ‘over’ when you’re finished speaking,” instructed Gilley, and I thought he looked really excited to be doing his commando thing in front of an audience. “Gopher, I’ll be recording all the sound down here to the wave file I told you about. You can have a copy to use in your broadcast when you need it.”
“Great,” said Gopher, putting on his headpiece, and through my own gear I heard him blow into the microphone and whisper, “Testing, testing, one, two, three, testing.”
“I can hear you,” I said, giving him a thumbs-up. He blushed slightly and was quiet again.
“Mediums,” said Gil, addressing Heath and me, “we’re going to follow your lead. The camerapeople are here only to observe, so if you get into a tricky situation and need backup, don’t look to them; look to me. And each of you should be ready to run to the aid of the other if something goes wrong or the demon reappears.”
“Or just push your camera guy in front of it and run,” whispered Heath, not realizing that his mike was on and that both Tony and Gopher could hear him. I laughed, but those two
really
didn’t look amused.
Gilley cleared his throat and continued. “Now, I’ve given each one of you two magnetic grenades. Inside those lead tubes is a magnetic spike. By uncapping the top and tipping out the spike you have a powerful weapon at your disposal against any ghost that comes within a ten-foot radius of you.
“Cameramen, it is
imperative
that you not play with the spikes or take the caps off the grenades unless something really bad happens. If the magnetic spikes inside are exposed too soon, we will lose the spirit that your medium is trying to cross over, so even if you’re scared, you can’t use them unless either Heath or M.J. gives the okay.”
Gopher and Tony shared a look, and I distinctly caught Tony giving a small shudder. “It’ll be fine,” I reassured him. “You probably won’t see anything at all. I’m going to do all the work.”
Tony nodded, but he didn’t really look convinced. “Now,” Gil continued, “I’ve asked the staff to cut the lights throughout the hotel, as it’s much better for ghost hunting to have relative darkness. You are each equipped with flashlights should it be too dark to see, and you can also just look through the view-finders of the night-vision cameras.”
I looked at my watch. “Gil,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s time.”
“All right,” Gilley relented. “Remember, I’m here if you need me,” he added dramatically.
I turned my head so that I could roll my eyes without Gilley noticing and gathered up my equipment. I was armed with two of the grenades, which I put into the nylon tool belt I’d started wearing on these busts, along with my flashlight, a granola bar, a bottle of water, an electrostatic meter, and one of the thermal imagers. When I was loaded up I turned my headset to channel two and motioned to Tony. “Let’s roll.”