I HEADED BACK to recheck Boswell’s old apartment—because now I was fairly sure the guy wasn’t just paranoid, and the flash of motion I’d picked up on in the bedroom was more than a passing reflection. If a repeater was there, I was determined to find it. With Jacob and Evelyn out of the picture, hopefully I’d get a cleaner read. No expectations, no distractions. Just me, the building…and that ever-present TV buzzing through the walls like psychic white noise.
Normally, I was good at tuning out the sound of neighbors. My last crappy apartment had a leadfoot upstairs and NPR droning continually from across the hall. But my last place wasn’t haunted.
Not unless you counted the basement.
I stood at the threshold of Boswell’s old bedroom and waited. Nothing. I did a couple of neck rolls, took a few slow breaths, and visualized my white light. Still nothing. And finally, I hauled out Mood Blaster in hopes of forcing myself into an alpha state to scour the etheric plane.
I was focusing on the binaural pulses…but all I could hear was the damn TV.
With no luck in finding the “woman in the bedroom” who’d been staring at Boswell, I decided to tap my FPMP resources tosee if they could give me a better idea what I was looking for. I texted the Records department and asked them for a roster of all women living in the apartment in recorded history whose year of death correlated with their residency. I also requested a log of any 911s associated with the place.
A search of that depth would take some time, but Records was able to give me a quick rundown on the last tenant, one Zachary Sledge. Given that Sledge was both male and (more importantly) still alive, I didn’t find any sign of him haunting the room. And unless he was also a medium, which would be one hell of a coincidence, I doubted he could tell me anything useful now.
I was debating calling him anyway when a particularly grating laugh track on the other side of the wall set my teeth on edge. One laugh in particular rose above the rest—haw haw haw—and pretty soon it completely hijacked my attention. I checked with Records to see who lived in the apartment next door. They asked if I wanted them to suspend my previous request or run it later. Gotta love bureaucracy. I told them to forget it and marched over there to have a look for myself.
I expected to encounter a retiree with a hearing aid—who else would be home at this time of the day playing the set so loud?—but was greeted by a squinty, sallow-looking guy with a thick neck and a formidable five-o’clock shadow. “Yeah?” he asked bluntly.
“Victor Bayne, FPMP.” I flipped open my badge. That earned me a raised eyebrow. “Got a sec? Just following up on someone who used to live next door.”
“I knew it!” he said, and threw open the door wide, gesturing for me to come in. “I knew that guy was up to something crazy.What’d he do? Strap a bomb to himself? Shoot up a school? Ooh, I know…I’ll bet he flipped out and hijacked a plane.”
I supposed if I lived next door to Boswell, I’d be eager to unload about him too. “Actually, I’m not looking for information about the last tenant. I want to find out who was here before him.”
TV guy was a third-shift worker who drowned out his neighbors with the predictable rhythm of daytime sitcom reruns. He’d lived in his apartment for four years. He didn’t really socialize with anyone else in the building due to his schedule, but in that time, he’d seen people come and go. Boswell. Sledge. And before that, an old man named Sergei who’d been there approximately forever, and was now in a nursing home.
And the only one active in the middle of the night, when this guy was actually awake, had been Boswell.
Three previous tenants…threelivingmen. If there was a repeater, maybe she was bleeding through from a pre-Sergei era. Or even from another apartment entirely. “Sounds like you’ve seen a lot of people cycle through here. Ever get the feeling one of ’em left in a hurry?”
“No one but that crackpot next door. You sure he didn’t go Unibomber on someone?”
Not that I’d ever take it upon myself to defend Boswell’s virtue—I’m sure it was no treat to live next door to him and all his paranoid theories—but the guy wasn’t violent. And seeing as much as I’d seen in my years on the force, that counted for something.
I jotted down Sergei’s name, braced myself, and headed back into the vacant apartment to hunt down whatever it was that didn’t want to be found.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
REPEATERS ARE TRICKY. You can’t talk to them, you can’t reason with them, and if their death was jarring enough, you can’t scrub ‘em out without a fight. Every once in a while, a repeater is useful in closing a cold case. But usually, they’re just a disturbing reminder that everybody dies.
If I was dealing with a repeater in the Boswell apartment—a bigif—no amount of coaxing would do me a damn bit of good. But since I was lacking an audience for once, I figured I should try anyway. Just in case there was a consciousness behind the flicker. I took in the soulless white walls, the bent mini blinds, the scuffed floor—then centered myself, and spoke.
“So…this is one hell of a place to spend eternity. If you’re stuck—say, something bad happened here, and nobody bothered to notice—I can’t fix it if you don’t help me out. You’ve been staring people down, right? Well, newsflash. None of them are in any position to look back. And that’s where I come in. So why don’t you show yourself and tell me your story? Or at least let me see you clearly enough to know I’m not just chasing shadows.”
I scanned the room.
Nothing.
I scowled. The bus stop repeater might have been a coincidence. Okay, that was stretching plausibility…but still. IfBoswell saw surveillance everywhere, then the presence of the repeater could’ve been correlation, not causation. The room felt empty to me, and if it weren’t for the flicker I thought I’d seen, I’d have to chalk it up as a false alarm.
But I was pretty sure I’d seen a flicker.
Wasn’t I?
My hand drifted to my pocket, where I kept some salt packets and a mini spray bottle of Florida Water on me, just in case. But those were for getting rid of ghosts. Not amplifying them.
I pulled out my phone instead and slipped in my earbuds.
Blip bobbed up on my screen like we were best friends. A banner floated above him: “Ready for Match-a-Mood?”
