I was really starting to hate Records. “You have a full name and you can’t tell me where she is before next week?”
“We’d have it sooner if we could. But her paper trail ends with a magazine subscription at your location. Once that lease was over, she kind of fell off the radar.”
I hung up with him and asked Jacob, “You buy that?”
“In this day and age? Not really.”
“And given that F-Pimp’s radar reaches farther than the line at a Taco Bell drive-thru after the bars close, I can’t imagine why they’re not finding her.”
“You didn’t tell them about the blood spatter.”
No. I hadn’t. Because I wasn’t ready to hand this off until I knew exactly what I’d be passing along. “Even so—there’s enough weirdness here that someone should want to dig deeper.”
And if Records wasn’t alarmed about the presence of an unexplained repeater, I knew someone who would be.
I checked in with Laura and let her know what we’d found out about Sarah so far. “And apparently, the trail stops there,” I summed up.
“Hm.” Laura was the master of solving the unsolvable. I silently congratulated myself for appealing to The Fixer’s weakness. “Come back to the office and we’ll figure out a plan.”
It seemed like a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth to me, but it wasn’t as if the repeater was currently cooperating. We headed back to HQ and went straight to the top—figuratively, not literally. Laura made her office in a corner of the second floor with an uninspiring view, but absolutely zero history of ghostly presence. Ever since her possession incident, Laura had been a paragon of caution. Can’t say I blamed her.
We found Laura was frowning over reports of what we’d done so far, and I belatedly kicked myself for not sending Jacob off on a made-up errand. If he was still stinging from that “satisfactory” performance rating, the last thing he needed was to be associated with the botch job I was making of a simple mediumship verification. I had to give him credit. For someonewhose competence was under the magnifying glass, he carried himself like he owned the room.
Then again, he always did. That’s what pushed all my favorite buttons.
“I’ve read through your findings so far,” Laura said to me. “Your report was supposed to confirm Boswell’s mediumship. Why are we spending more resources on the last tenant than the man we actually assigned you?”
The moment I uttered the M-word—not mediumship, but murder—the haunted apartment would be relegated to the police department. How to buy time without earning a “satisfactory” mark myself? “I wouldn’t frame it as switching targets,” I said carefully. “More like the trail leads back a little further than we expected. We’ll just need to—”
Laura lifted a hand. “Hold that thought.” Her eyes flicked to the monitor on her desk.
A muted buzz sounded from the outer door, and a moment later Evelyn stepped in, hair clip slightly askew, looking like she’d walked straight into a conversation she wished she hadn’t. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize you were busy.”
She tried to back out, but Laura waved her in. “No, please, join us. Sometimes an empath catches currents the rest of us overlook. But if it would interfere with your testing….”
“It wouldn’t. Bethany and I are through for the day.”
“Great. Unless Agent Bayne has another suggestion?”
No. I was too busy congratulating myself for holding onto the investigation so the cops couldn’t botch it. “Actually,” Isaid, “Agent Marks was just saying we could use an empath’s perspective.”
“By all means,” Laura said. “Use whatever resources are at your disposal.”
As we trooped out of Laura’s office and down the hall, Evelyn lowered her voice, leaned in, and said, “I hope that doesn’t mean tracking down Mr. Boswell again. He’s not easy for me to be around. I’m sure he can’t help it, poor guy, but after the last time, I took on enough of his anxiety that I found myself sleeping with one eye open.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t need to follow up with Boswell just yet. We’re gonna revisit Sledge.”
Jacob said, “But Sarah is alive. Which means it’s not her repeater.”
No, but something in the mailman’s utter smugness had rubbed me wrong.
Records was able to locate Zachary Sledge easily enough. We only told Evelyn about him in the broadest sense, that he was the prior tenant, so as not to influence her impressions. We caught up with him in the lobby of an apartment building with the mailbox panel open, tucking a sales flyer into each little cubby. As we approached and caught sight of him through the glass panel door, I muttered, “He doesn’t even see us coming and he’s already flexing.”
Jacob cut his eyes to me and hmphed.
So much for being unbiased.
When we all crowded into the lobby, Sledge looked us over with mild amusement. “Must be a slow day for the ApartmentPolice. What now, you want me to rate the plumbing on a scale of one to ten?”
