“Who was the man who attacked me?” The question comes out rough, and I have to clear my throat again.
“Marcus Walsh.”
I make a circular hand gesture to urge him to keep talking, because that name means nothing to me.
“He was an accountant and a father of two,” he says. “Normal guy.”
“Until he snapped and strangled a girl in a parking lot?”
“Until he was possessed by the ghost of William Caine. Caine strangled four women in the eighties. He had a stroke in prison three weeks ago, and death hasn’t slowed him down much.”
Hold on. “The ghost of aserial killertried to kill me?”
He nods. “He murdered another girl four days ago across town, and we tracked him.”
I need something to lean on, but there’s just empty asphalt stretching in every direction. Why her and not me? Why do I always walk away when everyone else dies? What makes me so special that I get to keep breathing while everyone else doesn’t?
Change the subject. “Do you, like, hunt these ghosts for a living?”
“I know how it sounds, but those entities possess innocent people like Marcus. Make them do things they’d never… We try to stop that from happening to anyone else.”
“And there are enough of these things to keep you busy?”
“I’m not retiring anytime soon.”
“So, Ted Bundy could still be out there killing people, and nobody knows about it?”
“Bundy never came back, as far as I know.” He tilts his head, considering. “Others have.”
“You catch any ghosts I’d recognize?”
“Donny has John Wayne Gacy in storage.”
It’s like the tiny person manning the control panel in my brain falls over and dies. “You’re serious?”
“Deadly.”
“Unfortunate choice of words.”
He shrugs, but the corner of his mouth tightens like he’s fighting a smile.
“Every entity is anchored to an object from the living world,” he says. “Could be anything. Jewelry. A weapon. Destroy the anchor, and the ghost gets pulled into whatever comes after death, but the problem is, some of these anchors are impossible to track down, so we keep the entities in storage until we can find them.”
“I can’t believe you have the killer clown sitting in a jar somewhere.”
“The jars are temporary transportation to our containment facility, but yes. His essence is contained.”
“What about Jeffrey Dahmer? Did he ever become a ghost?”
“Nope. Though we did track down a cannibal who possessed an electrician a few years back. There were two heads in his fridge by the time we got to him.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Could’ve been worse,” he says. “At least he didn’t possess a chef.”
I grin, even though the movement makes my neck ache. “Did you just make a cannibalism joke?”
He presses his lips together. “Too dark?”
