Raintree: Haunted (Raintree 2)

She stared out at the ocean, drinking in the beauty of it as if she, too, could literally absorb its power through her skin. How could this place already feel like home? Not the house, not the beach. Gideon. Gideon Raintree was home.

It was an oddly comforting and frightening thought, very much like the prospect of motherhood and all that would come with it.

FOURTEEN

Saturday—Noon

They were getting nowhere fast with the info on the vehicle Tabby had been driving four months ago. Gideon had left Charlie following up that information, trying to wring something useful from it, and then he’d headed here.

The motel room where Lily Clark had been killed had been sealed off. No one but the crime scene investigators had been in this room since she’d been murdered. Her spirit stood in the corner of the room, solid and angry.

Hope insisted that she didn’t have any unnatural powers of any sort, and yet she stood back and rubbed her arms as if warding off a chill on this warm day. She sensed the anger and sadness here; she still felt the violence.

“You said you were going to get her,” Lily said, so furious that her image flickered.

“I’m working on it,” Gideon said softly.

Hope stood behind him, just a few feet away, listening. He had to admit that it was nice not to have to hide what he could do. It was nice to be able to talk to Lily without tricking his partner into leaving the room or pretending to be talking to himself.

“Tabby was in this room for a long time,” Hope said gently. “Knowing she killed Lily Clark is one thing, but we need physical evidence. There has to be something. She must’ve left some kind of clue behind.”

“She’s careful,” Gideon said as he paced at the end of the bed.

“She left a hair at the Sherry Bishop scene. She left a witness at the Marcia Cordell site, and that’s downright sloppy. There must be something here as well.” Hope walked deeper into the room. “All the crime scene techs found were a few fibers that could have been here for days. Weeks, even. This isn’t exactly the cleanest motel in town. Tabby must have touched a surface she forgot to wipe down or left something behind or…”

“She took a shower after I was dead,” Lily said gently, her anger fading. “She had to, because my blood was all over her. On her face and in her hair and on her clothes…I think she liked it….”

“What did she do with her bloody clothes?” Gideon asked.

“I don’t know.”

Gideon nodded to Hope. “My cell phone is all but useless to me today.” Tomorrow was the summer solstice, and his electrical surges were coming more frequently than usual. “Call Charlie and have him get the crime scene techs in here to check the shower drain. Today,” he added forcefully.

Hope pulled out her own cell phone and made the call, and Gideon walked closer to Lily Clark’s much-too-solid image. “You can find those clothes for us,” he said. “Your blood, a part of you, is there, and if you concentrate, you can find them. I can’t guarantee that the clothes will lead us to the woman who killed you, but it’s a possibility.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” the ghost whispered.

“You can see so much more now, if you try. Think about that night. Remember what happened after. You watched Tabby walk out that door.”

“Yes,” Lily whispered. “I screamed at her, but she didn’t hear me. I tried to stop her, but I couldn’t do anything.”

“Did she have the clothes with her? Were they wadded up or stuffed in a bag or—”

“She was wearing my favorite dress,” Clark whined. She seemed to view that as just another indignity. “What nerve.”

“What about the clothes she was wearing when she killed you? Did she have them with her when she left?”

Lily cocked her head and turned her mind back to that night, even though she undoubtedly wanted nothing more than to forget. Maybe when this was done and she moved on she would forget. No one should carry such painful memories with them for eternity. “No,” she said thoughtfully. “All she was carrying was her purse. The knife was in it, freshly washed and wrapped in one of my nightgowns, and there wasn’t room in that purse for her clothes, too. She loved that knife,” the spirit added. “She touched it like it was alive.”

Gideon turned to Hope, who had just ended her phone call. “The clothes are here somewhere.”

“The room was searched,” she said.

Gideon walked into the bathroom. “Lily, did Tabby ever carry those bloody clothes out of this bathroom? After she had that shower, did she bring the clothes back out?”

The ghost shook her head, and Gideon glanced up at the tiles in the ceiling.

It would take a few days to get solid evidence from the clothes and the towel Gideon had found hidden above the ceiling tiles, but it was a step. They didn’t expect Tabby would have her name and address stitched into the clothes she’d worn, but at least they had something concrete, and there was bound to be recoverable DNA. All they needed was Tabby in custody so a match could be made.