Living With the Dead (Otherworld 9)

"I figure that belongs to the victim," Downey said. "Her purse was empty - dumped."

Finn surveyed the small mound of items, then glanced at Portia Kane's purse, barely big enough to hold a pack of smokes. "All this didn't fit in there."

"Hey, you should see all the crap my wife squeezes into hers. I swear, those things are magic."

Finn nodded, as if he understood. He wasn't married. No girlfriend, not for... well, it had been a while. It took all his time and energy to do his job - a life spent in service of the dead.

He could resent it, but he'd never really seen the point. He'd been given this gift, and it was his duty to use it.

Finn sorted through the purse debris with a gloved hand, looking for insight into the woman who'd left it behind. A young officer tapped him on the shoulder and said Marla Jansen wanted to speak to him. From the way he said it, Finn knew he should recognize the name, but he considered himself lucky to know who Portia Kane was.

He followed the officer - Tripp - into the hall and found a young woman with stop-sign-red hair bouncing on her tiptoes, trying to see into his crime scene.

"The body's been removed," Finn said.

"Oh!" Jansen's dark eyes widened with put-on horror. "I didn't want to see - " She shuddered. "Eww."

An actor. In this town, one learned to identify them at a hundred paces. From her exaggerated expressions, he would peg her as a wannabe - and likely to stay that way - but if Tripp knew her, she must be semifamous. Finn just hoped she didn't expect him to ask for her autograph.

"Officer Tripp says you saw something."

Jansen launched into a lengthy account of being in the club with Portia then sending Kane's PR rep - a woman named Robyn Peltier - to find her when she'd been gone too long.

"Portia Kane goes clubbing with her publicist? Does she expect to need her?"

"Of course not. Portia feels sorry for the chick. She lets her tag along with us sometimes. I always told her you shouldn't socialize with the hired help, and now look what happened. The chick flipped out and killed Port in a jealous rage."

"Was there an issue?"

Jansen fluttered her hands. "There's always an issue with people like that. They hate us. Finally it just bubbles over and... boom."

"Boom?"

"Or 'bang,' I guess. Anyway, they were fighting."

"About what?"

"How would I know?"

"When did this happen?"

"Right before Portia left us," Jansen said smugly. "The PR chick said something and Portia didn't like it. She told her to call the driver and went to the bathroom."

Didn't sound like much of a fight to Finn.

Jansen nibbled a purple-painted fingernail. "Do you think I should, like, get a bodyguard?"

"I doubt it's an epidemic."

Her brow furrowed, trying to figure out what he meant. Then she gave up and pulled out her cell phone. "I'm going to get one. Maybe two. You can't be too careful."

* * *

ROBYN

Robyn stood across the road from Bane. She looked down at her cell phone for the umpteenth time, as if the image she wanted was just slow in materializing, like one of those old Polaroid cameras. It was a great shot... of the blurred top of a light-haired head.

She looked at the club - at the growing crowd, at the reporters, the TV vans, the police cars, the ambulance... and she realized that every step she'd taken since finding Portia's body, as right as it had seemed at the time