Joyce & Jim Lavene - Taxi for the Dead 02 - Dead Girl Blues by Joyce Lavene, Jim Lavene Read Free Book Online Page B

exactly as it had been before he’d gone off to college. When we’d married, we’d shared one of the larger rooms with our own bathroom.
    After Jacob’s death, I’d started keeping everything I could find about the area where we’d died and the other deaths that had happened there on the desk in his old bedroom. It gave me a place to put up poster board and pin newspaper articles about other accidents and deaths on that curve. I hadn’t wanted Kate to find it.
    And that was the one part of our lives that I had managed to keep from her sharp little mind. She still thought her daddy had died in a car accident.
    When I was in Jacob’s old room, I was surrounded by his superhero posters and collectibles of everything from horses to Frankenstein. There was a globe in one corner and a hanging mobile of the solar system above me. There was so much hope for the future here, a future cut short by our tragedy.
    Looking up the name Tim Rusk had given me at the bar was easy on the laptop. Gerald Linker was a decorated veteran of two tours in Iraq as well as various other military missions. I found pictures of him and his wife, Julie, on their wedding day. They’d only been married a short time when she had died. There were no children.
    I studied Gerald’s lean face in his army uniform and then compared it to the photo of him the day after the wreck that had killed his wife. He hadn’t been shy about telling everyone that Julie’s death wasn’t normal. He’d spoken out for months, questioning the police findings.
    He’d claimed that someone had been waiting in the woods that night and had taken her from their pickup truck. He’d gone all the way to the governor’s office—no doubt getting there with good PR from his military career, but that was as far as it went.
    A few days after his visit to the governor, Gerald had been thrown in jail for public drunkenness and assault. He’d gotten into a bar fight and seriously hurt the other man. After that, it was downhill for him until he was taken to a mental hospital for observation.
    There was nothing mentioned about him after that.
    I sat back in Jacob’s old chair and looked around at his teenage belongings. No wonder Gerald had finally given up. The system could beat anyone down. I’d known that and had tried just to be grateful that I had the next twenty years to spend with Kate. I’d followed Abe’s strict orders to stay away from looking into Jacob’s death.
    In short, I’d been a coward. Time was passing quickly, only seventeen years left to find out what had happened that night.
    I saw Addie standing in the doorway and turned off the laptop. It was already six-thirty a.m. Time to get Kate up and ready for school soon.
    “Did you find anything new?” she asked with the apathetic air of someone who was used to disappointment.
    “Maybe.” I told her what had happened. “I’m going to see Gerald Linker as soon as I can. Maybe we can compare stories and come up with some new ideas.”
    Her thick face was much clearer now than it had been when she’d first returned as a ghost. Lucas had been helping her become more solid, learning about her ghostly powers.
    “Why not today, right away? What else do you have to do?”
    “I have to investigate a magic user’s death. Remember Harold the Great?”
    “The magician? Sure, although I think of him as Harold the mediocre. He couldn’t even make balloon animals at Kate’s party. Why are you investigating his death?”
    “Because Abe wants me to. Turns out he was a real sorcerer. He worked for Abe for a while. Abe thinks Lucas may have killed Harold to get his position.”
    “Well, that’s just stupid. You can tell Abe I said that too. Ignore him. Go talk to this Gerald person. Do what you need to for my son.”
    I switched off the desk lamp. “I will. You know I will.”
    “Sometimes I wonder.” She disappeared, and I ran upstairs to take a shower and change clothes.
    Lucas was already up—he didn’t sleep