"We don’t know that."
"Come on, you saw the look on his face. He knew that car. He knew her."
Yes, Cameron was right. She knew without a doubt that Paperboy was the dead woman’s dream man.
"But how would he know she was dead, Max?"
Unless he killed her. The unspoken words hung in the air.
No, no, no. There had to be another explanation, she just knew it, felt it inside like the double-time beat of her heart. “Maybe...” She unfolded the paper still on her lap, found the brief title of the short article on the back page.
“Woman murdered at SFO. That’s how he knew,” she whispered.
When was she murdered? How long ago was she found? Long enough to make the morning edition deadline. But not so long they’d had time to take her car away.
"What’s it say?" Cameron urged.
The words of the article shouted at her. She ignored the sharp whistle of the airport cop, the slap of his hand on her car hood. Her vision blurred around the edges of the name printed in the article, the sight somehow as bad as if she’d seen her own name there in black and white. The woman wasn’t anonymous anymore. She wasn’t just a vision. She was real. And she was dead. It had taken someone twenty-four hours to notice her. She’d been murdered the night before last—the night before Max had a vision of her last few hours alive.
No, it couldn’t be, it wasn’t possible.
She gasped. “Cameron, what’s happening to me?”
“Don’t you know?”
“It’s like I’m feeling all her emotions, like she’s inside me. Taking over.”
“Max, darling, I think you might be possessed.”
Chapter Two
Several hours later, her job interview dispensed with, Max dropped by the Wright temp agency that employed her. One thought occupied her mind. Cameron was correct. Psychic or crazy didn’t make a difference; she was possessed by something. She had to get rid of whatever it was in any way she could. The thought of someone else’s emotions running rampant through her body was...scary.
“I’ll take those in for you,” Max offered solicitously as she breezed past Roger, Sunny Wright’s administrative assistant.
Without a pause, Max slipped her forged pink message note between the six she’d snatched off Roger’s desk.
On her fifth read-through of the newspaper article, Max, with a lot of help from Cameron, figured the only way to exorcise Wendy Gregory—that was the woman’s name—was to find her killer. Didn’t all those old horror movies depict that solving the murder was the way to exorcise a ghost? It sounded a little wacky, but then so did admitting she was possessed.
But where to start her investigation? That was easy, find out everything she could about Wendy Gregory, and to do that, she had to slip into the woman’s shoes. She’d begin by taking over Wendy’s job, which was where Sunny Wright and her temp employment agency came into play.
The reporter who’d written the story had done his job. The who, what, when, where, and how concerning Wendy Gregory’s murder had all been covered in detail. The only question he hadn’t answered was the why.
Discovering that answer fell to Max, with a little help from her pushy ghost of a husband.
Being too anxious about getting Wendy’s job would look suspicious, if not to Sunny, then to Remy Hackett, Wendy’s boss, the man who’d reported her missing yesterday. Wasn’t that strange? In one neat swing, Max had two suspects: the husband who hadn’t reported her missing, and the boss who had, far more quickly than any normal employer would. One work day missed doth not a murder mystery make.
She had to take over Wendy’s job to ferret out the answers. Making her move would be tricky. If this plan back-fired...she’d think of something else. Because Max knew the woman couldn’t “go into the light” until her killer was brought to justice.
Aside from that, Max felt an odd compunction, a need, to give Wendy justice. Perhaps because she’d experienced Wendy’s last living moments. Or maybe it was that Cameron had never gotten justice. His killers were never caught. They’d never paid for what they’d done to him. Sometimes she still prayed for vengeance.
“You never got justice either, Max,” Cameron’s voice floated through her mind, then he was quickly gone. She didn’t want to dwell on what he meant by that.
Max casually flipped through the notes as she shut the door of Sunny Wright’s office with a tap of her foot. Pulling out the one she’d written herself, with Remy Hackett’s name, number, and a vague job description, Max smiled. “This one’s interesting.”
“Snooping through my messages?” Sunny looked like her name. The floor-to-ceiling windows behind her were the perfect backdrop for her golden hair piled neatly on top of her head. For Max, she wore a wide, welcoming smile that displayed a mouthful of white teeth, worth every cent she’d shelled out for those gorgeous porcelain caps.