Dallas shook his head, looking from the yard to the house. “How the hell could anyone think that a dying man was a ghost?” he demanded.
“The power of suggestion, probably,” Liam said. “People love ghost tours. They go on them all the time. They want to be scared. They don’t want real danger, but they want to be scared. Hell, Dallas, nothing’s changed since we were kids. This place survives on tourism. Tourists like stories. We’re full of them.”
“But this guy was stumbling around your friend’s yard and she didn’t wake up until some tourist screamed, and then she was all, ‘Wow, you saw a bloody ghost in my yard? Okay.’”
“Hannah is a good kid, Dallas. Lay off. She was dealing with screaming tourists who told her they saw a ghost, not a man.”
Dallas nodded. “Yeah, all right.”
“Come in and talk to her. Talk. Don’t yell.”
“I was never yelling.”
“You basically accused her of causing his death.”
“The hell I did. I merely suggested that an intelligent and rational human being might have thought from the get-go that there was something more than a ghost in her yard.”
Liam lowered his head, a slight grin on his face. “I’m going in for coffee. If you can be nice for a few minutes, you’re invited, too.” He looked up at Dallas, and his smile faded. “You heard the doc. He couldn’t have been saved unless he’d been in an emergency room when it happened. It’s not Hannah’s fault your man is dead.”
“I know. I just...I just feel like something is escaping me and that I should be able to grasp it, and I can’t. I’ll be pleasant. I promise.”
“No sarcasm?”
“No sarcasm.”
They took the path from the gate past the pool, where the techs were busy stringing tape to try to salvage what they could of the victim’s route from the yard to his death.
There were no blood trails to the yard, which seemed impossible, but unless the techs could find something with their equipment that neither Liam nor Dallas had seen, Jose Rodriguez might as well have appeared in the yard like the ghost those kids had thought he was, because there was no sign of where he had been before he showed up by the pool.
How could that be? He must have been bleeding steadily by that point.
There was a crime scene marker at every spot where Hannah O’Brien had seen blood as she’d followed the trail through her yard to the alley.
Dallas couldn’t help himself. He paused, looking at the lawn chairs beside the pool. He imagined the couple lying there....
Opening their eyes.
Seeing Rodriguez bleeding, holding a knife, then screaming in terror at what they thought was a ghost.
They had still been out there freaking out when Hannah came out to see what was going on, so why hadn’t Rodriguez stayed there with them and asked for help?
The pool was surrounded by attractive tile work, which gave way to lawn. It appeared that Rodriguez had stumbled past the chairs, then across the grass, past the bushes edging the yard and through the gate into the alley. It hadn’t rained recently, so the foliage was dry and brittle. He had to assume there would be evidence if Rodriguez had gone through it. Since there wasn’t, he had to assume Rodriguez had taken almost a straight line out to the alley.
Had the gate already been open?
He closed his eyes and tried to picture what had happened.
Sliced, bleeding, dying...but he hadn’t headed to the house?
Why?
There could be only one reason.
Rodriguez had come from the alley, trying to escape through the yard, and the killer had been behind him. But he’d seen the kids by the pool and hadn’t wanted anyone else to die, so he’d sacrificed his own life and turned around, back toward danger.
So where was the killer now?
And where was the knife the couple had seen Rodriguez waving?
The answer was obvious.
The killer had followed him until he had fallen, then wrested the knife—which might well have been dripping with the killer’s blood—from Rodriguez’s dying grasp.