8. Really, That’s the Hill You’re Dying On? #2
Davies straightens his spine and groans, and Jazz bounces up to her full height with her twenty-something-year-old legs and fantastic posture like carrying a chandelier half her weight was no big deal.
“What’s that under his pillow?” she says, glancing over at dead me.
Without the cage of the chandelier, my corpse looks too exposed. I’m not naked, I’m still wearing my ExorSquad overalls, but I feel more vulnerable than if I were in my birthday suit. It’s . . . embarrassing, actually. I look away. Some of the other ghosts stare transfixed at me.
Jazz strides over to the bed and gently lifts the right?side pillow. Rigor mortis means my head continues staring blankly upwards.
“A water pistol? What is this?” Jazz holds up the PolterPulse 33X and flips it over in her hands. “Why would he have a toy under his pillow?” Her index finger idly comes to rest on the trigger.
A blinding beam of light shoots from the end of the PolterPulse and lands squarely on the settee beside the chandelier, tearing open the upholstery and spilling its horsehair guts onto the cushion below. Fifty centimetres to the left and it would have been game over for Sergeant Dave Davies.
“Bro! Not a toy.” Jazz carefully places the weapon on the bedside table with the muzzle pointing towards the wall.
“Fucking hell, that was close,” Stove says, wiping imaginary sweat from his brow. “Imagine old Sergeant Saggy Pants croaking it here, and we’re stuck with his manky ghost forever.”
Peter pulls a face. “Yikes. No, thanks.”
“Jazz, look at this.” Davies beckons his young trainee over to the couch.
“Look at the burn marks that weird gun thing left.” They both crouch down to inspect.
Every ghost bar Josh tries to muscle in on the viewing party.
It looks like a cigarette burn, but longer, stretched out at the top and bottom.
“Now look at the mark on the chandelier cable.”
We rush over, or crane our necks, or in Peter’s case, float upwards. It’s pretty clear the scorch marks match. The cable and chain have been cut clean through, and at the top, the same stretched?out sooty burn.
“At least we know how the chandelier fell,” Jazz says. She makes a note of it on her pad. “Is your theory suicide?”
“Nooooo,” yell about five ghosts at once. Camille punches the air, then does a little dance.
Davies doesn’t answer Jazz, or if he did, it was drowned out by the protestations of the spirits.
“So, he lay in bed and shot the chandelier wire with this gun thingy, knowing it would fall directly onto him and kill him?” Jazz doesn’t sound so sure. She purses her lips together like she’s stopping herself from saying something, and side-eyes her sergeant.
Davies checks his watch again for the umpteenth time. “Exactly. Poor guy, must have had such a sad and lonely life, no wonder he travelled all the way here, to the suicide hotspot of the south?west.”
“The fuck, dude? You don’t even know anything about me,” I say.
“Well, is he wrong?” asks Peter.
I don’t have a witty response to that, so I scowl at him. “No.”
Stove practically leans through Jazz as she writes something on her pad. “Had a gun . . . why chandelier when he could shoot himself? . . . time to stash gun under pillow, question mark.”
“Ooh, she knows it’s not suicide,” Pixie says, raising a brow at me.
Jazz could prove to be a useful contact. An ally, potentially. Of course, I’ll need to figure out how to communicate with the living first. Ouija board maybe?
“I’m going to bag up his things. You check over the body for anything else, and we’ll build our case for suicide,” Davies says.
Jazz grimaces. If looks could talk, hers would say, “Do I have to?” Instead, she says, “Yes, Serg.”
“Is that legal?” I ask nobody in particular. “Can they just . . . do that?”
Trystan answers. “No idea, but that’s standard Davies procedure. It’s either suicide or accidental death—usually so long as the hotel isn’t legally responsible—or natural causes.”
“So long as the hotel’s not responsible?” I ask.
“He’s a shareholder,” Peter supplies.
“Isn’t that a conflict of interest?” I say.
He shrugs, then nods. “Practically everybody in this town owns shares in this hotel. They all want it to do well because . . . well, money talks. He has a vested interest in protecting the reputation of the business.”
Interesting. Very interesting.
“Is Helga a shareholder?” There’s a tiny spark of a theory bubbling away. “Or Franny Driscoll?”
It’s Jeanie who answers. “The Paragon is a co-operative, so yes, all the employees are shareholders. It’s actually what Dave and I argued about before I snuffed it.”
I eye Jazz enviously. Man, I wish I were able to take notes right now. “You fought with Sergeant Davies? How long before you . . . died?”