Wanted: Undead or Alive

It's Not Nick's Style

When we got to the car, I called Price. I left it on speakerphone so Moose could hear.

"What did you find?" he asked.

"We're following up on several clues." I shrugged in Moose's general direction in the hopes that he'd understand I was trying my best to sound less lost than we really were. "We're pretty confident Nick didn't do it."

His long-suffering groan reverberated through the phone. "And why is that?"

"It's..." I couldn't bring myself to tell Price it wasn't Nick's style. "There's no conclusive evidence."

"He was in a locked room with the body, was he not?"

"He was," I said.

"And he literally had her blood on his hands."

"We're not one hundred percent certain it was her blood. We've sent it to the lab. But yes, it appears that way."

"You're a lunatic," he said.

"It's been said," I confirmed. "Look, you sent us to investigate, and that's what we'll do. If Nick did it, we won't hide that from you."

Moose grunted, clearly conveying his thoughts on that statement.

I carried on as if I hadn't heard him. "But we're not letting you convict him if the evidence points to someone else."

"You mean the evidence beyond the locked door and the bloody hands and the eyewitness?"

"Technically, she didn't see it. She only heard it."

He gave another groan and hung up.

Moose started the car and drove away from the McMansion with its ostentatious pillars.

I laid my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes as if I'd be able to see my myriad thoughts written on the back of my lids and sort through them more effectively. Well, thoughts wasn't exactly right. I didn't have a lot of thoughts. I had a lot of questions.

"Why was Nick so... Irish?"

"Nick is Irish," Moose pointed out.

"Not that Irish, usually."

"Maybe it's one of those things. You know, like how people who've mastered their stutter will start stammering when they get stressed out."

"You think it was stress?" I'd use a lot of adjectives to describe how Nick had seemed before I got to stressed.

He took a right turn out of the driveway. "Could have been exhaustion."

"Why would he be that tired?"

"If he got a magical bonk on the head, that can really take it out of a guy."

Moose would know. He'd taken a great many bonks on the head over the years. Some magical, some of a more mundane variety.

"You think the ghost girl did it?" I asked.

"My money's on the demon."

"Which one?"

He snorted. It might have been laughter. Hard to say with Moose.

I confessed to him. "I feel fully unqualified to do this job. I'm not an investigator. I've never solved a mystery. I don't even read mysteries."

He gave me the side eye. "When did being unqualified ever stop you?"

Fair point. I had jumped headlong into bounty hunting and had died almost immediately. Only because of Nick did I get a second chance. Which brought up another question. "Why didn't he just heal her?"