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  DIE FOR ME

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2002, 2014 Jack Lynch

  Previously published as Wolf House

  ISBN: 1941298397

  ISBN-13: 9781941298398

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line, #253

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  BOOKS BY JACK LYNCH

  The Dead Never Forget

  Pieces of Death

  The Missing and the Dead

  Wake Up and Die

  Speak for the Dead

  Truth or Die

  Yesterday is Dead

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  She wouldn’t tell me what it was all about at first, she just asked questions about being a private detective: how the hours were, whether I like it. Ordinarily I would have hung up on a caller like that, but she said we’d had an important telephone conversation some years earlier.

  “You worked for the newspaper,” she told me, then paused again.

  I held the receiver loosely to one ear and stared out the window, down onto Saturday morning Market Street in San Francisco, where the well dressed, the casual and the homeless moved at varying gaits up and down the sidewalks.

  The woman on the phone was taking her time, and I was beginning to fidget. I had a lot of memories to do with the days I’d worked on newspapers; some good, some hilarious and some ugly. I didn’t feel this was going to be one of the hilarious ones. I wanted her to get on with it.

  “The girl at the answering service said you might have a job for me.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said after a pause. “But it’s not what most people would think of as ordinary work. This isn’t even an ordinary day to be calling. I guess I was lucky you came in this morning.”

  “I show up at a lot of dizzy times, but let’s get back to you.”

  “All right. I was hoping we might get to know each other again. I can’t expect you to remember my voice after all these years, but it was such a crucial conversation, from my viewpoint at least. You quite literally saved my life. You were so decent to me. I thought I might hear back from you sometime.”

  “Maybe I’m a changed man from the one I was back then.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. I’ve seen your name from time to time. From what I’ve read of the things you’ve done and the people you’ve worked for, I don’t think you’re all that different.”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me a little more about that earlier conversation.”

  “That’s easy enough. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I spoke first to an assistant city editor. He sounded quite busy, and told me he was transferring my call to a reporter named Bragg. And then you came on the line and I told you, ‘I think I have a story for you, or at least some caption matter.’ ”

  I leaned forward in the chair and put my elbows on the desk. I had indeed heard those words, in that tone of voice, nearly a dozen years earlier. “What day of the week was it?”

  “A Sunday.”

  That made me wince. I remembered all right. “That was my last day at the newspaper.”

  “Oh? Then maybe that’s why you never called back. Not that it matters. But do you remember our conversation now? The things you said to me?”

  “Not the specifics of it. I certainly remember what it was about. Other things later in the day pushed it out of my mind. But that was a long time ago. I’m glad to hear your voice again. What’s happening?”

  The woman gave a quiet sigh. Whatever it was, it wasn’t easy for her to talk about.

  “Would you mind if I repeated some of that conversation we had that day? It sounds silly, I know, but if I can help you remember, if I can show you how very important that was to me, then maybe the other things I have to tell you won’t seem so bizarre.”

  “Go ahead. I remember you told me you were going to jump off the bridge that morning.”

  “That’s right. And you asked if I meant the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  “And you told me yes,” I remembered. “You said you could see it from where you were sitting. You said it was particularly beautiful that day.”

  “And you said,” the woman told me now, “ ‘Oh boy,’ and I heard a very deep sigh. I asked what was the matter. And you said it wasn’t the sort of story you wanted to cover. And then you said something like, ‘Hey, look, could we just talk for a minute?’ And I said that yes, we could talk, but I asked you what was wrong. I asked you if you didn’t do stories about people who go off the bridge. You told me you did, ‘but not with a light heart.’ And I think right then, Mr. Bragg, I realized that I was speaking to somebody who was more than just a newspaper reporter.” She paused again. “You seemed that day to have difficulty choosing your words.”

  “You were making me a nervous wreck,” I admitted. “You were so damn calm about it.”

  “I had made up my mind, is all. At least I thought I had. But then, what you told me next made me realize how really uncomfortable our conversation was for you. You told me that through the years you had known too many people who had committed suicide. The first, you said, had been the mother of a youngster you grew up with. And you said there had been plenty of others since then. Do you remember telling me that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And was it true?”

  “Yes.”

  “I could tell.” She paused again. “Talk about the shoe being on the other foot. For that brief moment my heart went out to you.”

  There was more silence on the line. I shifted in the chair. I doubted that I would have leveled with her that way if it had happened today. She of course remembered all this better than I did.

  “Do you remember what you said next?” she asked.

  “Afraid not.”

  “You needn’t apologize. You said to me, ‘Look, you must be in an awful state. I mean, your life has to be absolutely shitty right now.’ ”

  “I said that?”

  “Your very words. And dear God, what a help it was to hear you say them. It made me laugh. Not happily, but laugh all the same, and I told you that you were so right. And then you told me that these awful things, these moods, pass in time.”

  “I was looking up the number for Suicide Prevention while I told you that,” I remembered.

  “And you went on to tell me that you also had talked to people who had attempted suicide in the past, but who had either failed, or been stopped in one way or another. I take it you talked to them in your capacity as a reporter.”

  “Some of them. Others were just people I knew. Same as with the ones who succeeded in doing what they set out to do.”

  “Well, I’m certainly glad you were willing to tell me about them that Sunday morning.”

  “I don’t remember all that.”

  “Y
ou told me that those people you’d spoken to, the ones who had tried to take their own lives, but for one reason or another had failed, you told me that every one of them had said they thanked God they hadn’t gone through with it. You said all those people had learned that things do change, that problems can be solved, or at least made tolerable. And then you said the most important thing of all to me, Mr. Bragg. Do you remember?”

  “Not right now.”

  “You said you could understand how a person whose brains had been blown away on drugs might not see things that way. But you told me that I sounded like a very composed and together lady. You said to me, ‘Damn it, I don’t want you to die.’ ”

  If I had still smoked cigarettes I would have lit one right then. I had been right. This was not one of the hilarious memories from my newspaper days.

  “You went on talking for a good while longer,” the woman continued. “You were being rock-bottom honest. You cared about me, I was convinced of that. You told me there were people who could take me by the hand and walk me through whatever mess I was in. You asked me to give you the phone number I was calling from. You said you would have one of these people call me. And you know, by then I felt as if you really were a friend. Somebody I could trust. And so I gave you my number. And a short while later somebody from Suicide Prevention did call me.”

  I stared at the ceiling. It was nice to know something had worked out that day. The woman on the phone might have been reading my mind.

  “It saved my life, is what it did,” she told me in a quieter tone. “Not that all the gloom and doom lifted like a magic veil. But you, and then the woman from Suicide Prevention, well, you got me to a place where I felt I could cope for a while longer. I phoned back a few days later to thank you for that conversation. That’s when I learned your name. But they told me you had quit your job.”

  “That’s right. That’s the day I quit my job.”

  She waited, giving me a chance to say more. When I didn’t, she continued.

  “Anyway, Mister Bragg, you were being honest with me that day, weren’t you? That day so many years ago?”

  “Gut level,” I told her. “And forget the mister. Just call me Bragg. I never did learn your name.”

  “It’s Maribeth.”

  “Nice name. It somehow goes with a composed and together lady.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way, because this is the part that starts to get tricky.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, as I said, I see your name from time to time and I know you’re in the detective business. Meanwhile, I’ve become…oh God, Bragg, please don’t laugh…but I call myself a mind consultant. It’s misleading. I’m not a psychologist or mental health worker as such, though I’ve studied those fields as part of what I do.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what it is that you do?”

  She hesitated, then said in a quiet voice, “I’m a psychic consultant.”

  I shifted the receiver to my other ear. “You don’t sound very sure of yourself.”

  “I’m sure enough when I’m doing it,” she said with a bit more authority. “It’s the trying to explain it to people that ties me in knots. Well come on, tell me, what do you think of people who call themselves psychics?”

  “I don’t laugh outright,” I told her. “Not all the time anyhow. I think there are people who sense things the rest of us don’t.”

  “That’s good to hear,” she told me. “That means I can tell you the rest of it.”

  “Please do.”

  “This all came about out of that earlier episode we shared.”

  “The suicide thing?”

  “Precisely, the suicide thing. On that Sunday, thanks in part to you, I survived. But one of the closest friends I ever had, a woman I’d known since childhood, did not survive. She was living on the East Coast then. On that day I phoned the newspaper and talked to you, she swallowed a fatal combination of tranquilizers and bourbon whiskey. It was, I learned later, the culmination of a crushing depression which had gripped her since her husband had died a year earlier. She had never told me about the state she was in. Not verbally.”

  The woman let the silence build.

  “I guess I’m beginning to get it,” I told her.

  “Are you?”

  “You think it was your friend’s depression you were feeling the day you called and talked to me.”

  “I’m certain of it. I’m more positive as the years pass. Except for you, I might have gone right down the tubes with her, although in a little more dramatic fashion. I always did have a certain flair. My father thought I should have gone onto the stage. He said I was a regular Virginia ham.”

  She was trying to make light of things, but I felt there was something else starting to catch up with her.

  “I’ve got to get this out,” she said abruptly.

  “I can tell.”

  “Trust me, then. I am reasonably successful as a ‘mind consultant,’ as I call it, but what I really mean is that I have considerable psychic abilities which I have recognized and trained and honed since my friend Betty took her life, and I just know that was what I was feeling that Sunday I spoke with you. I make money at what I do, but more importantly, Bragg, I know I have this ability. I’m not infallible, but I do have this God-given ability, and I try to use it to help people the best I know how. But I didn’t call you today to tell you how you turned my life around and launched me on my brilliant career.”

  “Go on.”

  “The first time we talked I wanted to kill myself. This time, I want to stay alive.”

  “What is it, Maribeth? What’s been happening?”

  “For the past two weeks, I have had two absolutely crystal clear impressions. This is a part of the psychic business. The sure end of it. This isn’t a possible, or a maybe, like I tell my clients when I’m not sure. This is the real thing.”

  “What are the impressions?”

  “One, there’s an open field somewhere north of here, in a rural area, but not too distant, and there are bodies buried there. It’s not a cemetery. It’s near a sort of picnic area. And the people buried there are victims of violence. There are several of them. And the second impression, and this is where you come in, Bragg, is that because of these bodies, I too am threatened with violence and death. I can’t think why. I don’t know what to do about it.”

  When she spoke next her voice had a catch to it. “And so I decided to phone you again. I didn’t say it the first time we talked, but I’m saying it now, Mr. Bragg. Help me. Please help me.”

  TWO

  Detective Sergeant Barry Smith of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department was a man of tolerance and professional courtesy. At least he treated me that way because I had traded on a name we both knew, Burt Danstadt. Danstadt was patrol commander of the neighboring Marin County Sheriff’s Department. Danstadt and I were pretty good friends, had been for years. And that, I figured, was the reason Detective Sergeant Barry Smith was patiently listening to my story there on a midday Saturday in the offices of the Violent Crimes Unit in the Sonoma County Hall of Justice in Santa Rosa, because no matter how adroitly you told it, no matter how you couched your terms, there was no easy way to tell a detective sergeant that a woman who claims to be psychic said he had a number of homicide victims buried in some patch of his bailiwick.

  Smith burned off a lot of nervous energy listening to the story. He was chewing gum and fiddling with a pencil and pad in front of him. He was a small-framed man of about thirty-five with a round face and pale complexion. He had dark hair and blue eyes that stared intently. When I’d finished the story Smith’s jaw stopped working the gum, as if the process of chewing had been making a record of it.

  He dropped the pencil and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his flat stomach. He was wearing a pair of cream-colored, hard-napped slacks and a short-sleeved, white dress shirt that had pale pink stripes through it. What appeared to be a .38 Police Special protruded fro
m a belt holster and what looked like a very large diamond was set in an elaborate setting on his right ring finger.

  He seemed for a minute to be staring at something over my left shoulder, then gave a thin smile. “That’s one helluva story to have to come in off the street with cold and tell some cop you’ve never met before.”

  I nodded. “Thank God for Burt Danstadt.”

  “So what do you think of it all?”

  “I think it was worth a trip up here to tell it to you. I’ve never even met the woman face to face, but the two telephone conversations I’ve had with her were pretty intense. I did some checking around. Among people who seem to know about these things, she’s considered top flight in her field. She’s worked with one of the police jurisdictions down on the Peninsula. I don’t know just which one, Los Altos or Sunnyvale, I think. I didn’t check with them. I thought you could do that better, if you want to. I personally feel she believes what she told me. I think she thinks there are bodies somewhere up here waiting to be found. I think she thinks she’s in danger.”

  “Because of the bodies?”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “Why didn’t she want to come up here and tell us the story herself?”

  “The way she explained it to me, she’s still a little quirky about being a psychic. She thinks she has the gift, or whatever you call it, but it embarrasses her to tell other people about it.”

  Smith grunted. “At least she isn’t a showboat. Why does she say Sonoma County?”

  “She said it seems about right. She said it’s a ways north of San Francisco, but not too far. She said she felt it was beyond Marin County. You’re next in line and she said the sort of country she senses is similar to what she’s seen when she’s been up in this area.”

  “It couldn’t be over the ridge into Napa?”

  “I asked her that. She said no, Napa County doesn’t do it.”

  “Mendocino? You suppose I could sell her on Mendocino County?”

  “You’d have to ask her.”

  Smith picked up the pencil and let it fall back to the desk again. “Christ. Sheriff’ll go ape if we start digging up bodies.” He looked across at me. “What’s your feeling? About psychics in general, I mean.”