Read Ghosts & Echoes for Free Online Page B

case.”
    “Didn’t say I wasn’t going to be involved. Don’t get huffy. Alex is my researcher.”
    He propped his feet back on the dash and fidgeted, blocking her view.
    “Go home already,” she said.
    “Nah,” he said. “You want me here.” He slouched a little more firmly, tilting his knees out of her line of sight, making the old leather creak and complain. “ I can spell you so you don’t have to pee in a cup. I like being useful.”
    “There’s a fine line between useful and distracting,” she said. “You’re right on it.”
    “Mind if I smoke?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “No fun at all,” he said. “Seriously, I’m good at my job. I can help. I want to help. Let me help.”
    “White knight with a badge,” she muttered. It wasn’t a compliment, though he tipped his head toward her as if he’d heard one. That kind of zeal could get a man killed.
    Sylvie’s phone buzzed in her pocket, a quiet interruption in the night. She flipped it open, glad of an excuse to avoid his gaze, and brought the phone to her ear after a quick glance at the caller ID.
    “Dad,” she said. “You’re up late. What’s wrong?”
    “You’ve got Zoe for a week,” he said without any preamble, harried and only half-attentive.
    “What? No, one night. I thought you said one night,” she said. The burglars looked like a no-show tonight, which meant more stakeouts, more man-hours, and Wright—she didn’t know how his case might play out, if it was even a real problem and not some psychological scar.
    She tuned back in to hear her father sigh. “. . . listening? The CIMAS presentation snuck up on us; we’ve got three days in Mexico City to present your mother’s new model for tracking climatic variability and hurricanes. We’ll be gone a week, and I don’t want Zoe staying in the house on her own.”
    “She’s seventeen,” Sylvie said, but remembering the drugs, the smokes, the cash, the attitude . . . Sylvie’s objection lacked force. “I guess. But what am I going to do with her?”
    “Put her to work for you?” her father suggested.
    “Did you forget what I do?” Sylvie said. Bitter amusement touched her. Hadn’t she decided to keep her sister at arm’s length? Now she was supposed to let Zoe shadow her for a week?
    “Hell, Sylvie, I haven’t known what you were doing since you were sixteen. Two daughters is too much for any man.”
    Sylvie closed her eyes. “Fine. I’ll think of something.”
    Wright squirmed in his seat, tapped her elbow, and jerked his head toward the mall. Sylvie peered over his shoulder. The janitorial van was packing up. Sylvie snapped her fingers, pointed at the notepad half-beneath his thigh. He wrote down the time, the license number, a quick description of the staff in more of that careful block print, a man used to making sure his reports were legible.
    He mouthed useful at her, and she disconnected with more speed than courtesy and found Wright watching her.
    “Family problems?”
    “You gonna help me with them, too?” Sylvie said. “Go, get some rest. You could be the poster boy for jet lag.”
    “Rather stick around—”
    “Go home,” Sylvie said.
    “Does that tone work on stray dogs? ’Cause that could be really useful on the beat. You’d be surprised how many cops get bit. It’s not always big bad dogs either. One of my partners got his ass handed to him by a Maltese I swear was rabid.”
    She hovered between pure frustration—one good push, and he’d be out of the truck, sprawled on the asphalt—and a stuttering desire to laugh. Insane, haunted, or something in between, he was entertaining company. God help her, but she just might like him. While she dithered, he snagged the binoculars from her feet and turned them on the mall. “That a light?”
    She snatched the binoculars back, peered through them, and said, “Not the kind we care about.”
    “What are we looking for?” he said.
    Sylvie sucked in a breath, ready to shout, then, all at once,