Witch Hunt(44)

“Rob. What are you doing here?”
“The cops,” he said. Erin was reflected in his wide eyes. “The cops are here. I know the alarms are disabled, and I didn’t call them, so someone must have…tipped them off…” He tried to move toward Erin’s blurry ghost. “Is that a ghost?”
Suzy swore in a language that wasn’t English. “I’ll take care of this,” she told me, seizing Rob’s arm, dragging him into the hallway. She left the door open. I could watch their shadows slide over the wall as she hauled ass toward the reception desk. Voices I didn’t recognize echoed back toward me.
We were out of time.
“Keep Erin here,” I urged Isobel. “Just a few more seconds.”
The sound of my voice finally drew Erin’s attention to me. Her ghost solidified and brightened. Her blank eyes penetrated me.
“Cèsar?” she asked through Isobel’s mouth.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, baby. It’s me. I’m here. You gotta tell me who killed you. I need to know what happened.”
Her glowing, delicate hands flew to her throat. Erin’s white eyes widened and her mouth opened.
Isobel began to scream.
Shit.
I grabbed her wrists, shoved her away from Erin’s ashes. Didn’t help. Isobel was trapped. All tangled up in Erin’s spirit.
And there was no fucking way that the cops wouldn’t hear it.
Footsteps beat in the hallway. I heard Suzy shout.
I shook Isobel hard. “Let go! We have to run!”
“You killed me!” she shrieked, beating at my chest, trying to wrench free. “You killed me!”
What she was saying sunk in. The room spun around me. Erin’s horrified mirage clutched at her heart where the bullet wound had been, screaming through Isobel’s lips as she stared at me, fraying around the edges. The ghost vanished with terror in her eyes, and Isobel kept screaming.#p#分页标题#e#
Terror pounded through me. The cops were still fighting with Suzy in the hall and getting closer. We needed to be gone. Now.
I lifted Isobel off of her feet, slammed her back into the wall.
“Izzy!”
Her scream cut off, mouth still open, eyes blank.
Slowly, she focused on me.
“Nobody calls me Izzy,” she whispered. She reached up to touch my face. Her fingers brushed along my jaw, up my cheekbones, to my brow, like she was identifying my features with her hands. “Oh my God, Cèsar. Oh my God.”
She didn’t have to tell me what she had learned from her connection to Erin. I already knew what she was going to say.
I had killed Erin Karwell.






 
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CHAPTER TWENTY

Somehow, we escaped. Don’t even fucking ask how, because I don’t know.
Everything went from screaming to running in about two seconds flat. There had been gunshots. Suzy had been yelling, flashing her badge. Men had shoved guns in my face and grabbed my sleeves. I had punched someone. Maybe a couple someones.
Then Isobel and I had been running. We’d gotten into her RV. And then we were driving.
After that, all I knew was that we ended up outside Los Angeles. It was night outside the windows. Desert stretched to the hills. We weren’t on a road anymore. We were far from the LAPD, far from the OPA, far from Suzy at the morgue.
But there was no running from what I had learned.
I sat on Isobel’s creaky futon and stared at my hands. They looked bigger than usual. I wondered if the shape of them matched the dark imprints on Erin’s throat before her body had been reduced to nothing but ash. I hadn’t checked. I’d been too busy freaking out. I hadn’t believed it could have been me anyway.
I still couldn’t believe it.
“Erin.” Her name was a prayer on my lips. An apology.
I wasn’t that guy. I wasn’t someone who got drunk enough to black out. I wasn’t capable of getting drunk enough to shoot a woman.
And yet, somehow, I was.
Like Suzy had said, the dead couldn’t lie.
You killed me, she’d said. You killed me. God, those screams. They’d carved my heart right out of my chest and left me hollow on the inside.
Isobel stood a few feet in front of me. Just out of arm’s reach. She was staring at me as if seeing my face for the first time. She wasn’t driving, so that meant that the RV had stopped at some point. I wasn’t sure when.
“Did you lie to me?” she asked.
I didn’t understand the question. “What?”
“You told me that you didn’t kill Erin. Were you lying to me?”
She had heard what Erin had said, hadn’t she? She knew what I had done. I could see it in her face. “I didn’t know,” I said slowly. “I didn’t think that I would have ever done…that. I wasn’t lying to you. I believed that to be true.”