Page 24 of The Turning of the Tables

“What about Leo Koury?” asked a deep, resonant voice.

All three of us turned to look at Mason Manning, Ward’s orc husband and a witch. Ward’s grey eyes focused on his husband. “The man who killed Eugenia Evers—” Ward held up the bone fragment. “—worked for Leo Koury.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why? Who’s Leo Koury?”

“Koury,” answered the orc-and-former-professor, “was a racketeer in the seventies who ran most of the illicit gay clubs in Richmond—an area known as The Block. Kouryspent most of the sixties and seventies extorting money and overcharging the gay community, undoubtedly engaging in blackmail, assault, and any number of other illicit activities before being placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List in the late seventies for a variety of major crimes, including both racketeering and murder. He died of a heart attack while in hiding in California.”

I knew my eyes were wide. I had not expected this little bone fragment to be tied to organized crime.

“How lovely,” Ward grumbled.

“And this Koury guy had ties to Baltimore?” I asked.

Mason shrugged his massive shoulders. “Probably. Not all that much is known about his life outside of Richmond and, later, California.”

“And he was a mobster?” I wanted to know.

“Not as such,” Mason replied. “Racketeer, certainly. And he wasn’t above using violence, threats, and extortion to get what he wanted, but as far as I know, he didn’t have specific ties to organized crime.”

“According to Eugenia, he did,” Ward put in.

“Really?” Mason’s eyes lit up. “What did she say?”

Ward repeated what he’d already told us.

“I—don’t suppose you’d be willing to write this down?” I asked. Maza was going to want all the details.

Ward sighed. “How about I get Eugenia to do it for you?”

Eugenia Evers—thedead woman—sat at the old conference table, which had been pulled out of the main conference room and shoved into Hart’s old office, writing down what seemed from its length to be her entire life story.

“She’s right there,” Elliot breathed from beside me. I turned and saw his attention fully focused on the manifested ghost.

“Yeah, he does that,” I replied, although I almost immediately went back to watching her, as well. Ward didn’t manifest ghosts at the crime scenes very often, so I’d only seen it a few times before. It didn’t really get any less impressive as you saw it more often, though.

It was weirdly like the special effects in the old movies that just used live actors made transparent with CGI. Except that they floated a lot better. The floating was the part I found the most disturbing, honestly. Because ghosts didn’t have towalk. They just… skimmed over the ground. Or teleported, which was even more disturbing. One minute they’re on the opposite side of the crime scene, and thenpoof,they’re literally up in your face wanting to know what it is you’re doing with the bullet that had gone through their chest cavity.

That had been a fun day. Ward had apologized profusely, but, honestly, once I’d caught my breath and managed to convince my heart to stop trying to beat its way out of my chest, I hadn’t minded explaining what I was doing to the dead man.

Today, Eugenia Evers was just sitting on a chair, writing, the back of the chair visible through her in a kind of foggy outline. Like looking through a jellyfish.

“But she’s alsonotthere,” Elliot said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Your first ghost?”

“No,” he replied, and his voice had gone soft. “My dad.”

I looked back at him, surprised. “Ward did that?” I asked him.

Elliot nodded.

“Fromhere?”

Another nod.

I swallowed. I’d known that Ward was powerful—that there was a reason Hart had only ever called him, and Maza now did the same—but to manifest a ghost from halfway across the country?—

“Sylvia helped,” the medium spoke from behind me.

Sylvia was a dead Victorian woman who also worked—I guess—for Beyond the Veil. I wasn’t totally clear on what ghostsdid, exactly, but Ward has two of them—Sylvia Randolph and Archie Lagarde, a crotchety older man who reminded me distinctly of Dirty Nelson, the alcoholic who used to sit in a rocking chair outside of the old general store in the Appalachian town where I’d grown up.