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“Going up against the Mob made for plenty of nightmares all by itself. Saw more than my share of revenge killings, witnesses murdered, hostages shot. That went with the territory. But the Ocean Visions Hotel was different from the other big places along the Strand. It wasn’t just a building with a lot of history. The longer I spent around it, the more the place felt like it had a personality of its own. Gave me the creeps.”

“Had a personality, how?” Vic probed.

Donaldson hesitated long enough Vic wasn’t sure the man would answer. “It’s hard to put into words, and I never really tried because I didn’t want to get laughed out of the squad room. I saw things out of the corner of my eye that vanished when I turned my head. Cold spots in places for no reason. Strange noises that sent a shiver down my back. Dark shadows that weren’t real people. It always felt like the hotel itself was watching; I’m not talking security cameras or guards.

“I was going after the Mob and the gambling, but there always seemed to be cases that had ties to the Ocean Visions. People who disappeared and were never found. Suicides. More tragedies than the other grand hotels. I wouldn’t have taken an all-expenses-paid stay there if you gave me the best suite in the house,” Donaldson continued.

His hand went to his chest, fingers reaching to clutch a medallion through his shirt. “The Ocean Visions seemed to either be riding high or be one month away from going bankrupt. Boom or bust. More than once, I’m positive that it was ‘blood money’ that bailed them out—payoffs from the Mob and others who wanted to use the property for their own ends.”

“The big fires there were before my time, but the memory of them seemed to be in the bones of that place, in a way I can’t explain,” Donaldson said. “Like it knew they’d come again and was just waiting.”

“The hotel knew?”

“I didn’t say it made sense, just that was how it felt,” Donaldson replied without heat. “Just like I’m sure the ghosts were real.”

Donaldson stared into space for a moment. “I was raised Presbyterian, and I was never a very religious man. But it got so that whenever I had a case that took me to the Ocean Visions, I went to a local priest for a blessing and protective charms. A witch too, covering all angles.” He chuckled. “I walked away from those cases alive, so maybe the hocus-pocus worked. Plenty of other cops over the years didn’t.”

Donaldson turned to meet Vic’s eyes with a piercing gaze. “Take my advice and leave that place the hell alone. If it were a person, I’d say it was a bad seed, born bad. There’s something dark about that hotel that draws evil to it. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and the next time, it’ll burn to the ground.”

Vic sensed that Donaldson had said his piece when the man went silent and looked out the window.

“Thank you for your time, and for sharing your story.” Vic got up to leave. “Enjoy the whiskey.”

Vic drove the long way back to the office, thinking about what Donaldson had said and what he hadn’t. The old cop had been more open about the supernatural side of Ocean Visions than Vic expected, and his candor helped Vic create a mental baseline for phenomena at the location.

Donaldson had also admitted that the place scared him, something that Vic felt certain wouldn’t have happened while the man was still on the force. It validated Vic’s own uneasiness, especially coming from someone Vic presumed had less first-hand supernatural experience.

Suicides. Disappearances. And money trouble. He kept coming back to the hotel’s bad luck and its boom-and-bust cycle, and its history of fires.

There has to be a link somewhere in that to the ghost, Vic thought. The bad luck cycle has lasted almost a whole lifetime, so it doesn’t seem likely to be the Mob. They don’t do subtle.

Simon agreed that there was a ghost; he just wasn’t sure if or why it might be behind the fires. I’m already convinced about that, but why the on-and-off cycle? Did it power up on the tragedies, go to sleep for a while, and wake up again when it was hungry? Were the former owners really able to lock it away?

How about the other smaller fires that seemed to happen at the same time as the big blazes at the Ocean Visions? And the dark shapes, what are those? It’s too much to be a coincidence. Are they related? Copycat spirits that fed off the main entity’s energy? There’s got to be a connection. Coincidence or connection? Hard to tell.

Ross looked up when Vic came back to the office. “Get anything out of Donaldson?”

“More than I expected.” Vic filled his partner in on what the retired cop had told him. “I’m going to try to do a chart of the hotel’s boom and bust cycles and try to figure out where the bailouts came from. My hunch is that the ‘investments’ have ties to bad people or disasters. If that’s true, we’ll be a step closer to knowing more about how much the ghost might have to do with what’s happened.”

“Cap is giving you a long rope on this one,” Ross observed.

“Between what I found online and what Donaldson told me, I’ve got a theory that the hotel has been the nexus of its own crime spree. If I’m right, we’re all safer if we can bottle that bad luck up again,” Vic replied.

“Better you than me.” Ross finished his coffee and set the cup aside. “I’ve got a report on a possible fraud case to check into and an interview with someone who reported a missing person.”

“Humor me,” Vic said as Ross got up to leave. “Keep an eye out for any links, however tangential, between your cases and the Ocean Vision.”

Ross frowned. “Even under a curse, one hotel can’t be responsible for all the crime in Myrtle Beach.”

“Probably not,” Vic replied. “But if any of my theory is right, it might be meddling to make trouble if we know to look for it.”

“Not the weirdest thing you’ve ever asked me,” Ross said with a chuckle. “I’ll check for connections.”

Vic thanked him, refilled his coffee, and settled back at his computer. He tried to call Simon, but was directed to voicemail, so he figured Simon was following up on his own leads.

He stared at the screen, trying to figure out how to wrap his mind around looking for crime patterns over such a long span of time, not just by where they occurred but how they were linked to Ocean Visions.

He took a sip of his coffee and got to work. The easiest first pass was looking for boom-and-bust cycles in local crime. During the boom periods, he looked at the most frequent types of crime, figuring he could go back and match those with the sorts most often associated with the hotel.