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Cassie shrugged. “She’s my little sister. I don’t want to get her mixed up in all this.”
“But she knows you’ve worked with the police in the past.”
“Kind of different talking about it in the abstract than having to say, ‘Hey, I’ll be back in a couple hours. Gotta go check out a dead body.’”
“She’d understand.”
“I’m sure she would.” Cassie struggled to control the rising frustration in her voice. “But I just need her and this case to have separation. At least for now. I’m not ready to talk to her about it yet.”
“You mean you’re not ready to talk to her about the ghost stuff just yet.”
“Yeah, the ghost stuff.” Cassie used air quotes as she wound her way around the table until she was standing over his shoulder. “Come on, catch me up.”
“Yeah, yeah, hang on. Let me find the beginning of the thread.”
David pulled one box closer, shifting through files and papers and bags. Cassie couldn’t see anything in particular, but she let her mind wander. Sometimes her abilities came to her unexpectedly. Other times, she could help them along an inch at a time. It was like defocusing your eyes to see a shape pop out of those Magic Eye books. If she could defocus her mind, let it wander a little, sometimes she could get a read on the situation.
“Here we are.” David’s voice snapped her back. He had pulled a file out of the box and placed it on the table in front of him. There was a name along the top. “Robert Shapiro.”
“Is that the guy you found?”
He nodded and flipped open the cover. Inside was a coroner’s report and a 4x6 picture of the dead body from the chest up. “Sixty-three years old. First, someone crushed his legs and then strangled him to death. We’re still waiting on some final reports, but I’ll bet money someone pumped him full of heroin, too.”
“Like the other victims? From the nineties?”
“Exactly.”
Cassie leaned closer. “How do you know it’s not a drug deal gone wrong?”
David chuckled, and when Cassie shot him a look, he held up a hand. “They’ve been saying that for over twenty years. All the victims we found had died the same way, and all of them full of heroin. But it never made sense. Most drug dealers don’t kill their best customers. They give them a warning.”
“Maybe they ran out of warnings?”
“There was also way too much heroin in their system. The killer must’ve forcefully injected that much and killed them, anyway.”
Cassie ran a hand through her hair. “And what drug dealer would waste his product like that?”
“Right.” David pointed at a section of the coroner’s report. “The killer likely crushed their legs so the victims couldn’t get away.”
“So, the drugs had nothing to do with it.”
“They were sending a message.” David looked up at her. “Although I don’t know who they were sending it to.”
Cassie tapped the photo. “Not to complicate matters, but that’s not the guy I saw this morning.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. My guy was a little younger. A lot bonier. Definitely not Robert Shapiro.”
“Perhaps there’s another victim.”
“Or he could be one of the original victims?”
David held up a finger and leaned forward. He grabbed another folder and flipped through it. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he tossed it to the side and scanned through two more.
“Here we go.” He looked up with a sheepish grin. “Sorry, we’re still getting set up. I’m not organized yet.”
Cassie gestured to the boxes strewn across the table. “Is someone gonna help you with all this?”
