Page 20 of Simon Says… Fight (Kate Morgan Thrillers #11)

K ate didn’t want to put too much credence in Simon’s psychic input, but neither could she ignore it.

She hadn’t personally done a full walk-through of the warehouse yet, delaying that when she had seen the three homeless men from the window and had gone outside.

And now she was here once again, going step by step, room by room, floor by floor of this warehouse.

The three of them had decided to split up to check out everything faster, but Simon remained close to her.

She looked over at him with a scowl. “Any particular reason for the hovering?”

“Yeah,” he declared, with a shrug. “It makes me feel better.”

“Why is that? I’ve never known you to be the hovering type.”

“I don’t like this building,” he snapped.

She stopped, slowly turned, studying him. “The three homeless guys I just spoke to thought it was more or less haunted too. They mentioned seeing somebody with a dark gray van who came through here often.”

He nodded. “I don’t know anything about the dark van, but I can tell you that this place has seen some ugly shit.”

“ Great ,” she muttered.

“Let’s just see if you do have another person here,” Simon suggested. As he waited for her search to complete, he kept steadily abreast of her.

When Rodney rejoined them from his side of the building, he shared, “Nothing is here.”

“Good,” Simon snapped. “I really don’t want there to be any more.”

“Of course you don’t,” Rodney said. “All the ghosts are talking to you.”

As Kate walked through the top floor, she noted a bunch of garbage tossed off to the side. She raised an eyebrow as she looked over at Rodney.

He nodded. “Yeah, I checked. It’s literally garbage.”

She nodded and kept going, but she kept glancing back.

Then finally, not allowing herself to even question her urge, she backtracked to the pile of garbage for a closer look.

Definitely old tarps and paint cans, fast-food trash, and generally just a mess of leftover stuff had been thrown here.

When she bent down to take another look, she noted something didn’t belong.

Pulling gloves from her pocket, she put them on and lifted one corner of the stiffened tarp, and right there in front of her was a set of toes.

She lifted it higher and found the toes were attached to a body, and the man who was here couldn’t care less about anybody getting his toes.

The body was cold. He was dead, and, by the looks of it, he had been dead for a very long time.

Rodney bent down beside her. “Damn, I was going by volume,” he shared in disgust. “As in there couldn’t be anything here because there just wasn’t enough space for a human body to be here. I wasn’t thinking of an old skeleton.”

“It’s not quite an old skeleton,” she clarified, as she looked at it, “but it’s not far off, that’s for sure. The problem is, it’s not been decomposing as much as it’s been here long enough that it’s pretty well been eaten down to nothing.”

“And when you say, eaten down ?” Simon asked, turning to look at her.

“Rats and anything else that needs food and sustenance. This is a body, a body that people will be quite happy to have the smell of its decomp limited,” she noted, her nose scrunching. “It’s January, and, although there is some decomp, this body has been here for a very long time.”

Rodney stared down at the body and swore. “That’s a hell of a way to dispose of a body.”

Simon nodded. “The voice is quiet, so that’s got to be what they were so adamant about.”

“Good,” she replied. “I would hate to think someone else was here.”

Simon frowned. “I think that’s it.”

Rodney swore as he stood up and started making phone calls.

Kate still looked around at the rest of the area. “It’s a very strange area for a dumping ground. Yet we don’t even know if it’s connected to my other current cases, so, for the moment,” Kate decided, her tone glum, “we’ll just treat it as a separate scenario.”

“It’s connected,” Simon muttered.

“Yeah, I hear you,” she murmured, as she turned to him.

“But I,… I need to be as open about it as I can. So, for the moment, we’ll treat it as a completely separate issue.

Separate case, everything except for location.

What I can tell you is, this one’s been here for a very long time.

I don’t suppose that voice in your head”—she gazed him intensely—“wants to clarify how long or why he ended up here?”

“I don’t think he has any idea,” Simon noted.

“Is it a he?” Kate asked.

“I really can’t say, but that voice skipped into my mind. Like so many of the voices I hear, they have no idea where they are or why they’re there,” he explained. “It’s been the same as always, as you well know.”

“I do know,” she noted. “I know you get told what you get told. I just keep hoping that one day we’ll have somebody who can say something more.”

“Well,… Peter did.”

“ Puppy ,” she repeated, with a smile. “Yes, he did remember the puppy, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did, and that led to exactly what you needed.”

“It did, indeed,” she muttered, as she looked up at him. “And, for that, I’m very grateful for Peter.”

“And he’s grateful to both of us,” Simon replied.

“And do you know anything about this guy, our skeleton?”

“No, I don’t know anything.” Yet he frowned, and his eyes turned glassy for a moment, and then the fog cleared. “Jay.”

“Who’s Jay? His name is Jay?” she asked Simon. “Or are you asking me to check something?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. He may be Jay,… which could even be Jacob or John, who the hell knows?… Or maybe it’s the guy who killed him. I have no clue.”

She filed that away for later and waved to Simon. “You might as well leave, as we’ll be here for a while. We’ll handle this. We’ll have to wait for the coroner to show up for one thing. Smidge will love this.”

“He can’t blame you for this one, can he?” Simon asked her.

She smiled. “He doesn’t blame me for any of them, but, if they stay on the docket too long as unsolved, believe me that I’ll get a talking to because I’m not doing my job .”

Simon shook his head. “I’m sure that goes over well.”

“It hasn’t happened to me yet, but it’s happened to the others. So I guess they keep waiting for it to happen to me.”

“Not happening,” Simon declared. “You’re closing an amazing number of cases.”

She gave him a sideways glance. “And so are you,” she added, her tone wry. “I wouldn’t have even known about this one. I was hoping to get back around and through here, but it wasn’t exactly high on my priority list either,” she admitted. “So that’s on me too.”

“It’s not on you at all,” Simon countered, shaking his head. “You can’t be expected to do everything.”

“Nope, I can’t, but I can tell you one thing. An awful lot of people are out here who seem to think I should be doing more than I am.”

“Christ,” he muttered, “that’s not fair.”

She laughed. “Nothing is fair. When you think of all the cases we still haven’t solved, of all the people looking for answers, hoping beyond hope that we’re doing our jobs, you know for a fact that nobody really gives a crap when we say we are doing our best.”

“But you do,” Simon stated. “I know you do. I see you inside and out.”

“You’re right. I do,” she confirmed, as she looked down at the sad remains of a life cut short.

Sadder still that this was someone who had apparently gone missing some time ago and seemingly hadn’t triggered a response that generated any answers.

“We’ll find out who this person is, what the story was, and continue from there.

But I suggest you get lost before the chaos ensues, and you get caught up and can’t leave. ”

Simon winced. “I’m out of here.” He gave a wave to Rodney, as Simon quickly disappeared down the stairs.

Rodney walked back over to Kate, with a long face.

She looked up at him and nodded. “I was still planning on doing a walk-through here anyway,” she added. “So we would have seen him at some point.”

“But I looked at this garbage,” Rodney admitted, “and dismissed it as garbage.”

She nodded. “I hear you, and I understand why it’s upsetting you, but don’t let it get to you.

We all make mistakes, and it’s easy to get callous and to lack care at times, but that wasn’t the situation in this case.

It’s just that sense of constantly being pushed to carry on and to get to the next thing. ”

“That’s always the problem, isn’t it?” Rodney muttered, as he stared around. “This was supposed to be canvassed today by the patrol units.”

“And they probably walked right through and took one look, realized it was just garbage, and kept on going, just like you did. But now,” she noted, as she looked down at the body, “we know this isn’t just garbage, and we have another soul whose life and death we need to unravel.”

“You also think it’s connected, don’t you?”

She hesitated, then turned to him. “I’m afraid it is.

So, the question is, has our killer been operating all this time—since this guy’s death one year or however long ago?

Or has something brought him back out of retirement?

Was he happily married, and then something blew up?

Was he in prison?” she asked, shrugging.

“We won’t know until we get to the bottom of it.

But, right now, it’ll be all about finding the bits and pieces to get there. ”

In the distance, they heard the emergency vehicles approaching.

Rodney said, “Here they come. I guess we’ll be here for a while, won’t we?”

“Yeah, I’ll be here for Smidge.”

“Good,” he declared, smiling at her. “Better you than me.”

She shook her head at him and laughed. “He’s really not that bad.”

“No, he’s way worse,” Rodney declared, with feeling. “I’ll go outside and direct traffic or something.”

“Direct traffic?” she repeated, laughing. “I have way better things you can do.”

“What’s that?”