I swallowed, wanting to loosen the Doric column my neck had become. I got enough breath into my throat to form words. “Nicole is with you?”
He gave an address. I scribbled it down on the only thing I had handy, the back of my new auto registration. “Forty minutes,” he said. “Walk through the gate alone. If I see anything I don’t like …”
“Wait! Let me—”
But the voice was gone, leaving only its echo in my head, like something pondering along the gloomy halls of a nightmare. I stared at the phone, willing it to ring again, to tell me what to do next. It didn’t. So I fell back on what seemed logical. I called police headquarters. I asked for Paul Duross, but I was told he was off duty. For a moment I sat, feeling something moving in me, something dark like a fast-fading winter sky when it reminds you that death is waiting. I put down the phone. The woman setting up the Halloween display at the public library had spoken of breaching the barrier between the living and the dead. It was what I needed to do. I looked at the dashboard clock—I didn’t have a lot of time—then raised the phone and made another call. It rang a long time before someone answered, coughing rust out, but at least it was a real voice. I steadied my own. “It’s Rasmussen,” I said.