Free The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke) by John Rickards

into melancholy again. ‘OCME Gateway Services’. Remote login to the OCME intranet. An intranet, if her user account hadn’t been deleted, on which I could access the report on her own murder, probably crime scene stuff too if it was linked to the VSP’s forensics service. It took less than a minute to find her username and password details on a notepad full of similar reminders in the desk drawer.  
    I looked at it. Looked at the icon. I was well aware that tech support, especially in government bodies, could be very slow to clear out old accounts unless someone had been fired and needed wiping from a given system ASAP.
    If it worked — a big if , still — there’d be access logs, I knew. Records. Maybe no one would check them, not unless they had reason to. But if they did, and I’d gone looking for information, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out who had used her login and then I’d be on felony charges for accessing data I had no business reading with zero chance of a successful defense.
    I looked at the password. Looked at the icon.
    Switched the screen off and walked away. For the time being. Told myself I didn’t need to see the official report on her death. I wanted to know what might have been going on at work, that was all, and maybe the file folder the guy had left for her was still here somewhere.
    So I went through the rest of the house, checking the drawers, closets and even the trash. I made the climb up into the attic room to see if Gemma had moved any of her things into what used to be empty space. She hadn't. No cardboard file. Nothing from work except on the computer that I wasn’t going to touch. Temptation was gnawing at me and it was growing dark early outside as the mountains to the west shut out the sun.
    By eight I was in the bar again. The Sunday night crowd was thin, down a dozen or so heads on yesterday. Ed and Charlie were in again when I arrived, sitting at the same table, and I joined them.  
    After navigating small talk for a while, Ed said, “I hear you've been out asking folk about what happened. How's it going?”
    “So far, so nothing. I met Officer Ehrlich and she told me a bit about what she found, but not much. How did you know I've been talking to people?”
    “She’s a good girl, Sylvia. May Tyler saw you calling at houses on West. I guess no one could help you, huh?”
    I shook my head. “I take it you guys haven't seen anyone unusual around town? You seem pretty keyed-in to everything that goes on.”
    Charlie's eyes flicked towards Ed and he said, “No one like you’d be after. There's not many out-of-towners stop here.”  
    "We'll keep our eyes open, though,” Ed said. Like last night, his tone hinted at something deeper going on.
    When Ed left to take a leak a while after, Charlie leaned towards me and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You can trust us to keep our eyes open,” he said. “We're in here every night. Ed, well...”
    I tried not to look like I thought he was crazy. “Yeah? You get a lot of trouble in town?”  
    “No. Look, I dunno if he’d want me telling you this, but Ed lost his granddaughter Stephanie two years ago. She’d come to visit him on vacation, like she used to for a couple of weeks every summer since she left high school. Real keen walker, Steph. She went hiking north one day, said she might trail camp overnight, never came back. Sheriff’s Department tried to find her when Ed called them. Then the staties made a big song and a dance about trying to find her on the Long Trail, except she wasn’t there and eventually they gave up too.”
    “Ed thinks she was killed by someone she met round here.”
    “We come in most nights looking—” Then Ed was coming back and Charlie clammed right up. That more or less killed the conversation and once I’d finished eating I left, claiming I needed to sleep but knowing I probably wouldn’t.
    Snow was falling, chalk dust blowing down from the mountains, and I