Free The Sleeping and the Dead by Jeff Crook Page A

“What’s this?” he asked. “Shit, this is from last night?”
    I nodded and took another doughnut. He clicked through the photos. I couldn’t stand to look at them anymore. “Christ. Two thousand bucks down the shitter.”
    â€œWhat are these?” He clicked through a series of eight or ten grainy purple images of nothing.
    â€œNo idea.”
    â€œLet’s see.” He converted one of the images to grayscale and everything changed. The darkness came alive with textures, tones and shades. It was a photo of the backstage area of the Orpheum, but I hadn’t taken it on purpose. My finger must have touched the shutter between shots, maybe when I was running back to tell Adam that I recognized the victim.
    â€œThe M8 is easy to turn on by accident,” he said as he clicked through the next few photos. “It’s a known bug. You should always carry an extra battery.”
    â€œGreat.” One more fault to love about it.
    â€œDon’t be pissed, Jackie. The M8 is a damn good camera, and there are workarounds, plug-ins can fix the color problems. It’s worth every pfennig you paid. Black-and-white and infrared photography is where the M8 really stands out. It’s superior to just about anything on the market.” He tweaked the settings, bringing out even more detail in the otherwise empty scene. I leaned over his shoulder to watch him work his voodoo.
    â€œThat’s incredible.” In one photo there was a huge piece of castle scenery that I hadn’t noticed even though I walked right past it.
    â€œThere’s somebody standing back there,” Deiter said. It was only a hint—an outline of a shoulder, an arm and part of a head, leaning out. I couldn’t make out the face, but it wasn’t one of the cops, I could tell. This person, whoever he was, was short, almost like a kid. It was difficult to judge his height for sure. It might have been another piece of scenery, some cardboard-cutout figure, but my gut told me differently. There had been somebody hiding backstage the whole time.
    â€œCan you pull out any more detail?” I asked.
    Deiter shrugged. “Maybe. It’ll take time. I’m too busy today. Maybe tomorrow or Friday.”
    â€œIt’s important, OK?”
    â€œSure. You think maybe he’s the killer?”
    â€œMaybe.” Wishing, hoping to God I should be so lucky.
    â€œIt could be a ghost,” he said.
    I laughed, but he was deadly serious. “Do you believe in ghosts, Deiter?”
    â€œOf course. The Orpheum has lots of ghosts. Look at this.” He opened a file on his computer and pulled up an image named Orpheum_ghost_girl. It was a picture of a blob of light hanging over one of the balcony seats. “That’s Mary, seat C-5, the most famous Orpheum ghost. This is the only known photo of her. I took it myself with a Hasselblad 503CW mounted with an Imacon digital camera back.”
    To me, it looked like a flash reflecting off a speck of dust in the air. But in the background I could see the Exit sign where I had seen the girl standing last night.
    â€œOf course, it’s only an orb, not a full-body apparition,” Deiter continued. “You have to be careful with orbs. Most of the time they’re just bits of dust, but I’ve analyzed this photo every possible way and there is no physical explanation for it.” He opened a drawer, tossed me a black baseball cap. The letters GMPI were printed in white block letters on the front of the cap.
    â€œGrant-Marks Paranormal Investigations. That’s why I’m so busy right now. We’re doing a tour Friday night at Magnolia Manor out in Bolivar, then we’re headed over to the old mental hospital. You want to come? You could bring your Leica.”
    â€œI had no idea you were into this kind of thing.”
    â€œYah, it is important work. You can keep the cap.”
    â€œMaybe you could check out my