Free Chasing The Dead (An Alex Stone Thriller) by Joel Goldman Page B

they’re about?”
    Calvin shrugged. “Some people say dreams don’t mean a thing. I don’t buy that. Man dreams of making love to a beautiful woman, that’s what he needs. Man dreams he can fly, he’s trying to escape his troubles. Man that’s a midnight screamer, well, that’s his demons trying to get out.”
    “You talk to him about his nightmares?”
    “Don’t need to talk to him. I heard enough.”
    “What did you hear besides his screaming?”
    Calvin paused, looking around to make certain they wouldn’t be overheard. “Whoever that girl, Ali, is—or was—you ask me, he killed her. That’s what’s waking him up. He’s calling her name, saying he’s sorry.”
    Alex’s heart picked up a beat. According to Rossi’s report, Jared said he didn’t know the victim’s name and Rossi hadn’t identified her. Knowing her name would jump-start Alex’s investigation.
    “What, exactly, did Jared say?”
    “He kept calling her name, saying ‘I’m sorry, Ali, I’m sorry.’”
    “I don’t suppose he mentioned her last name.”
    Calvin smirked. “You ever hear of a demon with a last name?”
    Alex thought about her recurring nightmares, the ones in which Dwayne Reed appeared out of the darkness, reaching for her with one hand, the other clamped around Bonnie’s throat.
    “I can think of at least one,” she said.

Chapter Thirteen
    ROSSI GOT BACK TO HIS DESK in the homicide unit, playing out in his head his next visit with Alex Stone, wanting that encounter to appear as accidental as the one at the Zoo actually had been. He was trying to figure out how to make that happen when his boss, Mitch Fowler, hollered at him from the door to his office.
    “Rossi! My office! Now!”
    Fowler was the commander of the homicide unit. He yelled at Rossi because he could and because it was his idea of strong leadership. Fowler lived in and by the book, while Rossi used the book as a doorstop. Fowler spent his days crunching numbers on overtime and closed cases, his hair thinning as his waistline swelled, frustrated that Rossi’s name was always at the top of both lists. Rossi’s overtime cost their unit too much money, but his closure rate made it impossible for Fowler to dial him back.
    Rossi grabbed his cell phone, holding it to his ear, pretending to be talking to someone on the other end, one finger in the air signaling to Fowler that he’d be there in a minute. No one was on the other end, but he couldn’t resist pimping Fowler. He watched Fowler from the corner of his eye, waiting until Fowler’s face blossomed red before he pocketed his phone, slow walking to Fowler’s office. By the time he got there, Fowler was behind his desk, thumping a pencil against his belly. There were two chairs on the visitor’s side of the desk, one of them occupied.
    “Hey, Rossi,” Charlie Wheeler said. “How’s it hangin’?”
    Wheeler was Rossi’s first partner when he joined the homicide unit. His parents were wealthy physicians who sent him to Pembroke Hill, Kansas City’s private prep school, and to Princeton, where he got an engineering degree. He’d disappointed them when he enrolled in the academy the day after he graduated, telling Rossi he never grew out of playing cops and robbers. Rossi nicknamed him Mr. Mayor since he shared the name of a popular former holder of the office.
    He was black, which would have given him a leg up with the brothers on the east side if they trusted the cops and if they couldn’t sense his upper-class, Ivy League background a mile away. Despite the badge, he was an engineer at heart, more pen-and-paper problem solver than throw-down motherfucker.
    One day they chased a suspect into an abandoned house, Wheeler taking the front, Rossi going in the back. The suspect put a bullet in Wheeler’s left leg before Rossi took him out. His wife, Lorraine, reminding him that their two kids needed their father, convinced him that it was time he stopped chasing bad guys and used his