Cast the First Stone

by K. J. Emrick

  He blinks and leans his head over to one side. “So you aren’t mad at me for taking it?”

  “Oh, I’m not happy you took it, but… hey. I figure you’ve probably been trapped in that rug for a few years now—”

  “Thirty-seven this time around,” he says, without a hint of anger at being a prisoner for that long.

  Wow. I get mad if I’m stuck in traffic for five minutes.

  “Well, yeah. Okay. You’ve been in there for thirty-seven years and I have to believe there isn’t a decent buffet table hiding away in those tassels, so who am I to begrudge you one sandwich? Anyway. You left me the beer.”

  With a loud POP my beer appears on the low coffee table in front of the couch, displacing all the air in the space where it was now standing.

  “Hey, thanks buddy.” Picking up the beer I take a long swallow. Don’t even try to harsh on me for drinking a Lite beer. Fun fact, because of the method used to reduce the calories in Lite beer, it actually has more alcohol. Yeah. I know what I’m doing. This was actually the last of a six-pack that I’d bought probably two weeks ago. I’m really not a heavy drinker.

  Of course, I could always wish for more. I mean, I’m only supposed to wish for things that help me solve my cases but taking the edge off right now so I could think more clearly… didn’t that count?

  I was sorely tempted for several long seconds, but in the end I decided against it. I was not wasting one of my three-per-case-wishes on good coffee, so I sure as hell wasn’t going to waste it on beer.

  After that there was a lot of writing, page after page, each page representing a day’s worth of short text messages. It seemed like Katarina and Carol only spoke once or twice a day, which made things a little easier, but there was a couple of months’ worth of conversations here, off and on, and my hand was cramped after the twentieth or so page. So was my back. I’d only stood up once in all that time, to go and get a charger for the phone when it started to die.

  This is the glamorous life of a private investigator. When we’re not sneaking into medical clinics, we’re doing drudge work like this. I don’t get shot at every day, thank God, but sometimes I’d prefer it to things like writing down my eleventh conversation about the weather.

  * * *

  Carol: Did you see the weather report for today?

  * * *

  Katarina: Cloudy with a chance of rain. Clearing up around ten in the morning. Rain again around two.

  * * *

  Carol: Think I’ll go for a walk then.

  * * *

  Katarina: Bring an umbrella.

  * * *

  Carol: Don’t I always?

  * * *

  Katarina: No, lol.

  * * *

  All this access to all this technology, and this is what we use it for.

  This wasn’t getting me anywhere. When I got to the last day it was all just more of the same. This would be the day before Katarina went missing, according to the date on the screen. Just a question about what the weather would be like tomorrow, and no response. I guess that made sense, since after that Katarina had left her phone behind in Barlow’s apartment.

  Tossing the notepad onto the table next to the phone, I threw my hands in the air and leaned back into the couch. “Gah, my brain is on fire—hey!”

  Harry’s standing right there behind the couch, looking down over my shoulder. Just right there with no warning. He startled me, and I’m not used to being startled. Kind of a new sensation for me. One I really don’t think I like.

  “What are you doing there?” he asks me, as if he hadn’t just seen me jump out of my skin.

  “You need a bell around your neck. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  From my angle, looking up at him from down here, his face is upside down. His smile is a frown. “Did I interrupt you, my lady?”

  “Yes. Well, no. Not really,” I admit. “I’ve done everything I can with this and like I told Barlow, there’s just nothing here. I mean, I was going to make a comparison chart between the different text messages and see if there was any sort of pattern. I was thinking that if maybe I could find some sort of correlation that would tell me where to find this Carol woman. It’s just so much work.”

  “Hmm,” he murmurs with keen interest. “A correlation that points to a location… does that ever work?”

  “Sometimes. I mean, this is the heart of detective work right here. You put all the facts in front of your face and see what connects to what. It’s a lot harder than it looks. I’m going to be at this all night long, with absolutely no guarantee that I’ll find anything at all. All of these texts are literally just about the weather. I don’t know… maybe if I can pinpoint what areas of the city had rain on these days? That might get me close to a location for Carol. I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Hmm,” he says again.

  “Hmm what? You sound like a cat when you do that and it’s making me want to put a bell on you even more.”

  His frown-smile twists with lopsided amusement. “We can discuss what you like your men to wear some other time, my lady, for now… I could help you with this.”

  He lifts his hand, fingers poised to snap.

  “I do not have a cat fetish…! Wait a minute.” I twist around on the couch to look up at him the right way, one leg crossed over the other. “You could organize this for me? All this work that I’m planning on doing, comparing all of the text messages and listing them by date and similar wording and… and… you could do all that?”

  “Of course. It’s a simple matter to make all your words line up the way you want them to. All you have to do,” he says, leaning in closer, “is make a wish.”

  He’s almost eager when he says it, like his greatest desire is to have me use him and his power. How weird it must be, being him, having this massive ability and never being able to use it unless a master asks you to. That would be like a detective with no crimes to solve, I guess. Or a Marine, with no wars to fight.

  I’ve been both, at different times. Neither one of those was much fun.

  And besides, what he’s offering is exactly what I need right now.

  I give it a few more seconds of thought even so. I can’t see any way this can go wrong, and if he screws up the information it won’t be any worse than what I’m looking at now, staying up all night and doing it by hand myself. “So… how do I do this?” I ask him. “Is there like a formal incantation I have to recite, or something? Do we sign a contract granting me this wish? Please tell me we don’t sign in blood. I’m not down with that.”

  “Ha! You are most amusing, Sidney Stone. I think this is the start of a wonderful partnership between you and me. No, there is no contract, and there are no specific ways to say the words. You simply have to make a wish.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yes,” he says with a single nod of his head. “Just like that.”

  “Well, in that case… I wish you would take my notes and organize them in easy-to-read results.”

  “Your wish, my lady, is my command.”

  With a flourish, he snaps his fingers.

  On the coffee table the notebook shakes. It dances about on its four corners. The pages rustle against each other and then burst open and flip, flip, flip, all the way to the end, and all the way back again.

  Then it jumps up into the air and spins a full rotation, before dropping back down again.

  The page it fell open to had been blank a moment ago. Now, there are neat rows of dates next to words that appear in each of several text messages between Katarina and Carol. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was my own handwriting staring back at me.

  I pick it up, and then run a finger down the columns. This is exactly what I would have done myself. Exactly, down to the letter. Down to each column heading. It just would have taken me three to four hours to compile it all like this.

  “Ni-ice,” I sing out, adding an appreciative whistle. “Harry, you do good work.”

  “Thank you, my
lady. I do my best.”

  He was trying to sound humble, but I can tell that he’s proud of what he just created for me. My compliment meant more to him than he was willing to let on. The start of a wonderful partnership, he said. Seeing this, I believe him.

  “Does it mean anything?” he asks me, leaning down low to look over my shoulder again. “Does it hold the answer you seek?”

  I scan the page, and the next one, and the one after that. “I’m not sure. I don’t see anything obvious but maybe after a little reading it will make more sense to me. Most of the connections are weather related, just like I thought they would be. See here, Carol’s the one who is always asking about the weather, Katarina tells her it’s raining on these dates here, but clear and sunny on these dates here. This one’s a couple of days before she went missing and she’s talking about the rain again…”

  The rain.

  Oh… oh! How in the world did I miss this?

  That date was just last week. Only, most of Michigan has been in a dry spell. We haven’t had rain here in Detroit for ten days now, which I know because that weather girl with the plucked eyebrows on Channel Seven has been telling us about it every morning with a big smile on her face as if a drought was just the most fascinating thing in the world.

  So there was no rain that day, even though Katarina said there was. I’m willing to bet if I looked at the rest of these dates and matched them to the Weather Service’s records, there’d be a lot of discrepancy over the actual weather, and what Katarina and Carol said.

  “Ha!” I cheer, slapping the back of my hand against the notebook. “Yeah! Now I’ve got you.”

  Harry’s eyebrows scrunch up together. “You have what, exactly?”

  “I have a way of finding Carol, that’s what. These texts aren’t just meaningless chat-chat. This is a code, Harry. This is a code!”

  His laughter booms through my apartment. “Well done, my lady! “I knew you could do it!” And then he rubs a hand over that square chin, and frowns. “Hmm. I don’t get it.”

  Chapter Seven

  Neither did I. Not at first.

  This was obviously code, because they were intentionally saying things that weren’t true even though each of them understood the other. It was like when you were in high school and you were on your phone talking about a party but didn’t want your parents to know it was a party, so on the phone you called it a ‘study session.’ Katarina and Carol were using words that sounded like they meant one thing but actually meant something else. Which, in turn, meant they were worried someone was reading their conversations. Someone they were hiding their real conversation from.

  And that ‘someone’ could only be Barlow, Katarina’s boyfriend. The boyfriend who she didn’t want to know about her pregnancy.

  “Maybe,” Harry suggests, “they are talking about Katarina’s pregnancy. Perhaps you were too quick to dismiss Barlow as a suspect in your case.”

  “Maybe,” I admit, in almost the same tone he had. I at least had to consider the possibility if I was being honest with myself, but my instincts told me he wasn’t the guy. That whole no-sex thing had been pretty believable. I needed to find whoever got Katarina pregnant, and my instincts were also telling me that Carol was just the person to point me in that guy’s direction.

  So first, I had to find Carol.

  Which meant more work for me. That’s okay. ‘Work’ is my middle name.

  No. It’s really, really not.

  I’ve fed Spot the goldfish and set my cellphone on do not disturb, and I’m in for the night. With Harry sitting next to me on the couch I knocked back the last of my beer while I backtracked through several of the text message strings in my notebook, cross referencing the things Katarina and Carol said with data from the National Weather Service each time. The Weather Service really is a wealth of information. Weather.gov is their website and it covers everything from forecasts, to education on different types of weather systems, to how organizations can become “weather ambassadors” to educate people in their area about preparing for severe weather systems. I’ve got their site bookmarked in my browser.

  There’s also a really handy tab for “past weather.”

  It didn’t take long to figure out none of the weather Katarina and Carol talked about corresponded to actual weather patterns in our area. From there it was easy to figure out what words were being used as the code in their conversations.

  Rain.

  Specific times of day, like ten o’clock in the morning or two in the afternoon.

  Going for a walk.

  Umbrella.

  Okay, maybe not that last one. I wrote it down with the others just in case because according to the synopsis that Harry had wished up for me, that was one of the most used words in their texts.

  While I worked, Harry started flipping through the TV channels, keeping the volume low so it wouldn’t bother me. He looked for all the world like a college football player hanging out in a dorm room, one arm hooked over the back of the couch, legs thrown out straight, slouching down and relaxing. Flip went the channel, and he was watching a talk show. Flip went the channel, and he was watching a cooking show. Flip went the channel, and he was…

  On the coffee table, I see the TV remote just sitting there.

  Flip went the channel, and he was watching golf.

  I look over at him, confused how he’s doing this since the remote isn’t in his hand.

  Flip went the channel, and he was watching a commercial for running shoes.

  With the hand not hanging behind the couch, he’s pointing at the television, and clicking his thumb like it’s a pretend gun.

  Flip went the channel, and he was watching an infomercial for a blender.

  Flip.

  Flip.

  Flip.

  I laugh softly as I go back to my work. Of course he wouldn’t need the remote to change the channels. He’s a genie with awesome magical powers. Why should he need to actually push a button to get what he wants?

  My notes finally reveal something else. The times mentioned in Katarina’s texts were almost always the same. The rain was going to end around nine or ten in the morning. It was going to start again around two in the afternoon. Every time, the same thing, except for those days when she said it was raining all day long. Hmm. If only I had a chart that showed which days of the week the “rain” was supposed to happen all day, and which days it was “clearing up.”

  Turning his finger towards me, Harry clicks his thumb, and the page in the notebook flips over. The next page is filled with another graph, showing me exactly what I’d been looking for. Days of the week, compared to when it was “raining.”

  “You are pretty amazing, Harry,” I tell him, curling my legs up under me as I peruse the new page.

  He lifts his finger to his mouth, and blows on the end of it, like it was a smoking gun that needed to be cooled off.

  My new genie friend’s got a flair for the dramatic, apparently. “Just keep that thing away from me, big guy.”

  He turns it back on the television instead. Flip. “Oh!” he suddenly exclaims, sitting up straighter on the couch. “Baseball. I do enjoy your country’s national pastime.”

  “Jock,” I mutter, as if he’s just confirmed it for me.

  “Truly, Sidney Stone, baseball is amazing. It’s all about chance, and superior athletic skill, on a field of combat where it’s one batter against nine opponents all at once. This is very reminiscent of a game from my time. I used to play it with the other children in my village. I was quite good, actually. My friends and I would spend hours playing that game—when we weren’t working of course—and those are some of my favorite memories…”

  I keep my attention focused on my notebook, still giving him half an ear as he reminisces about his days as a child. Soon enough he’s back to cheering for the players on the television with no regard for which team they were on, calling foul on several of the umpire’s decisions. It was kind of fun, actually, hanging out
with him like this. I’ve done this plenty of times by myself in the past, but having someone around while I worked… this was nice.

  After a while I shift my body around again, and I find myself leaning back against his side, resting my head against one massive shoulder, crossing my feet up on the arm of the couch at the other end.

  It should have felt odd, being this close to a guy I had only just met. It should have been weird and awkward. It wasn’t. Somehow it felt right, as if we were already the best of friends, just hanging out together. I’ve had friendships like this in the past. Guys and women who I served with in the military, mostly. This felt just like that.

  The smile on my face feels good, too.

  Slowly, with a lot of focus and mental calculations, the text messages from Katarina’s phone revealed their secrets to me. I think it was the top of the ninth inning when I sat up suddenly, startling Harry in the middle of a rant about how the batter was bringing shame on his team, his family, and his ancestors. He clicks his thumb at the screen again, and the television went dark.

  A-ha.

  “Are you all right, my lady? What is wrong?”

  “Nothing at all,” I tell him, putting the notebook down on the coffee table and drawing a big circle at the top of the page. “I just figured it out.”

  Within my circle were the names of the weekday lists. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The work week.

  The “rain” only stopped on workdays.

  I looked over at the clock on the wall. It was early evening. Late, but not too late. Had we really been sitting here on the couch together that long? It felt like no time at all. I guess time flies when you’re unravelling a mystery.