Forgery of the Phoenix
Page 16
Then he walked around to the car’s driver’s side. With a fluid backhand motion, he shattered my car’s windshield. The laminated safety glass instantly spider webbed. Then with a POP, the frame crumpled into a V-shape under the force of his blow. The entire assembly sagged inward and then dropped in a single twisted mass onto my front seats.
“Insane...” I gritted.
Harrison nodded. “Yes. I meant McClatchy. But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
Now that my anger had blossomed, I spoke more recklessly. “You’re both crazy, as far as I’m concerned. You just let all your antics get caught on the security cameras.”
“Oh, you mean those?” Harrison nodded off to one side. Sure enough, the camera mounts next to the flickering light tubes were bare. No one had gotten around to installing them yet. “I don’t think that will be a problem. You can file a complaint if you want. But I hear that it would take quite a while for a complaint to make its way up your chain of command. In the meantime, who knows what I might be asked to do?”
He whistled a jaunty little tune as he walked past me, balancing the crowbar in the palm of his hand as he did so. I watched him as he wandered back towards the elevator like he hadn’t a care in the world. My hands shook, and something ugly and feral raged inside of me.
“This isn’t the end of it!” I shouted at his retreating form. “Do you hear me? Not for you, not for your boss, and not for McClatchy!”
Damon Harrison didn’t even bother turning around as he made a dismissive little wave.
“Be careful of the glass,” he called back. “It would be awful if you cut yourself. Accidents do happen, you know.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Far behind me, the elevator doors slid shut, taking Damon Harrison back upstairs to report to his masters. I forced myself to breathe, waited until my hands stopped shaking. I’d never felt simultaneously so enraged and so helpless at the exact same time.
It wasn’t a pleasant experience.
I fished for the fob on my car key ring and with the press of a button, I popped the trunk. I normally had to fiddle with putting the shoulder holster back on, but this time it slipped into place like a long-familiar blouse. The gun was a comforting weight hanging at my side.
Next, I grabbed up my jacket. Instead of putting it on, I closed the trunk and came around to the driver’s side door. I swung it open and watched as a dishearteningly large amount of glass tumbled out with a sad tinkling sound.
After a moment’s consideration, I used the jacket to protect my hands as I grasped the broken windshield frame. With a couple of tugs, I was able to slide the thing across the driver’s seat. I dumped the mangled piece of wreckage onto the parking lot’s concrete surface. Then I shook my jacket out and re-bundled it more tightly around my hand.
I began sweeping out the fragments of glass that had pooled in the driver’s seat or any other horizontal surface. It took some time, and it wasn’t pain free. Laminated safety glass was designed to shatter into mostly harmless fragments. Mostly harmless.
By the time I was done, I’d nicked both of my thumbs and picked up a nasty little cut on the ball of my right middle finger. It figured. That finger was likely to get the most use the next time I talked with McClatchy.
I shook my head. The fact that there actually was going to be a ‘next time’ disgusted me. So did the fact that I wasn’t running to Internal Affairs to report on what McClatchy was up to.
A small part of it was that yes, I still felt stupidly responsible for Bob getting bad enough to sic someone like Harrison on me. McClatchy had been a power-hungry type of person from the get-go. I hadn’t exactly planted that seed, as it was all too common in the modern office world.
But I had contributed to what transpired since then. I’d humiliated Bob in front of the one class of people he respected – his fellow bureaucrats. Then I’d gotten myself backed into a corner where Destry had done something desperate to get me out. And finally, I’d taunted both him and his protégé, Lieutenant Ollivar. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why I’d ended up at the top of his hit list.
Yet that was only a small part of it. I wasn’t running to report anyone – in fact, I wasn’t storming out to Human Resources to hand in my resignation – because Harrison had impressed me with the real message that lay under his intimidation tactics. That message being, McClatchy had something else up his sleeve. Something else that was going to force me to hang around, whether I liked it or not.
The car had come with a small first aid kit in my glovebox. I located it and fished out a bandage for my finger. A quick glance into the passenger-side area confirmed that it was still full of broken shards of windshield.
I climbed in and started the vehicle. I felt the crunch of tiny glass particles underfoot as I pressed down the gas pedal to exit the parking structure. The passenger side headlamp socket trailed down to the ground alongside the car, making pathetic little scraping sounds as I wound my way up from the sub-basement.
The attendant at the exit booth was so startled by the battered look of my automobile that he didn’t even notice my exposed shoulder harness or holstered gun.
“What the heck happened to your car?” he breathed.
“Uh, yeah,” I said, with a vague gesture. “I took a couple of the speed bumps too fast. You know how it goes.”
“But how–”
“Oh, and you need to call maintenance down to the sub-basement,” I added. “There’s a lot of glass down there that could mess up someone’s tires. Just send the cleanup bill to the Chief of Police, okay?”
I left him sputtering in my wake as I pulled back out onto Main Street.
Thanks to the lifting of the triple-layer security, it took me less than twenty minutes to navigate back to the OME offices. I got a couple more weird looks from people as I parked in a spot that was off to the side of the lot and relatively inconspicuous.
When I made it back inside, I collapsed in my office chair with a groan. The tensions of the morning had left me feeling more drained than at any time since the battle with the Noctua. But the day was already half over, and there was no way I could take my car safely onto the freeway in its current condition.
I searched online for a combination tow truck and repair service. I was in luck there. The sketchy nature of the neighborhood around the LAPD proper meant that a pick-up before closing hours wasn’t an issue.
Once I’d handled that mess, my stomach spoke up loud and clear that it wanted something in it. Given all that had happened, I really didn’t feel like socializing with anyone. So, since I didn’t pack a lunch for the day, I simply snuck out to grab a cup of coffee from the nearest break room. Then I all but barricaded myself behind my desk and wolfed down a pair of granola bars I’d stashed in a drawer for just such an emergency.
I was ravenous. Even the faux-honey taste of wood bark that some health food company called ‘tasty rolled oats’ didn’t faze me. I destroyed both of the bars and washed them down with the tar-colored liquid that passed for coffee around here. It wasn’t until I balled both wrappers up and tossed them into the trash that I spotted a trio of manila envelopes someone had dumped on my desk while I’d been out hunting for hot caffeine.
Even given the all-out war that had been declared against me by McClatchy and Company, I could feel my pulse pick up. Christmas had come, because I recognized each of the envelopes as a set of completed lab results. On the other hand, I’d gotten some devastating news from lab results as of late. Yep. It was more akin to opening Christmas presents...while not knowing if one of the boxes contained a bomb.
The first envelope contained information about the hair I’d collected in the shooter’s apartment down on Main and Second. All but two strands had been matched genetically to Jorge Cielo. The coroner Myun-Hee had assigned noted that although there were no officially approved methods for dating the freshness of shed hair, some strands were relatively clean, while others had been coated in a thick layer of dust.
They were ‘fresh’ hairs. And the hairs collected didn’t match the deceased’s DNA, nor that of anyone in the LAPD’s criminal database. The database was hardly the equivalent of a nationwide sweep, but it did tell me that someone else had visited the apartment fairly recently. The hairs could have belonged to a fellow gang member, but that was unlikely. Most of the Gallitos had been processed through the LAPD at least once in their criminal careers.
Perhaps the hair belonged to a sibling. A fellow gangster. Or a girlfriend?
It had to belong to someone really strong, my brain pointed out. Someone strong enough to have thrown a hardened gang killer out a five-story window to his death.
I considered that. Whoever it was had been fast and deadly. There hadn’t been any evidence of defensive wounds on the body. And I hadn’t come across any signs of a protracted struggle in the shooter’s room.
With a frustrated sigh, I slipped the papers back into the envelope and went to the next one. These were the lab results from the little red shard I’d turned in. I skimmed the chemical composition tests with interest. There weren’t any traces of organic polymers, so it wasn’t plastic. Neither did contain silicon dioxide, which would allow me to classify it as a kind of glass.
Instead, the shard was composed of chromium and an oxide of aluminum I’d never seen before. I’d have to do some research to identify this stuff, but it wasn’t crystal of any sort. Not the material that had come from Wyeth’s shattered antler, nor the quartz ‘Phantom’ crystals that Hollyhock and her brothers had stolen.
The third folder looked promising. Someone down in the lab had gone out of their way for me by pushing the two samples of sartuul I’d brought in through chemical and biological analysis. And they’d even circled a couple spots in red pencil – such as the fact that both samples had come up with the exact same levels of Carbon-14.
I had to do some mental gymnastics based on how slowly the isotope decayed. The number I came up with startled me. Snatching up a nearby notebook I wrote out my calculations. The results were the same. Both the Codex of the Bellum Draconus and the summons I’d been sent had been written on material that was between 2800 and 3200 years old.
And then things got even more interesting.
The material tested proved beyond all doubt that sartuul wasn’t made of stone, or metal, or some mystic version of paper.
It was made out of keratin.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I turned back to read the analysis again. Sure enough, each sample tested positive for the fibrous structural proteins that showed I was looking at some strange form of keratin. It was a variation of the protein that made up human hair, griffin beaks, or centaur hooves. And there were plenty of examples of keratin surviving, at least in certain conditions, for up to five thousand years.
Each page of the Codex was the size of a large dinner plate, and the tensile strength of the paper-thin slices easily exceeded that of a human nail, or even a horse’s hoof. I was looking at the impossible.
At least, for my world. I had to remind myself for the umpteenth time that the rules didn’t necessarily apply in Andeluvia.
But what could grow keratin in such large sheets?
The answer popped into my mind as I recalled what Albess Thea had told me. Right before my departure for the Vale of the Seraphine, she had said, I have heard that it is made of a gossamer-thin slice of dragon scale, but no one has proven it.
Well, modern science just gave that hypothesis a major push towards the ‘true’ column.
I leaned back in my chair and considered what else the tests had borne out. If anything, they showed that Albess Thea knew what she was talking about. Just as she had informed me, sartuul was proof against the decay of age.
The carbon dating proved that the material had indeed been made before the founding of Fitzwilliam’s kingdom. I didn’t think for a second that the timeframe of around three millennia ago was a coincidence. In fact, it put the creation of those two pieces of sartuul right around the time of the Old War.
My computer pinged. I sat up and felt a quick rush of anticipation as I saw that the lab results from this morning had arrived. I clicked on the first email and scrolled through the report on the strange orange powder.
It was a quick scroll. According to the optical spectrometer, it was a simple blending of graphite and copper, refined into a very pure and extremely fine-grained state. I’d actually seen this mix of elements before, on a murder case involving industrial sabotage. Powdered graphite and copper were the main components used to fight fires fueled by the presence of volatile chemicals or even reactive metals, such as sodium or lithium.
“Son of a gun,” I murmured. Whoever had repeatedly shot the Quondam Seraphine had done so using bullets loaded with doses of fire-suppressing powder. And that meant whoever had pulled the trigger understood sophisticated chemistry better than any native Andeluvian.
I clicked on the remaining email, which contained a listing of the elements and assorted chemical residues found in Pirr’s remains.
The Quondam’s ashes contained many of the usual organic compounds one would expect to see in a cremated body...and a lot of elements that tallied with the use of the graphite-copper mixture. If Pirr was typical for a phoenix, then the Seraphine contained a great deal of iron, followed by smaller amounts of nickel, aluminum, manganese and sodium oxides. Even more interestingly, the tests had gotten a positive hit for hydrocarbons. Specifically, hydrocarbons in the form of refined paraffin.
That last bit stopped me. Where did Andeluvia have the technology to ‘refine’ carbon-based fuel sources? The answer was simple. They didn’t. Their High Middle Ages level of technology (and a bit of magic) could do plenty of things, but enriching fossil fuels wasn’t one of them.
I came to the end of the report. The analysis had detected traces of an extremely complex chemical compound called dimerized isobutene. That name rang a bell, though not from any scientific journal I’d recently read. I closed my eyes and thought about it.
That peculiar form of isobutene had made its way into a recent news headline. The journalist’s little joke about it had made me roll my eyes. I did a quick archive search through the local news reports and spotted it in a few seconds.
The article had been: Stopping Pollution on a DIME – County Health Officials Say ‘No!’
My brain did one of its trademark clicks.
Now I knew exactly where the Quondam Seraphine had been before she’d been murdered.
* * *
A buzz came from my pocket. I quickly leaned forward in my chair, pulled out my phone, and answered it.
“Dayna,” Alanzo’s voice sounded breathless. “I was just talking with Myun-Hee about the Cielo case. She told me that Shelly never showed up to work.”
“What?” I stood up in shock. “Did she say why?”
“Lee said she called the Labs Director. From what she gathers, Shelly’s return has been suspended indefinitely. She’s still at the First Samaritan Mental Hospital!”
“Oh, God...” I whispered, and I swayed on my feet. “I need to get over there. I’m afraid that I need a ride.”
“I just got off duty, I can drive you. Are you at your office?”
I rubbed a temple with my free hand. “Yes, but I’m waiting for a tow.”
“A tow? What happened to your car?”
“Easier to show you than tell you,” I said in a wry voice. “Meet me in the OME’s parking lot, over on the side closer to the freeway.”
By the time Esteban arrived, the towing company had already shown up. I stood off to one side and watched as the driver began to position my car for transport behind his rust-speckled truck. Esteban parked his car, and I saw when he got out that he�
��d arrived dressed in civilian clothes. His eyes went wide as he caught sight of my car.
“Did you make a wrong turn at the riot?” he asked.
I grimaced. “Something like that.”
He gave me a concerned look, but I refused to say more for now. Esteban could be protective of me to a fault. Until I knew more about McClatchy’s game, I didn’t want Alanzo to blunder into a fistfight with Harrison. Given the latter man’s ridiculous strength, I wasn’t sure which way a contest like that would go. And even if Esteban won the fight, I was sure that McClatchy would arrange to have Esteban written up or fired.
“Come on,” Esteban urged, as my poor little car was whisked off in a puff of diesel. “Let’s get going before we hit rush hour traffic.”
I nodded, and we wound our way along surface streets and the Harbor Freeway before we pulled up to First Samaritan. The backside of the hospital, where they kept the wing for Mental Health Services, had a peaked roof terminating in a plain white cross. It looked a bit too much like a nunnery for my taste.
The attendant who ran the desk in the waiting room had a lined face and a personality as sour as a crabapple. A name badge decorated with a smiley face sticker told me that her name was, appropriately, ‘Joy’. She scowled at me and gave Esteban a suspicious look as I signed in.
“Miss Richardson’s ward is finished with their afternoon meal,” she remarked, in a voice that spoke of a few too many cigarettes over the years. “We should have a staffer available to guide her to the visiting room in a couple minutes.”
“A staffer?” I said, amazed. “I just want to go in and talk to her.”
“I’m sorry, but Miss Richardson has been listed as a ‘Needs Assist’ client. That means you wait until we have a staffer available. Please have a seat, and we’ll call you when she’s ready.”
I didn’t like this at all, but Joy’s tone was firm and immovable. I took a seat next to where Esteban irritably flipped through some well-worn magazines. I couldn’t help but think of Thea’s cautionary words. I can only hope she has caretakers, not jailers in all but name.