The Long Chain

by Dan Willis

  “You think these belong to whoever broke in?” he asked.

  Alex quickly explained about how the glass at the end of the line had to be perfectly clean.

  “Whoever did this would have washed the beaker,” he said. “It’s a cinch these are their prints.”

  “I don’t know,” Danny said, holding his thumb near the glass. “These are tiny.”

  Alex took the oculus back and examined the fingerprints more closely. Danny was right, they were very small.

  “Maybe our burglar is a kid,” Alex said. “Or a woman.”

  “Maybe,” Danny said with a shrug. “But I’ve been thinking about your distraction theory.” He pointed to the neat row of powders, potions, and reagents at the far end of the table. “If whoever did this didn’t want us to know what they needed from upstairs, then why leave these here?”

  Alex swore.

  “This beaker has prints on it, but that’s all,” he said. “There’s no potion residue inside.”

  “You mean they went through all this,” Danny indicated the maze of glassware and tubes, “but they didn’t finish?”

  “Yes,” Alex said, scooping up his kit and heading for the stairs. “And I think I know why.”

  He hurried upstairs and shined his lamp over the back door, then paused to give the little office space a look before continuing into the front of the shop.

  “What is it?” Danny asked, coming up behind him.

  “Find out if any of your men have had their shoes re-heeled recently,” Alex said, then he walked around the spilled powders and knelt down to reach under the overturned display case.

  As Danny called his men in, Alex retrieved the large tin scoop he’d seen in the display case on his previous visit. Kneeling outside the area of the strewn powder, Alex began to carefully scrape it to the side, revealing the floor underneath. After a few passes with the scoop, he uncovered a patch of clumpy powder that stuck together as he pulled the scoop through it.

  “None of my men have had their shoes fixed recently,” Danny said, coming up behind him.

  “Well then, I think we both owe them an apology,” Alex said, setting the scoop aside.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I know why our burglar wrecked the store, and why they didn’t finish brewing the potion they came here to get.” He pointed to the sticky lumps of chemical powder on the floor, then handed Danny his oculus and pointed his lamp at it.

  “Why is it glowing like that?”

  “Because it’s blood,” Alex said. He got up and moved to where the partial shoe print was visible on the floor. “Note the heel,” he said, pointing to the sharp line. “It’s new and since none of your men have new heels on their shoes…”

  “You think someone walked in on our burglar,” Danny said. “There was a fight and one of them was wounded. That’s why the burglar didn’t finish with the potion downstairs.”

  “That’s the way I figure it,” Alex said. “The second man fought with the burglar, wounded him, then overturned the display case to hide the blood. Our second man knew by the time the cops found it, he’d be long gone.”

  “What makes you think this is the burglar’s blood?”

  Alex pointed to the display case.

  “Look at the size of that thing. It would take somebody big to turn it over, and we know our burglar was small.”

  “So the second man wounds the burglar, the burglar runs for it and the second man sticks around to clean up?” Danny asked. “Why didn’t he go after the burglar?”

  “He had to stick around,” Alex said. “To do whatever he came here to do.”

  “So what was that?” Danny asked.

  Alex led him to the back room and pointed to the mess that had once been Charles Grier’s files. Doubtless the second man had been looking for something, or taken something, and dumped out the files to hide what was missing. He was about to point this out when his eyes caught sight of Grier’s trophy wall. The glass case under the picture of Grier in Nepal, India was broken open.

  “What is it?” Danny asked, reading the expression that sprung to Alex’s face

  “This case held a knife called a kukri,” he said, pointing to the broken frame still hanging on the wall.

  “Maybe the burglar grabbed it to defend themselves,” Danny suggested.

  Alex shook his head.

  “But if the burglar stopped to get this knife…”

  “The second man would have caught him...or her,” Danny finished.

  Alex looked down at the folders littering the floor as if seeing them for the first time.

  “Here,” Danny said, handing Alex the oculus before he could ask for it. “What do you see?”

  Alex almost didn’t need the oculus. The glass that remained in the case showed no sign of blood anywhere. If the burglar had been seriously wounded, it was unlikely he, or she, would have been able to retrieve the knife without leaving a blood trail.

  He played his lamp over the floor. There were plenty of fingerprints on the folders and the desk, but no blood.

  “Hang on a second,” Danny said. He crouched down and shoved a big stack of the folders to one side. Immediately the floor lit up with reflected light.

  “There’s more blood here,” Alex confirmed. He turned back to the door that led down to the lab. “But there isn’t any on the door, and there was a carpet in that corner before.”

  “Well, that doesn’t bode well for our burglar,” Danny said. “You figure our big guy got to the knife first, killed the burglar, then took the burglar’s body out in the missing rug?”

  “Not without leaving some kind of trail,” Alex said, stepping around the broken door and into the fog. Danny followed him, looking up and down the Alley.

  “If you’re right about that blood trail, can you find it?” Danny said, peering through the fog. “I can get my men out here to help.”

  “Don’t bother,” Alex said, catching a spot of fluorescence reflected back at him from across the alley. He and Danny crossed to the far side, where a rolled-up rug lay against the back of a laundry. A metallic tang hung in the air and Alex could smell something like rusty iron. The rug was a dark color, so Alex couldn’t see any blood, but parts of it appeared to be wet. It was also much bulkier than it had been the day before.

  “I don’t need a lamp for that,” Danny said, pointing to one of the shiny spots. “Blood.”

  “I guess the burglar didn’t get away after all,” Alex said.

  Danny knelt down and took hold of the rug.

  “Let’s see who our small burglar was.”

  He pulled and the rug rolled open. Inside was a body, but it wasn’t the one they expected. The man who rolled out with the rug had to be over six feet tall, or at least he would have been if his head hadn’t been completely severed from his body.

  9

  The Other Monograph

  The brownstone was dark and quiet when Alex finally got home, and the grandfather clock in the foyer showed a quarter past eleven. Once he and Danny understood that The Philosopher’s Stone wasn’t just a break-in, but a murder scene, Alex had gone over every inch of the place.

  The walls and ceiling of the shop had been painted with a dark green paint, probably to hide any evidence of smoke or chemical residue, things common to alchemy shops. It was also quite effective at hiding the spatter of blood cast off from a knife when it was being used to repeatedly stab someone. Whoever had dumped out the file cabinet and the display case had done a credible job of hiding the direct evidence of the crime, but once Alex knew what he was looking for, traces of a violent assault were everywhere.

  The body in the alley had at least a dozen stab wounds in it, to say nothing of the missing head. Danny surmised that whoever removed it didn’t want the dead man’s identity known. He’d called in a dozen more beat cops to help search the alley and the surrounding area, but Alex figured that would be a waste of time. Whoever took the time and effort to remove a dead man’s
head wasn’t about to just toss it somewhere as they fled the scene. It was probably in the East River by now, and weighted, at that.

  Once he’d finished showing Danny and the cops where all the blood was, Alex had tried to get a cab, but the few daring cabbies still at work in the fog were busy serving high paying riders in the Core. Eventually, Alex had walked ten blocks to a nightclub on the edge of the Core and gotten a cab there.

  He hung up his hat as he entered, but instead of going to bed, he turned into the library and sat down in his reading chair. His hands shook as he took out his cigarette case, though whether that was from fatigue, lack of rejuvenator, or the grisly scene of the headless corpse, he wasn’t quite sure.

  “I thought I heard you come in.” Iggy’s voice cut through his thoughts.

  Alex jumped. He hadn’t heard the old man come down the stairs from his second-floor bedroom.

  “Sorry, lad,” Iggy said, emerging from the darkness to clap him on the shoulder. He reached under the Tiffany lamp as he passed and switched it on, casting its multi-colored light over the bookshelves. “Well, you look terrible,” he said, sitting in his own chair on the far side of the lamp.

  “People keep telling me that,” Alex said, taking a drag on his cigarette. “I might develop a complex or something.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  Alex cast Iggy a sidelong glance.

  “What makes you think there’s anything to talk about?”

  Iggy scoffed.

  “You stagger in here just before midnight, looking like ten miles of bad road, and smelling of sweat, blood, and silverlight oil. Of course there’s something to talk about. If there wasn’t, you’d have gone straight to bed.”

  Alex sighed. One of these day’s he’d finally learn that he couldn’t put one over on Iggy.

  “Not sure I could sleep if I did,” he said.

  Alex had seen corpses before, of course. Iggy had dragged him to the morgue more times than he could count to teach him about wounds, bodies, decomposition, and deduction. This had been his first decapitation, however.

  He took another drag on his cigarette and told Iggy about his adventures at The Philosopher’s Stone.

  “Ugh,” Iggy grunted when Alex described the condition of the murdered man. “Desecration of a corpse is never a pleasant thing.”

  “I’m no expert,” Alex said, “but based on the wounds, I’d say a lot of what was done happened after the guy was dead. Like the killer was insane.”

  “You may be right,” Iggy said. “There’s historical precedent for such an attack. In Brunei, men have been known to suddenly start attacking people, maiming, wounding, and even killing in a frenzy. They call it ‘running amok.’”

  “You said men,” Alex observed.

  Iggy nodded.

  “It’s a phenomenon that’s never been seen in women or youth, so far as I know.”

  “Well I may have a case for you. Based on the fingerprints our survivor left behind, they were small, most likely a woman.”

  Iggy shrugged.

  “I’m very progressive in my opinions on crime,” he said. “Evil isn’t limited to the male of the species.”

  “Well, Danny and the police will have to figure that part out. I’m more concerned with what happened to Charles Grier. It’s unlikely that two different burglars picked the same shop to break into — they were both there looking for him.”

  “Could he be your headless man?’

  Alex shook his head as he ground out the stub of his cigarette.

  “Grier’s in his sixties. Even without the head, I could tell the dead guy wasn’t that old.”

  Iggy got up as Alex fumbled with his cigarette case again and crossed to the liquor cabinet.

  “What’s your next step, then?” he asked as he removed a crystal decanter with a blood-red liquid in it.

  “Tomorrow Danny is going over to Grier’s place to see if there’s anything there,” Alex said, focusing on holding his hands steady as he lit another cigarette. “He’ll have to get a warrant, so it won’t be till after noon. I’ll meet up with him then.”

  “What about the body?” Iggy asked, pouring the red liquid into two glasses.

  Alex shrugged.

  “Down at the morgue,” he said. “Danny will call me if they find anything.”

  “Here,” Iggy said, passing him one of the glasses. “Fortify yourself with some port.”

  Alex accepted the glass and sipped it.

  “I’ve got something else for you,” Iggy said, sitting back in his chair. He leaned down and opened the elaborately carved wooden chest that sat under the front window. Pulp novels were Iggy’s biggest weakness and he kept them in the chest rather than putting them on one of the library’s shelves where he might have to explain them to a visitor.

  Instead of a pulp paperback, however, Iggy pulled out a slim book bound in green leather. He hesitated, looking at the book for a long moment before he handed it to Alex.

  “What’s this?” Alex asked, turning the book over. Both the front and back covers were blank, though they appeared well worn.

  “A little monograph of my own,” Iggy said with an enigmatic grin.

  Alex opened the book. The first printed page read, On the Use of Linking Runes to Build Disconnected Constructs. Below that was printed the name of the author, Arthur Conan Doyle.

  “It’s everything I know about writing three-dimensional runes,” Iggy said. He gave Alex a somewhat sheepish look. “I was inspired by the textbook.” He nodded toward the thin red volume on the shelf beside the hearth.

  “I went through the textbook for at least three hours last night,” Alex said, holding up Iggy’s monograph. “This seems pretty important; why doesn’t the textbook mention it?”

  “There’s quite a lot the textbook leaves out,” Iggy said, sitting back in his chair. “I suspect the men who put it together wanted to make sure that if it did fall into the wrong hands, it was as difficult as possible to misuse.”

  Alex’s tired brain chewed on that for a moment, then he nodded wearily.

  “I guess that makes sense,” he said. “So is that why you’ve spent the last two years teaching me to write more complex runes instead of digging into the textbook?”

  “Just so, lad,” Iggy said, sipping his port. “I know you understand a lot of what’s in there, but you weren’t ready to really use it.”

  “And now?”

  “You’re almost there. Once you learn the real power of linking runes, we’ll move on to inverse runes, persistence runes, and finally void runes. Once you master those, you’ll be ready to use the textbook to its full potential.”

  As he spoke, Iggy’s eyes seemed to light up and his bottle-brush mustache turned up in an infectious grin. For over a year, Alex had believed his mentor had lost faith in him, that he was punishing him for sacrificing so much of his life to save the city. He felt a wave of shame, looking at Iggy’s enthusiasm.

  You should have known better.

  “Sounds like I’ve got some reading to do,” Alex said with a tired smile.

  Iggy’s face turned serious and he leveled his index finger at Alex.

  “Later,” he said in his best instructor’s voice. “Right now you’re tired and wrung out. You said yourself that Danny won’t have his warrant until tomorrow afternoon, so you have plenty of time for reading in the morning.”

  Alex wanted to protest but he simply couldn’t seem to put together a cogent response, a sure sign that Iggy was right. Finally he gave up and nodded his acquiescence.

  “Good,” Iggy said in a firm voice. “Now finish your port and go to bed.”

  The next morning, almost all traffic on the roads had stopped. Even the street level crawlers weren’t running. Alex had to walk five blocks to catch a sky bug and then walk another seven blocks to get to his office. Unsurprisingly, Leslie was there when he arrived.

  Very surprisingly, she didn’t look happy.

  “What in heaven’s name happ
ened to you?” she said when he came in.

  Alex had forgotten the black eye he’d gotten off Henry Travis, Grier’s super.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, then explained about his weekend. As he spoke, he offered her a cigarette from his brass case. When she selected one, he noticed she wasn’t wearing an engagement ring.

  “That’s disgusting,” she said when he told her about the body behind Charles Grier’s shop.

  “Do I dare ask how your weekend went?” he asked, offering her a light from his squeeze lighter.

  “You probably shouldn’t,” she said, giving him a hard look. She knew Alex well enough to know he hadn’t missed her bare left hand. “I’ve been through your notes from Saturday,” she said, unambiguously changing the subject. “Your first client meeting isn’t till Wednesday.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got some other work to keep me busy.”

  He quickly outlined his visit from Sorsha and her new feds.

  “I think I might have a way to figure out where all this fog is coming from,” he finished. “But I’ll have to do some reading first. If anything comes up, go ahead and interrupt me. I’ll be in my vault.”

  Leslie promised that she would, and Alex headed for his office. Once inside, he hung up his hat and pulled out his rune book. He needed to read Iggy’s monograph on linking runes, but he didn’t want to do that in his office. Instead, he pulled out a vault rune and opened his extra-dimensional space.

  Iggy’s book wasn’t as secret or as dangerous as the textbook, but just the same, Alex didn’t want to just be walking around with it, so he’d left it in his vault. Despite his having expanded it greatly, his vault was mostly empty space. What little furniture he had was acquired a piece at a time over several years, and at the rate he was going, Alex would need another decade or so before he’d have it decked out like Iggy’s.Assuming he had that long.

  Still, it did have a comfortable reading chair and a magelight lamp with a shade. It also had a security door. Alex wasn’t worried that Leslie would send someone into his office without calling him on the intercom, but some clients in the past had simply barged in. To prevent anyone from entering his vault while he was inside, Alex had taken the precaution of adding a heavy door of solid oak that had been reinforced with a steel frame. The frame even had a metal stopper that stuck out, preventing anyone from shutting the vault door completely while he was inside. Only he could lock the vault door, but that wouldn’t stop someone from closing it and putting something heavy against it in the hopes that Alex would suffocate or starve inside. With the security door shut and locked with two heavy steel bolts, however, no one could close him inside it.