The Infernal Heart

by R. L. King

  Raider leaped out and immediately made a beeline for the space behind the toilet where he crouched, watching Stone with his wide, unblinking green stare.

  “Right then, Raider,” Stone told him. “I’m going to leave you alone for a bit so you can get settled in—I’ve got to get back up to campus. Tonight we’ll see what you might be able to tell me.”

  As soon as he opened the door, Raider made his move, beelining for the door. Stone barely got it closed before the gray-and-black missile managed to streak through it. He stood on the other side and let out a long sigh.

  Why am I doing this again?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Stone’s pocket buzzed in the middle of his afternoon Western Occult Symbology class, but he let it go to voicemail. That was another new experience for him since he’d started using the mobile phone: in the old days (a couple months ago) the only way anyone would be able to reach him during a class was if they called the department office and the office sent a messenger over. That meant the call would have to be pretty important. Now that he had the mobile, it was entirely possible he’d missed someone trying to sell him vacuum cleaners or a cut-rate oil change.

  He checked it on his way back to his office. It wasn’t a telemarketer. Instead, a brisk, no-nonsense male voice said: “Dr. Stone? This is Captain Mark Flores at the San Jose Police Department. Could you give me a call back as soon as possible, please? It’s urgent. Thank you.”

  This couldn’t be anything good. Had they figured out he’d nicked Raider from the shelter? No, that was absurd. Why would the San Jose police be involved with the theft of a cat destined to be put to sleep? Surely they had more important things to do with their time.

  A chill ran up his neck: what if it was about Cheng?

  He stepped off the path, found an unoccupied spot behind a nearby building, and returned the call.

  “Flores.”

  “Captain Flores. Alastair Stone. You left me a message. How can I help you?”

  The briefest of pauses crackled on the line. “Yes. Dr. Stone. Thank you for getting back to me so quickly. Would it be possible for you to come down here today?”

  His initial assessment was right: this couldn’t be anything good. “Do you mind telling me why? I’m supposed to be teaching another class shortly.”

  “I’d prefer not to discuss it over the phone, Dr. Stone. I assure you, though, it’s very important.”

  “I’m not in trouble for anything, am I?” He forced himself to keep his tone light, but the last thing he wanted to do was walk in blind and end up getting arrested for something.

  “No, we just want to ask you some questions. When could you get down here?”

  He glanced at his watch. His next class was intro-level; he could get one of his teaching assistants to take it for him. “I’ll be there in an hour, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Stone.” Flores gave him the address. “Just tell the front desk to buzz me when you get here.”

  The desk sergeant didn’t ask questions when Stone arrived, but called Flores immediately. Stone waited in the busy lobby, pacing around and examining the wanted posters until the captain arrived.

  “Dr. Stone?”

  Stone turned. Here we go. “Captain.”

  A tall, broad-shouldered man with graying temples and wire-rimmed glasses, Captain Mark Flores looked as if he would be more comfortable in a uniform than in his white shirt, gray slacks, and blue striped tie. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “Let’s talk in my office.”

  Stone followed him through a maze of desks and bustling people—both uniformed cops and administrative personnel—to a small, neat office near the back of the room. He sat in the indicated desk chair, taking in the framed certificates on the wall, the photo of a smiling woman and two grinning kids on the credenza behind the desk, and the drooping plant on top of a file cabinet that looked like you could hide in it to survive a nuclear blast. “Mind telling me what this is about, Captain?”

  Flores didn’t answer until he’d settled himself behind his desk and pulled a pair of closed folders in front of him. “When was the last time you saw Detective Cheng, Dr. Stone?”

  The crawling feeling at the back of Stone’s neck intensified. “In Gilroy, at the murder victim’s home. Last week. Why do you ask?”

  He opened one of the folders and consulted a sheet of handwritten notes on the top of a stack of papers. “It says here that you phoned the department in the middle of the night a couple days ago about an odd phone call you received.”

  “Yes…” Stone frowned. “Has something happened to Detective Cheng, Captain?”

  “Tell me about that phone call.”

  Clearly, the captain would answer questions when he was damn good and ready. Stone could either press him for answers or go with the flow and wait for Flores to get around to telling him what was going on. Deciding to opt for the latter, at least for the moment, he told the captain everything he could remember about the phone call. “If you’d told me that was what you were interested in, I could have brought my notes. But I think I’ve got it all.”

  “And this was on your home phone, not your cell?”

  “Home phone, yes.”

  “Did you recognize the voice?”

  “No. I’d never heard it before.”

  Flores nodded and made a note on the paper, and then flicked his gaze back up to meet Stone’s. His expression revealed nothing of his thoughts. “Did you have any further contact with Detective Cheng after he informed you that he’d been requested not to consult with you any longer?”

  Stone narrowed his eyes. “Should I be retaining a lawyer, Captain? Be assured, I’d like to help you, and I’ll do everything I can to do so. But please tell me what’s going on. Has something happened to Detective Cheng?”

  “Detective Cheng was murdered, Dr. Stone.”

  Stone stared at him, shocked. “Murdered? When?”

  “Can you please answer my question? Did you have any further contact with the detective following the night in Gilroy?”

  He could lie, he supposed, but he couldn’t think of any valid excuse to do so. If Cheng was indeed dead, it wasn’t as if he could get the detective in trouble for contacting him. “Yes. I didn’t see him in person, but I did speak with him on the phone.”

  “Did you call him, or did he call you?”

  “He called me. He wasn’t convinced that his captain—presumably that’s you—was correct in his assessment of how valuable my consultation might be.”

  “What did he ask you to do?”

  “He told me he wasn’t allowed to work with me officially anymore, but that he still believed the occult angle was worth pursuing.” Stone leaned forward in his chair. “Captain, please tell me what’s happened to the detective. Do you believe his murder was somehow related to the phone call I received?” He didn’t know if going on the offensive would work with this man, but he wanted to deflect the captain’s line of questioning away from his continued consultations with Cheng. If he revealed his suspected connection between Dennis Avila’s suicide and the other murders, he feared the mundane police would interfere with his chance to investigate the supernatural angle. Once he knew more, he’d decide whether it would make sense to reveal it. But not yet.

  Apparently, however, Flores was not to be steered from his line of questioning. “What did the detective ask you to do?”

  Stone had a ready answer for that, and it wasn’t even a lie. “He thought the odd sigils around the bodies were significant, and he asked me to continue researching them.”

  “And did you discover anything about them?”

  “So far, only that they’re written in a very old language. Bits of it look familiar, but as yet I haven’t been able to identify it. My plan was to consult some other research material I have access to and see if I can discover anything else.”

&n
bsp; “I see. And do you plan to continue doing so?”

  Stone shrugged. “I like puzzles, Captain, and contrary to what you might believe, I’m still convinced the crimes include an occult angle. The detective showed me the photos from the recent crime scene, and as you know he allowed me to accompany him to the one in Gilroy. I’m not going to forget that information, even if I don’t have access to anything else going forward. If I should come up with anything, of course I’ll share it with you.”

  He paused. “Is there a reason you’re not telling me anything else about Detective Cheng’s murder, Captain? The only reasons I can work out are either that I’m a suspect—in which case I hope you’ll understand I don’t plan to say anything else until I’ve retained a lawyer—or that there’s something unusual about it. Am I correct?”

  “You’re not a suspect, Dr. Stone,” he said.

  Stone let his breath out, only just now mindful of the tension in his shoulders. He’d been a suspect in one murder last year, and he was in no hurry to repeat that performance. “The circumstances were unusual, then.”

  Suddenly, Flores looked tired. He put aside the top folder and pulled up the other one. “Detective Cheng’s body was found by a couple of homeless people late last night, in the office of an abandoned warehouse in east San Jose.” He opened the folder. “His body was in much the same condition as the last murder victims.”

  Stone went still. “In…what way?” Despite his resolve to remain objective about the case, he couldn’t bring himself to elaborate on the atrocities had been inflicted on the other victims. They had been nameless, faceless (almost literally) statistics—the fact that they’d been dismembered and skinned, horrific as it was to contemplate, also served to dehumanize them. But Stone had known Johnny Cheng. He’d spoken with him, had coffee with him, even gotten to know him a bit as a person, not just a detective. He wasn’t sure he wanted to look at the crime scene photos, even if Flores offered to show them to him.

  To disassociate himself from the horror for just a moment, he shifted to magical sight and took a quick look at Flores. Not surprisingly, despite his stoic exterior, the captain wasn’t taking this as impassively as he might want to suggest. His clear, blue aura (odd but not entirely unexpected, Stone thought idly, that so many cops’ auras were blue) shifted and surged, shot through with muddier areas that indicated emotional disturbance. It made sense: the guy had been Cheng’s boss. This couldn’t be easy for him either.

  “The scene…was similar to the others,” Flores said. Clearly he wasn’t in any more hurry than Stone to discuss the particulars.

  Stone glanced down at his hands, then back up at Flores. “I’m…sorry, Captain. I didn’t know Detective Cheng very well, but…”

  “Yeah.” Flores riffled through a few more papers and photos in the folder without letting Stone see them. “I can’t give you any details about the case, you understand, since it’s still an ongoing investigation. I’d like to keep it quiet, but I’m sure that isn’t going to happen. I expect it will be in tonight’s paper.” He squared up the folder’s contents, stuck them all back inside, and closed it, then looked up to meet Stone’s gaze. “We’ll be requesting your phone records around the time you received the call, though I doubt it will pan out. If he was smart, he’d call from a pay phone or someplace else he couldn’t be traced.” He paused, then pushed the folders aside. “If there’s anything else you can tell us—if you think of anything else later that slipped your mind—please let us know.” His gaze hardened. “Naturally we had our full attention on these murders before, but when this guy killed one of our own, he made it personal. We’re going to find him.”

  Stone doubted that, but didn’t say so. Instead, he stood. “The only thing I can tell you is that I fully believe the detective was right: there is an occult involvement in these murders. As I told him in Gilroy, I think you’re looking for more than one murderer, all directed by someone pulling the strings. Someone with a strong connection to the occult. I know you don’t believe that, and I know you want to deny it. But if you want to catch the man at the top, you’ll need to keep an open mind.”

  “I appreciate your thoughts, Dr. Stone.” Flores stood as well, and his expression suggested that getting anything supernatural past his button-down cop’s mindset was going to be a hard sell.

  Before, Stone would have said ‘impossible.’ Now, though, with one of his own men as a victim, perhaps a chance existed that he might open his mind a bit more. “Captain…” he said, his hand on the doorknob.

  “Yeah?”

  “I wonder…I told you I planned to continue trying to decipher the sigils found at the other crime scenes. I still plan to do that, now more than ever. Would it perhaps be possible to get a copy of the ones found with Detective Cheng?” He braced for impact, expecting Flores to order him out of the office.

  Instead, the captain merely looked tired. He sighed. “I can’t let you have the crime scene photos, Stone. You know that.”

  “Nor do I want them. I’d rather remember the detective as I knew him. All I want is the sigils. If there’s some sort of larger message, having another part of it might help my translation efforts.”

  He paused for a long moment as if weighing his options. “Yeah, okay. But you’ll have to sign something stating that you won’t release them to anyone else.”

  “Of course. Thank you, Captain.”

  Flores picked up the folders. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll get copies made. You can wait out in the lobby area.”

  It was twenty minutes before Flores returned carrying a thin manila envelope and a clipboard. “Sorry—it’s always crazy around here. Ten things to do at once.” He made Stone sign a form swearing not to reveal the contents to anyone else, then handed over the envelope. “Remember—if you get anything, you call me. Understood?”

  “Absolutely. Thank you, Captain.” As the man turned to leave, one other thing occurred to him. “Captain?”

  Flores looked impatient now, his mind obviously already moved on to the next fire he had to fight. “What?”

  Stone moved closer to him so he wouldn’t be overheard. He didn’t want to ask the question, but this time it wasn’t merely his usual insatiable curiosity. If he was to understand the bizarre message the killer was trying to leave, he had to have as much information as possible. “I’m sorry to ask this, but it might be important to the helping me understand what the killer is trying to accomplish. You said Detective Cheng’s body was ‘in the same condition as the other murder victims.’ Was he missing an organ like the others?”

  Flores glared at him. “You’re pushing your luck, Dr. Stone.”

  That would be a yes, then, but it sounded like the captain wasn’t going to be forthcoming about which one was missing. “Forgive me, Captain. And please accept my condolences to your department for your loss.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  As Captain Flores had predicted, the murder of Detective Cheng was all over the news by the time Stone arrived home. It was the top story on all the five o’clock news channels, and made the front page of the Mercury News.

  Stone spread the paper out on the coffee table next to a fresh bottle of Guinness and studied it. SJPD Detective Latest Victim of Ritual Killer, the headline read. He skimmed the article, hoping for more information than Flores had given him—in light of what had been published about his involvement with the case, he believed somebody on the paper’s staff must have an inside track with somebody in the department—but the only new bit of information it contained was that sources believed Cheng must have been killed late Friday night (shortly after he called me, Stone mused). He glanced up at the television to see several people gathered behind a podium in a nest of microphones—a press conference, it looked like. He turned up the volume.

  “—has several solid leads, and it’s only a matter of time before this horrific killer is in custody. In the meantime, it’s str
ongly suggested that everyone refrain from going out alone at night unless necessary, remain in well-populated areas, and remain vigilant about what’s going on around you.”

  Stone turned it down again as the various reporters surged forward in a clamor of questions. The last thing he wanted to do right now was listen to a bunch of talking heads repeat the same meaningless platitudes in a variety of different ways. Images of Cheng kept returning to his mind; anger rose at this unseen killer, as well as a healthy dollop of guilt. The detective hadn’t deserved this. None of the other cops involved with the case had been killed—at least not yet. Why Cheng? As far as Stone was concerned, two possibilities were the most likely: either he’d discovered something that took him too close to the killer, or the killer had murdered him as a warning to Stone to stay off the case. Normally he’d have thought the latter to be fairly conceited on his part, except for the phone call. The killer had made it a point to call him, to tease him, to warn him off. That meant, whoever this guy was, he knew about Stone and probably knew what he was.

  He sighed and leaned back on the sofa, taking another long drag from the Guinness bottle and watching the silent talking heads and jostling reporters.

  A muffled yowl rose from the other room, followed by several faint scratching noises.

  Damn. In all the upheaval around his trip to the police department, he’d forgotten about Raider!

  He jumped up and hurried to the bathroom. “Sorry, sorry,” he called. “I’m coming.”

  This time he was ready when he opened the door. Raider dropped down from where he’d been scratching at the inside and made another break for it, but Stone scooped the cat neatly up and dropped him, struggling, back inside. “Well,” he said, closing the door and looking around. “You have been having fun, haven’t you?”

  The bathroom was a wreck. Raider had knocked the soap off the sink, deposited the hand towel in his water dish, and gathered the rug into a little ball in the corner behind the toilet. He’d unspooled the entire roll of toilet paper, shredded it, and spread it all over the floor. In the shower enclosure, he’d flung litter with great enthusiasm around the perimeter of the box. Kibble from his food dish littered the floor like crunchy caltrops. Right now, he’d leapt onto the toilet seat and was eyeing Stone with a mixture of feline pride and apprehension, as if fearful of how this strange two-legger might react to his art project.