by Dan Willis
Once he had ten of the vault runes drying next to the finding runes, Alex weighed his options. He was out of restoration runes, purity runes, and unlocking runes, but all of those were elaborate and time consuming. Instead, he decided to restock the simpler runes from his book.
He’d barely made a half dozen minor barrier runes, however, when the intercom box on the rollaway cabinet chirped. Alex set aside his pen and pushed the key that activated the microphone.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Sorry to bother you, boss,” Sherry’s voice came through the speaker, “but Danny’s on the line for you.”
Alex had been hoping for a call from Lieutenant McClory or one of his subordinates, but he was always happy to hear from Danny.
“Put him through.”
A moment later the phone next to the intercom began to ring and Alex picked it up.
“What’s the good word?” he asked.
“How fast can you get uptown?” Danny asked, ignoring Alex’s lighthearted question. “I’ve got a body for you to look at.”
Alex consulted his pocketwatch and found it was just after noon. He hadn’t eaten but something in Danny’s tone told him to favor haste over nourishment.
“I can leave in about ten minutes,” he said, glancing at all the drying runes he would need to put into his book. “Where are you?”
Danny gave him an address in north Harlem and Alex scribbled it in his notebook.
“Get here as quick as you can,” he said. “And don’t do anything tricky, just take a cab.”
Danny knew about Alex’s vault, but that was only useful for getting from a remote location back to the office or the brownstone. Alex could use his vault to go to the brownstone and catch a cab from there, but that would only cut ten minutes off the trip at best.
“You think I might be followed?” Alex wondered.
“I don’t know,” his friend admitted. “You need to see this crime scene. I don’t want to talk about it over the phone, but…our friends might be involved.”
Alex felt a chill. ‘Our friends’ was a code word they’d worked out to refer to the Legion. Since the Irregulars started looking for evidence of Legion activities, they hadn’t found anything they could confirm, but Alex knew it was just a matter of time.
“I’ll grab my kit and a cab and see you in about forty minutes,” he said.
The cab dropped Alex off in front of an outer-ring building that could only be called a shack. It appeared to be a one-room dwelling built before the turn of the century. The boards that made up the exterior were gray and splintering. Dried mud had been applied as chinking where gaps had appeared in an effort to keep the weather out. Clearly there had been some kind of structural damage, however, because the roof leaned to one side.
As Alex approached, the entire appearance of the little structure gave the impression that it was too old and tired to stand up straight. Only the presence of the police cars and Danny’s green Ford coupe told Alex he was in the right place.
Mounting the creaking wooden steps in front, Alex reached out to knock on the door. Before he could, the door opened, and a slightly greenish policeman appeared. Alex didn’t know the officer, and that usually meant he’d have to stall until Danny realized he’d arrived.
“Through there,” the cop said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder as he stepped past Alex. With the door open, Alex could smell the aroma of sour sweat and the iron tang of blood coming from inside.
He took a deep breath of the relatively fresh outside air, then entered. The inside of the shack was just as run-down as the outside. A single bed stood in the corner, and like the roof, it was leaning a bit to one side. Next to it was a battered chest of drawers, with a rough table and two chairs in the opposite corner. A cast iron stove used for cooking and heating in the winter was the only other object in the room, though it seemed in relatively good repair.
Despite the dilapidated state of the house and the furnishings, there were signs that someone had taken the time to make the place a home. A chipped mason jar on the table held a mass of wildflowers above a faded tablecloth, and above the stove was a sort of mantel where a row of knick-knacks and curios were proudly displayed.
Only two things were out of place in the ramshackle dwelling. The first was an area rug that had been pulled off the floor and left in a pile at the foot of the bed. The second was the naked woman lying dead on the floor. Her body was gaunt rather than thin, with the telltale boniness that came from too little food. She had dark brown skin, with a mass of kinky hair that had been pulled back behind her head by a simple cord. From where she lay, Alex could see that the skin on her wrists and ankles had been worn raw and there was a long gash that ran horizontally across her neck where it met her lower jaw.
As disturbing a sight as the woman was, the floor around her was worse. She lay in the exact center of the room, occupying the space where the discarded rug should have been. It was clear why the rug had been removed, because beneath the body, a geometric shape had been painted in what looked disturbingly like blood. Inside the shape, a massive symbol had been painted. It looked like a rune, but Alex didn’t recognize it.
The shape consisted of an outer ring of lines forming ten shallow points and a flowing ring of flower-like curlicues inside. Candles and some of the knick-knacks from the dead woman’s shelf had been laid around the body at places where lines touched the tip of the curlicues. With ten sides, the symbol would be a decagon, but Alex didn’t know of any runes that used such a complicated shape.
“What do you think?” Danny said. He and another detective stood on opposite sides of the body, looking down at the grisly tableau. The second man was broad-shouldered and fit, with black hair and a thick mustache that drooped over the ends of his mouth, giving the impression of a perpetual frown.
“I see why you called me,” Alex said, stepping in and setting his kit bag next to the wildflowers on the table. While he opened it, Danny said something to the mustachioed detective, and the man withdrew outside.
“Meet Katherine Biggs,” Danny said, indicating the dead woman. “She lived here alone, but one of the uniforms recognized her as a local prostitute. The blood,” Danny indicated the symbol, “appears to be hers, as her body’s been entirely drained. Whoever did this cut her throat and let her bleed out.”
Alex looked around at the meager walls and furniture. There weren’t any overt signs of blood spatter or any signs of a blood pool, only the painted symbol. Cutting someone’s throat was a messy business, so Alex had expected there to be some sign.
“How did he collect the blood?”
Danny looked up at the ridge beam that ran across the top of the walls and helped hold up the roof. Alex could see a rope still tied around it, right over where the girl lay. The trailing end had been cut clean by a sharp knife.
“He hung her up, then used a bucket or a washtub to catch the blood.”
Alex shivered as he pulled his lamp and oculus from his bag. He couldn’t imagine what the dead woman’s last moments had been like, trussed up like a Christmas turkey until her killer finally just cut her throat and watched her bleed out.
“I know,” Danny said, noticing Alex’s discomfort. “We’re dealing with one sick bastard.” He gave Alex an intense look. “I want this guy,” he said. “What can you tell me?”
Alex lit the burner and shone silverlight around the room. As he expected, the symbol lit up like a neon sign. Silverlight reacted to bodily fluids like blood. As he stepped around the dead body, the light passed over her, and Alex stopped.
“You said she was a prostitute?” Alex asked. When Danny nodded, he went on. “There’s bodily fluids all over her thighs,” he said. “She had intercourse recently. Maybe one of her customers did this?”
Danny didn’t say anything, but he jotted a note on his pad. Alex leaned down and touched the fluorescing blood. The moment he did, a sick knot formed in his gut and the smell of rotting meat filled the air.
Gagging, he stood up and backed away.
“What’s the matter?” Danny asked.
Alex pulled out his handkerchief and scrubbed the blood from his fingertip. As soon as it was gone, the rancid stench disappeared, and his stomach settled.
“Something happened when I touched the blood,” he said. “It was like being downwind from a rendering plant.”
Danny shook his head and looked at the blood.
“Other guys touched that stuff, and nothing happened to them,” he said.
Alex blew out the silverlight burner and switched it for ghostlight. When he shone that at the symbol, it lit up like Broadway. He had to close the aperture in his oculus to avoid being blinded by the glow. When he could see again, he went over the symbol meticulously, being careful not to touch it. The markings were definitely magical, but he couldn’t tell if they had been imbued with power when they were painted, or if some alchemical substance had been added to the blood beforehand.
“What now?” Danny asked as Alex pulled off his oculus and blew out the lamp.
“The symbol is definitely magical,” he said. “But it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. You’d better call that guy with the mustache back in.”
“Detective Wilson,” Danny supplied. “Why?”
“We need to pick up the body and move it off that symbol,” Alex said. “And we need to be careful not to smear it.”
“Okay, then what?”
“Then I’ll copy down the symbol and try to find out what it is and where it came from.”
“You think this is the work of the Legion?” Danny asked.
Alex wished he had an answer for that question, but he could only shrug.
“Maybe,” he admitted. “But killing prostitutes seems a bit low rent for them.”
“I guess that depends on why Miss Biggs was killed,” Danny said.
Alex walked around the blood symbol again.
“It’s so outlandish,” Alex declared at last. “Hanging the poor girl, collecting her blood, and then using it to paint all this. It’s like some kind of primitive ritual.”
“You mean like an occult ceremony?” Danny said. “Someone trying to commune with the spirits or something like that?”
Alex shrugged again.
“All right,” Danny said, stepping to the door to summon Detective Wilson. “I’ll look into Miss Biggs’ known clients and associates, you run down what that symbol is and why whoever killed her painted it.”
“All right” Alex said. “I’ll talk with Iggy tonight; maybe he’ll know what this is.” It was a long shot — by now, Alex knew most of what Iggy knew about runes, but it was better than admitting to Danny that he had absolutely no idea where to begin.
7
Cracks
It took Alex another hour to finish going over the scene of Katherine Biggs’ murder, and by the time he got back to his office it was three o’clock. He wasn’t convinced that the bloody symbol was the work of the Legion, but he took a cab back to his office just in case.
“Hi, Boss,” Sherry greeted him with her usual enthusiasm as he walked in. “How did it go with Danny?”
“Bad,” he said. He didn’t plan to elaborate, but a thought made him pull out his notepad. “Do you recognize this symbol?” he said, holding out his drawing of the blood rune.
Sherry squinted at the drawing then shook her head.
“Sorry, Boss.”
“Can you do a reading about it?”
She shook her head again, sending her waves of dark hair swirling around her face.
“I can only read people,” she said. “Sometimes I get…premonitions about things, but nothing came when I looked at your drawing. Is it some kind of new rune?”
“I don’t know,” Alex admitted. “Did your…your former boss ever write runes in blood?”
Alex hadn’t asked Sherry much about her former life since he learned she spent the better part of three thousand years as a mummy. The pain on her face when she described the Runelord, the man who’d essentially owned her, made Alex angry. It also made him reluctant to make her relive the experience.
A cloud passed over Sherry’s face, but she recovered quickly.
“Back then runes were mostly painted on walls or stone tablets,” she said. “I never heard of anyone using blood, but it’s possible.”
Alex sighed and flipped his notebook closed, returning it to his shirt pocket. Frustration bubbled up inside him, but he squashed it quickly. Asking Sherry about the blood rune had been a long shot, after all.
“Any messages?” he said, changing the subject.
Sherry’s mouth crooked into a sly smile and she picked up a notepad from her desk.
“A Lieutenant McClory called from the Central Office,” she said. “He said there were two other robberies this month that match the one you asked about.”
Alex felt the knot of tension that had formed between his shoulder blades begin to relax a bit. He was overdue for some good news.
“Did he leave the names of the warehouses that were hit?”
Sherry tore the top page off the notebook and handed it over. Two businesses were listed on the paper; one was on the south side by the port, and another one was near Grand Central. The note didn’t say what was taken, but Alex could get that information from the warehouses in question.
“This is great,” he said with a grin. “If anything stolen was personal to the owner, I should be able to track the thieves.”
“Which will lead you to Mr. Su’s missing herbs,” Sherry finished, nodding along with Alex’s excitement.
“I’ll go call them,” he said, heading for the back office door.
“Boss,” Sherry said with a note in her voice that stopped Alex short. “There is one other message.”
That knot of tension between Alex’s shoulders clenched again and he sighed.
“Barton?” he asked, dreading the answer.
Sherry nodded.
“He wants you upstairs,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’ll call those warehouses and find out who had merchandise stolen, then I’ll run down the owners and find out what it was.”
When Alex accepted the Lightning Lord’s offer to be the runewright on his power distribution network, he figured it would be a once a month kind of job. Linking runes didn’t require much in the way of maintenance. They would fade when the rune they were connected to degraded away, but when connected to a spell like Barton’s, it was possible they would remain active forever. What he wasn’t prepared for was the onslaught of ideas on which Barton wanted his opinion, once Alex worked for him. It seemed like he was up to Barton’s office, or to one of his other workshops, at least three times a week. Alex liked the work, but it was making it difficult to resolve his cases. He had a suspicion that Barton was doing it on purpose to convince Alex to work for him full time.
With a heavy sigh, he handed the paper with the warehouse names on it to Sherry and headed back out in the direction of the elevator. A few minutes later he found himself in the vast lobby of Barton Electric. In former days he would have to wait for Gary Bickman, Barton’s valet, to get approval to go up to the private office. These days he had his own key to the private elevator, and he only talked to Gary in the time it took the elevator to arrive.
When it finished its journey, Alex stepped out into Andrew Barton’s massive office. The back wall was window glass from floor to ceiling, revealing a stunning view of the city and Central Park. Sumptuous leather couches and chairs were spread around the room, all encircling a massive desk with a marble top that had to be fifteen feet long. Pacing around behind the desk was the man himself. The Lightning Lord wore a red velvet smoking jacket with gold embroidery instead of a suit coat. An unlit cigar was clenched in his teeth and he moved with the nervous energy of a caged tiger.
“There you are,” Barton bellowed when he noticed Alex. “It’s about time, we’ve got a problem.”
That snapped Alex’s distracted mind back into focus.
&nbs
p; “What problem?”
Barton waved him over to the desk where he leaned over a pile of blueprints and schematics.
“The Brooklyn tower has been fluctuating all day,” he said. “Several of the breaker boxes keep tripping.”
“It’s not the linking runes,” Alex protested. “We’ve been running power to the Bronx tower for almost four months without a hitch, and the Brooklyn tower has the exact same setup.”
“Well, something’s off,” Barton said. “I’ve got a crew over there turning the breakers back on, but there’s four of them that trip about once an hour.”
“Are they on the same side of the system?”
Barton nodded. Since the power was distributed through a central plate to two daughter nodes, the fact that the problem was only on one side would make it easier to track down.
“They’re all on the south side,” he said.
“Maybe something on that end of Brooklyn is pulling too much power.”
“That shouldn’t be possible,” the Lightning Lord said, pulling a note pad from under the stack of blueprints. “Yes,” he said after running his finger down the topmost page. “I built that system with at least a dozen years of growth potential.” He handed the pad to Alex. “Nothing in the city should be able to trip it.”
Alex looked at the pad, but all it contained was a mass of incomprehensible mathematics.
“Hey,” he said, setting the pad down and pulling out the torn page with Alice Cartwright’s calculations on it. “Do you know what this means?”
Barton took the page and scrutinized it, then shook his head and handed it back.
“It’s nothing I recognize, why?”
“The woman who wrote it was a computer for the government, whatever that is. Somebody killed her and I need to know if this is related to the murder.”
“A computer is someone who checks math,” Barton said distractedly. He leaned over his blueprints again, tracing lines with his finger. “People employ them when their calculations have to be right. If you want to know what the math means, head out to Columbia and ask Dr. Samuel Phillips. He’s the head of applied mathematics there. If anyone will know what those formulae mean, it will be him. Now can we please get back to the problem at hand?”
