by Dan Willis
“Are you sure about this?” he asked. “I mean are these even useful for a detective?”
“I’ve used versions of all those runes in cases before,” Alex said.
Mike folded the papers reverently and then tucked them in his inside pocket with the rune papers.
“I won’t let you down, boss,” he said with an eager smile.
“Great,” Alex said. “Now, I’ve got some calls to make so—”
Alex could see from Mike’s face that there was something more.
“I should have said this right off,” he said with a chagrined look. “Mr. Barton wants to see you right away.”
“Of course,” Alex said with a sigh. “If Sherry gets back before I do, tell her to finish those warehouse calls for me.”
“Yes sir, boss.”
“How is it that whenever I need you, you’re off on some case?” Andrew Barton asked irritably when Alex stepped out of the private elevator. The Lightning Lord wore a pair of thick work trousers with a white shirt and no tie. An apron of thick leather protected his clothing, and he had a pair of heavy gloves tucked into the front pocket.
“It is my job,” Alex pointed out.
Barton sneered at that.
“I can pay you ten times what you make finding people’s dogs and helping the police catch purse snatchers,” he grumbled. “If you’d just take the cursed money.”
Alex just shrugged at that. He and Barton had this discussion before. In fact, Barton had offered him quite a sum to work for him exclusively just the other day.
“What can I say?” Alex said. “I like my job.”
That, at least, was something Barton understood, even though he didn’t like it.
“What’s the emergency this morning?” Alex continued.
Barton beckoned Alex over and handed him a notepad.
“The breakers in the Brooklyn tower are tripping again,” he said. “I don’t think that crack in the metal plate was the problem.”
“Is it just the ones on the south side again?”
Barton nodded and muttered a curse.
“Are you sure your runes are solid?”
“You asked me that last time,” Alex said. “They were solid then and they’re still solid now.”
Barton gave him an annoyed look and Alex just shrugged.
“This is why you don’t want me working for you, remember?”
“You said that last time,” he mimicked Alex. “Come on,” he said sticking out his arm for Alex to grab. “Let’s go see if we can figure it out.”
“Maybe it’s something on this end,” Alex protested. He hated teleporting — it always left him nauseated for hours afterward.
“Then all the breakers would be tripping, not just half of them,” Barton growled. “Now gut up, Lockerby, we’ve got work to do.”
Alex sighed and grabbed the offered forearm. A moment later he felt as if his insides were being squeezed into a new shape while the sensation of rushing through a tiny, enclosed space overwhelmed him. An instant later there was ground under his feet again and he staggered forward, grabbing one of the breaker boxes that surrounded the transfer core of the Brooklyn tower.
A very surprised workman jumped back with a cry of alarm, but he was quickly shushed by a thick-bodied man in coveralls.
“Mr. Barton,” the coveralled man addressed the Lightning Lord. “We’ve had to pin the breakers to keep them from tripping, but that’s not going to work long term.”
“I’ll check the breakers,” Barton said to Alex. “You check the magic.”
Barton headed over to the ring of malfunctioning breakers with the man in the coveralls while Alex opened the hinged top of the glass case that held the three transfer plates. The one on the south side of the case was a slightly different color than the other two, having been replaced when the previous one had a flaw. According to Barton, that hadn’t helped.
The linking runes on the central plate led to the two side plates, and other linking runes then ran to the breaker boxes. They were invisible to the naked eye, but Alex could feel them. He walked around the pedestal supporting the glass case, sensing each linking rune individually. All of them felt exactly the same. If one had been weak or improperly made, he would have known it. Still Barton wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d checked absolutely everything, so Alex closed the protective lid and went into the stairwell to open his vault. The chalk door he’d drawn the last time was still there, so he tore out a vault rune and opened the door with his key.
After retrieving his bag, Alex set it on top of the glass case and used his ghostlight burner to examine the transfer plates and the runes connecting them. As he’d known they would be, all the runes were solid and working as intended.
“Well?” Barton said, coming over as Alex blew out the burner in his lamp.
“Everything looks good,” Alex reported, grabbing his kit bag to begin repacking his gear. “If there’s a…”
“What?” Barton asked when Alex’s voice just trailed off.
“It’s wet,” he said, pulling his hand back from his bag.
Barton took hold of the top of the bag, then looked up at the ceiling. Alex followed his eyes, but couldn’t see anything amiss. Just as he was ready to give up, however, a shimmering drop of water detached itself from the seam where the ceiling met a large support beam and splashed on the back of Alex’s hand.
Moving his kit, Alex followed the path the drop would have taken if his hand hadn’t been in the way.
“Here,” he said, pointing to the corner of the glass case. “The water’s hitting this corner and seeping inside where the glass panels come together.”
Barton bent down to look then moved to the far side and opened the case. Reaching inside with no fear of being electrocuted, he ran his finger down the inside corner. When he reached the bottom, Alex saw the base ripple. There was a small amount of water covering the bottom corner of the case.
Barton slid his finger along the tiny puddle, then splashed the water up onto the transfer plate. Enormous sparks leapt up and there was a crack like a gunshot; at the same moment all the unpinned breakers on the south side of the room tripped.
While the man in coveralls and his associate scrambled to reset the breakers, Barton looked up at the ceiling and swore.
“That’s a brand-new roof,” he fumed.
“There must be standing water up there,” Alex said. “It rained last night, but it’s been dry all morning.”
Barton nodded in agreement.
“I’ll call my crew over to fix that roof right away,” he said. “In the meantime, I’ll need something to cover the case. You wouldn’t happen to have a tarp in your vault, would you?”
Alex grinned and pulled out his rune book.
“I can do better than that.” He tore out a standard barrier rune and dropped it on the transfer plate near the puddle. “Would you mind?”
Barton stuck his finger down by the paper and lit it with a tiny spark. Alex felt the familiar caress of energy as an invisible bubble spread out from the rune, forming a waterproof sphere around the plates and most of the case. As it went, the water in the bottom of the case was pushed up against the glass and finally through the gap in the corner.
“Don’t those runes only last an hour?” Barton asked.
“Minor barrier runes do,” Alex confirmed. “That one was its big brother, it will last a whole day.”
Barton looked at Alex like he’d said something ridiculous.
“Then why don’t runewrights sell those on rainy days?”
“Because they’re too expensive and too hard to make,” Alex said. He indicated the water running down the back side of the pillar that held the transfer plates up. “Besides, it expels any exposed water inside the bubble, so how would you drink anything?”
Barton chuckled at that thought. “That could be dangerous,” he said. “I don’t remember regular barrier runes doing that.”
“They don’t,” Alex said. “Now if you don�
�t mind, I’ve got one of those annoying cases to get back to. If you need me to come back tomorrow with another barrier rune, let me know.”
Barton nodded, then turned to the man in the coveralls and began giving orders. Alex went back to the stairwell and, once he was sure Barton was fully engaged with the problem of the leaking roof, he slipped into his vault and closed the door behind him.
19
Keepsakes
It was almost noon by the time Alex finished with Andrew Barton. He hadn’t eaten yet, but his stomach was still a bit queasy from the earlier teleport, so he made his way back to his office instead of stopping at the brownstone for a sandwich.
“Hi’ya boss,” Sherry said when he came into the waiting room.
Alex smiled, grateful to see her. If she was back, that meant she was done at the library and maybe he could get somewhere on the blood rune case.
“Where’s Mike?” he asked.
Sherry shrugged at that.
“He got a delivery right as I got in and went running into the back.”
“Good,” Alex said. The sooner Mike got up to speed, the sooner he could take some of the rune writing duties off Alex’s plate.
“How’d you do?”
Sherry picked up a notepad from the desk and handed it over to Alex. It was full of her tight script.
“There were murders matching the voodoo killing in Paris in thirty-one,” she said. “As far as I can tell, though, the only reason they made the papers was because of the reaction to them. Apparently there was a panic in Paris as a result.”
“Did the papers say why?”
Sherry nodded.
“There was a decent sized community of Russian immigrants in the city,” she said. “Most had fled the revolution and they believed the murders were the work of Grigori Rasputin.”
“The mad monk?” Alex asked.
“The very same.”
“But he was killed ten years before the murders.”
“Fifteen,” Sherry corrected. “The problem was that the Russians believed that Rasputin couldn’t die, that he saved his body from death with dark rituals.”
Alex had heard those stories before, of course. Rasputin’s political enemies had tried to kill him several times before they got the job done and those events inspired rumors and legends of his alleged immortality.
“But what does Rasputin have to do with the Paris murders?”
“According to the immigrant Russians, there were a string of similar murders in Moscow back in nineteen-seventeen. That was the year after Rasputin was supposed to have died. During those murders, Moscow was in a panic because the people believed it was Rasputin reviving himself, returning from the grave.”
“So when similar murders happened in Paris, the Russians thought Rasputin had followed them?”
“The story doesn’t say that,” Sherry said. “But it certainly seems that way.”
That didn’t make a lot of sense, but superstition and ghost stories rarely did.
“All right,” he sighed, scanning the notes on the pad Sherry had given him for any other information. “I don’t think we’re dealing with a mad monk, Rasputin or otherwise, but the Paris killings and the ones in Russia seem connected to ours. Was there any information on the Russian murders?”
Sherry shook her head.
“Thanks anyway,” he said. “I’m going to call on those warehouse break-ins, so if you need me, I’ll be in my office.”
He left Sherry to her work and headed through the back hallway to his private office. The knowledge that the blood rune had appeared at other murder scenes, possibly going back twenty years, was tantalizing, but Alex didn’t have any real information on those killings, just rumors and second-hand reports. It was a lead, just not much of one.
“Maybe Theo will remember something else in another book,” he said as he sat behind his desk.
Pushing thoughts of blood runes and Russian monks from his conscious mind, Alex picked up the folder Sherry had labeled Warehouse Burglaries. Inside was a page for each of the three warehouses that contained the names of the people who had property stolen and what was taken. Alex knew this, and he knew it for the misdirection it was. Whoever broke open all those shipping crates was after something else. Now all Alex needed to do was find out what.
On the top of each page, right below the name of each warehouse, was the name of a contact person. Two were warehouse foremen and one was a clerk. It wasn’t much, but it was a place to start.
With a sigh, Alex reached for the telephone on his desk. Before he could grab it, however, it began to ring.
“Lockerby,” he said once he picked up the handset.
“It’s Danny,” his friend’s voice came through the speaker. “Please tell me you’ve got something on our voodoo killer. I’ve got a half-dozen city councilmen calling me for updates after half of Linsey O’Day’s apartment building fell down. I’m running out of things to tell them.”
“What’s the story?” Alex asked.
“We’re saying it was a structural defect, but they’re not buying it. The Captain says that I am not to tell them what really happened under any circumstances.”
“It would start a panic,” Alex agreed.
Like the one in Paris.
“Do you have any contacts with the police in France?” he asked.
“No,” Danny said, in a voice that suggested Alex should know that. “Why?”
“Because five years ago there was a string of murders in Paris that were exactly like these,” Alex explained.
There was a pause on the line, then Danny came back on.
“I’ll see if Captain Callahan can find out anything,” he said. “In the meantime, however, I need you to come over to the morgue. According to Dr. Wagner, the bodies of Katherine Biggs and Linsey O’Day are decaying at an accelerated rate, even in our cooler.”
Alex clenched his teeth. Ever since Dr. Anderson had retired and moved out west to care for his sister, the morgue had been functionally off limits to Alex. The new coroner, Dr. Wagner, didn’t like private detectives in general and Alex in particular. Every time Alex went to the morgue, he ended up verbally sparring with the man.
“All right,” Alex said, rubbing his forehead. “I’ll catch a cab and be right over.”
He hung up with a sigh and stared at the paperwork from the warehouse robberies. As boring as calling a bunch of surly warehouse foremen looking for what hadn’t been stolen sounded, an afternoon at Wagner’s morgue would be worse.
Forcing himself to close the folder, Alex stood. He picked it up, put on his hat, grabbed his kit, and headed back out to the waiting room. When he got there, Sherry was holding her hand out expectantly for the robbery folder.
“I’ve got to go see Danny at the morgue,” he said, handing the folder over.
“Have fun,” Sherry said with a smile that indicated she knew very well he wouldn’t.
The morgue that served the Manhattan Central Office of Police was in the basement of an unassuming five-story building just inside the mid ring and a few blocks south and west of the Central Office. The morgue was in the basement since building a refrigerated cold room was cheaper if it was underground. The upper floors held the support staff that kept the police department running.
A dark stairwell led down to the morgue, but it was always locked at the bottom, so Alex had to take the freight elevator. The morgue itself was tiled all around with white tiles on the floor and green ones running up the walls. The hallways weren’t lit especially well, which always made Alex think of it as a dungeon. Bright lights did shine out from the office windows and through the operating theater doors, but the dark hallways seemed to soak up the light, not letting it pass along the corridors.
“Alex,” Danny’s voice called out of the gloom to his right.
Alex had already turned that way since the chiller was at the right-hand end of the hallway with the operating theaters to the left.
“Okay, I’m here,” he said as he
approached.
“Thank the heavens,” the sarcastic voice of Dr. Wagner drifted out from behind Danny. “Will you please do whatever it is you’re going to do so I can send these bodies to the crematorium,” he went on. “They’re stinking up my chiller.”
Alex chuckled humorlessly as Danny rolled his eyes. Wagner was a big man, almost as tall as Alex, with a squarish jaw and a handsome face that was a big hit with the ladies. That had gotten him in trouble in Chicago and he’d had to move to New York and take the coroner’s job to preserve his advantageous marriage.
“Dr. Wagner,” he said, giving the man a nod. “As always, your compassion and professionalism are an example to the rest of us.”
“Get going, scribbler,” he growled. “Before I lodge a formal complaint against your friend, here.”
With that, Wagner stormed off in the direction of his office. As he went, Alex picked up the faint aroma of putrefaction coming from the direction of the chiller.
“What is it you want me to do?” Alex asked as Danny turned and led the way around to the heavy, insulated door. As they approached, the smell of rot got thicker. “That’s really bad,” Alex observed.
Danny nodded and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, pressing it over his nose and mouth as he reached for the door.
“Hang on,” Alex said, setting his kit down and opening it. The kit was an old doctor’s valise and it had mounting straps for tools under each side of the fold-down top. One side held a row of jars that had various inks and powders Alex might need at a crime scene. The other side held his oculus and a little-used face mask made of sturdy leather with a rubber seal around the edge. Alex slipped it free of the strap that held it in place, then placed it over his face, securing it around the back of his head with an elastic band.
As he did this, Danny gave him a quizzical look. The mask had holes in each side where paper and cloth filters were mounted. It didn’t look effective for protecting against anything but, like most of Alex’s gear, appearances were deceiving. Taking his lighter from his pocket, Alex lit a tiny wick sticking out of the front of the mask. It burst into flame and vanished, leaving a modified purity rune hovering over the mask. As soon as the rune appeared, the rank aroma of decomposition vanished.
