“They”—she pointedly glares at the reporters—“might contaminate the scene. I’ll be quick.”
Ella sighs. “Please don’t beat up anyone.”
“Don’t worry, sister.” She starts back down the steps toward the muted onlookers. “I’ve got Mr. Hero Cop for crowd control.”
“Who is that anyway?” Ella mutters. “You recognize him?”
“Nope. Don’t know. Don’t care.”
Ella looks like she really wants to grab Amy and drag her inside. But she refrains. “Just…hurry up and don’t kill anybody.”
Amy chuckles and replies, “Funny. My therapist tells me that all the time.”
Chapter Nine
A moment later, the door is closed behind us—Ella, Liam and me—and we’re beating the snow off our boots in Slate’s toasty warm foyer. Finally free from the media madness, we take in the sight of the grand little house around us.
A sprawling mansion it is not, but Arthur Slate sure did have expensive taste. The ceilings are high, sporting crystal chandeliers, soft yellow light caressing the rooms. Oil paintings adorn the walls, in the hallway, in the living room, in the small study, a few of which I think may be original works. Black and white photographs, framed, vintage, fill up the large gaps between the paintings. Snapshots of old Americana, small town and country life. And finally, in what spaces remain—watches and clocks.
So many watches and clocks.
I’ve never seen this many watches and clocks in one place in my life.
They all look antique. Faces trimmed in gold and silver. Leather bands. Crystal detailing. Ornate black hands moving in sync as the seconds tick by. There are even a few polished wooden pieces in the mix, cuckoo clocks threatening to release a bird on the hour, every hour. In the far corner of the living room stands a half-finished grandfather clock, the wood still light and fresh from carving. A few large cogs and a pendulum are sitting in a nearby armchair, waiting for their maker to come home and finish assembling them into his latest masterpiece.
They’ll be waiting for a long time, I guess, until the beneficiaries in Slate’s will swing by to pack them up…or throw them away.
Ella, still trying to shake off the shock of our confrontation outside, says, “Man, I knew the guy made watches and stuff, but this is a bit ridiculous. Even in retirement, how on earth did he find the time to make all of these?” She bends closer to a little round clock with a gold flower detail hanging on the wall above a side table. “This is incredible work for a new hobbyist. Do you think he got into this stuff before he retired from politics?”
I shrug. “Maybe so. Could have been dabbling in his office, in between vetoing bills and making public parade appearances.”
Ella snorts. “Too right. He was a character, wasn’t he?”
“To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to him until he lost his last election. I was just a teenager back then, so…”
“Of course.” She smacks her cheek playfully. “I forget you’re so young sometimes, Cal. And you, too, Liam.”
Liam snaps to attention, having been staring off into space for the past couple minutes. “Yes, ma’am?”
Ella shakes her head. “Okay, boys. Enough dilly-dallying. Up the stairs we go.”
For the next thirty minutes, we scour the attic and top floor of Slate’s house for any clues that might relate to his death. But our discoveries are…less than helpful. Liam finds a particularly angry bat that chases him out of the attic and nearly sends him tumbling down the ladder to a broken neck. Ella bumps into a box of Christmas decorations while trying to pop the top on a bin labeled IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS, and brightly colored holiday cheer rains down on her with a vengeance. And I trip over a loose board on my way into a guest room and ram my head into the door so hard it leaves a noticeable swollen knob right above my temple.
Yeah, Mayor Slate’s house is a whole bucket of fun.
After being thoroughly dominated by the upper levels of the house, we groan our way back down to the second floor, where Slate’s office and bedroom are located, along with a modest home theater.
Amy meets us at the landing. “Find anything good?”
“Nothing yet,” Ella replies. “How’d it go on your end?”
Amy grins. “Well enough.”
Oh, I can’t wait to watch the news tonight.
Our group now complete, Ella guides us to the aforementioned office.
It’s like something straight out of a movie set. Solid oak furniture. Bookshelves lining three walls. A massive picture window overlooking Slate’s fenced-in back yard, heavy gold and red curtains framing the view. An expensive carpet that matches the curtains stretching across the hardwood floor. A reading nook with an antique-looking armchair, a small table, and a tall lamp. And, of course, a desk fit for a British politician.
The desk is twice the length of Riker’s and significantly more organized. There’s an inbox-outbox tray on the left end, papers neatly stacked in each one. A fancy Apple desktop with a huge screen sits perfectly aligned in the center, with a MacBook Air lying closed nearby. An hourglass paperweight rests atop a manila folder, from which the edges of some white papers peek out. And finally, behind the desk, pushed in neatly in front of the desktop computer, is a large, genuine leather office chair.
Slate may have not been a mayor anymore, but he certainly didn’t lose his sense of political grandeur during his unfortunately short-lived retirement.
After we all finish gawking at the room, Ella clears her throat and says, “Let’s get back to work, guys. There are a lot of books in here, and plenty of places to hide sensitive material. So this could take a while.” She points a finger at the desktop computer. “Amy, why don’t you take a crack at that and see if you can get into Slate’s files? If it’s password protected and we can’t get in, then we’ll take it back to HQ with us and have the IT guys pry it open. Liam and Cal, start searching the books for any suspicious texts—also, make sure you check behind and underneath each book. I’ll start sorting through the crap in Slate’s desk. Okay?”
All three of us nod at our de facto leader and start our assigned work.
For twenty minutes, we find no clues. I flip through sixty-eight books, looking for any texts with supernatural subjects, but find nothing except tax codes, accounting lessons, and thirteen dictionaries, all in English. Liam, my partner in the book search, sighs from the other end of the room, as he pulls out yet another encyclopedia volume that should have been trashed thirty years ago. Meanwhile, Ella is on her knees, sifting through what appears to be a junk drawer in Slate’s desk, while Amy is furiously flipping through a stack of used sticky notes she found somewhere, presumably trying to find Slate’s computer password.
Then, Ella’s phone rings, disturbing the quiet of the room. She tugs it off her belt, checks the screen, and answers, “Dean here. What do you need?” Someone I can’t hear responds. “What?” Ella springs up and marches around the desk, to the picture window. “Are you sure?” A pause. “Damn. Okay. I’ll be down there with help in a minute. Just hold them off.” The call ends, and she jams the phone back into its belt clip.
Amy looks up from her sticky notes. “Problem?”
“Reporters climbing the fence, trying to get into the yard. Don’t have enough manpower patrolling down there. Because we didn’t think the press would be joining us for this excursion.”
“Should we call for backup?” I suggest.
“No.” Ella waves her hand dismissively. “They won’t get here fast enough. I’ll go down myself. And take Liam with me.” She doesn’t say she picks Liam over me because the poor guy is clearly bored out of his mind, but that’s the impression I get from the half-smile she tosses my way when Liam perks up like a dog offered a new toy.
“We’ll be back in a few,” she adds. “You two finish up in here. If you don’t find anything, move on to the bedroom.”
“Got it,” Amy and I say in unison.
Ella heads for the door, Liam trailing behi
nd her. But before she crosses the threshold, she pauses and says, “And for god’s sake, be careful.” Then she’s gone.
I shove my latest book back on the shelf and mutter, “Why do I feel like that was directed at me?”
“Asks the man who fell into a pool of blood earlier today,” Amy retorts.
“That wasn’t my fault!”
“So you say.” She flips through the last few sticky notes. “But really, Kinsey, are you surprised that—Ah ha!” She tosses the whole pile of notes onto the desk, except for the second-to-last one. Scribbled across the small yellow sheet is a single word with a few numbers on the end. “This must be it!”
I maneuver around the desk to watch her type in the phrase, and sure enough, it’s the correct password. The login screen is replaced by a desktop background filled with three dozen blue folders. They all have incomprehensible names, seemingly random combos of numbers and letters. The dock at the bottom of the screen has only a handful of apps in it, notably MS Word, Google Chrome, iTunes, Calendar, and some program with a plain black box as its icon. When Amy mouses over the box, the label that appears above it is a series of four question marks.
“Well, that’s not suspicious,” I mumble.
“Nope,” she replies. “Not at all.”
“I wonder if it’s rigged to self-destruct or something. Maybe if you click on the wrong thing…”
“It’ll activate a virus that wipes the hard drive?”
“Yeah. And that black box looks a tad menacing too.”
“I agree.” She drags the mouse cursor to Google Chrome. “He’s still got his browser open from the last time he logged in. You think it’s safe to bring it up?”
I mull over our options. “If we unplug the computer and take it back to HQ, we’ll lose the current browser session, so…”
“You’re right.” She throws me a smirk. “And if the computer explodes, I can always blame you.”
Before I can get another word in, she clicks on the Chrome icon. The window pops out of hidden mode and fills the screen. For a moment, we wait, tense and half cringing, sure the computer will activate some kind of countdown sequence to blow itself up, or some virus will black out the screen with a huge skull-and-crossbones motif. But when nothing concerning happens after five seconds or so, we lean toward the screen again and check out the tabs that Slate had open before he left his home for the very last time.
Three of the tabs are standard news sites.
The other one is his email account.
Amy clicks over to the email tab without hesitation, bringing up Slate’s inbox. At first, we don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Bills. Coupons. Order confirmations. A few personal emails from distant relatives. But then, in the left-hand sidebar, where all the folders are displayed, I spot one with those same four question marks as its label. I point at it with my index finger, and Amy wordlessly navigates to it. When she clicks on it, all the regular emails disappear and are replaced with a set of archived emails that are about as far from normal as you can get without moseying on into the Eververse.
Amy clicks on the first one in the list. “What the…?”
The title of the email is written in a language I’ve never seen, using symbols that I honestly don’t think an Apple computer should be able to support. The body of the email is even worse, with the same symbols strangely distorted, out of alignment, overlapping one another. Even if I knew this alien language, I still wouldn’t be able to read this email. It’s almost like it’s…two layers of protection. Written in a strange language that most people wouldn’t know, and then encrypted again for extra security.
“Amy, the black box app.”
“A decryption program?”
“Must be.”
“Give me one second.” She clicks through the email client’s options until she finds the one to download the email as an HTML file. It appears in the downloads folder on the dock a second later. “Okay, here we go.” With a deep breath, Amy quickly taps on the black box app. We both recoil, just in case, but the computer doesn’t explode this time either. Instead, a window that resembles the Mac OS Terminal pops up, and the menu at the top of the screen is replaced with a single option: Open File.
Amy shoots me one more look, half nervous, half excited, and then uses the Open File command to select the email she downloaded. A tiny progress bar appears in the middle of the black box window, and we watch with bated breath as the little green line advances toward the end, the words Decryption in Progress written underneath it.
Finally, the decryption finishes running, and in the black window, in stark white letters, the mystery email from Slate’s question-mark folder appears in plain English.
S,
All ingredients now acquired. Have completed initial setup. Will need you to transport your side of the bargain to the designated location by Tuesday evening. Can discuss logistics of transport at Jameson meeting on Monday morning. If need be, can get moving truck or business truck, something inconspicuous. If there are questions, let me know.
By the way, Wolf friend is getting impatient. Pack member hurt during acquisition of summoning instructions. Tread carefully at meeting. Need to keep him calm.
All the best,
H
Amy stares at the screen for twenty silent seconds and then says, “Go get Ella.”
Chapter Ten
Halfway down the stairs, the déjà vu returns with a vengeance. But this time, I’m ready for it.
I wheel toward the banister and hold tight to stay balanced in case I get dizzy again—don’t want to fall down the stairs—and then I focus harder than ever before on Navarro’s instructions.
Don’t move toward the déjà vu, or away from it. In fact, if you can, don’t react to it at all. Let it run its course without your interference. That way, your body’s response to the sensation will be minimized. Whatever the déjà vu is trying to tell you will be easier to identify without nausea or lightheadedness or any other physical symptom distracting you. Find the balance point, Cal.
Essentially, Navarro told me to do nothing and allow the déjà vu to show me what it will or guide me where it wants to go.
Do nothing.
Nothing.
I drop to my ass on the stairs, release the banister slowly, and refrain from fighting the memory war inside my head. I don’t pull away from the overwhelming sensation that I’ve seen this before, but I don’t move toward it either, seeking out the knowledge of my future. Seconds pass where I sit limp and listless, the nausea nothing but a distant echo in my stomach this time, the dizziness kept at bay, no longer risking a fainting spell. And then the time comes—I feel it, like a bump in the road—when the déjà vu should end, when the tempting touch of future knowledge should retreat to whatever dark corner of my head it’s taken up residence in.
That time comes—and it goes.
I feel something new: a tug. In my head. Like someone nailed a string to my brain and starting yanking it. I can’t see this string, or sense it externally in any way, but it’s there, some wispy tendril in the air urging me to move.
Is this the balance point? Did I get it right this time?
Hesitantly, I rise and follow the tug. Down the stairs I go, to the first floor, and then across the hall to another staircase that leads to the basement we haven’t yet cased. I pause at the closed basement door, unsure if I should continue, but the tug becomes insistent.
I turn the knob and push the door open, revealing the darkness below. As I descend, the tug urges me to move faster and faster, like it’s running out of time. I feel along the wall for a light switch, but I don’t find one fast enough. So I’m forced to plunge into the absolute blackness of Slate’s basement.
The tug, despite dragging me in a distinct direction, is not very good at maneuvering around objects in my way. I trip half a dozen times, over boxes, over rusty lawn equipment—including a garden hoe that nearly pierces my boot—over several squishy things that move (and I do not care
to find out what they are).
At last, as I’m moving along the back wall, my arms and legs bruised and aching from running into too many things to count, the tug…stops.
The déjà vu is gone.
Just like that.
And it has led me to a blank wall in Arthur Slate’s basement.
What?
I let out a deep sigh, my whole body shaking, but I don’t feel nearly as bad as I have from déjà vu episodes past. So even if following the weird tug ends up being useless, at least I know how to avoid vomiting up my guts or passing out on the floor. That’s something.
However, if the déjà vu does indeed turn out to be useless, I’ll feel even more cheated than I did before.
With that in mind, I start running my hands over the wall, searching for something. Anything. Pretty please?
It’s only when I’m on my tiptoes, fingers on the ceiling, that I remember ex-Mayor Slate was much shorter than me. He wouldn’t have been able to reach so high without a stool or ladder. So, if he did hide something in the wall, it would probably have been placed lower. I sink to my knees instead and test all the crevices in the cinderblock wall near the floor.
I find it on the third row of blocks up from the dirty concrete.
A tiny lever, hidden in a narrow hole between two blocks. It’s almost too small for me to pull—Slate must have had slimmer hands than me too—but I manage to tuck my index finger underneath it. With a sharp yank, the lever pops forward, and something inside the wall clanks loudly. A lock?
As if to answer my question, the wall suddenly juts forward at an angle. I jerk away, scared it’s a booby trap, but then the logic hits me: it’s a door.
Of course it’s a door. It’s a door hiding a secret room in Slate’s basement, no doubt to conceal some dastardly deeds related to the rather terrifying topics he was discussing with H (Wizard Halliburton, I imagine) in his encrypted emails.
City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set Page 33
