“We truly hope nothing more serious has happened to her,” said Raven. “It would be such a waste!”
* * * *
“They were lying up their noses,” said Click.
“They were trying to make us think they were lying,” the Old Woman replied.
“Or trying to make us think they were just trying to make us think they were lying!”
“Slow down and stop talking like a hall of mirrors.” Lestrade sounded disgusted. “Alistair and Raven Anathema are a couple of silly little fancy-class playactors. They’re guilty of grabbing any chance to make themselves look sinister. Nothing worse.”
“How the ‘H’ can you just ignore the most obvious—”
“‘Most obvious’? How can you sit there and make that pair of black lovebirds, one of them in a wheelchair, out to be our most obvious suspects?”
“If she really belongs in that wheelchair,” Click persisted. “Look, Les, by the Anathemas’ own admission, the Carpenters are telling the truth about Sharon being involved with them—”
“There are worse types she could be going through her youthful rebellion with. Raven and Alistair will show her a colorful, harmless fling and let her loose to wander back to the fold and enjoy a good repenting and being born again.”
“All right, if she’s safe and sound, where is she?”
“Probably sneaked off to a friend’s home for a weekend out from under parental supervision,” Lestrade replied.
“Never a parent yourself, were you?”
“I’m a godparent,” she shot back at him. “How about you?”
They were passing the Chisholm Avenue Nineteen Fifty-Six. Click made a sharp swing up and slammed the car smoothly into the nearest parking space. “What if you’re wrong, hey? What if Sharon Carpenter is lying bound and gagged in the basement of that place right now, waiting to be some Satanic Walpurgisnacht sacrifice tonight?”
“You’re an eight percent fantasy-perceiver,” Lestrade reminded him. “Settle down and get it under control.”
A carhop had rollerskated up to the polcar, looking concerned. A pretty, blond carhop—Click was sorry she had rolled straight to the Old Woman’s window. Lestrade tabbed it down and told her, “Two colas.” In the obvious relief of someone learning that the pollies had just stopped on plain old people business, the carhop skated back to the drive-in building. She looked a little like Sharon Carpenter’s photo.
Click took a few deep breaths and said, very evenly, “You’ve usually got the best hunches in the district. Why are you so dead against the obvious this time?”
“Because the only thing that makes the Anathemas ‘obvious suspects’ is their professed religion.” Lestrade’s voice took on a low, trembling intensity that kept her partner silent. “As soon as we start jumping to ‘obvious’ conclusions about anyone’s religion or fancied religion, everyone’s freedom of conscience gets chipped away and we’re that much closer to the Established Church of Holy Mob.”
The carhop brought their colas. Click paid. They drank in silence and left.
After a few curves of the road, he asked, “Any other ideas?”
“I’d like a closer look at the parents.”
“Come on, Les! You actually think they’d lock their own daughter up, and then come report her disappearance to us? Why? Just to get a couple of rich Satanists in trouble?”
“A couple of hours ago, you were the one who called the Carpenters as far out as the Anathemas.”
“Who’s using religion as grounds for suspicion now?”
* * * *
Lestrade was still smoldering when they got back to the station and found that Dea Fortuna wasn’t through with the day’s bad jokes. Acting Lieutenant Montoya wanted a preliminary oral report on their visit to Medam Abbey. Walking into his office to deliver it, they found a caramel-skinned woman with silver and amethyst earrings that hung down to her shoulders and Grecian-style fillets running through her red hair—otherwise conservatively dressed—sitting across from his desk fingering a duplicate photo of Sharon Carpenter, swaying back and forth in her chair, and moaning, “Death! Death!”
Lestrade rolled her eyes up behind briefly closed lids. There, but for the grace of ...
“Ah, here they are at last,” said Montoya. “Good. M. Skysilver, Sergeant Lestrade, Sergeant Click. M. Skysilver is a pro psychic who will be helping us with the Carpenter case.”
Wasn’t it just a little bit early to call in the psychics?
“Crystal Skysilver,” the young psychic said brightly, dropping her doomsaying in order to turn and shake hands with the newcomers. “I’m a disciple of Windcrystal Crowley’s.”
Lestrade shook hands, fighting down a nanosecond of panic—the old, irrational fear that going public about her childhood might somehow sink her from a real polly with occasional good hunches to a psychic ineligible for the regular payroll. Oh, Lady, don’t let Windcrystal ever have identified me with Edith Willowmartin’s snotnosed kid up in South Bend! Or don’t let Windcrystal ever have told this one about it, or at least don’t let this one say anything ... Grow up, Lestrade, you’ve got a good, solid record, and we’ve still got a Constitution that guarantees freedom of religion, even if some of us don’t always pay much attention to it.
Aloud, she asked, “What do Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter say about this?”
“Nothing, yet,” Montoya confessed. “M. Skysilver saw the public announcement and volunteered her services.”
“I could see the aura of death heavy around Sharon Carpenter even in the newscreen image,” Skysilver assured them. “It’s still blacker in the actual photo.”
Click asked, “Are you saying she’s already dead?” Lestrade was glad he’d been the one to put it into words. Out of the old habit of not letting on about her own inside knowledge, she’d resisted asking whether Skysilver called herself a present-tense clairvoyant or a fortuneteller.
Skysilver made her voice hollow. “I am saying that I see the black aura of death heavy around this unfortunate young woman.” More matter of factly, she added, “I could naturally tell you more from some article of personal possession. A hairbrush, for example, or a favorite piece of jewelry.”
“Oh, yes,” said the policewoman. “I’m sure Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter will be delighted to let an occultist loose in their daughter’s bedroom. Or do they make a distinction between witches and psychics?”
“We could tell them we needed her hairbrush for fingerprints,” Click suggested. “Hey! Could you read us any data from the suspects’ personal possessions?”
Skysilver began, “Of course—”
Lestrade’s forced calm exploded. “We don’t have any suspects yet, Sergeant!”
“What about the Satanists?” said Montoya.
“Raven and Alistair Anathema are a couple of harmless fanciers playacting at being Satanists. Sir.”
“Nevertheless,” said Montoya, “they’re known to have been associating with the victim against her parents’ wishes.”
“Let me point out. Sir. That Sharon C. Carpenter isn’t yet known to be a ‘victim’ of anything. Except maybe the urge for an unsupervised fling.”
“She is known to have been associating with the Anathemas?” Skysilver repeated. “Satansim is nothing to playact with, Sergeant Lestrade. Even if your guess about their personal characters should happen to be right, and I don’t mind saying that I wouldn’t go near those two.”
Click chirped, “There, Les, copy that?”
“And if I might give my opinion,” the psychic went on, “considering all the death I see in M. Carpenter’s aura, and with Walpurgisnacht falling tonight, I think this should be checked at once.”
* * * *
“Crystal Skysilver,” said the Old Woman, “is about as good a psychic as Charlie Montoya is a police lieutenant.” It was almost her first comment since Montoya had ag
reed with Skysilver about the need for an immediate investigative step. Click had jumped for the chance to help plot it out, but his senior’s only input had been to insist that the backup stay well back unless called for.
There were things Dave Click had mixed feelings about. Like waiting so long to go in. He was in basic agreement with Montoya’s idea that they’d have to catch them in the act if they wanted to be sure of a conviction, but 22:30 seemed like shaving it a little close. What if the Satanists operated on Eastern Standard Time or something? Or what if, in spite of the lack of evidence, Alistair and Raven headed a whole coven?
Trying to blank his imagination, he pulled up to the fence around the Medam Abbey estate and parked a few meters from the gate.
Lestrade spoke again. “Dammit, Montoya could’ve settled for sending us back before dinner to bully a couple of personal possessions out of them. They’d have been tickled at the added attention, and it would’ve given our so-called psychic something else to playact with.”
“If a little police attention tickles ’em, Les, a midnight raid should throw them into raptures.”
“There’s a difference between dropping in during social hours and crashing a religious ceremony.”
“If you’re right about them,” Click argued, “it isn’t a real religion with them anyway, just fancy-class playacting.”
“With some people—and I don’t mean only fanciers, either—playacting is a religion. ... Damn police state,” she added under her breath, tabbing the official entry button on the dashboard.
The gate swung open smoothly, without protest. “Look there,” Lestrade went on. “No override tangler, no housebreak foiler, not even a query delay. These are people with secrets to hide?”
“Might be a silent alarm.”
“Hooked up to what? The police station? All right, if we’re going in, let’s go.”
“It’s only twenty-two ten.”
“Right. Maybe we can get in, get out, and still let them have their privacy for trying to ‘reseal the astral crack’ and heal her leg. Or had you forgotten that’s what they were planning to do tonight?”
“What about our backup?”
“What Sobieski and O’Hanrahan don’t know, won’t hurt them.”
“You mean, if they try to call us in the next twenty minutes, we should just tell them we’re still sitting outside the gate?”
“If you want to keep working with me, Dave, refer any such call to my wristphone. I can’t see any case-connected reason they might try to call us before time to go home, anyway.”
He drove on through the gate, but right then he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep working with the Old Woman. Solid as her record was, good as her hunches usually turned out, much as sharper people than Acting Lieutenant Montoya said you could learn from her ... it looked as if Lestrade was finally slipping. Not even acting like herself. Under normal circumstances, nobody played things closer to the book, nobody was less likely to blank the obvious without at least checking it out, or ignore the possibility of somebody’s life being in danger ...
From the outside, the five-pointed building was completely dark. If it hadn’t been for the car’s headlights, they’d have had trouble finding the door without crashing into something.
“Not even a dollarstore safeguard,” Lestrade muttered.
“Maybe they know no unauthorized persons are going to dare break into this place.” Stopping the car, the junior sergeant stared at the apparently lifeless obscenity of a house. “Les. What if they aren’t even here? What if they’ve gone someplace else for their ceremony?”
“Then they’ve increased their chances of being spotted—with Carpenter, according to your dearly beloved theory. And with Raven Braithwaite in a wheelchair. Since nobody’s called us about spotting them, I’m guessing they’re down in their own basement.” Lestrade got out of the car, adjusted her penlight, and strode up to the door.
“Official entry?” Click called after her.
“I want to try the knocker first.”
She tried it. Three times, then, after a hundred and twenty seconds, three more times. The clangs came down loud, hollow, and echoless to the man in the car.
Lestrade gave it another full five minutes before she turned and shouted, “Okay, police state override.”
He hit the official entry. Lestrade turned the door handle, and the door opened to her push.
She waved the penlight around at the lobby, giving Click a view of a lightline dancing through darkness. She turned again and motioned him to come on up.
Leaving the headlights on and the car idling, he did.
“M. Anathema!” she was calling into the darkness. “Either of you! It’s us pollies again.”
Nobody answered.
Click muttered at his senior’s ear, “The idea is to catch them in the act.”
“Montoya’s idea, maybe,” she snapped back, finding a light switch and tabbing it on.
Lights flooded the lobby from a stained glass chandelier, and somehow made the atmosphere worse. Before, it wouldn’t have been hard to imagine monsters lurking just out of sight. Now, the absence of any kind of life lay open to view.
Lestrade went to the same corridor they’d walked with Alistair Anathema half a dozen hours ago, found its light switch, tabbed it on, and led the way, cursoring in on the room where they’d met Raven. The senior sergeant knocked twice, opened the door, called, “Anybody here?” and tabbed the room lights. They came on, six decorator lamps at once, enough to show that nobody was there now.
The Old Woman drummed her fingers once on the doorframe, tabbed the room lights off again, and backed out, shutting the door. She looked around, turned to the door just across the corridor, yanked it open, and found the light switch.
This time a bunch of electric candles came on in silver candlesticks on a long, polished realwood table. They were in a dining room, done up like an old movie set, with the remains of a formal dinner set for three at the far end of the table. Alistair Anathema sat in one of the three chairs, staring at the pollies with an expression somewhere between horror and blank surprise. His mouth was about two centimeters open, and he sat perfectly motionless.
“Lady God!” muttered the policewoman.
They knew at a glance, but they still had to make an official check. No pulse, no respiration, not quite cold yet, but getting there. Lestrade finished the job in fifteen seconds, opening her mouth just enough to get the data on vocorecord.
Then she got out her stunner and looked straight at her partner. “All right, Dave, you win. Any ideas where the secret panels are?”
“But why…him? I thought ...”
“Shh!” Head on one side, Lestrade stood listening.
Getting his own stunner into his hand, Click copied her. At last, faintly over his own heartbeat, he seemed to catch something…a ghost whispering just on the edge of the audio range ... it might as well have been a kilometer away for all the pinpointing he could do on it, but he thought there was something ...
Lestrade stared slowly around the room, sniffed, frowned, and led the way back to the corridor. Where she stood still ten seconds longer, listening, staring, and sniffing. To Dave Click, the quasi-sound seemed, if anything, fainter out here; but now he began smelling, or imagining he smelled, something not quite strong enough to be either pleasant or unpleasant.
“Les,” he whispered, “what about that backup?”
She glanced at him, at her watch, back at him. “Okay. Call ’em. Keep it quiet and stay here until you finish the call.”
By the time he was in wristphone contact with O’Hanrahan and Sobieski, Lestrade was back to the entrance lobby. Explaining the situation with his mouth almost touching the mini-mike, Click edged forward to keep her in sight. The smell seemed to be getting very slightly stronger. He decided it was more unpleasant than pleasant. Like some kind of once
sweet spice mixture being charcoaled.
Lestrade was going from doorway to doorway, tabbing on all the corridor lights, each in turn. At the fourth switch she paused and felt the velvet-covered wall beneath the ornate bronze switchplate. After a second, she flattened her palm over the area and pressed.
The entire length of corridor floor started slanting, turning into a long ramp down from the lobby. Lestrade tabbed the light back off. Holding her stunner according to guiderule, with the muzzle pointed at the ceiling, she started down.
Click followed, palm sweating around the handle of his own stunner. At the far end of the corridor, a murky red light was appearing, like the mouth of a cave where someone’s campfire was getting out of control. Smoke came up in heavy gray curls. The smell was definite now, and the sound was clearer, recognizable as a chant, even if he couldn’t yet tell what language it was in, or how many voices might be involved.
Lestrade stopped and let him catch up. “Dave. I’m going in right now. I want you back up there waiting for Sobieski and O’Hanrahan.”
He shook his head. “Both of us, Sergeant.”
“This whole floor could snap back into place, and they wouldn’t know where to find us.”
“Les. Something’s burning down there. I didn’t join up just to catch dates.”
“... All right, but keep your brain in control.”
They headed on, Click aching to break into a dash, his senior partner holding the pace to a stalk. His brain told him that was the right pace. On this downslope, which kept slowly increasing, a run could have given them too much momentum. And, if the fire was out of control, there’d be screaming instead of chanting.
He still couldn’t understand the words of the chant, but now he could make out a high soprano that seemed to be the lead voice, rising above a deep, gravelly chorus. “Les,” he murmured, “it’s a whole damn coven.”
“Brain in charge!” she murmured back.
They had almost reached the end of the ramp. Beyond and below, he could make out a landing…and a few angled stairs. The top of a spiral staircase, he thought. Between the landing and the edge of the ramp, there seemed to be empty space. Optical illusion caused by his angle of sight? Or maybe the ramp wasn’t all the way down yet ...
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 60
