4 The Infernal Detective

by Kirsten Weiss

  Pen clutched the book to her chest. “But what was that cat shadow?”

  Riga and the gargoyle exchanged looks.

  “A thought form?”

  Brigitte nodded, the sound of stone grinding. “Sent to spy, you think?”

  “What’s a thought form?” Pen asked.

  “Your next research project,” Riga said.

  “What?!”

  “Brigitte, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.” Riga leaned a hip against the footboard, explained about the photographer, her wait for the police who never arrived, Donovan’s flight with Cam, caught on video. “He finally answered his phone and said he’d see me tomorrow. For tonight, he seems to be staying at the casino.”

  Pen kicked off her heels. “That’s weird. Why wouldn’t he come back here, with you?”

  “Because something’s wrong,” Riga said. “And he wouldn’t tell me what.”

  “Wouldn’t? Or couldn’t?” Brigitte asked.

  “He left here of his own free will,” Riga said. “That much was clear on the video. And he doesn’t want me to follow.”

  “So you’re not going to,” Pen said.

  “No, I won’t. But… there’s no reason why you couldn’t check on him, Brigitte.”

  “Yes,” the gargoyle said slowly. “I believe ze circumstances warrant it. He is a grown man, and I have much respect for Monsieur Mosse. But there is dark magic afoot, and in these matters, he is still a novice. I shall leave immediately. Door please.”

  Riga escorted her onto the balcony.

  The gargoyle sprang from the ledge and soared into the night, a shadow blotting out the stars.

  Chapter 5

  Brigitte didn’t return.

  Riga waited, tried to stay awake, couldn’t. Then she tried to sleep, and failed. The bed felt strange and empty without Donovan, and she came awake at every creak, every tap of branches on the window, expecting the gargoyle.

  Finally, at six o’clock, she gave up and got out of bed, checked the messages on her cell phone. There were none.

  She showered. Slid into a pair of wide-legged khaki slacks, a blouse, boots. Looped a camel-colored scarf over her arm and carried it downstairs.

  The kitchen was predictably empty at this hour, its sleek chrome sparkling – had the caterers done the cleanup, or the service Donovan employed? She’d have to investigate them as well, she realized, the field of suspects in Cam’s attack widening.

  Hell.

  She toasted a bagel. A bulky manila envelope lay where the new mail usually piled. Cursing, she ripped the end off, dumping a cell phone on the counter. She grabbed a wooden mallet off a wall hook, and with three sharp blows smashed the phone, pieces of plastic and metal scattering across the marble. Riga stood, panting more with anger than exertion. She’d made a mess. But it had felt good.

  “Uh, Aunt Riga?” Pen, hair rumpled, stood in the entryway. She wore a black tank and cammo pajama bottoms. “Why are you killing a phone?”

  “I don’t like the sender.”

  Vasily Gregorovich, local mob boss, Riga Hayworth admirer. No, she corrected herself. Admiration had nothing to do with it. The mobster wanted her for something, thought she was magic. He’d been sending her phones on a weekly basis since their last meeting, and she’d been throwing them out, packages unopened. Until Vasily started sending them turned on. And calling her.

  Donovan’s bemusement at a ringing wastepaper basket had evaporated when he’d answered the phone.

  Pen eyed her warily. “So, did Brigitte find Donovan?”

  With the edge of her hand, Riga swept the pieces of phone into a pile on the counter. “She hasn’t returned.”

  “That’s… kind of weird, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” She knotted her scarf around her neck.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  Riga grabbed her leather satchel from a hook near the entry, slung her pea coat over one shoulder. “Find him myself.”

  *****

  Riga sat in the casino parking lot, fingers tapping the steering wheel of her Lincoln. She checked the clock on the dash. Seven thirty AM. He’d be in his office by now. And he’d told her he’d see her in the morning.

  She wrinkled her brow.

  What if he didn’t want to see her?

  Stupid, he was the one who’d suggested the meeting.

  But what if he’d just said that to… Oh, the hell with it. She flung the door open and stepped into an iron gray world – wet asphalt and towering casino, its lights dimmed by a lowering sky. Squat piles of snow huddled in the corners of the lot, in the shadows, beneath the pines. Beside the casino’s front door grew a massive pine. Donovan’s father had refused to cut it down when he’d built the casino, and Donovan kept it carefully pruned and tended, more wary of a branch falling on a guest than anything harming the giant. It was solidly planted, here to stay.

  She passed beneath a cheerful mish-mash of twinkle lights and holly, through the casino’s sliding doors. Carols vied with the ringing of slot machines. Christmas trees stood in every spare bit of space, each with a different theme – woodland, Mardi Gras, patriotic, fairy (she shuddered), classic Christmas…

  A dealer swished past her, dressed like an elf in a short skirt and curly-toed shoes. “Merry Christmas, Miss Hayworth!”

  “Merry Christmas to you, too,” Riga said, distracted. Donovan knew every employee’s name. She did not, and had not caught the woman’s nametag as she’d flashed past. She’d need to make more of an effort.

  Riga rode the private elevator up to the executive floor. A guard held the elevator door for her, and she stepped out into a hallway lined with paintings of cowboys and high Sierra landscapes. Her boots were silent on the lush, cream-colored carpet.

  She stopped in the open doorway to Donovan’s outer sanctum, and rapped on the frame.

  A woman looked up from behind an oak desk, and smiled. “Good morning, Miss Hayworth.” Olive-skinned, and striking, long black hair shot with a bride-of-Frankenstein gray streak that Riga found frankly awesome.

  Surreptitiously, Riga checked the brass nameplate centered at the front of the woman’s desk. “Hi, Ellen.” She jerked her head toward the closed door to the left. “Is he in?”

  “Yes. I’ll let him know you’re here.” Ellen pushed a button on her desk phone, and a faint buzz rang from the inner office.

  Riga wandered to a grouping of chairs around a polished wooden table, picked up a crisp Wall Street Journal, glanced at the headlines. Economic malaise. Another uprising in the Middle East. And they were still in Afghanistan.

  Same old, same old.

  “Mr. Mosse? Miss Hayworth is here.”

  “Send her in.” Donovan’s voice crackled over the intercom.

  Ellen looked up at Riga.

  She nodded, her heart suddenly slamming against her ribs. “Thanks.” She swept into his office, and at the sight of him, behind his polished wooden desk, her face lit.

  He rose, his answering smile lopsided. He smoothed the front of his Armani suit. “Hello, Riga.”

  The room had an old-fashioned feel to it: herringbone patterned wood floor, wood paneling, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and a set of antlers mounted on the wall behind his desk. Wide windows looked out over the mist rising from the lake. Two bottle-green wingchairs were positioned before a brick fireplace. The fire was lit.

  “Donovan.” She shut the door behind her. “Thank God you’re okay. What happened last night?” She hurried toward him.

  He sidestepped, slipped away from her around the desk, motioned toward one of the wingchairs. “Have a seat.”

  Have a seat? Her face warmed, and not from the heat of the fire.

  She sat.

  He took the wingchair across from her and she regarded him closely. His black hair was slicked back, fifties-style businessman, rather than in its usual rakish waves. Shadows bruised the skin beneath his green eyes.

  He leaned forward, forearms on the thighs of his sharply
pressed black suit, hands dangling loosely. “How are you?”

  She twisted the ring on her finger. “Concerned. Last night I left you with a dead man. When I returned, you were both gone, without any explanation.”

  “I wasn’t sure what to say. I left the room for a moment. When I returned, he was gone. I thought I saw someone heading down the back staircase, so I ran after him. He – whoever it was – took off in a car. I followed.”

  He was lying, and the thought made her feel slightly sick. And she wanted, she wanted, she wanted to believe him. It hurt how badly she wanted. But Riga wasn’t a self-deluding kind of girl.

  “You followed him,” she said flatly, extending the rope.

  “Yes.”

  “And instead of returning home, you decided to spend the night at the casino?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why stay at the casino?”

  “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  She didn’t say anything, just watched him. Finally, “You’re lying to me. And you don’t even have the respect for my intelligence to put much effort into it. I checked the security footage. I saw the two of you leaving in your car, together. Now stop trying to protect me, or whatever the hell you’re doing, and tell me what’s going on.”

  His mouth opened as if to speak. Closed. “I can’t.”

  It was a kick to her gut. She deflated, shoulders curling inward. “Can’t or won’t?”

  He scrubbed a hand across his jaw. Didn’t respond.

  Slowly, she rose. “I don’t know what to say to you. I know in the past I haven’t been completely open with you, and you’ve always called me on it. Rightfully so, I thought. I’ve tried to do better. I have done better. Is this some sort of payback?”

  He sighed, standing. “No, Riga. It’s not payback.”

  “Does this have something to do with Mr. Smith, your secret squirrel?”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “Secret squirrel?”

  “You’ve told me he’s with the Treasury Department, but he’s more than that, isn’t he?”

  His gaze darted around the room. “Um… I can’t say.”

  She stared. The problem wasn’t that he couldn’t say, it was that he couldn’t figure out what to say. And that was very un-Donovan-like. “What is wrong with you? We’re supposed to be getting married in a week, and you’re lying to me, keeping secrets.” For a moment she wondered if this was some sort of passive-aggressive way to break things off, but that wasn’t Donovan either. There was no passive in Donovan.

  “You’re overreacting,” he said.

  “Overreacting?” Blood pounded in her head. “A man was killed in our bedroom!”

  “It seems unlikely now he was dead.”

  “I know dead, dammit,” she shouted. “He was dead!”

  A clatter echoed from the executive bathroom, and Riga oriented toward the sound. “Is someone in there?”

  Donovan frowned. “There shouldn’t be.” He went to the door, opened it, leaned in, closed it. “A soap bottle fell from the sink. I must have knocked it when I was in there earlier.”

  “I don’t care.” She stalked to the office door, turning when her hand touched the knob. “I’m going to find out what’s going on. So by lying you’re only delaying the inevitable, and making me really angry. And you’d better have a damned good reason for this, because I need to trust the man I marry, and right now, I don’t trust you.”

  Riga slammed the door behind her, rattling the paintings on the wall.

  Donovan’s assistant looked up, startled. “Have a good…” Her cheeks pinked. “Day?”

  “Thanks,” Riga snarled. She stormed out of the office.

  What was wrong with him? Hesitation. Lies. Uncertainty. He’d never been like this before.

  Tears pricked the back of her eyes. Angrily, she blinked them back.

  Something had gone on in their bedroom last night. A man had been killed. Magic had been woven. Maybe he was protecting her from something. There had to be a reason for his odd behavior.

  She stopped in front of the private elevator and stabbed the up button, bending back the nail. Grimacing, she curled her fingers around the throbbing digit.

  The doors slid open, and a beefy guard in a green blazer and with a bulge at his hip stepped back to give her space. “Going up, Miss Hayworth?”

  She nodded, stepped inside, her stomach plummeting as the elevator rose. If Donovan had a good reason for his behavior, for hiding things from her, she had good reason to leave it alone.

  But she was damned if she would.

  The elevator doors opened on a high-ceilinged foyer. An antler chandelier dangled from the central point, softly illuminating a wall lined with rows of antlers, the hardwood flooring, and a totem pole. Someone had put a Santa hat on the raven’s head at the top of the pole – Donovan, probably. Christmas was his favorite holiday.

  Damn him!

  Riga tore through the penthouse, searching for evidence before the cleaning crew arrived. The guest bed had been slept in, as had the master bed. Donovan’s clothing from the night before lay neatly folded over the back of a bedroom chair – wrong, wrong, wrong. He normally let it drop where he stood.

  She returned to the foyer and strode past the totem pole, unconsciously nodding to the raven, and through the door into Donovan’s library. Like the rest of the penthouse, the room was styled in American Craftsman. Tall bookcases lined its walls, and flames lit a stone fireplace. But the high-backed leather chairs that normally sat before the fireplace had been thrust against the walls, along with the leather couches. Throw pillows lay scattered about the oriental carpet in the center of the room. Riga stopped dead. Her nose wrinkled at the smell, acrid and cloying.

  She extended her senses outward, probing.

  Magic.

  Dark magic, sickly sweet. The traces were faint, but they were there, an afterimage, a footprint obscured, as if someone had tried to sweep the traces away but not quite finished the job. Someone else’s magic, here? Her stomach turned over. The lakeside house was new, neither truly hers nor Donovan’s yet. But this place had been his sanctum. And someone had snaked their way inside.

  Swaying, she clutched a nearby bookshelf for support. Donovan might have stumbled into dark magic at the lake house, but he’d participated in it here. He had to have known a ceremony had taken place here – they hadn’t even bothered to clean up after themselves.

  Was Donovan under someone’s or some thing’s influence? Was he possessed? It had happened before. Perhaps somehow that had left him open to invasion. It would explain Donovan’s odd behavior, the circles beneath his eyes. But where did the photographer, Cam, fit?

  Her fingers slid along the bookshelf, taking comfort in the feel of the spines: leather and cloth and paper. And then she touched something cold. Rough stone that didn’t belong there. She jerked her hand away, startled.

  The bookshelf was designed irregularly, with narrow rows for books and the occasional double-high shelf for ornaments. Brigitte sat in one of these, claws curled around the shelf’s edge.

  Riga clutched her chest, relaxing. “Brigitte! You scared me. What did you find?”

  The gargoyle stared forward, impassive.

  “Brigitte?”

  The gargoyle didn’t respond.

  Riga craned her neck forward, peered into Brigitte’s blank, stone eyes. “Are you in there?” she whispered.

  Nothing.

  She put her hand on the gargoyle’s back, reached out with her senses.

  Stone, blank, cold.

  She stumbled back, catching her heel upon the carpet, falling hard to the floor.

  Brigitte, her friend, her ally, was gone.

  Chapter 6

  Dazed, Riga walked down the neon-lit corridor of slot machines. They clanged and flashed, a buzz of white noise. Chandeliers cast wavering globules of light across the casino’s gold and red-patterned carpets. A waitress swished by, drinks hel
d high on a silver tray, and Riga automatically made way.

  She wasn’t sure why she’d come down here, except the penthouse felt unwelcoming, hostile. That strange, dark magic permeated it, and Riga had been unwilling to disburse the miasma, leave evidence of her trespass.

  Whoever had done this to Brigitte and Donovan might come back.

  Before she’d left the penthouse, Riga had promised Brigitte’s unmoving figure that she’d fix things. But she didn’t know how she’d keep that promise, or if the gargoyle had even heard her. And how could she fix things with Donovan when he was determined to hide what was wrong?

  She paused in front of a slot machine, stuck a quarter in, pulled the handle. The dials spun – cherries, grapes, a red number seven, a yellow bell. They slowed, stopped.

  Fruit salad. She was a quarter poorer, and no wiser.

  She’d have to stay close to Donovan if she were going to figure this out. A brunch with the early arrivals had been scheduled at a lakeshore restaurant that morning. She’d go with him, as planned, play hostess. It was as good an opportunity as any to start digging. If a caterer or one of the house staff hadn’t attacked Cam, then it was one of their guests. They were more likely to have a history with the celebrity photographer, more likely to have a motive for the assault.

  The murder.

  Her thoughts pinballed between murder and unholy resurrection, and attempted murder and a ghastly mistake on her end. None of the answers added up. Riga had tangled with necromancers, but her experience with the undead was limited to an assault in a Parisian alley by a necromancer’s servant. Even now she wasn’t certain that the woman in Paris had been undead – just unstoppable. But her hands had been cold as the grave, and the woman’s eyes had had that yellowed, dull look of a corpse. Not like Cam. The security video had shown alertness.

  She felt a sudden awareness and turned. As if she’d summoned him, Cam was there, standing on the other side of an empty card table, watching Riga. Her breath caught.

  The photographer wasn’t as tall as Donovan, probably five-foot-ten, and his face was unnaturally pale. His body had a lean toughness and he wore a black leather jacket and jeans – the same clothing from last night. He had close-cut, wavy brown hair, but his facial hair – five o’clock shadow and brows – was coming in pale gray, accentuating his deep set blue eyes. They were filled with longing.