Storm Demon

by Gregory Lamberson

  Jake curled his fingers around a hilt and drew a long sword sheathed in a scabbard from the box. Setting the scabbard on the sofa, he held it down with one leg and freed the blade. Weighing the weapon in his hand, he recognized the blade that Ernesto Malvado had used to slay Andre Santiago and Jake had used to humiliate the demon Kalfu.

  Jake slid the sword back into its scabbard, which was harder than drawing it, and left it on the sofa. He closed the case for the ATAC 3000, then opened his desk drawer and removed the Thunder Ranch in its shoulder holster and stuffed it into his duffel bag.

  Sitting at his desk, he brought up the Eternity Books website on his monitor. He clicked on the About Us menu button and scrolled over the portraits and biographies that appeared beneath Lilian Kane’s information. Studying the pictures, he furrowed his brow. Every member of the Eternity team was female. He recognized three of the women from World Book Expo.

  Harla Soto, President. Long auburn hair and full lips. She had offered Jake the bottle of water.

  Chloe Sanderstein, Vice President. Blonde with blue eyes. She resembled a model to Jake, and she had worked Lilian’s table with Harla.

  Jada Brighton, Director of Business Development. The black woman who had worked at the opposite table.

  All three women looked beautiful and glamorous. Jake tapped a single finger on his desktop and scrolled through the other profiles. Every woman in the company must have turned heads in person, and each appeared to be under thirty-five. He wondered if this was normal in the publishing world.

  The Order of Avademe had been the opposite: all old men. Until Jake joined their ranks and brought them down. Somehow he didn’t see himself wearing a dress to do the same with Eternity.

  He scrolled back up to Lilian Kane’s photo. In two dimensions, her eyes appeared normal. On his screen, her photo could have been touched up, making her appear impossibly perfect. Face-to-face, she had looked even better. Her employees, if that’s what they really were, appeared beautiful but not in the extreme manner she did. They also looked human.

  What the hell was Lilian Kane? What were her followers? And what did they want with Laurel?

  Are they all psychics?

  He decided to listen to his instincts.

  Witches.

  After parking in a garage, Maria walked a few blocks to the fortified thirteen-level building known as One Police Plaza. Inside the lobby, she showed her shield to the police officers maintaining security and walked around the metal detectors.

  Men and women in suits crisscrossed the gleaming floor of the opulent lobby as she made her way to the elevators.

  “Maria!”

  She turned as a man a foot taller than her, wearing a crisp blue suit, caught up to her: Arturo Delgado, an assistant district attorney with whom she had worked on numerous cases.

  “Welcome back to the trenches,” Arturo said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Is everything okay? I know you took an emergency leave.”

  “Everything’s good. What are you doing here?”

  He smiled. “I had a meeting on the fourteenth floor.”

  One Police Plaza only had thirteen floors, but cops and other people in the know referred to the police commissioner’s office as the fourteenth floor.

  “You must be moving up in the world,” Maria said.

  “I’m trying. Hey, I just heard that Edgar’s back. That’s great news.”

  She felt her body tightening. “It’s the best news I’ve had all year.”

  “Do you know what the story is? I mean, it’s unbelievable, right? I thought for sure he was buried in a field somewhere in Jersey.”

  “I really don’t know anything. I’m just grateful he’s okay.”

  “Would you like to go out for dinner? I meant to ask you before, and then you were gone.”

  She had felt an attraction to Arturo when they worked a case together two months earlier and had sensed the same attraction in him, but she had been preoccupied with her caseload and the search for Edgar. Then she followed Jake to New Orleans.

  “I don’t know. I make it a rule not to date cops, and an ADA falls into the same category for me. We work together.”

  Arturo didn’t bat an eye. “I understand. Give me a call if you change your mind, okay?”

  She smiled. “Yeah, sure.”

  He headed for the exit and she boarded an elevator. She got off on the fifth floor and walked to the door marked Major Crimes Unit.

  Inside, she faced a receptionist to whom she showed her shield. “Detective Vasquez, Special Homicide Task Force. Lieutenant Geoghegan’s expecting me.”

  “One moment.” The receptionist pressed an intercom button. “Detective Vasquez is here.”

  “I’ll be right out.”

  The receptionist smiled at Maria rather than repeat Geoghegan’s words.

  A moment later an office door opened and Geoghegan stepped out. He wore a jacket over his button-down shirt, and the way he straightened his arms to rid the sleeves of wrinkles told Maria that he had just put the jacket on.

  “Good to see you again,” Geoghegan said.

  Maria had met with him three times: to discuss the sixty sawdust-filled cadavers, the shipyard in Brooklyn where Mayor Madigan and several other power brokers were killed, and Edgar’s disappearance. “Thank you.”

  The lieutenant looked at the receptionist. “What’s open?”

  “B.”

  Geoghegan gestured to the corridor lined with interview room doors. “Shall we?”

  Passing the lieutenant, Maria turned the corner into the hall and moved through the open door to interview room B.

  Once both of them sat facing each other, Geoghegan leaned forward, a degree of familiarity between them. “That’s some tan you got. Did you just get back from vacation?”

  You know my deal, she thought. “I was on leave. I just got back.”

  “Where did you go, if I may ask?”

  There was no point in lying to him. If he didn’t already know where she had been, he would find out. “I was on Pavot Island when the shit went down.”

  Geoghegan raised his eyebrows. “What the hell were you doing there?”

  “I went with a friend. We were looking for a cheap romantic getaway. We didn’t expect the package to include a Caribbean revolution.”

  “Holy cow. Were you ever in any danger?”

  Maria reflected on her experiences battling soldiers and zonbies and evading a river full of carnivorous Biogens. “We were in danger the whole time.”

  “Who’s the lucky fella?”

  Maria met his gaze. “Jake Helman.”

  Geoghegan didn’t blink. “You say that like I should know the name.”

  “He told me you’ve spoken a couple of times.”

  “How did you two meet?”

  “You know I took his place in Special Homicide.”

  “And you interviewed him after Gorman killed Helman’s wife, then turned up dead.”

  “So? There was no conflict of interest.”

  “You mean unlike in Hopkins’s case?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No one ever got pinned for murdering Gorman, did they?”

  Maria’s stomach tightened. “No.”

  “But Helman was a suspect.”

  “He was briefly a person of interest, but we cleared him right away.” On Pavot Island, Jake had confessed to the murder. She had never expected she would have to defend her investigation, which she had conducted according to regulations.

  “How was that?”

  You must have seen Jake’s jacket. “His supervisor at Tower International provided him with an alibi. She came to the station and spoke to me and Edgar.”

  “But Kira Thorn disappeared right after that, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.” Jake had killed her as well. “She disappeared after Nicholas Tower died.”

  “You think that’s the connection?”

  “Thorn was Tower’s executive assistant. She
could have had access to secret accounts of his.”

  “I guess that would be easier for you to accept than Helman killing her because she found out he was up to his neck in trouble.”

  “Did you bring me down here to ask me about Jake?”

  “Gorman isn’t your only unsolved homicide, is it?”

  “You know it isn’t.”

  “You’ve got a hell of a record.” He looked like he wanted to smile.

  “Why am I here?”

  “Hopkins disappeared almost a year ago while you and he were investigating the Machete Massacres, which you tied to the Black Magic on the streets. Today you returned to the job and he showed up out of thin air an hour later. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “I called to arrange the end of my leave a week ago.”

  “Where were you then?”

  “Miami.”

  “With Helman?”

  “Yes, we stayed in Miami for a week after we got back from Pavot Island.”

  “Did you come straight here after that?”

  “No, we went to New Orleans to pick up my car.”

  “What was it doing there?”

  She disliked lying. “I drove to New Orleans to get away from things for a while. I was stressed out after I got tagged with those sixty corpses and the FBI took over the murders of Mayor Madigan and the industrialists. Those murders are unsolved too. I ran into Jake while I was in New Orleans. I didn’t know he was there.”

  “How long were you there before you ‘ran into’ him?”

  “A week, maybe longer. I wasn’t ready to come home. Jake was heading to Pavot Island, and he drove to Miami to catch the flight. I decided to join him at the last minute, so I left my car in Orleans and flew to Miami to catch him.”

  “So it was an impulsive, romantic decision?”

  Maria held his gaze. “Yes.”

  “And you wound up on Pavot in the middle of a revolution. That’s some luck. Bad luck follows Helman around just like trouble, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t been dating that long.”

  “Did you happen to see Hopkins on Pavot Island?”

  “No.” It felt good to tell the truth.

  “How about in Miami?”

  “No, and before you ask, I didn’t see him in New Orleans, either. I haven’t seen him at all until he walked into the squad room this morning, and we haven’t spoken over the phone or communicated by text.”

  “Gee, you knew what I was going to ask and everything. Maybe I’m wrong about you. Maybe you are a good detective.”

  “Can I go now, or do you have a point to make?”

  Geoghegan’s smile seemed genuine. “You, Helman, and Hopkins are three of a kind.”

  Maria rose. “Yeah, we’ve all been murder police.”

  Geoghegan stood as well. “You’ve got more than that in common, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

  10

  Jake opened his safe and took out the laptop inside it. Glancing out the window at the Tower, he set the laptop on his desk and raised the lid. Then he removed a battery from the charger beneath his desk and popped it into the laptop—he refused to connect it to AC power and he had disconnected Internet capability—and booted the file on the DVD-R it contained.

  The laptop was dedicated to a single file: Afterlife. Nicholas Tower had funded the research project at a cost of millions of dollars over a period of a nearly two decades. The end result was a compendium of research conducted by scholars, researchers, theologians, and scientists—the most thorough exploration of the occult, supernatural, and existence of an afterlife.

  Jake had downloaded the file from Kira Thorn’s computer. As far as he knew, he possessed the only copy, although the concern that someone else had it tugged at

  his conscience.

  One of the researchers for the Afterlife project had been Ramera Evans, a leading expert on vodou. Evans’s work for Tower unearthed the secrets of reanimating the dead and performing transmogrification. Using the alias Katrina, she had unleashed the drug Black Magic on the streets of New York, created a legion of zonbies to do her bidding, and turned Edgar into a raven after Jake revealed to Edgar that she was consorting with Prince Malachai. She told Jake that she had gained her powers by agreeing to fornicate with the demon Kalfu. Jake wondered if Lilian Kane had done the same thing.

  The laptop’s screen filled with the Tower International logo, and then Afterlife’s search engine opened. Jake keyed in witch, and the program jumped to a section entitled Witchcraft.

  He had skimmed the content in the months after Ramera had transformed Edgar into a raven, hoping to find a way to return Edgar to human form. For selfish reasons, Ramera had withheld certain information from her contribution to the file, so Jake had found no usable data in the program. He only hoped that the six individuals who had contributed to the section on witchcraft had not also withheld critical information.

  The glossary defined a witch as “one credited with supernatural powers, often with the aid of the devil or a familiar; an ugly crone; an alluring girl or woman; a practitioner of Wicca.” While Afterlife dismissed Wicca as a harmless pagan religion, Jake gleaned plenty that aroused his interest.

  Most religions and cultures referenced some form of witchcraft or sorcery. Although the concept of witchcraft existed for as long as mankind kept records, the belief in it blossomed in early modern Europe, where it was viewed as a conspiracy to undermine Christianity, which led to witch hunts. “Well-meaning sorcerers and healers” were considered witches. So were mediums and clairvoyants. All were burned at the stake.

  Laurel’s a healer and a psychic, Jake thought. In ancient times, she would have been considered a witch.

  He read accounts of twenty people executed for witchcraft in New England between 1645 and 1693, and five others died in prison. Every execution appeared to be a case of public hysteria, but Jake had to wonder. Kira Thorn had confessed to studying witchcraft with a coven in Massachusetts, and through Tower’s research project she had learned how to cast an energy spell preventing Cain and Abel from materializing inside the Tower unless summoned.

  The geographic area of New York had become a focal point for psychic and supernatural activity because Avademe had lived in Lake Erie before moving to the waters off Brooklyn. Was Massachusetts a focal point for witchcraft, and if so, was it for a similar reason?

  The intercom on his desk buzzed. “Ripper’s here,”

  Carrie said.

  Jake pressed a button on the box. “I’ll be right out.”

  He shut down Afterlife, closed the laptop, ejected the battery, and returned the laptop to the safe. Then he stuck the battery into its charger, picked up the duffel bag, and opened the door.

  In the reception area, Ripper stood at Carrie’s desk, wearing his traditional long black duster despite the temperature.

  Jake set the duffel bag down on the desk and held out the cash. “Five hundred, as agreed. If we run into any trouble, I’ll make it a thousand.”

  Ripper eyed the cash. “What if I make it back and you don’t?”

  “Consider the extra five hundred an incentive to make sure we both come back.”

  Ripper nodded to Carrie. “Give it to her in case I don’t come back.”

  Jake handed the cash to Carrie, who deposited it into her bag. He had already amended his will to give her the lion’s share of his few assets. Now that he and Maria were getting closer, he wondered if he would need to amend it again.

  Carrie fixed him with a stare. “Bring him back alive and intact.”

  “Will do.” Jake had no intention of putting Ripper in harm’s way. Jake returned to his office and picked up the case with the ATAC 3000 inside it. He carried the case into the reception area, where Carrie had risen on her high leather boots with the Frankenstein soles and kissed Ripper.

  “Wait until I’m gone for that, will you?” Jake rested the box against the wall and picked up the duffel bag.

  Ri
pper withdrew his tongue from Carrie’s mouth and faced Jake.

  “I’m going to get my car. Bring this down to the lobby in ten minutes.”

  Maria double-parked across the street from Sloane House. No cop would give her a ticket. She crossed the street and entered the lobby, her rubber-soled shoes pressing into the long burgundy carpet, and stopped at the doorman’s station. “I’m here to see Alice Morton. My name’s Maria Vasquez.”

  The doorman picked up a landline and entered a number. “Maria Vasquez is here to see you, Miss Morton.”

  “Tell her it’s a social visit.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The doorman hung up. “She heard you. You can go up to 4B.”

  “Thank you.” Maria passed him en route to the two elevators and pressed the button on the wall. When the elevator to her left opened she boarded it and pushed the appropriate button. The door closed and Maria watched the indicator count floors.

  When the door opened, Maria stopped in midstep: a tall black man with facial hair stood before her. Their eyes met and she made him as a bad guy. She had to check herself to keep from reaching for her Glock.

  “You getting off?” he said.

  “Yes.” She slid by him, expecting him to get on.

  He didn’t and the elevator door closed.

  Alice Morton stood three doors and at least twenty-five feet away, half in and half out of her condo.

  Maria looked over her shoulder at the man, who motioned her forward. “Can I help you?” she said in a tight voice.

  “You can’t help me,” the man said.

  Maria took out her shield and showed it to him. “Now you show me yours.”

  The man stared at her, then showed her his driver’s license. His name was John Coker.

  Maria took out a small notepad and wrote the name down. “You got an alibi for around 9:00 a.m. this morning when Darryl Hughes and a hopper called A-Minus got themselves killed?”