Known Devil

by Matthew Hughes

  “You’re probably right, boss,” I said, “but I still think that you–”

  “Maybe we can do it anyway.”

  As soon as Karl said that, McGuire and I turned our heads to stare at him.

  “I read an article, couple months ago, about a vampire who was able to stay awake during the daytime,” Karl said, “instead of turning into a corpse at sunrise, the way we all do.”

  “How’d he manage that?” I said. “Or she.”

  “Magic,” Karl said. “Dude had a witch cast a spell that let him keep functioning during the daytime. He still had to stay out of the sun, though – that didn’t change.”

  “What kind of magic are we talking about here?” McGuire said. “White or black?”

  “White, definitely,” Karl said. “All legal and aboveboard. I doubt they’d be writing about it in Supe magazine otherwise. It’s illegal to advocate the practice of black magic, boss – you know that, same as I do.”

  “So this vampire that got the spell cast on him – he doesn’t have to rest during the day anymore?” I said.

  “Nah, the spell’s not that good,” Karl said. “It only worked for one day, and the witch who did it had to spend a lot of time in preparation. I guess she did it as kind of an experiment in thaumaturgy. It’s not a consumer magic item yet – not by a long shot. Maybe it never will be.”

  “But it worked at least once,” I said. “That’s what’s important.”

  McGuire asked Karl, “Far as you know, did the vampire who did this suffer any ill effects?”

  “The article didn’t mention any,” Karl said. “Except that the guy was really wiped out by the end of the next night, same as you might be after pulling an all-nighter.” He gave us a pointy grin. “Guess you could say he was dead tired.”

  I sat there rubbing the bridge of my nose for a little while, then said, “I figure there’s a couple of things we need to do pronto.”

  “I assume one of them involves getting a copy of that article Karl’s been talking about,” McGuire said.

  “You assume right.” I turned to Karl. “Have you still got your copy of the magazine at home?”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “I don’t usually keep stuff like that around once I’ve read it. But Supe’s got an online edition that I can access cause I’m a subscriber. They should have all the back issues in there.”

  “Good,” I said. “How about you track down the article and print off three copies – one for me to read and one for the boss.”

  “What’re you gonna do with the third one?” he asked me.

  “Take it with me when I go downstairs to see Rachel.”

  Rachel Proctor leaned back in her creaky desk chair and shook her lead slowly. “I’ve never heard of anything like that being done before, Stan,” she said. “I’m not even sure it can be done.”

  “Then take a look at this,” I said, and handed her the article that Karl had downloaded from Supe magazine. She put on her glasses and read it slowly, her concentration so intense that I could almost feel it. I sat there in front of her desk, tried not to fidget, and kept my mouth shut. That’s something I should try more often – keeping my mouth shut, I mean.

  Finally Rachel looked up and tossed the article onto her desk.

  “Sounds interesting in principle,” she said, “but it’s kind of short on specifics. Supe is usually a decent enough source for news, but it’s no academic journal. It’s hard to know how much of this story is accurate.”

  “There’s academic journals for magic?” I said. I’d never thought about it, but I guess it made sense. They’ve got professional publications for every other field. Christine had once showed me an article that had appeared in the online edition of something called Vampirology. The title was “Free Choice vs Influence: Ethical Issues in Recreational Exsanguination.” Or something like that.

  “Sure,” Rachel said. “The Quarterly Journal of Thaumaturgy is one of the big ones. Then there’s Critical Studies in Sorcery, the Annals of the American Academy of Witchcraft, and a whole bunch of others.”

  “OK,” I said. “I guess I can see how an issue of Supe doesn’t belong in with that crowd.”

  “On the other hand,” Rachel said, “it so happens I’ve heard of the witch who carried out this experiment. Annabelle Araguin has made quite a name for herself in thaumaturgical research circles over the last few years. So it’s possible that this article is actually on the level.”

  “How fast can you find out? Like I said, we haven’t got a lot of time.”

  Rachel shrugged. “I can send her an email right away. But how fast she responds is up to her.”

  “You know this Annabelle …?”

  “Araguin. Yes, slightly. We’ve met at conventions a few times.”

  I used to smile at the idea of witches attending conventions, until Rachel set me straight. All fields have their own professional meetings, she’d explained, and witches were nothing if not professional. I knew that much – you’ve got to be licensed to practice magic, and that license is a lot harder to get than the kind that lets you drive a car.

  “Have you got her email address?” I asked.

  “No, but I should be able to find it online easily enough. I’m sure she’s got a website. Most practicing witches have one.”

  “Of course they do,” I said. “How soon can you track her down?”

  “As soon as you get out of here and let me start looking.”

  I stood up. “I’m practically gone already,” I said, and headed for the door.

  Our shift ended about ninety minutes later, and I checked in with Rachel before leaving.

  “No joy yet,” she told me. “I got Annabelle’s email address without too much trouble, and sent her a message. She hasn’t replied, but it is pretty damn late for people who don’t keep the kind of hours that you and I do.”

  “How about a phone call?” I asked.

  “I’m working that angle, too. Her number’s unlisted, which isn’t surprising. But I’ve sent out some more emails to people who might know her, asking for the phone number. No responses yet, but, again…”

  I nodded. “Most people are still in bed. Well, I’m heading home, but if anything develops, don’t hesitate to call – no matter what time it is.”

  “You’ll be the first to know.”

  I went home, spoke with Christine briefly, then went to bed and slept for eight hours straight. Normally, that’s a good thing – but this time, it meant that Rachel didn’t have any news worth reporting.

  When I got to work, there was no message from Rachel waiting for me. I was about to go down to her office when McGuire sent Karl and me out on a call. There’d been a near-riot at Eric’s, one of the local dance clubs, the night before.. Word was, every male patron in the place had tried to rush the stage during the final number, performed by a local band called the Banshees. After a certain amount of head-scratching, management had finally decided that a supernatural influence had been at work, and called the Occult Crimes Unit.

  The band members weren’t really banshees, of course. Those Irish spirits are harbingers of death, and nothing else. Their singing, although beautiful enough to break your heart, isn’t something anybody looks forward to hearing. Besides, it hasn’t got much of a backbeat.

  As soon as I learned that only the male patrons had been involved in the disturbance, I thought I knew what we were dealing with. Karl and I had a conversation with the band members in the club’s dingy dressing room before they went onstage, and it didn’t take long to find out that I’d been right.

  The Banshees’ bass player was a crew-cut blonde who called herself Scar, but whose real name, I finally got her to admit, was Meredith Schwartz. She didn’t usually sing, I learned, but last night they’d let her take lead vocal on the final song of their set.

  I turned to Meredith. “You’re a Siren, right?”

  She locked eyes with me for a couple of seconds, then looked away. “Ain’t no law against it,” she mutter
ed. She wore a sleeveless black top, and I saw that her upper right arm bore a large heart tattoo – not the valentine kind, but an anatomically correct human heart, valves and all.

  “Of course not,” I said. “There’s no law against being anything. It’s the stuff you do that can get you in a shitload of trouble.”

  “There’s a city ordinance against Sirens singing in public places – or at least, in front of any audience that includes males,” Karl said. “You guys know that – or you ought to.”

  “And if you’re wondering why that ordinance exists,” I said, “what happened in the club last night should give you a pretty good idea.” Looking at the three male members of the band, I asked, “How come you guys weren’t affected by her voice?”

  After a moment, their leader, a beanpole named Artis Bowdin who went by the name of “Daddy Longlegs”, shrugged and said, “Earplugs, man. We always wear ’em when we play. Nobody wants to end up stone deaf, like, ten years from now. You know?”

  “If you let Scar sing lead again, going deaf is gonna be the least of your problems,” Karl told them. “Incitement to riot is a felony, no matter how you do it. And you guys could also be sued for any damages that result, either to the audience or the joint where you’re playing.”

  “We’re not going to bust you this time,” I said. “And the club management says there wasn’t enough wreckage to worry about – not much more than they get on an average night, anyway. But if this happens again, you guys are gonna find yourselves in a world of hurt. Understand?”

  Nobody gave me an argument, which was probably the closest this bunch was ever going to get to “Yes, officer, whatever you say, sir.”

  As we turned to leave, Daddy Longlegs said, “Hey – we got a gig next week at Susie B’s. You got any problem if Scar sings at that one?”

  Susie B’s is the city’s biggest lesbian bar. For reasons nobody’s ever been ever to explain, women are immune to the Siren’s song.

  “Sounds OK to me,” I told him. “Go wild.”

  “Just be sure they keep all the windows closed while you’re playing,” Karl said. “Wouldn’t want guys who were driving past to crash their cars against the front of the building, would we?”

  When we got back to the squad room, our PA, Louise the Tease, handed me a message slip that read, “See Rachel Proctor, ASAP.”

  “It took a while, but I finally hit the jackpot,” Rachel told me. “Unlike most people I know, Annabelle isn’t compulsive about checking her email. I never was able to dig up her phone number on my own, but when she saw my message, she got back to me right away and suggested I call her. Which I did.”

  “And how did that go?”

  “Quite well, actually. Once I explained to her the seriousness of the matter – without telling her too much, I hope – she sent me a PDF of an article she’s written that’s already been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Magical Association. That’s the most prestigious journal in the field, although Annabelle’s article won’t see print for another couple of months.”

  “And this PDF she sent – it contained the spell?”

  “Uh-huh. I’ve read through it once already,” Rachel said, frowning. “The mathematics and symbology are pretty involved, but thank the Goddess for computer programs that handle most of that stuff.”

  “So, can you do it?”

  “Keep Karl awake and functioning past dawn tomorrow?”

  “That’s what we need, yeah.”

  Rachel blew out a slow breath. “Maybe. If I put all other work aside and bust my hump for the next twenty-four hours or so, I might – might – have the spell ready in time, and if I do, it might even work. No guarantees.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d make the effort,” I said. “I know it’s a lot to ask.”

  She stared at me for a couple of seconds, a hand on one slender hip. “Explain to me again what’s going to be achieved if I put myself through all of that – an activity for which I will almost certainly not be paid overtime.”

  I’d had a little speech prepared, in case this question should arise. I was going to talk about duty, and sacrifice, and the greater good, and blah, blah, blah. But looking at Rachel, I knew she’d see all of that as the self-serving bullshit it really was.

  Then I remembered a scene from All the President’s Men, that movie about the two reporters who broke the Watergate scandal all those years ago. As Richard Nixon said much later, “It wasn’t biting all those people’s necks that did me in – it was the cover-up afterward.”

  I’d seen the movie a several times, most recently on HBO a couple of weeks earlier. I thought about what the editor of the Washington Post, played by Jason Robards, had told his two star reporters near the end of the story. So I said to Rachel, “Well, there isn’t very much riding on this, really – just the election, the future of our city, and maybe a few dozen lives – human and supe both.” I tried for a casual shrug. “Not that any of that matters.”

  After a couple of seconds, Rachel gave a tired-sounding sigh. “Tell Karl not to go too far from the station house tomorrow night,” she said. “I’m not sure when I’ll be ready for him – but once I am, there won’t be any time to waste.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said. “And thanks, Rachel.”

  She gave me a crooked smile. “Thank me if the fucking thing works.”

  Twenty-six hours later, I was standing next to my partner in Rachel’s office, saying, “I owe you a big one, Rachel. I’ve got some of an idea of how hard this must’ve been to pull off in such a short time” – how could I look at her haggard face and think anything different? – “and I want you to know I really appreciate it.”

  After looking from me to Karl and back again, Rachel said, “Why don’t you wait and thank me in” – she checked her watch – “an hour and forty-two minutes.” Rachel’s habit of cynically telling us to postpone gratitude might’ve started to annoy me if I hadn’t known about all the intense effort she’d put in for this thing to work. If it did.

  “What happens then?” If I’d taken a second to think, I would’ve realized the answer to that question even before Karl and Rachel said, at the same time, “Sunrise.”

  The Q-and-A session with Slattery was scheduled to take place in what McGuire calls the Media Room, where us detectives go whenever there’s a briefing that involves visual material. It’s got a four-foot-square white screen on one wall and a projection system that’s hooked up to both a Blu-ray player and an Apple computer on the opposite side of the room. I once had to watch a snuff film in there that still gives me nightmares. But the projector wouldn’t be in use today.

  McGuire told me he’d picked the media room because it was about the only place in the building big enough to hold the number of people who were going to be present. I was pretty sure he had another reason for the choice, too – the media room doesn’t have any windows.

  But there were windows between the Occult Crimes squad room and the media room, and covering them to keep out the sun would probably have roused Slattery’s suspicions. So Rachel and I were in the media room with Karl well before sunrise, which was due to arrive in Scranton at 7.24 this morning, according to Weatherwitch.com. The three of us sat in the last row of chairs, with Karl in the middle.

  “How you feeling, buddy?” I asked Karl.

  “About like usual,” he said. “A little hungry, since Rachel said it was better to do this on an empty stomach. But that’s no big deal – I been hungry before. I’ll survive.”

  I sure as hell hope so, I thought.

  “Do you normally conk out exactly at meteorological sunrise?” Rachel asked.

  “Beats the shit out of me, Rachel,” Karl said. “I don’t go by the clock.”

  “Then how do you know when it’s time to close the coffin lid?” Rachel smiled. “Metaphorically speaking, I mean.” She knew that most vampires don’t spend the day inside a mahogany box these days, if they ever did. Karl used a sleeping bag, just like Chri
stine did. I found that thinking about Karl, Christine, and sleeping bags put an image in my mind that I didn’t much care to have there, so I banished it by focusing extra-hard on what Karl was talking about.

  “It’s hard to describe,” Karl said. “You can feel it coming, getting closer you know? It’s like when they give you anesthesia before surgery.”

  “When did you have surgery?” I asked. “You never mentioned that before.”

  “Ah, I got gang-tackled during a football game when I was in high school,” he said. “Broke my leg in three places, and they had to operate on me to fix it – put plates in or something. So, yeah, I know what anesthesia’s like.”

  “Count backward from one hundred,” Rachel intoned with a little smile.

  “Yeah, kinda like that, except without all the counting,” Karl said. “You feel yourself going, and the feeling gets stronger, and then” – he snapped his fingers – “you’re gone.”

  “Well, if you start to experience that sensation, be sure and say something,” Rachel said.

  “So you can do what?” he asked.

  She shrugged tiredly. “Catch you before you hit the floor, I guess.”

  I didn’t tell them, but I had a back-up plan ready in case the spell failed. As a favor, Homer Jordan from the ME’s office had loaned me one of those green plastic body bags that they use to transport bodies to and from the morgue. If Karl turned into a corpse at dawn, the way he usually did, I was going to get him into the body bag and find somebody stronger than Rachel to help me carry him out of the building and to the trunk of my car. The deadly sunlight would never touch him.

  I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about, the three of us, as we sat in that big, empty room, waiting for the sunrise. Somebody started a conversation about a TV program, but that didn’t go anywhere. Small wonder – we all worked nights, and at least one of us hadn’t seen any daytime TV for quite a while.