I stood. “I really am sorry, Jason. And I enjoyed being with you. I just don’t love you, and that’s not going to change.”
“Get out.”
I let myself out and went to my Honda Civic, then sat there staring at the dashboard for a minute before realizing Jason could probably see me, and who knew what he might think? So I drove around to the far side of the lot and parked, clutching the wheel and occasionally shaking. I hadn’t expected Jason to be so vicious, and it hurt more than I’d thought it would. Not because of his cruel words—nothing he said mattered, and most of it probably came out of his pain and humiliation—but that he so easily made light of our relationship. I really had liked him, but I wondered if he’d ever liked me.
I pulled out my phone and texted Viv, IT’S OVER. NEED FOOD.
Her reply came so quickly I was sure she’d had her phone in hand, waiting. PICK ME UP.
I put the car in gear and headed toward the freeway. I felt empty inside, but in a good way, a freeing way. How long might that relationship have gone on without me knowing what kind of person Jason was? At least something good had come of kissing Malcolm.
The memory made me cringe again, but this time it was buried under my fears for him. I wondered how long he could stay ahead of dozens of hunters, all of them skilled at tracking their prey. And not only did he have to avoid them, he had to track his own prey, find the serial killer and bring him to Lucia. I clenched my hands on the steering wheel and sent up a silent prayer, though I wasn’t a particularly religious person and I wasn’t sure I was doing it right. I just hoped Malcolm could find the killer before anyone found him.
15
The shrill beeping of my alarm clock jerked me out of a dream of running naked through a field of buttercups. I slapped it a couple of times until I found the snooze button. My head felt like someone had filled it with molten lead and given it a good stir, my eyes ached, and my mouth tasted like rotten meat. Why had I set my alarm for—I eyed it blearily—seven o’clock on a Sunday morning? Why had I set it at all? I was having dinner with my family later, but that was no reason to get up early. I closed my eyes against the pounding in my head. This was why I never got drunk: I got hangovers from hell.
It was coming back to me now. I’d gone to dinner with Viv, and then we’d gone for drinks, and sometime in there I’d told her I was going to save Malcolm’s life. I’d had a plan for it, too, one I couldn’t now remember. I’d been aware enough to call a cab to take me home, so I couldn’t have been that drunk, but this hangover was making it hard for me to remember. It was probably a bad plan, like most things are when you think of them while drunk. Something about using my head.
Right. I was going to investigate Amber Guittard.
I pressed down on my lidded eyes, trying to keep them from popping out of my head. My memory of the previous night was almost nonexistent. How had I intended to do that? And what was I hoping to achieve? Well, that was easy—I wanted to find evidence that she was connected to the serial killer. No one would be looking at her as anything but a victim. And if she’d actually killed two people, as Malcolm had said, there might be evidence of that.
I groaned and rolled out of bed, padded barefoot into the bathroom, and swallowed some pain pills. Then I went to the kitchen and made coffee. Now I remembered why I was up so early; I was going to visit the Athenaeum, greatest repository of knowledge both magical and mundane in the world. Probably it wouldn’t be busy on a Sunday morning, but I had no idea how long this little quest was going to take. It was possible what I needed wasn’t in the Athenaeum at all. But it was the only lead I had.
Fed, dressed, and with my teeth thoroughly brushed, I called a cab—I’d have to retrieve my car from the club later—and headed downtown.
The Athenaeum access point for Portland was in a florist’s shop off Washington that looked like an old-time movie theater. I went inside and came face to face with a stranger, browsing the shelves and pots full of flowers and greenery. I reflexively smiled, but the man ignored me. I went around the other side of the display and pretended to be interested in the blooming poppies there. Was this guy a magus, or what? I couldn’t enter the Athenaeum with him standing there if he wasn’t.
A woman with blond dreadlocks and piercings in her nose and eyebrow pushed open a door behind me. I jerked my head in the direction of the man. Irina ignored me. This was typical of her; we’d never become friends. “Can I help you?” she asked the man.
I listened with half an ear to their discussion. The man was going to the hospital to visit a sick friend. Why didn’t he get flowers at the hospital gift shop? I ran my fingers along the smooth curve of a poppy petal. I’d never seen poppies in a floral display before. Irina led the man around to my side of the display. “I think you’ll find what you’re looking for on the far wall,” she said to me, emphasizing her words just slightly.
That was invitation enough for me. I crossed the room, avoiding the tall Greek vases that tipped if you brushed them even slightly, and with a final glance to see if the man was watching, ducked through a wall of green-and-yellow striped grass.
The room beyond smelled of loam, though aside from a couple of benches and tall tables it was empty. I moved one of the tables aside and pulled up on a black iron loop that blended with the dark floor, heaved the hatch aside, and knelt down to flip a switch. Lights bloomed beyond the hatch, revealing a shaft about three feet across lined with aluminum. I crawled over to the rungs mounted in one side and began my descent.
The passage to the Athenaeum felt shorter every time, probably because I knew better what to expect, and I never felt claustrophobic anymore, but it still was my least favorite part of the procedure. When I reached the bottom, I hurried through the arched doorway to the hall beyond, which was lined along the floor with the kind of emergency lighting you see on airplanes. The hall and floor looked like riveted sheet metal, but the floor was springy, like foam rubber, and I had to walk slowly to keep my balance.
I touched the first door I came to, and it slid open, revealing lights blossoming in pairs to illuminate the space beyond. Its egg shape always reminded me of a cheesy ‘70s science fiction movie, a pod in which the heroes escape the clutches of the evil space villain. There was no furniture, no seats, just a waist-high pillar of white ceramic. I inhaled the slightly warmer air that came from within and smelled the usual burnt-peanut aroma. Today it made my queasy stomach roil. I stepped inside and the door slid shut behind me.
I stepped up to the pillar and pushed open the sliding compartment near the center of the flat top, between two palm-sized rubbery disks embedded in its surface. Inside was a sharp hollow needle like a hypodermic. I opened my oversized purse and took out a miniature aluminum briefcase that looked like the sort a teddy bear would carry if it were a secret agent. I popped it open to reveal a foam honeycomb filled with vials of sanguinis sapiens, their bluish contents swirling in unseen currents. I hadn’t known how much to bring for this, so I’d over-packed. This represented thousands of dollars of my own money, since I didn’t think I could justify spending the store’s funds on my personal business. Even if it ultimately served all of magery.
I took out a vial and pressed its rubberized seal against the tip of the needle until it touched the base of the recess. Letters flashed on the wall in front of me in dozens of languages, among which was English: PAYMENT ACCEPTED. YOU HAVE [21] CREDITS.
I placed my palms against the rubbery disks, and the wall cleared, the letters replaced by a pinpoint of white light that traced a spinning circle in the center of the wall. It spun fast enough to turn into a solid line, which blinked at me, faster and faster, until a silent “pop” sent silver glitter all across the screen. The glitter started forming letters, but I’d done this before. “I’d like to search in English, please,” I said.
The room exploded with white light coming from deep within my own eyes, impossible to block out. I blinked a few times until my aching eyes adjusted, and pressed my palms more secur
ely against the disks.
Welcome to the Athenaeum, a woman’s voice said inside my head. I wasn’t hearing her with my ears any more than I was seeing the light with my eyes. She sounded like the channel 2 weekend news anchor yelling at me. “Normalize volume,” I said, wincing. This happened maybe every third time I came here, and I’d asked Irina and Guille, the access point attendants, if they could do anything about it. They’d said I was the only one who’d ever complained, like that was an answer.
Volume has been adjusted to your tolerances. Her voice was more comfortable now. What would you like to learn about today?
“Amber Guittard,” I said. “From Seattle.”
The whiteness whirled like a blizzard. Specks of gray appeared, whizzing about like dusky bees, hovering and then zipping away. They left right-angled lines like an Etch-a-Sketch that faded with time. There are fifty-seven hundred records relevant to [Amber Guittard] + [Seattle]. How can I narrow your search?
“Do you have any lists of her movements over the last ten days?”
The bees whirred about. There are zero records relevant to your search. Would you like to try different search terms?
Well, it had been a long shot. “How about…Amber Guittard and mysterious deaths.”
There are seven records relevant to [Amber Guittard] + [mysterious deaths]. Would you like to narrow your search further?
“No. Display records visually.”
An outline of a standard tablet appeared hovering midair in front of me. It had seven little rectangles like tiny book covers on it. I tapped one and the image swelled to fill the wall. It was a newspaper article about a heat wave in Chicago seven years ago in which fourteen people died. Guittard had given a statement to the newspaper about how to prevent heat-related death. I’d known she was a doctor, but I hadn’t realized she hadn’t always lived in Seattle. This didn’t seem like a very mysterious death to me—unfortunate and sad, maybe. I moved on.
Three more newspaper articles had Guittard making some kind of statement about an unexpected death, but these really were mysterious, at least as far as the public was concerned. The individuals concerned were all high-profile, and they’d all died of stroke or something similar, but I knew from the descriptions that they’d all been killed by invaders. If someone were looking for a conspiracy, they might be suspicious at Guittard’s involvement, but I wasn’t sure this was evidence that Guittard was a killer. If she’d killed those three people, it was hard to imagine her being so openly involved with their autopsies. Or maybe that was part of her cover. I set those aside for later examination.
The fifth item was an article from a medical journal for magi, based on the title, which was “An Inquiry Into the Causes and Pathology of Sanguinis sapiens Extraction.” The medical jargon was too complicated for me to follow, but the abstract summarized it as a study about how to most effectively extract sanguinis sapiens from a body. Amber Guittard’s name was at the top of the study. It sounded gruesome, even if they were talking about removing it from a dead person and not a live one, but it was the first real piece of evidence I had: Guittard was an expert at extracting raw magic, and what little I did understand suggested the technique was the same whether the person was alive or dead. So I knew she was capable of committing that kind of murder. Unfortunately, there were a lot of other people who had the same ability. Guittard was different mainly because she wasn’t a bone magus, as it was mostly bone magi who extracted sanguinis sapiens from dead Wardens. I closed that document and moved on.
The next document was Guittard’s true death certificate, produced for the Athenaeum’s records. It was different from her public death certificate, which would reflect the illusion Rasmussen’s people placed on her to disguise her actual cause of death. I didn’t know what they’d made it look like she died from, but it would be something that wouldn’t look mysterious to the non-magical folk who handled her body. But the one in the Athenaeum was accurate. Cause of death: exsanguination due to a knife wound to the heart. Oh, Malcolm. I wondered why this had been tagged as mysterious. That might be Lucia’s influence, refusing to condemn Malcolm out of hand, so the mystery would be the motive behind the murder.
I went to the last document feeling hopeless. Of course Guittard would have covered her tracks. What had made me think I could find what Malcolm couldn’t?
It was a list of names:
Tiffany Alcock
Carlos Solorio
Johnathon Derleth
Aaron Hesse
Samantha Bannister (Ambrosite)
Mike Lavern (Ambrosite)
Shonna McNally (Ambrosite)
The victims—but what did this list have to do with Guittard? “Help,” I said.
Accessing help files. Please state your request in the form of a question. The man’s voice sounded like Robert Downey, Jr., which would comfort me if I weren’t so distressed.
“How do I find out where a record came from?”
Say “display provenance.”
“Exit help. Display provenance.”
A new, smaller screen bordered in red and overlapping the document flashed into existence.
Document produced by Malcolm Campbell.
Seeing his name was a jolt to the chest. Malcolm had written this out, and submitted it to the Athenaeum, but why? He must have thought he would need it as evidence. And it looked off, somehow. “What is the connection between this document and Amber Guittard?”
Amber Guittard examined each of the bodies on this list for evidence of forcible extraction of sanguinis sapiens.
“Huh.”
Please repeat your last input.
“Oh. Um…display a list of all people killed by extraction of sanguinis sapiens in Portland, Oregon—not by invaders—in the last ten days, in chronological order.”
The screen cleared. A list of names appeared:
Tiffany Alcock
Carlos Solorio
Mary Gilbert
Johnathon Derleth
Aaron Hesse
Martin Wellman
Samantha Bannister
Mike Lavern
Shonna McNally
“Display this list side by side with the last document viewed.”
There it was. There were two names missing from Malcolm’s list. It was impossible that he’d mistakenly left them off. What had he said…that Guittard had killed two of the victims herself? Maybe those two were the ones she hadn’t officially investigated, for fear of being linked to them. “Display as electronic files, but I’m not done searching.”
What would you like to learn about today?
“I want to see any files submitted to the Athenaeum by Malcolm Campbell in the last ten days.”
There are four records relevant to your search terms. Would you like to narrow your search further?
“No. Display visually.”
You have insufficient credits to review all four records. Please apply another payment.
I popped another tube over the needle, and about half the liquid drained away. The virtual tablet appeared again, this time with four little rectangles. I prodded one with my finger. It was the list I’d just seen. I closed that and selected the next, and there was what I’d wanted: a map of Guittard’s movements since she’d returned to Portland.
Malcolm had been thorough: the map was a detailed street map of the city and environs, color-coded with a key to the colors. He’d also scribbled notes in the margins in a much messier hand than I was used to seeing from him. There were times and dates next to all the red dots. I checked the key. The red dots were Guittard’s location when the murders occurred. She’d been near every one of the victims except the two that weren’t on Malcolm’s list, when she disappeared from the map entirely.
Why did she kill them? read a note in the upper right, scrawled across the Columbia River. Looking at Malcolm’s handwriting made me feel unexpectedly sentimental, longing to see him again. I swallowed tears and moved on to the next document. This one didn’t make any
sense to me; it was a sequence of numbers that looked like latitude and longitude, except bits of them were missing. A code, maybe? I set it aside to examine later.
The final document was a letter, written in Malcolm’s usual elegant hand:
If you are reading this, it’s likely I have failed in my attempt to wring a confession out of Ms. Amber Guittard. I have what I consider sufficient evidence that she is involved in the serial killings plaguing Portland over the last several days. What I do not have is the identity of her colleague, the man or woman who has committed most of the murders. I intend to leave this documentation in the Athenaeum to speak on my behalf, but I realize my confrontation of Ms. Guittard may result in my death. I can only hope that someone else will see what I have, for I fear the deaths will not stop until Ms. Guittard and her accomplice have achieved their mysterious goal.
He’d signed and dated it—the date was two days before. I read it over again, once more feeling a pang at seeing his handwriting. I was such a sap. “Display records to electronic files. Include information about provenance and dates the files were left in the Athenaeum.”
Records saved. What would you like to learn about today?
“I’m done.”
There was a whirring sound, and I bent to retrieve a flash drive from the compartment in the base of the pillar. “Thank you.”
It was my pleasure, Helena Davies.
Shocked, I stopped where I was. “You know my name?”
Silence was my only answer.
“Can you speak to me?” Still nothing.
I took my half-empty vial of sanguinis sapiens and put it away in my briefcase. “Well, thanks again.” I waved as I always did, feeling less self-conscious about it than usual. It made sense that the Athenaeum was partially aware, since it was a Neutrality like Abernathy’s, but this was the first time it had shown that awareness toward me. It was unsettling.
The Book of Mayhem Page 16
