“Hey, Devries,” he mumbled. “I kind of guessed that you were on your way—that weird broad’s already here.”
Which meant Cassie again. She’s not exactly on the department’s list of favorite people. Rather too contemptuous of the rules for that. I spotted her bright red Harley.
“I’m not supposed to let you in,” Matt told me when I started heading for the grounds. “You’re not on the payroll anymore.”
Which was nitpicking, since he’d just admitted that Cassie—who had never been on the payroll—was already in there. Besides, every cop knew what I did these days. I seemed to have developed a real talent for facing down problems of the supernatural kind. And it wasn’t just a knack. I’d found out recently that there was something more than that involved. Higher powers watching over me. I didn’t understand that fully, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. So I tried to forget about it, simply get on with the job in hand.
Matt was making no real move to stop me.
“Saul inside?” I asked.
“Where else would he be?”
“See you later, then.”
I reached across when I went past him, giving his shoulder a firm squeeze. I was trying to show him that I understood. So many of us have lost people that we care about to magic.
He simply looked away, then reached up and yanked at the peak of his cap, and that was all I got from him.
Once through the gates and past the conifers, surprise struck at me. I’d only been here a couple of times. But I didn’t remember the Tollburn place being quite as small as this. He had been very old. His wife had passed away. He didn’t need a larger dwelling. Perhaps, it occurred to me, the house had once been bigger, and he’d used his powers to hive it off into a space where he felt comfortable. I’d known adepts do stranger things to their homes, Woodard Raine for instance. But then…no, don’t get me started.
The lawn was dense with moisture. A couple more uniformed cops were out there, playing their flashlight beams across the wet turf, looking for signs of anything that shouldn’t be there. This entire area was surrounded by trees, I noticed, giving it a closed-in look.
“I can see footprints going in,” I heard one of the guys say. “But none coming out. What the hell is that about?”
I had to admit, it didn’t sound exactly promising.
With most of the lights in the house on, the leaded windows made it look partway like a cage. But the door was wide open. There was another patrolman, Hugh Williams, stationed by it. He stepped back and let me in. I wiped my shoes on the mat and then, finding no one in the living room, went through to the back.
When I saw the corpse, I felt my frame twitch. Lucas Tollburn was the last person that you’d expect to see this way. Such a massively respected figure in the town, an adept of almost legendary power.
He was lying faceup in a pool of blood. But there was more than that. He had apparently been mutilated. I’d met the man several times. He had seemed amiable and charming. So…who’d do such a thing, and for what reason? Why?
The examiner was crouched over the body. He was new to the team, a small, yellow-haired guy called Troughton, and I didn’t know him very well.
Saul Hobart and Cass were standing at opposite sides of the conservatory, their backs propped against the glass, watching the man do his work. I could make out silhouettes beyond them, the trees I’d noticed and a higher section of the hill, a few other lights shining in the distance. Their heads came around when I walked in, and both Hobart and Cassie nodded to me. Cassie looked like she wanted to favor me with a brief smile, but then thought better of it. She is used to death and tough that way, but understood she ought to be respectful.
The detective lieutenant, Hobart, was smartly dressed as usual, in a plain navy suit, a blue shirt, and a knitted woolen tie. He was, above everything else, a family man. He had a wife and three young daughters up in the northern suburbs. And they defined most things about him.
Massive, sometimes lumbering, he was no soft touch—don’t get me wrong about that. But he was generally slow and thoughtful, sizing up the consequences of his actions. The sort of cop—in other words—who thinks first, hard, and only shoots if he has to.
Cassie, my de facto assistant, was the precise opposite of that. Her black hair cropped closely to her skull, she stood nearly six foot tall. She had on a sleeveless beige T-shirt, and the same ripped jeans and biker’s boots she always wore. The faded tattoos on her arms stood out in the room’s stark light. There was a 9mm Glock strapped to each of her hips, as usual. I sometimes imagine she sleeps with them on.
As I’ve mentioned, she used to have children too. So, when she peered at me, there was a spark of pain in her dark eyes that never really went away.
She looked pretty sickened. Both of them did. I took a closer look at the corpse. Cause of death had been, without any doubt, a stabbing to the abdomen. An exceptionally savage one, it looked like. The blade had been dragged about with expert cruelty. Lucas here had either bled out, or had simply died of shock. But his shirt had been ripped open. And some kind of symbol had been carved into his chest. An oval, with a horizontal line running across it.
I didn’t recognize it.
“It’s postmortem,” the examiner told me, seeing where my eyes had gone.
There were no ligature marks, so I’d already figured that one out. No one simply lay there and let someone else do this to them.
“He went quick,” Troughton added softly. “Barely felt a thing.”
“Anyone know what this is?”
I looked across at Saul. The big guy nodded, his bald head glinting faintly as it caught the light.
“I spoke with Levin, then got on the phone to a few other adepts. This is not a symbol any of them use.” He worked his heavy jaw uneasily. “Gaspar Vernon knew what it was, though.”
Vernon was, among other things, a classical scholar. I didn’t get on with the man particularly well, but I respected him for that.
“It’s a theta,” the lieutenant continued. “Eighth letter of the Greek alphabet. A ‘tee-aitch’ sound, as in ‘them,’ ‘those,’ ‘that.’ But it can signify something else as well.”
I waited, the night’s silence closing in around me.
“It can sometimes stand for thanatos. Which means ‘death’ in Greek.”
At which, Cass let out a snort.
“Someone kills this guy, and then writes ‘death’ on him? So…we’re looking for someone with a knack for stating the obvious?”
Saul peered at her annoyed.
“More like, whoever did this has a weird mind-set, and maybe an agenda.”
I could see what he was driving at. The more I thought about it, then the more it dawned on me we might be heading down a path we’d never gone before. You see, Raine’s Landing might be a pretty weird place. But folks here are generally peaceable. They’ve learned, down the centuries, to get along with their neighbors and make the most of their tenuous lives, largely because there’s no option. We’re all stuck here. No one born inside the Landing can ever get out.
We call it Regan’s Curse. And because of it, nobody from our town can wander off into the outside world. No one visits here for very long either, save for the occasional lunatic. And now, Hobart was suggesting…?
That someone might have killed old Lucas merely for the sake of killing. For the pleasure and the thrill of it. In which case, he might strike again. Serial, I knew they called it in the outside world. And we’d not had one of those before…not human anyway. The thought of it made my blood run cold. This was something none of us was used to.
“Found a pair of sneakers next door, definitely not the old man’s,” Saul went on. “Whoever was here left them behind.”
And what exactly did that indicate? The only thing it did was leave me puzzled.
Troughton finished up and left. A couple of forensics guys moved in. One began dusting for fingerprints. The other went across the flooring with a pale blue light. I was still trying t
o sort this through my buzzing head when a commotion out front brought my attention swinging back around.
Someone else had turned up. A woman, apparently. Her voice was raised in anger, and it wasn’t anyone I knew. She was trying to get past Hugh Williams. He was trying to reason with her, but wasting his breath.
“I have to get in there, you idiot!” Her tone was supercilious, shrill. “Do you have any idea who I am?”
She must have simply shoved past him, next instant.
Her heels made a staccato clattering as they came down the hall.
CHAPTER 5
The house was fast asleep. Darkness and silence hung about it like a pair of overlapping shrouds. There were not even any ticking clocks. Stephen Anderson had always hated those, and made it his habit to buy only electric ones.
His was a two-story home, painted white and with a green-tiled roof, in the area of town known as East Crealley. With small variations, the other houses around it looked pretty much the same for block after block. There were two cars on the driveway, since both adults worked. An aluminum swimming pool out back—little more, in truth, than a large hot tub without the benefit of any heat. And beyond that, an old apple tree, a swing hanging from one of its stouter branches. There were a few scattered balls and other toys. And a kennel occupying the rear corner of the yard, sitting empty.
There’d been a dog until two weeks ago. But Rusty, a friendly but rather dumb Labrador cross, had taken badly sick this summer, and had had to be put down. It was the worst tragedy this family had ever known. Both kids, as soon as they were awake, would whine about it constantly, and their parents were looking for a suitable replacement.
In the smallest bedroom, at the front of the house, slept Joe. He was six, liked comics and superhero TV shows. His sister, Aggie, next door, cared for neither. She was two years older, and already displaying a notable musical talent. There were a flute and oboe in her room—she practiced the whole time. She wanted to move on to alto sax, and was dreaming about playing a solo in the Liberty Theatre on Union Square, which also doubled as a concert hall.
In the largest bedroom, at the back, Stephen Anderson lay slumbering next to his wife, Christine. They were not snugglers, which did not mean that their marriage was emotionally lacking. Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact. They simply needed their own space to get a good night’s sleep, and so had bought the widest bed that they could find.
Stephen worked for one of the Landing’s few insurance companies. There were only two, if the truth be told. It wasn’t a popular business to be in around these parts, for obvious reasons. Both companies had pages of disclaimers attached to their simplest policies. But there’d been a fire recently, at one of the warehouses in the commercial district. And it had not been caused by supernatural forces. Stephen was still trying to crunch the numbers properly, the claimant’s attorney arguing with him at every turn. It had been a rather trying week.
Christine was a high-school teacher. She was good at it, but got far too involved in her students’ lives. Their problems became hers as well. And one of them, a bright thirteen-year-old girl with a promising future ahead of her, was suffering from depression and had even threatened suicide. It had affected Christine badly. She had poured herself a glass of Scotch this evening, before turning in.
Her mouth dropped open, and she began snoring faintly. So the silence in the room was broken, just a little bit.
And then—as if summoned by the noise—there was sudden motion at the window.
One small pane had been left open. Neither of them slept well in a stuffy room. There was not the slightest breeze outside, so the drapes didn’t tremble. But a portion of the darkness directly outside their window…
Seemed to detach itself from the rest, revealing itself as a much paler gray. It moved to the opening.
Wafted in, tendrils of it spreading out across the ceiling. Formed a thick pall of vapor, the same color as a heavy fog. Parts of it would swell, come boiling outward, then shrink back again. Once that it had entered completely, it hung over the couple like a canopy, expanding and contracting gently as though it were breathing.
Christine gave a gentle grunt, then her lips pressed together and her snoring stopped. Her husband’s mouth dropped open instead. They always did everything that way, one picking up where the other had left off.
And that seemed to be the signal that the gray mist had been waiting for. It coalesced abruptly, drawing itself in tight. And then started funneling down in a thin, dank stream.
It went into Stephen’s throat, until every last scrap of it had disappeared.
The man coughed. Then his jaws clamped shut, the muscles in them going very tight. His whole body went rigid for a second.
It relaxed again. He sat up on the mattress in one smooth motion, the quilt dropping away from his chest. His face was completely blank. His eyes came open, very wide. Their normal blue was gone. There were gray from lid to lid. The color swirled before becoming solid.
Stephen smiled—but there was no humor in his expression. Then he murmured two words, in a tone far deeper than was normally his own.
“Special fun.”
He peered around carefully. Being careful not to wake Christine, he climbed out of bed and started heading down toward the kitchen, where the sharpest knives were kept.
CHAPTER 6
The owner of the heels—they sounded like pretty high ones—finally came to a halt bolt upright in the conservatory’s doorway. And that was when I recognized her. Or rather, realized that I’d seen her from a distance a couple of times. It had been at the big garden parties thrown by Raine’s distinguished father, back when I had been a cop.
I’d never spoken to her, but knew a bit about her history. This was Millicent, Lucas Tollburn’s sole surviving grandchild. The man had had two children, a son and a daughter. The latter had never married, and was a reclusive type. But his boy, Tremayne, had continued the bloodline with three kids of his own.
One had fallen to a childhood illness. The second had died in an accident when he had been fifteen. Millicent here was the last one left. It wasn’t exactly the happiest of sagas, but that’s often the case with wealthy families.
There was something else I knew about her too. Not so long ago, she’d married into the Vernon dynasty. It had been Gaspar’s nephew Todd. She’d stayed with him for barely a year, and word had it she’d done very well for herself out of the divorce.
These days, she’d reverted to her family name. She had to be in her midthirties, not the slightest crease or shadow on her expertly made-up face. At this hour? Where’d she been? And she was dressed from head to toe in designer clothing, all of it the darkest shade of blue. Her hair was a lustrous brown, and was tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes were the same peculiar turquoise as her granddad’s. She wore a silver pendant with one large diamond in it—not a magical device, so far as I could tell—and a few narrow but expensive-looking rings. And she stood about five foot seven, very slim. She might even have been attractive save for one small adjective. The word for the way she looked was “pointy.”
Her nose and chin had plenty of that quality. And her ears were rather that way too. Whoever had carved her cheekbones had overdone it with the chisel. And when you saw the way she held herself, the angle of her limbs, you quickly understood that this was someone who was sharp all over. Even her bright gaze, which swept across us quickly as if summing us up. You could cut yourself badly on Ms. Tollburn—I was left in very little doubt of that.
I also knew that she was just a minor leaguer in the hierarchy of adepts. Lucas must have taught her some tricks—that went without saying. But she seemed to prefer using other means to get the things she wanted. Judging by the way she’d prospered, it was a reasonable guess that she was pretty good at that.
The look on her face was haughty, her eyebrows lifted like a distant pair of birds in flight. And then she looked down at the floor, and her whole expression changed.
Al
though…I wasn’t really certain what to, during those first few seconds. Her face didn’t seem sure what shape it wanted to take. As if a dozen different emotions were clashing across it, disbelief and denial at one end of the scale, fright and anger at the other.
Partly she was confused, and I gave her that. But it seemed to me like she was trying to choose what to show the rest of us.
She finally decided. Her mouth contracted and her eyes grew very wide.
“Poppy!”
She came hurrying forward with tears welling up in her eyes. And was practically touching the corpse, when Saul grabbed her gently by the shoulders.
“Let go of me, you imbecile!”
She lashed out at him, catching him on the cheek with her long fingernails. But Saul hung on, moving his grasp down so that her upper arms were pinned to her sides.
“This is a crime scene, Miss,” he told her. “I’m genuinely sorry, but you can’t do that.”
She seemed to think it over, and then quieted down. Her chest was going like a bellows, but no more tears came spilling out. Looking at her carefully, I could see her cheeks were barely wet.
The forensics guys were both watching the scene unhappily, as was Hugh Williams, who’d come stumbling along behind her. Cassie hadn’t even moved. She was still standing by the glass, her arms folded in front of her. And by the steadiness of her gaze, I could see she wasn’t impressed by the woman either. But then, Cass generally has little time for wealthy folk and their petty antics.
Millicent stared around at us.
“Who’d do such a thing?” she blurted. “He was such a well-loved man.”
Saul let go of her and straightened his tie. A spot of blood had appeared on his cheek, but he just ignored it. In fact, he looked as solemn as an undertaker. People tend to forget that dealing with not merely death, but bereavement, is a major part of a cop’s job.
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