Death Mask

by Graham Masterton

  Frank flicked the lighter and a long blue flame curved out of it.

  Molly called, “Frank! Be careful! Frank—remember that you’re only—”

  But Frank gradually forced his hand around until the flame was playing directly on Red Mask’s cheek. Red Mask screamed, and thrashed, and kicked his legs, but Frank kept the flame concentrated on his face. His red skin crinkled like cellophane, and Sissy could hear it crackle.

  “Get that off me! Get that off me!”

  Red Mask managed to yank his left arm free and immediately started to stab at Frank’s shoulder and sides, screaming all the time. But it was then that his face burst into flame, and then his shoulders, and then his arms.

  “Frank!” screamed Sissy. “Oh my God! Frank!”

  Frank had caught alight, too. His hair was burning, and within seconds the fire had spread down his back, as if he were wearing a cloak made of waving flames.

  Frank and Red Mask then screamed at each other in a terrible chorus of hatred and pain. Then they both exploded. A huge orange fireball rolled across the office, and it was them, rolling over and over. They collided with a central pillar and then they stopped, still blazing so fiercely that Sissy had to raise her hand in front of her face to prevent her cheek from being scorched.

  There was a second explosion, and then the whole office was filled with a whirlwind of white ash, which spun around and around and filled the air from floor to ceiling. The whirlwind was furious, but almost silent, and after less than a minute it gradually began to die down.

  Sissy and Molly and Trevor stood amongst the softly settling ash. It reminded Sissy of the first Christmas she had spent alone after Frank had been killed. She had walked out into the yard and the snow was falling.

  “You did it to me again, Frank,” she whispered. She couldn’t stop her eyes from filling up with tears.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Roses are Red

  Trevor knelt down beside Officer Gillow. The policeman was groaning and coughing, but he was still alive. Sissy knelt down beside him, too, and took hold of his hand, sticky fingered with blood.

  “What’s your name, Officer?”

  “Herbert, ma’am, but everybody calls me Duke.”

  “Well, you’re going to be okay, Duke. I’m a psychic and I can feel it. You’re going to recover, I promise you.”

  “You don’t have to lie to me, ma’am.”

  “I wouldn’t, and I’m not. But after you’ve gotten yourself well, you’re going to retire from the police department so that you can run your own business. A bakery, maybe, or a restaurant. You’re going to get married and you’re going to have at least five children, all girls.”

  Officer Gillow blinked up at her, his face speckled with ash. “Five girls?” he asked her, and a bubble of blood popped between his lips. “Why don’t you just let me die?”

  Molly came back from the other side of the office.

  “Poor Deputy’s dead.”

  Sissy stood up and took hold of her hand and squeezed it. “Deputy did us proud. And remember, he was only made of paint and paper.”

  She didn’t have to add that Red Mask and Frank were only made of paint and paper, too. Their ashes were still tumbling across the carpet.

  “Only Deputy could have picked up Red Mask’s scent,” she said. “And only Frank could have burned him. Look how many times Red Mask was shot, and it didn’t affect him one bit.”

  “We still have another Red Mask to find,” Molly reminded her. “And the police still don’t have any leads at all on the real Red Mask.”

  “Well—finding the real one, that’s up to them,” said Sissy. “We can only find the painted ones.”

  They heard pattering footsteps and clattering noises from the stairwell, and somebody shouting, “Breaching ram! Bring up that breaching ram!”

  “Do you hear that, Duke?” Sissy told Officer Gillow. “Your buddies are coming to get you. You’ll soon be fixed up.”

  A loud banging came from the stairwell doors, and then they heard the locks break open. Trevor came up to Sissy and laid his hand on her shoulder. “How are we going to explain this, Momma?”

  “All we can do is tell the truth. Whether they believe us or not, that’s up to them.”

  “I just want to say that—Everything I used to say about your psychic stuff—”

  Sissy reached up and patted his hand. “You don’t have to say a word. Even I find this hard to believe, and me, I’ve had conversations with real live dead people. It’s like a dream, isn’t it? Your father, and everything. I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and I’ll be back in my bed in Connecticut.”

  A half dozen police officers and two young paramedics came weaving their way between the cubicles. The paramedics immediately started work on Officer Gillow, cutting off his shirt, while two of the police officers came up to Sissy and Molly and Trevor. One of the officers was big bellied, with a brush mustache. The other was round faced with flaming red cheeks and looked far too young to be a cop.

  “What the hell happened here?” asked Brush Mustache.

  Before anybody else could answer, Sissy said, “We were looking for forensic evidence.”

  “You were looking for forensic evidence?”

  “That’s right. We were checking this office for latent scents when the suspect appeared without any warning and attacked Officer Gillow.”

  “You were looking for forensic evidence?” Brush Mustache repeated. “You?”

  “Well, not just me. Me and my son and my daughter-in-law.”

  “It was authorized by Lieutenant Booker and Detective Bellman,” Molly put in. “I’m an accredited CPD sketch artist, and my mother-in-law … she has special forensic expertise.”

  The officer turned to Molly, in her flowery blue gypsy blouse and her tight designer jeans. Then he looked Sissy up and down—a seventy-one-year-old woman with wild hair and silver bangles and a black and silver dress with moons and stars on it.

  “Special forensic expertise?” he said. “I’ll bet.”

  “We had a scenting dog with us,” Trevor explained. “He tracked Red Mask to that closet. Officer Gillow kicked down the door and all hell broke loose.”

  “That the dog there?”

  Trevor nodded. “Red Mask stabbed him to death, and then he went for Officer Gillow. He was like a crazy person. A lunatic.”

  The officers looked around the ash-strewn office. “So where is he now? This Red Mask character?”

  “He disappeared,” said Sissy, promptly.

  “Okay—which way did he go?”

  “I couldn’t exactly say. There was so much confusion, you know. Stabbing, shouting. It was like he vanished into thin air.”

  “Did you see which way he went?” Brush Mustache asked Trevor, as if Trevor was his last hope of getting a sane answer.

  “I, um. No. Not really.”

  “So what’s all this fire damage, all this ash?”

  “Some paper caught light, that’s all. It got a little out of hand.”

  “Some paper caught light? I see. How did that happen?”

  “Listen,” said Sissy. “Is Detective Bellman with you?”

  “Detective Bellman took the elevator, so he’s trapped between floors. The engineers reckon at least a half hour before they can get it working again.”

  “I really need to talk to Detective Bellman. He’ll understand what happened here.”

  Brush Mustache jammed his notebook into his breast pocket. “Okay, ma’am. That’s fine by me, so long as you don’t mind sticking around to make a statement. But you will stick around, won’t you? You won’t leave the building?”

  “Of course not. I’ll wait in the lobby.”

  Brush Mustache and his red-cheeked partner went across to examine the black scorch marks on the office carpet. One of the burns distinctly resembled the outline of a man with one arm outstretched.

  Trevor said, “Are you going to be okay with the stairs, Momma? It’s seventeen flights d
own to ground level.”

  Sissy picked up her purse. As she did so, she lifted her head and frowned.

  “Momma? We can always wait till they fix the elevators.”

  “Actually, sweetheart, I think I’m going to go up first.”

  “Up? What the hell for?”

  “If I remember rightly, George Woods used to work on the nineteenth floor, didn’t he, Molly?”

  “Yes,” said Molly. “He was a Realtor for Ohio Relocations.”

  “I’d like to go up and take a look-see.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not so sure that I understand, either. I have one of my tingles, that’s all. George Woods told a deliberate lie during my séance.”

  “So?”

  “It’s very rare for gone-beyonders to tell lies, even to spare the feelings of the loved ones they’ve left behind. I told Frank about it, and he was interested to know what George Woods was lying about, too.”

  As Sissy and Molly and Trevor walked across to the stairwell, Brush Mustache called out, “Can you manage all those stairs, ma’am?”

  “I’m not an invalid, Officer. I walk ten miles a day, as a rule, and I smoke forty cigarettes down to the filter.”

  “Nothing like a healthy lifestyle, ma’am.”

  As they went through the door, Trevor said, “Listen, I need to go to the office to pick up some paperwork. Why don’t I catch you later? I can take a cab home.”

  “In other words, you don’t want to be involved in what I’m going to do now?” Sissy asked him. “Okay … if you feel like you have to.”

  Trevor lifted both hands. “Momma … psychic investigation, I can put up with. But when it comes to real serial killers … I don’t think I really want to know. Especially when you’re going to go poking around in somebody’s private office. I have my job to think of here.”

  Sissy tapped her forehead so that the little bell on her index finger jingled. “Sorry, Trevor. There’s a little voice inside of me someplace, and it’s telling me to go upstairs.”

  “Yes, Momma. I believe you, Momma. But all I can say is, don’t do anything stupid. I don’t want you ending up in the women’s reformatory, at your age. Molly—make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid.”

  Trevor kissed her on both cheeks, and kissed Molly, too. Then he took the left-hand staircase and went down. Sissy and Molly took a quick look around to make sure that nobody was watching them, took the right-hand staircase, and went up.

  “Christ on a bicycle.” Sissy found it much harder to climb up two flights of stairs than she had imagined. On the landing of the eighteenth floor, she stopped to take a rest, tilting against the railings, trying to get her breath back.

  “What’s happened to me, Molly? I used to bound up stairs like a mountain goat.”

  “I hate to say this, Sissy, but forty years and forty Marlboros a day can take their toll on you.”

  “I don’t believe it. They’re just building stairs steeper than they used to, when I was a girl.”

  “The Giley Building was completed in 1931. You weren’t even born in 1931.”

  “Don’t split hairs.”

  They carried on slowly climbing until they reached the nineteenth floor. Sissy tried the door to Ohio Relocations, and to her surprise it was unlocked.

  “This is very handy indeed,” said Sissy, as she opened it up and peered into the offices. “I thought I would have to use my lock-picking skills.”

  “You can pick locks?”

  “A very smooth conjuror taught me—amongst other things. All you need is the right kind of hairpin.”

  “The staff probably left in a panic, after that last attack. Forgot to lock it.”

  They ventured into the offices. They were laid out in cubicles in much the same way as the office on the seventeenth floor, except that these cubicles had higher sides to them, and the chairs and desks were very much smarter and more modern. The carpets were deep purple, and there was purple lettering across the wall—OHIO RELOCATIONS, MOVING OHIO—and a picture of a circus strongman with an uprooted buckeye tree over his shoulder.

  “Sissy,” said Molly. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m out of breath. Otherwise, I’m hunky-dory.”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Frank.”

  Sissy looked away. “That wasn’t the real Frank, and you know it.”

  “He was real enough to make you happy.”

  “Yes. But I knew that it couldn’t last. Apart from anything else, look at the difference in age.”

  “There’s still Red Mask number two.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning we’re going to need another Frank. And another Deputy, too.”

  Sissy pressed her hand over her mouth and kept it there for a long time. Eventually, she said, “If that’s what it takes.”

  “But what about afterward?”

  “Afterward?”

  “What if Frank survives this time?”

  “You have plenty of erasers, don’t you?”

  “I’m not so sure that you mean that.”

  “No,” said Sissy. “Neither am I. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?”

  Molly looked into one of the cubicles. “What exactly do you think we’re going to find here?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s try the secretary’s office.”

  “You really do have a feeling about this, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but I don’t exactly know what I can feel. During that séance, I think that George Woods was desperately trying to cover something up—something he was ashamed of. Usually, when people die, they don’t care what they confess to. They like to clear the air. But George Woods was hiding something, and I’ll bet that whatever it was, it had something to do with his life at the office. What other life did he have? He went to work, he came home.”

  They walked along the corridor until they found a frosted glass door with gold lettering on it—FRANCES DELGADO, PERSONAL ASSISTANT. Sissy went inside and looked around. A desk, a PC, a dried-up yucca plant. A bookshelf, with rows of files and framed photographs of Ms. Delgado’s family.

  Sissy picked up one of the photographs and peered at it through her bifocals. “God almighty. They look like orangutans.”

  Molly went across to the gray filing cabinet marked “OR Personnel” and tugged the handle, but it was locked. Sissy opened the drawers in Ms. Delgado’s desk, but Ms. Delgado was plainly a neat freak, because it contained nothing but Magic Markers in order of color, and paper clips in order of size, and dictation CDs arranged A to Z.

  As she closed the drawers, however, Sissy noticed a cardboard box under the side table, the one on which the dried-up yucca stood. She maneuvered the box out with her foot so that she wouldn’t have to bend too far, and then she lifted it up onto Ms. Delgado’s desk. On the lid was scrawled “G. Woods, desk” in felt-tip marker.

  Inside, Sissy found mostly trash. Unused matchbooks from Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse and Neon’s. A dog-eared copy of How To Win At Horse Racing. A blue flashlight with no batteries in it. The instruction booklet for an HP desktop printer. Nail clippers. Six or seven ballpoint pens, all with their ends gnawed. A wooden Indian’s head, roughly carved, with the name “Quamus” on it.

  She found heaps of old receipts, too. Receipts for gas, receipts for pharmaceuticals, receipts for drinks at Japp’s and the Crowne Plaza bar. And five receipts for a dozen roses.

  Sissy lifted the florist’s receipts out of the box. She could sense at once that these were what had alerted her psychic sensitivity. They almost prickled her, like real roses. Roses. Just like the roses that had appeared in every DeVane card that she had turned up recently.

  Each delivery had come from Jones the Florists, on Fountain Square. They had been delivered every Tuesday for five weeks to Ms. Jane Becker at Taft, Clecamp & Evans, Attorneys at Law, Twenty-one Giley Building, Cincinnati.

  “You see this?” said Sissy. “I thought Jane Becker told you that she di
dn’t know George Woods.”

  “That’s right, she did. She called him ‘that poor man.’ ”

  “Did she? Well, ‘that poor man’ was sending her a dozen roses every week. Fifty-three dollars’ worth, including delivery. That was from the second week in March to the third week in April.”

  “Do you think they were having an affair?” asked Molly, peering at the receipts over her shoulder. “That would account for George Woods wanting to say sorry to his wife, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes. But I don’t understand why Jane Becker should give everybody the impression that she didn’t know George Woods at all. If some man sent me a dozen red roses every week for five weeks, I’d sure want to find out who he was, wouldn’t you?”

  “Every order had the same message on it,” Molly pointed out. “ ‘Remember the Vernon Manor … when our dreams came true.’ So she must have known who he was.”

  “I think we need to go talk to her,” said Sissy. “I’m pretty sure she’s only told us half of the story. If she was having an affair with George Woods, that would have given Red Mask a motive to attack her, too, wouldn’t it? Red Mask didn’t stab her at random, just because she happened to be in the elevator at the wrong time. It was premeditated. He meant to hurt her. He might even have intended to kill her.”

  Sissy tucked the florist’s receipts into her purse, and they left Frances Delgado’s office. As they began the long, careful climb down the stairs, Molly said, “Red Mask could be one of Jane Becker’s boyfriends … or maybe some guy who was obsessed with her, a stalker, who didn’t like to see her getting too friendly with anybody else.”

  “Or a relative of Mrs. Woods,” Sissy suggested. “A brother or a cousin who wanted to punish them for cheating on her. So there’s a chance that Jane Becker knows who he is.”

  “So why lie about it?”

  “That’s what we have to find out, don’t we?”

  Sissy paused on the fourteenth landing and pressed her hand to her chest.

  “Whoever said exercise was good for you was lying through their teeth.”

  “Do you want to stop and rest for a while?”

  “No … I think I want to get out of this building as soon as I can. There’s still a second Red Mask on the prowl, remember?”