Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  “Dr. Aguilar,” she said, sitting forward. “Would it be possible for us to get a copy of your wife’s unpublished paper? And possibly to take a look at your grandfather’s journals themselves?”

  Ricardo squirmed a little uneasily. Izzie could tell that he was tempted to refuse her request, but that he was having difficulty finding the grounds on which to do so.

  “I can arrange that,” he finally replied, nodding reluctantly. “My wife still has the journals in her office here on campus, so as long as she doesn’t object, you could pick them up right away.”

  “Is she likely to object?” Izzie asked, recalling the conversation that they’d just overheard, and his comments about the strain that all of this had placed on their relationship.

  Ricardo considered the possibilities for a moment before answering. “Possibly. But I think I can convince her. If …” He raised a finger for emphasis. “If you can guarantee us that our connection to all of this remains confidential.”

  Patrick and Izzie both assented immediately. “You have our word,” he said, speaking for both of them.

  “Was there anything else you wished to ask me?”

  “Actually,” Patrick said, raising a finger, “we were hoping that we might get access to the mine shaft where the Undersight project was housed.”

  The professor raised an eyebrow, quizzically. “Whatever for?”

  Patrick glanced over at Izzie before answering. “Again, just following up on some old evidence, looking for new connections that have recently come to light.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Ricardo replied with a cursory shake of his head, “but I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you there. The university merely leased the mine shaft and some of the surrounding grounds, but the land itself remained the property of the city of Recondito. At least until it was sold off to a private concern shortly after the university pulled the plug on Undersight.”

  “Sold?” Izzie said. “To whom?”

  Ricardo shrugged. “I don’t recall. I remember that it was a matter of considerable debate, since the university had put in a bid to purchase it, but in the end the mayor’s office convinced the city council to sell it to some holding company. I’d hoped that we might restart the Undersight project—or something similar—after the furor over the Reaper murders had finally quieted down, but from what I understand the new owners are not willing to entertain any offers to lease the land, for any purposes whatsoever.” He frowned. “It’s probably for the best, anyway. Scientists are not known to be particularly superstitious, of course, but the fact that nearly everyone who went down into that mine shaft to work on Undersight ended up dead somewhat cast a pall over the whole idea of setting up any new experiments down there.”

  “Nearly everyone?” Patrick echoed. “I thought that Fuller had targeted the entire team.”

  “There was a graduate student on the last experiment who either escaped Fuller’s attention or else slipped through his net,” Ricardo explained. “But so far as I know that was the only member of the Undersight team who survived.”

  Izzie remembered what Fuller had said about there being “one more,” and mentioning “the student” right at the end.

  “Well, if there’s nothing else … ?” Ricardo searched their faces. “Then come on,” he said, getting up from his chair. “I’ll walk you over to the anthropology department now. Might as well get this out of the way, so we can get on with our lives.” He gestured towards the door. “And I hope that this will be an end to our involvement in this, once and for all.”

  “Dr. Aguilar, we hope so, too,” Izzie said, getting to her feet.

  He held the door open for them, and as they passed through, he added, “I hope it doesn’t offend you to hear that I would rather never speak to either of you about any of this again.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  On their walk across the campus of Ross University to the Department of Anthropology building, Izzie rehearsed in her head all of the logical arguments she could employ to convince Ricardo Aguilar’s wife to hand over the materials they’d requested. As it happened, not only did she and Patrick not speak to Samantha Aguilar, but they never even saw her. Ricardo had asked them to wait in the hallway when he went in to speak with his wife, and then had not emerged for nearly a quarter of an hour. Through the closed door they could hear muffled voices, raising in pitch and volume as time went on, but could not make out what was being said. Then, fifteen minutes after he had gone in, Ricardo Aguilar came back out, this time holding a file box not terribly dissimilar to the ones in the community room back in the 10th Precinct station house.

  “Here,” he said, shoving the box at Patrick. “Take it and go.”

  As Patrick took the box, Izzie asked, “Shall we return it to you or bring it back to your wife when we’re finished?”

  “If it were up to me I’d say burn it all,” Ricardo said, eyes flashing. “But just drop it at the reception desk downstairs when you’re through with it. They’ll know to get it back to my wife.”

  He took a deep breath, composing himself.

  “Now,” he finally went on, “if you’ll excuse me, I have a full day scheduled, and then my wife and I will be leaving on a much-needed vacation.” He glanced at the box, lip curling in a poorly concealed sneer. “Good luck with all of this”—he looked back up at Patrick and Izzie—“and if there is any luck left over for me, I shall never see either of you again.”

  He nodded curtly, turned on his heel, and walked away.

  “I get the impression that he doesn’t like us,” Patrick said out of the corner of his mouth. “Is it just me?”

  “Come on, chess club.” Izzie grabbed his elbow and steered him towards the stairs. “Let’s get out of here before someone changes their mind.”

  “So much for the idea of seeing what’s down in that mine shaft for ourselves,” Patrick said as he steered the car out of the Ross University visitors parking lot. “Not that Aguilar seems like he’d be eager to help us out even if the University did own that land.”

  Izzie had wedged the file box in between her feet on the floorboard underneath the glove compartment, and was leaning forward, rifling through the contents. A stapled printout of Samantha Aguilar’s paper was on top, and below that a collection of hardcover journals, not fancy leather-bound numbers but utilitarian and inexpensive notebooks, like accounting ledgers purchased at an office supply store. She’d pulled out the topmost of the journals and was flipping through it, scanning the pages crammed with solid blocks of neatly handwritten notes.

  “Well, maybe we won’t need to see it for ourselves,” she said, glancing up from the journal. “Old man Aguilar here seemed to have a lot to say on the subject, so maybe he can shed some light on things.”

  “Yeah?” Patrick glanced in her direction before turning his attention back to the road ahead. “Find anything interesting so far?”

  “This is going to take some time to process, but yeah. I’m seeing a lot of references here that line up with things that Fuller obsessed over. I’ve already run across mentions of the Guildhall and the Eschaton Center.”

  “I thought it was all Mayan mythology stuff?”

  “Oh, that’s in here, too. Most of the text is about that, actually. Stuff about these ‘daykeepers’ and their function. Lots about the disposal of dead bodies, as well. Rendering a corpse so that …”

  She stopped short, her breath catching in her throat.

  “What?” Patrick said. Then, when she didn’t answer immediately, he repeated a little more emphatically, “What?! What is it?”

  Izzie looked up from the journal. “There’s a section here about the proper method of dismembering a body so that it is no longer useful as a vessel for, and I quote, ‘daimons from the Unreal.’ And it refers to those who are controlled by such daimons as ‘Ridden.’”

  Patrick stopped at a red light, and turned in the driver’s seat to face her.

  “And?” he said, leadingly.

  �
�That’s the same term used to describe someone possessed by a spirit in Haitian Vodou,” Izzie explained, a little breathlessly. She turned to look at him. “Nicholas Fuller said that when his victims went down into the dark, the dark came back with them. He said they were ‘ridden,’ and were carrying ‘passengers.’ That’s when he mentioned that the ‘old daykeeper’ had given him the key.”

  She paused, arranging the puzzle pieces in her mind.

  “Patrick, I think he mutilated the corpses of his victims because he believed they were being controlled by some outside intelligence. Killing them wouldn’t be enough …”

  “Because they would just get back up and keep on going,” Patrick said.

  She nodded slowly. “So he did what old man Aguilar describes here. He ‘rendered’ the remains, so that they were no longer useful as vessels.”

  The car behind them honked when the light turned green and Patrick failed to move. He took his foot off the brake and accelerated through the intersection, distracted.

  “So what are you suggesting?” Patrick finally said, eyes on the road ahead.

  “Well, knowing what we know now …” Izzie trailed off, remembering Malcolm Price getting up from the pavement, already dead.

  She turned to face him.

  “What if he was right?”

  When they arrived at the 10th Precinct station house, the detectives’ squad room was a riot of activity. Chavez and Harrison were presiding over the chaos, and it was clear that something big was in the offing.

  “What’s up?” Patrick said as he walked away from the closing elevator doors, with Izzie lugging the file box and following close behind.

  Chavez glanced in their direction as they approached, while continuing to talk to the uniformed officer standing beside him. “… and I want them geared up and ready to roll when I give the signal.”

  The uniformed officer nodded a hasty consent, and then hurried off to take care of whatever it was that Chavez had tasked him with doing.

  “What’s going on?” Patrick repeated, glancing around the room.

  “We think we’re onto something with Fayed’s ‘friends’ here,” Chavez answered, and turned to indicate the computer monitor on his desk. There was a browser window open showing the same streaming video feed of the laptop that Izzie had seen on her phone.

  Patrick leaned down to get a closer look at the screen, while Izzie rested the file box on her hip and leaned to one side to look over Patrick’s shoulder. The dots were still mostly congregated at the site of the Pinnacle Tower at the corner of Gold Street and Northside Boulevard, but there were others scattered around the Financial District and City Center either on their own or in groups of twos and threes. Izzie glanced at a clock displayed in the corner of the screen and saw that it was approaching noon. She figured there was a better than average chance that most of the dots that had drifted away from the Pinnacle Tower represented employees on their lunch breaks.

  “We’ve had eyes on them since last night,” Chavez went on, “tracking their movements. We managed to identify six of the names from Fayed’s contact list that also appeared on the email threads in his personal account that included discussions of Ink, and we’ve been focusing most of our attention on them. We’ve got home addresses for each of them.” He pointed to a printed map of the city that was tacked to a corkboard mounted to the nearest wall, with six red pushpins marking the residences of each of the suspects, four in the Kiev, one in Ross Village, and one in Hyde Park. “The six suspects spent last night at the addresses that we’ve got on file, so that much checks out. And each of them was at work at the Pinnacle Tower by 9:30 a.m. this morning. But when we went back through the feed to see how they got to work, we spotted something interesting.”

  He turned to Harrison, who was sitting at the next desk over.

  “Can you bring up those snapshots?” Chavez asked.

  Harrison grumbled a little, but with a few mouse clicks he brought up a folder on his desktop screen, containing a collection of screen captures of the video feed. He selected six of them and then opened them tiled on the screen, a mosaic of almost identical maps of the city, three images across and two high.

  Circles and lines had been digitally drawn on each of the maps, and Izzie guessed it was most likely done by the detectives quickly with a computer mouse and some simple computer graphics program. But while the results might have been inelegant, they served their purposes.

  “Each of the six started the morning at their respective apartment or house,” Chavez explained, pointing to the red circles that appeared on each of the six maps. “And each of them ended up at the Pinnacle Tower.” He pointed to the circles that marked the terminus of each line. “But none of them took the quickest or easiest route to get where they were going.”

  Izzie leaned in to get a better look. The line that started in Hyde Park veered far to the south as it headed west, past Ross Village and into the northeastern corner of the Oceanview before turning north and finally ending at the Pinnacle Tower. The lines that started in the northwest corner of the city, in the Kiev, traveled south and east past the Pinnacle Tower to the eastern side of the Oceanview, before turning north and heading back towards it. And the one that started in Ross Village traveled south away from the Tower for a dozen blocks, dipping down into the Oceanview, before turning one hundred and eighty degrees and heading back in the other direction along the same path.

  And all six of the lines passed through the same city block in Oceanview, just off of Bayfront Drive not far from the docks.

  Patrick and Izzie turned back to Chavez.

  “So what are we thinking here?” Patrick asked. “Some kind of drop site?”

  Chavez put his hands on his hips. “We’re not sure yet. We’ve had unmarked cars surveilling the area ever since we spotted the pattern, but it’s only been a couple of hours and they haven’t reported back anything of note yet.”

  “Have you tried checking the address that they visited?” Izzie shifted the file box on her hip.

  “No dice,” Harrison answered, shaking his head. “The friends app is only accurate up to a couple of hundred feet, and cellular coverage is pretty spotty out by the docks anyway, so the GPS locations are pretty fuzzy as it is. We know within a city block or so where they went, but not much more than that.”

  “That’s a mostly industrial area,” Patrick said, and Izzie knew that he was familiar enough with the neighborhood to take him at his word. “The fish market isn’t far from there, and I think there’s a cannery or two still in operation. Otherwise it’s all warehouses, other than the docks themselves a few blocks east.”

  “We’re checking property records to see who owns the buildings on that block,” Chavez added, “but so far as we know, based on what our plainsclothes in the unmarked cars have seen from cruising the area, it’s all warehouses and self-storage facilities and things like that, except for one warehouse that’s been converted into office space. You know the kind, little shoebox offices with barely enough room for a desk and a phone.”

  Izzie had been in that sort of converted industrial space before. Cavernous buildings rendered claustrophobic, low suspended ceilings above floors that bounced with every step, thin walls that barely muffled the sound from one tiny room to the next, narrow winding hallways purely utilitarian in design and function. Tiny offices filled with people running Internet businesses, shady accountants, or podcasters who needed a cheap place to record outside of their homes.

  “So we’re hoping that it’s not the office space, I take it?” Patrick said. “Though now that I think about it, door duty in a place like that sounds only marginally worse than the hassle of dealing with a bunch of self-storage bays … just getting the search warrants lined up would be a nightmare.” He glanced over at Harrison. “I’m glad this is your case, guys. I’m happy to just be along for the ride.”

  “Yeah, well,” Chavez jumped in before Harrison could give voice to the sneer that was forming on his face, “don’
t start celebrating just yet. If we can’t narrow things down any further on this end, we’re going to need to search all of the buildings on that block, and that includes you. Captain’s orders. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” Patrick said. “And who’s responsible for assigning the search details?”

  Harrison raised his hand, a smug look on his face.

  Patrick rolled his eyes. “Great. Just great.”

  He turned to Izzie and reached out to take the file box from her hands.

  “Come on, let’s get this stuff in the community room with the rest of the stuff,” he said, starting in that direction.

  “Don’t get too comfortable, Tevake,” Harrison called after him, smoothing down his mustache with thumb and forefinger. “We’ll be ready to move out soon. And I’m thinking you’d be a good fit for the office building, so limber up those knocking knuckles of yours.”

  “What an asshole …” Patrick muttered in a voice so low that only Izzie was close enough to hear. But she couldn’t disagree with his assessment.

  It was only after Patrick had unlocked the community room and he and Izzie were safely inside that they were able to continue their conversation from the ride over.

  “You’re not really serious, are you?” Patrick said, closing the door behind them. “You think that Nicholas Fuller was right to murder all of those people?”

  “No, of course not,” Izzie answered hastily. “Not really. I mean, it’s still murder. But my point is that it’s possible his delusions weren’t entirely delusional, you know? He was pretty far out in the deep end by the time we caught up with him, but maybe his logic when he started out wasn’t so crazy, after all.”

  Patrick put the file box containing Roberto Aguilar’s journals and Samantha Aguilar’s academic paper down on the table with the Fuller evidence.

  “I don’t know, Izzie, it sounds an awful lot like you’re justifying the actions of a serial killer here.”

  “No, honestly …” Izzie shook her head. “It’s just … you and I both know that there’s more going on here than everyone else realizes. That’s why you called me in. But the more that we put the puzzle pieces together, the more it starts to look like there was a method to Fuller’s madness. His actions were repellant, obviously, and I wouldn’t dream of justifying serial homicide. Far from it. But if we’re going to be able to get our heads around what’s happening in this town, we need to consider the possibility that the beliefs that lead Fuller down that path might have been … well, maybe he wasn’t entirely wrong.”