by Jon F. Merz
In time since she had been here, the blood had darkened to a burnt umbra type of brown. I could see bits of organ pieces here and there, rendered so small they looked like bits of chewed up meat stuck into the blood. Had she partially ingested parts of the organs and spat them upon the walls?
I frowned. No. I didn’t think so. If she had, there would have been DNA from the saliva we could use to track her down. Too much risk in doing that.
Perhaps she’d shredded the organs off-site and simply transported them here to be used in such a way.
Which brought up another question: why did she even bother coming here? Why expose herself potentially when she could have found some rundown warehouse somewhere and performed all of her ceremonies there without taking the chance of being found out?
I’d assumed at the start of this whole thing that she was sending a message. That she was announcing her presence in the city. Did this crime scene confirm that? Or was there a deeper reason why she chose to expose herself in this way?
Did she enjoy knowing that she was being pursued? And if that was true, then why go to the bother of trying to gun us down at MIT? And for that matter, how the hell did she even know we’d be there?
It was possible, of course, that the shooter at MIT wasn’t connected to the case. I had a laundry list of enemies I hadn’t managed to put in the ground yet, and I was sure Letourneau had one or two old ghosts lurking around who would like to bury him as well.
Still, I couldn’t pin the drive-by on them without more convincing evidence. And given that we were running this down pretty hard, I had to assume it was connected, at least in some way, to the case itself. But again, I came back to asking myself why she would try to kill us if she enjoyed the chase? Or was this all part of the fun for her?
Newby was starting to set up his step ladder and lay out his gear. Letourneau and I felt a bit out of place. Clearly, Newby knew what he was doing, but I’d never done anything like this. I sat down on one of the few parts of the floor that hadn’t been covered in blood and Letourneau joined me after another moment.
“You ever see him do this before?” I asked.
Letourneau shook his head. “Nope. But considering that really wealthy clients and foreign governments fly him all over the world to consult on a variety of projects tells me that the kid knows what he’s doing. And then he helped me with some stuff, too. So yeah, he can do this, but I’ve never seen him do anything like peel layers of blood off a wall so he can see what’s written underneath. This is a new one.”
“For me, too,” I said. “And I’ve seen some crazy shit in my day.”
“Like what?”
I smirked. “Nice try, slick.”
“Can’t blame a beat cop for giving it the old college try, huh?”
“It’s honestly not as exciting as you think it would be,” I said. “People have this image in their minds of what it means to be a spy, but it’s very rarely what Hollywood tells you it it. Most of the time, it’s boring. There are moments of intensity, but running assets is grunt work. And tracking down bad guys takes a lot of hard investigative research. Plus, as I’m sure you know, surveillance sucks balls.”
“You don’t like pissing in water bottles?” Letourneau chuckled. “I thought everyone lived for that kind of fun.”
“The last time I had to piss in a water bottle,” I said, “I was outside of Tokyo. Parked up in a shitty little Toyota outside of Kashiwa, trying to find a gun runner for the Japanese Red Army. You know them?”
Letourneau eyed me. “Heard of them from way back in the day, pal. They still around?”
“It was an old case,” I said. But Letourneau was right. JRA wasn’t exactly active these days. “Anyway, the guy I was with had brought me a cup of this special tea they had over there. Swore by this stuff. Drink this, he says to me, and you will never be sick another day in your life. So I did. Tasted good. Rose petals or some shit. Anyway, it goes right through me. I felt like I must have drunk thirty gallons of water because I could not stop pissing every ten minutes without fail. I ran out of space in the water bottle and had to keep opening the car door and emptying the contents in the gutter. It was ridiculous.”
“So no more rose petal tea then?”
“No.”
Newby was on the ladder now using some type of solvent and a sponge to work at a section of the wall. I glanced at Letourneau. “Should we go see what he’s got there?”
“Nah. Let him work in peace. If he finds something, he’ll let us know. Until then, we’d just be getting in his way. No sense poking our noses where they don’t belong.”
“So what about you?” I asked him after a few minutes. “How’d you wind up on BPD?”
He shrugged. “I grew up playing cops and robbers.”
“Didn’t we all?”
Letourneau nodded. “Probably. But you know how sometimes you want to be the robber? You know, live out that dream of being able to do something bad and get away with it?”
“Yeah.”
“I never wanted that. I always wanted to be the cop. I always wanted to be the one who caught the bad guys and put them away. I used to throw a fit if someone told me to be the robber. I wanted no part of it.”
“So, grade school straight on to the force?”
“Yup, skipped all that shit in the middle. I didn’t see the need for it.” He smirked. “I did a stint in the Marines, saw action in Fallujah, and came home and got picked up for a class at the academy. Next ten years were a blur. I loved every single minute of it.”
“A natural cop.”
He shrugged. “They say sometimes you’ll come across someone who is just doing what they were born to do. That’s kinda how I feel. Guys like Newby? He’s got multiple talents. Tons of stuff he could be doing if he wasn’t doing one thing or another. Me? I’ve got this single-mindedness to find the bad guys and either put them away or make sure they don’t hurt anyone else.” He paused. “I guess it might seem simple to some people, but I truly love getting out of bed every morning and coming work.”
“If you love it, it’s no longer work,” I said. “I’m glad you’ve found your calling.”
“Your buddy Larazo doesn’t share my sentiment about the job.”
I smirked. “Larazo has been doing the job for far too long. He needs to be sitting on a deck somewhere fishing and telling war stories, preferably with a bottle of whiskey in one hand.”
Letourneau laughed. “I thought the same thing.”
“He’s a good guy,” I said. “We go back a ways.”
Letourneau looked at me. “How’d you end up in the Agency?”
“The better question might be how could I not end up in the Agency?”
“Okay.”
“Here’s the thing: when you show promise at a young age, you meet people. And then those people stay with you for a little while and then you get handed off to other people. All the while, you’re thinking to yourself that you have all this control over your destiny, that you can do whatever you want. But you don’t. Because once you show a little bit of interest, then they start making subtle suggestions to your life that steer you in certain directions. Before you know it, you’re dreaming about the job, and taking on things that they’ve suggested in the past, thinking you’re still making the decisions. By the time you realize what’s happened, you’re already in.”
“That what happened to you?”
“Me?” I shook my head. “Nah, man. I just answered a job listing in the paper one day.”
“Yo!”
We both looked up. Newby was waving us over.
25
“What have you got?” asked Letourneau as we walked over to the ladder.
Newby was a few feet above us, dabbing at sections of the wall with his sponge. I don’t know what he was using to remove the layers of blood, but it stank horribly and I wrinkled my nose. “I found a few more ideograms and I think whoever did this is pretty damned fascinating.”
“Why do you say t
hat?” I asked.
“Because the stuff they’re writing is old. And I mean, old as fuck. Like Akkadian script, ancient Hebrew, stuff like that. This wall almost looks like a sort of Rosetta Stone with the different languages and scripts I’ve found so far.”
“Yeah, but can you tell us what it means?” asked Letourneau. “I don’t really care if the person who wrote this is a genius or not. I just want to know what they have planned so we can stop them from killing again, you know?”
Newby nodded. “Well, it’s occult shit, man. And it’s old occult. Not that crap you find in the New Age section of your local bookstore, either. Whoever wrote this did some serious studying somewhere. This kind of information you don’t happen to come by at college.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning they learned this shit from someone. First hand. You feel me? Not some weekend seminar learn to cast a love spell on someone. This is ancient, learned by rote memorization from someone else who knew how to use it. I mean, I can’t even identify some of these ideograms and I’ve seen a ton of stuff along these lines. I’m going to need to uncover all of this, take pictures, and then go back to my office and work on translating it all.”
Letourneau sighed. “So, what you’re really telling us is it’s going to take time.”
“You can’t rush this shit, man,” said Newby. “And it shouldn’t be rushed anyway. Translating this stuff is painfully slow. Others have tried in the past to rush through the process and the whole thing just gets smeared. Words aren’t exactly what they were supposed to mean, so you end up reading it and it makes no sense. Then the translators start getting subjective about what they think it means, instead of worrying about what it actually means. You might as well start over at that point.”
“But you don’t do that,” said Letourneau.
“No, I don’t,” said Newby. “My mother always taught me to do it right the first time. I live by those words.”
“Can you give us anything now?” I asked.
Newby frowned but turned back to the wall and pointed a finger at an ideogram. “You see this?”
“Yeah.”
“It translates to ‘demon.’” He moved further down the wall and I could see the change in script. “And this here? This is old Hebrew. It means, “Her gates are gates of death.’”
“Are you sure about the ‘her’ part?” asked Letourneau.
“Positive.”
Letourneau nodded and looked at me. “So that would seem to confirm that we’re dealing with a woman, at least.” He shrugged. “Wasn’t sure if we were dealing with a dude or not.”
“No indication either victim was gay,” I said.
He nodded. “True, but he could have disguised himself as a woman.”
“Too much trouble,” I ventured. “I think we’re dealing with a woman and an interesting one at that. She’s obviously got a huge background in history and languages. Enough that she’s giving our boy are a hard time.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Newby from on high. “I just haven’t had the chance to properly look at everything yet. I have no doubt I’ll be able to figure out her game once I see everything set before me. I’m good.”
I smiled and looked back at Letourneau. “Should we stay?”
Letourneau checked his watch. “I’m getting hungry.” He looked up at Newby. “You want something to eat?”
Newby pointed at one of his bags. “I brought a sandwich.”
“You did?”
Newby sighed. “Man, you think this is the first rodeo I’ve been to? I know enough to bring my own supplies to these things. They take time and I need sustenance. So I bring my own.”
“Okay then,” said Letourneau. “Call me when you need a lift back to Cambridge.”
Newby put his sponge down and came down the ladder. “Listen to me dudes: this is going to be slow. I know you want a quick fix and all, but it’s not going to happen here. As I said, I’ve got to take my time. If I mess up and use too much solvent and take off too much, I might ruin the script and we’re fucked. Leave me to it, you guys go on with your day. I’ll be here. Once I’m done uncovering all of this stuff, I’ll grab some pix and head back to my office. I’ll call you as soon as I have something. But until then, you guys are kinda just clogging up the work site.”
“So you want us gone,” said Letourneau.
“Don’t you have to go find out who did the drive-by on us this morning?” asked Newby.
“Still waiting for a phone call back from Cambridge PD.”
“So go to lunch,” said Newby as he started back up the ladder. “And shut the door on your way out. I’m going to need the music on loud while I work.”
“You brought a radio?”
Newby pointed to another bag. “You mind switching it on on your way out? It’s all set to go.”
I found the old school boom box in the bag and pulled it out. Newby must have customized it, though because it had an old iPod sitting in a bay that came to life as soon as I plugged it in. A song started almost immediately, and Newby started singing while he worked.
Letourneau pointed at the door and we made our exit.
Down in the lobby, Letourneau’s phone rang. He opened up the call and listened for a moment. After a few questions, he hung up and looked at me. “Cambridge. They found a stolen car in Belmont that matched the description we gave them.”
“Are they sure that’s the car?”
“Bullet holes in the back from when we returned fire. There are probably only a few possibilities for cars involved in drive-by.”
“Good point. Anything of note?”
Letourneau shook his head. “Not a damned thing. Entire car was wiped down pretty much the same as the one we found in Allston.”
“Dammit.”
“Not even a shell casing,” said Letourneau. “Whoever this is really knows how to be careful. I mean, Cambridge is going over it with a fine tooth comb, but I doubt very much they’ll find a damned thing we can use to track this woman down.”
“So far, the only real thing we have going for us is upstairs singing along with his boom box,” I said. “And I hate the fact we can’t seem to find shit on this woman.”
“You’d think in this day and age, that it wouldn’t be this hard,” said Letourneau. “Everyone’s got a digital footprint, it’s just a matter of knowing what the search criteria would be.”
“You think it’s worthwhile typing in ‘knows Akkadian and Hebrew’ and seeing what pops out?”
Letourneau sighed. “I need food.”
We wandered outside and he pointed further down the way. “There’s supposed to be a good joint down here that serves a decent meatball.”
“Italian?”
He nodded. “Kinda feeling it today. That cool?”
“Sure.”
A couple blocks down we found the place. It was new and chic but with limited seating. Letourneau managed to find us a spot by the back of the dining room and we settled in to wait for our orders. Letourneau got himself a meatball panini and I ordered the veal parm.
“So what do we have so far?”
“A woman. Presumably attractive.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Letourneau.
I shrugged. “Our two victims were decent-looking guys. From what we know about them, they didn’t strike me as the types who’d engage in a pity fuck.”
Letourneau sighed. “Ah, the pity fuck.”
“Dragging up some fond memories, are you?”
He chuckled. “Hey, we’ve all got one or two in the past we might not care to trot out for public spectacle, but they were still fun, right?”
“If you say so.”
He frowned. “Yeah, you can’t tell me all of yours have been tens. Especially when you were first learning how to handle your equipment.”
I smiled. “There may have been one or two.”
He nodded. “Damn right there were.” He waved his hand. “But yeah, okay, let’s go with the idea that
she’s attractive. How old are we guessing she is?”
“Twenty to fifty,” I said.
Letourneau leaned forward. “Seriously?”
I shrugged. “We can’t disregard any possibles.”
“You sure you don’t want to open it up to potential GILFs too?”
“What the hell is a GILF?”
“Grandmother I’d Like To-“
I held my hand up. “Roger that, I got it. Thanks.”
“Just saying, who knows? These guys could have had a thing for the older gals. Can we afford to discount any of them from our search?”
“I suppose not.” I shook my head. “So, we’re spanning decades now and all we’ve got for certain is that this chick knows ancient languages and is presumably attractive.”
“Right.”
“You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“That we are well and truly fucked,” said Letourneau. “I mean, I’ve got cold cases with more to go on than this thing.”
“We forgot that she can apparently drive and fire automatic weaponry with relative ease.”
“Oh well, shit,” said Letourneau. “That’s oodles of helpful right there. I know just the gal.” He shook his head. “She could have learned how to fire a gun anywhere. Military, father’s a cop, knows someone with guns…the choices are endless.”
“Is it worth searching the firearms license database?”
“And what-cross reference it with the people-who-know-Akkadian database? I wish such a thing existed.”
The waitress brought over our meals and we tucked into them. Letourneau’s meatball panini apparently was up to snuff, because he moaned once or twice with each forkful. My veal part was fairly spectacular as well, although I wished I’d grabbed the same thing as Letourneau. Something about a well-made meatball always helps me think.
When we were done with the meal, I leaned back and wiped my mouth. I could have used a stiff drink to wash things down with, but given it was only one o’clock in the afternoon, that didn’t seem prudent. “You think Newby will be okay there?”
