Last Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 3)
Page 10
Maggie rolled over in her bed, ascending out of the dream like a bubble rising slowly to the surface of the water. Then she pulled the covers against her face and finally let herself cry.
19. The Witch Bone Is Connected to…
It was like a puzzle. Putting the pieces together. Except it wasn’t like a puzzle. There was nothing to solve. The pieces went where the pieces went. The mystery wasn’t in the putting together of the bones. The mystery was in the bones themselves. And the solution was in extracting it.
The hand bone connected to the arm bone…
Frankenstein’s monster was coming along nicely. But there was more work to be done.
20. Picking a Destination
Maggie turned the picture frame over and over in her hands. Her morning coffee was cooling to just the right temperature and the bright sun rising outside belied the cooler autumn day it was bringing. The peacefulness of the morning gave her a chance to contemplate both the object in her hand and Philip’s ‘business’ proposition.
The business position was actually an invitation to the conference Hamilton was speaking at. The university had already paid for Sarah to attend, so he was allowed to go in her stead. It was being held October 31-November 1 on the Isle of Lewis, near the world-famous Callanish standing stones. He’d given her the conference brochure as he explained the arrangement, but she had completely tuned him out when she flipped through and came across the description of the stones:
Dating back over 4000 years, the Callanish standing stones are second in importance only to Stonehenge. The heart is a central circle of 13 tall stones where excavations uncovered a chambered tomb reported to have contained human remains. From there four limbs run out in line with the cardinal points of the compass.
When she’d come to, Philip was apologizing for the sleeping arrangements. “The college only booked one room, but I’ve been assured I can bring a guest.” ‘Business’ indeed. She told him she’d think about it.
Shaking the suggestions hidden in both Philip’s invitation and the description of the Callanish stones, Maggie took a drink of her coffee and returned her full attention to Sarah’s broken picture frame.
She’d never really thought about it before, but the entire point of a picture frame was to make the viewer look at something else. Its job was to accentuate the photo without overpowering it. Frames for sale in a store usually had some sort of fake picture inside, and even the ones with words and decorations were still designed to highlight, not overpower, the image within.
So an empty picture frame fairly screamed in the silence of its omission.
She turned it over again and looked at the rectangle which had once housed an image important enough to Sarah MacKenzie to first display, then destroy. So many questions…
What picture was in here?
Why is the frame broken?
And, and she peered closer at the few glass shards embedded in the frame, Is that blood?
*
Just a trace. That’s all she needed. Just some trace of the person.
Warwick sipped from her scalding coffee and allowed herself a smile as she opened her computer’s browser. She enjoyed the challenge of it. Finding someone who didn’t want to be found. It used to be more difficult, more challenging. Now, with credit checks for apartments and shopper’s cards at grocery stores, it was harder to avoid being found. Most people didn’t even think about it. It was the ones who did who were fun to hunt. Prey who knew the lion was watching.
With the grave-robbing case successfully delegated to Willis, Warwick had turned her attention fully to Benson’s hotel murder. Ordinarily, she might not have been that interested in a homicide in another jurisdiction, but the connection to her local suicide had piqued Warwick’s interest. Nevertheless, the leads were turning up dry. But that only meant other leads needed to be pursued. You might not be able to get blood from a stone, but you can get water from a cactus, if you know how to go about it. She knew one of those apparently dry leads was Devan Sinclair, the Aberdonian who had rented the room where the body was found.
His bookstore was closed and gone. His last known address was now someone else’s flat. He had no known family alive. But Scotland wasn’t that big of a country, and he couldn’t use cash for everything.
Time to draw blood.
*
Maggie set the frame on her coffee table and knelt in front of it as if to pray. She had an idea of what she wanted to do, but wasn’t sure of the details. A plan without a blueprint. A premise, but no script. A hope, but no words.
Well, some words. Probably. It was one of the spells she had, if not mastered, then at least used a few times, and therefore remembered. Mostly. She was pretty sure.
The divination spell. Extracting information from an object about a person who had been in contact with it. She’d used it a few times before and each time it had produced a vision for her to view. To date, she’d simply unleashed the spell and sat back to watch the phantasmic show that would coalesce in front of her face. This time, she wasn’t entirely sure what to expect because she wasn’t entirely sure if she could remember the spell correctly. She wondered what might happen if she got it a little bit wrong. Would it simply not work at all? Or would she get some other result, unsure how it might relate to the frame and Sarah?
Well, she thought, only one way to find out.
*
There was more than one way to find someone, Warwick knew. Or rather, there was more than one way for someone to give themselves away. Apartment application. Bank account. Debit card. Most people didn’t even think about the cybertrail they left everywhere every day. You could tell the ones who did by how much less of a wake they generated. But refusing the supermarket discount card didn’t do much if you still used your debit card to pay. Either way it was a blip on the screen.
Someone who had no blips at all—that’s what stood out. Devan Sinclair was standing out. The last activity on that identity was the hotel room. She assumed he had come there on holiday.
Then she remembered: never assume.
She almost missed him.
*
Maggie closed her eyes and sighed. She really missed her Dark Book. But she supposed that’s why she was pursuing the leads. Using what she could recall of the magic to track down the source of it. Or at least the user’s manual.
She took a deep breath and tried to calm her thoughts. Then she opened her eyes again and spoke the spell—to the best of her recollection.
“
Nothing happened at first, but that seemed to be the way sometimes with the magic, as if she were drawing water up from an ancient and weary well. After a moment, a small glow started right where she’d seen the dried blood on the broken glass. The glow swirled up and out from the frame in a billowing wisp, then coalesced into a translucent image before her amazed eyes.
They weren’t amazed because the spell had worked. They were amazed because of what the spell showed her.
She recognized the scene. She just didn’t know how it related to Sarah MacKenzie.
It was the murdered man, bloody and lifeless in the hotel bathtub.
*
Sinclair wasn’t a ghost. He was a living breathing man. And he couldn’t walk everywhere. If he’d merely been visiting Edinburgh, there was no reasonable way to guess where he might have been at any given moment of any particular day. But if he’d moved to Edinburgh, odds were good he’d used public transport. And there were cameras at every station.
His most recent driver’s license photo was open on one of Warwick’s two monitors. The link to Edinburgh’s public safety cameras was on the other. It took a bit of an educated guess as to what kind of neighborhood a man like Sinclair might live in, but eventually her patience—and another refill of coffee—paid off.
She froze the frame. There he was. The morning commute into downtown. Looking up at the station clock—and the camera.
Edinburgh.
And now Warwick was going there too.
*
The hazy image had long since dissipated. Maggie had rocked back onto her backside and sat, silently, as she considered what was next. She knew what was next, but she felt an anxious emptiness in her stomach.
Edinburgh.
Iain was in Edinburgh.
And now Maggie was going there too.
21. Driven Crazy
A week later, Maggie had both begun the semester and made plans to leave the college. The good news was, Ellen was willing to drive. “A weekend in Edinburgh?” she’d said. “Count me in.”
The bad news was, she had a really small car and had insisted on bringing a third person along.
The worse news was, the third person was a boy she’d just met and was sweet on.
The worst news was, it was Stuart Menzies.
“Maggie!” he fairly oozed when she stepped out of her flat toward Ellen’s waiting car. “We meet again.”
“You two know each other?” Ellen asked as she got out and popped open the compact’s boot. Maggie shoved her backpack on top of the two bags already taking up most of the car’s tiny storage space.
“We bumped into each other at the library,” Stuart joked. “She was tripping all over herself when she met me.”
Maggie groaned, but didn’t say anything. She shoehorned herself into the alleged backseat. It was going to be a long drive.
*
The city of Arbroath lays approximately halfway between Aberdeen and Edinburgh. It’s a beautiful seaside village, looking out on the North Sea, and famous for the Declaration of Arbroath, a letter written in Arbroath Abbey in 1320, signed by three dozen Scottish nobles, and sent to Pope John XXII as an assertion of Scottish independence after the Pope had recognized the claim of the English king, Edward I, over Scotland and excommunicated the Scottish king, Robert the Bruce. In the Declaration, the Scots asserted they had the right to choose a king who would guarantee Scottish independence, and reserved the right to remove a king who failed to do so. It was one of the first expressions of popular sovereignty over divine right—another gift of the Scottish people to the world.
So Arbroath offered an ideal combination of Scottish beauty and Scottish history, surely a welcome destination for anyone even slightly interested in fair Alba. As they crossed into the picturesque and historical village, Maggie wished she could blow her brains out.
Stuart hadn’t stopped talking since they’d left the parking spot in front of Maggie’s flat. She wasn’t sure he’d even paused to take a breath. To make it even worse, he hadn’t addressed even one of his comments to his apparent girlfriend, Ellen Walker, preferring instead to speak exclusively with Maggie—ending statement after statement with, “Eh, Maggie?” The only times he wasn’t talking directly to her were the rather common and astonishingly long monologues when he simply spewed forth information without any visible concern about who, or whether anyone, was listening.
It seemed that he had memorized that entire ‘History of Science’ book and was especially taken by the mortuary sciences. After discussing some of the less pleasant methods of disposing of bodies (“Zoroastrians believe fire and earth are primal forces which must not be contaminated by dead bodies, so they leave the bodies out to be picked clean by vultures, which is a bit of a problem now that most Zoroastrians live in big cities like Mumbai where there aren’t many vultures any more. Pretty interesting, eh, Maggie?”), he moved on to a recitation of basic mummification practices.
“The ancient Egyptians used to pull the brain out through the nose with a hook,” he announced. “That must’ve be pretty messy, eh, Maggie?”
Brain pulled out and mummified. Maggie wondered whether that’s what had happened to Stuart. His skin did hold a rather unhealthy looking gray pallor. She decided not to reply. She’d actually stopped replying about an hour earlier, but he hadn’t seemed to notice.
“What I find so interesting about that,” he droned on, “is that we still do essentially the same thing. At autopsy, the coroner removes the brain, then sews it back up in the stomach cavity with the rest of the organs, all bagged together like a haggis. Sounds appetizing, eh, Maggie?”
Maggie realized he was using the split seconds after her name to breathe. That made her feel somehow responsible for her own torture.
“In a lot of ways,” Stuart continued, “we don’t really change. Science just gives us new ways of doing the same old things. Take alchemy for example. I’m studying chemistry, but I’ve also taken some courses on medieval history. Those alchemists were on the right track. They just never got it quite figured out, is all. They wanted to turn lead to gold, but it never worked. Maybe if they’d started with iron. And anyway, now we can make hydrogen from helium or, given enough energy, vice versa. I bet there are some lost secrets of those alchemists, things they knew were true but we can’t see anymore because science is in the way, blinding us with the brilliance of its cold truth. Maybe some of those ancient secrets are just lying about under our noses, maybe even in one of the hundreds of dusty old books in the college’s ancient book collections.” This time, he turned and looked Maggie straight in the eye. “Eh, Maggie?”
Maggie met his gaze for several seconds, then closed her eyes and leaned her head against the car window. “I’m going to take a nap. You’ll have to talk to Ellen for a while now.”
And Stuart was silent for the remainder of the trip.
22. Maid to Order
They weren’t staying at the Hotel Regency—not three students on a budget. And Maggie wasn’t about to start flashing around her trust fund—not in front of Ellen, who didn’t know about it, and certainly not in front of Stuart Menzies. The less he knew about her the better. Besides, the last thing she needed while she explored the Hotel Regency that afternoon was to run into either of them. So instead, they checked into the Hotel Rebus, a cheap but clean hotel about halfway between the main train station and the downtown core. It catered to students and budget-minded tourists, offering a small, clean room and little else. Maggie was relieved that she’d be sharing a room with Ellen while Stuart stayed across the hall. She didn’t want them all to be in the same room, and she wanted even less for Ellen to share a room with him. They’d just met after all.
It took Maggie some convincing to extract herself from her companions for the afternoon, but not too much. Ellen was used to Maggie’s sometimes mysterious ways, and she wanted some sight-seeing time alone with Stuart. He’d actually been the bigger issue, trying to insist that Maggie come along with them, but he was no match for two determined women. Maggie soon found her afternoon free and her plans in motion. They would all meet up at a pub near their hotel for dinner. Until then, Maggie would be at the Hotel Regency.
The trick wasn’t getting there. Edinburgh had a very good public transportation system. The trick also wasn’t getting inside. Anyone could walk into the lobby. No, the trick was getting into the room. The same room. She realized, as she approached the front doors of her destination, that she had no idea which room she had been in. She had no recollection of ever entering through the front door. But she realized the memory she did have might help her pinpoint its location anyway. She didn’t remember going in, but she most definitely remembered going out. Out the window and onto the sidewalk by the loading dock. She stopped and considered for a moment, then turned to walk around back.
She arrived behind the hotel and scanned the area. Recalling the sting in her ankles, Maggie remembered that she’d dropped from the second floor. She looked up at the second floor windows, but they all looked the same. There was no sign with an arrow, saying, ‘This One’ or ‘Dead Guy in Bathtub Suite.’ So rather than looking up any more at the soft sandstone of the hotel, she looked down at the dull gray of the sidewalk. If she could remember where she landed, the room would be the second floor window directly above that.
Again, there was no magical ‘Here’ sign, but she recalled vi
vidly the large woman who stormed at her from the loading dock. Keeping that mental image in mind, she shuffled slowly along the sidewalk until the angles and sightlines in her eyes corresponded with the memories in her mind. When she was pretty sure she’d found the right spot, she looked up and counted over. The window above her was fourth from the end.
Second floor. Facing the loading dock. Fourth from the end.
She put her fists on her hips and narrowed her eyes.
“Now… how do I get in?”
*
Emma Valentine held the print outs and doubled checked the alleles. It always took too long to get to all the testing they needed to do, but such was the life of a forensic scientist. Far more cases to solve than resources to solve them. So everything got in in line and waited its turn. But they’d finally gotten to that strange murder in the bathtub at the Hotel Regency and the wait had been worth it.
She turned and put her hands to her computer keyboard.
To: benson.lindsey@edinburgh.police.gov
From: valentine.emma@edinburgh.police.gov
Subject: DNA Result
I just completed the DNA work on the Hotel Regency case. One of the swabs from the scene contained a mixed sample. That is, there were two donors. That is, we have non-victim DNA at the scene, mixed with the victim’s blood. Will draft formal report and forward ASAP.
-Emma
She clicked ‘send’ and smiled. “I wonder where that will lead.”
*
Maggie’s lip-twisted ruminations about how to slip into the Dead Guy Suite were interrupted—and, she realized after a moment, solved—by the loud clunk of the back door opening out onto the loading dock. A maid wheeled out a fabric-sided bin and left it there, dashing back inside before the heavy door slammed shut on her. Maggie hurried toward the loading dock. She couldn’t see what was in the bin, but it didn’t matter. If it wasn’t laundry, she’d just steal a maid’s uniform from inside.
*
The bin had not in fact been loaded with maid uniforms in just her size. It was flattened cardboard. But with her scheme fully formed and her resolve solidified, she walked back to the front of the hotel and casually strolled inside.