Blood Summoned

by N. P. Martin

Routman looked disturbed when I told him this, and I knew it was because he hated the idea of one of his past cases unraveling and undoing all his good work, as he saw it. “Only you could dig this shit up,” he said. “Why would you think it’s the same girl?”

  “I did some digging,” I said. “The girl was handed over to Social Services. Her name was Charlotte Webb. Now I’m thinking that was her biological father in that house. Did he artificially inseminate one of the women or something? Was the girl part of some fucked up experiment?”

  Routman looked around him for a second as if he was afraid others were listening. “Come with me,” he said, getting up, and I followed him into the men’s restroom. Once inside, Routman checked all the cubicles to make sure no one else was there with us.

  “We’re alone,” I said. “Spill.”

  Leaning against one of the sinks, Routman lit a cigarette, even though smoking was banned in the building. “What I’m about to tell you didn’t come from me, are we clear?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  He sucked hard on his cigarette before blowing a large plume of smoke into the air. “Alright, Philips and I, we were told to go to this house in Eden—that jumped up gated community for all those rich, entitled fucks— to check out a house after somebody reported it was an illegal laboratory for human experimentation.”

  “Who reported it?”

  “Don’t know. The captain at the time—your buddy Lewellyn, actually—never said. He just told us to go to the house and check it out. So we did, taking a team with us. And we found—” He stopped to take another drag on his cigarette, his eyes haunted by the memory of what he was talking about. “The SWAT guys busted the door in, and the first thing that hits us is the smell. You know what it’s like, right? It’s hard not to gag. So we search this huge fucking house, and eventually, we find a basement that’s like…somebody’s fucking nightmare. Full of hospital beds and all kinds of lab equipment. We found the bodies of three dead women on the beds, and in the subbasement, we found another six bodies, all women, and all in different stages of pregnancy.”

  “Jesus,” I said, shaking my head, taking out a cigarette and lighting it.

  “As I said, the smell was just awful, but that wasn’t even the worst of it.” He stopped to take a drag of his cigarette, glancing at himself in the mirror for a second before quickly looking away, his eyes haunted by bad memories. “We also found incubators in there, eight of them, and inside seven of them…Jesus—” He stopped again like it was too much. “There were babies inside. Seven babies, and all of them…Christ, I can’t even think about it.” Routman made the sign of the cross as if to protect himself from the awfulness of the memories.

  “What about the owner of the house, the person who was doing all this?” I said.

  “He was in there,” Routman said, his voice strained now. “We restrained him as soon as we hit the basement. He didn’t even put up a fight, though he kept shouting about his daughter, the only baby in that charnel house that was still alive. He kept saying she was important, that she was special, that she was going to change the world. We just thought the guy was some fucking sicko. We didn’t pay his ranting any attention. The baby was taken away for Social Services to deal with.”

  “And the guy? Who was he?”

  Routman stared at me a moment. “His name was redacted for a reason. Why don’t you ask your buddy, Lewellyn?”

  “Come on, Jim,” I said. “Save me the fucking trouble, will you? The baby you saved is all grown up now, and I think she’s in danger. I think this guy has her.”

  “Fine,” Routman said. “I’ll tell you, but you never heard it from me, got it?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “His name was Jonas Webb.”

  “Jonas Webb?” The name sounded familiar, and it took a moment of wracking my brain to remember why. “Wasn’t he some big-name scientist, the owner of a pharmaceutical company?”

  “That’s right, at least until his wife and three kids were murdered in their home one night.” He shook his head. “I was on that case. It was a fucking massacre. Never caught who did it.”

  “So this Jonas Webb guy goes crazy after that or something?”

  “Seems that way, although we never got the chance to interview him. Men in dark suits came and took him away shortly after his arrest.”

  “Men in dark suits?”

  “Yeah, like corporate guys, but with guns. Big Pharma guys, is my guess. That’s the last I saw of Webb. He ended up being committed to Danvers Asylum. He’s been there ever since.”

  “Wait, you’re sure he’s still there?”

  “Unless he’s escaped, and I didn’t hear about it, but I doubt it. You know Danvers, once you’re in, there’s no getting out.” He stubbed his cigarette out in the sink before throwing the butt in the waste bin. “So it seems to me like your theory is wrong, Ethan. Jonas Webb is rotting in a padded cell right this minute, so he couldn’t have kidnapped anybody.”

  After speaking with Routman, I returned to the subbasement and called Hannah. “Hey,” I said when she answered. “I just spoke to Routman. He’s saying he has video footage of the square in Little Tokyo. How likely is it that you’re going to be on it?”

  Hannah stayed silent for a moment, then said, “I don’t know.”

  Not the answer I was looking for. “You’re fucked if your little act of revenge was caught on camera, you know that, right? Routman will put you away.”

  “You think a prison could hold me?”

  “Don’t get fucking cocky, Hannah,” I said, annoyed at her cavalier attitude. “We don’t need this fucking hassle. Our partnership will be over.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  “You couldn’t have picked a less public place?”

  “That would’ve defeated the purpose of what I was trying to do.”

  Rubbing my forehead, I sighed down the phone. “Jesus, Hannah. Sometimes I don’t know where I stand with you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean dealing with you is like dealing with someone with multiple personalities sometimes.”

  “Isn’t that…everyone?”

  I gave a small laugh as I shook my head. “Alright, look. I’ll get my tech guys to look into the footage. If there’s anything incriminating on there, they should be able to wipe it.”

  “Thank you, Ethan,” she said. “I’d be lost without you.”

  “How’s your face?”

  “It’s healing. I should be ready for action by tomorrow.”

  “Glad to hear it.” I told her about Clare and how she had gone missing from the hospital. “We need to hit that boarding school soon so we can put an end to this cult and hopefully save Clare, assuming they haven’t killed her already.”

  “I hope not. I liked her.”

  “If they have, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “What are you doing in the meantime?” she asked. “Would you like to come over for a drink? There’s a lot of old vinyl records here you might like. I don’t know much about music, but we could listen to them together.”

  “As good as that sounds, I can’t,” I said. “I’m still trying to track down Scarlet’s little sister. I have a lead now that I’m going to check out.”

  “You need any help?”

  “I got this. Just stay in your apartment for now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” She didn’t sound happy about it. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

  “Bye, Hannah.”

  “Ethan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Be careful.”

  “I will,” I said after a pause, and then hung up the phone.

  After the call, I sat for a moment, staring into space before pouring myself a whiskey and typing the name Jonas Webb into the computer’s search engine. Surprisingly, the search returned very little information about the man. It was as if someone had gone to great lengths to make it seem that Jonas Webb had never even existed. The most I fou
nd on him was a brief entry in Wikipedia that outlined his career as a scientist and geneticist. In the late nineteen-eighties, Webb founded a pharmaceutical company and became a billionaire almost overnight thanks to a drug to treat depression that outsold even Prozac. There was a brief mention of his family’s tragic slaughter, and then nothing after that. No mention of his arrest or the fact that he now resided in an insane asylum.

  The article did mention, however, that Jonas had a brother, a man named Robert Webb, who was a professor of chemistry at Fairview University. If anyone could fill me in on what happened to Jonas Webb, it was his brother. A quick search in the police database got me an address for Robert Webb that was near the university. I decided to pay the man a visit, but first I had to go and see the terrible twosome about the possibly incriminating video footage of Hannah, or rather Xaglath.

  I left the precinct by the front entrance and walked to the Dodge parked just down the street. Night had long fallen, and there was a brisk breeze in the air, the sky threatening more rain by the look of it.

  When I reached the car, I noticed the motorbike parked behind it, a motorbike I recognized. Seeing me coming, the rider took their helmet off. “Going somewhere?” Scarlet said.

  I was surprised to see her. I didn’t think her capable of even getting out of bed, never mind riding a motorbike. “What are you doing here?” I asked, coming to stand next to her. “How are you even here?”

  “The medications you told Daisy to give me helped,” she said, her face looking drawn and pale, not to mention covered in dark bruising still.

  “I doubt it helped that much. You have severe internal injuries, for Christ’s sake. You should still be resting up.”

  “I’m fine. Besides, I can’t lie around when I know Charlotte is out there somewhere. Have you found out anything else?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Quite a lot. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll tell you everything?”

  On hearing this, her battered face lit up with hope. “You know where she is?”

  “Not quite yet, but I’ll know soon. We’re close.”

  “How close?” she asked as she got off the bike, her face registering the pain she was still in.

  “Very close,” I said. “Where’s Daisy? Please tell me she’s still not with Cal.”

  “I dropped her off at her place before I went to the storage unit I have here in the city to get some clothes.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “She’s a good girl. She thinks highly of you.”

  I shook my head. “Fuck knows why.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” she said as she opened the car door, pausing to stare at me across the roof. “You’re there for her. Sometimes that’s all that matters.”

  I thought about my lonely childhood, and about how no one was ever there for me, not until I met Cal. Before that, it was just the boys home and a long line of authoritarian figures who thought they could control and dominate me, most of them finding out to their detriment that they couldn’t do any such thing. “She’s not a replacement for my daughter if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said.

  “I don’t think that. No one could replace your daughter, Ethan, any more than anyone could replace my sister. It helps to have people, though.”

  “So who do you have, besides your sister?”

  She looked silently across at me, her eyes full of physical and emotional pain, before giving me a plaintive smile and getting inside the car, leaving my question to hang in the air unanswered.

  Once I told Scarlet where we were heading, she rolled her still swollen eyes. “Really? You’re going to let me get fanboyed again by those conspiracy-obsessed death metal freaks?”

  “You’re too hard on them,” I said, smiling. “They’re good kids, and besides, they love you.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  I laughed. “They think you’re Jane Wick.”

  “I don’t even get the reference, so…”

  “You don’t watch movies?”

  “I don’t own a TV.”

  “Good call. I just keep mine for the Hellbastards. They’d be lost without their daily dose of The Muppet Show.”

  “I saw those little guys in action at the club. They’re vicious.”

  “Yep, that’s why I keep them around. Better than any gun most times.”

  “You know,” she said, staring out the window at the rain that had just started. “I didn’t think I would make it out of there alive.”

  “You thought I was just going to leave you there for Carlito to have his way with you?”

  “It felt that way when he was running a blowtorch across my back.”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said as I pulled onto the expressway leading across the river. “It took balls to do what you did.”

  “It took balls to come and get me after.”

  “It was nothing we couldn’t handle. How much did you see?”

  “It was all a blur, to be honest. Bits and pieces.”

  “Probably just as well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, it doesn’t matter. It’s over now.”

  “If you say so. Are you going to tell me what you’ve found out then? About my sister?”

  “Sure.”

  As we sped down the expressway, I told her everything. About Jonas Webb and his crazy experiments, and about how he was committed to the insane asylum. I also told her about Jonas’ brother Robert, who we’d be paying a visit soon.

  “I had no idea,” she said, shaking her head. “It explains a lot, though. I always knew there was something different about Charlotte. Her physical capabilities are beyond human, but I always put it down to freak genetics and all the training I gave her.”

  “Well, you’re right about the freak genetics,” I said, lighting a cigarette and cracking the window an inch. “Jonas Webb created Charlotte for some purpose that we don’t know yet. I’m hoping his brother will shed some light on the subject.”

  Scarlet put a hand on my leg and smiled across at me. “Thank you,” she said.

  “What for?” I directed my stream of smoke out the window before looking at her.

  “For getting me closer to Charlotte. I’m not sure I would’ve managed the same on my own.”

  “I’m a detective,” I said, smiling. “It’s what I do.”

  “By the way,” she said. “Was I in a hospital at any point? I have vague memories of two people in surgical clothing poking and prodding at me.”

  “Yes, you were,” I said. “You were dying on me. You needed professional medical attention that I couldn’t provide. Luckily, I knew someone who set me up with a couple out of hours doctors.”

  “Out of hours?”

  “Off the books.” Reaching into my pocket, I took out the piece of paper the red-haired doctor had given me and gave it to Scarlet.

  “What’s this?” she asked, looking down at the slip of paper.

  “The bill.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s a lot. It also needs paying soon.”

  “Don’t worry. I have it.”

  “I guess you do, after doing all those hits. Do you ever think of retiring?”

  “Do you?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “There you go then.”

  A while later, Scarlet and I were standing behind Pan Demic and Artemis as they sat in their customized chairs, snorting coke as usual as the death metal blasted away in the background, which Pan Demic informed me was Morbid Angel’s classic first album, Altars Of Madness. “I can make out the lyrics in this one,” I said.

  Pan Demic spun around then after a huge snort of coke and started singing, “Bleed for the devil, Impious mortal lives, Feel the enticing power, Fill the chasm of your soul…”

  “Nice,” I said. “I guess Morbid Angel knows about hellots too.”

  “Oh yeah,” Pan Demic said, smiling and nodding. “I see what you mean there, Drakester.
Nice.”

  Beside him, Artemis was too busy staring at Scarlet to engage in the usual banter, a sad look on his face, his eyes like saucers from all the drugs. “I can’t believe they did that to your beautiful face,” he said.

  “Relax, Artemis,” Scarlet said, as she finished paying her hospital bill via one of the computers. “I’m fine.”

  “Is it okay to say you look even sexier?” Artemis said. “I mean, the color on all that bruising, it’s—”

  “Dude,” Pan Demic said, cutting him off with a stern look.

  “You have a fetish you want to share with us, Artemis?” I asked.

  “A fetish?” he mumbled, swinging around to face his computer screen once more. “No, I just…no.”

  Pan Demic gave Artemis a look before shaking his head. “Anyway, moving on,” he said. “Drakester, I should inform you that we have the whole Brokedown Palace Massacre on video. Full disclosure and all that.”

  “The Brokedown Palace Massacre?” I said. “Are you serious? And I don’t remember giving you permission to video anything.”

  “Relax, Drakester,” he said. “There’s only one copy. It’s Ctrl+Alt+Safe With Us.”

  “I don’t Ctrl+Alt+Give A Fuck,” I said. “Wipe it.”

  “Drakester,” Pan Demic whined. “It’s some of your best work. I might even add that it tops Scarlet’s Restaurant Mafia Massacre.” He turned his head to look at Scarlet, who had a wry smile on her face at this point. “Not by much, though. The Hellbastards tipped the scales in this case. Those little guys are fucking crazy, man. Drakester, where can we get some? Like right away?”

  “Believe me,” I said. “Even if you could summon the little bastards, you’d never be able to handle them. They’d snort all your coke and fuck your place up.”

  Pan Demic and Artemis grinned at each other. “Sounds awesome,” they both said at the same time.

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “Are you two wasters going to help me out here or not? The video footage, remember?”

  “This conversation isn’t over,” Artemis said.

  “We want Hellbastards!” Pan Demic pronounced.

  “And we shall have them!” Artemis said.