Stone and Claw: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  “Hmm?”

  “You and Verity. I noticed it from the moment I saw the two of you together. The way she looks at you, the way you look at her…and scents don’t lie.” She smiled. “If you’ve got any concern whether she’s telling the truth about you seeing other people—don’t worry about it. I didn’t pick up even a hint of jealousy when she saw the two of us together. She’s a good one, Alastair. Trust me. I know these things.”

  “I know it too.” He sipped his wine again. “But it’s not up to me, is it? Not entirely, anyway.”

  “True. But that’s the best way.” She took another bite of the bloody sirloin and made a satisfied face. “Mmm. You do know how to entertain a lady.”

  “I’m fairly good at entertaining cats, too. In this case, all I had to do was combine the two. Trust me—leave room for dessert. I hear the catnip flan is to die for.”

  As they left the restaurant and walked out to Stone’s car in the late-October chill, Viajera took Stone’s hand to stop him. “Alastair…”

  He stopped in the act of pulling his key from his pocket, catching her change in tone. Where it had been light before, now it took on a lower, huskier edge. “Yes?”

  She pulled him into a hug, her strong arms wrapping around him, and kissed him. It was a sensual kiss—her soft, full lips tasted of meat and wine—but not a sexual one. She held it for a few seconds, then pulled back and met his gaze. Her clear, golden-brown eyes were difficult to read. “Thank you. For everything. I…never would have succeeded without you. I wanted you to know…before I go…how much that means to me.”

  He embraced her, pulling her into the soft wool of his overcoat. “It was an honor and a privilege, Viajera. I’m glad I got a chance to know you.”

  “Even if it did almost get you killed?” Now her tone was back to its former lightness, and her eyes sparkled.

  “Even that.” Briefly, he caught himself wondering what might have been if he’d met her a few years ago, but then shook off the thought. It didn’t matter. He knew her now, and that was all he needed. Despite her invitation, he wondered if he’d ever see her again.

  He broke the embrace and opened the car door for her. “We’d best go now, though, before little Diego destroys my house…or starts giving my cat ideas.”

  47

  Stone wasn’t set to return to work officially until the following Monday, but nonetheless he headed to campus late Friday afternoon. He had an appointment he didn’t want to miss.

  He didn’t stop by the Occult Studies department; he knew he’d have to field a plethora of questions from Laura, Hubbard, Beatrice Martinez, and various students when he returned, but today he didn’t want to deal with any of that. He had other things on his mind—things that had very little to do with his work.

  Pamela, the Chemistry Department admin aide, smiled at him as he entered. “Ah, Dr. Stone. Good to see you again. Dr. Wright is waiting for you.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate his agreeing to meet with me.”

  “You’re in luck that he had another meeting this afternoon. He normally doesn’t come in on Fridays.”

  He’d made the appointment yesterday, using a bit of charm to convince Pamela he had something important he wanted to talk with Dr. Wright about. She’d added him to the old professor’s schedule following his two o’clock meeting. “He won’t be able to stay long, though,” she told him.

  “Not a problem—I don’t think this will take more than a few minutes.”

  Delmar Wright didn’t stand when Stone entered and closed the door behind him, but regarded his visitor from behind several stacks of notebooks and folders on his cluttered desk. “Hello, Dr. Stone. I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

  “To be honest, I didn’t expect to be back so soon.”

  “Please—sit down. You can move that stack of folders off the chair.”

  “That’s quite all right. I won’t be staying long.”

  “What can I do for you?” Wright’s gaze followed him as he paced back and forth in front of the desk. “As I believe Pamela mentioned, I’m only in the office for a short time today, but—”

  “I’d like to talk about Dr. Benchley.”

  He blinked. “Dr. Benchley? I know you were looking for information about him, but I told you everything I knew last time you were here. I don’t think there’s anything else I can—”

  “Died of a heart attack, I understand,” Stone continued as if he hadn’t spoken, still pacing. Back and forth, back and forth, as he did when lecturing his students.

  “Er—yes. That was what they discovered, if I recall correctly. Quite a shame.”

  “Indeed.” He paused, examining the books and papers on Wright’s desk. “You know, I found out something the other day. Something I didn’t know. Had a friend look into it for me.”

  “Oh…?” Wright studied him in confusion. “Dr. Stone, I’m not sure I—”

  Once again, Stone spoke as if the other professor had not. “Yes, it’s really quite fascinating. Did you know there’s a chemical reaction that can produce an odorless, colorless gas? One that, when someone with a weak heart is exposed to it, could cause that person’s heart to beat erratically enough that it could induce cardiac arrest?”

  Wright paled, and tiny beads of sweat broke out on his wide forehead. “I’m sure I don’t know what you—”

  “You’re a professor of organic chemistry, Dr. Wright. Surely you know of methods one might use.” He began pacing again, keeping his tone speculative rather than accusatory. “For example, apparently some compounds derived from the digitalis plant are quite deadly if misused. Normally such poisons have to be ingested for maximum effectiveness, but if…say…a brilliant young chemist were to get his hands on some, he might have the talent to create a highly concentrated dose along with little apparatus that would render it into a gaseous suspension. Probably harmless in that concentration for someone who didn’t already have heart issues, but in Dr. Benchley’s case…”

  “What are you talking about?” Wright sputtered. “Dr. Stone, this is preposterous! Are you accusing me of—”

  His tone was angry, but his aura flared with bright red streaks of fear.

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, Dr. Wright. I’m merely passing along some fascinating information I discovered. I thought you, as a chemist, might appreciate it.” He paused, then resumed his pacing. “A couple of days ago, I checked the air-conditioning register in the study at my house. The same study, as it happens, where Dr. Benchley passed away all those years ago. Do you know what I found?”

  “I—haven’t any idea. How could I?” His gaze shifted toward the door, then toward the phone.

  Stone shrugged. “No reason, I suppose. But I did find something intriguing there.” He pulled a palm-sized apparatus from his pocket and set it on the edge of the desk.

  Wright’s fear flared even higher, and the sweat beads on his forehead grew more pronounced. He pulled at his collar. “What…is that?”

  “Ingenious, really. Unless anyone discovered it fairly soon after the event occurred, they might think it a bit unusual to find such a thing in an air-conditioning duct, but not completely unlikely. And why would they look? Dr. Benchley was known to have heart issues, and it’s doubtful medical science at the time could have detected anything in his body.” He shrugged. “Nowadays things are different, of course, but back then…it could have been the perfect crime.”

  Wright’s gaze, clearly terrified now, skated once again back to the door, but even if Stone hadn’t been standing between him and it, there was still the matter of the desk. He clutched at the edge of it, shaking, and then burst out, “I didn’t mean to do it! You’ve got to believe me!”

  Stone paused. “Mean to do what, Dr. Wright?”

  “I never meant to kill him!” Still clutching the desk, Wright slumped forward, tears forming in his eyes. “Oh, God, you’ve got to believe me.”

  “So you did leave this in the vent?” Stone indicated the item o
n the desk.

  “Yes…yes…” Wright’s voice shook, and his face had gone dead pale. “I only meant to make him sick—that’s all. I thought the compound’s gaseous form would be so diffuse it couldn’t do more than give him a mild heart attack at worst. I never meant to kill him!” He lowered his head into his hands, his shoulders shaking with his sobs, but then his gaze came up and fixed on Stone. “How…how could you possibly have known?”

  “Why did you do it?” Stone asked, ignoring his question. He did sit now, moving the stack of file folders off the chair and relocating them to the far end of the desk. “Why did you want to make him ill?”

  Wright took one final glance toward the door and then gave up. “I was...angry with him.”

  “Why?”

  “He was my advisor. My friend.” His hands clenched and unclenched spasmodically on the desktop. “We worked together on all sorts of projects—him and me and the others in that photo you showed me. But…I didn’t have a lot of money, and I…well, I had a gambling problem in those days. I got into some financial trouble. I needed a lot of money in a hurry, or I’d have to leave the university.” He looked down at his hands and made a strangled little sound in the back of his throat.

  Stone waited.

  “So…” he said after a few moments of silence, “I used my skills. I started making and selling drugs. I wasn’t going to do it a lot—just enough to pay off my gambling debts.”

  “But then you discovered you liked having the extra funds.”

  Wright nodded miserably. “Yes. Everything was fine for a while, but then… Dr. Benchley found out about it. He caught me in the lab late one night mixing up a batch. He was sick over it. I was his favorite student, his protégé. But…he was also an honorable man, and he told me he had no choice but to report me. He told me if I promised to stop he wouldn’t tell the police, but he had to report it to the university.”

  He buried his head in his hands again. “I would have lost everything. Everything I worked for. We argued about it, but he wouldn’t budge, even when I did promise to stop doing it. So…I worked out the plan to make him sick. He’d already been talking about retiring soon—I thought this might hasten things along.”

  “You thought if you could do that, he’d have more important things on his mind than reporting your drug activities.”

  “Yes. I created the compound and put it in the vent while he was in the bathroom. I—I planned to stay and talk to him until the effects hit him, then call an ambulance and be the big hero. I figured he’d be so grateful to me for saving him that he’d never be cruel enough to report me and ruin my future.”

  “But it didn’t go as planned.”

  “No.” Fresh tears appeared in his eyes, and his lined brow furrowed. “It happened so fast. One minute he was talking to me, and the next, he’d gasped, slumped over and…died. I panicked. We were alone in the house and nobody knew I was there, so I just ran. I figured I could pick up the thing from the vent later, but was afraid I’d get caught.”

  He met Stone’s gaze with red-rimmed eyes. “I’ve been carrying this guilt for decades, Dr. Stone. Eventually I figured nobody would come after me about it, but that didn’t mean I didn’t keep feeling guilty.”

  He swallowed hard and put his hands flat on the desk. “You have to tell me—how did you know? Even if you found that thing, how did you ever figure out what happened?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Tell me…please. I have to know.”

  Stone met his gaze. “My cat told me.”

  Wright blinked. “What—?”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps I believe in ghosts a bit more than I admitted. Sometimes people with unfinished business hang about until it’s sorted.”

  As Wright continued watching him in shocked disbelief, he thought back to the day after they’d returned from the compound. He’d examined the vent just as he’d said, and found the apparatus there. A brief back-and-forth with the eager Raider, who was once again harboring Benchley’s echo, had confirmed the events. Stone had brought out the photo again, and Raider had pawed at Wright’s image. The basic details hadn’t been hard to work out from there.

  “You’re saying…” Wright’s voice shook. “Dr. Benchley’s ghost really is haunting your house?”

  “Who knows? Perhaps I just put two and two together, and I didn’t really know as much as I implied. You filled in the rest, just as I’d hoped you would.”

  Wright slumped back in his seat. “So…what now? Are you going to call the police? Turn me in? I know I deserve it…I’ve gotten away with it for this long, which is far more than I had any right to.”

  “No.”

  “No?” He looked surprised, his head snapping up. “You…aren’t going to turn me in?”

  “No, Dr. Wright. I’m not.”

  “But…why not? Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  Stone shook his head. “No. I’m here to set things to order. To provide a bit of closure to someone who’s had this hanging over his head as long as you have. But he doesn’t want to see you in prison. Not after all this time.”

  “He…doesn’t?” Wright was now looking at Stone as if he thought him insane.

  “No. I believe you when you say you didn’t mean to kill him…and he trusts me to be a good judge of that. But I think it’s time for you to retire, don’t you?”

  Wright stared at his hands and nodded, letting out a long sigh. “Yes. Yes, I think it is.”

  “Quietly. Without fanfare or parties or accolades. Just…fade away.”

  Again he nodded. “Yes. That’s…the best way. You’re right.”

  Moving slowly, like a man even older than he truly was, he stood and offered Stone his hand across the desk. “This isn’t what I would have wanted, Dr. Stone. I wouldn’t have chosen it. But in the long run…I’m glad you came to see me today. I don’t know if I believe you about Dr. Benchley telling you anything, but…I think I needed this closure as much as he did.”

  Stone gave the man’s damp, trembling hand a brief, firm shake. “See that you do something worthwhile with the time you have left, Dr. Wright. I think Dr. Benchley would approve of that.”

  48

  Verity called the following day, inviting Stone out to dinner with her and Jason that evening. “Our treat,” she said. “I just think after everything we’ve been through, we should get together and do something fun.”

  Given that he’d planned to spend the rest of the day doing as little as possible, he readily agreed.

  “Great,” she said. “We’ll meet you at Antonelli’s at eight.”

  The first thing he noticed, when he arrived and the hostess showed him to the back table where they waited for him, was their twin expressions of innocent anticipation. He paused, tilting his head. “You two are up to something.”

  Verity grinned. “Sit down, Doc. You really don’t know, do you?”

  “Know…what?” He edged closer, lowering into a seat across from them without taking his gaze off them.

  “Well,” she mused, eyes twinkling as she glanced at Jason. “He has been fairly busy the past few days. I guess it makes sense he might forget. It happens when you get old, you know?”

  And then he realized what she was talking about.

  He started to rise, raising his hands and shaking his head. “No. No. Verity, I don’t—”

  “Sit down, Al,” Jason said. “Don’t worry—nobody’s gonna come over and sing or anything. But you didn’t expect us to forget your birthday, did you?”

  “Your fortieth birthday, even,” Verity added. She looked him up and down with a critical eye. “Though I only have your word on that. You sure as hell don’t look anything close to that old.”

  Stone sighed. He had forgotten, odd as that might seem to most normal people. He simply didn’t consider the occasion to be worth celebration. Brilliant, I’ve made it another year around the sun. Hardly cause for any excitement. Before he’d met Jason and Verity, the da
y usually passed with barely a moment of notice, except for the obligatory package from Aubrey. This year it had fallen earlier in the week, when they’d all been in the middle of the Garra affair, and he hadn’t even thought about it. Either Aubrey hadn’t sent anything this year or it had been held up in the mail.

  “Honestly,” he said, exasperated. “You didn’t need to—”

  “Yeah. We kinda did.” Verity reached across the table and took his hand. Her tone wasn’t amused now, but soft and serious. “It might not be a big deal for you, but you never forget ours. And…after everything that’s happened over the last year, it’s a wonder you’re still here at all. So you’re stuck with us.”

  “Just roll with it, Al,” Jason said. “We’ll buy you dinner, we’ll sit around drinking and bullshitting like we always do, and that’ll be it. No party hats, no waiters singing off-key, no strippers. Hell, we didn’t even get you a cake. We get it.”

  Stone studied the two of them, and sighed. “Right, then. So I’ll just pretend this is another of our regular nights out.”

  “Well, we did get you a gift,” Verity said. “Sort of. But that’s for later, after dinner.”

  They settled in and ordered drinks. “So,” Jason said, “Garra—I mean Viajera—is gone?”

  “Yes. I heard from her yesterday—she’s safely in Peru, and she’s reconnected with her clan down there. She says it won’t be the smoothest sailing since she’s been away for so long, but she’s become sort of a clan hero for returning the chalice. And she’s decided to adopt Diego.”

  Verity’s eyes lit up. “That’s fantastic. I figured she might. I wish they were closer, so I could visit.”

  “We need to get this woman a pet,” Jason told Stone.

  “Well, she’s welcome to borrow Raider whenever she likes. He prefers her to me anyway.” He glanced at her. “How’s the experimentation coming on the blood?”

  “Slowly. I was up visiting Hezzie yesterday and we’re trying to figure out what we can do with it, but we have to be careful since we only have the one bottle.”