"It's over here, too," a familiar voice said. Karl was in the doorway, and he slowly pushed back the right side of his jacket to reveal the holstered Glock on his belt. He held the jacket back with his forearm, and just stood there, like an Old West gunfighter ready to take care of business.
Karl gestured in the direction of the squad room. "And I think there's some more of it out there, too."
I slowly turned my head to look through the glass. Sefchik and Aquilina were both on their feet and facing us, maybe ten feet apart. As I watched, Aquilina slipped off the blazer she wore on the street to reveal the wide brown leather belt underneath, and the holstered automatic on her right hip. She dropped the blazer on a nearby desk then just stood there, hands on her hips, calmly looking at us. Sefchik left his suit coat on, but he slowly and deliberately hooked his thumbs in his belt, and kept them there, close to the gun you knew he had under the coat. He stood looking our way, too.
I glanced at McGuire and saw a tight smile appear on his face. "Don't let us detain you, gentlemen. I'm sure you have a number of important appointments – elsewhere."
Ferris's pale face had turned dark red, and I noticed that Crane had lost that mean smile of his. "This is – this is-" Ferris seemed to be having trouble getting the words out. He stopped, swallowed a couple of times, then said, more calmly, "Stay near your phone, Lieutenant. You'll be hearing from your superiors, shortly. Enjoy your rly retirement from the police force."
Ferris looked at the handcuffs Crane still held and snarled, "Put those away and come on!" Then he stalked toward the office door, and Karl moved away to let him pass. Crane dropped the cuffs in his suit pocket and hurried after him. I saw that Aquilina and Sefchik didn't bar their way, but they didn't step aside, either.
My chest was tight, and I took a big, deep breath to loosen it a little. "Thank you, sir," I said to McGuire, which may have been the first time I ever called him that.
I looked through the glass at Sefchik and Aquilina and nodded at each of them. They returned the nod. Aqulina put her blazer back on, then she and Sefchik returned to whatever they'd been doing.
I turned back to McGuire. "Are you screwed, Lieutenant?"
He went back behind his desk and sat down again. "Maybe, but I don't think so. I know several city councilmen who are none too happy with this witchfinder bullshit, and a couple of local religious leaders who feel the same way. I'll make sure the mayor and the chief both hear from them. Now get out of here, both of you – I've got some phone calls to make."
"I don't know about you," I said to Karl, "but I've probably got a shitload of messages that've come in since yesterday. Email and voicemail both."
"Yeah, I've got a bunch, too." I didn't know if that was true, or if he just understood that I wanted to spend a few minutes letting my guts unclench. "Might as well take ten or fifteen, catch up a little," Karl said.
"When do you figure the department's going to start issuing those fancy phones where you can check all that stuff from anywhere?"
He pretended to think about it. "Dunno. What's the latest estimate for Hell freezing over?"
"Beats me," I said. "But if it does, I bet we'll catch the complaint."
Karl laughed and turned toward his desk.
"By the way…" I said.
He looked back at me.
"Thanks," I told him. "For… you know. Thanks."
He gave me a fat grin. "Ahh, I fuckin' loved it. Felt like John Wesley Hardin there, for a minute."
"Is that better than 'Bond, James Bond'?"
"No," he said, "but it ain't half bad, neither."
I started with my email but only got through about half a dozen messages when McGuire came to the door of his office.
"Sefchik! Aquilina!" he called. "You got one!"
Once I knew that it was somebody else's problem, I brought my focus back to the computer monitor. But you know how it is: if somebody uses your name, even in a conversation that you're not really listening to, you're going to notice. The name that caught my attention wasn't my own, however. It was Mercy Hospital.
It's impossible to measure stuff like this, but after the hospital's name was mentioned, I'd say the conversation at McGuire's door had maybe 25 percent of my attention. Then I heard patient was incinerated, and that brought my focus up to around 75 percent. But it was the word dismembered that got me to my feet.
I walked quickly to where the three of them were standing. "Don't mean to kibbitz, boss, but did you say something about burning and dismemberment? At Mercy Hospital?"
From the corner of my eye, I saw Karl get up from his desk and head over.
McGuire stared at me for a couple of beats, then said, "Yeah, it's at Mercy. There's a report of a patient in his room found burned to a crisp, arms and legs hacked off. Since there was no fire damage elsewhere in the room, the first responders are thinking black magic as a COD."
My guts, which had just started to relax, were a big clenched fist again. "Did you get a name on this patient?" I asked, dreading the answer.
"No name," McGuire said. "Just the room number: 333."
I glanced at Karl. His expression said he was thinking the same thing that I was.
"Boss, can you let Karl and me take this one?" I turned to Aquilina and Sefchik. "That okay with you guys?"
Aquilina said, "Sure," and Sefchik shrugged. They didn't much care – there would be other calls; they'd catch the next one.
"What's your interest?" McGuire asked me.
"I'm thinking that the vic might be-" I took a second to swallow, even though my mouth was suddenly very dry. "-Benjamin Prescott."
"Prescott?" McGuire's eyebrows dipped in a frown. "Oh, that professor, right? The one who was choking, and you two got to be heroes over. I thought he was in a coma."
"No, he's out of it, and doing some translation work for us. On the Opus Mago."
"Then what the fuck are you two standing here for?" he said. "Get moving."
It's not unusual to find flashing red lights around the back of Mercy Hospital. That's where the ambulances deliver emergency cases to the ER. But flashing lights clustered around the hospital's front entrance – that's something you don't see every day.
I took some doctor's parking space, then Karl and I made our rapid way toward the front door. I made sure that the ID folder with my shield on it was hanging over my breast pocket, since I was in no mood to be stopped by some rookie who didn't know us by sight.
I'd planned to stop at the information desk and get the name of the patient who'd been in room 333, but the harried-looking woman behind the counter was trying to talk to five people at once, and every one of them look pissed off, or scared, or both.
At the elevators, I mashed the call button and we waited for a car to show up. About half a minute later, I was about to say "Fuck it" and look for the stairs when one set of elevator doors slid open with a muted ping.
The only one inside was a middle-aged nurse who quickly left the car before Karl and I got in. I got a glimpse of her face as we passed each other. Being strong, controlled, and emotionally resilient are all part of every nurse's unofficial job description, which is why I was surprised to see that this one had almost certainly been crying.
The elevator brought us to the third floor, and a sign said that those with business in rooms 320 to 340 should turn left. We did, and a hundred feet farther down rounded a corner and that's when I knew we were in the right place – or the wrong one, depending on how you look at it.
Part of the hallway was blocked off by yellow crime scene tape in two places, with one room in the middle. I didn't really need to look and see if it was 333, but I did, and it was.
A uniform named Klein was stationed at the barrier. He nodded at me and lifted the tape up so we could duck under it.
I waited for Karl to say "What do we got here?" but he didn't. I glanced at him and saw that his face was pinched and gray, and we hadn't even been inside the room yet.
A few yards down the hall, another uniform was
interviewing a nurse who kept waving her hands around as she talked. I walked up to them. "Excuse me," I said. "Anybody know the name of the vic?"
The cop, a redheaded beanpole named Sadler, flipped bck a page in his notebook. "Prescott, Benjamin R," he said. "Moved down here from the ICU earlier today."
I wish I could say that the news surprised me, but by then the surprise would have been if he'd said a different name. My guts weren't clenched, the way they'd been with the witchfinders. Instead they were cold, freezing cold, as if a big ball of ice had formed there and was planning to stay a while. Like maybe the rest of my life.
I asked Sadler, "Witnesses?"
"Nah. Couple of nurses heard screaming and ran over, but the guy's door was locked – from the inside. One of them had to go back to the nurse's station to get a master key. When they got the door open, nobody was in there but the vic, or what was left of him." He shook his head. "Sounds like your kind of thing, huh?"
"Yeah, sure. My kind of thing."
I turned away and went to the doorway of room 333 and stood there while a couple of forensics techs inside went about their business.
I let my gaze wander around. Standard-looking hospital room: green walls, patterned linoleum floor, a single window open wide; I didn't know if the window had been like that earlier, or if a cop was hoping to let out some of the stench. If that was the point, it hadn't worked real well so far. The sickly-sweet smell of burned flesh was so thick, you could almost see it in the air.
The rest of the room was pretty much what you'd expect. Narrow bed with mechanical stuff underneath it for raising and lowering; a small wooden armoire; a nightstand; one of those rectangular tables on wheels that they use for meals; a couple of uncomfortable-looking chairs.
There were a couple of differences from the average hospital room, though. Like the four bloody, naked limbs – arms and legs, two of each – stacked neatly in one corner, and the charred thing that lay in what was left of the bed.
Some of Prescott's abundant body fat had been liquefied by the intense heat. You could see it, runny and yellowish, sticking to parts of the bed frame. There were a couple of congealed pools of it on the floor, one on each side of the bed.
I stepped closer to the monstrosity on the bed. Might as well drink from this cup all the way to the bottom. A quick look at what had once been Prescott's head didn't tell me anything useful. A really hot fire will explode a corpse's eyeballs, so there was no way to tell whether the empty sockets that stared accusingly at me had been victims of the fire, or maybe the claws of something right out of Hell. I couldn't bring myself to check Prescott's crotch, to see if his balls were still there. I just couldn't.
Apart from some scorch marks on the wall behind the bed, the rest of the room had been untouched by the flames. The blaze had been localized and focused, no doubt because that's what a very old and deadly curse had specified.
The curse that I had invoked.
Sure, Prescott did the translating, but that's not what caused the curse to kick in – it's revealing to somebody what you've learned that does it.
Which is exactly what I asked Prescott to do.
Which is why Prescott died, in agony and horror.
I think Karl said something to me, but I waved him off. I stood there, looking at the remains of what had been a pretty good man and wondered if he'd damned Stan Markowski in his final moments. If he did, I wouldn't blame him.
But even he couldn't have damned Stan Markowski nearly as hard as I was right now.
After a while, I went back to acting like a cop. What else was I gonna do?
As I turned, my foot knocked againstomething metal. A wastebasket. I looked and saw some used Kleenex, the remains of a tube of Life Savers, a bent straw, a couple of used cotton balls. And a big FedEx overnight envelope. It was addressed to Prescott, care of the hospital, with a return address at Georgetown University. Looked like his assistant back on campus had sent the stuff that Prescott wanted. Like the remaining untranslated pages of the Opus Mago.
Then what the hell happened to them?
I turned to one of the forensics guys, Billy Santoro. "You come across any paper around the corpse, maybe something written in a foreign language?"
"No, no papers, Stan. Some ashes that might've been paper, but nothing that's got any hope of recovery. Fire was just too hot, you know?"
"How about a laptop?"
"We found something, was probably a laptop once. But now it's just a bunch of warped metal and melted plastic. You can look at it, if you want."
"No, I guess not. Thanks."
Well, so much for that brilliant idea. If Prescott had learned anything useful from the Opus Mago fragments, it had died with him. Even if my hunch had panned out, what would I do with a bunch of papers written in Ancient Sumerian?
Find another translator, who can get dismembered, blinded, and burned alive for his trouble? One's not enough?
I looked at the corpse one more time. Just punishing myself, I suppose. I didn't need to see it again – that charred mound of gunk and bone was going to have a starring role in my nightmares for a long time to come.
As I turned away, something glittered in the corner of my vision.
It came from the corner where Prescott's severed arms and legs were stacked. They hadn't bled much, without a heart to provide pumping action. I walked over, and tilted my head a little. There it was again.
I squatted next to the pile of flabby, pale flesh, careful not to touch anything. I looked closer.
A cell phone. Prescott had been holding the phone in his hand when the arm was severed. Not surprising, then, that his big paw was squeezed tight around it.
I looked over my shoulder and saw that Billy was still taking samples of Prescott's ashes and putting them into small plastic bags.
"You do these yet?" I asked him. "The arms and legs?"
"Not yet," he said. "Thought we ought to concentrate on the torso first. We'll get to the rest of him pretty soon. I figure there's no hurry."
"No. No hurry at all."
He went back to work. Using my body to hide what I was doing, I slowly leaned forward, got two fingers around the phone, and carefully worked it loose from Prescott's grip.
I knew I was tampering with evidence in a homicide investigation. But the cause of death wasn't exactly in dispute, even if nobody but me and Karl would ever know for sure what had happened here.
I slipped Prescott's phone into an inside pocket of my suit coat, then stood up. Walking over near the window for better light, I casually pulled the phone out again. As far as anybody could tell, I was messing around with my own phone, just like millions of people do every day.
I opened the phone and, with a little work, found the list of outgoing calls. The last one Prescott ever made had been to a number I knew well – it was my phone, at the squad room. Length of call: 11:46.
Sweet Mother Mary on a motorcycle.
"Come on," I said to Karl, who'd been staring at the body from another corner of the room.
"Where we goin'?"
"Back to the squad, so I can check my voicemail."
As I drove us out of the hospital parking lot, Karl said, "It's my fault."
I turned and looked at him, and his face reminded me of a man I'd once seen at the funeral of his three children. They'd been murdered by his wife, before she killed herself.
"What the fuck are you talking about, Karl?"
"Prescott. What happened. It's my fault."
"You're wrong about that, partner. You are totally fucking off base. I'm the one who roped him into all this shit."
"Doesn't matter. You told me, Stan! You said to get additional warding for his room. I called two witches I know. One's moved out of town, I left a message with the other one's answering service. She didn't call back, and I forgot, Stan. I should have tried somebody else, even looked in the fucking Yellow Pages, if I had to."
"Karl, listen, you didn't-"
"But I just forgot. With p
eople dropping dead bodies on us and Internal Affairs and the SWAT raid, and the rest of it…"
"Listen, man, don't be-"
"It could've made the difference, Stan! It could. If the protection was stronger, the fucking curse might not have been able to get him. Instead, he went out as hard as any motherfucker I ever saw, or even heard of. The dude was trying to help us, and for that he had his fucking eyes gouged out, and got his arms and legs chopped off, and then he was burned alive…"
Karl buried his face in his hands and started to cry.
If I wasn't driving, I just might have joined him.
• • • •
Back at the squad, we reported to McGuire what we'd seen, what we knew, and what we suspected.
He sat back and ran a hand slowly over his big jaw. "All right," he said. "I'll assign a couple of other detectives to it, just so we can say we investigated and filed a report. I'll need you to brief them before they go out, so that they don't waste a lot of time reinventing the wheel."
Fine. Now I'd have to explain to a couple of other cops just how bad I had fucked up. McGuire was right to do that – I just wasn't looking forward to it.
"You figure this was Sligo, shutting Prescott's mouth?" McGuire asked. "He's got a copy of the Opus Mago. He'd probably know about the curse, and how to make a murder look like one."
I thought about that, then shook my head. "No, if it was him, he'd want us to know it – he wouldn't try to hide his work by imitating the curse, the arrogant prick."
"Besides," Karl said, "it happened in broad daylight. Sligo's a vamp, remember?"
"Yeah, you got a point there." McGuire looked closely at me, then gave the same scrutiny to Karl. "You guys need some time off?" he asked quietly.
Considering everything that was going on right now, he was being extremely generous. But there was no way I wanted to spend the next few days sitting around my house thinking – or worse, drinking myself stupid.
I looked at Karl, who gave me a small headshake. His face had lost a little of the stricken look it had worn at the hospital, but only a little.
"We'd just as soon keep busy, boss, but thanks," I said.
McGuire took a case file from a stack sitting on his desk and put it on his blotter. Opening it, he said, "Then get back to work and catch this motherfucker, before he kills anybody else." e susiv›
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