by King, R. L.
He wanted to look through some of the remaining books, but as he reached for the next one he became conscious of a heaviness settling over his limbs, pressing down on his eyelids. He blinked and shook his head, trying to wake up, but it didn’t help. Even the coffee wasn’t helping. His body was telling him loud and clear, “I’m going to sleep now, you idiot. Do you have a problem with that?”
Well...he was tired. Perhaps he could spare just a few minutes...
He laid his head on the table, resting it on his folded arms. Just for a few minutes...
Loud, sharp pounding on his door jolted him awake.
“Dr. Stone, open the door, please!” a booming voice called. “This is the police!”
Stone blinked. Light streamed in through the window—how long had he been sleeping? Slumped over the table, his arm and neck bent at an awkward angle, his whole body felt stiff and unresponsive. His head was pounding, no doubt at least partially from last night’s drinks. “Wha—?” he mumbled, running his hand through his hair. His voice sounded thick and muddy to his ears.
“This is the police, Dr. Stone! Open the door or we’ll break it down!”
That got him to his feet. He gazed around uncomprehendingly for a moment, trying to figure out what was going on and why the police were yelling at him. “Just a minute, just a minute...” he said, though nowhere near loudly enough for them to hear him. “I’m coming...” Instinctively, he used a levitation spell to pick up the notebook and settle it on top of one of the ceiling beams, where it was invisible to anyone at floor level. Then, conscious of the fact that he must look like something dragged several miles behind a bus, he stumped over and flung open the door. “What is—”
He stopped. It wasn’t just one policeman: it was two. He didn’t recognize either of them. As he appeared in the doorway, both of them tensed, their hands going to their still-holstered guns.
Stone blinked again. Maybe he was still dreaming. A bizarre sense of deja vu wafted over him as he took in their hard, implacable faces. “What’s this about?” he demanded.
“Alastair Stone, you’re under arrest,” said the older cop. Already the younger one was pushing forward past him.
Stone stood still, shocked, as the cop cuffed his hands behind his back. The deja vu was getting worse by the minute. “Wait a minute—for what?”
“Murder.”
He stared. “Murder? But I thought we settled that—”
“The murder of Lindsey Cole,” the cop said.
Chapter Fifteen
Stone sat numbly at the table in the interrogation room at the Ojai police department. Across from him, Lt. Peter Casner, his face a cold mask, leaned forward and clicked on a tape recorder.
“Let’s start again, Dr. Stone,” he said. “Tell me what happened last night.”
Stone bowed his head. His brain felt pummeled. Shocked. Dead.
He hadn’t put up any protest when the policemen led him to the car. He let them direct him into the back seat of the cruiser with broken docility.
Lindsey...
A lovely, vital young woman was dead, and it was his fault.
What the hell did any of this even matter anymore?
They’d taken him back to the police station in silence; unlike last time, they’d walked him in, fingerprinted him, and had him hold a board with his name and numbers on it while they snapped mug shots. The whole thing would have been surreal if Stone hadn’t been so mentally stunned by the proceedings that he could barely form a coherent thought.
They took him into another room, gave him a set of orange scrubs, and told him to change into them and put his clothes in a bag. All of this they did with minimal conversation: the only words they said were directions on what to do. He followed them without question or argument. They wouldn’t give him any other details about what had happened.
He glanced up through haunted, bloodshot eyes at Casner, his hair spiking everywhere at crazy angles, dark stubble shadowing his pale face. “I didn’t kill her, Lieutenant,” he said softly. He was alone; when they’d told him he had the right to call an attorney, he hadn’t even responded. It was foolish, he knew. He didn’t care.
“Just tell me what happened,” Casner repeated.
This was the second time he’d told the story, but he didn’t object. He simply told it again, his voice a monotone devoid of any kind of life. He described how he’d picked Lindsey up at her home and taken her to the restaurant, how they’d had dinner and drinks there and then he’d driven her home. How she’d invited him in, and he’d accepted.
“Did you sleep with her?” Casner asked.
Stone nodded, staring at the worn table again.
“And then what happened?”
“I—left, after.”
“You left her house?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why didn’t you spend the night?”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t feeling well.” He knew how inadequate that sounded, but he couldn’t tell Casner the truth. In a way, though, it was a truth. Just not the relevant one.
“You weren’t feeling well.” The detective’s tone suggested he didn’t believe it. “She didn’t ask you to leave?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“She didn’t ask you to leave and you refused?”
His gaze came up. This was new. “No. Why do you—”
“Dr. Stone, the ME’s initial examination found bruising on Lindsey Cole’s wrists, consistent with having hands wrapped around them. We don’t have all the data yet, but are we going to find that those bruises are the same size as your hands?”
Stone closed his eyes and nodded.
“Please give verbal answers for the recording, Dr. Stone.”
“Yes,” he rasped.
“So you’re admitting you grabbed her wrists? Maybe to hold her down?”
“No.”
“No you’re not admitting it? But you just said you—”
“I did grab her wrists. But not to hold her down.” He hated this. He didn’t want to reveal what had happened. Lindsey was dead—the last thing he wanted to do was cast her memory in a bad light, which is what he would have to do unless he wanted to try making them believe she was possessed. Even in his current less-than-optimal mental state, he didn’t think that would go over well.
“Why, then?”
He took a deep breath. “She—something came over her.” His voice was soft, still without inflection. “Perhaps a bad dream interacting with the drinks she’d had—I don’t know. I awoke and—” He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again. “I awoke and she was sitting over me, preparing to stab me with a letter opener.”
Casner stared at him. “Dr. Stone, let me get this straight. You’re saying that Ms. Cole tried to stab you?”
“Yes. I—don’t think she realized what she was doing.”
“Did either of you take any drugs last night?”
“No.” For the first time since they’d brought him in, his voice took on a tinge of indignation.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m certain that I didn’t,” he said, his gaze dropping back down to the table. “And I don’t think she did.”
“Would you be willing to submit to a blood test to prove that?”
“If you like, yes.”
“How many drinks did you have?”
“I had two at the restaurant, and another when we got back to her home. She had about the same.”
“And you’re saying that Ms. Cole tried to stab you with what, again?”
“A letter opener. It had a slender blade, about five inches long.” Forgive me, Lindsey. I hate having to do this to you. I know it wasn’t your fault.
Casner opened a file folder in front of him and withdrew a photo, which he slid across the table in front of Stone. “Strange that you should
say that. Take a look.”
Stone’s gaze flicked to the photo. He stiffened, his breath catching in his throat.
The color photo had been taken in Lindsey’s bedroom. It showed a close-up view of Lindsey, sprawled half-seated against the headboard of her bed, propped up on a pillow. Her eyes were wide open, filmy, lifeless. She was naked, her lower body covered with a sheet, her upper body slicked with blood. Protruding from a wound on the left side of her chest was the same letter opener that Stone had dropped over the edge of the bed before he’d departed. He gripped the edges of the table with shaking hands and stared, unblinking, unable to take his eyes from the photo.
“So...” Casner said, “You don’t think it’s odd that the murder weapon was the very same thing that you claim she tried to stab you with?” He slipped the photo back in the file folder. “You know what I think, Dr. Stone? Try this on for size: you drove her home, just like you said. She invited you in. You had a few drinks, things got a little hot and heavy, you ended up in the bedroom. But somewhere in there maybe you tried something she didn’t like, or she just decided that maybe she didn’t want you around for whatever reason. She told you to leave. You refused. She tried to fend you off with the only weapon she had, and you took it away and stabbed her with it. Maybe it was an accident. That happens sometimes when people get emotional. Then you realized what you’d done, panicked, and took off.”
Stone started shaking his head halfway through Casner’s words. “No, no,” he said. “Lieutenant. No.” The image of Lindsey’s staring, empty eyes had imprinted itself on his mind, and he couldn’t drive it away. “I didn’t kill her.”
“Are you saying she stabbed herself?”
Stone bowed his head. If the thing had come back and taken residence in her body again after he left, he realized, it was entirely possible that that was exactly what had happened. If these things were powerful enough to make a stolen body cut a teenage girl’s throat, then they were strong enough to override a human’s powerful natural self-preservation instincts to force her to plunge a sharp object into her own heart. But there was no way in hell that Casner was going to believe that. He himself wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen the evidence with his own eyes.
“Dr. Stone? Answer the question, please.”
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “All I know is that I didn’t do it.”
“Are we going to find your prints on that letter opener?”
“Probably. I took it away from her and threw it on the floor.” Through the fog in his brain, something bubbled up. His voice took on a bit more life again. “Lieutenant, did your investigators find a small puncture or slash in the sheet and mattress on the side of the bed closest to the window?”
Casner frowned as he consulted his papers. “I don’t have all the reports back yet. They’re still working the scene. Why?”
Stone sighed. “It won’t prove my story, obviously, but it might lend some credence to it. When Ms. Cole—attempted to stab me, I rolled to the side and she hit the bed with the blade. That was when I grabbed her wrists—just long enough to make her drop it.” Remembering something else, he added: “And have them take a look at the opener itself. See if it was bent and then re-straightened. It was bent when I took it from her, so whoever—” the image flashed in his mind’s eye again “—whoever killed her—would either have to have straightened it, or stabbed with it bent.”
“I’ll let them know,” Casner said. “My guys are good, Dr. Stone. If there’s anything to find, they’ll find it.”
Stone nodded. “I hope so, Lieutenant.” He looked up. “What happens now? I assume you intend to charge me with Ms. Cole’s murder.”
“Not yet. But the law allows us to hold you for up to seventy-two hours before we have to charge you or let you go, and we’re going to do that. What the investigators and the ME come up with will determine whether we pursue the case and charge you with the murder.”
He frowned. “May I ask a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why aren’t you charging me? It sounds as if you’re convinced that I’m guilty. Why risk allowing me to flee if you let me go?”
Casner sighed. “Because, Dr. Stone, this is a serious charge. You realize, if you’re found guilty of this, it could mean life in prison. If they determine it was premeditated, you could get the needle. That’s not something I take lightly. Especially because you’re wrong: I’m not convinced you’re guilty. Not yet.”
“Why?” Stone’s voice was dead again. He slumped in his chair.
“Call it my gut. There’s been a hell of a lot of very strange stuff centering on you—and this friend you’re searching for—ever since you arrived in Ojai. Before that, even, if the first murder is connected to the rest of this.” He tapped his folder with his pen. “First, we find you at the scene of another murder you claim to have stumbled onto while following a—what you claim was a psychic vision. It looks suspicious, but you’ve got an alibi that places you nowhere near the victim when he died, and nowhere near the first victim, assuming they’re connected. The very next day, a local kid you’ve never met before tries to strangle you in a public place, then claims he has no idea why and doesn’t even remember doing it. A kid, I might add, who’s lived in town all his life, has never been in trouble beyond the occasional school detention, never had any history of mental issues, and who passed drug and alcohol screens with flying colors.”
He opened the folder and pulled out another sheet of paper. “Now, we get an anonymous call saying that a local woman—a woman you’ve been seen with just the previous night—has turned up murdered in her bed.” He put that page back and picked up another one. “I’ve been doing some checking up on you, Dr. Stone: you’ve got a very interesting history. Professor at Stanford for about seven years, citizen of the United Kingdom, resident alien in the process of applying for dual citizenship, no criminal record in either country—but yet you were present when an elderly woman’s mansion was destroyed by fire in Los Gatos shortly after you arrived in the U.S. You barely escaped with your life when your rented home in Palo Alto was destroyed by a gas explosion four years after that. You were injured in the explosion of an abandoned mine in West Virginia almost two years ago. And—” he studied the paper again, “—you were on the scene of that terrorist attack at Burning Man last summer where several dozen people were killed.” He looked up, meeting Stone’s gaze. “Trouble does seem to follow you, Dr. Stone, even if there’s no way to connect you directly with it. Either that, or you’re somehow seeking it out.”
This was one of the things Stone had been dreading for years, ever since he got involved with Jason and Verity and the Evil: that someone would examine his life closely enough to put all the pieces together and figure out just how deeply buried in the unexplained he was. He scrubbed at his hair while searching for a plausible answer. “There isn’t much I can say in my defense, Lieutenant, except to say that I do a bit of—investigation of potentially occult-related events in my spare time. I was working for the elderly woman in Los Gatos, and the West Virginia incident started out as another investigation, though the actual cause of the explosion had a perfectly mundane explanation. So did my home in Palo Alto.”
“And Burning Man?”
Stone shook his head. “That one was—a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I knew some of the people who died there. It’s not something I’d prefer to dig up again unless absolutely necessary. The whole thing is still quite raw.” He sipped from the bottle of water Casner had given him and his shoulders sagged back into a dejected slump.
The lieutenant leaned across the table. “If there’s anything you want to tell me, Dr. Stone, now’s the time to do it. Just because there’s a lot of weird shit going down around Ojai right now and my gut tells me you’re not the guy we’re looking for doesn’t mean the evidence won’t show otherwise. And it doesn’t mean I can do a damn thi
ng for you if there’s enough of it that I’ll be forced to charge you. I’ll tell you something you might not know: if the evidence convinces us that you didn’t commit the murder, and we release you before that seventy-two-hour period is up, then the arrest won’t go on your record. It just counts as you being ‘detained,’ which won’t get you in any sort of trouble. But I can promise you this—and it’s not a threat, it’s simply the way things work—if you are charged with this murder, even if you go to trial and are eventually found not guilty, your life will never be the same again. It will be expensive, it’ll put every aspect of your history, your personality, and your habits under a microscope, and it’s possible you might even lose your job or be deported back to England. Like I said, I’m not saying this to scare you. I’m saying it because I want you to help us. If there’s anything you’re not telling us, don’t wait too long.”
He stood, gathering his files. “We’ve been talking for quite a while now, Dr. Stone. I’m going to give you some time to think things over. We’ll meet again later. If you decide you want to talk before I get back to you, just tell one of the officers. Same if you decide you want a lawyer after all.” He nodded to the uniformed cop standing by the door, who came over and motioned for Stone to get up.
The cop took him to a small cell and waved him inside. He went without protest, lying on the narrow bed and turning away to face the wall. He closed his eyes as the steel door locked behind him.
He stayed in that position for over an hour, the image of Lindsey’s bloody body playing on an endless loop in the theater of his mind, interspersed with flashes of her laughter, her sparkling brown eyes, her soft hands as they pulled him into an embrace and caressed his hair.