by King, R. L.
Stone’s gaze locked on him. “That, Jason, is a damned good question.”
“Maybe it only appears every so many years,” Lopez said. “You know, like that creepy clown thing in that Stephen King book.”
Jason shook his head. “Unless it’s a pretty long interval, like every hundred years or even longer, somebody’ll have noticed. I’d imagine if there was a bunch of people getting sliced up around here regularly, there’d at least be stories about it. That’s a big deal. Ojai usually doesn’t even have one murder in a year. This place is about as peaceful as it gets. We could check the newspaper archives, but—”
“He’s got a point,” Lopez said, sighing. “So that gets us back to the original question: if they called it up and told it to murder their enemies, and it actually did it, then why didn’t it keep doing it? Did it off a bunch of people and sleep for three hundred years, and now it’s woken up again?”
Stone shoved his hair back, his mind running fast as it examined possibilities. Nothing looked likely based on the facts as they knew them, or the speculations they had.
“If it got summoned, could it get sent back?” Jason asked.
“If it got sent back, though, wouldn’t it be gone?” Lopez leaned forward. “I still can’t believe I’m sitting here having this conversation.”
But Stone sat up again. “Wait a moment,” he said. “You might be on to something.” He was silent for several seconds; nobody interrupted him. “This is obviously a reasonably powerful entity—if the magical corruption from the site of its summoning could persist even over this many years, it’s not a lightweight. So to banish it would require a lot of power as well.”
“So?” Jason asked.
“So,” Stone said, “what if it isn’t banished? What if it were—given a sort of astral ‘time-out’? Sent away—or more likely, somehow had its power diminished. Or it just decided it had fulfilled its obligation and left on its own? Or—just let me ramble here, this is all speculation—someone bribed it to stay away.”
“Spirits can be bribed?” Lopez asked, dubious.
“Sure, if you can find the thing they value. In this case, this one was summoned for vengeance and blood, so—” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I think this line of reasoning might be valid, but I need to think about it a bit more.”
“It’s too bad there aren’t any other mages around here,” Jason said. “Could you maybe go talk to this Garcia guy again? Maybe he’ll know more about this Faces thing.”
“I doubt it,” Stone said. “He didn’t seem to recognize the name when he read it off the tablets. And as much as he was interested in the history of the Chumash, I’m fairly sure he doesn’t believe in the supernatural aspect of it.”
“So what do we do, then?” Jason sounded frustrated. “We can’t just keep letting people die. It looks like it’s started killing people in groups now. Why is it escalating?”
Stone was thinking again. “Stan, do you know if there were any other unusual murders around the area recently? Before Creek Road, I mean.”
Lopez thought about it. “I don’t recall any,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there weren’t any, but I’d be surprised. That’d be easy enough to check with another phone call. I wouldn’t even have to call Casner—I could check with somebody in Ventura. The records for the county are centralized.” He frowned. “What are you thinking?”
“It just seems odd that these killings started so recently. Unless there are other bodies here that were killed before the man in the barn, then that places the first of the murders sometime last week.”
“Yeah,” Lopez said, nodding. “It doesn’t seem like this thing is trying to hide the bodies very well. And the ME put Paul Gardo’s—that’s the guy in the barn—death somewhere around last Monday or Tuesday.”
“Hmm,” Stone murmured. “So if we assume Gardo was the first, that puts nearly a week between his death and Ashley Reed’s. Leaving out Lindsey—I don’t think she’s part of the pattern here—it’s another two days before the other woman’s body was found.” Again, he forced himself to submerge his vision of Lindsey’s bloody body. She was every bit as much a victim as the others, even if she wasn’t one of the descendants.
“Linda Solis,” Lopez said.
“They’re getting closer together,” Jason said soberly.
Stone nodded. “Precisely my point. And then the Ayalas sometime last night or early this morning—three people at once.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” Lopez said. “Aside from the fact that the killings are coming faster, which is bad enough.”
“What does it imply to you that the killings started last week?”
“That this Faces thing just showed up on the scene again,” Jason said.
“Exactly. Which, if you know about spirits, could mean any one of three things: either it’s been dormant and re-awakened, it simply decided for whatever reason to start killing again, or it’s been re-summoned.” Stone shoved himself back to a more upright position. “There’s also another thing to consider: why did it bother grabbing Jason?”
“I thought we agreed it wanted my power,” Jason said.
“Yes, but why? It certainly wouldn’t have reasonably expected someone like you to stray so enticingly into its path. Were you simply a target of opportunity, or did it see some advantage in taking time out from its primary mission to abduct you?”
Lopez looked confused. “You lost me. What’s this power you’re talking about?”
“Long story,” Jason told him. “Short version: Mages like me because I have power they can use, if I let them. Sort of like a battery.”
“Wait a second—you’re snarled up in this whole magic thing, too?”
“Please,” Stone cut in. “We don’t have time for this right now. Stan, if you could make that call and verify that there haven’t been any other unusual murders lately, that will help put another piece to our puzzle.”
Lopez looked like he was going to push it, but then shrugged and headed back out to the kitchen. When he was gone, Jason turned toward Stone. “You’ve got an idea, don’t you?”
“Possibly.”
“Something crazy and probably dangerous, right?”
“Almost certainly, yes.”
“You want to let me in on it?”
Stone shook his head. “Not yet. It’s still baking. Let’s see what Stan has to say. But I might need your help with it.”
“You know you got it,” Jason replied without hesitation.
Lopez came back a few minutes later. “Okay,” he said. “I was right. No unusual murders in the county in the last six months. Nothing in Ojai, and even Ventura only had three: two gang drive-bys and one domestic violence case.” He sat back down with a weary sigh. “This business is attracting a lot of attention. I mean, seven murders in a town that barely has one a year—Casner’s guys are getting overwhelmed. And from what you say, it’s only gonna get worse.”
Stone nodded, his expression grim, and stood. “If you two will excuse me, I need to go think for a bit.”
“But—” Lopez began.
Jason held up a hand. “Let him go, Stan. He does this. Hey, Al, is it safe for us to go out?”
Stone shrugged. “Probably. I’d stay together if I were you. Where were you planning to go?”
“Library. I want to check a couple of things, and if you’re gonna be off meditating or something, it might be a good time to do it.”
“Go,” he said. “Give me an hour or two. I have some things I need to work through.”
Alone in Lopez’s house after the cop and Jason had departed, Stone lay on his back on his bed and stared up at the ceiling, at last letting his mind have its way with the cacophony of thoughts zooming around his head.
He still felt tired, more tired than he’d been since being in the thick of the Evil situation t
he previous year. The cumulative injuries he’d suffered over the past few days, none serious on their own, were more problematic when they all got together and linked arms. He’d tossed back a couple of ibuprofen before lying down; he still wished he could take something more potent, but now more than ever he couldn’t afford to dull his mental processes.
He also couldn’t afford to think too closely about the murder victims. About Ashley Reed, who’d been a good student and a cheerleader. About Linda Solis, who’d had a husband and children. About the Ayala family, slicing each other to ribbons in front of the television as a small girl looked on in horror.
About Lindsey Cole.
Thinking about them as people—people whose only crimes were being connected through ancient history to the enemies of an insane, vengeful group of long-dead Indians (or, in Lindsey’s case, being connected to one very much alive, only slightly insane British mage)—wouldn’t help him track down and deal with the entity that had caused their deaths. He couldn’t help them now, no matter how much he wanted to turn back time and stop all of this from happening. Time travel wasn’t something anyone had figured out how to do with magic yet, at least as far as Stone knew.
So the plan was to prevent any further deaths, including his own, Jason’s, and Lopez’s. Because he had no illusions about the fact that He of Many Faces had all three of them clearly in its bloodthirsty sights—and that he was right there at the top of its Most Wanted list.
He sighed, sitting up. None of this was helping. Even if he knew exactly what he needed to do to deal with the problem, once again he would certainly be fighting roadblocks that weren’t even related to the situation. Roadblocks like Casner. Stone had no doubt that Lopez was right: Casner was a good cop and a good man. He only wanted to do the right thing. But he was also hopelessly mundane. When you combined “hopelessly mundane,” “head of law enforcement for the relevant area,” and “still half-suspects you of murder,” it could only make for a significantly more difficult time getting anything accomplished.
He thought about Stan Lopez. A few days ago, he’d have thought of him as just as mundane as Casner. Perhaps he had been. Not for the first time, Stone considered what it might be like to be able to simply reveal what he was to people when he needed their help, or needed them to stay out of his way while he tried to get something done. It had a certain allure, sure, but so far he’d been very lucky. He didn’t have any illusions about whether he’d keep up the streak if he got too indiscriminate about who he let in on the secret. The world of magic was definitely on a “need to know” basis, and Stone wasn’t convinced yet that Casner needed to know. As long as Lopez could run interference, that would have to suffice.
The thing was, though, if he was being completely honest with himself, by Casner’s reckoning Stone himself was every bit as much in the way of the investigation as he found Casner to be. Putting himself in the lieutenant’s place, he wondered what he would think or how he’d react if some out-of-town nutter blew onto the scene and kept turning up at murder sites. That realization didn’t make him feel any more charitable toward Casner and his stubbornness, but it did make him a bit more sympathetic. The man was just doing his job.
Unfortunately, however, no matter how hard Casner worked or how many mundane resources he brought to bear on the problem, he wouldn’t be able to solve it. This wasn’t the kind of thing you could solve with guns or smart police work. Despite their best efforts, Stone had no doubt that He of Many Faces would continue his campaign of revenge against his ancient enemies until he either killed them all or the sheer number of murders caught the attention of some other mage who decided it was worth his or her time to come to Ojai and investigate. That probably wouldn’t happen until things were well past the point where anything short of a whole team of mages would be able to deal with it.
Which meant Stone was going to have to find a way to deal with it soon, whether he liked it or not.
He got up and headed for the living room. He only had one idea, and he hadn’t been kidding when he’d told Jason it would be dangerous. He hoped Jason and Lopez would come back with some information from the library that would suggest another alternative, but he didn’t think they would.
Usually things just didn’t work that way.
By the time Jason and Lopez got back a little over an hour later bearing fast-food bags and a small stack of papers, Stone was slouched on the sofa watching a news account of the latest murders. He shut off the television as they came in. “Find anything?”
Lopez went to the kitchen to get drinks while Jason dropped the bags on the coffee table. “Yeah. I think so, anyway.”
When they were all seated, Jason held up the papers. “We got into the newspaper archives, starting ten years back and going from there. Just looking for anything that looked weird or unusual, especially murders or deaths. I was getting discouraged because we weren’t finding anything, but then we got further back and found these.” He passed the papers over to Stone. “Check it out and see what you think.”
Stone glanced over the top sheet. It was a photocopy of a news story, dated twenty-seven years ago in late February. “Police have no suspects in murder of local woman,” he read. He skimmed the rest of the article. “Name was Patricia Perez, age thirty. Throat slashed...no prints but hers on the weapon. Police thought it was a vengeful ex-husband, but never proved it.” He raised an eyebrow. “I suppose it’s possible, but—”
“Keep going,” Jason said.
Stone slid that one behind the stack and looked at the next one. This one was dated in the same year, a month earlier. It described the attempted murder of a teenage boy in the locker room of the local high school. The coach had come in and caught another boy trying to stab him with a large pocket knife. Police could not find a motive for the attack: the boys barely knew each other, and no one, including the victim, could come up with any reason why the attacker would want to hurt him. More oddly, the attacker claimed not to remember committing the crime and seemed disoriented following discovery. The names of the victim and the attacker weren’t mentioned in the article since they were both minors. Stone glanced up. “Interesting.”
“One more,” Lopez said, nodding toward the stack. “This one might not be relevant. It was a little different, but we made a copy of it just in case.”
The third article, dated two weeks after the previous one, described the discovery of a 34-year-old local woman named Edna Soren by a group of hikers in a woody area off Creek Road. She had been severely injured and claimed not to remember what had happened to her. She was taken to a local hospital where at the time the article was written she was still being treated. “Creek Road again,” Stone murmured. He glanced up. “Anything else?”
Jason shook his head. “Nothing after that one—the only other murders after that were all things like domestic violence, drunken brawls, gang stuff—all pretty normal.”
“And nothing prior to these?”
“Not that we could find,” Lopez said. “We went back through another twenty-five years or so to see if we could find a pattern, but there wasn’t anything. Of course we only had time to check the Ojai paper—we might be able to turn up more in the Ventura one, but that would take a lot more research.”
Stone nodded, thinking. “So we’ve got a murder and either one or two attempted murders that match the pattern of our current ones. Edna Soren didn’t die, correct?”
Jason shrugged. “The papers didn’t say anything else about her in the next few weeks, so I’m guessing not.”
“What I want to know, though,” Stone said as if talking to himself, “is if these are connected with the current ones, why so few, and so unsuccessful? One would think that if Faces went on another killing spree twenty-seven years ago, he wouldn’t have stopped with one victim and two almosts.”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “That’s a good point. But even so—especially the one with the kid that
doesn’t remember, that sounds like our guy, or thing, or whatever. It’s like you said happened with the kid who tried to strangle you at Bart’s.”
“But why did it stop?” Lopez asked. “After seeing some of those bodies, I can’t figure it just decided ‘that’s enough, I’ll stop now.’”
“Good question,” Stone said. “It’s possible that someone stopped it.”
“A mage, you mean?”
“Or more than one,” Stone said. “It’s possible. We don’t exactly advertise our activities, generally. And if someone did stop it, they probably assumed it wouldn’t be back, so there was no need to discuss it further.”
“So, assuming you’re right,” Jason said, “the big questions are who stopped it, and why’s it back now?”
“Yes,” Stone agreed.
“Do you have any idea how to answer those questions?” Lopez asked.
“What about that plan you had, Al?” Jason added. “Did you work it out yet?”
“As well as I can—which isn’t that well, I’m afraid.” Stone stood. “I need to make a couple of phone calls. May I use your phone, Stan?”
“Sure, go for it.”
“Hang on,” Jason protested. “Don’t leave us in suspense. What are you thinking of doing?”
“Trying to talk to it,” Stone said, and disappeared into the kitchen.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
An hour later, Jason and Lopez were having an unspoken contest to see who looked more uncomfortable standing amid the doily-strewn tablecloths and gauzy decor of the Third Eye Bookstore and Mystic Emporium. As Stone studied the bookshelves, the two of them finally decided to declare the competition a tie.
“We’ll be outside,” Jason said as he turned sideways to fit past Stone in a narrow aisle. “You—uh—take all the time you need.”
Stone nodded, flipping through a book.
On the other side of the store, the proprietress and her friend, the same woman who’d been here the last time Stone had visited, sipped tea and watched him while trying not to be obvious. After Jason and Lopez left, Stone headed toward them. He didn’t miss the looks of apprehension on both their faces.