The Long Chain

by Dan Willis

  “What if I need your deductive skills when I talk to William Henderson?”

  Alex laughed.

  “You don’t really want me around while you’re sweating an important political figure,” he said.

  Sorsha looked as though she wanted to argue, but after a moment to think, she nodded.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Get your cannon back from Mendes and get out of here.”

  Alex collected his A-5 and the bag with his trench coat, stopping long enough to drop them off in his vault. He had just shut the heavy door when Detective Hawkins came sweeping into the building with a dozen officers in tow.

  “Jeez, Lockerby,” he said, coming over to stand beside Alex. “What did you get me into?”

  “Glad you could make it, Detective,” Alex said. He took a minute and explained the scene.

  “So let me get this straight,” Hawkins said, rolling his eyes. “That thing is a smoke machine a retired chemist was making for the Navy,” he said, pointing at the device. “Someone stole it and tried to sell it to these gentlemen, who just happen to be Chinese nationals.”

  “That’s pretty much it,” Alex said with a completely straight face.

  “You realize that even if the scary FBI lady catches the thief, none of this is going to make the papers, right?”

  “I promised I’d call you, Detective,” Alex said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I never promised I’d make you famous. Still, the Navy will probably thank the chief for the return of their property, and that’ll reflect well on you.”

  “Except you found it,” Hawkins grumbled.

  Alex put his finger in front of his lips in a gesture of silence.

  “I was never here,” he whispered, then he winked at the detective and strode out of the ramshackle building.

  22

  The Girl

  A black police car was parked next to the curb in front of Dr. Kellin’s home, making no attempt to be inconspicuous at all. As Alex approached from the direction of the sky crawler station, he could see a bored-looking cop sitting behind the wheel. He had his window down and was alternating between puffing on a cigarette and watching the little brick house. His partner in the passenger seat was asleep with his head on his chest and his arms folded.

  Alex walked a bit heavier than normal as he approached the car, until the cop leaned out of the window to get a look at him. He was blond with a blocky face broken up by a bulbous nose.

  “Officer Johansson,” Alex said, recognizing the man.

  The big man looked confused for a moment, then grinned.

  “You’re the scribbler, right?” he recalled. “Detective Pak’s friend.”

  “That’s me,” Alex acknowledged. “Whose doghouse are you in to be pulling this detail?”

  Johansson chuckled at that.

  “This here is a prime job,” he said. “All I have to do is sit and keep an eye on Dr. Kellin. No walking my shoe leather off or chasing after pickpockets, just sit here, relax, and get paid.”

  He leaned back in his seat and put his hands behind his head to emphasize his point.

  “Well, I’m glad it’s working out for you,” Alex said.

  “What are you doing here?” Johansson asked. He almost managed to make it sound like idle curiosity instead of him being a cop.

  “I was here for the festivities the other night,” Alex said. “I think I dropped my key ring out back and I just want to take a look, if that’s okay.”

  Johansson thought about it a minute and then shrugged.

  “It’s okay by me,” he said.

  Alex looked back over his shoulder at the house. The ‘Open’ light on Dr. Kellin’s sign was out and the windows were dark.

  “Is Dr. Kellin home?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but I think she went to bed. The girl left about an hour ago and she hasn’t come back yet.”

  Alex’s stomach soured. He’d wanted to see Jessica, to find out if she was really okay after the events of the other night. Though, if she’d gone out, she must be feeling all right. It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing.

  “Thanks,” he told Johansson. “I shouldn’t be more than a couple of minutes.”

  Officer Johansson waved at him and went back to smoking his cigarette. Alex looked around as he made his way through the front yard to the hidden gate. He saw one of the FBI cars half a block down, but there was no sign of the second detail. Maybe Agent Redhorn had recalled it as being redundant.

  Once in the back yard, Alex hurried to the spot where the missing thug had crashed through the window. The hole in the wall had been boarded up and much of the broken glass had been swept into a pile. Alex was grateful no one had picked it up yet as he set down his kit.

  Finding blood on fragments of broken glass would have been difficult at noon on a clear day, and it was already getting dark and still foggy. Alex, however, had other options. He shone his silverlight lamp over the glass pile and the ground behind the house. The bits with blood on them glowed back at him with a purplish light and he easily picked them out from their fellows.

  Once he had four, he put away his lamp and oculus, switching them for his rolled-up map and cigar box. Moving quickly, he laid out the map and weighed it down to keep it from rolling up again. He placed the battered brass compass on the map, then added a folded finding rune and finally the bloodstained glass shards.

  Since he didn’t want the spell to find glass, but rather the owner of the shed blood, Alex also took out a bottle with a dropper from his kit. Being careful, he added a drop of the liquid to the dried blood, which turned the liquid red. After a few moments, he tipped the shard up so that the liquid ran down onto the flash paper that contained the rune. This would link the blood to the rune, allowing it to ignore the broken glass.

  His preparations finished, Alex took out a cigarette and lit it. Being back at the lab was grating on his nerves and he half-expected the missing man to loom out of the fog and take another shot at him.

  Pushing that thought from his mind, Alex touched the burning end of the cigarette to the flash paper and the rune flared to life. Casting an orange glow into the persistent fog, the rune spun around, slower and slower, until it drew the compass needle along with it.

  “Gotcha,” Alex growled as the rune shuddered, then vanished in a shower of sparks.

  According to the compass, the missing thug was in a rural block on the West Side of the mid-ring. Fortunately it wasn’t too far from a sky bug station. If Alex hurried, he could be there in half an hour.

  The compass led Alex to a quaint little house with a neatly-mown lawn and rosebushes, right up against the outer ring. It was full dark when he arrived, and the fog obscured most of the street, so he wasn’t too worried about being observed. A single light was visible through the front window by the door, but it was dim, probably from a back room rather than the parlor.

  Patting his side, Alex felt the mass of his 1911 hanging just below his left arm. Reassured by its weight, he crossed the front lawn to the side of the house. All the windows had the curtains drawn, so he continued around to the back. A small wooden porch connected the back of the house to the yard through a door in the center of the rear wall. There was a socket for a magelight, but it was empty, and the yard was in darkness. Alex could barely make out the shape of a dog house but no growls or barks greeted him as he stalked toward the porch.

  Moving slowly, he mounted the porch, which creaked a little under his weight. From inside he heard the muffled sound of a radio playing band music, which would cover any noise he made crossing the porch. As he reached the door, Alex slipped his hand inside his jacket and pulled his 1911 free of the holster, then slowly cocked the weapon. He didn’t want trouble, just information, but it payed to be prepared for both.

  Gripping the pistol tightly, Alex took a quick breath, then put his hand on the doorknob. Before he turned it, though, a smell like rust hit him and he could suddenly taste iron. The only thing that did that was blood, and only when it w
as fresh and there was a lot of it.

  Alex turned the door knob but his hand slipped and when he pulled it away it was wet.

  He swore.

  Grabbing the knob again, he squeezed it tight and turned it. As he expected, the door wasn’t locked and opened into a little kitchen. A single bulb burned over a round table strewn with playing cards, cash, and blood. Four chairs were around the table, three of them lying overturned and two bodies lay on the floor in sludgy pools of red. Streaks of blood covered the walls and reached up to the ceiling.

  The nearest body was a big man with massive shoulders and arms; a .38 that looked like a toy was still clutched in his massive hand. The other man was smaller, with a bushy mustache and a snipe nose. He lay against the wall with a look of shock frozen on his rat-like face. Alex could see at least a dozen knife wounds on his arms and torso.

  Being careful not to step in any of the blood, Alex moved to the opening that led from the kitchen to the front room. A quick look inside showed him another man lying dead on the floor just inside the front door. His throat had been cut with what looked like one long stroke, and there weren’t any other wounds he could see on the body.

  “So our boys are playing poker,” Alex said, thinking out loud. He looked back to the lone chair that was still standing upright. “Someone knocks at the door, and that one gets up to see who it is and gets his throat cut for his trouble. His friends jump up from their card game, but the attacker is on them quick.”

  Alex sniffed the air. Underneath the smell of blood and offal was the faint hint of gunpowder.

  “The big guy gets off a shot but either misses or only wings the attacker. He goes down next, followed by rat-face...so where’s our fourth player?”

  Alex would have expected the man who answered the door to be the homeowner, but he definitely wasn’t the man who had fled the workshop. Neither were the two dead men in the kitchen.

  “So, let’s say this house belongs to the guy from the lab; what does he do while his friends are being cut up by a knife-wielding maniac?” Alex looked down the hall toward the bedroom at the back of the house. “He goes for a weapon.”

  Alex had to hop over the big man to stay out of the blood and even then, he managed to get a little on his shoe. Not wanting to confuse the evidence, Alex dropped his pistol into his jacket pocket and pulled out his handkerchief. He wiped the blood from the bottom of his shoe, then cleaned off the blood he’d picked up from the knob of the back door.

  Satisfied he’d gotten off all he could, Alex carefully folded up his handkerchief with the blood on the inside, and tucked it into his trouser pocket. Then he pulled out his pistol and continued carefully down the hall. He passed an empty bathroom and a linen closet, then reached the bedroom. Gripping his 1911 tightly, he ducked his head out around the door and just as quickly back. The bedroom was dark, but he could make out a dresser, an overturned chair, and a bed with a bloody body sitting against it.

  He stepped around the door, sweeping the room with his gun but nothing moved. A sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun sat on the floor by the body, just out of the dead man’s reach.

  Alex fumbled for the light switch and finally got it on. When the bulb on the ceiling bloomed into light, the dead man gasped. Alex brought the gun to bear but he needn’t have bothered. The man was still alive, but he was bleeding from multiple stab wounds.

  Alex swore and the man looked up at him with a glassy-eyed stare. He had several scabs on his cheek from where he’d previously jumped through Dr. Kellin’s window.

  “C-come to...to finish the job...you son-of-a-bitch,” he slurred. “I should have...put a bullet in your head...when I had the chance.”

  “Shut up,” Alex said, slipping his gun back into its holster. He took off his jacket and pulled out his handkerchief, moving to the man to try to stop the bleeding. The worst wound was in the man’s abdomen, so Alex pressed the handkerchief into it, eliciting a groan from the man. Blood oozed out over Alex’s hand. His handkerchief wasn’t going to be enough. Without a major healing potion, nothing would be enough.

  “Who did this?” Alex asked, keeping any urgency out of his voice.

  The man started to chuckle but coughed instead, spewing out blood as he did so.

  “Girl,” he gasped. “Said her name...was Lilith.”

  “A woman did this?” Alex asked, remembering the small footprint at Charles Grier’s alchemy shop. The man there had been beheaded by a knife, probably taken from the scene.

  “N-no,” he coughed. “A...a kid. Couldn’t have...have been more than twelve.”

  The idea that an adolescent girl could have cut down four grown men with a knife was absurd, but Alex could tell the man absolutely believed what he was saying.

  “What did she look like?” he asked. “What did she want?”

  “White hair,” he gasped. “Gray...eyes. Old eyes. Asked me abo...about Charles Grier. Who took him. Why they went after...after that other bitch...Kellin.”

  His breath was coming in rasping wheezes now and he couldn’t seem to hold his head up.

  “And what did you tell her?” Alex demanded. “Who has Grier? Who’s after Dr. Kellin?”

  Alex grabbed the man’s hair and pulled his head back, but when he did, the man’s eyes had already gone glassy and distant. A long, shuddering breath escaped his lungs and his body slumped down. Dead.

  Alex released the man and swore again.

  The man had been his best lead on whoever was targeting alchemists, and Alex didn’t even know his name, much less who he worked for. All he’d really discovered was that the men who came for Dr. Kellin were the ones who had grabbed Grier, and he’d already suspected that. Worse, there was some crazed, knife-wielding killer who looked like a child involved somehow, but he had no idea who she was or what she wanted.

  He put his hand on the carpet, intent on pushing himself to his feet, when a wave of exhaustion passed over him and his vision went dim for a moment. Shaking his head to clear it, Alex leaned on the side of the bed and pulled his jacket over to him. He extracted the flask of rejuvenator from the pocket and took a swig. Instantly he felt better, but it wasn’t the usual shot of energy he got from the potion. That was worrying. He’d been using more than usual of late and now it didn’t seem to be working as well. Either he was getting used to it or he simply didn’t have enough life energy left.

  Pushing that cheerful thought to the back of his mind, Alex used the bed to pull himself to his feet. He had to be careful, since his right hand and shirt cuff were covered in the dead man’s blood. For a moment, he considered retrieving his handkerchief, but he decided against it. By the time the coroner found it, there wouldn’t be any way to link it back to him.

  Alex left the bedroom and the dead man and went to the bathroom in the hall. Unbuttoning his sleeve, he rinsed the blood from his hand and did his best to scrub it from his shirt cuff. The red stain persisted, but he could remove it later with a restoration rune. Right now he needed to get out of this house. Whoever the knife-wielding girl was, she’d tried to brew some kind of potion at Grier’s shop. She seemed to be fixated on him, but she might just as easily break into Dr. Kellin’s lab and try to use her equipment. He didn’t even want to think about what might happen if Jessica or the doc walked in on her.

  Satisfied that he’d removed all the blood he could, Alex dried off his hand and rebuttoned his cuff. He was just heading back to the bedroom to pick up his jacket when he heard the creak of a floorboard.

  “Hold it, you!” a rough voice boomed. “I mean it,” he continued when Alex started to turn around. “Get those hands up, and don’t you move a muscle.”

  Since his jacket and its two remaining shield runes were still in the bedroom, Alex did as he was told. He had no idea who would be in the dead man’s house, but most likely it would be one of his friends. Not someone late for the poker game, since all the available seats had been taken. Who did that leave?

  He heard quick steps behind him and then t
he muzzle of a pistol was jammed into his ribs. A man pressed up against his back, reaching around his body from the left, then across his chest to grab the 1911. As soon as he had it, the man jumped back.

  “All right,” the man behind him said. “You turn around, real slow.”

  Pressing his thumb against his flash ring, Alex complied. Once he’d turned, he found himself facing a blue-uniformed policeman with dark hair, a pug nose, and a scar on his cheek. Alex recognized the man; they’d met two years ago at the apartment building of one Jerry Pemberton. The cop hadn’t liked Alex then, and there was no reason to think time would have softened his opinion.

  He wondered how the police had ended up here. He was certain no nosy neighbor had seen him this time. A memory of gunpowder tickled his mind and he remembered, the big man had gotten a shot or two off before the girl had cut him down. You didn’t need nosy neighbors when people were shooting next door. The cops probably got half a dozen calls.

  “Now just who are you?” the cop asked.

  “I’m Alex Lockerby. I’m a licensed private investigator and I came here to get information from the dead guy in the bedroom. Of course, I didn’t know he was dead until I got here.”

  At the words ‘Private Investigator,’ the cop’s look, which was already sour, turned positively grim.

  “What happened here?” the cop demanded.

  Alex shrugged and ran the man through his reconstruction of the crime based on the clues at the scene. He left out the bit about the assailant being an adolescent girl named Lilith and just left it at ‘a knife-wielding-maniac.’

  “Well that’s a very pretty story,” the cop growled in a voice that indicated he found it neither pretty nor credible. “But I’ve got a better one. A crummy private dick tortured some answers out of a bum he’d been following, and then shot him.” He held up Alex’s 1911 with his free hand. “With this gun.”

  It took all of Alex’s willpower not to sigh.