Ghost Hunter gh-4

by Jayne Castle

  "Who was Mary Tyler Jordan?"

  "An eccentric botanist. She died about fifty years ago and was consigned to the dust heap of history in her own time. Her work was never recognized as legitimate. Her peers considered her an outsider, a real crackpot."

  "Eccentric being a polite term for crazy?"

  "Not in my opinion. Jordan devoted her life to studying the therapeutic uses of herbs and plants. I use several of her old tisane recipes. In my opinion, she was a genius. But the mainstream medical community dismissed her work because she was not able to do the kind of controlled studies that scientific researchers demand."

  "Why no controlled studies if she was so good?"

  "Because she was dismissed as a quack and couldn't get funding from the government or any reputable research firm." Elly looked at the herbal in her hands. "That's how it works, you know."

  "Can't argue with that."

  "And there's no getting around the fact that she contributed to her own downfall when she declared that she had discovered what came to be known in the field as Jordan's Jungle."

  "Never heard of it."

  "Jordan wrote that she had discovered a vast underground jungle in the catacombs," she explained.

  "No wonder everyone wrote her off as eccentric. In the whole history of catacomb exploration no one has ever discovered any signs of plant or animal life growing in the tunnels."

  'True," Elly said. 'The assumption is that Jordan may have experimented on herself with some of her own psychoactive herbal concoctions and experienced a few major hallucinations. In any event, her work was ignored and later forgotten except, of course, by Jordan's Jungle fanatics."

  "Those would be folks who believe that the jungle exists?"

  "Right. They are a small but sturdy lot of diehards who have been known to spend years searching for the jungle." Elly hefted the heavy volume, unable to believe that she was holding it in her hand. "Do you realize how rare this book is? There are only three known copies still in existence, and all of them are in the libraries of private collectors who have refused to allow access to them."

  "You tried?"

  "Oh, yes. I've always been interested in Jordan because of her early work with medicinal herbs. After I started coming across obscure references to this herbal, I couldn't rest until I tracked down every extant copy of her book. I contacted each of the three collectors and asked for permission to examine their copies. They all turned me down flat."

  "Did they give any reason?"

  She smiled wryly. "They're all book collectors. They didn't need reasons. In fairness, two of the three are elderly and quite reclusive. I think they were simply afraid to allow strangers inside their homes, let alone into their private libraries."

  "What about the third?"

  She cleared her throat. "Dr. Frances Higginbottom informed me that she only allowed those with what she termed 'proper academic qualifications' access to her private library."

  "You've got plenty of academic qualifications."

  "Not in Dr. Higginbottom's view. She went on to make it clear that she didn't think anyone from a Guild family could possibly have the right degrees or a suitably serious, scholarly mind."

  "A trifle biased against the Guild, huh?"

  "As we all know, the Guilds do have some image issues. And, to be honest, although I've got a couple of degrees, the highest post I held at Aurora Springs College was that of a lowly instructor. In addition, I can't claim any significant publications. I really didn't have the proper academic qualifications to be allowed into her library."

  "Three extant copies," Cooper repeated thoughtfully. "So, we ask ourselves, how did a third-rate florist like Stuart Griggs come by an extremely rare, presumably expensive herbal and a couple of highly collectible pre-Era of Discord journals?"

  "Excellent question." She looked around at the spare, shabby furnishings. "I don't know the answer to it, but I'll tell you one thing about Mr. Griggs that I hadn't realized until this very moment."

  "What's that?"

  "I think it's safe to say that he chose to set up his shop here in Ruin Lane for the same reason I did."

  "Which was?"

  "Mary Tyler Jordan once lived on this street," she said. "In fact, if the old records are correct, she lived at this exact address. I remember talking about it with the Realtor when I was searching for a suitable location for my herb shop."

  "Let's check out the basement."

  "You know, this is kind of exciting." Clutching the precious Jordan herbal, Elly hurried after him. "I'm starting to feel just like Harmony Drew."

  "Who's Harmony Drew?" he asked, halfway down the stairs.

  "You never read the Harmony Drew, Girl Detective stories when you were growing up?" she asked.

  "Doesn't rez any bells."

  "Well, you're a guy. You probably read The Amber Boys series instead. My brothers loved those. All about a couple of brothers with strong dissonance-energy para-rez talents who solved crimes."

  "That must have been the year I was reading Espindoza's A History of the Era of Discord."

  "Oh, sure. Every kid reads Espindoza's History when they're ten years old. How many volumes in that set? Two? Three?"

  "Four, not counting the index."

  "Gosh, how could I forget the index? Yes, indeed, fun, youthful reading, all right."

  "You're mocking me, aren't you?" he asked.

  "You have to admit, your childhood reading program was a little unusual."

  "My parents assumed that I would follow in their footsteps. When they discovered that I had a strong appetite for history, they fed it, figuring I would become a history professor like Dad."

  "Little did they know," Elly murmured darkly.

  Cooper did not respond to that comment. He reached the floor of the back room and went behind the staircase.

  Elly felt the wave of strong psi energy the instant he opened the cellar door.

  "There's a hole-in-the-wall down there," she said.

  "Sure is."

  Cooper descended first into the darkness. Elly followed, keeping a close watch on Rose, who showed interest but no alarm.

  At the foot of the old staircase Elly saw the thin arc of green light. It emanated from a narrow, jagged opening that was partially obscured by several large boulders.

  "It's not far from the hole next door in Bertha Newell's cellar," Cooper said, crossing the space to examine the opening on the other side of the rocks. "I wonder if she knows that Griggs had an entrance into the catacombs only afew yards away from the one she uses."

  "I don't think so. She never mentioned it. You know how it is in the catacombs. You can have two bolt-holes separated by only a few feet on the outside, but once you go inside, you're back in the labyrinth. You might never find the second entrance from the interior unless you stumble into it accidentally."

  Beyond the narrow tear in the quartz wall she could see a short corridor that ended in a rotunda. Five other hallways branched off the circular space.

  A small utility sled was parked just inside the jagged opening.

  "If we're lucky, Griggs left the amber-rez locator set to his last destination," Cooper said.

  He slipped sideways through the opening, walked to the vehicle, and leaned into the driver's compartment. Elly watched him fiddle with the instruments.

  "Well?" she asked.

  "Got it." He straightened, looking coolly satisfied. "Care to take a spin?"

  "You bet."

  She squeezed through the opening with Rose on her shoulder and hopped up onto the passenger seat of the sled.

  Plant psi shivered across her senses. Turning in the seat, she surveyed the cargo bed of the sled.

  "Sense something?" Cooper asked, getting in beside her.

  "Yes. Psi-bright or some form of it. Very faint, but I recognize the buzz."

  "I think we're on a roll here," Cooper said.

  He hit Retrace Route on the locator and rezzed the small motor.

  The trip was
a short one. The sled hummed through a couple of turns and stopped in front of a vaulted chamber.

  Cooper got out and walked to the door of the room. "Nothing in here."

  She went to join him. The chamber was empty, as he had said, but the tingle of psi-bright was stronger.

  "The herbs were here," she said. "And probably quite recently."

  "There's another room off of this one."

  Cooper started across the space. He paused halfway and abruptly changed direction.

  Elly saw something glitter in the corner. She watched Cooper pick it up.

  "Looks like broken glass," she said.

  "It is. I think it's the bottom half of a beaker, the kind you use to run chemical experiments. There's still some white residue in the bottom."

  "Let me see." She hurried to join him.

  There was no need to touch the shattered glass. Her psi senses flared wildly.

  "Enchantment dust," she said.

  Chapter 28

  "THE SON OF A BITCH HAD A LAB GOING IN THAT chamber." Cooper eased open the rear door of Griggs's shop and stepped out into the alley. "The question is, what in green hell happened to it?"

  He listened with all of his senses. Fog still swirled in the alley, limiting visibility. A glance at Rose, perched on Elly's shoulder, assured him that there was no immediate threat.

  "I can't get over the notion of Stuart Griggs as a big-time drug dealer," Elly whispered. "It boggles the mind. He must have made a fortune. Wonder what he did with the cash."

  Cooper thought about the two journals he was carrying and the herbal that Elly clutched as though it were a box of amber diamonds.

  "Looks like he may have used some of it to buy these books," he said. "But a few rare volumes wouldn't have put much of a dent in the kind of profits Griggs must have been pulling in with the chant. Looks like I'm going to have to do some follow-the-money research on him tomorrow."

  "Maybe that's what the intruder was looking for tonight, Griggs's drug money."

  "Or a stash of chant."

  "Well, we know where a lot of that wound up," she reminded him. "In the basement of The Road to the Ruins."

  "Yes."

  "I'll bet he dismantled the lab and moved the drugs after he realized that Bertha had escaped his vortex."

  "That theory assumes that Griggs was the blue freak I'm chasing," he said.

  "You've got doubts about that?"

  "It occurs to me that the odds of Griggs just happening to collapse and die from a heart attack shortly after Bertha Newell discovered his underground lab seem a little long."

  She turned her head quickly to look at him in the shadows. "Are you saying that you think there's someone else involved in this?"

  "It crossed my mind. Death by a strong blast of intense blue ghost energy can look a lot like death by heart attack. But if someone murdered Griggs that way, he would have had to do it underground. I told you, blue energy is very weak outside the tunnels, too weak to kill."

  "I suppose the killer could have murdered Griggs down in the catacombs and then dragged his body up the stairs into the back room of the shop," she said slowly. "It would probably require an autopsy to determine the truth. I doubt if one will be ordered in this case. Neither the medics nor the cop had any reason to think they were dealing with a crime scene today."

  "I'll call Mercer Wyatt first thing in the morning," Cooper said. "This is his town. He shouldn't have any problem pulling whatever strings it takes to get an autopsy performed."

  She cleared her throat. "Generally speaking, the mainstream media here in Cadence takes a dim view of the quaint practice of referring to the city as a particular Guild boss's town. It invites unfortunate comparisons to mob boss rule."

  "Damn. Done in by semantics again."

  They were almost back to the mouth of the alley. The green-tinged mist roiled in the empty street. On the other side of the pavement he could just barely make out the haloed lamps over the back doors of the next row of shops.

  Rose rumbled softly. A warning this time.

  "Cooper," Elly said, voice tight with urgency.

  He felt the spectral fingers of awareness on the nape of his neck and reacted instinctively. He pushed Elly into the dense, dark shadow cast by a large metal trash container.

  Rose, nearly invisible except for her four glowing eyes, started to tumble toward the ground.

  "No, Rose," Elly whispered. "You mustn't." She caught the dust bunny in one hand and tucked her safely into the crook of her arm.

  Two figures moved into the alley opening, silhouetted against the acid-hued fog light. The features of both men were covered by stocking masks. Flickers of green ghost-energy snapped and crackled in the mist around them.

  At least one of them was a hunter, Cooper thought. When the adrenaline started flowing, a lot of them unconsciously summoned bits of whatever stray ghost light happened to be in the vicinity.

  Unlike a lot of dissonance-energy para-rezzes who generally chose to stick with UDEM energy as the weapon of choice when they went into this kind of work, these two were armed. One carried a gun. Light glinted on the edge of the wicked-looking blade in the other man's hand.

  The man on the right rezzed a pocket flash. He was the one with the gun. His stocking cap had a tassel on top.

  "Don't move," Tassel Top ordered. "Either one of you even breathes hard, and you're both dead. You," he said to Cooper. "You're dressed like a hunter. You the real thing or just a wannabe?"

  "It's a fashion statement," Cooper said.

  The other man snickered. "Hey, Joe, the guy thinks he's a stand-up comic."

  "Skip the jokes," Joe snarled. "Unless you want to feel what it's like to take a bullet."

  "Anyone who knows me well knows I never joke," Cooper said quietly. "What do you want?"

  "Whatever you found back there in Griggs's shop," Joe said.

  "You went in ahead of us, didn't you?" Cooper asked. "That means you know there wasn't anything of value left inside. Unless you count the books." He held up the one he carried. "But somehow I don't see either of you as big readers."

  "Why'd you take those old books?" the other one demanded. His mask was trimmed with two white circles around the eyes, giving him a rather startling resemblance to a moon-rat. "Somethin' special about 'em?"

  "My friend, here, is a librarian," Elly offered helpfully. "He likes books."

  "Shut up," Joe snapped. "I don't like mouthy babes."

  "Elly," Cooper said without inflection.

  She went silent, but he could have sworn he heard the simmering. He could almost feel the steam.

  He did a quick survey of his options. Neither of the two thugs had noticed Rose. Elly was holding her just out of sight behind the corner of the big trash container. The position blocked the men's view of the dust bunny's four eyes.

  Rose, too, had gone quiet, he noticed. He didn't know much about dust bunnies, but he knew a lot about hunting strategy. Some things remained the same across species lines. When a predator, large or small, stopped growling a warning and went very quiet, it was time for the prey to start worrying.

  "We grabbed the books because they looked valuable," he said aloud, putting a shrug into the words. "Didn't seem to be anything else left that was worth taking. What were you guys looking for? Drugs? Cash?"

  "There wasn't any," Moon-Rat blurted. "We know he must have had plenty of both around somewhere. He always paid us with the chant."

  "Shit, Benny, keep your dumb mouth shut," his companion rasped.

  "Okay, take it easy." Cooper slowly unfastened his jacket. "I'll show you what we found."

  The small section of the glowing fog in the street behind Benny and Joe started to change color, shifting subtly from green to blue. Neither of the two men noticed.

  Cooper probed hard for the blue psi energy he needed. Fortunately, this close to the Dead City there was enough of it around to serve his purpose.

  "Hurry up," Joe said hoarsely. "We ain't got all night.
"

  Blue flames leaped out of the open trash container.

  "What the hell?" Benny jolted backward a couple of startled steps and swung around to stare at the blaze. "There's a fire in the garbage."

  "Shit." Joe retreated a couple of paces. "We've got to get out of here. Someone is going to see the flames and call the fire department."

  Cooper moved.

  "Stay where you are," Joe snapped. He whipped back around to face the spot where Cooper had been standing a couple of seconds earlier.

  But Cooper was already on him, using the momentum of his body to slam him into the side of the heavy metal container. The gun clattered on the stones.

  "What the hell?" Belatedly realizing that things were getting out of control, Benny swung around, knife in hand.

  Cooper kicked out with one booted foot, catching him high on the thigh.

  Benny staggered backward, trying to keep his balance.

  Elly came out of the shadows, swinging the heavy herbal. The weighty tome slammed against the side of Benny's skull.

  Benny shrieked in pain and sank to his knees. He lost his grip on the blade.

  There was a sudden scampering noise on the ground. Four eyes glowed in the night, rushing toward Benny's leg.

  Benny screamed. "Get it away from me. Get it away."

  "Rose, no," Elly said quickly. "You mustn't bite anyone else, sweetie. Someone may call the pound."

  To Cooper's surprise, the dust bunny halted, albeit reluctantly, and dashed back to Elly, who grabbed her with both hands and tucked her close.

  "Are you all right?" Cooper said, bending down to scoop up the gun.

  "Yes." Elly took a deep breath. "I'm okay."

  Joe was on the ground, moaning. Cooper yanked off Benny's ski mask and discovered that the disguise had been an apt one. The guy actually did resemble a moon-rat.

  "Now, why don't you tell me exactly how you came to be acquainted with the deceased," Cooper said.

  Benny's faced scrunched up in confusion. "Huh?"

  "What was your connection to the florist?"

  "I'm not tellin' you nothin'," Benny stated.

  "Let me put it this way," Cooper said. "You can talk to me, or you can talk to Mercer Wyatt."