Blood Relation (Arcane Casebook Book 6)

by Dan Willis

  “Nope,” Lockwood said. “I called the owners of the opened crates and they came in to pick up their goods. All of them confirmed that nothing was missing.”

  Alex had been hoping that the theft of the herbs had been a ruse designed to throw authorities off the track of whatever the thieves were really after, but that was looking more and more like a dead end.

  “I’ve got to get home to the wife, Lockerby,” the foreman said. “You can stay and talk to the watchmen if you like, but I’m locking the doors, so you’ll have to talk on the loading dock.”

  Alex followed the big man out and found both the night watchmen waiting. He’d assumed one of them must have been in on the theft, but if that was the case, why was he still showing up for work? Now that the thieves had what they came for, it was only a matter of time before they got paid.

  The night watchmen were both older men with quiet, serious demeanors. Both of them corroborated each other’s stories and the more Alex talked to them, the more convinced he became that they had nothing to do with the theft.

  Frustrated, he thanked the men and headed back to the crawler station. He had no idea what he was going to tell Lung Chen and his uncle. Right now he had exactly nothing, no clues, no suspects, and no idea how to proceed. Still, he did have a day to figure it out so he resolved to ask Iggy about it and get his mentor’s advice.

  One crawler ride later, Alex rode the elevator up from the security station in Empire Terminal to the residence floor of Empire Tower. His apartment was one of the smaller ones, but it still had a front room, kitchen, office, and two bedrooms. It was by far the nicest place Alex had ever lived.

  He had a key for the front door, but he never carried it. The door was protected by the same runes on his vault cover doors and the brownstone’s front door. All he needed to do to pass was to open his pocketwatch and the door would yield easily.

  Once inside, Alex headed through his front room and down the hall to the office. Another of his rune-protected cover doors stood against the back wall and led into his vault. He used to have two more-or-less permanent openings into his vault; one in his old office, and one in his bedroom in the brownstone. Since he’d moved to Empire Tower, Alex had also moved the office door and added a third, here in his apartment, to make it easy to get to the brownstone. Most nights Alex had dinner with Iggy and slept at the brownstone; still, it was nice having his own place, even if he didn’t use it much.

  Alex was just pulling out his pocketwatch to open the vault door when the phone on his desk rang. He contemplated ignoring it, but that was a bad precedent to set. Detective work required a lot of odd hours and contact with people who kept odd schedules, so he picked up the candlestick phone, pressing the receiver to his ear.

  “Is this Alex Lockerby?” a familiar voice asked. When Alex admitted that it was, the man went on. “This is Detective Derek Nicholson, of Division Three.”

  Alex remembered him. He was one of Lieutenant Detweiler’s men, a decent enough fellow though not terribly bright.

  “I remember,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I hate to bother you, Alex, but I’m looking at a dead woman and I think she was into some kind of strange magic. I could use your help.”

  “Officially?”

  Even with Frank Callahan filling the job of Captain over the detectives, Alex still had to get approval to work a police case if he wanted to get paid.

  “I cleared it with Lieutenant Detweiler.”

  Alex considered saying no; he was hungry and frustrated by his failure at the warehouse. Still, the cops always paid his bill on time, and keeping them happy came with other dividends.

  “All right, Detective,” he said. “Give me the address and I’ll come right over.”

  4

  Calculations

  The elevator bell rang and Alex stepped off onto the carpeted hallway beyond. A placard on the wall opposite had the number ten emblazoned on it. The address Detective Nicholson gave Alex was for a relatively new apartment building squarely in the east-side middle-ring. Turning left, he made his way toward the end of the hall. A large window occupied the wall at the end and Alex could see the last rays of the setting sun painting the tops of the skyscrapers in bands of yellow and orange.

  A young policeman in a blue patrolman’s uniform stood by the open door to apartment 1017. He had an earnest expression on his face, and he eyed Alex nervously as the latter approached along the hallway. Clearly he was new on the job and Alex couldn’t help feeling old. The cop still looked like a kid.

  “Can I help you?” the patrolman asked as Alex stepped up to him.

  “I’m Alex Lockerby,” Alex said, handing him a business card. “Detective Nicholson asked me to come by.”

  The young man stared at the card with wide eyes. Apparently he’d been on the job long enough to know the official police position on private detectives, which meant he should tell Alex to beat it. On the other hand, Alex clearly knew which detective was in charge of the scene, which meant Alex probably belonged there. The indecision on the young man’s face was almost comical.

  Before he could instruct the cop to ask his superior, Detective Nicholson’s voice emerged from the apartment.

  “Lockerby, is that you? Let him in.”

  Relieved, the patrolman handed the card back and stood aside as Alex stepped around the door frame and entered the apartment. From where he’d stood in the hallway, he couldn’t see inside, but now he found himself in a modern, well-appointed apartment. The furniture was all relatively new and the front room was neat and orderly with a pair of chairs that bookended a reading table and a couch opposite. The table supported a lamp and a radio. Along the back wall of the front room were several shelf cabinets all filled with books.

  Alex could see a kitchen area off to the left and a hallway disappeared into the rear of the apartment. The table in the kitchen was bare except for a vase containing flowers and a set of salt and pepper shakers. Beyond the table, the counter supported an electric toaster and a teapot but was otherwise bare, and there were no dishes in the sink, or none that Alex could see, at any rate.

  Everything in the apartment was as it should be…with three exceptions. Standing in front of the couch in the front room were two large blackboards on wheeled stands, and lying beneath them on the pale blue carpet was a large, round bloodstain. What looked like a handprint was off to one side and there was evidence of smearing near it, no doubt from the victim’s ultimately futile struggle for life.

  Standing around the bloodstain were two uniformed officers and Detective Nicholson. The Detective looked exactly as Alex remembered him, a somewhat dumpy, disheveled man with a broad face. His suit was a dark gray color and it looked like the man had slept in it, his white shirt had a mustard stain where his paunch bulged out and his hair appeared several weeks overdue for a barber.

  “There you are,” he said as if Alex had kept him waiting for hours. He looked down at the bloodstain, then ran his fingers through his unruly hair. The expression on his face was one of both frustration and relief. “I think this case might be right up your alley.”

  Alex refrained from either smiling or rolling his eyes. Nicholson wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer; in fact, Alex was certain he had some relative in a position of authority in city government that got him his job as a detective. That said, Nicholson had some serious street smarts. He knew an opportunity when he saw it and he’d make the most of it if he could. That was why he’d called Alex in on this case. As far as Alex could see, nothing in the room spoke of rune magic. There might be an alchemy lab set up in back, but he doubted it. Alchemy had a certain smell that tended to permeate the spaces in which it was practiced.

  “This place is rented to Alice Cartwright, age forty-two, now deceased,” he nodded at the bloodstain on the carpet.

  “Coroner already come for the body?” Alex asked.

  Nicholson nodded and continued with his notes.

  “She was stabbed in t
he chest and fell here,” he indicated the bloodstain. “A neighbor found her when he noticed the door open.”

  “Did you move anything?” Alex asked, looking around. Other than the bloodstain, there were no signs that anything was amiss.

  “No,” Nicholson said. “And there aren’t any signs the killer broke in.”

  “So she let him in,” Alex said. “Maybe she knew him.”

  “Or he coulda been a salesman,” Nicholson offered.

  “Is there a Mr. Cartwright?”

  “No,” Nicholson confirmed. “Alice was a spinster.”

  “What did she do for a living?”

  Nicholson looked at the uniforms but they only shrugged back at him.

  “We’re still working on that,” he said. “I’ve got men canvassing the building.”

  “I thought you said there was magic involved,” Alex said, taking another look around.

  Nicholson grinned at him and held up his finger in a theatric gesture. He turned, grabbed the top of the nearest blackboard and pulled, causing the board to flip over to the back side. The front had been blank, but the back was covered with chalk markings. Strange words and symbols adorned it, radiating out from a central sentence in the middle. The sentence was circled and lines ran out to other groups of the unintelligible text but none of it made any sense.

  Before Alex could ask a question, Nicholson grabbed the second board and flipped it over as well, revealing more of the nonsense. Clearly he’d turned them around in anticipation of Alex’s arrival so he could have this dramatic revelatory moment. Part of Alex resented him for it, while the rest recognized a fellow showman. Alex was fond of doing this exact kind of thing when revealing the solution to an especially difficult puzzle.

  “After that incident with the Harper boys, I figured this might be more of the same,” Nicholson said. “I didn’t want to take any chances.”

  Alex didn’t believe that for a second. If that were true, he never would have stood that close to the chalkboards. The Harpers were brothers who robbed banks using explosive runes, something that shouldn’t have existed. Alex learned that Roy Harper had developed them under the influence of a drug known as Limelight.

  On the other hand, everything Roy had written while under its influence looked like nonsense to everyone else. Alex looked at the blackboards again. The things written on them were clearly nonsense, but Roy’s nonsense had been mostly illegible, the nonsense on the board had been written with an almost mathematical precision.

  Mathematical.

  The word rang in Alex’s head like a bell and he stepped up to examine the board more closely. After a moment he found what he was looking for and took out the piece of chalk he always kept in his jacket pocket.

  “What are you doing?” Nicholson demanded as Alex drew a line under what looked like a malformed letter ‘T.’ He was understandably nervous. If it had been a rune that had been drawn on the board, it might be activated just by touching it.

  “Don’t worry, Detective,” Alex said. “This isn’t magic, at least not the kind you’re thinking of.” He pointed to the circled text in the middle of the first blackboard. “I thought this was written well, but it turns out it’s actually pretty sloppy.”

  “Who cares how it’s written?” Nicholson asked.

  Alex shrugged at that and started writing in the space below the sentence.

  “If this had been written better,” he said, “you wouldn’t have called me because you’d have realized that what you have here isn’t magic, it’s math.”

  When Alex finished, he’d written what looked like a math problem, if math problems didn’t have numbers. What had looked like the word ‘ant’ before was actually the letter ‘A’ with an ‘N’ next to and slightly above it with a plus sign coming next. It had been written in such a way that Alex had assumed it was the letter ‘T.’ More letters and symbols went out from that ending with an equals sign and more letters.

  “I’ll be damned,” Nicholson said, rubbing his chin. “So what does it mean?”

  Alex just shrugged at that, dropping his chalk back in his pocket.

  “No idea,” he admitted. “I know magic, not this stuff.”

  Nicholson gave him a hard look, as if he thought Alex was lying, then stepped back, over to the blood spot.

  “Then I guess you don’t know what this means either,” he said, indicating the smears near the bloody handprint.

  Alex stepped closer and peered down. What he’d taken to be smears at first were clearly symbols. Taking care to avoid the blood, he knelt to get a closer look. Unlike the letter-based math on the boards, these were clearly numbers. Two digits, written over one, with two more below.

  “I make it nineteen, seven, and eleven,” Alex said, looking up.

  “Yeah, I can read too, Lockerby,” Nicholson said with an edge in his voice. “Any idea what it means?”

  “Is there a safe or a lock box in the back?” he asked. “Three numbers all under thirty, it could be a combination.”

  Nicholson looked up at the officers, who had stood quiet during Alex’s examination.

  “Either of you mugs find a safe?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “There’s a bunch of files in the back office, but they aren’t even locked,” the shorter of the two said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the hallway.

  Alex was torn. The case of the dead Miss Cartwright was definitely intriguing, but he had plenty of work to keep him busy. Still, it was clear that Nicholson was at a loss and Alex could always use more billable hours.

  “Tell you what,” Alex said, setting down his kit. “Let me look around with my gear. If there’s a safe hidden somewhere, I’ll find it.”

  Nicholson nodded sagely, as if it had been his idea all along.

  “I’ll go talk to the building manager and catch up with the boys doing the canvass, he said. “See if I can find out what Miss Cartwright did for a living.”

  Alex watched him go with the two officers in tow. He took a moment and copied down the hieroglyphics from each blackboard, doing his best to transcribe them into his notebook. When he finished, he tucked the notebook back into his shirt pocket and opened the battered valise that served as his kit bag.

  Alex got out his oculus and set it aside, then took out his egg-shaped multi-lamp. The lamp had four curved sides, each with an oval crystal lens mounted in it. Three of the lenses were covered with a leather cap, so the light from inside only had one direction to shine. Each lens was inscribed with runes and there were runes all around the bottom of the lamp.

  The front of the lamp opened by folding the side down from the top on a hinge, which allowed Alex access to its interior. He removed a brass reservoir from a row of them clipped into his kit bag, and snapped it into place in the bottom of the lamp. The reservoir had an alchemical solution in it that would burn with a bright silver light. When viewed through the oculus, the light would cause biological traces to fluoresce, making them easy to spot.

  Alex lit the burner with his brass squeeze lighter, then closed the door to the lamp. His oculus consisted of a leather pad that went over the right side of his face and was held on with a leather strap. A brass tube, not unlike a telescope, was mounted to it, positioned over his eye. There were several focusing rings and colored lenses that could be used to change the sensitivity of the oculus, and he fiddled with them briefly before starting his investigation.

  The home of Alice Cartwright wasn’t just orderly to look at, it was clean as well. Alex found fingerprints in the usual places; icebox, kitchen cabinets, office drawers, and her nightstand. There was evidence that she’d cut herself in the bathroom and had cleaned up the blood. That probably meant that she shaved her legs, which could mean there was a man in her life.

  If such a man existed, however, Alice had not had him in her bedroom. Nothing there indicated anything untoward had occurred.

  All in all, Alex’s search of the apartment had been both frustrating and fruitless.
Determined to be thorough, he extinguished the silverlight burner and clipped in the one that made ghostlight. With the greenish light emanating from his lamp, Alex went back over the apartment, taking extra time on the blackboards in the front room and in Alice’s office. The office was simple and straightforward, just a desk with a phone on it and four filing cabinets full of papers. He swept it twice, but nothing showed as magical.

  Defeated, he blew out his lamp and set it on the desk to cool. As far as he could tell Alice Cartwright had led an average, somewhat boring life, yet someone had hated her enough to stab her to death. Her apartment was nice, but nothing in it spoke to money, at least not the kind you’d kill to get.

  There was still the matter of her job. She might have been a kept woman or had a small amount of family money, but the four file cabinets full of papers spoke to some kind of work. With a sigh, Alex opened the top drawer of the first cabinet and pulled out the first three file folders. He had just sat down at Alice’s desk to go through them when he heard raised voices coming from the front room. One of them was clearly the young policeman from the door and, after a moment, Alex heard Detective Nicholson as well.

  Setting the files aside, he stood and packed his lamp and oculus back into his kit.

  “I don’t care if you’re investigating the murder of the Arch Duke Ferdinand,” an unfamiliar voice was saying as Alex made his way out of the office. “This apartment is under my jurisdiction until I say otherwise.”

  Alex emerged from the back to see Nicholson standing nose to nose with a man in a light blue suit. He was a little taller than the Detective, but otherwise was the man’s polar opposite. Where Nicholson was dumpy and unkempt, the newcomer was thin and immaculate. His suit was pressed, his tie was straight, his hat had been blocked recently, and Alex could see the crease in his trousers from across the room. The only thing out of place about the man was the ring of dark brown hair around his head that didn’t quite match the bit on top. Clearly he was wearing a toupee.