Wisdom's Grave 01 - Sworn to the Night

by Craig Schaefer

  “So why do you stay?” Marie asked.

  “I’d like to say I’m mercenary. You’ve seen where I live, Marie. You don’t get a brownstone in the West Village on a college professor’s salary. Richard and I generally lead independent lives. It’s not a great burden to playact the dutiful wife, now and then, in exchange for the perks. To be honest, though? Chalk it up to simple inertia. I could live happily with far less than I have. It’s just easier to stay than it is to leave. A comfortable rut. My husband would be happy to replace me with a younger, prettier model, if he could do it without making a stir or upsetting his father.”

  “I think you’re pretty,” Marie told her. She twisted her lips, suddenly awkward. She wasn’t sure why she’d said it.

  “Thank you,” Nessa said with a faint chuckle. “But I’m not as young as I used to be. Besides, in the Roth family the purpose of a woman is, first and foremost, to provide a male heir. Something we’ve discovered that I am medically incapable of doing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” Nessa asked. “I’m not.”

  Marie drank her water.

  “So,” Nessa said, “now we each know a secret. There’s power in secrets, you know.”

  “I always thought there was more power in truth.”

  “Spoken like a valorous knight. You’re confusing truth with exposure, though. The truth is buried inside the secrets we keep.”

  “What you said when I came in,” Marie said. “About my ‘true face’ showing—”

  “I believe that we all have two faces. Our public face—the mask we wear, the persona we want the world to see—and our true face. The person we really are, when we’re completely unguarded and our defenses are down. There is no greater intimacy than the truth, Marie. You can stand utterly nude before your lover and never show him anything at all. Nothing that truly matters. I know, I’ve done it. Your body isn’t who you are.”

  “The corollary being,” Marie mused, “I assume, that you can reveal to someone your deepest truths in the middle of a crowded restaurant.”

  “And no one, no one but your intimate companion, will know that you’re naked as the day you were born,” Nessa said with a smile. “A bit exhibitionist for my tastes, though. I find such conversations flow much better in privacy, on moonless nights.”

  “In the dark,” Marie said.

  “It’s nobody’s business what we do in the dark.” Nessa put her napkin to her lips, coughing delicately. “I mean ‘we’ in the universal sense, of course.”

  Marie smiled. Her gaze came to rest on the untouched book at Nessa’s side.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  Nessa’s French-manicured fingernails rapped the dusty blue cover. It looked like the book had once been titled in gold leaf, but age and wear had scraped off all but a few slivers, leaving the ghosts of words behind.

  “A little light reading. As I mentioned on the phone, I found a partial reference for that mysterious tattoo of yours. I’m afraid it won’t help you, though.”

  “Why do you say that?” Marie asked.

  “Because the reference in question is nearly four hundred years old.” Nessa’s hand caressed the cover of the book. “From 1627. The Würzburg witch trials, in Germany.”

  Twenty-One

  “Würzburg was a bloody affair,” Nessa said to Marie. “All of Europe was going through a bit of a witch frenzy in the early sixteen twenties, and Würzburg was the worst of the lot, largely owing to the Catholic reconquest of Germany. By the time the smoke cleared, and I mean that literally, as many as a thousand victims were executed on charges of consorting with the devil. The lucky ones were beheaded before they were burned.”

  “A thousand witches?” Marie asked. “That seems…steep.”

  “A thousand victims. Precious few of them could tell the difference between a supernatural hex and a bad dream brought on by undercooked sausage, I assure you. But when war and disease are on the doorstep and the wolves are circling, people crave simple answers, simple solutions. Life is bad? Find a witch to blame for it. Your life isn’t magically better after you murder her? Well, obviously there are more witches out there. Keep hunting.”

  “And the tattoo?”

  Nessa carefully shuffled the tapas plates off to one side. Marie helped her make some room. Then Nessa turned the tome, opening it to a page marked with Marie’s scrap of paper, her copy of the dead man’s tattoo. On the edge of the page, all dense type in a florid, antique font, was her drawing’s twin sibling. A bit cruder, the woodcut blotchy and lacking the tattoo’s precise swirls, but clearly the same glyph.

  “It was described as a brand, in this case,” Nessa said. She tapped the side of her hand. “Right here, on the bridge between thumb and forefinger. The accused was a local blacksmith whose ‘cursed’ shoes allegedly caused a clergyman’s horse to bolt, throwing its rider into a bed of stinging nettles. Rather slapstick, until the smith was put on trial for the sake of the priest’s wounded ego. Better to burn a witch than admit to being an incompetent horseman.”

  “That’s…horrifying,” Marie said.

  “It was the sixteen hundreds. Anyway, the blacksmith—possibly realizing he was good and screwed, and hoping to avoid being tortured into a confession before they killed him—gave himself up. He presented himself before the magistrate with a fresh brand on his hand, this one, and proclaimed it was a mark of his fealty to the prince of darkness.”

  Marie blinked. “What happened to him?”

  “Oh, they tortured him anyway. They tortured him a lot. Nobody likes a smartass.”

  It didn’t make sense. She had her own torture victim to investigate, and he wasn’t a village blacksmith. The man in the basement in Monticello had been a shooter for the mob, and for all of the Five Families’ sins, they weren’t known for practicing Satanism.

  “Weird,” Marie said. “Thanks for looking, anyway.”

  She reached out, her fingertip tracing the curves of the woodcut, looking for a clue. Nessa reached out at the same moment. Their fingers brushed.

  “Oh.” Marie jerked her hand back. “Sorry, I didn’t—”

  “No, no, that was—” Nessa shook her head, suddenly flustered. “I’ll keep digging.”

  “You don’t have to. I mean, I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble at all,” Nessa said. “Now you’ve got me curious. I’ll text you, okay?”

  * * *

  Home again. Marie locked the door behind her, flipped the deadbolt, and listened to the sound of a laugh track playing over a tinny laptop speaker. She kicked off her shoes.

  “Welcome home,” Janine said. “How was work? Oh, right, you’re on a mandatory paid vacation, but you went looking for work to do anyway, because you are a crazy person.”

  “Guilty,” Marie said. She strolled into the kitchen nook, humming to herself, rummaging around in the fridge and plucking out a can of Dr. Pepper. Janine sat on the futon and stared at her.

  “What?” Marie asked, looking back at her.

  “You’re smiling,” Janine said.

  “I’ve been known to do that occasionally.”

  “No. Uh-uh.” Janine hit a key, pausing her show. “Not that kind of smile. That’s a very specific vintage of smile, one I’ve not seen in a long time. I know your secret, Marie Reinhart.”

  She popped the tab on her soda can and took a sip, leaning against the refrigerator. “Yeah? Do tell.”

  “You,” Janine said, “were on a hot date tonight.”

  Marie choked on her drink. Sputtering, she set the can down.

  “Uh-huh. I knew it.” Janine beamed with triumph.

  “No, no I—it was not a date. It was just dinner, with a…this college professor who’s doing some research for me. You know, about that weird tattoo?”

  “Just dinner,” Janine said.

  “Just dinner. And research.”

  “I remain skeptical,” Janine told her. “What’s his name?”
/>   Marie winced. “Um…George,” she said, offering up the first name that jumped into her mind.

  “And is Um-George cute? He is, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know.” Marie fluttered a hand. “I guess? I think so?”

  “Oh my God, you’re turning bright pink.”

  “I am not.”

  “You are so.” Janine grinned. “Go look at yourself. Did he kiss you? Did you kiss him?”

  “He’s married.”

  “Is it a happy marriage?”

  “Janine.”

  She shifted on the futon, curling her legs up. “I’m just saying, you’re way overdue for a lover who doesn’t run on batteries. It’s a small apartment, Marie. Thin walls.”

  Trapped somewhere between mortification and laughter, Marie ducked her head and scurried across the apartment.

  “I can’t even handle you right now.”

  “You need to be handling George right now,” Janine called out behind her.

  In her room, the door closed, Marie looked in the mirror. She wore a blush on her cheeks, and something else: a light she hadn’t seen in her own eyes for a very long time.

  “What am I doing?” she asked her reflection. But she smiled when she said it.

  * * *

  At five minutes to eleven, Marie’s phone rang. She stirred from an uneasy sleep, grumbling, and reached for it. She rubbed her eyes with her other hand. The display on her cell sharpened as she squinted at it. It was Jake Moretti, her new friend from Jersey City.

  “Detective,” she mumbled as she answered the call. “What’s up?”

  “Hey, sorry to wake you. We, uh, got a little problem here. The Sylvester Rimes situation.”

  “Don’t tell me he got out on bail.”

  “Never had a hearing,” Jake told her. “He’s dead.”

  Marie sat up and clicked on the bedside lamp. “Wait, what? What happened?”

  “He ended up in a holding cell with five other guys. CO came through on patrol, found Rimes dead on the floor with his brains painted all over the wall. Somebody beat him to death. All five guys say they didn’t see a thing.”

  “Covering for whichever one of them did it,” Marie said. “Typical. Everybody knows snitches get stitches. What about the recordings from the surveillance camera? You’ve got cameras in New Jersey, right?”

  “Well, that’s the thing.” Jake paused; then his voice went deadly soft. “Cameras we got. Recordings we don’t. The hour Rimes spent in that cell is gone. Erased. I saw it myself: there’s a burst of static, then nothin’. Just a one-hour jump. One second he’s fine, the next he’s stone dead.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. This whole thing is a clusterfuck. The brass is calling half the department on the carpet, the Policemen’s Benevolent is getting involved, and everybody’s pointing fingers at everybody else. That ain’t all. You remember how we left the interview room when that homeless guy had his little freak-out?”

  “Sure,” Marie said. “And that lawyer went in while we were distracted.”

  “I pulled that footage too, from the hall cam. Whole lot of people in that hallway. The homeless guy, five or six uniforms, you and me…but no lawyer.”

  A slow chill rippled down Marie’s arms. She inched closer to the lamp, as if the softly glowing bulb could drive back the cold. A little pool of sanctuary in the dark.

  “You’re saying—”

  “I’m saying,” Jake told her, “that I watched that footage over and over again. And that lawyer, Smith, he’s not in it.”

  “But he got into the interview room.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “There was only one door.”

  “Watch your back, Detective. Something is very, very hinky about this whole mess, and I don’t like it one bit.”

  “What are you going to do?” Marie asked.

  “I’m gonna keep my head down,” Jake said, “mind my own business, and be as invisible as humanly possible until this all blows over. You oughta do the same.”

  “I can’t do that,” Marie said.

  “Whoever got at this guy, they did it in the middle of a secure lockup and walked away clean,” Jake said. “You oughta be asking yourself one real important question right now.”

  “Yeah?” Marie said. “What’s that?”

  “If they could do that to Sylvester Rimes, what could they do to us?”

  Twenty-Two

  Marie didn’t sleep much, or easily. She groaned as the alarm on her phone roused her with the dawn, flashing a reminder on her screen that she couldn’t put it off any longer: today was her mandatory psych evaluation. She rode a crosstown bus, still waking up, wanting nothing more than to get this over with.

  The shrink’s waiting room held a bare Berber rug, magazines from a previous decade, and some very uncomfortable chairs. Marie thumbed through an old issue of People. She wasn’t really reading. Her eyes wouldn’t focus on the glossy pages.

  She didn’t object to therapy on principle. Some cops worried about being seen as weak for seeking help, but that wasn’t a problem either. Mandatory was mandatory, nothing she could do but show up if she wanted to get her badge back, and nobody was going to judge her for it. It was just that therapists had this tendency not to help. Children who went through hell saw a lot of doctors, and none of them had been overly useful. Most had talked down to her about how it wasn’t her fault, tried to help her overcome something that wasn’t even bothering her, and given her more of a complex than she had to start with. Of course it wasn’t her fault. She’d never been confused about exactly who to blame for her parents’ deaths.

  It had never been about that, and none of them understood. Then again, they were expecting a scared little girl, not a bloodhound catching her first scent.

  The door swung open. Marie wasn’t sure if she was in the right place, for a second. It wasn’t that therapists had a particular dress code, but all of the ones she’d visited favored neutral cardigans and slacks that reminded her of Mister Rogers. This one didn’t. Dr. Chen stood half a head taller than Marie, and she wore broken-in jeans and a white button-down. Come to think of it, Marie thought with a glance at the doctor’s square-toed shoes, she looks like a cop.

  “Come on in. Marie? You can call me Patricia, or Patty.” She didn’t wait for a response, just turned and headed inside with the surety that her patient would follow. It worked.

  Once inside the room, though, Marie remembered a dozen offices with a smell just like this one and diplomas on the wall just like the ones behind the doctor’s mahogany desk. Hesitantly, she managed, “Look, Doc, I know you need to do your job, but I’m really not that into talking about my feelings.”

  “That’s good. I don’t want to hear about them.” Patricia sat down across the desk and took out a notebook and a pen.

  “What?” Marie said. “Um. Okay. Well, if you want to just sign the paper—”

  “Oh, we’re going to talk. We’re just not going to talk about your feelings.”

  Marie tilted her head, wary. She’d gone from irritated to curious in less than a minute, but this still felt like some kind of touchy-feely setup.

  “O…kay.” She settled a little more comfortably in her seat. “What are we going to talk about, then?”

  “Behavior. Specifically, how your perception affects your behavior, and what tools you can use to control those perceptions and clear up confusion and anxiety.” Patricia eyed a file on the desk. “I see you were involved in two prior incidents involving civilian deaths.”

  Marie nodded. She shifted in her chair.

  “Yeah, back when I was in uniform, early in my career. Liquor-store shooting, and a domestic.”

  “You were offered nonmandatory counseling after both events. You accepted the first time but only attended one session with…ah. Dr. Sinclair. You declined the second time.”

  “I didn’t like him,” Marie said. “He kept telling me how much he understoo
d. Like a guy who’s never worn a badge can understand what it’s like to be first on the scene at a robbery gone bad. See, the perp and the cashier blew each other away and caught some customers in the crossfire. Four corpses on the ground and the only person still breathing was this stupid scared kid who was there to buy booze for his twenty-first birthday. Kid bled out in my arms while we were waiting for the bus to show up. Sinclair tells me ‘I know what you’re going through.’ Pretentious prick.”

  “Sinclair is a good therapist, really. He’s just not used to dealing with patients who have to confront mortality as part of their daily work. Patients who, for example, may have to put down a suspect to save a life. And he’s much more of an emotional analyst sort.” Patricia rested her palms flat on the desk. “I’m not. I work primarily in cognitive behavioral therapy. The focus is on your issues, where they come from, and what biases are skewing your perceptions. I help you get from point A to point Z with a few stops in-between.”

  “That’s different.” Marie still felt uneasy, but at least she didn’t want to swallow her own gun to get out of there faster. This felt more like…maintenance. Like a trip to the dentist. Nothing anyone wanted to do, but you felt better when it was over and were glad that you went.

  “It’s useful in situations where moralizing just makes things less clear. Which is often true for police officers. There’s a baseline of right and wrong, but it’s easy to get stuck in a loop of what the more-right solution would have been. Should you have shot earlier? Should you have shot at all? Could you have somehow de-escalated the situation before it became lethal, or would that have led to more loss of life? Any time a gun comes into the picture, you’re facing incredibly complex and life-changing decisions—for you and everyone around you—that have to be resolved in the blink of an eye. Nobody gets out of a situation like that unscathed.”