by Guy Riessen
“Damn, you’re right.”
The theme from Ghostbusters blared from Howard’s pocket.
Howard said, chuckling, “Put that on when Sarah assigned us to the Trinity Alps Haunt—dammit, I so wanted my phone to ring while we were in the house!”
Derrick chuckled and said, “Dang man, that woulda been awesome!”
They bumped fists as Howard pulled his phone out and looked at it. “It’s Mary,” he said when Derrick looked at him expectantly. “Hey, what’s up?” he said, bringing the phone up to his ear.
Derrick paused his sorting while Howard talked. He snorted when Howard mimed sliding a pair of glasses down his nose and scowling over them. Derrick started sorting again.
Dropping the phone back in his pocket, Howard looked up and said, “Sarah must have spilled the beans about what happened, because Mary’s already on my ass to get this stuff down to her lab and run it through the mass spectrometer ASAP, then upload the data so she can see it on her phone.”
Derrick nodded. “No prob. You head over to her lab and I’ll call you when I’m ready to go.”
“Really? You sure it’s no problem? I’ll help you here first if you want.”
“Thanks, man, but nah, I gotta go through all this stuff on my own so I know if anything’s missing. Although, a couple minutes help just to get these papers up on the desk where I can reach them would be awesome.”
They spent the next fifteen minutes getting Derrick organized to go through the papers, then Howard left at a trot to get the tests started down in the Basement—the secure DCV-only area below the Physical Sciences building.
When Howard returned a little over an hour later, Derrick had shuffled through most of the papers, enough to identify everything was there. He was moving papers back into folders to go into the file cabinets. He handed one full folder to Howard as he walked in.
“Anything missing?”
“All the papers and even all the Post-its are accounted for. Just a heck of a mess. They literally pulled everything out of the drawers, threw it around, and didn’t take anything. That folder goes in the left cabinet, second drawer from the top. How’d Mary’s tests go?”
“Well, there were lots of numbers. Columns of ‘em. Some pretty graphs with colors and everything. My doctorates in linguistics and multiple languages tell me conclusively that I have no idea what any of it means.” Howard put the folder in the drawer.
Chuckling, Derrick handed Howard a stack of folders. “These all go in the top drawer, same cabinet. And these,” he said, lifting another stack, “Go in the second drawer from the top in the right-hand cabinet, then I think we should knock off for the night.” He pulled his phone out and looked at the screen. “It’s already eleven-twenty.”
“Yeah I’m feeling it.” Howard rolled his shoulders. “We were supposed to just be hanging at my place, rocking the Steam Epic Wars expansion, not doing this working bullshit on a Friday night.”
Derrick nodded, “No kidding. My leg is pounding. Can you grab the pain meds from my backpack?” he said, hooking his thumb over his shoulder to point at the backpack hanging from the back of his chair.
“Aw, damn, man, totally forgot about your meds. Sorry!”
By 11:50, they were finally pulling out of the faculty parking in Howard’s 1977 Smokey and the Bandit-style Trans Am. Black with gold trim, with the gold outline of a firebird covering the hood. Even though the night was cold, they opened the T-top and folded Derrick’s wheelchair into the tiny back seat. To the heavy pulsing thrum of Smokey’s engine, they roared down the Arkham streets, while their brains ticked over the mystery of the shadow man.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SARAH AND MARY WERE back in Arkham, Massachusetts, two days later. By that time, the physical therapist had repossessed Derrick’s “totally rad wheelchair.” He was told to use a cane as much as possible but should use crutches as necessary. That was supposed to keep his muscles and tendons as limber as possible, but Derrick was pretty sure the real reason was that the physical therapist was a sadist.
Derrick and Howard sat in the faculty cafeteria. The floor to ceiling windows that lined the west side of the room let in the beautiful early-afternoon light. Outside the leaves were beginning to change, the green leaves lightly dusted with burgundy and mustard. The grass in the middle of the quad was browning from the nightly frosts.
Derrick shifted on the hard, wooden chair and put his leg up on the seat next him. He adjusted his leg until the cast wasn’t digging in to his upper thigh.
“How’s it feeling today?” Howard asked.
“Meh. The cold makes it ache when I’m outside, and when I’m inside and warm, the darn thing itches like heck,” Derrick said.
“Heard about the dreaded itch before, but I’ve never had a cast.”
“What? You’ve never had a cast? No way, you can’t be serious. You’re like always doing all kinds of crazy stuff. Cycling. Skiing. Rock climbing. Translating demonic texts. And you never broken a bone?”
“Well, let’s see, I’ve broken my collar bone and my left shoulder. Oh yeah, and several ribs. Uhm, my little toe—that was from a demonic text. But, you know, they don’t cast those bones when you break them. Best you get is tape and maybe a sling for when the pain gets too bad. And the pain does get pretty bad.”
“I dunno. I think I’d trade some pain for this dang itching. Under the cast is bad, but I think the worst is down at my heel.”
“Your heels not under plaster, dude. Just scratch it.”
“Yeah, wish I’d thought of that, Professor Brilliance ... I’m not exactly a yoga instructor, man. I can’t reach it, and can’t bend my knee because of the cast. You want to volunteer for heel-scratching duty, then whip out those claws and dig in!” Derrick lifted his leg off the chair.
“Uhhh, yeah, I think I’ll pass,” Howard said, looking back to his bowl of chili as Derrick lowered his leg.
Sarah walked over to their table. Her dark hair was glossy and dusted with streaks of gray. She had it down, not in a ponytail, but its shortness emphasized her lithe neck curving down to the muscles of her shoulders which were just visible at the open collar of her blouse.
Howard kicked Derrick’s good leg under the table making him realize his stupid mouth was hanging half-open. He snapped it shut and tried to hide it by wiping with the white cloth napkin tucked into his shirt.
“Hey, Boys, mind if we join you?” Sarah looked back over her shoulder, “Mary ran back to get her cookie.”
“Sure thing, Chief,” Howard said, smiling his easy smile. It flashed just a tiny bit bigger as his eyes flicked toward Derrick and he said, “Isn’t that right, D?”
“Oh. Yeah. I mean sure, uh, boss. Uhm I mean, Sarah. Yeah.” Derrick stammered out.
Sarah took her plate, silverware, and glass of water off the tray she carried and set them at the place next to Derrick. She set the orange plastic tray on the table next to them. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbows.
He noticed the food on her plate was neatly arranged ... but not just arranged, it was ordered by each food’s glycemic index and, he suddenly realized, arranged clockwise around the plate to maximize the efficiency of the food-energy. Frakkin brilliant, he thought, as he looked up and met her gaze.
Her smile was warm as she asked Derrick. “How’s the leg doing?”
“Oh, you know, ain’t no thang.”
“Heh, if you say so. Sure looked like a ‘thang’ to me when I saw the x-ray. At least whoever kidnapped you seemed to know what they were doing when they patched you up. They did quite the job sterilizing and stabilizing everything.”
“We got anything yet on who might have been behind it?” Derrick asked.
“Nothing at all. And, uh,” Sarah glanced around to make sure no one was sitting close enough to them to overhear, “We’ve got the data entered in MARC. And both the San Francisco Sweep team and Mary are poring over the scene evidence from the Haunt’s basement kill-room and the summoning location.”
Derrick grunted and poked his fork at the scraps of coleslaw left on his plate.
“The Sweeps say anything?” Howard asked.
“Dead silence, but they’re running data from several weeks before the tip-off for the haunting. Algorithms looking for patterns that might indicate the plan being initiated. But so far, nothing. The computer information is oddly incomplete.”
Derrick brightened at the computer talk. “I’ll take a look at the data after lunch. Where’s the data originating?”
“U.S. Forest Service, internal site. We don’t have official access, and we’re getting the slow roll from the Feds. It’s tough to get anything done with the politics these days.” Sarah shook her head.
“Meh,” Derrick shrugged. “Like I said, I’ll just pop in for a look-see. Federal government servers are so leaky, it’s like holding water in a sieve.”
Howard chuckled. “Maybe stop in and find out what the seven herbs and spices are in KFC.”
“Ain’t no way, man. That’s real security.” Derrick spun his fork around his thumb before setting it next to his plate.
Howard leaned in toward the table, resting his forearms on the wood top. “Goddamn bizarre, really. Why capture D. just to take him off and patch him up and send him home. All to break in and mess up your office, but steal nothing. Just doesn’t make sense. We’re missing something.”
“Well, the Frenchman was grilling him about who he worked for. Derrick was pretty drugged by the time we got to him, so maybe their interrogation was just getting started when we interrupted it? We are missing something, I’ll give you that.”
“Psych pull anything from your memories?” Howard looked from Derrick to Sarah. “Were there really no clues about what he was after?”
“Nah, man. I was so drugged that most of the memories are garbage—oh I still remember everything, but ‘feels like I’m floating outside my body’ isn’t very helpful, you know?” Derrick laughed.
They were all laughing at that, as Mary walked up and put her lunch in front of the chair next to Howard, stacking her tray on top of Sarah’s. Mary was wearing her lab coat. Mary was always wearing her lab coat. Derrick grinned. Lab coat, eyeglasses, hair trimmed to a short boy’s cut. The only thing that kept her from being a walking-talking scientist-stereotype was that she ate in the cafeteria, instead of in the lab.
Mary nodded to everyone, smiling. Her spray of freckles rose on her round, apple cheeks. Her fiery-red hair was dazzling in the light that poured in through the large windows. Her head cocked slightly as she listened, catching up on the conversation.
“Why the hell would the Frenchman turn D’s phone on?” Howard asked, turning back to Sarah. “It’s like they wanted us to find him.”
“Maybe they were following our search patterns and knew we were getting close. Could have had something more to do with wanting to time our arrival to their schedule?”
“What if they didn’t know we could track the phone once it was turned on?” Mary added as she pulled her glasses off and held them at arm’s length up toward the light, looking at them. Then she carefully folded the temples in and tucked them into her shirt pocket already crowded with pens. She peeled the plastic wrap off her cookie and started eating that first.
Derrick shook his head, “Unlikely. Everyone knows cell phones can be tracked if they’re on.”
“You checked to see if it was pinging anything? Could they be tracking the old phone themselves?” Howard asked.
“I should probably be insulted by that, but yes, of course I checked my old phone. It’s been in secure holding in the Basement since Howard brought it back to MU. It hasn’t been up to my office, but I checked it, because, well, I’m at a loss for things to check. There’s no unusual activity—the phone looks for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when that’s turned on, so I checked the packets that went out each time it pinged a connection and it’s all bog-standard data. And, of course there’s no wireless signals in or out of the Basement at all.”
Sarah nodded at that.
Howard looked around the table, “Like I said, we’re missing something.”
“Yeah, and it’s extremely irritating,” Derrick said, absently trying to scratch his heel against the edge of the chair seat. “I’m not one for missing stuff.”
Mary leaned over. “So, D, speaking of ‘missing stuff,’ you find anything that was taken from your office?”
Derrick stared at a bit of cookie on Mary’s cheek, trying to resist the urge to lean across the table and flick it. “No. Also irritating. Why would you break into an office, dump everything all around, and not take anything?” Derrick picked up his fork and tossed it onto his plate with a clatter. The cashier at the cafeteria checkout looked over, frowning.
“Well, now I know I should randomly fuck with Derrick’s office if I really want to piss him off,” Howard said, as he gave the cashier a friendly, never-mind-us wave.
Derrick shrugged, still staring at the bit of cookie. As Mary smiled at Howard’s quip, the crumb dropped off her cheek and into her lab coat pocket. Derrick noticed there were a number of stains there at the bottom seam of the pocket and wondered what other foods might be living in there.
Sarah said, “Well, offhand I’d say you leave a mess like that if you were looking for something and couldn’t find it. Or, maybe you’re not actually looking for anything, but are looking to disrupt a tightly timed schedule. Something to do with your research perhaps? Throw a timing-wrench in the works.” Derrick shook his head, and she tapped her chin with the back of her spoon. “Or maybe it’s a distraction from something else. They could be trying to make us look at the left hand while the right hand is palming the card.”
“Yeah,” Derrick said, “Or by looking at my research papers they could maybe verify what we don’t know. That could be as valuable as learning what we do know. But, the question is ... about what?”
“Could be a combination of all four,” Mary said, blowing on a spoonful of chili, the steam twisting and curling up from the beans and meat. “If they found what they were looking for, they might have taken it. But since nothing is missing, maybe they couldn’t find their treasure, and they tore your office up to make us concentrate on figuring out why.”
Derrick shrugged.
Mary took a bite and waved her hand in front of her mouth. “Hot!”
“And yet, they call it ‘chili,’ amirite?” Derrick said, clucking his tongue and nodding at each of his friends.
“See, Mary,” Sarah said, looking at her and shaking her head. “It’s exactly these kinds of comments that keep us,” she made finger quotes, “‘busy with work’ when they’re having lunch.”
‘Yep.” Mary nodded at Sarah. She turned toward Derrick again. “Oh! Maybe they could’ve been verifying the information you gave them, yes? Maybe to check the veracity of the rest of the information? But then left everything messed up so we wouldn’t know what they were verifying? It’s not like they know you have the weird memory you do ... you could be spending months trying to figure out what’s missing.”
“Diabolical! Keep it secret and clean if they found what they wanted. Mess it up to keep us guessing if they didn’t.” Derrick popped the last bit of bread from his BLT into his mouth, wiped his face and pushed his plate toward the center of the large round table. “You’d make a great evil scientist if you get tired of being on the good team, Mary.”
Derrick pulled his napkin from his shirt and placed it in front of himself. “Speaking of laser toner ...”
Howard said, “No one mentioned laser toner, dude.”
“Well since you’ve brought it up, H, what the heck was that black powder that we bagged from the break-in?” Derrick asked, looking at Mary.
“When I checked the mass spectrometer data he sent to my phone, I thought it was just a big bag of ash. It was a fair amount of carbon and other minerals like phosphate, calcium, sulfate, potassium,” Mary said. “I reran the tests when we got back, just to be sure, and it’s definitely as
h.”
“As powdery gray and black dust often is ... and?” Derrick said.
“Specifically, it was cremated human remains. It was a much more uniform consistency than I would expect from cremation, so not just your average cremation which usually has small bone fragments, shattered teeth, that kind of thing.”
Derrick shifted uncomfortably, the corners of his mouth twisting, “Glad I’m already done with lunch.”
“But not this time?” Howard asked, ignoring Derrick’s comment.
“Nope. The consistency was quite strange ... and it was less than what you might get from a cremated body. Only about four pounds instead of the usual five to seven or so pounds of ash.”
“There was wind in the courtyard, a fair amount blew into the grass, before I could collect it, I think.”
“We’re actually lucky it didn’t all blow away,” Mary said, “it could have, since the particle size was tiny and electrostatically charged.”
“What exactly does that mean?” Derrick asked.
“It means, it’s as though someone took a cremated human and ran the ash through a high-end burr grinder.”
“You mean like a grinder for espresso? Ugh. Now there’s a pleasant image.” Derrick stuck his tongue out.
Mary continued, “The grinding was uniform, but initial indications are they weren’t actually using a cremation oven—it was more likely a burn barrel or similar.”
“How can you tell?” Sarah asked.
“Well, like I said, even in the initial mass spectrometer results, there were still plenty of organic compounds in the analysis. A body goes through modern cremation at temperatures over fifteen-hundred degrees, and at those temperatures organic compounds break down completely leaving very little carbon in the ash at all.”
“Ah,” Sarah said. “And no carbon means no DNA.”
“Right, but this, you think was ground up post burning?” Howard said. “Why would you burn a body then grind it up? Do you think they were trying to hide DNA evidence?”