by John Levitt
Sherwood’s persona was more of a worry, but she was good at shielding. If Jackie suspected her and really probed, she’d be able to tell Sherwood was a practitioner, but why would she? There was no reason to do that. It takes some energy, and it’s not practical to examine everyone you meet on the off chance they might be the odd practitioner, even if you’re hiding out and super paranoid.
Sherwood walked down to the café, Lou dutifully trotting beside her like a faithful dog, and went inside. She reappeared a minute later with a cup of coffee and sat down at the open outdoor table. Lou hopped up onto the chair beside her and scanned the area carefully, looking for any leftover scraps of sandwich that might have fallen on the ground around the tables.
Twenty minutes later Jackie showed up, wearing a bright red sweatshirt. I recognized her instantly from her picture, though she was shorter than I had expected, no more than five-two or so. She paused in front of Sherwood before sitting down across from her. She reached over a hand for Lou to sniff. He did so, playing his part, and then sat up in his all-purpose begging position, the one guaranteed to melt the heart of dog lovers and even coax a smile out of dog cynics. She was clearly the former, and she made a big fuss over him, ruffling his ears and thumping him gently on his side.
I was too far away to hear what they were saying but it seemed to be going well. Sherwood laughed a couple of times, and so did Jackie. After a while Jackie looked at her wrist and stood up. Sherwood stood up as well, they hugged briefly, and Jackie walked away with a little good-bye wave. Sherwood stayed on her feet, looking after her. I could see she was now even less comfortable with her Mata Hari role.
I waited a couple of minutes before joining her, just in case Jackie made an unexpected return. When I finally walked over and sat down at the table, Sherwood gave me a sour look.
“Okay, I did my part. Now what?”
“What did you think of her?” I asked.
Ever since Sherwood had “returned” to us after a year’s absence, her natural empathetic abilities have increased considerably. She could get a pretty good reading on people almost instantly. Practitioners were harder to read for her, and some people were naturally closed off to that particular ability, so she wasn’t always right. But her take on people was not to be dismissed lightly.
“I like her,” she said. “We talked about music, naturally, and she’s serious about it. Sort of like you, actually. Made me wish I really could play instead of just faking it.”
“Anything else?”
“She’s passionate.
“Really?”
“Not like that, you idiot.” She shook her head in resignation. “Men. No, passionate about life. Passionate about music. Passionate about things she believes in, the all-or-nothing type. You can see it burning in her. Maybe she could be a bit obsessive, but there’s nothing at all nasty about her.”
Interesting. Not that it meant that much, though. Thieves aren’t necessarily bad people in other ways. And even a person who is honest, loyal, and trustworthy can be dangerous, if their values and worldviews are opposed to your own.
“Did she tell you where she lived?”
“No, but she gave me her cell number. And she did say she was temporarily living downtown somewhere. We’re going to set up a session later, supposedly.”
“Good enough. Lou will be able to find her. And we’ll see where she lives, and maybe who she’s hanging out with. After that ... well, we’ll see.”
“Count me out,” she said. “I don’t want any more to do with this. I’m not sure helping to track her down for Jessie is such a good idea, anyway.”
“You could well be right. But I won’t know until I find out a little more about her.”
AFTER I DROPPED SHERWOOD OFF BACK AT HER house, I continued on downtown. San Francisco is a small city, geographically speaking, but the downtown area covers quite a bit of space. However, when someone says they live downtown, that’s more specific than it sounds. Usually they’ll use a more exact description for wherever they live—I live in SOMA, I live in North Beach, or the Financial District. Only places that don’t fit neatly into those specific areas become the amorphous “downtown,” which doesn’t cover that much territory. Maybe she lived in one of those elegant high-rises that dot the downtown area like the one Jo and Rolando had been staying in last year.
I parked on Mission Street and Tenth, right outside where “downtown” starts. Lou could direct me from the car, using body language and the occasional bark; he’s done it before. But driving around at random and interpreting his barks at every intersection is not the most efficient method. Traveling on foot usually works better.
Lou hopped out and looked up at me expectantly.
“Time to do your stuff,” I told him. “That woman? The one with Sherwood? I need to find her. Find, okay?”
He started off down Mission without a pause, which meant Jackie was fairly close. If she’d been farther away, he’d have cast around for a while until he got a whiff of her, or however he does it.
There weren’t a lot of places to live close by, though. Maybe she was shopping at a store, or on her way somewhere. When we got to Sixth and Mission, Lou took a right, sliding through the street denizens clustered on the sidewalk.
Sixth and Mission is street person central, not as rough as the Tenderloin, but filled with citizens on the fringe: men pushing shopping carts that hold their life’s possessions, drug addicts, alcoholics, desperate women who are thirty and look sixty. Scattered throughout are the rundown resident hotels where you can get a cheap room for a day or week or month.
Halfway down the block Lou stopped in front of one of those hotels. A surprisingly elegant sign proclaimed it to be the Hotel Carlyle but the dingy lobby with an iron grate across the door showed its true colors. Lou stopped in front of the door and looked over at me, ducking out of the way of a friendly drunk who had stopped and was clumsily trying to paw at him. I stood on the sidewalk, hesitant. This was odd. The Carlyle was one step up from a crack house, not the sort of place Jackie would choose. Even if she was trying to keep a low profile and hide out, it made little sense. With her fashion model looks, she’d stand out in a place like this like a delicate warbler amid a flock of city sparrows. People would notice, people would talk, and talk like that has a way of making its way up to unintended ears.
But she was in there. Lou’s never wrong, not about stuff like this. Maybe she was visiting someone. I stood in front of the entrance for a few moments; then, as a resident came out of the hotel and opened the iron grate, I squeezed past him into the lobby.
The guy manning the lobby desk was reading a paperback book and didn’t even look up. I followed Lou up a flight of stairs that angled off to the left and then down the hallway that ran the length of the building. The walls were covered with patterned wallpaper so old it was almost one dull color, plaster showing through in places where it was ripped. Sounds of rap music leaked through closed doors, harsh and tinny over the booming bass. I walked past one door that was propped open, and the two guys sitting inside the cramped room looked at me with a mixture of wary suspicion and passive indifference.
Lou ignored them and continued on until he reached the next-to-last door on the right. He sat down in front of it, then got up and sniffed at the door. He seemed oddly unsure of himself, but finally gave a little shake and sat back down. I came up close to the door and listened for the sound of voices. Silence.
After standing there for a while I knocked. No sounds from inside, and after a short pause I knocked again. Still nothing. I tried the doorknob, just in case, and it turned easily. A slight pressure and the door swung inward. This was all too easy, so I stood in the doorway a moment, scanning the room from outside. But only for a moment. In the middle of the floor, surrounded by clutter, lay a figure, dressed in a bright red sweatshirt. Even from the doorway I could see dark red blood pooled around the figure’s head, lots of it.
I’d found Jackie, all right.
FIVE
MY FIRST INSTINCT WAS TO RUSH IN AND CHECK the body, to see if she was still alive, and that was what I would have done a few years ago. But I’d learned a lot from Victor since then, now that I’d finally stopped ignoring anything he had to say. Secure the room was now my first priority. When finding a body on the floor it’s a good idea to make sure whoever put it there isn’t hiding behind the kitchen counter waiting for you to bend over the body, back conveniently turned.
I took one step through the doorway and closed the door behind me. There wasn’t much space to hide in the small room, but there was a closet. I glanced around the room and saw a walking stick leaning against the wall next to the door. I picked it up, then realized I might have just placed my fingerprints on a murder weapon. Oh, well.
I moved quietly across the room, jerked the closet door open, and jumped back, holding the stick at the ready. A few jackets and a dead TV were all that was in there. The bed was a twin with no room underneath for anyone to hide, but I pointed to it just the same.
“Lou,” I said. “Check under the bed.”
He wormed his way under and reappeared a moment later. All clear, at least for now. I put the stick down and bent over the body, reaching for the throat to find a pulse. Lou circled around me, looking at the body from different angles as if trying to figure something out. Finally he sidled over and sniffed at her. That was totally out of character for him; he doesn’t like death at all—he’s rather squeamish about such things. Usually he wanders over to the farthest corner and waits for me to be done. This time he simply walked over to the door and stood there impatiently.
No pulse at the throat, which was what I expected to find. Or rather, not find. The side of her head showed a depressed area matted with blood where someone had struck a blow, but other than that she could have been sleeping. Her face was untouched and she looked almost peaceful, as if she’d be waking up soon from a refreshing nap. There was a slight odor of perfume coming from her hair, mixed in disturbingly with the odor of fresh blood. Her skin was cool but not cold, so whatever had happened had been recent. Which made sense. I’d seen her laughing and talking with Sherwood a scant hour ago.
One thing was for sure: this was no random murder. Sure, the cops might think so when they showed up, but I could feel the magical residue of a powerful talent hanging in the air. This murder had been done by a practitioner—maybe even by a killing spell, with the knock on the head an afterthought to make it look mundane and believable to the cops. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had been bludgeoned to death in this hotel, no doubt. There was something strange about the traces of talent, though; it was muddy and unfocused.
I stood up and took a quick look around the room, looking for anything that might provide a clue. A small bureau sat in the corner, but when I pulled out the drawers there was nothing in them that could have belonged to her. Only men’s clothes, and if the shirts were any indication, a large man at that. So this wasn’t her hidey hole at all—she had been visiting someone.
It was time to get out of there before someone came by and found me in a situation that would be difficult to explain. But first I needed to search the body, unpleasant as that would be. Again, a few years ago I would have been filled with dread and loathing, but I’d seen too much death since then. They say you can get used to almost anything, and although I wasn’t exactly blasé about it, my emotional reactions had definitely been dampened.
As I grabbed the body to roll it over, Lou came over and gave one sharp bark. At first I thought he was warning me about someone coming, but when I paused he just stood there looking at me with a definite air of frustration.
“What?” I said, but of course he can’t answer.
I bent back to my task and he slipped by me, standing right next to the body. Calmly he lifted one leg and peed on her, as if marking his territory. That got my attention. I stared at him, baffled, and he blandly stared back at me. Either he’d gone completely nuts or I was missing something and he was trying to tell me what it was.
Lou wouldn’t randomly piss on a dead body, not for any reason. Unless he had gone insane. That wasn’t an option, so the logical conclusion was that it wasn’t a body at all. I’d been so focused on the dead Jackie lying crumpled on the floor that I hadn’t paid proper attention to the reek of talent permeating the room. Somebody had performed a powerful spell. I’d assumed it was connected to her death, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it had to do with making something seem to be what it wasn’t.
I took a step back and viewed the scene critically. If this was an illusion, it was a top-rate job—visual, tactile; even the sense of smell was involved. It was possible to create such an illusion, though it was beyond my own abilities. But not beyond my ability to see through it, hopefully.
I concentrated my vision and drew power from the mundane room, very much in the here and now. I narrowed my attention, let out some talent, and focused on the figure lying there. The body flickered briefly like a strobe light before returning to solidity. I walked around in a circle and examined it carefully from every side. It wasn’t quite perfect after all. The hair that lay across the red sweatshirt was sharp and detailed, but only on the side you were looking at. On the side of the head farthest away it blurred slightly, bleeding into the fabric. When I walked around to the other side the same thing happened. So it was definitely an illusion, but damn impressive nonetheless.
Usually I can cut through illusions easily, but this one was special. It would take a hell of a practitioner to pull it off. I reached out to examine the odd magical residue again and realized why it was confused. It wasn’t just traces from one practitioner; it was the remnants of two practitioners working together. That was why it had seemed so muddy.
Two practitioners working together would explain the illusion’s quality, but two practitioners can’t work well together unless they’re personally close and have had a lot of practice time. So it had to be someone powerful, and also someone Jackie knew well.
It wasn’t Cassandra, though. The remains of talent are recognizable; if you know the person’s talent signature, you can always recognize it, and Cassandra’s spell at her houseboat had given me a taste of hers.
And like voices, some signatures are more recognizable than others. If you’ve ever heard Jack Nicholson or James Earl Jones, you instantly recognize their voices when you hear them again. And the talent signature of both practitioners involved, though similar, were distinctive.
There was another issue. What was going to happen when the owner of the room came back? And then called the cops? Could the illusion stand up to an autopsy, when the pathologist sliced it open with a scalpel? Highly unlikely. Eventually it would fade anyway; no illusion is permanent, no matter how strong. And then there would be hell to pay.
The one thing every practitioner is aware of is the need to keep our abilities quiet, to not expose the practitioner community to widespread scrutiny, and something like this would surely cause some ripples. Then again, Jessie had hinted that she thought it was time for a change; maybe she was involved in some way I didn’t understand. I didn’t have enough information to come up with a plausible explanation, so I filed it away for the time being.
One strong possibility was that the illusion was specific to me, and only me. Jackie might have set it up to throw me off her trail. But if she had set it up that way, how had she done it? To implement that sort of a personally specific spell, you need to use something physical as a trigger, something from the person you’ve targeted. Or some object you’ve planted on them. But she’d never met me, never even been in close proximity to me. I ran over everything she’d done at the café with Sherwood. Had Jackie even glanced my way? Had she handed something to Sherwood? Had I inadvertently taken anything from Sherwood?
Then it clicked. There was one connection between her and me—Lou. She’d fussed over him, running her hands all over him. A spell wouldn’t stick to his Ifrit persona, but...
I called him over, loosened the Velcro on
the harness, and ran my hands along its length. I found it right between his shoulder blades, a small slip of folded paper, sticky on one side like a Post-it.
I unfolded it, and there was a neat drawing of the famous optical illusion where you can’t decide if it’s a vase or the profiles of two faces. The note felt magically inert, but when I tore it in two a huge burst of energy rushed out, amazing for such a small piece of paper.
Immediately the body on the floor shimmered, and then, like the vase picture that looks like the one thing and suddenly flips into the other, I was looking at a pile of jumbled clothes. A can of Pepsi had been overturned by one end and the liquid had poured out across the floor, dark and sticky. Right by the can, nestled ludicrously in the clothes, was a dented cantaloupe—the supposed head. It was ludicrous and creepy at the same time.
So the only ones affected would have been me and Lou. The average Ifrit might have been fooled, even though they’re resistant to such magical tricks, but Lou’s not your average guy. He’d seemed confused before entering the room, as if Jackie were there but not there. And he’d circled the supposed body, trying to figure out exactly what was wrong with the scene, like a bloodhound who temporarily loses the scent when the hunted backtracks and grabs an overhanging limb. But it hadn’t taken him long to see through it, even with the spell paper tucked securely under his harness. That was when he sat by the door, ready to pick up the scent again, or whatever it is he does when he tracks someone.
He must have wondered what I thought I was doing investigating the room and its contents, blithely unaware of the true state of affairs. Finally he figured out that I wasn’t as smart as he was and helped me see the light.
“Let’s book,” I said, but it was too late.
The door swung open and a man stood in the doorway. I couldn’t be sure of his race, but he looked like a Pacific Islander, Samoan or maybe Tongan. I’d guessed he’d be large from the size of the shirts in the bureau, but I’d had no idea. He wasn’t much taller than I was, but his shoulders brushed both sides of the doorway. He had to weigh three hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce, and he wasn’t fat, just thick and solid. He looked momentarily surprised to find me there, and then asked the logical question.