by J. S. Morin
He hooked a thumb toward the building side entrance. “Grab your gear.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Taking up the lead, Greg guided us to the office like he’d been there before. I guess technically he had—five minutes ago.
The door was ajar, the police tape nowhere to be seen. Tim flipped a light switch, and I got my first real look at the scene of Saliera’s murder—I mean Patricia Martinez’s murder.
The flashlight hadn’t done justice to the mess on my prior visit.
Greg closed the door behind us. “Man, this is a lame crime scene. Gonna have to drag our feet to give you time to search.”
Flecks of blood spattered the walls and dripped along the floor. The bloodstain waterfall from the desk to the floor was the same as I’d seen, though from the doorway it wasn’t as intimidating. With the breathing mask, there was no smell except for a sterile rubbery odor. I heard not only my own breathing through the filter, but the huffing of Tim and Greg as their mics picked up every echoing inhalation.
“I’ll help by not helping,” I suggested, turning my vacuum on for the noise more than the suction. I lugged it to the nearest wall and used the attachment wand to sweep the wall for clues. If I sucked anything up, I was willing to dig through a hazard-rated vacuum bag to find it—or at least to make Greg search it.
Tim got on his knees and scrubbed the floor with some solvent from Greg’s supplies. “You know, this heist sounded more fun when we were breaking into a crime scene. This cleaning shit is for the birds.”
Judy’s voice came over the earpiece. “Do I need to commit a crime in the shower to get you to clean it?”
“Cut the chatter, Red 2,” I snapped. The last thing we needed was domestic bliss mucking everything up.
Judy’s I’m-annoyed-at-you-but-you’re-right sigh seethed through my earpiece. “Reports in from Simon, Kelly, and Javy. Police presence nil.”
We kept quiet for a while. The scrubbing, wet-vac, and my ineffective vacuuming of the walls kept the three of us occupied. I followed a grid pattern along the walls. Up, down, up, down. Always half a vacuum attachment’s width left between passes. Blood spatter remained under my attachment head as it passed; someone would have to actually clean the walls later.
Tim couldn’t stand the silence too long. “So what’s the worst mess you’ve had to scrape up after?”
“Easy,” Greg replied. “Jumper off the Pru’ a couple years ago. We ended up with more of that guy in the vac than the coroner got. The in-homes can be nasty too though.”
“Like how nasty?” Tim asked.
“Any time you hear about a body discovered cuz a neighbor reported a smell… Imagine what that’s like up close. Guy’s son asks me if we can save his dad’s couch… the one his dead body rotted on for three weeks. I’m all, ‘guy, that’s plush. Ain’t no way that’s coming out; burn it and buy a new one.’ Some people, man.”
Judy cleared her throat. “Any way we can stop talking about rotting bodies?”
“Sorry, babe,” Tim replied.
“Yeah, sorry,” Greg echoed. “Hazard of the job, you know? Don’t get too many people asking about my work twice.”
Any distraction was welcome. The banter kept my mind from going into full lock-down panic over the chance of getting caught.
Every minute without finding whatever Martinez had hidden from her murderer was a minute closer to a nosy cop driving by or an insomniac professor dropping in and wondering why no one told him there would be cleaners in the building. Advanced degrees and prestigious titles didn’t eliminate gossip from a workplace.
“Floor around the desk seems clear,” Tim reported. “Nothing hidden, no sign of trap doors or secret safes. I even looked on the underside of the desk.”
Greg worked with a dry scrub brush, getting around the filing cabinets. “We maybe gotta start thinking of filling the back of the van with as much stuff as we can pass through the window.”
I grunted. “I’m about done with the walls. But I’ve got a good feeling about the ceiling.”
Judy snickered. “You feel right about the height tonight?”
“Can you two cut it out?” Tim groaned at Judy’s rhyme.
“I’ll need a stepladder to reach.”
“Judy, can you run in with the—”
“Cops sighted!” Judy broke in. “Quincy Street, heading our way, according to Javy. No lights or sirens.”
Greg patted his hands in the air. “Easy, folks. We’re here legit. Just play it dolce for a few minutes just in case they look through the windows.”
It was a nice thought, but I wasn’t willing to take chances.
Odds were that at some point, the cops would get nosy. Too much had gone on around Harvard lately for them to let their guard down.
I waited until Tim and Greg were occupied with their searching and cleaning once more. Buried at the bottom of the duffel filled with vacuum attachments, protected in a sealed baggy, was Tony Kang’s phone. Working one of the clumsy biohazard gloves off, I dug it out.
The pre-written message I’d typed in was: GUNMAN ON CAMPUS. CABOT HOUSE. HELP!
There was even a picture I’d grabbed from the net, too blurry to tell what was really going on.
I hit ‘send’ and stuffed the phone back in the duffel. The police couldn’t ignore a text like that, even if they were 99% sure it was phony. They had to check.
But one thing was clear: we weren’t going to have much time. Once you decide to distract the sleeping bear instead of praying that it doesn’t wake up, you’ve put yourself on the clock.
Sooner rather than later, there would be lights and sirens. I just had to hope they’d take my bait and go the opposite direction.
“Forget the ladder,” I said. “Tim, take the vac and check the ceiling.”
I rifled through Martinez’s desk, throwing things into the duffel rather than taking the time to examine them. Any pretense of me cleaning vanished.
With his height and reach, Tim had no trouble running the vacuum along the office’s ceiling and didn’t complain that he had to keep the heavy part of the machine off the ground with one hand for the hose to reach.
“Sirens!” Judy shouted in my ear, drawing a wince.
“Where?” I asked quickly, before anyone else could panic. It was clearly too late for Judy.
“Pack it in,” Greg ordered. “We’ll tell them another shift is coming.”
“Out the window,” Tim said. “Fuck taking chances. Grab anything you can and toss it out there.”
This wasn’t the plan at all. I couldn’t just tell them I’d called the cops, either. My claims on sanity were tenuous at best. But I needed to finish the search. “You guy pack up. I gotta try one last thing.”
I grabbed a lamp from Martinez’s desk and plugged it back in at the far corner of the room. Turning it on did nothing to the brightness of the room—until I flipped off the overhead lights.
“Dude! What the hell?”
“C’mon, man. We can’t see what we’re doing.”
Whiny bitches. There was plenty of light. But more importantly, there were shadows. “Make yourself useful. Find it.”
My shadow slithered along the walls. I tracked it, holding the lamp up like a lantern, causing the inanimate shadows to waver and sway. It traveled across expanded bare light as Tim and Greg watched, transfixed.
“Guys?” Judy asked. “Come on. Get out of there. Say something. Kelly says the cops are heading your way—our way.”
Fuck me. The local PD wasn’t as dumb as I’d given them credit for.
“You two go,” I said absently, never taking my eyes from my shadow’s search. “I’ll get away.”
Tim opened the window. “You sure, Matt?”
“Don’t be an idiot, Matt,” Judy said.
Greg held out a gloved fist. “Be epic, man.” I butted his fist with mine. Tim came over to do likewise.
As the two of them unloaded our gear out the window, I stripped off my hazard suit, still watching my sh
adow probe the room. The world’s temperature dropped 30 degrees. It was like stepping from a sauna into a cool night breeze. The sweat from the suit clung to my clothes. I pulled the shirt away from my skin and tried to air it out.
Greg collected my suit without a word of complaint. Given his occupation, a lack of concern over a bit of damp plastic laundry shouldn’t have been surprising.
“Keep your phone live,” Greg said, his voice going a little Darth Vader through the bio suit. “I’ll get Kelly or Simon to pick you up.”
Greg climbed out the window; Tim was already below.
I shut off my phone the instant the van pulled away, stuffing the earpiece into my pocket. I didn’t need them hearing this shit. “Quit stalling, you bastard. Find what Saliera hid for me.”
“From you,” my shadow corrected. “From us. From everyone. She was a puppet who played fiddle on her strings.”
“Very poetic,” I seethed. “Just whatever it is, find it.”
Leaving the lamp on the floor, I crossed the room and watched the shadow at work up close. When it didn’t change its meandering path, I focused my attention on it and guided it through force of will. It slid across the walls and over furniture.
The sensation was nearly indescribable.
I could feel the textures of the surface though only my shadow touched them. I’d never had amorphous, remote fingers before. The comparison grew more apt when I ran into something and the tendril of shadow stubbed.
“Fuck. What was that?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who grabbed hold of my soul and steered me like a merchant galley.”
The obstruction had been on one of Martinez’s pictures. In this case, the framed copy of her first acceptance letter from Netherwind Press.
The shadow hadn’t been stopped by the frame but rather by something on the surface of the glass.
I pulled the frame from the wall and ran my flesh-and-blood fingers over it. There was something there. Bringing it to the lamp in the corner, all I could see was a small, round splotch of… superglue? It was just a filmy clear smear, but something solid was definitely there, held to the glass, invisible.
With a twist, I snapped free whatever was stuck to the glass.
Closing my eyes, I knew it by the shape in my hand—a USB drive. This was Saliera’s scroll. Absently, I released my hold on the shadow and headed for the window.
Grinning like the burglar I was, I raised my prize. “Jackpot.”
“I’m glad you’re pleased. Now release your grip on me,” my shadow groused.
I headed for the window but never made it.
A dark form blocked my path.
I was ready to chastise my shadow but quickly realized that it was the Black-Hatted Stranger instead. “What brings you back to the lair of the prophetess?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Up close, the Black-Hatted Stranger was much taller than me. His trench coat made him appear even larger than he probably was beneath it.
This was about the time I wished Tim were here, even if the oversized lug had never been in a fight in his adult life.
“Couldn’t shake the feeling I’d missed something,” I told him, trying to play it cool. “But the cops are on the way. No time to keep searching.”
I moved to step around him, making my way for the window.
The Black-Hatted Stranger matched my sidestep. “Or maybe you shooed your friends away so they wouldn’t see you find what you were looking for.”
He held out an empty hand and a wisp of shadow swirled and formed into the shape of a dagger.
Even though Black-Hat’s shadowy weaponry had passed through me once without breaking the skin, I was having a hard time convincing my innards that I was safe.
After all, a guy his size could maul me barehanded.
Silently I commanded my shadow to interpose itself between us. It obeyed, but the Black-Hatted Stranger stepped through it like a fog.
I backed away.
“This is a nice spot for murders. I’ve had practice here.”
The handle of Black-Hat’s dagger grew until it was the length of a spear.
It was him. This black-clad thug had been the one who killed Patricia Martinez. Breath caught in my throat as I looked in the direction of the spear-skewered desk.
I held up my hands and backed against the wall. “The cops are coming.”
“I not worried about the old guard’s lackeys,” the Black-Hatted Stranger warned. “Give me what you found, and I’ll let you live. But, I get the feeling you still haven’t picked a side. You can be of use to us. It’s us or them, really; you’re too deep to stay neutral and come out alive. A gesture of good faith would go a long way.”
This wasn’t the greatest sales pitch I’d ever heard. “You could just murder me like you did her.”
“Please… that arcanist bitch had it coming, meddling with powers she didn’t comprehend.”
My shadow flitted fitfully around the room behind the assassin. Mentally, I ordered it to do something about my plight.
The only help I got was it pointing toward the window.
Thanks, I griped silently.
I curled my lip in a sneer. “You don’t want me for an enemy.” Bravado was the only weapon I had left.
He shoved me against the door, hard enough that I worried the glass might break, and pinned me there with one hand while the other held the dagger under my chin. “Fool me once… etc., etc. I’m not falling for the rune circle crap again. You have shadow magic. You’re being hounded, and that means you have no personal rune. You’re no arcanist. You’re shadowblood like the rest of us. And you have until the count of three to hand over whatever the prophetess hid.”
The threatening countdown was a tired dramatic trope. The Black-Hatted Stranger should have read more Martinez instead of living her world and watching Die Hard for his villain lines.
“One…”
I wasn’t going to wait this shit out.
I was either shadowblood like Black-Hat said or I wasn’t.
Follow the shadow, Matt. There was a sensation of blur.
Next thing I knew, I was standing in the shrubbery outside the Barker Center, staring into the flashing blue lights of a Boston police cruiser. But those lights cast shadows that bathed the side of the building in darkness.
Keeping an eye on the window to Martinez’s office, I slunk away. The shadows concealed me like a cloak.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I materialized on the street just across from the Barker Center after slipping through the shadows, not as a burglar but as a shadow myself. Two patrol cars flanked the Incident Scene Services van. Blue lights strobed across the night, blinding in their glare.
As I watched, cops loaded Tim and Greg, handcuffed, into the back of one of the cruisers.
I paced behind a parked car, peering over at the scene unfolding. They had Tim and Greg. Where was Judy? I clutched my cell phone in both hands, afraid to turn it on.
Out of the corner of my eye, I kept a lookout for the Black-Hatted Stranger to emerge from the window like a dark tornado of death, skewering Tim and Greg along with the cops on the end of that murderous spear.
“He won’t. Don’t worry,” my shadow assured me.
“Quit reading my mind,” I snapped in a whisper. I didn’t need that umbral monster crawling inside my head. Was that what drove the shadowbloods to villainy?
“I read your eyes. You watch for the vandal of great artistry to come after you for that trinket you found. He won’t.”
Nervous fingers ran through my hair, clenching in a fist. “What can I do? Can I… I don’t know, shadow whisk Tim and Greg out of those cars?”
Even as I debated, the car door closed, sealing the two of them inside.
“You could always stand there, gnashing your teeth and wailing like an army widow. I think you’ve shown some promise toward that end.”
Lights blazing, the cruiser with my friends locked inside pulled away and ferrie
d them off to get booked. It was a less mysterious process than it had been when I’d relied on TV shows and movies for what I knew of the justice system.
That didn’t make watching them carted off any more reassuring.
I kept a vigil, watching the area around the van while flashlight beams swept the building, inside and out. “Where’s Judy…?”
The question had been self-directed. My shadow didn’t seem to notice and answered regardless.
“Right there. Quit looking for her in the light.”
Following the pointed tendril my shadow extended, I saw nothing. The darkness between the building and the hedges seemed complete. When I quit squinting and let my eyes adjust, Judy snapped into focus. She cowered around the side of the building from the police search, hugging a laptop to her chest.
It was only a matter of time before the police combing the area came across her.
I was by her side in the blink of an eye.
Judy gasped, then pulled me down into the mulch beside her. Prickles of some unidentified decorative shrub snagged at my sweatshirt. “We’re in so much trouble,” she whispered.
“Do you trust me?” I asked, looking her in the eye but not seeing any hint that hers were focused on me in return. Of course. She was blind in this darkness, like anyone should have been.
She hesitated only briefly, just enough that I couldn’t tell whether she had to think it over or her brain was just a muddled mess right now. But the nod I got in reply was good enough for me.
“Take my arm. We’re going to walk out of here, and no one will say a word.”
“Matt!” she chided in a stern whisper. “I’m in a blue smurf-suit that squeaks like a pool toy when I move.”
“Then take it off first,” I replied. It wasn’t like I was asking for a striptease. Judy was fully dressed under the hazmat suit she hadn’t even needed to be wearing. It was more a disguise for their cover story than any practical use. Now that the police were onto them, it was just a liability.
“They’ll hear me change.”
That was a valid point. Judy was unfortunately filled with valid points. Winning an argument with her bordered on the impossible.