“Just a couple of things that I need to clear up.”
“Of course.”
Jerre made a show of consulting his travel pad. “First, Keshaia says that nobody expected the—what did she call it?—the luck-of-the-town intention to become a great working. Is that correct?”
“Yes. The Circle does such workings regularly, as part of our relationship with the town. We anticipated that this one might prove arduous, but nothing more than that.”
“Does it happen often that a routine working turns out to demand a death?”
Vareas frowned. “Not a death,” he said. “It isn’t a death that the great working demands from us. It’s a life.”
“A life, then.” From the Watch’s point of view, Jerre reflected, it came to the same thing in the end—a man who’d been alive when the working started wasn’t alive any longer—but he was willing to grant Vareas the distinction. “Do things like that happen often?”
“No. But we know that they always can.”
“Thank you,” Jerre said gravely. “I have one more favor I’d like to ask, etaze. If it doesn’t do too much violence to your Circle’s customs, I’d like young Keshaia to show me the room where the working took place.”
The Lokheran Circle, it developed, carried out its workings and intentions in a large, windowless room on the building’s second floor. The chamber had clearly been converted to its present use from some other purpose. The three tall windows along its rear wall had been bricked over and then, like the walls themselves, painted solid black. The hardwood floor was also painted black, with a white circle several yards across in the center of it.14 The floorboards looked like they had recently been scrubbed clean, but Jerre knew that a good forensic team would find traces of blood on them just the same—Deni Tavaet’s blood, shed in the working, and the blood of whichever member of the Circle had matched him.
Which would mean nothing at all, he reminded himself. Nobody was trying to hide the fact that Deni had died in the working, and the blood alone wouldn’t be proof even of that.
He turned to Keshaia. “You were present in this room during the working, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Looking at it, but not seeing it from the inside?”
Rasha etaze had told him once that what she saw during a working was something other than the physical world—other, but not unreal. He was willing to take her word that there was a distinction; in the present case, it meant that none of Lokheran’s Mages except for the youngest and most inexperienced counted as a reliable witness for his particular purposes.
“Yes,” Keshaia said. “I had to stay out, to keep watch.”
“Good. I want you to tell me exactly what you saw. Start with who was in what place when the working began, and go on from there.”
“All right.” Keshaia walked to a place on the perimeter of the painted circle. “The First was here.” She crossed to the other side of the circle. “Chiwe etaze”—Jerre consulted his notes; Chiwe Raiath was Lokheran’s Second—“was over here.”
“What about Deni?”
She moved a few steps to the left along the edge of the painted circle. “He was here. Kneeling and meditating on the intention, like everybody else.”
“And that went on for how long?”
“I didn’t have a timepiece; I’m not sure. A long time.”
“Then what happened?”
“The eiran started pulling tight,” she said. “I wasn’t even inside, and I could see them. I wasn’t worried yet, not really; the First had warned me it could be a hard working. I was expecting that he and Chiwe would raise the power, like I’d seen them do before, and that the worst that would come of it was that we’d have to patch one or the other or both of them up in the infirmary afterward.”
“But it didn’t happen that way,” Jerre said. “Something went wrong.”
“No, no—not wrong. Workings go the way the universe wants them to go; ‘wrong’ isn’t part of it.” Keshaia paused, then said, “But this one did go—not how we’d expected.”
“In what way?”
“Well,” she said, “first Grei etaze got up and said we needed more power, and who would match him. And Chiwe never got a chance to answer because Deni was already standing up and answering for him. And after that”—she swallowed—“after that, it was a staff-fight, like we do every day in practice, only this time for real, with the threads of the eiran going into it and weaving out again and the pattern drawing tighter and tighter until Chiwe got past Deni’s guard and struck him dead. The pattern was done then, and that was the end of the working.”
Two days later, Jerre syn-Casleyn paid a second social call on Refayal Tavaet sus-Arial. The two men spoke, as was courteous, of the weather and other trivial things until the red uffa was brewed and poured into the crystal glasses.
Then Jerre said, “I’ve made my final report to Center Street.”
“And?”
“It was as the Circle told you. A death in the working.”15
“That’s all?” Refayal frowned. “I don’t believe it, syn-Casleyn. I can tell when I’m not being told something, and you’re not telling me something now.”
“Very well,” Jerre said. He set aside his glass of uffa. “You were intending to purchase Lokheran Premium Container and Packaging. The initial overtures are a matter of public record, and the Financial and Accounting Division at Center Street was able to find them for me with no difficulty. I’m told there was considerable worry in some quarters about whether you intended to break the company up and move its talents and assets elsewhere, or continue to operate it in its current location.”
“I honestly hadn’t decided yet,” Refayal said. “It’s all moot now, anyway. The Lokheran town council managed to top my offer—they scraped up enough money from somewhere at the last minute, apparently.”
“Yes,” said Jerre. Refayal Tavaet wasn’t going to like what he heard next, but he’d asked for knowledge and it would come to him in the way that the universe willed—just as it must have come to Deni himself in the course of the working. Jerre wondered if Refayal would be as willing as his brother to accept that knowledge. Not Center Street’s problem, thankfully; an Inquestor’s work, as always, was merely to report the truth as he knew it and move on. “The money was a gift from the Lokheran Circle, for the health and welfare of the town of Lokheran.”
Cold Case
Diane Duane
Diane Duane has written more than thirty novels, various comics and computer games, and fifty or sixty animated and live-action screenplays for characters as widely assorted as Batman, Jean-Luc Picard, Siegfried the Volsung, and Scooby-Doo. Together with her husband of fifteen years, Northern Ireland–born novelist and screenwriter Peter Morwood, she lives in a townland in the far west of county Wicklow in Ireland, in company with two cats and four seriously overworked computers—an odd but congenial environment for the leisurely pursuit of total galactic domination.
She gardens (weeding, mostly), collects recipes and cookbooks, manages the Owl Springs Partnership’s Web site at http://www.owl springs.com, dabbles in astronomy, language studies, computer graphics, and fractals, and tries to find ways to make enough time to just lie around and watch anime.
After Rob pulled up in front of the house on Redwood, he sat there in the front seat of the car for a few moments, drinking what remained of his coffee and looking the place over. It was the only single-family house left on this block, and one of very few remaining for some blocks around in this neighborhood—almost all of the rest of the buildings were apartment buildings now, or at the very least duplexes. As he swigged the second-to-last gulp of coffee, Rob tried to imagine what the neighborhood had been like when this house was built, fifty or even seventy years ago: wide lawns, wide new sidewalks, decorously spaced white stucco houses with red tile roofs, tidy front walks leading up to them, poinsettia and dwarf orange planted by the houses or on the lawns . . .
Not anymore, Rob thought. The fro
ntages of the beige-painted terrace apartment buildings to either side of the house came up to within about two feet of the sidewalk, and the tiny strip of what could have been grass between them and the sidewalk was trampled to bare dirt. And the house that seemed to crouch between them had no lawn anymore, either—just a tangle of heat-blanched goatsfoot and crabgrass and a single incredibly stubborn patch of dusty, wilted pachysandra that had refused to die even though no one ever watered it now. The windows were all barred and curtained inside. The door had been barred, too, but the black iron screen-and-scrollwork gate hung sideways off its hinges, rammed through when the Drug Squad came in last week. Probably the neighbors had been glad to see the crack house go. Most of them, anyway, Rob thought. The rest of them’ll have found another source by now.
He finished his coffee, crumpled up the paper cup, and chucked it into the garbage bag hanging off the cigarette lighter, then got out of the car and locked up. Rob made his way across to the front walk of the house, relieved at least that he wasn’t going to have to go through the usual prolonged explanations to the present residents of the house. Just shy of the single step up to the cracked concrete of the front porch, Rob paused, gazing at the scarred paint on the door, the tiny window with the iron grille just visible inside, the newly split and splintered wood of the doorsills. All right, he said silently to the Lady with the Scales, help me see what’s going to get the job done here.
The shift happened: the air got glassy clear, all the uncertainty and randomness of daily reality falling out of it in a breath’s space to leave everything unnervingly fixed. That fixity had long since stopped bothering Rob, though: he worked in it every day. He stepped up onto the porch and tried the bell. It didn’t work. Rob knocked on the door.
A pair of pale blue eyes, a little watery, looked out that little grilled window at him. “Yes?”
“Mrs. Eldridge?” Rob said. “Mrs. Tamara Eldridge?”
“Yes?” said the soft, uncertain voice.
Rob held up his ID. “I’m Detective Sergeant DiFalco from the LAPD, ma’am. Homicide. Could I speak to you for a moment?”
“Oh! Oh, of course, just a minute—”
There followed the sound of locks and chains being undone from the inside of the door, though one last chain remained in place. The lady standing on the far side of the door peered around it carefully, looking Rob up and down. “Here, ma’am,” Rob said, and handed her his ID, being careful before he let it go to make sure that she could touch it.
She could. She held it in one hand, shaking a little, and looked down at it, while Rob looked her over and readily recognized her as the woman from the picture in the case file. Those watery blue eyes looked up at him again, and the crinkled face, framed by curly silver-white hair, smiled at him. “That’s a terrible picture of you,” she said. “It makes you look like a cartoon burglar.”
Rob had to smile, for this was an accusation he heard often enough from his buddies back at Division. They claimed Rob could display five o’clock shadow five minutes after shaving; and he did have the kind of dark, craggy, brawny look that suggested he should be climbing out of windows in a striped shirt with a big sack labeled LOOT. “May I come in, ma’am?”
“Certainly, just a moment—”
She closed the door to take the chain off, then opened it again. “Please come in, Sergeant,” she said, gesturing him past her into a small, tidy living room on the right-hand side.
The room was like her: neat, compact, a little worn but well kept—overstuffed chairs; a sofa with some brassware, half polished, laid out on it on newspaper; antimacassars over the sofa and chair backs; a worn but clean Persian rug in a reddish pattern; and curtains and wallpaper in an ivory shade. The lady herself, as she sat down across from Rob, struck him suddenly as so very frail as to almost certainly make this a wasted trip. She’ll never buy it, Rob thought. She’ll throw a seizure or something, and I’ll have to come back next week. And probably about twenty times after that.
But he’d been down this road before, and patience had always won out. It would win out now. “Please sit down,” Mrs. Eldridge said. She sat there perched on the edge of a big chair done in worn red brocade, looking very proper in a rather old-fashioned pastel tweed jacket and skirt, the effect of faded elegance somewhat thrown off by the tattered “comfy” scuffs she was wearing. “I’m sorry the place is a little messy at the moment: I was cleaning. What can I do to help you?”
“We’re investigating a murder in the neighborhood, ma’am,” Rob said.
She shook her head. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you much with that, Sergeant. I don’t get out a lot: I don’t really know any of the people living around here these days. And I don’t know much about the neighbors, except that mostly they play their stereos too loud. Especially the people upstairs over at Fifteen Seven-twenty. I call and call their landlord, but he never does anything . . .” She shook her head in mild annoyance. “When did this murder happen? I didn’t see anything in the papers.”
“It’s not recent, ma’am,” Rob said. “There was very little physical forensic evidence to help us, so we’re having to do neighborhood interviews and psychosweeps to see what else we can find.”
Mrs. Eldridge looked at Rob with great surprise. “Why, you’re a lanthanomancer!”
It was the usual mistake. “No, ma’am,” Rob said, “that takes a few more years of training, and some paralegal. A lanthanometer, yes.” He would have taken on a night job years ago if he’d thought he had any real chance of getting through the LMT course and making ’mancer. But his regular work left him tired enough, and Rob was also none too sure he could make it through the entry exams. He’d made it through the lanthanometry course only because of natural aptitude scores high enough to favorably average out the rather low score on his written tests. I like what I do well enough, Rob thought. So why screw with what works?
“So you can sense dead people,” she said. “That must be very interesting work!”
There was a lot more that could be said about the job, but this wasn’t the time to get into the technicalities. “Uh, it is, ma’am,” he said. “Which brings me to the reason I came. Have you noticed anything different about the neighborhood lately?”
“Well, besides the noise from next door . . .” She laughed a little, shook her head. “The whole place has gotten so remote. I can remember when all the doors on this street would have been open: no one ever locked anything. If you did that now, you’d be dead in minutes.”
Rob thought of saying something, restrained himself. “And if something happens to you,” Mrs. Eldridge said, “well, you’re probably just going to have to handle it yourself, aren’t you? I remember when I fell down, right there, coming in the front door with the groceries. Nobody came to help. I had to drag myself in. It was awful.”
“Can you tell me a little more about that, ma’am?” Rob said.
“What’s to tell? I tripped, I fell down.” Mrs. Eldridge gave him a wry look. “It’s such a joke, isn’t it? ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,’” she said, in too accurate an imitation of the old commercial. “But that’s all it was, dear, a fall. I got up.”
“No, ma’am,” Rob said. “You didn’t.”
She looked at him strangely. Now it would come: the part that always bothered Rob the most, but couldn’t be rushed. Without her acceptance, his work could go no further—and Rob’s memory was mercifully dulled as to how many of his cases had gotten stuck for weeks or months right here, at the point where truth met denial.
“What on earth are you talking about?” Mrs. Eldridge said. Her eyes suddenly went wide. “Whose murder are you investigating, Sergeant?”
“I think you know, ma’am.”
She stared at him.
Rob waited. A change of expression, a twitch, at this point could blow everything out of the water.
“It’s mine, isn’t it?” she whispered.
Rob nodded, and waited.
Mrs. Eldridge sim
ply sat there for some moments, looking down at her tightly interlaced fingers. They worked a little, and the knuckles were white.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Who would want to murder me?”
“We were hoping you might be able to shed a little light on that, ma’am,” Rob said.
Now, though, the shock was beginning to set in. “But I fell down,” she said. “That was all it was.”
“Ma’am,” Rob said as gently as he could—for if at any point gentleness was needed, this was it—“as far as we can tell, you were coming into the house when someone came up behind you and struck you in the head. You did fall down. But not because you tripped.” He stopped there, not yet being finished with his own disgust at the crime scene pictures, the tidy rug with its pattern blotted out across nearly half its width. It still astonished him sometimes how much blood even a small human body contains.
Her face was surprisingly still: the face of a woman who’s just received one more piece of bad news in a life that has had its fair share of it. She looked up at Rob then and said, very composed, “Who killed me?”
“We don’t know, ma’am. That’s why I’m here: to see what you know about it. Unfortunately, the department is very backed up, and there were no witnesses in the neighborhood, so it’s taken a while to get around to you. I was only brought on about two months ago to handle the backed-up cold cases—”
She blinked. “Cold cases?”
“Cases where we ran out of leads, ma’am, and didn’t have the manpower right away to follow through. Your case was put ‘on ice’ until someone could be spared to look into it again.”
The look in her eyes gave Rob a whole new definition of “cold” to work with. “Which has been how long, exactly?”
“You’ve been dead for about three years.”
Her eyes widened. “And you’re only turning up here now?”
“Budget, ma’am,” Rob said, truly ashamed. “We’re a very small department yet. The other kinds of forensics have been established longer, and they get most of the funds. I’m sorry for any inconvenience.”
Murder by Magic Page 10