Hard Spell

by Justin Gustainis

  Even a tough guy like me.

  So the crime scene people took our statements, the department exorcist sent the snarling and screeching demon back home, and the poor hooker's body was carted off to the morgue. The cultists were on their way to the county jail. They'd be arraigned in the morning.

  Only a few of the robed idiots had actually seen Karl throw one of their buds to the demon. God only knows what kind of story they'd be telling. But if it came down to it, Karl and I would be more credible in front of a jury than a couple of cultists facing murder and summoning charges.

  A medic said my ankle was badly bruised, but nothing was broken. He taped it up tight and told me to take ibuprofen for the pain.

  As Karl and I headed back to the car, I said, "That was quick thinking in there, earlier. Pretty good job of power lifting, too. I guess I owe you one."

  There was enough light for me to see his grin. "Okay, so you're buying breakfast, even though it's my turn."

  "Deal," I told him. "But you're driving, since I'm injured, and all."

  As Karl started the car I said, "You know, those guys in the robes might have been onto something. I sometimes think that Satanism is the perfect religion."

  He looked at me like I'd just grown a second head.

  "No, really," I told him. "Way I figure it, if you're a Satanist, and you fuck up – well, you go to heaven. Right?"

  Karl laughed a lot longer and harder than the feeble joke was worth. Then he turned on the lights and drove us out of there.

  The kid was going to work out okay.

  • • • •

  For Karl and me, the rest of the shift was paperwork: arrest reports, a Supernatural Incident Report, all that stuff. And since Karl had fired his weapon, he had to talk to the Internal Affairs people, who surprised everybody by quickly agreeing that it was a righteous shoot.

  We were able to knock off about 6:00, just as the sun was coming up over the city. Karl said, "See ya," and headed off to his car, but I stood at the top of the steps for a minute, watching the sunrise. I know that Scranton's not a big deal like New York or San Francisco. But I still like the way the skyline looks at dawn.

  It's not a big town. And the way most people figure these things, it's not a great town, either. But it's my town. And protecting it from the forces of darkness is my job.

  The shit hit the fan three months later, and none of us even knew it – at first. On the night in question (as we say in court) I came on shift at the usual time. I barely had the chance to sit down at my desk when McGuire was at his office door. "Markowski, Renfer!" he barked. "You got one."

  We'd caught a homicide. The stiff, according to McGuire, was in a house on Linden Street. The address was near the campus of the University of Scranton, which I attended for three years before running out of both money and ambition.

  "We know anything about the perp?" I asked. "Vamp, werewolf, or..."

  McGuire shook his head. "Or none of the above. It isn't clear the killer was a supe."

  I let my raised eyebrows ask the next question. McGuire got it immediately.

  "It's our case," he said, "because although the perp might not have been a supe, the victim was."

  I heard Karl mutter under his breath, "Well, fuck me to Jesus with a strap-on dildo."

  I couldn't have put it better, myself.

  The house on Linden Street was typical for that neighborhood – a mid-size Victorian with a front yard the size of a postage stamp. The uniforms had secured the scene, but forensics hadn't shown up yet. There's a joke around the station house that if forensics ever arrives on time, it's a sign of the Apocalypse.

  I think the forensics guys started that one themselves, to stop detectives from bitching.

  Inside, I hung back a little and let Karl ask one of the uniformed cops, "So, what do we got here?" He just loves saying that at crime scenes. What the hell, we were all young once.

  One of the uniforms, a stocky guy named Conroy who I knew slightly, led us down a dim hallway toward a room where lights burned brightly. Halfway there, the smell told me this was going to be a bad one.

  What crept up my nostrils was a mixture of blood and shit and sweat and fear, and if you don't think fear has an odor, just ask any cop. Overlaying all of that was something a lot like roast pork, which is what burned human flesh smells like.

  I don't eat roast pork anymore. I haven't since my second year on the job, when I arrived at a crime scene shortly after a guy had doused his sleeping wife with gasoline and set her ablaze.

  From the warning my nose had given me, I wasn't surprised by what was waiting for us in that room, which the owner of the house probably called his study. I saw Karl's face twist when he saw the corpse, but I wasn't worried about him. He'd been a uniform himself for six years before joining the Supe Squad. Like any cop, he'd seen plenty of the ugliness the world has to offer. Although maybe nothing quite so ugly as this.

  The vic was a male Caucasian, early fifties. He was tied, with heavy fishing line, to a sturdy-looking wooden chair that probably belonged behind the ornately carved desk over near the window. Shelves on every wall were filled with old-looking books, but the man in the chair wouldn't be consulting them any more. It's pretty hard to read once your eyes have been burned out.

  The man was naked, so it wasn't difficult to see everything else that had been done to him – cuts, bruises, and burns covered the body from scalp to shins. I stepped forward for a closer look, making sure to breath through my mouth as I did.

  The tissue damage around the burns suggested a very hot flame, the kind you get from a blowtorch. I glanced around the room, but didn't see anything that would produce that kind of heat. Maybe the perp took it with him. On the floor not far from the chair was a wide strip of duct tape, about six inches long, all wrinkled and bloody.

  Karl started to say something, stopped, cleared his throat, and tried again. "How'd you know the guy was a supe?" he asked Conroy. "He's no vamp, that's for sure, and a were would probably have transformed and got free. That ain't silver holding him to the chair."

  Before Conroy could answer, I said, "Look here." Taking a pen from my pocket, I leaned over the vic's left hand. I slipped the pen under his fingers, what was left of them, and gently lifted the hand up. Despite the blood smear, the tattoo of a pentagram was clearly visible on his palm. I'd seen the edge of it from where I was standing.

  "Wizard," Karl said.

  "There's something else you guys oughta see," Conroy said. "It's in the next room."

  We followed him through a connecting door into what was clearly the wizard's bedroom. The ceiling light was burning, along with a two-bulb floor lamp.

  I asked Conroy, "Were these lights already on?"

  "Yeah, that's why I decided to take a look," he said. "Everything's exactly the way I found it." He sounded defensive, and I wondered why.

  The four-poster bed was shoved over against a wall, fresh drag marks clearly visible on the polished hardwood. Where the bed had been standing was a hole in the floor, maybe a foot square. The matching pieces of wood used to conceal it had been pried up and tossed aside.

  Inside the hole was a safe with its heavy door open. I looked inside and saw cash, lots of it, although there was plenty of room left. The bills were divided into stacks bound with rubber bands.

  Now I knew what had gotten up Conroy's ass: he was afraid we might accuse him of helping himself to some of the dead guy's money.

  I straightened up and looked at Karl. "Whoever it was, he didn't come here for money," I said. "The bills haven't been messed with at all." The last part was for Conroy's benefit, although it was also true.

  "Unless maybe he was after the money," Karl said, "but got scared off by somebody before he could grab it."

  I shook my head. "Anybody who's hard-core enough to do all that–" I pointed with my chin toward the study "he's not gonna be stopped by a surprise visitor."

  "Yeah, maybe you're right." Karl turned to Conroy. "We got a name o
n the vic?"

  Conroy checked his notebook. "Kulick, George Lived alone."

  "Who called it in?" I asked him.

  "There's a housekeeper, Alma Lutinski, comes in once a week. Has her own key. She found the stiff, went all hysterical, and started screaming her lungs out. The neighbors heard her and called 911."

  "We'll need to talk to her," Karl said. "Where is she?"

  "She really lost her shit, so they took her to Mercy Hospital. The docs'll probably give her a shot, get her calmed down a little."

  "I doubt she got a look at the perp," I said. "Otherwise, he would've iced her, too. But we'll find out what she has to say for herself, later. Maybe she knows what the late Mr Kulick's been up to lately. And with who."

  There were voices coming from the hallway now. "Sounds like forensics is here," I said. "Finally."

  "Wanna start canvassing the neighborhood?" Karl asked.

  "Might as well," I said. "Shit, we might even find a witness. That happens every three or four years."

  I looked at Conroy. "Make sure the forensics guys pay close attention to that safe, okay? I'd like to know what else was in there besides money."

  We went back out through the study, careful not to trip over the forensics techs, who were crawling all over the place like ants on a candy bar. "Guess whatever was in that steel box was real important to somebody, haina?" Karl said.

  "Two somebodies."

  "Two?" Karl's brow wrinkled. "The perp, for sure..."

  "Kulick was the other one." I looked once more at the savaged piece of meat that had once been a human being. "Otherwise, he would have given it up long before all that was done to him."

  Our canvass of the neighborhood turned up precisely zip. Richie Masalava, the M.E.'s guy at the crime scene, guesstimated that Kulick had been cold about twenty-four hours, but nobody we talked to remembered seeing or hearing anything unusual the day before.

  When Karl and I got to the hospital, the tranquilizers had worn off enough so that Alma Lutinski was more or less coherent. She said she had been George Kulick's housekeeper for about two and a half years.

  "I dust, I vacuum, I sweep and mop up. That's all." Her voice sounded husky, like the kind you get with heavy smokers, but I couldn't smell any tobacco on her. I wondered if Alma had screamed herself hoarse inside George Kulick's house.

  "Once in a while he leaves a note," she said. "'Dust the venetian blinds,' so I dust them. 'Clean the shower,' two-three times, maybe. He leaves a check on the kitchen table, every week. Never bounces. Not like some."

  "You never saw him when you came over to do your cleaning?" Karl asked Alma.

  "A few times, he's there. But then he goes into that room, his 'study' and closes the door. It's like I'm there by myself. I like that, nobody bothers me."

  "But didn't you have to get into the study to dust?" I said.

  "Oh, no." Alma shook her head. "Never the study. 'Stay out,' he says. 'Don't worry about the dust, the dirt,' he says. Why should I argue – I need more work to do?"

  Karl gave her his special smile then, the one he once claimed could charm the knickers off a nun. "Bet you went in at least once, though, didn't you? Looked around a little, maybe checked out his desk, all that crazy stuff he had in there. Weren't you curious? Just a little?"

  The look she gave him reminded me of a nun, all right, but not the kind who'll slip her knickers off for you. Her expression was right out of Sister Yolanda's playbook, and I was glad for Karl's sake that there wasn't a big wooden ruler handy.

  "You little snot," Alma said venomously. "You think I snoop? Look around? You think I steal, maybe, too, huh? He says stay out, I stay out. I'm a good Catholic woman, you German bastard."

  Karl and I backed away slowly, the way you do from a Doberman that's slipped its chain. Once we were safely outside, Karl said, "I think maybe she took a dislike to me. He shook his head. "'German bastard.' Talk about old country."

  "Maybe you should have tried for her knickers, instead," I said.

  Things were quiet among the supe community the next few nights – nothing that the other detectives couldn't handle, anyway. Karl and I spent the time going through George Kulick's personal effects. We were looking for names of friends, associates, relatives, even enemies – anybody who could tell us what Kulick kept in that safe besides money.

  We came up empty on all counts. The only letters we found were professional correspondence, like the letter from a magical supply house, saying that the shipment of powdered bat wings he'd ordered would be delayed. Stuff like that. If he had an address book, we didn't find it. No diary, of course. My luck never runs that good. No answering machine for somebody to leave a juicy message or two.

  Phone records revealed no incoming calls for the last four months, and only two outgoing. Both of those were made to the local Domino's Pizza place.

  Kulick didn't even have a home computer. Guess he did his communicating in ways that Bill Gates had never heard of – although there were news stories that Microsoft was getting ready to release a new product line called Spell Software.

  I checked with my contacts in the magical community, but nobody knew George Kulick – or would admit to it, anyway. And no relative ever claimed the body, so it was buried in some land that the city owns in a local cemetery just for that purpose. In the old days, I guess it would have been called the potter's field.

  Driving home at the end of the third fruitless night, I found myself wishing that the forensics guys would pull off one of those miracles that you see on TV every week – the kind where they find some microscopic bit of evidence that would give us the perp's name, address, phone number, and astrological sign.

  Because what we had right now was shit.

  After two more nights of no leads, no evidence, no witnesses and no dice, McGuire was talking about putting this one in the Pending Cases file, the place where unsolved crimes go to die.

  I could see his point. The other detectives in the unit were overworked, picking up the slack we'd left to work Kulick's murder. Things were getting busy again – the supes don't stay quiet for long. But the idea of just letting this one go made my whole face hurt. Nobody should have to die the way George Kulick did. Nobody. Except maybe the bastard who'd killed him.

  Near the end of our shift on the fifth night, I closed another cardboard box full of Kulick's stuff and said to Karl, "I guess if we're going to clear this one, we're going to have to go to the source."

  He turned and stared at me.

  "There's only two people who know for sure who whacked Kulick, right?" I said. "The perp and the victim."

  Karl shrugged. "Yeah, so?"

  "It's pretty clear that the perp hasn't left us anything to go on," I said. "So I guess it's time to ask the vic."

  "But the vic is fucking..." Karl's voice trailed off as his eyes narrowed. "Stan, you're not gonna–"

  "Yeah, I'm gonna. I don't see what other choice we have, if we're going to find this motherfucker."

  "Necromancy's against the law, for Chrissake!"

  "Not if it's conducted as police business, by a duly licensed practitioner of magic. And I know just where to find one."

  Rachel Proctor was barely five feet tall, and built lean. She had auburn hair, smart-looking gray eyes and a beautiful smile. The smile put in an appearance when I first walked into her office, but once I'd started talking, it was gone, baby, gone.

  She was looking at me as if I'd just suggested that we have three-way sex with a goat some night. A real old, smelly goat.

  "Necromancy's against the law, Stan. You of all people ought to know that."

  "And you of all people ought to know that it's legal with a court order, Rachel."

  "And what do you think your chances are of getting that?"

  I pulled the court order out of my inside jacket pocket and laid it gently on her antique oak desk. "Pretty good, I'd say."

  She looked at the folded document for a few seconds, then at me for a few more, then she reached
out one of her small, delicate hands to pick it up. She unfolded the order and scanned it quickly. "Judge Olszewski. I should have known."

  Rachel tossed the paper back on her desk. "Your paisan."

  "We prefer homie," I said.

  "I suppose you two hang out together at meetings of, what is it? – the Polish Falcons?"

  I shrugged. "Man's gotta do something with his free time, and Mom always told me to stay out of pool halls."

  She managed to combine amazement and annoyance in one slow shake of her head.