Source

by King, R. L.

  A week later, Stone arrived home early one afternoon to find a message on his machine. He hit the button and was about to grab something from the refrigerator, but stopped in mid-reach when a brisk male voice emerged from the speaker.

  “Yes, I’m trying to reach Alastair Stone. This is Lieutenant Robert Okuda from the Los Angeles Police Department. I’d like to ask you a few questions at your convenience.” He left a phone number and hung up.

  Stone stared at the phone, head tilted. The Los Angeles police? Why would the police be calling him? He let his eyes go unfocused for a moment, trying to remember anything he might have done while in L.A. that could have caught the attention of the police, but nothing came to mind. The only thing he could think of that any of them had done that might be construed as illegal was Verity going clubbing with her fake ID, but why would the police call him about that? He wasn’t her guardian. If anyone, they should have called Jason.

  Curious now, he replayed the message, wrote down the number, and punched it in. After a couple of minutes of hold music he was connected. “Okuda,” came the same brisk voice.

  “Lieutenant. Alastair Stone. You left a message for me, though I’ll admit to having no idea what you might be calling about.”

  “Ah, yes. Dr. Stone. Thank you for getting back to me. Do you have a few minutes? This shouldn’t take long.”

  “Of course.” Stone carried the phone over to the breakfast bar and perched on a stool, idly scribbling magical symbols on a notepad. “What’s this about?”

  “You attended the International Occult Symposium in Los Angeles last month, correct?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “Did you meet or interact with a woman named Pia Brandt?”

  Stone thought about that for a moment. “The name sounds vaguely familiar…help me out a bit?”

  “She’s forty-six years old, five-three and one-fifty, short blonde hair going gray. She’s a German national.”

  That last part did it. His mind went back to the get-together dinner at the bar and grill, replaying the discussion he’d had with her over cocktails. “Ah. Yes. I did.”

  “Can you tell me anything about that, Dr. Stone? When did you see her?”

  Stone glanced up at the calendar hanging on the wall. “It was the Friday night of the symposium, at a restaurant called Agua Bar and Grill, on Figueroa.”

  There was a pause, as if Okuda were writing this down or consulting notes. “Yes,” he said at last. “I’ve talked to some others who were there, too.”

  “There were quite a few of us there. Just some friends and acquaintances getting together to catch up and compare notes,” Stone said. “Why? What’s this about?”

  “Was that the last time you saw Dr. Brandt?”

  “I believe so,” he said. “I didn’t pay that much attention, to be honest. I’m not even sure she was still there when I left the restaurant.” He paused. “Lieutenant, may I ask what this is about? Is something wrong?”

  “She’s missing, Dr. Stone. In fact, her husband and ten-year-old daughter are as well.”

  “Indeed?” Stone frowned.

  “Yes. I’m not at liberty to reveal much since it’s an ongoing investigation, but they never returned to their hotel room on Saturday night, they didn’t catch their plane back home to Germany on schedule, and none of their friends there have heard from them since.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Lieutenant. You don’t think I had anything to do with it, do you? I told you, I barely—”

  “No, no, Dr. Stone,” Okuda assured him. “Nothing like that. We’re just trying to follow up with everyone she or her husband or daughter might have talked with when they were in Los Angeles, and your name was mentioned by a couple of the attendees at the dinner. In fact, the reason it’s taken me so long to get to you is that you’re fairly far down my list of people to contact.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I can’t be of more help. I’ve got your number—if I think of anything else, I’ll call you. But as I said, we only chatted for a short time on Friday night. I didn’t see her after that.”

  “All right, then. Thank you for your time, Dr. Stone.”

  Stone hung up the phone and sat there for a few more moments, thinking. That was odd. How could an entire family simply disappear? There were, of course, several immediate possibilities, but they all seemed farfetched: when he’d talked with Pia Brandt he’d gotten the impression that she was happy in Germany, so she hardly seemed a candidate for some kind of defection or political asylum (unless, of course, it was her husband who wanted it—but wouldn’t the police know about that?) He couldn’t imagine any reason why anyone would want to kidnap them, and who kidnapped an entire family anyway? For that matter, he didn’t think they could have simply chosen to drop off the face of the earth on purpose. Sure, Brandt was a mage, but although they hadn’t talked about specific areas of interest, he’d gotten the strong sense from their brief conversation that she was almost purely theoretical in her magic. She hadn’t seemed at all like someone who could effectively vanish both herself and two other family members in an unfamiliar country. Stone, whose talents ran in more practical directions as well as the theoretical, didn’t think he could do that, and he’d been in the United States for over five years now.

  He sighed, getting up. He supposed there was no point in dwelling on it: it wasn’t as if he was going to find her. Even if he were inclined to do a magical ritual to try to track her down, he couldn’t do it without some sort of tether item for her or one of her family members. He reminded himself that many of the others Okuda had spoken with were also mages, and any of them who were closer to Pia Brandt would immediately come to the same conclusion: that a magical ritual could be used to find her.

  That assumed, of course, that she even wanted to be found—if she didn’t, a ritual likely wouldn’t work. As long as there was no sign of foul play, it would probably be best if he minded his own business.

  Still, Pia Brandt occupied his thoughts intermittently for the rest of the afternoon as he graded some papers in his study, and then resumed his ongoing attempts to make sense of Trevor Harrison’s odd magical methods. Something about the case, little that he knew about it, wouldn’t leave him alone.

  Finally, if for no other reason than that he was tired of it rattling around in his brain alone, he picked up the phone and called Jason at A Passage to India.

  “Wait, so you’re saying she just disappeared?” Jason asked. “And not just her, but her husband and kid too?”

  “That’s what they told me,” Stone confirmed.

  They sat in a back booth in a small pub on Murphy Street, a block from A Passage to India. It was eleven o’clock; Stone has driven down to Sunnyvale to meet Jason after the restaurant closed.

  Jason contemplated his beer and blew air through his teeth. “That’s hard to do,” he said at last. “Intentionally or otherwise. There are just too many ways to keep track of people’s movements nowadays. Credit cards and ATM cards can be traced, for instance. If they disappeared on their own, they’d better have a lot of cash on hand, because the cops will flag their cards to set off an alarm any time they’re used. That’s true if they were kidnapped, too, or robbed—if the perps try to use their cards they’ll get flagged, too.”

  Stone nodded. “I can’t imagine that they were kidnapped,” he said. “Who would want to kidnap an entire family? That seems difficult to manage unless you’re talking about an extremely well-orchestrated plan. Far too well orchestrated for three German tourists.”

  “Yeah,” Jason agreed, thinking. “Kidnapping one person is hard enough to do—a lot harder than it looks on TV. It can be done, of course, but the longer they’re held, the bigger the chance that something will go wrong. And besides—why? Is there anything special about these people? Are they rich? If so, it’d make more sense to just grab the kid and hold her for ransom.”

&nbs
p; “True. Especially since they’re strangers to this country and would be likely be terrified of tipping someone off if they were tempted to go to the authorities.” Stone took another sip of his Guinness. “What if they were killed?”

  “It’s possible,” Jason said. “Maybe even probable—maybe they wandered into the wrong part of town, or saw something they shouldn’t have. But three people and no trace at all? That’s hard, too. Especially for a spur-of-the-moment thing like a botched robbery or something. Bodies don’t just disappear, usually. They leave traces. Physical evidence like blood, or somebody seeing something going down, or whatever. There’s a reason why murderers usually get caught, even if it sometimes take a long time. Murder’s messy. And the whole thing just gets worse when we’re talking about three people instead of one.”

  “Well…I do hope they’re able to figure out what happened.”

  “You think this could have something to do with her being a mage?” Jason asked. “Her husband wasn’t, was he?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. She didn’t talk about him at all when we were chatting. I didn’t get much chance to chat with her individually at all, actually—that Frenchman monopolized most of the conversation. And as for it having to do with her being a mage—” He shrugged. “Well, magic could make it easier to make a body disappear, of course. Especially if the murder was committed by black mages.”

  “How so?”

  “Because most of them can drain a body to ash, remember? You’ve seen it yourself. It’s a lot easier to dispose of a couple of pounds of ash than a whole body.” He spread his hands. “But then again…why? I suppose it’s possible she could have been involved in something that would lead one or more black mages to murder her entire family, but it hardly seems likely. She struck me as a rather inoffensive sort.”

  “You don’t think there’d be any reason the Evil would want her, do you?” Jason asked suddenly. “I mean, they have tried to recruit mages before, and killed them when they didn’t go along.”

  Stone shrugged. “Who knows? It’s possible, I suppose, but why her and no one else? And again, why the whole family? Might be worth a bit of investigation, but we can’t blame everything on the Evil.”

  Jason nodded. “If you want, I’ll look into it a little. You know, check the L.A. papers, and maybe see if a couple of my cop buddies can get me some more information. I probably won’t be able to get much, but it’s worth a try.”

  “If you like,” Stone said, finishing his beer. “I’ll be interested to hear what you come up with, at any rate.” He got up. “And I’ll do a bit of research myself, to see if I can find out more about what Dr. Brandt was up to that might cause someone to target her.”

  One of the largest downsides of the fact that magical academia was by and large a scattered and disorganized affair was that it wasn’t at all easy to track down publications produced in other countries and in languages other than those in which one had sufficient fluency. Even papers written in English were often frustratingly hard to come by: since there were no magical universities per se, most arcane research was performed by small teams working on their own. Even if they chose to publish the results of their studies at all, there was no central clearinghouse to serve as a repository for such things. When you added in the fact that magical researchers were a vanishingly small subset of an already small population, it was often only by a combination of hard work and sheer luck that one was able to locate any reference material related to one’s subject of interest.

  Stone was lucky in that he was in contact with a group back home in England who actually kept each other up to date on their research and maintained a collection of such things, which meant that he had a reasonable chance of laying his hands on something if he needed it. Unfortunately for him in this case, however, that extended only to papers written in English that the group was able to obtain copies of. Stone himself had contributed some of those papers: either his own work or that of American researchers who had made theirs available to him. The best he could do to try to find anything Pia Brandt might have published was to make a couple of calls back home and see if any of the British researchers had any contacts in Germany. He did so, they promised to see what they could do, and at that point he put the matter aside. It was getting close to finals week for his Occult Studies courses and he forced himself to focus on his mundane students until the end of the quarter. He couldn’t quite convince himself that Pia Brandt and her family’s disappearances weren’t somehow relevant to her activities as a mage, but he couldn’t be sure they were, either.

  Jason, meanwhile, had more success. He called Stone a few days after their meeting at the bar and suggested they meet again. Though he couldn’t really spare the time, Stone’s curiosity got the better of him, and he showed up at Jason’s place later that evening.

  “What did you find?” he asked, settling down on the sofa.

  Jason tossed him a Guinness. “Not a lot,” he said, “but there was some interesting stuff in the papers, and I got some more from my friends.” He sat down and popped his own beer. “First of all: they’re pretty much stumped about what happened. It’s been several weeks, and beyond what they found initially, literally no clues have turned up. It’s like they vanished off the face of the earth.”

  Stone stared at him. “Jason…” he said slowly, “You might be on to something.”

  Jason frowned. “What? I haven’t told you anything yet.”

  “Well, you just nudged a connection in my mind that I probably should have made before this. I wonder if they didn’t take a portal somewhere, and something went awry.”

  “Shit,” Jason said. “But I thought you said there weren’t any portals down there. That’s why we had to drive down.”

  “There aren’t,” he said. “But remember, nobody reported them missing right away. They could have driven somewhere.”

  “Maybe,” Jason said. “But that comes back to the whole credit card thing again, unless they paid for gas and food with cash. Anyway, you want to hear what I found out?”

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  Jason nodded. “Okay. So the last time Pia Brandt was seen, she was taking a taxi to a restaurant on Sepulveda Boulevard on Saturday night. Apparently they had reservations there, but they were for like half an hour before she got there. The cabbie remembers dropping her off in the parking lot.”

  Stone shrugged. “That’s not so odd, if they had reservations. Perhaps she was meeting her family there, and they were already—”

  “—but they weren’t,” Jason cut him off. “Nobody ever showed up inside the restaurant.”

  “Interesting… Did you find out anything about the father and the child?”

  “They apparently were at Disneyland all day. The L.A. police are scouring the security footage from around the park, but that’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and that’s even assuming that it still exists. They don’t keep those tapes forever—eventually they reuse them. So they might not have anything to go on.”

  Stone pondered that. “Were they seen leaving the park?”

  “Yeah. That’s the interesting part, and why it took so long to find: they left at about 2 p.m. on Saturday.”

  “Why is that odd?”

  “Think about it, Al: a dad and his ten-year-old daughter go to Disneyland for a day. Even if they were supposed to meet Mom for dinner after the conference, would they have left three hours early? That kid would have wanted to stay as long as possible. Especially since they were all the way from Germany, and she’d probably never get another chance to go back.”

  “True,” Stone admitted. “Perhaps one of them was ill?”

  “Maybe,” Jason said. “But my cop friend told me one more bit that isn’t common knowledge: Pia Brandt and her husband apparently weren’t getting along so great. According to some of their friends that the police talked to back in Germany, both of them had
been thinking about divorce for a while now.”

  Stone frowned. “So you think this could be some sort of custody issue? The father runs off with the child and disappears? But if that’s true, then what about Pia? She could have tracked them down, and he would know that. And why didn’t she just go to the authorities if she thought he’d done that?”

  “Did he know she was a mage? That’s not exactly something I could ask my sources, you know?”

  Stone shrugged, shaking his head. “No idea. My instincts say he had to, though: why else would the whole family make an expensive international trip to go to what would look like a conference full of charlatans?”

  “I dunno,” Jason said. “Maybe it’s just gonna have to be a mystery, you know? I asked my friend to give me a call if they find out anything else, but maybe this is just one of those cases where it’s weird, but it doesn’t mean anything. I know you’re curious as hell about puzzles, but you might just have to let this one go.”

  Stone nodded reluctantly. “I suppose so. It’s just a shame to lose one of our number and not even know why. There are so few of us left these days.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” He paused; when he spoke again his voice was more animated. “Oh, hey, V called today.”

  “Oh? How is she?”

  “Great, apparently. She and Sharra are having a great time back there. She said they haven’t even really talked about magic much. They’re too busy going out to clubs and restaurants and just having fun.” He shrugged. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is what she needed—to get away from us for a while, and figure out what she wants to do with her life.”

  “Did you tell her that?” Stone asked, amused.

  “Of course not. Do I look like an idiot?” Jason was clearly trying to sound indignant, but his grin spoiled the effect. “She doesn’t know when she’ll be back—she said to look for her when she gets here.”