Detonation Boulevard (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 2)

by Craig Schaefer

  He glanced to the back seat, piled with luggage. The dull blade of a European longsword, bought off the Home Shopping Network after one too many glasses of late-night chardonnay, poked from a makeshift newspaper sheath.

  “I still don’t know why you brought that thing.”

  “Felt right.” Janine Bromowitz held the steering wheel steady, her eyes on the curve of forested road.

  “It’s not even sharp.”

  “A knight needs her sword.”

  “Don’t you start with that,” Tony said. “Marie isn’t a knight. She’s…sick. And she needs help.”

  His phone trilled. Janine turned down the radio and he put it to his ear.

  “Fisher.”

  “Detective,” said the woman on the other end. “It’s Patty Chen.”

  “Hey, Doc. If this is about my next appointment, I—”

  “It’s about your partner,” the department’s staff psychologist said, cutting him off. “She’s in trouble.”

  He shot a sidelong glance at Janine. “Yeah, we’re aware. Look, this is off the record, but her roommate and I are working the case. We’re going to try to find her before anybody else does. I don’t know if you heard about what went down upstate, at the Vandemere Zoo, but they pulled twenty dead bodies out of that hellhole. Whatever happened, she’s hip-deep in it.”

  “I’m aware. The FBI agent working lead is a woman calling herself Harmony Black. I returned to my offices just in time to find her and her team ransacking my medical files, pulling everything I had on Marie.”

  “What?” Tony sat up in his seat. “That’s—they can’t do that.”

  “They had a warrant. The warrant was real, but that’s as far as the charade went. Agent Black referred me to her superior, a woman named Walburgh.”

  “And?”

  “I did some digging. There is no SAC Walburgh, Detective Fisher. She’s a voicemail box in an empty office. Whoever Black and her team are, they’re not FBI.”

  “So what did they get?” he asked.

  “I’d only seen Marie once, before everything happened, so just my initial notes. All the same, they were clearly building a profile on her. They have her entire history, the bits on the record, anyway. Let me guess, you’re on your way to Asbury Park, aren’t you?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “She grew up there, in foster care,” Patty said. “It’s familiar territory. First place I’d look, too. Which means it’s the first place Agent Black is going to look, if she’s not there already. Watch your ass.”

  “Noted. Thanks for the heads-up, Doc.”

  She paused. “There’s something else. I’m breaking more than a few rules and crossing some serious ethical lines by telling you this. But I can’t responsibly not…oh, hell with it. Do you have my back, Tony?”

  “This phone call never happened,” he said.

  “Word is floating around the precinct. A body was found in Midtown this morning. A sketchy psychiatrist named Neidermyer. He bled out in his office after eating half a box of razor blades.”

  “Jesus.”

  “The lead on the case found a string of payoffs from Richard Roth, Vanessa’s husband. It’s too early to say for certain, but reading between the lines…I think Neidermyer was drugging Vanessa at her husband’s request. They found a stock of Preloquil in his office. It’s bad shit, Tony. FDA yanked it off the market a year ago when users started committing suicide. Neidermyer’s time of death lines up with Roth’s. Same day, just a few hours apart.”

  “So Vanessa finds out she’s being gaslit,” Tony mused, “then…wait, are you saying she made this guy eat razor blades?”

  “Neidermyer’s files had an initial write-up of Vanessa Roth, from their first consultations together. Avoidant personality disorder, possible borderline—”

  “Nutty as a fruitcake?”

  “He gave her an empathy test,” Patty said. “She’s not a sociopath, but she’s damn close on the scale. Also, in Neidermyer’s opinion, a woman with deeply, deeply seeded sadistic impulses. She likes hurting people. And considering how the man died, I’m going to clock that one as a correct diagnosis.”

  “Level with me, Doc. Is she a danger to Marie?”

  “I don’t think so. Sometimes, when two people with compatible delusions come together, they mentally create a world of their own, with just enough room for the two of them. Vanessa Roth feels that everyone in her life has betrayed her. Everyone but Marie.”

  “You ask me,” Tony said, “she’s not wrong.”

  “There’s a very good chance she’ll see anyone trying to come into their world as a threat, and react accordingly. And your partner, with her fixation on playing a protector’s role, will mold herself to Vanessa’s needs. The wrong stressors, the wrong circumstances…Detective, this situation is one bad move away from turning into a killing spree.”

  He thanked her and got off the phone. Then he rode in silence for a while, watching the pine trees.

  “What did she say?” Janine asked.

  “That we need to hurry.”

  * * *

  They found their way to the used-car lot on the edge of nowhere. Tony stood in the wasteland of junked cars, taking in the scene as a warm breeze ruffled his jacket. He knew how his partner worked, how she thought, how she processed a trail of clues. They’d worked last year’s chop-shop case together, and it was just as fresh in his mind as it would have been in hers.

  “They couldn’t keep the car Vanessa stole from that Lyft driver,” he said to Janine. “Too hot. They’d need to trade it in, someplace they could do a deal with no names, no papers, and no questions asked.”

  The garage door was locked down tight, and he heard the whine of an angle grinder on the other side of the dirty steel. They circled the building and he paused, crouching down. One empty spot in a row of junkers, a couple of oil drops staining the worn asphalt.

  “Afternoon, folks,” the salesman said, rounding the corner behind them. “Help you find a new set of wheels?”

  Tony stood tall and nodded to the garage.

  “Sure. Two of ’em. First is the hunter-green Hyundai Elantra you’ve got sitting in your garage, assuming you haven’t already pulled it apart.”

  The salesman froze. He still wore a smile on his face, but his eyes went someplace desperate. He looked from Tony to Janine to Tony’s busted arm.

  “You cops?”

  “Not today,” Tony said.

  “What if I said I didn’t know what you’re talking about?”

  “Then I’d say you’re pretty dumb,” Tony replied, “escalating a situation that needs no escalation. We’re looking for the women who sold you that car. Tell us what they rode out of here in, and we’ll be on our merry way.”

  Seven

  Once her shoulder stopped bleeding, Marie rummaged through their luggage. The sting of her wound faded to a dull ache, and inspiration dug its spurs into her hips.

  “I was there,” she told Nessa, “before Savannah jumped me. I was inside the place where you recorded the message for us, the—what did she call it?”

  “The Black Archives.” Nessa eyed her, curious now. “You seem…giddy.”

  “I overheard a conversation, and they said a name. Mirenze. An expedition, some kind of search party looking for Wisdom’s Grave, set out from Mirenze and got lost.”

  Nessa shook her head. “The name doesn’t ring a bell, but considering that wasn’t our Earth, no reason it should.”

  Marie had to laugh. “Oh, but it does. It does. Okay, so I flipped through this book, a history of knights who served witch covens.”

  “Sounds like your kind of reading material.”

  She couldn’t help herself. Marie hauled Nessa into a hug and squeezed her tight.

  “One of the entries, dated a few centuries earlier, was about a knight who swore herself to the service of the Witch-Queen of the Invalsi.”

  “Again, delighted at your enthusiasm, Marie, but—”

  Marie dug back i
nto the rolling suitcase. She pulled out a rumpled, yellowed paperback and brandished it like holy scripture. On the lurid cover, a young woman in green-steel armor sat on horseback, preparing her lance to face a shadowy behemoth on the horizon.

  “Swords Against Madness, by Carolyn Saunders,” Marie said. “My favorite book.”

  She tore through the pages, finding the passages by heart, and jabbed a finger at the faded type as she showed Nessa her discovery.

  There was no home for her here, not anymore, one section read. The knight turned her steed and turned her back on the bell towers of Mirenze. The City of Coin had abandoned her.

  Pages ruffled as she flipped a few chapters ahead. The Invalsi was a forbidding land, read a part underlined by her short-chopped fingernail, all murk and mire and cloaked by the boughs of corpse trees. A fitting place for the Witch-Queen to make her abode.

  Marie closed the paperback and slapped it against her palm. “It’s part of a whole series, called the Valor Cycle. It’s real, Nessa. The places Carolyn Saunders writes about, the people—it’s all true.”

  “I thought we were alone in this curse.” Nessa’s fingertip touched her lips as she stared at the book. “But if this author of yours has seen other worlds, worlds we’ve lived upon…she might have lived there, too.”

  “She might know where Wisdom’s Grave is. I mean, even if she doesn’t, she’s got to be able to tell us something.”

  “Do you know where she lives?”

  “Yeah, I just read an interview last month. It was”—Marie snapped her fingers, combing her memory—“Bloomington. It’s in Illinois, south of Chicago. Maybe thirteen, fourteen hours on the road? We can do this.”

  “Let’s get moving, then. Soonest begun is soonest done. We can drive until we’re tired, stop off for the night, and be there by—”

  A metallic bang echoed from outside the hotel. Marie and Nessa ran to the window, standing side by side, and caught a glimpse of some familiar faces down below.

  “We have definitely overstayed our welcome,” Nessa said. “Get the suitcase.”

  * * *

  El Dorado, Janine thought. The fabled lost city of gold. She and Tony were chasing their own Eldorado, dirty white and forged in Detroit steel. The shady dealer at the car lot had given up the goods with a minimum of prodding, and she’d only had to threaten him once with the stun gun in her purse.

  “You are seriously not allowed to carry that thing,” Tony grumbled when they got back in the SUV.

  “In New York. We’re in New Jersey now.”

  “I’m not sure the law is any different here.”

  “If I don’t mind breaking the law back home,” she said, “I don’t see why a road trip should be any different.”

  Checking the boardwalk hotels was her idea. It was entirely possible that Nessa and Marie had already left, splitting town in their new ride, but they might have been looking for a place to hole up for the night. Halfway there, though, rolling through the heart of town, flashing lights caught her eye. Tony had to be thinking the same thing she was. He pointed left at the intersection.

  “Fingers crossed,” he said. Janine turned the wheel and pulled up to a crime scene.

  A blue sawhorse cordon blocked the sidewalk on both sides of a storefront. Under the sign reading Spirit Harbor, grim-faced EMTs carried out a black vinyl body bag. It glistened like wet eel skin under the stark afternoon sun. The bag sagged in odd places, like there weren’t enough body parts to make up a whole corpse inside, or maybe they’d been taken apart and put back together wrong. Janine put the SUV in park and Tony hopped out, walking up to a uniformed cop at the edge of the barricades.

  “Hey, my man,” Tony said. “Tony Fisher. I’m on the job, on the other side of the Hudson.”

  “Picked a hell of a day for a vacation,” the uniform told him.

  “Bad scene?”

  The cop glanced to the storefront windows, blinds pulled down and drawn tight, and turned a deeper shade of green.

  “Never been called out here, you know? Never once. Never had a single complaint about this place. And in ten years on the job, ain’t never seen anything like what happened in there.”

  The ambulance door slammed shut. The EMTs didn’t look at one another, didn’t talk.

  “What happened to that lady…” the uniform said. He took another look at the blinds. “Satanic. Fuckin’ satanic. Only word for it.”

  Tony got back in the SUV.

  They were idling at a four-way intersection, the next block over, when a long, low sedan crossed their path like a black cat. It had tinted windows and government plates. Even through the amber, Tony recognized the driver and her copilot in a heartbeat.

  “Those feds who told me to step off the case,” Tony said.

  Janine narrowed her eyes. “The fake feds, you mean?”

  He answered her with a glance. The light flicked green and Janine pulled the wheel around, turning a hard left. They prowled in the sedan’s wake, creeping up on its rear bumper.

  “Janine? What are you doing?”

  “They’re here for the same reason we are,” she said. “Damned if I’m going to let them find Marie first.”

  * * *

  Harmony Black wasn’t paying attention to the rearview mirror. The agent—blond hair coiffed, her body framed in a tailored three-piece suit and a salmon-pink necktie—kept her eyes on the road ahead and her focus on the phone resting in the center console. April Cassidy’s Irish brogue drifted over the speaker.

  “If you’ll forgive the literary allusion,” the psychologist said, “it appears we’ve encountered a dash of the old Edgar Allan. ‘The Purloined Letter,’ to be precise.”

  Next to Harmony, the passenger seat was leaned back as far as it would go. Jessie Temple dressed casual compared to her partner, wearing sunglasses just a few shades darker than her skin. Her tan linen blazer shifted as she wriggled in the seat, trying to get comfortable, and bared the holstered Sig Sauer pistol on her hip.

  “Is that the one with the raven, or the one with the pendulum?” Jessie asked. “God, I hate it when you try to make me read things.”

  Harmony had been in shark mode since they left New York, and now she smelled blood in the water. Her pale grip tightened on the steering wheel.

  “It was one of the first detective stories ever written,” Harmony said. “The police search a blackmailer’s garret for a letter. They tear the place apart, look under the rugs, behind the furniture, but they can’t find it. Reason being, it was sitting out in plain sight the entire time. They failed because they overcomplicated the problem.”

  “Quite correct,” April replied.

  Jessie tugged her glasses down. Her eyes—irises too bright, too turquoise to be real—rolled to the overcast sky.

  “I love you both, but you’re a couple of goddamn nerds. Can we get a sitrep in English, please?”

  “As it turns out, the elusive Daniel Faust isn’t elusive at all. He was simply using his alleged death as a shield, ensuring nobody would be looking for him. Harmony, when you were working with the Las Vegas task force, I believe you interrogated a known accomplice of his? A narcotics trafficker named Jennifer Juniper.”

  Jessie arched an eyebrow. “That’s an alias, right?”

  “Actually her real name, believe it or not,” Harmony said. “And yeah, I ran her in on a weapons charge, but it didn’t stick. Nothing ever did.”

  “Last year, the Bureau closed a dragnet on the self-proclaimed king of Las Vegas, Nicholas Agnelli,” April continued. “Ms. Juniper stepped in to fill the void. She’s taken the helm of what they’re calling the ‘New Commission,’ a coalition of street gangs, organized-crime elements, and racketeers, united by treaty.”

  Harmony had a corkboard in her mind’s eye. Photographs captured by memory, thoughts transcribed onto imaginary index cards. String and pushpins linked ideas and suspicions in a mental web.

  “We knew that much,” she said. “After Faust died in prison—after we
thought he died—his old gang broke up and went their separate ways. Juniper’s ambitious, she always has been.”

  “Hey, she took over the old boys’ club, good for her. Nice seeing a woman break the glass ceiling.” Jessie paused, catching Harmony’s side-eye. “I mean, except for her being a murderous drug dealer. I totally disapprove. Boo. Thumbs down.”

  April’s sigh washed over the speaker. “If I may proceed? The Vegas Bureau office has identified most of the principals in the New Commission. Including Ms. Juniper’s alleged enforcer and right hand, a man named Paul Emerson. Sending over a copy of his driver’s license now.”

  The phone pinged. Harmony couldn’t look down, not yet. She kept her eyes on the road, playing it safe as she drove. A pebble of pressure sat in the pit of her stomach. It swelled with every turn of the tires, squeezing her lungs, driving out her oxygen.

  The light up ahead turned red. She glided to a gentle stop at the tail of a line of cars. She looked at the screen.

  She knew him. The name on the blurry copy read Emerson, but that flyaway wave of chestnut hair, the cruel slash of an arrogant smile, could only belong to one man.

  “He changed his name. That’s all he did. He’s been out in plain sight, operating in Vegas, this entire time.”

  “The purloined felon,” April replied, her voice dry. “So long as the authorities thought he was dead, no one was looking for him at all, so there was no reason for any grand disguises. His ‘Paul Emerson’ persona is well-crafted—quite well-crafted, really, he must have hired an expert forger along with a hacker to insinuate his identity into the usual government databases—but it wasn’t hard to penetrate once I knew what to look for.”

  “So riddle me this,” Jessie said. “He’s safe, he’s off the feds’ radar, off our radar, and he’s got his own little kingdom out in the desert. So why come back with a bang, pulling that massacre out in Texas? He left his magic playing cards buried in the bodies; might as well have spray-painted his name on the wall. Was it a message to the Network? Some kind of declaration of war?”