by David Wood
“There we go,” Crowley said. “When one technology fails, there’s always another to try.”
Jerkwad said some unkind things about Crowley’s mother. Crowley ignored him and had a quick look through the phone, quickly realizing it was must be all business. “All the calls to a single number, all the emails to the same address, eh?” he said. “This is clearly your boss you’re talking to. I knew you had to be a monkey, not an organ grinder.” He went into settings and changed the passcode. Much easier than cutting the guy’s thumb off and carrying it around with him. “I can see from a quick scan that there’s enough dirt here for me to easily convince your big boss that you’ve betrayed him.”
Jerkwad’s eyes went wide.
“Oh yeah,” Crowley said. “I play dirty. I’ll set it up so your boss will have you wiped out in no time at all. I imagine he’s known for that.” It was a gamble, but a fairly safe one, Crowley thought.
“Don’t do that, man! I’m just trying to get by, right? You know how it is, don’tcha?”
“So now you’re more talkative,” Crowley said. “Well, fine by me. Tell me everything you can about the man you work for.”
Chapter 23
Rose sucked in a deep breath to calm her nerves as the tall woman closed the gap between them. As she approached, she smiled and reached out a hand.
“Elena LaGuerta.”
Rose took the offered hand, found it warm and smooth. “Rose Black. Good to meet you.”
“You’re looking for Jazz? For Jasmine?” LaGuerta’s eyes were calculating, but also a little wet. Rose saw the conflict there, the sadness coupled with the need to protect Jazz. Or her memory, at least.
Rose shook her head. “I know I won’t find her. I’ve heard the news.”
LaGuerta’s mood immediately softened. “Oh, thank god. I thought maybe I was going to have to break the news to someone I didn’t know. You’re that friend of hers. The English girl. Lily, is it?”
“It’s Rose. And yes, we’re old friends.” She was proud she’d managed to remain calm. Of all the names LaGuerta could have landed on, the name of Rose’s sister? It couldn’t be a coincidence. Had Jazz and Lily remained in touch? With one of the two dead and the other most likely in the same condition, the emotional baggage surrounding that imagined scenario was more than she could unpack right now.
LaGuerta misinterpreted her silence, reached out and put a hand on Rose’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry. It’s truly awful. How did you guys know each other?”
“We met when I was in New York before. I’m here again, on vacation with my boyfriend, so I called Jazz. We caught up a couple of times, and then...” A slight frown danced across Rose’s face as she heard herself refer to Jake as her boyfriend. It was the first time she’d done that verbally, or even internally for that matter. She didn’t mind how it sounded. Funny how life went on even in the face of the worst tragedies.
“She was a good person,” LaGuerta said. “And a fine reporter too. The office here, we’re all still in shock. It’s hard to fathom, you know? I mean, this is New York, there’s awful news every day, but not usually so close to home. We report the news, we don’t usually become the news.”
“What was Jazz working on?” Rose asked, trying to sound as casual as possible.
LaGuerta drew a breath, shook her head gently. “A few things. She’d been putting together a feature on corporate property scandals, she was enjoying that. She loved to expose the rats and crooks. She also had a piece going on a young girl, only fourteen years old, who’s just joined Juilliard, playing violin. The kid is an absolute prodigy and Jazz had been building a great human interest piece, following her story. Jazz is a great features writer.” LaGuerta swallowed. “Well, she was.”
Rose nodded, thinking what else she could ask. LaGuerta hadn’t said anything about missing persons, or Matthew Price, or even the discovery of the mass burial site. Perhaps Jazz had been keeping all that to herself until she had more to go on.
“You have any clues about what Jazz was doing in the days before her death?” Rose asked.
“No,” LaGuerta said, eyes narrowing. “Not outside usual work and life. I thought Jazz was the victim of a burglary gone wrong, that’s what the police told us. And they seemed pretty convinced of that. Do you know something else? Are you really just a friend?”
Rose sensed this woman might be mostly friendly, but was unlikely to be her ally. LaGuerta would be keen to protect her paper and its reputation as much as anything else. And Rose didn’t want to give away anything that might compromise what she could learn later. “No, no, I’m sorry. I’m just her friend. I guess I’m having trouble dealing with the situation. I’m looking for something more. Trying to find some reason in it all, you know? It’s just so bloody senseless.”
LaGuerta softened again. “It is, yes. Absolutely tragic. Sadly, so many deaths are.”
“Well, look, thanks for talking to me. I won’t keep you.”
“If you need anything, and you think I can help, you can give me a call, okay?” LaGuerta handed over a card.
Rose slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. “Thank you. I really appreciate that.”
LaGuerta smiled, but stood waiting. She wanted to make sure Rose left, perhaps, so Rose made her way back between the desks towards the office’s main door. From the corner of her eye she saw LaGuerta watch for a moment longer and then head back towards her office. As Rose walked out the doors and headed for the elevator, she sensed a presence across the hall and turned. Someone ducked out of sight, behind a closet door marked CLEANER. Rose watched the door and saw a shadow move behind it.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She had learned to never ignore her intuition and suddenly she wanted to be out of the place as soon as possible. She imagined the elevator arriving and someone leaping in just as the doors closed, trapping her in the small box. Trusting her gut, Rose turned and went quickly to a door marked STAIRS and pushed it open. The stairwell was cool and gray concrete, and smell chalky and unused. She quickly ran down, her feet echoing as she rapidly descended. As she turned onto the level below, the stairwell door she’d come through opened and a large shadow came through.
Rose cursed and started to run. She jumped down steps three or four at a time, hand gripping the railing to swing around at each landing. Heavy footsteps from above increased with hers, a grunting breath of a large man not used to running down stairs echoed over the slapping of her own feet.
Well, I’m fit and fast! Rose thought. I’ll outrun you, buddy.
She passed a large sign on the wall with a 1 on it and bolted down one more flight, then burst through the doors, expecting the lobby on the ground floor. She found herself in a long cement corridor, air-conditioning tubes and electrical conduits running along the ceiling. A basement? She cursed again. Of course, in America, 1 meant the ground floor. In England the ground floor was marked with a G and 1 was the first floor up.
Too late to worry about that now, and she couldn’t go back up. Surely there would be another way out. She ran along the corridor and came to a T-junction. As she randomly chose left, the door she’d come through banged open. She had a moment to glimpse a large man with thick dark hair, then she was running again. The new corridor had no more features than the last, but it did end in a double gray door. Rose sprinted to it and slammed the bar to push it open. Nothing happened. She hit it again, drove a shoulder into the door, but it didn’t budge. Locked tight. She was underground in a dead end.
The big man got to the junction and looked down to see her standing there, panting for breath, back pressed to the wood. He smiled.
Chapter 24
“Okay, man, it’s not worth all this hassle, okay?”
Jerkwad was talking happily enough now, Crowley noticed with amusement. Clearly he was scared of his boss.
“I’ll decide what’s hassle and what’s not,” Crowley said. “Just tell me about your boss. Who is he, and why are you here?”
“I�
�m private eye, okay?”
Crowley was getting annoyed with how often this guy said “okay”. Maybe it was a nervous habit. “Tell me all about your work, then.”
“I don’t work full time for anyone, usually. I’ve always been just a gumshoe for hire. But a few years ago I was contacted by this one fella. He wanted someone with my skills and contacts and he wanted me to work for him and no one else. He said I needed to commit to his payroll, and ask no questions, and I’d be very well compensated for it.”
“You didn’t think that was a little suspicious?” Crowley asked.
“Of course it is! But do you know how hard it is to make a living in this town? Especially in this business? I used to celebrate whenever I’d get a gig that would put me on retainer for two weeks. This guy? He wanted me on retainer permanently. And it was a good retainer at that. I ain’t never been paid so well before in my life. So I can look away from the occasional less than honest request now and then, okay? What are you, an angel?”
Crowley shook his head. “I don’t think anyone would ever call me that. But I have morals. So who is this guy you work for, asking no questions?”
“I ain’t ever met him in person, never seen his face. He keeps it that way. And I don’t know his real name, before you ask. He calls himself the Witchfinder, and that’s what we call him too, officially.”
“We?”
“There’s a couple other guys around. They’re his underlings that he sends to me with messages or payments, stuff like that. Like I said, I never met the guy in the flesh.”
“And you all call him something different from the Witchfinder?”
“Naw, man, I call him what he wants to be called. But these underlings, they’re sycophants, you know, they creep and scrape around. But they don’t show much respect. They think they’re getting something over on him because they secretly call him the Revenant. They think it’s funny, maybe, I dunno. I have no idea where they got it from.”
“Okay, sounds all very cloak and dagger.” Crowley pursed his lips in thought. “So what does he do, this Revenant?”
“The Witchfinder,” Jerkwad said, emphasizing the correct name, “he spies, snoops, gathers intel. I rarely have a clue why I’m being told to get things I’m sent for, or learn the things he wants to know. He’s a complicated guy, you know? This is just another job, like hundreds before it. I have no idea why the Witchfinder is interested in this Jazz Richards lady, but he sent me to find out anything I could from her apartment. I didn’t expect anyone to be here.”
“Do you know anything about how she died?” Crowley asked.
Jerkwad licked his lips like he was about to answer, then grinned as the apartment door banged open. “What kept you?” Jerkwad said to the man in the doorway.
The newcomer swung up a semi-automatic pistol and fired it at Crowley.
Chapter 25
Rose drew breath to scream, her only thought to bring anyone in hearing distance running to her aid.
The big man shot up both hands, palms out, and said, “Please don’t! It’s about Jazz!”
The scream stuck in Rose’s throat like a rock and she stared, heart-racing, adrenaline making her thoughts slippery. “You stay back there, okay? Keep your distance.”
The man had started forward again, but he stopped, nodded. “Okay. I’m sorry, I’ll stay here.”
He was huge, maybe six and half feet tall, broad as a barn, with rounded shoulders belying a powerful physique. But under his mop of thick brown hair, his face was soft, kind. His eyes, even in the dim lighting of the basement corridor, were warm.
Rose found herself relaxing slightly, but remained a little on edge. The man stood awkwardly, moved a bit from side to side as if embarrassed about something. Maybe the guy was just weird, or not altogether neurotypical, but anxiety seemed to wash off him. “Why were you chasing me?” Rose asked. “Why not just call out to me?”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t sure how to get your attention, and then you ran away. I’m not supposed to fraternize with the staff.” He stumbled over the word ‘fraternize’, making it into four or five syllables, and Rose thought perhaps she was right about his mental state. But was he scared or always this way?
“Okay, let’s start again then,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm and level. “What do you have to tell me?”
“Can we go somewhere private? I don’t want to be caught talking to you. And I don’t want anyone to overhear.”
Rose narrowed her eyes. “Where?”
“I’m the janitor here. My room is just back that way.” He gestured over his shoulder, right from the T-junction where Rose had turned left.
Staying alert, she nodded. “Lead the way then.”
Just a few yards along the passage, they came to a door marked JANITOR, so he wasn’t lying about that much, at least. He went in, held the door for her, then closed it quietly behind them. He had the decency to hurry past her and stand a good distance away on the far side of the room. Rose had the feeling that perhaps this guy lived his life constantly aware of his size and how just being himself maybe intimidated people. A wave of sorrow passed over her for that, but she remained nervous. Was she foolish for letting him shut her away in a room like this? Her body was wound tight, muscles tensed ready to fight or run again if she had to.
The room was like a large supply closet, with steel shelving holding all kinds of cleaning chemicals, rolls of toilet paper, hand towels, and more along two of the walls. A rack of mops and brooms filled one corner, and tiny scratched and battered desk was shoved into another corner. Beside the desk was a set of three tall metal lockers, like the kind that might be found in a gymnasium. It was dim inside, one low wattage bulb bare in a cage of wire fixed into the cement ceiling. The big man leaned against his desk.
“I’m sorry for scaring you.”
“It’s okay. I’m Rose, by the way.”
“My name is Derek.”
“And what do you know about Jazz, Derek?”
He took a long breath, then looked down at the cold cement floor. “Jazz was my friend.” He stopped there and his shoulders moved in a way that made Rose think perhaps he was crying, or at least suppressing tears. She wanted to hug him, but wasn’t feeling safe enough for that yet.
“She was my friend too,” Rose said quietly. “And we’re both going to miss her fiercely.”
Derek nodded without looking up. “She was always real nice to me. She treated me like a colleague, not like some slave or something. Or worse, like I wasn’t even there. Most folks act like I’m invisible, or as if they’re embarrassed to notice me. But not Jazz, no way. She always had a smile and took time to have a chat.”
“She was a good person.”
Derek nodded again. “Anyway, I heard you talking to her boss, and I thought maybe you’d be interested in what I know about her. You see, I know Jazz was researching witch covens, but I don’t think she’d told anyone else. She used to chat to me about stuff she wouldn’t tell other people. She said I was good for bouncing ideas off of.”
“Witch covens? Really?” Rose felt as though this small piece of information was important, that it carried weight. She had been learning about the possibility of witchcraft herself, after all, and how it might be related to the experiments, to the bodies under Washington Square Park. But why was Jazz looking into witches? Did it have anything to do with the bodies they’d found? Or with Price?
“Yep,” Derek said. “Witch covens. And the night she died, she was supposed to visit one. But I don’t know if she did.”
Rose was momentarily lost for words as she processed the information, wondering how it might be relevant to anything. The lab under the Bannerman Castle maybe? Would a coven meet there? Some people had said those experiments were somehow connected to witchcraft back in the day, but could that be ongoing? It seemed a little far-fetched, but she had recently learned that far-fetched things were rarer than a person might think.
Derek turned to his desk and pulled ope
n its single small drawer. “This might be helpful,” he said. He moved closer and held something out at arm’s length.
Rose stepped forward to take it and saw it was a phone message pad. As she opened her mouth to thank him, there was a sudden sharp knocking at the door.
“Derek, you in there?”
Rose and Derek exchanged a surprised look, both clearly recognizing LaGuerta’s voice. “What’s she doing down here?” Rose whispered.
“I don’t know! I have more to tell you. Hide somewhere while I talk to her.”
Rose paused for a moment, wondering where in the small space she could possibly hide, then saw the lockers. She could maybe squeeze into one. Derek opened the door and slipped out as Rose quickly moved to the locker and opened it. The inside of the door was plastered with dozens of pictures, all of them various shots of Jazz.
Rose gasped, quickly put a palm over her mouth to stifle any noise she might make. The weirdness level, which had been easing, ratcheted right back up again. She moved cautiously back to the door and listened, and heard the voices of Derek and LaGuerta moving away. She’d had enough, and while the big man might have more to tell her, she felt all her trust had evaporated the moment she saw his freaky picture gallery. She slipped out and headed back to the stairs, desperate for the fresh air of the street.
Chapter 26
As the stranger’s gun boomed, Crowley was already moving. He dived over the tied man he had been interrogating, snatching up the bedside lamp as he moved. He’d cut the cord off to tie up Jerkwad, and now the lamp was easily thrown. He twisted and launched it through the window above the bed, shattering glass raining over the fire escape and no small amount all over the bedclothes. He knew the shooter would be tracking him, so the moment he had let go of the lamp, he flipped back over, enjoying the crack of his knee into the tied man’s cheek as he went, an unexpected bonus. The gun boomed again and the carpet where Crowley had been burst upward. Crowley grabbed the laundry basket as he went over and swung it hard at arm’s length directly as the shooter. The basket itself tipped over and a shower of clothes filled the air between him and his assailant. The man grunted more in annoyance than anything else, but he was momentarily blocked and blinded.