Ghost of a Chance

1 The Sapphire Rose

Waves of heat rose off the ground under the August sun, distorting the piles of garbage that made up the Brooklyn landfill. Alex Lockerby took off his hat and mopped his brow, lowering the spade he carried in his left hand. Putting his hat back on, he reached into his vest and pulled a battered brass compass from the pocket. The little needle trembled but kept pointing onward through the piles of stinking rot and refuse left over from the world’s largest city.

As he stepped over the shattered remains of a wooden crate, the ground gave under his foot with a wet, squishing sound. The stench of rotting vegetation, spoiled meat, and sour milk assaulted him, and he had to repress the urge to gag.

“How do you let yourself get talked into this?” he said out loud, mostly to keep his mind off his surroundings.

He knew very well what had brought him here, of course. Money.

Or rather, the lack of it.

It had all started that morning when a well-dressed Brit named Gary Bickman came to see him at his Mid-Ring office. Bickman worked as a valet for some swell named Atwood who had a fancy Core address. A brooch worth more than Alex would earn in a decade went missing, and suspicion fell on the lady’s maid, Bickman’s wife. Both were immediately fired, and Atwood was pursuing criminal charges against his former employees.

Bickman insisted that his wife was innocent and offered Alex a C-note if he could prove it. The easiest way to do that was to find the brooch. The police had searched Atwood’s house and the couple’s living quarters but had found nothing. Since Bickman and his wife were the only people with access to the room where the brooch was kept, naturally they were the only suspects.

But Alex had methods the police didn’t.

He had the best finding rune in the city.

Alex reached into his pocket for a cigarette, but found it empty. He swore as he remembered that his last few cigarettes were locked in his desk back in his office.

Eleven short months ago he’d been paid a grand for helping the government recover a deadly man-made plague and now, here he was, chasing down a lead in a garbage dump without even the comfort of a cigarette to blunt the smell. Most of that money had gone to his training as a runewright. The special inks and equipment needed to master the craft didn’t come cheap, and while he was good, Alex still had a lot to learn. Thinking back, he remained amazed the cash had gone so quickly, leaving him owing his secretary Leslie back pay, and Alex behind on rent and short on smokes.

Garbage dump or not, a C-note would go a long way toward putting him back in the black.

“Once more unto the breach,” he sighed, quoting the Bard. His mentor, Dr. Ignatius Bell, late of His Majesty’s Navy, insisted that he learn more than just rune magic as part of his training. Extensive reading was also required. Alex had complained at first, but as time went on, he began to like it.

Not that he’d be telling Iggy that any time soon.

Watching for any more wet spots on the ground, Alex pushed his predicament out of his mind and moved on. After a dozen more yards, the compass needle began spinning in lazy circles. He lowered the spade, pushing it gently into the garbage at his feet. Taking off his jacket, he draped it over a broken crate nearby that didn’t look too dirty. Depositing his dark blue fedora on top of his coat, he picked up the spade and began gently removing trash from the area.

He tested each shovel full of debris by holding the compass over it, just to make sure he hadn’t removed the brooch. Ten minutes in, the compass turned and pointed toward his latest shovelful of garbage. Carefully, Alex picked through the damp pile until he found a wadded-up bundle.

It was a lady’s handkerchief, lacy and delicate. Alex could guess why it had been thrown away, as it was tattered around the edges.

Being careful not to tear the fabric, Alex unwrapped it. Inside lay the most expensive thing Alex had ever held in his hands, the Sapphire Rose. The brooch had a platinum setting with dozens of little diamonds around a blue flower in the center. The flower’s petals were made up of small, blue sapphires with one as big as a robin’s egg in the center. Their color was perfect, a deep, lustrous blue, and it sparkled in the afternoon sun.

“Hello, beautiful,” Alex said with a grin. “I know some folks who will be very happy to see you.”

“Oh, God,” Leslie Tompkins exclaimed as he trudged wearily through the door of the fourth-floor offices of Lockerby Investigations. Leslie immediately covered her nose with the back of her hand. “What happened to you?”

A former beauty queen, Leslie had worked as Alex’s secretary for years. She was in her early forties, but time hadn’t slowed her down any. Tall and statuesque, she had strawberry blonde hair and hazel eyes that looked blue when she wore blue, and green when she wore green. Today she had on a white blouse, so they were gray. Leslie was the business side of Lockerby Investigations, booking Alex’s clients and making sure the bills got paid while Alex did the actual detective work.

“Long story,” Alex said as Leslie threw open the window behind her desk despite the August heat.

“Cut to the chase,” she said, still covering her nose. “Did you find it?”

Alex grinned and dropped the handkerchief on Leslie’s perennially organized desk. He opened it, revealing the brooch.

“Wow,” Leslie said, looking at the brooch as it glittered in the afternoon light. “That’s really something. Is that little trinket really worth twenty Gs?”

Alex nodded.

Leslie wanted to get closer and examine it but as she moved, her hand came back up to her face.

“Where did you find it?” she gasped. “You smell like a fish market at closing time.”

“It was in a dump in Brooklyn,” Alex said. “Don’t worry, though, I’ve got a cleansing rune in my office.”

“Good,” she said, stepping back toward the window. “Just don’t use it in here.”

“Yes mother,” he said with a grin and trudged toward the door marked, Private.

Alex entered his office and pulled out his rune book, a pasteboard volume with a red cover that he carried in his suit jacket. This was where he carried the runes he needed for work, so he’d have them when he needed them. The pages inside were made of volatile and delicate flash paper so he turned them gently until he found the one he wanted. It bore the symbol of a triangle with circles at each point, drawn in silver ink. Delicate lettering ran around the inside of each circle and along each edge of the triangle.

He carefully tore the vault rune from his book, licked the edge of the paper, and stuck it to the wall of his office. The outline of a door had been painted on the wall complete with a keyhole in the exact center. Taking a paper matchbook from his pocket, Alex lit one and touched the flame to the flash paper. It vanished in a puff of flame and smoke, leaving the glowing, silver rune behind, hanging in the air by the wall. After a moment, the rune seemed to melt into the wall itself, then a cold steel door appeared. Alex took a heavy skeleton key from his pocket and used it to open the door to his vault.

Vaults were extra-dimensional spaces where runewrights could keep valuables or supplies. Alex’s vault was bigger than his entire office, encompassing a large workspace with workbenches, shelves, and storage for all the tools of his trade.

Entering the vault, Alex left the spade in a rack of tools along the wall, then moved to the tall, angled drafting table against the back wall. Several papers were strewn about the table on the floor, testaments to the difficulty of his work. Many runes were simple to draw but costly to create, requiring inks infused with precious metals or gemstone. Cleaning Runes, on the other hand, were cheap to make, requiring just an ordinary pencil, but the rune was excessively complex, needing meticulous attention to detail to get right.

Still, Alex was used to writing complex runes. This time the delicate lines and symbols of the cleaning rune eluded him for a different reason. Last year he’d teleported the floating castle of New York sorceress, Sorsha Kincaid, out over the Atlantic Ocean. It had cost him decades of his own life to power the magic required to move such an enormous mass, but since a Nazi spy was trying to drop the castle on the city at the time, Alex reckoned it was a good trade. Ever since that event his brown hair had turned completely white, and recently — his hands had begun to tremble.

Alex reached for the sole paper on the table, his lone success after hours of work, but the memory of his shaking hands made him stop. The tremors weren’t enough to notice except when he was trying to write delicate symbols, but he rubbed his hands together anyway. He felt like he could force them to stop if he only squeezed them tightly enough.

Grinding his teeth at the futility of the gesture, he picked up the paper and stuffed it into his pocket. He turned to leave, but stopped beside a long shelving unit against one wall to retrieve an electric desk fan made of brass.

Dropping the rune and the fan on the desk in his office, Alex unlocked his desk and took out his last pack of cigarettes. There were only three left, so he tucked the pack into his pocket after withdrawing one. Lighting it with the touch tip on his desk, Alex took a satisfying drag and let it out. That act alone helped his trembling hands and he felt better. Especially since he’d soon have spending money to buy cigarettes again.

Shaking off his euphoria, Alex opened his office window, letting in a blast of heat. One of the few nice things in his life was the fact that his office was always cool thanks to the small coldbox mounted above the door.

A coldbox was basically a box lined with asbestos that had an opening in the top and a fan on the front edge. When the power was turned on, the fan drew air through the box and over three metal disks that had been enchanted to remain cold for up to six months. The disks were the work of the Ice Queen, Sorsha Kincaid. Despite Alex dropping her castle in the North Atlantic, Sorsha had offered Leslie new cold disks whenever she wanted them, so Alex’s offices were always cool, even in the summer.

With the window open, Alex was almost ready for the rune. Cleaning runes were finicky magic, and they had the potential to simply redistribute filth rather than removing it. He plugged the desk fan into an electrical socket, pointed it at the window, then turned it on. The motor hummed as the brass blades of the fan began to pick up speed.

His preparations complete, Alex stood in front of the fan, facing the open window. Licking the edge of the paper, Alex stuck the cleaning rune to the brim of his hat, then touched the lit end of his cigarette to it. The paper burned away in an instant and Alex felt a tingling sensation wash over him. He held his breath until a puff of dust-like particles leapt away from him, catching in the wind from the fan and swirling away out the window. Alex knew from experience that you didn’t want to breathe any of that. If you did, it took days to get the taste out of your mouth.

With the dirt and the smell of the landfill stripped away, Alex shut the window, then returned the electric fan to his vault. When he emerged back into his office, the coldbox was already beginning to return the room to a comfortable temperature. All in all, Alex reasoned, this had been a good day’s work.

Leslie’s face did not mirror Alex’s enthusiasm when he went back into the outer office. She sat at her desk, staring at the Sapphire Rose with a stern look on her face.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She looked up with a grim expression.

“Did that butler pay you for this job yet?” she asked.

“No,” Alex admitted. “He kept his money in his employer’s safe and the jerk refused to give it to him. He’ll have to once I bring this back.”

Leslie’s expression soured even more.

“I doubt it,” she said. She stood and handed Alex the brooch. “It’s a fake.”

Alex held the brooch up to the light, but the stones looked real enough.

“How could you know that?”

Leslie took the brooch back and turned it over so Alex could see the back of the setting where a long straight pin and hook would keep it in place when worn.

“Here,” she said, indicating the seams where the pin had been attached to the setting.

Alex looked closely, but aside from a bit of tarnish on the silvery metal, he saw nothing amiss.

“I called the Atwood’s insurance company while you were out,” she said, picking up a note pad from her desk. “According to them,” she said, consulting her notes, “the Sapphire Rose is a brooch made of seven small sapphires, one large sapphire, and sixteen diamonds in a platinum setting.”

Alex turned the brooch over and did a quick count of the stones. All were present and accounted for.

“I still don’t get it.”

Leslie turned the brooch to the back again.

“Platinum doesn’t tarnish,” she said, indicating the tarnished area again. “This is silver, which means it isn’t the original setting.”

Alex felt a lump form in the pit of his stomach.

“And if the setting’s a fake—” he began.

“Then the stones are sure to be fakes too,” Leslie finished.

Alex just stared at the bit of tarnish on the bottom of the brooch.

“This means we aren’t getting paid, doesn’t it?” Leslie said. “I mean, if you take this to Atwood, he’ll just say the butler had it made.”

“Valet,” Alex corrected absently while his mind was working overtime. Leslie was right; Atwood would claim that Bickman had the fake made, either to clear his name or to cover for the theft. He had to prove that the fake came from Atwood.

Unless he didn’t.

“Who is the Atwood’s insurance company?” he asked, puffing absently on his cigarette.

“Lloyds,” Leslie replied. “And if we’re not getting paid, you could at least let me have one of those,” she said, pointing at the cigarette. “It’s been almost a week for me.”

Alex grinned and tossed her the nearly-empty pack.

“Save me the last one,” he said, heading back to his office. “And call Bickman. Have him meet me in front of Atwood’s place in an hour. Then call Danny and have him tell the detective on this case to do the same.”

“Callahan Brothers Property,” a perky voice came through the phone once Alex’s call connected.

“Arthur Wilks, please. Tell him it’s Alex Lockerby.”

The perky voice asked him to wait. Alex met Arthur Wilks while chasing down some stolen diamonds. He was a former cop turned insurance investigator with an extensive network of underworld informants.

“I thought I told you not to call me,” Wilks’ gruff voice rumbled at him.

“No,” Alex corrected. “You told me not to come back, which you’ll note I haven’t. How are you, Wilks? Catch any jewel thieves lately?”

“I’ve got things to do, Lockerby,” Wilks growled. “What do you want?”

“Do you know anybody at Lloyds of London?”

“It’s a small industry,” he said.

“Do any of them owe you a favor?”

“Lockerby, quit wasting—”

“Would you like them to?” Alex cut in.

The line went quiet for a long moment before Wilks answered.

“What did you have in mind?” he said with a conspiratorial smile Alex could hear.

Almost an hour later, Alex got off a crosstown crawler right in front of Empire Tower. Crawlers were the brain child of John D. Rockefeller, former industrialist and now one of New York’s six resident sorcerers. They had the upper body of a double decker bus but from the wheel wells down, they had thousands of glowing blue legs made of pure energy. To Alex, they looked like a cross between a centipede and a snail.

Formerly called the Empire State Building, Empire Tower had been converted into a magical battery that radiated power to most of the Island of Manhattan. The closer you were to the tower, the better the power reception got, so naturally New York’s well-to-do built their townhouses right up against the tower in an area known as the Core.

The home of Ernest and Linda Atwood was styled after a Grecian temple, with marble columns and friezes under the eaves. Ernest was second-generation money, his father Marvin having made millions providing textiles to the growing nation’s clothing manufacturers.

Marvin was widely reputed to be a workaholic who spent his days in the office making deals and, more importantly, money. Ernest was a man of leisure who, as far as Alex could tell, had never worked a day in his life.

Alex’s clients, Gary and Marjorie Bickman, were waiting for him on the sidewalk outside the elaborate gates that led up to the Atwood home. A police detective Alex didn’t know stood with them, wearing a brown suit and a sour look on his face. He was average height with brown hair, a strong nose, and tired eyes.

“You Lockerby?” he said, barely containing the sneer in his voice.

Alex put on his most affable smile. He was well used to police detectives looking at him like something nasty on their shoe.

“Call me Alex,” he said, offering the detective his hand.

“Marcus North,” he said, not shaking. “I’m only here because Detective Pak vouched for you, but if you’re wasting police time, I’ll bring you up on charges.”

Alex’s smile didn’t even hint at slipping.

“Did you find anything, Mr. Lockerby?” Bickman asked in his proper, British accent. He stood with his arm around his wife, who looked like she might faint at any moment. Gary Bickman was short and slim with a slight build and black hair that he wore slicked back. He was dressed in a tuxedo, which Alex assumed was standard attire for a rich man’s valet. His wife was pretty and blonde with a plump face and round figure in a tasteful floral dress.

“I think I’ve got good news for you,” he said, looking around. “We just need to wait for — ah, here they come.”

A sleek black sedan eased up to the curb and a woman in a form-fitting silk dress got out. She was about Leslie’s age, but time had not been as generous to her as it had been to Alex’s secretary. Her face was lined and her hair had started to gray, but her eyes were sharp, even shrewd.

“Which one of you is Lockerby?” she declared as she mounted the sidewalk.

“Here,” Alex said, tipping his hat. “Are you from Lloyds?”

“Greta Morris,” she said, holding out a hand.

“If this is everyone,” Detective North growled, “let’s get on with this. Some of us have work to do.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Alex said.

“Do you have it?” Greta asked.

With a dramatic gesture, Alex reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the fake Sapphire Rose.

“That’s it,” Marjorie gasped, collapsing against her husband as she began to cry.

“Good show, Alex,” Bickman said.

“Where did you get that,” North asked.

“I found this in the Brooklyn landfill,” he said, passing it to Greta.

“How did it end up in a landfill?” Detective North asked.

“If I had to guess,” Alex said as Greta pulled a jeweler’s loop from her pocket and used it to examine the brooch. “I’d say Atwood threw it in the trash.”

“Why would he do that?” Bickman asked.

“Because this brooch is a fake,” Greta said, tossing it to North.

The detective caught the brooch deftly and held it up to sparkle in the sunlight.

“You sure?”

Greta favored him with a stern look.

“Detective, I’ve worked for Lloyds of London for twenty years,” she said. “We’re the most prestigious insurer of high-end jewelry in the world. I know fake jewelry when I see it.”

“That can’t be,” Marjorie Bickman gasped. “Lady Atwood only wears it on special occasions. The master keeps it in his safe.”

“When was the last time she wore it?” Alex asked.

“They went to a party last week, at the Astors,” Bickman said. “A picture of the Lady Atwood wearing the brooch was in the Times.”

“Convenient,” North said, turning the brooch over in his hands. “I think I see where you’re going with this.”

“Based on what Mr. Wilks of Callahan Brothers Property told me, I’ve made a few enquiries,” Greta said. “The Atwoods have sold off quite a bit of their art collection over the last year.”

“That’s true,” Bickman said. “The elder Mr. Atwood was the collector. The master said he disliked art.”

“I suspect it’s more that he likes money,” North said.

“Or rather spending it,” Alex added. “When was the last time you got paid?” he asked Bickman. “I mean in cash.”

Caught off guard by the question, Bickman took a moment to answer.

“Most of our needs are taken care of as part of the household,” he said. “The master usually just puts my salary in his safe for me. I think the last time I needed money was about a month ago when I took Marjorie to a picture show.”

“What’s this about?” Marjorie asked, her fearful look back with a vengeance.

“Your boss is broke,” Detective North said. “He got rid of this so he could collect the insurance.”

“I suspect they sold off the stones in the real brooch a few at a time,” Greta supplied. “Eventually even the setting. I have a colleague trying to track them down as we speak.”

Alex chuckled at that. Wilks might be a jerk, but he was very good at his job. If the Atwoods had sold off the stones on the black market, Wilks would know about it by breakfast.

“My God,” Marjorie gasped, clinging to her husband. “If the Atwoods are broke, what about our money?”

“How much do they owe you?” Detective North asked.

“Sixteen hundred and twelve dollars,” Bickman answered immediately. “It’s supposed to be in his office safe.”

“I’ll look into that,” North said. “But if they’re trying their hand at insurance fraud, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

Mrs. Bickman made a sobbing noise and buried her face in her husband’s lapel.

“What are we going to do?” Bickman asked, his face ashen. “That money is all we have and until the accusations against my wife are cleared up, no one will hire us.”

Alex looked at North, but the detective just shrugged.

“I’ve got some questions for the Atwoods,” he said, pocketing the fake brooch. “I’ll lean on him about your money.”

“Thank you, detective,” Bickman said, somewhat woodenly.

“I’ll go with you,” Greta said to North as the detective headed toward the enormous house. “I have some questions of my own.”

Alex watched them go as Marjorie sobbed into Bickman’s tuxedo jacket. He pulled out his rune book and tore out a minor restoration rune, passing it to the diminutive valet.

“This will get the stains out of your jacket,” he said.

“Thank you,” Bickman said in the same wooden voice he’d used with Detective North.

“Do you have a place to stay?” Alex asked.

Bickman nodded after a moment.

“Marjorie’s sister lives in the city.”

“Good. Take your wife there.” Alex hesitated. He really didn’t want to go on, but the sight of Bickman’s lost expression and Marjorie’s sobbing drove him on. He sighed and resigned himself to the course of action in front of him. “Call me in the morning,” he said at last. “I might be able to help.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lockerby,” Bickman said, his face brightening a little. “I’m sorry… I only have my pocket money right now. I can’t pay you.”

Alex didn’t even grimace when the valet said it. Of course he’d known it was coming, so it wasn’t such an incredible accomplishment.

“I know,” he said, putting a comforting hand on Bickman’s shoulder. “You’ll pay me when you can.”