Ghost of a Chance

24 The Cooler

The basement of the Central Office of Police was a series of rooms, cages, and holding cells known collectively as the Cooler. After Officer Preston had put Alex in handcuffs, he’d been driven to the Central Office and thrown unceremoniously into a large open cage with a few drunks and a sullen-looking pickpocket.

The police had confiscated all his possessions, including his suit coat with its shield runes. Apparently they’d dealt with runewrights before and had procedures for handling them.

There wasn’t a clock anywhere, so Alex had no idea how long he’d been there. Not that it mattered. He’d been so sure that Duane King was the killer. As far as Alex could tell, he was the only person with a real motive.

That you know of, he reminded himself.

Seth Kowalski and his confederates at North Shore Development probably swindled dozens of people out of their land, buying up small farms and scrubland before anyone knew rich people were looking to build their summer homes in the area. Seth and his friends probably made millions before anyone knew better. There could be hundreds of people who wanted them dead.

No, the contrarian part of his brain protested. Word would have gotten around fast that rich people were buying up land. Even if North Shore wanted to swindle people, they really didn’t have the time.

Alex thought about the building permit North Shore filed for the parcel of land that included Duane King’s property. That permit had been filed just a few weeks after the tax sale.

Duane King’s five acres of land was right in the middle of the twenty-two acre parcel. North Shore wouldn’t have been able to sell the parcel if they hadn’t gotten King’s piece. That had to be it, they were desperate. That permit was one of the first they filed; if that deal had fallen through because they didn’t have King’s land, they’d have probably lost everything. That sale gave them the capital they needed to buy up the next bit for the next fat-cat looking for a beachfront home.

Alex had already figured out the rest. They told Duane King the land was worth less than what was owed for the taxes, so he’d let it go to tax sale, and then manipulated the sale to be sure they got it.

“So unless there’s another phony tax sale on the books, King is probably the only person they actually swindled,” Alex said out loud.

“What?” the nearest drunk mumbled looking up. “You know a king? Really?”

“Go back to sleep,” Alex told him, then got up and started pacing around the cage.

None of this made sense. Everything pointed to Duane King, but that simply wasn’t possible. If the ghost was using escape runes to leave the scenes of his murder, he’d be purchasing his revenge with his own life. Who, other than Duane King, would be motivated to pay that kind of price?

And yet, King was dead. Dead and buried in a pauper’s grave.

Alex sat down angry. He tried to sleep, lying down on the wooden bench with his hat over his face, but his mind was too active for that. He kept seeing the rune fragment he’d found in Marcellus Gordon’s wastebasket. The police took his notebook along with his other possessions, but Alex remembered the fragment well enough.

It wasn’t an anchor rune, that much he knew: it wasn’t complicated enough for that. It kind of reminded him of a shield rune, but it wasn’t complicated enough for that either.

Frustrated, he got up and began pacing again.

“You look rested,” Iggy’s voice interrupted him several miles later.

“Iggy,” Alex gasped. “You found me.”

The old man wore his tweed suit with a bowler hat and looked as tired as Alex felt. Iggy smiled. He looked relieved, like he’d expected to find Alex in solitary confinement.

“When you didn’t come home by midnight I started asking around,” Iggy said. “That’s the one,” he said, turning to a uniformed policeman with a large ring of keys that moved up from behind him.

The officer unlocked the cage and held the door so Alex could step out.

“How’d you manage this?” Alex asked as he breathed in the free air again. “I figured Detweiler would hold me for at least a day while he figured out some bogus charge against me.”

“Later,” Iggy whispered. He nodded at the officer who was closing the door to the cage. With a wink, he led Alex away, toward the elevators. A wall with a locked cage door separated the Cooler from the elevators and there were two armed officers on the inside, in case of trouble. Both of them eyed Alex with a mixture of curiosity and disdain as Alex picked up his coat, rune book, notebook, matchbook, flask, and the few loose coins he’d had in his pocket when Officer Preston brought him in. His kit bag was there as well, and he picked it up without bothering to inspect its contents.

Discretion, he’d learned, was definitely the better part of valor. Especially since Iggy seemed to think that the order for Alex’s release could be rescinded at any minute.

“Okay,” Alex said, once they were safely outside the Central Office and into a taxi. “How did you pull that off?”

“When you didn’t call, I knew something was amiss, so I went over to the Gordons’ home to find you.”

“How did you know where the crime scene was?”

“Those officers Detweiler sent to the brownstone to fetch you weren’t exactly tight-lipped,” Iggy said with a grin.

Alex should have known better. The old fox would have had the whole story off them before he told them that Alex wasn’t there.

“So,” Iggy continued. “Once I got there and learned what had happened, I spoke to Detweiler.” His smile faded for a moment. “He told me about Duane King, and that’s a problem, I grant you, but I convinced him not to charge you.”

Alex couldn’t believe that the Lieutenant had rescinded his order to arrest Alex, no matter what Iggy had said. The old man must have called in a major favor to pull that off.

Alex got a chill as he realized the most obvious leverage Iggy could get was to call Sorsha. Alex already owed her for getting Bickman a job with Andrew Barton; he didn’t like the idea of owning her further. He didn’t want to admit it, but he disliked the idea of her knowing he’d been thrown in jail, too.

“Give me some credit, lad,” Iggy said, reading Alex’s expression. “I just reminded the Lieutenant that they wouldn’t know who the ghost was targeting or why without you. I also pointed out that if I were to mention that to that nice Tasker fellow over at the Sun, it would sell a lot of papers.”

Alex barked out an explosive laugh.

“And make Detweiler into a citywide chump,” he said.

“He decided to put off bringing any charges against you for the moment,” Iggy said, lighting up a celebratory cigar despite the lateness of the hour.

Alex sat back against the seat and closed his eyes, letting out a long sigh. That could have gone very badly for him if Detweiler had actually filed a charge.

“Thank God for paperwork,” he said.

“Now,” Iggy said, slapping him on the knee. “Tell me where we are with the case.”

Alex sighed again and shook his head.

“We’re nowhere,” he said. “Turns out I was wrong about Duane King.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He’s dead.”

Iggy puffed his cigar in silence for a moment.

“Well, that certainly is a setback,” he said.

“Setback?” Alex laughed. “That’s the whole game.” He leaned back in his seat again. “I was so sure it was him.”

“Me too,” Iggy said. He was stroking his mustache in the manner Alex knew meant his incredible brain was working overtime. “Everything you found points to King. The victims, the motive, even the method of the murders.”

“You think someone did that on purpose?” Alex asked.

Iggy shook his head.

“Why?” he pointed out with a shrug. “It’s too easy for the police to find out he’s dead.”

“True,” Alex admitted.

“Is there anyone else involved with this business who could be involved?” Iggy asked.

“Not that I could find,” Alex said.

“What about Duane King’s son, the one who impregnated that girl and then ran away?”

“Nobody knows where he is,” Alex said. “Besides, if he wanted to avenge his mother’s death, why wait this long? The delay only makes sense for Duane because he was in prison for twenty years.”

Now it was Iggy’s turn to sigh. It actually made Alex feel a little better: if the mind of the great Sir Arthur Conan Ignatius Doyle was stumped by this, what chance did he have?

“I did what you said,” Alex said, speaking just to fill up the silence that had descended. “I eliminated the impossible so that whatever was left should have been the truth, right?”

Iggy chuckled at that, but it wasn’t a dry, ironic chuckle of agreement, this was amusement. Alex looked over to find the old man grinning behind his mustache, his teeth clenched on the cigar, and his eyes shining in the glow of a passing streetlight.

“Thanks, lad,” he said. “You just reminded me that there’s a corollary to that formula.”

Alex sat up, interested.

“If you eliminate the impossible and nothing remains,” he said, taking his cigar out of his mouth and considering it.

“Yes?” Alex prompted.

“Then some part of the impossible, must be possible.”

“Well, I’m sure Duane King’s ghost isn’t committing these murders,” Alex said. “So where does that leave us?”

“Think about it,” Iggy said puffing on his cigar again. His shining eyes and wide grin told Alex that he’d already come to a conclusion.

Alex thought about it, turning the problem this way and that in his head. There really was only one satisfactory answer.

“Duane King didn’t die in that fire,” Alex said. “Either the cops messed up or King made sure they thought it was him. Either way, he’s still alive, and he’s still the killer.”

“That’s my read on it,” Iggy said, finally sitting back against his seat.

“Okay, I’ll tell Detweiler in the morning,” Alex said, so tired he couldn’t even remember what day it was.

Iggy sat back up and gave him a withering look.

“Detweiler isn’t going to believe a word you say,” he said. “You’re going to have to find King yourself and bring him in before the lieutenant will take your word for anything. And, if you go to him with something less, he’ll press those charges, tabloid or no.”

“Great.” Alex rubbed his temples. How was he going to find one not-as-dead-as-reported ex-con in New York City?

“So,” Iggy said, his senior-detective voice firmly in place. “What are you going to do to find our ghost?”

Alex thought about that for a long moment.

“I have to find out how he haunts,” Alex said. “I’m pretty sure he’s using an escape rune to get away from the crime scenes. It’s the only thing that makes sense after Marcellus Gordon. If he’d left any other way, the cops would have seen him.”

“I agree,” Iggy said, nodding. “He’s killing for revenge, so he doesn’t care about spending his own life.”

“So that leaves the question of how he’s getting into the crime scenes. The cops watching Gordon’s place swore the place was locked up tight.” He rubbed his chin. “Is it possible King could have used an escape rune to get in?”

Iggy shook his head.

“There are only two ways to link an escape rune to a location,” he said. “One…”

“Draw the link rune on the spot you want to land on,” Alex supplied. That’s how the second part of his own escape rune worked. If he triggered the rune, he and anyone within ten feet would be teleported to a spot about one hundred feet above the North Atlantic, then he would be teleported again, landing right on the rune he’d carved into the floor of the brownstone’s library.

“And two…” Iggy prodded.

“Use latitude and longitude in the escape rune itself,” he said. That was how the first part of his rune worked. The coordinates of the spot over the North Atlantic were coded right into the rune tattooed on his left forearm. It was, of course, horribly imprecise, but that didn’t matter when the point of it was to dump a ten-foot radius worth of bad guys into the ocean. It would never be precise enough to allow someone to teleport to a specific room.

“Any chance King snuck into all those homes a month ago and carved link runes under their desks to get ready for this?” Alex asked.

Iggy didn’t dignify that with an answer.

“I don’t suppose King inherited a bunch of money while he was in prison, so he could afford a couple dozen unlocking runes?” Alex asked.

Unlocking runes could have gotten King through the locked and bolted door at the Gordons, but that was about one hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of runes. An ex-con wouldn’t have that kind of cash on hand, so that was out.

Something twitched in his brain. Something about carving link runes under the murdered people’s desks, but he was too tired to suss it out. Besides, he knew that there weren’t any runes in those rooms, under the desks or otherwise.

Or were there?

“Wait a minute,” he said, digging out his notebook. “I completely forgot to tell you, I found a fragment of a rune in Marcellus Gordon’s trash.”

He flipped open to the page where he’d drawn what had remained of the rune and passed it to Iggy. The old man flicked his gold lighter and held it up to see what Alex had drawn.

“I don’t know what it is yet,” Alex began, but Iggy handed him back the book.

“It’s an obfuscation rune,” he said. “Write out a document, then draw the rune with the same ink and the text becomes unreadable. Some business men put them on important papers and contracts.”

“What use is a contract that no one can read?” Alex asked.

“Use the ink to draw the rune on a glass lens and anyone looking through the lens can read it,” Iggy explained. “They also have a side effect of blocking any kind of linking rune.”

“Watson must have used it on some business papers,” Alex said. He hadn’t found any unreadable papers, but since the rune was in the trash, it was likely Watson destroyed it.

With a sigh, Alex closed the notebook and put it back in his pocket.

Another dead end.

The cab eased to a stop in front of the brownstone, and Iggy paid the cabbie while Alex got out. He had no idea what time it was, but he needed to get to bed. Not because he was exhausted, but because tomorrow he had to find a dead man, recover a motor, and save a kidnap victim all in time to have a date with an angel.

Cheer up, he thought as they mounted the stairs to the front door. Tomorrow couldn’t possibly be worse.