In Plain Sight

7 The Brother

It was nearly two o’clock when Alex trudged up in front of a red brick apartment building right against the border between the north side, middle and outer ring. Despite being this close to the low rent district, the building was clean and well maintained, and there wasn’t any trash on the sidewalk. The key Evelyn Rockwell had given him had 5C stamped on it and Alex looked up at the five-story building wearily. It was a cinch that a building this far out wouldn’t have an elevator.

His lunch with Leslie had gone well; she’d chosen to eat at the Imperial Table, a Chinese joint with linen napkins and china plates that were actually from China. Alex used to dislike foreign foods, but living with Iggy had broadened his palate a bit.

He waited until they’d finished their chop suey to tell Leslie about the mission and Father Harry. She hadn’t much liked Father Harry, but the news still hit her hard. It’s a strange thing how someone you know can be alive one minute and dead the next, but you don’t feel it. You don’t know until someone tells you, and only then do you understand the things they did that you’ll never experience again. Alex found himself talking to Leslie about his youth in the mission and what Father Harry had done for him. With the Father gone, he wanted someone else to know just how great a man had passed.

Alex pushed thoughts of lunch and of Father Harry out of his mind as he ascended the stairs of Thomas Rockwell’s building. There would be time to reminisce later, with a bottle of bourbon.

Preferably two.

The door to Thomas’ apartment was shut and locked securely. There weren’t any scratches or tool marks that would indicate that the lock had been picked, so Alex inserted the key and turned it. The lock yielded smoothly and he pushed the door open.

Beyond the door was a large room that had once been well appointed. Evelyn had been right, however — the room looked like the scene of a barroom brawl. Furniture had been turned over, lamps smashed, and the contents of every drawer littered the floor.

Someone had been looking for something. Something they wanted very badly.

The fabric covers on the sofa had been slashed open and every pillow was cut. The doors and drawers of a standing secretary cabinet were open and their contents spilled on the floor. Every cupboard in the tiny kitchen stood open, even the door to the range. No stone seemed to have gone unturned.

“All right,” he said to the empty room. “Let’s get to work.”

A sweep with his lantern revealed fingerprints all over, but not as many as he’d expected. Whoever tossed Thomas’ place must have worn gloves. He did, however, find an excessive amount of bodily fluids in the bedroom. Thomas might have been a bachelor, but he wasn’t spending all his nights alone, that much was clear.

Maybe his exercise partner can tell me what he was working on. On the other hand, if he has a girlfriend, why hasn’t she reported him missing?

After the silverlight, Alex used the ghostlight to look for magic. Being that Thomas was a runewright, it wasn’t surprising that his apartment lit up like a neon sign. There were protection runes on the door and runes of silence on the walls, ceiling, and floor to keep out noise from his neighbors. A few runes written on flash paper littered the floor, but these were all basic. The interesting runes were written on Thomas Rockwell’s kitchen table. A large central rune decorated the tabletop with at least four nodes, and six other runes wound around it. Alex knew most of the runes, but he’d never seen a casting this complex before. The big rune was for concealment — it was almost exactly like the one Alex had put on his book safe in Iggy’s library. The others all dealt with either privacy or finding.

Alex took out a pad of paper from his kit and meticulously copied the construct. It looked like something to prevent people spying on Thomas, magically or otherwise.

Something a man working on a revolutionary new rune might do.

Alex wondered why it was so intricate. There were better runes Thomas could have used that would make the construct simpler and more effective. Rune casting was always a balance between simplicity and power. Adding nodes to a central rune could make it more specific and therefore more powerful, but the more complicated a rune got, the more a runewright ran the risk of conflicts and backlash.

Satisfied that no out-of-place magic was operating in Thomas’ apartment, Alex packed away the ghostlight burner and turned to the mess on the floor. Clearly whoever got here ahead of him had decided that those things weren’t worth keeping, so it was likely they wouldn’t be of use to him either. Still, he had to check. Anything he could learn about Thomas’ life leading up to his disappearance would help when he cast his own finding rune.

Alex pulled the dining table to the center of the room, then put his multi-lamp on top of it. From his kit, he extracted another burner and clipped it in place, then lit it. He took the covers off the other three faces of the lamp, letting the amberlight inside fill the whole room. Amberlight looked just like its name implied, a ruddy reddish-yellow glow. Everywhere the light touched, rusty-brown shapes began to appear in the air. Iggy called amberlight, Newton’s first law of motion applied to time. If you shone amberlight on a chair, it would create an image of that chair in the place where it usually stood.

An object under amberlight showed where it was usually at rest.

As the light filtered out of the lantern and filled the room, Alex took a pair of yellow spectacles from his kit and clipped them to his nose. The amberlight after-images snapped into sharp focus, and Alex could see the room as it had been before it had been wrecked. The sofa had stood against the back wall opposite a bookcase that now lay in the center of the room, next to the open secretary cabinet. Alex returned them to their places, allowing the light to shine where they had been. A shower of book images rose up from the floor and flowed up onto the bookcase, each coming to rest where it had been. Several flickered, more indistinct than the others — these were books Thomas moved regularly, and Alex traced each one down where they lay on the floor and set them aside.

Moving around the room, Alex rearranged the furniture and picked up anything that looked important or often used. It took over an hour but when he finally blew out the amberlight burner he had a stack of books, papers, and curios to examine.

An hour later, he had to admit defeat. There was plenty of information on Thomas’ activities as a bookkeeper, all of it boring and ordinary, but nothing on his activities as a runewright. The only thing he could find that gave any idea at all about Thomas Rockwell was an old picture of the man himself, standing in front of the doors of Empire Tower. He was a lean and lanky man in his mid-twenties when the photograph was taken, with light hair and a bushy, unkempt mustache. Despite that, Thomas had a debonair air about him; he wore a bowler hat at a jaunty angle and had a genuine, friendly smile. It spoke well of him as a person, but it gave Alex no real insight into the man behind the ratty ‘stache.

“Damn it,” Alex swore, getting up and pacing the apartment. He wanted more information to use in his finding rune. The more he knew about Thomas and what might have made him disappear, the more powerful his casting would be.

Now he had to do it the old-fashioned way.

Alex went back to Thomas’ bedroom and into the bathroom. Despite Thomas’ having a regular visitor, there was only one toothbrush. Alex picked it up and started to turn when he caught sight of himself in the mirror over the sink. He remembered seeing fingerprints on the bottom of the mirror when he swept the room with silverlight. Fingerprints on a bathroom mirror weren’t exactly uncommon, but only on the bottom?

Alex set down the toothbrush and carefully felt the bottom edge of the glass. Using his fingernail, he was able to pull it away from the wall and swing it upward on a hidden hinge at the top. Behind the mirror was a small space cut out of the wall. Inside were a book bound in blue leather, a gold pocket watch, and a roll of bills with a rubber band around it. Alex took the book and carefully lowered the mirror back down over the secret space. He cursed himself for not looking for this kind of hidey-hole first, but most runewrights would have extra-dimensional vaults. If Thomas had a vault, anything in it would be gone forever.

Alex picked up the toothbrush and went back to the front room. He still needed to cast his finding rune. Without a better connection to Thomas, it wouldn’t be very powerful, but he could at least get direction and distance from the toothbrush. The book would give him a better insight into Thomas the runewright, but it would take hours, maybe days of study, and he needed answers now. Evelyn needed them.

Alex set the book aside and removed an inkwell and pen set from his kit. He followed them with a piece of chalk, a vial of green powder, a small leather tool case, and a red beeswax candle. He took off his jacket, picked up the chalk, and drew an octagonal shape on the floor by the table. Around the octagon, at each point, he drew different geometric shapes; circles, triangles, squares, and trapezoids. Once that was done, he took the pen and carefully dipped it in the inkwell. The ink was a solution of several substances, most of them expensive, so he was careful not to spill any. In each of the eight small shapes around the octagon, he drew a rune. The order he wrote them and the shape they occupied were all part of the magic. When he finished, he moved to the center of the octagon and drew an elaborate rune. This was the finding rune base, the rune that tied the whole pattern together. It always reminded Alex of a dragon sitting on a fainting couch.

His writing done, Alex put away the pen and inkwell. He lit the candle, then while it burned, he took out the tool case and vial of green powder. The powder was emerald dust and very expensive, but fortunately Alex needed only the tiniest bit for the finding rune. He took out a metal spatula, that looked for all the world like a miniature shovel, and coaxed a few precious grains of the emerald onto it. Moving with exaggerated care, he tapped the grains off into the still-wet ink of the reclining dragon symbol and the ink promptly turned a deep green. Lastly, Alex took the candle and dripped eight drops of wax on the points of the chalk octagon. When the last drop hit, the entire geometric shape and all its sub-shapes turned red, and the finding rune glowed with power.

Alex put his hand on the rune and felt the power of the universe flow through him. Calling the photograph of Thomas into his mind, Alex spoke.

“I seek to find one Thomas Rockwell,” he pronounced in a loud, clear voice. “Bookkeeper and runewright. Brother of Evelyn. I seek him here, in the heart of his domicile. Show him to me.”

Usually the incantation that released the rune’s magic took longer, but usually Alex had a better idea of who he sought. He’d worked with less, but he didn’t like it.

Normally the rune would come back with something almost instantly. It could be a sound or smell, or even just an impression of which direction to seek the target. The better Alex’s link to the person or object, the more details he’d receive. Sometimes he could even see them and their surroundings if the bond was strong enough.

This time he felt nothing.

That could only mean one thing. It meant that Thomas was dead.

Alex kept his hand on the rune and reached out with his senses nonetheless. He’d never received a response that took longer than a few seconds, but it didn’t hurt to try. After a full minute, he gave up.

“I’m sorry, Evelyn,” he said out loud.

Casting a finding rune used a tremendous amount of energy and Alex felt weariness pushing down on him. He dragged himself up into a chair and sat staring at Thomas’ little blue book. It had the runewright emblem stamped into the cover and it was stained dark from repeated handling.

Has to be his Lore book, he thought.

If Evelyn was right, something in Thomas’ book might have gotten him killed. Alex hadn’t been paid to find a killer, but turning the book over to the police would be a waste of time. Only a fellow runewright would know what to look for in a book full of runes.

Alex picked it up and opened it. He smiled as he saw the first, most basic runes in the front. Each page was covered with annotations and drawings. It reminded him very much of his father’s lore book that he’d inherited. Flipping through the pages revealed Thomas’ training. As the pages progressed, his notes became more specific and more detailed as he learned to draw more utility from a single rune. All of it was familiar to Alex — he had these runes and many more in his own lore book.

When he reached the end, however, everything changed. The last dozen pages were filled with six of the most complex runes Alex had ever seen. One looked very much like his own finding rune, but heavily modified. Another resembled a life rune, magic that would allow a runewright to power his constructs with his own life force. Another looked familiar, but Alex couldn’t place it. The other three were alien to him. He’d have to study them intensely to figure out what they were for.

He whistled as he paged back and forth, looking at these last pages. They were orders of magnitude more complex than anything else in Thomas’ book. They were certainly something that might have cost him his life. New runes were a rare thing and, depending on what these particular runes did, they could be worth a fortune.

“Well, somebody wanted something here,” Alex said, looking down at the mess. It was likely that whoever tossed Thomas’ place didn’t find what they were looking for. Only a desperate searcher cuts open the couch.

Alex suddenly felt very self-conscious with the book. He’d been in Thomas’ apartment for hours. What if a neighbor had been paid to watch it? He could very well find himself running into a welcoming committee out in the hall.

He quickly put away his gear, except for his chalk, and then drew a door on one of the walls. Activating a rune from his book, Alex opened his vault. He placed the book inside along with his kit, then slipped a rune-covered pair of brass knuckles into the outside pocket of his jacket.

It never hurt to be prepared.

Satisfied, Alex closed the door, and scrubbed the chalk outline from the wall with his handkerchief.

He needn’t have bothered. No one lurked in the hall or the stairwell waiting to pounce. There wasn’t anyone strange at the crawler station either, let alone as a crawler passenger, while Alex rode back to the brownstone.

It was well after six when Alex got home, and he wanted nothing more than to tramp upstairs to his bed.

“In here,” Iggy’s voice came from the kitchen.

Alex sighed and turned away from the stairs and his inviting bedroom. He expected to find Iggy working his culinary magic over a hot stove, but was surprised to see the balding man sitting at the table with nothing but a cup of tea and a lit pipe. He looked old. Alex knew that Iggy was in his seventies, but he’d never seen the man look old. Iggy was usually bursting with energy and enthusiasm for life. Now he appeared drained, hollow even.

“What is it?” Alex asked. “This is about Father Harry, I can see it in your face. What’s happened?”

Iggy’s brown eyes moved up to meet Alex’s.

“Are you sure you want to know?” he asked. “I don’t recommend it.”

Alex sat down across the table, all traces of his weariness evaporating.

“Tell me.” he insisted.

“Doctor Halverson is the man at the University who studies diseases,” Iggy began. “I’ve been up with him since last night at his laboratory. Thanks to those blood samples I collected, Halverson was able to grow samples of the virus and stain them.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Alex asked. “I thought the whole point of staining was that you could see whatever made people sick and then stop it.”

“Yes and no, in this case.” Iggy nodded. He puffed on his pipe as if searching for the right words to continue. “We got a good look at the little devils, clear as spring well water.”

“And?”

“And there’s nothing natural about that damn disease,” Iggy said, shivering as if taken by a chill. “It’s too perfect. It was designed. Engineered by someone.”

Alex could feel the blood draining from his face as the implications of that statement took hold of his mind.

“This is terrifying,” Iggy said. His pipe had gone out, but he continued to puff at it anyway. “Man shouldn’t have this kind of power. I wish I didn’t know about it.”

“I’m glad you do,” Alex said after a long silence.

“What do you mean, boy?” Iggy said, aghast. Alex shrugged.

“Someone has to pay for Father Harry,” he said. “Someone has to pay for all the people at the mission.” He reached into his coat and pulled his Colt 1911 from its holster, placing it on the table. “I don’t know how to kill a virus,” he said. “But I know how to kill a man.”