CHAPTER 4
Billie and I had decided early on in our relationship that we were permanently off the record as far as her reporting was concerned. She wouldn’t try to get stories out of any of my investigations. It was an easy agreement to reach, because few of my usual cases—really none of them—involved anything that would interest her readers.
But our arrangement became a bit more complicated when I was called in to help out the Phoenix Police Department. Those investigations were far more intriguing, and thus just the sort of thing she would want to cover. We had met during one such case, and it had involved sorcery, one of the state’s most prominent politicians, and a serial killer whose crimes were as sensational as they were gruesome. Now the PPD needed my help again, and the case appeared to involve magic, murder, and perhaps an attempted act of terrorism.
Billie studied me as I finished my call with Kona, green eyes narrowing, the expression on her lovely face shrewd, knowing.
“What was that?” she asked, as I put away my phone.
“Kona needs my help.”
“I gathered that much. With what?”
I sighed, holding her gaze, a smile creeping over my face.
“What?” she demanded, her voice rising, though she was trying not to laugh.
“We should get our food to go,” I said. “I need to get to the airport, and I would suggest you do the same, though obviously we have to drive separately.”
Her eyes widened. “Fearsson, are you giving me a tip?”
“I’m doing no such thing. I’m simply saying that you might find it useful to make your way to the airport.”
She grabbed her computer bag. “I’m going now. I’ll eat later.”
“If you go now, Kona will know how you found out and I won’t ever be able to help you out again.”
She twisted her mouth, and for an instant I could imagine her as a kid, pondering some scheme that was going to land her in big trouble. She must have been cute as a button. A handful, but cute as a button.
“At least wait for the food,” I said.
“All right.” She hung the bag over the back of her chair again. “What did Kona tell you?”
“This dessert menu has some interesting things on it,” I said, reaching for one of the folded cardboard menus sitting on the table by the salt and pepper shakers and bottles of hot sauce. “We should come here for dinner one night.”
“Fine,” she said, her expression sharpening. “I’ll find out on my own.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Tell me about your case. The one you solved.”
“There’s not that much to tell,” I said, still reading about the desserts. “Though it did end strangely. The guy I caught took a couple of shots at me. He should have hit me, but he didn’t. It almost seemed like someone cast a spell to save my life.”
When she didn’t respond, I set the menu aside. She was staring at me, her face as white as our napkins. I guess it should have occurred to me sooner that I might be better off keeping those details to myself.
“You almost got shot again?”
Crap.
“Yeah. But I’m fine. Like I said, someone was watching out for me.”
“Someone, but not you.”
I’d long imagined that it would be nice to have someone in my life who cared about what happened to me, who wanted to be certain each evening that I was safe at home. Turns out, the imagined version is easier to deal with than the real thing. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate Billie’s concern, but I also didn’t want her worrying about me all the time.
“I’d taken all the precautions I could, but I . . . messed up. It was an accident, the kind of thing that happens once in a blue moon. I stumbled over something and let the guy know I was there before I was ready to disarm him.”
“And he shot at you.”
“He missed.”
The waitress arrived with our food.
“I’m very sorry,” I said to her. “Something’s come up, and we need these to go.”
She forced a smile, muttered a less-than-heartfelt “No problem,” and took the plates away again.
Billie continued to stare at me, her cheeks ashen except for bright red spots high on each one.
“Fearsson—”
“Billie, this is what I do. If I was still a cop, I’d be on the streets every day, taking more chances than I do now.”
“If you were still a cop, you’d have a partner watching out for you. You wouldn’t have been alone with this guy.”
The problem with getting involved with someone smart was that she was right more often than not, and way more often than I was. I shrugged, conceding the point.
“You say that magic saved you?” she asked, lowering her voice.
I nodded, wishing I’d had the good sense to keep quiet when the chance presented itself.
“But not your own.”
“That’s right.”
“Was it Namid?”
We hadn’t been together for long, and at the beginning I had tried to keep from her the fact that I could cast spells, the fact that I was subject to the phasings and was slowly going mad. And even after I told her, she was slow to believe it all and slower still to accept that she could be part of my strange life. But she had come around far sooner than I’d had any right to hope. Her ability to make that simple leap, to guess that Namid had been the one to save me, was evidence of how far she and I had come in little more than two months.
“That was my first thought, too. But no, it wasn’t him. I don’t know who it was.”
“That frightens me even more than someone shooting at you.”
I thought about asking her why, but realized I didn’t have to. Some nameless magical entity or entities keeping me alive for reasons unknown? Yeah, I didn’t like the sound of that either. If they could save my life, they could take it, and since I didn’t know why they’d intervened in the first place, there was always the danger that I would disappoint them, or piss them off in some way.
The waitress came back with a couple of take-out boxes, which she placed on the table.
“Anything else?”
“No, thank you,” I said.
She walked away. Billie ignored the food.
“I’ll be careful,” I told her. At her raised eyebrow, I added, “More careful than I’ve been.”
“I like you, Fearsson. I’d rather you didn’t get yourself killed.”
I heard in what she said an odd echo of Namid’s words from the previous night, and another shudder went through me. I covered it with a shrug and a nod. “I appreciate that.”
We both stood, and I followed her out into the street. Once we were outside, she planted herself in front of me, and I thought she might say more. But instead she kissed me, her forehead furrowing as it had before.
“Call me later, okay? I want to know you’re all right.”
“I will.”
I watched her hurry off toward her car and then walked back to the Z-ster.
I was on the western edge of Mesa, a few blocks from where it gave way to Tempe. Sky Harbor Airport wasn’t far, and I made good time getting there. Once in the airport loops, however, the nightmares began. Navigating any airport can be a headache, but add in a murder and a bomb threat and all hell breaks loose. It took me close to forty-five minutes to get from the east entrance to the Terminal Three parking garage, and once there I had to argue with a uniformed cop for another ten minutes before I convinced him to call Kona so that she could authorize him to let me park and join her in the terminal.
Once inside, I saw that the place was crawling with cops, FBI, bomb-squad guys, TSA officers, and a few suits from Homeland Security. Kona met me in the food court and escorted me through the north security checkpoint. It was the first and no doubt the last time I would ever get my Glock through there without a question or even a quirked eyebrow.
“You took your time getting here,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I’ve had a helluva time putting off the guys from the coroner’s office, not to mention the Federal boys.”
“Sorry. You wouldn’t believe the traffic around the terminal.”
“Actually, I would.” She cast a glance my way. “Everything okay with Billie?”
“We’ll talk about that later.”
She led me toward the end of the gate area, past clusters of cops and agents. And as we walked, people paused in their conversations to stare at us.
Usually, Kona by herself was enough to draw gazes. She was tall and willowy, with dark eyes, the cheekbones of a fashion model, and short, tightly curled black hair. Her skin was the color of coffee, and she had a thousand-watt smile, though it wasn’t in evidence today. But as many people were watching me as her; fallout, no doubt, from the Blind Angel case.
“You’re a celebrity,” she said.
“I’m a curiosity. The disgraced cop who solved one last case.”
She gave a low snort of laughter.
“Hold it, Shaw!”
I knew that voice. We both stopped. Cole Hibbard, the commander of the police department’s Violent Crimes Bureau, was striding in our direction, his face ruddy beneath a shock of white hair. To say that Cole and I hated each other did an injustice to the depth of our animosity. He had once been my father’s best friend, a colleague in the department. When my dad’s mind went, Cole was the first to turn on him. When my mother and her lover were found dead, he was at the fore of those accusing my father of the murders. And years later, when I was on the force, struggling with the phasings and their effects on me, he was the one who pushed to have me fired and then forced me to resign in order to avoid that final disgrace.
“Who authorized you to call him in?” Hibbard asked, gesturing toward me but refusing even to glance in my direction.
“Sergeant Arroyo, sir.”
“Well, he didn’t clear it with me.”
“I’m sure he meant to, sir.”
“I don’t care what he meant to do—”
“Commander,” I broke in, “can I talk to you for a moment?”
Kona laid a hand on my arm. “Justis . . .”
“It’s all right,” I told her.
I faced Hibbard again. He stared daggers at me, appearing unsure as to whether he should be pissed or amazed at my audacity.
“I won’t keep you long,” I said.
I thought he’d refuse, but after a few seconds he gave a single jerky nod, pivoted on his heel, and walked to a bank of windows nearby.
“This is a bad idea, Justis.”
“Maybe. It wouldn’t be my first.”
I joined Hibbard by the window and gazed out over the apron and runways. Planes had been pushed back from all of the terminal three gates. They sat on the sun-baked concrete, motionless, abandoned, heat waves rising from their fuselages. The other terminals hummed with activity, and even as I stood there a jet raced down the nearest runway, its nose angling upward.
“What the hell do you want?” Hibbard asked in a snarl.
“Believe it or not, Commander, I didn’t come here to embarrass you or cause problems.” I kept my voice low, even, the way I would if I were trying to calm a cornered dog. “I came to help.”
“We don’t need your help,” he said.
“The head of your lead homicide unit and your best homicide detective disagree with you.”
“Screw you.”
“You can send me away; we both know you have that authority. But for better or worse, I’m famous now—the former cop who brought down the Blind Angel Killer. If I leave, it’s going to raise questions. You’ll give your answers, I’ll give mine. How do you think that’s going to play?”
He said nothing. I had him, and we both knew that, too. In the weeks since I’d killed Cahors, a lot of people in Phoenix had been asking why I’d been forced to leave the department in the first place. More than a few had suggested that if they’d let me stay, the case might have been solved sooner and lives might have been saved, including that of Claudia Deegan, the daughter of Arizona’s senior U.S. Senator, and the Blind Angel’s final victim.
If Cole demanded that I leave the airport, and this case dragged on for more than a few days, he’d have real problems.
The truth was, I found the talk about me and my firing more embarrassing than gratifying. I took no satisfaction in seeing my former colleagues on the force second-guessed in this way, especially Kona. But I had slept better at night over the last month or two knowing that Cole had to have been squirming a little bit.
“Fine,” he said, the word wrung out of him. “Just stay the hell out of my way.”
“Yes, sir.”
He was striding away before I got the words out. I watched him go, then walked back to where Kona still stood.
“What did you say to him?”
“I asked him how he was going to explain to the press and his superiors why he had chased away from a crime scene the guy who killed Arizona’s most notorious serial murderer.”
“You are a piece of work, Justis.” She raised a hand to keep me from answering. “I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it,” she went on, voice dropping, “but these days I have to confess to feeling a little sorry for Cole. With all that’s on our plate right now?” She shook her head in a way that told me there was more going on in the homicide unit than I knew.
“Something else I should be helping you with?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. But just because you and I got rid of one wack-job, doesn’t mean there wasn’t another one waiting to take his place. Know what I mean?”
The one wack-job would have been Cahors. “You’ve got another serial killer?”
“That surprises you?”
“Not really.”
“We’re keeping it quiet,” she said, whispering now. “The patterns aren’t clear yet, and it may not be one guy. But inside 620, the pressure’s pretty high. And Hibbard bears the brunt of it. I’m not saying you should buy the guy a beer, but as much as he might hate you and your dad, he’s also dealing with some shit right now. You know?”
I nodded. “If I see him again, and he doesn’t shoot me on sight, I’ll give him a break.”
“That’s all I’m saying. Come on,” she said, leading me toward a men’s room that had already been cordoned off with yellow police tape. “Our victim’s in here.”
We stepped into the restroom, the noise from the terminal fading to an echoey background buzz. A toilet in one of the far stalls flushed repeatedly, its automatic mechanism obviously malfunctioning, but otherwise no sound came from within the tiled space.
A body, covered with a white cloth, lay by a row of sinks.
I hesitated, but at Kona’s nod of encouragement I squatted beside the corpse and pulled back the sheet, revealing the body of a young man, his head shaved to blond stubble, his face pock-marked as if he’d had bad acne. He was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt with the words “America for Americans” printed in block letters across the chest.
I didn’t need to search for evidence of what had killed him; it was right there in front of me, a shimmering blur slashed across his chest.
All spells left a residue, a glow tinged with color that no one but another weremyste could see. Each sorcerer’s magic was a different color, a different shade, and each faded at its own pace. The more vibrant the color, the more powerful the sorcerer.
But this residue was unlike any I had seen before. Most of the time, magic in this form reminded me of wet paint. It was brilliant and it gleamed, but it was opaque. Even the glow left behind by the spells of Etienne de Cahors, who was the most powerful conjurer I’d ever encountered, had those same basic qualities.
Not this spell.
Whoever had killed the kid lying in front of me had left behind a flare of power that had more in common with Namid’s sparkling clear waters than with the residue I was used to seeing. It had color—a deep, rich green that reminded me of early spring leaves—but I could see through the glow to the dead man’s shirt. More, the residue seemed to be alive; it shifted and swirled, like a sheen of oil on top of a puddle.
“Talk to me, Justis,” Kona said after I’d stared at the kid for a good minute or two. “Was I right? Was he killed with magic?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But this magic is . . . it’s weird. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Well, that’s what I want to hear right now.”
I tore my eyes away from the swirling glow to scan the rest of his body. I saw no blood, no other wounds or bruising. Of course he had a lot of tattoos, including at least half a dozen swastikas on his neck and arms, which made bruising a bit harder to find. But I was sure that the spell to his chest had killed him.
“A spell hit him here,” I said, tracing a line across his heart with my finger, but taking care not to touch him. “Aside from that I don’t see any magic on him. We could turn him over to check for signs of a second conjuring, but I don’t think there’s much point.”
“Do you recognize the color?”
I shook my head. “I don’t even recognize the kind of magic that was used against him. It doesn’t look like any spell I could cast.”
“Is that because of the spell, or the guy who cast it?”
This was one of the things that made Kona such a great cop—the best I’d known. She would have been the first to admit that she was out of her depth; she knew next to nothing about magic. But she had asked the perfect question, one that cut to the very core of the matter. One that I couldn’t yet answer. First Billie, now Kona. It seemed that I was giving my friends a free education in magic: “Runecasting 101.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “In the past I’ve only used magical residue like this to find the conjurer. Someone who knows more about this stuff than I do might be able to tell us what kind of spell was used against him, but I can’t.”
I scrutinized the glow for another few seconds, trying to commit to memory the color and quality of the residue. I covered the body again, and straightened.
“What do you know so far?” I asked.
Kona pulled out the small spiral notepad she kept in her blazer pocket. “We know more than we usually do this early in an investigation, but so far we haven’t been able to make much sense of it.” Opening the notebook, she went on. “The victim’s name is James Robert Howell.” She glanced up, her eyes meeting mine. “I swear, Justis, I think he went by Jimmy Bob. As you can tell from his hair style and the lovely artwork he’s wearing, he was a skinhead, I’m guessing with ties to a bunch of white supremacist groups. We pulled his luggage and found that it held a bomb with an altitude-sensitive trigger. The bomb-squad guys aren’t sure yet when it was set to detonate, but the way these things work is that you reach that level, the air pressure changes enough to trip the mechanism, and boom, no more plane.”
“How do you even get a bomb onto a plane these days? I would have thought that the TSA could find any explosives in a checked bag.”
“Usually they can. This was a pretty sophisticated device. They’re still trying to figure out exactly where the system broke down.”
“Who else was on board? For that matter, where was the plane going?”
“Both good questions. This was American flight 595, a non-stop to Washington Reagan. And the passenger list included Mando Rafael Vargas and several of his aides.”
I let out a low whistle. “So you think that Mister White Supremacist here had it in mind to assassinate one of the most prominent Latino leaders in the country.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. That’s what the Feds are thinking.”
“Sounds about right. The FBI guys are letting you play in their sandbox?”
“It’s my sandbox,” she said. “I’ve made it clear to them that this is my goddamned sandbox. But yeah, for now at least they’re playing nice and they’re eager for any help we can give them.”
“How soon was the plane supposed to take off?”
Kona nodded, an eyebrow going up. “Well, that’s where all of this starts to get very interesting. Flight 595 was supposed to take off a little before nine o’clock this morning.”
“What?” I bent down again, uncovered Howell’s body a second time. “So how did he end up in here? Why isn’t every person on that plane dead already?”
“The plane had mechanical problems. It pulled back from the gate, a red light came on in the cockpit, and it wound up sitting on the tarmac for about two and half hours while mechanics tried to find the problem. At that point they gave up, rolled it to the gate again, and had everyone deplane, intending to move them to a new aircraft. While they were waiting, someone killed Howell. We found the bomb in his luggage a short time later.”
“That’s some coincidence,” I said.
“Exactly what I’m thinking. I need you to put your magic eyes on a few more things for me, and maybe a few people, too.”
“People?”
“I want to know if our murderer was on the plane, and I know you can tell from looking if someone’s a conjurer.”
“Just because a conjurer is on the plane, that doesn’t mean he or she is the killer.”
She frowned. “I know that. You know I know that. But it would be a place to start, right?”
I couldn’t argue. “I’ll ‘put my magic eyes’ on whoever you want me to.” I shifted my attention back to Jimmy Bob. “What do you suppose Pete Forsythe is going to say was the cause of death?” Forsythe was the Medical Examiner in Phoenix, and had been since way before I joined the police force.
Kona shrugged. “I don’t know. Why?”
“From what I’m seeing, I’d guess that the magic slashed through him—I don’t know if it simply stopped his heart or caused a heart attack, or a rupture of some sort.”
“Does it matter?”
For some reason I felt that it did, though I couldn’t say why. “It’s not the kind of spell I would cast.”
“Well, I’d hope not.”
I grunted a laugh but then grew serious again. “No, I mean that if I was going to murder someone, and if I intended to attack his heart, I’d seize it with a spell, make sure it would appear to anyone who cared that he’d died of a heart attack. And maybe this sorcerer did that, but a spell like this . . . It seems odd.” I covered him again, stood.
Kona was watching me. “Go ahead and say it.”
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you’re thinking right now.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “All right. It’s almost like whoever killed him didn’t care how it would look.”
“Except that they did it with magic, which most of us can’t see.”
“True. But that’s all the more reason to make it seem like a natural death—why would you draw attention to what you’d done by flaunting the spell?”
“I can’t help you there, partner,” she said. “I think all of you weremystes are crazy.”
“Or at least headed that way, right?”
“At least. Come on. Let’s go see the rest of it.”
I followed her out of the men’s room to the nearest of the gates. A TSA official swiped a card and pulled open the gate door, allowing us to walk down the jet bridge. Halfway between the gate and the open end of the bridge, the heat hit us, a fist of stifling air. I pulled off my bomber. We exited onto a stairway that led down to the apron, and climbed into what was essentially a golf cart. Kona released the brake and steered us out of the apron and onto a roadway that ran parallel to the runways and led toward an open area near the western edge of the airport.
“Where are we going?” I asked, raising my voice so that she would hear me over the rush of hot wind and the constant roar of aircraft.
“To check out a bomb.”
I nodded. “You know how to show a guy a good time.”
She grinned. “Don’t tell Margarite. She’ll be jealous.”