CHAPTER 4
“Megan! Grab your field kit!” My boss, George Bernhardt, yelled out from his door. He had a tendency to forget how loud his voice is. “I just got a call from central dispatch. They’re texting you an address and downloading some directions to your phone’s GPS.”
I had just walked back into the office after filling out the reports, in triplicate, of course, on Hardeman and Leonard. Someone had told me that they were planning on putting all the forms online and getting us tablets to use. That may be what the politicians are saying in places like the city council, but I’ll believe it when I see that they’ve actually stuck a crowbar in the city’s wallet and let some money escape.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
George Hamish Bernhardt is a towering grey-haired figure who stands six foot two and seems taller. He has been practicing law in Tulsa for more than a quarter of a century, though there are people who swear he’s been around a lot longer than that. Rumor says he knows where a lot of the bodies are buried from the political wars; he probably helped bury half of them. The funny thing is, to see him away from the office on some of the local community theatre stages, it’s like he is a totally different man.
“Hell, I run the place, and do you think they bother to tell me? Half the time I figure we’re lucky to even have the address. I think they expect you all to know everything through psychic vibes or jungle drums or whatever the hell it is that you guys do. Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for this shit.” he muttered.
There was talk that a few years ago Bernhardt had taken off for a couple of years to tend bar down in Key West. But, I frankly think, if he was in Key West, he was probably running cigarette boats and hip deep in a smuggling operation of some kind. The funny thing is, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that if he gives you his word on something, he will keep it, no matter what. I’ve seen him face down angry mob bosses, politicians who were after his scalp and even once an angry pit bull. Thirty seconds after he looked at the dog, the animal ended up licking George’s hand and demanding to be petted. If it were possible for him to be an undiscovered sorcerer, I would think that was exactly what he was.
So, since he was the boss, not to mention the guy who filled out my yearly employee evaluation, and had spoken, I knew what I would be doing for the next few hours. I grabbed my backpack and a yellow toolbox that held additional supplies and headed for the door. Along the way, I pulled out my iPhone and tried to one-handedly pull up my text messages. They say my generation is supposed to be the master of hand-held computer devices like that. Well, once again that seems to have been a skill that I missed out on mastering.
On my third attempt I found the address. By that time I was in my car and trying to maneuver through the maze that is the underground parking area beneath the plaza that houses the courthouse. I’m really surprised that there aren’t more accidents down here. Maybe claustrophobia helps to make people safer drivers.
Since it was the middle of the day, and hence nowhere near rush hour, I expected to make the run to the crime scene in about ten minutes. The problem is, no one told people that they weren’t supposed to be out on the Crosstown Expressway right then. It seemed like every person with a phobia of going more than fifty miles an hour was in my way. I don’t have one of those fancy magnetic blinking red lights to put on the roof of my car; that’s for cops on their way to “real emergencies.” Besides, even if I did, it would probably end up shoved way under the car seat next to my missing sunglasses and my shopping list for Wal-Mart from two weeks ago.
The condo complex looked like it had a convention of police cars around it, which, I’m sure, filled the residents with nothing but joy and feelings of safety. Since there would probably be more cars showing up and blocking everyone in, I left mine parked a half block away. I probably looked like a door-to-door sales lady as I walked up to the barrier created by the yellow police tape.
“Sorry, ma’am, this is a crime scene. No one is allowed in unless they’re residents,” said a uniformed officer that I didn’t recognize. He was rather severe in his tone and locked a ‘don’t mess with me or you will regret it’ look on me.
Instead of saying anything, I wasn’t in the mood to be either professional or come back with a snarky remark. I just held up the ID card that I had clipped to the strap of my backpack.
The officer stared at it for a moment, then lifted the tape to allow me to slip under. If he had called back to confirm my identity or if they even should let the DA’s office onto a crime scene, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest.
I walked around an S-curved driveway to come up to the condo in question. Flynn and his partner, detective Karl Barker, were standing outside the door of one of the condos. There was a ‘in case of fire please rescue cat’ sticker on the door and a ‘protected by attack cat’ sign hanging next to the door.
“Did you have fun with the vampire hunters?” asked Flynn. He was trying to keep a straight face, which was difficult. Flynn had heard me expound at length on vamp hunters, and knew how much I was annoyed with the whole idea. It gave the public the wrong idea about magic.
“So who lives here?” The whole complex was actually a modestly sized place. I counted about twenty units; not high end by any means, but certainly not like some of those low-end ones that I had seen over on Sheridan Road.
“You’re going to love this one,” said Barker. An average size guy, he was the sort of person who, five minutes after walking away from someone, the person might be hard pressed to give a description of him. Barker was also handicapped because he had a distinct south Texas accent, which gave him all sorts of problems during OU/Texas football weekend. Not to mention, made him the butt of any number of Oklahoma vs. Texas jokes. Though from what I’ve seen, he was actually a very sharp detective. How he ended up in Tulsa, I’ll never know.
“This modest little mansion belongs to one Christopher Rafael Gillman,” said Flynn.
I ran through my mental card file for about five seconds before it hit me. “Chris ‘The Rat Killer’ Gillman?”
“One and the same!”
Gillman had been born the heir to a fairly substantial oil fortune. Unfortunately, a lot of it had gotten zeroed out in the oil bust in the 1980s, and what was left went down in the dot-com bust ten years later. However, by that time his family had kicked him out and disowned him. It was a matter of his father finding him in bed with the upstairs and the downstairs maids, not to mention running a ponzi scheme of some sort among his friends. I’m not sure of the details; I just know they kicked him out. Then, ten years later, he emerged as the number two man in a local criminal organization. It’s funny; when you say this stuff, it sounds like something out of an episode of ‘Law and Order.’ But in this case it isn’t ripped from the headlines (I always wondered if those headlines were from The National Enquirer). This came from real life.
I was about to ask why we were all there when I noticed the smell. It was awful and seemed to fill the house. Flynn saw my distress and motioned me to follow him down the hall toward the kitchen.
“When the neighbors called in about the smell, one of them swore it was sulfur.” He pointed toward a pot sitting on the stove in the kitchen. The remains of a small pot full of some sort of former liquid was sitting to one side of it. “We think that used to be cream of mushroom soup.”
“Only if Gillman was totally dyslexic and added all sorts of other shit to it,” I muttered.
I could see the living room, which had been trashed. The first thing that went through my mind was, there must have been one hell of a party last night. There were overturned chairs, a number of pizza boxes with their lids bent like someone was trying to do origami with corrugated cardboard, and clothes hanging from the edge of the balcony and over the huge television screen that filled one wall.
“So what does the proud owner of this establishment have to say about this whole thing? Other than it being the set of a horror movie. I can’t see why any of us are here.”
Barker took me upstairs while Flynn answered a call on his cell. It was a standard balcony/bedroom, open air looking down on the living room, with a small office and bedroom off to one side. I was maybe five steps from getting to the top of the stairs when something hit my shields.
I keep mental shields going at all times, sometimes stronger than others. Sometimes I don’t even notice them; it’s all a matter of practice and a strong belief in self-preservation. My gran had pounded that into me from the first day that she started teaching me how to use my powers.
For a moment it was like I was walking through a thick molasses-like material. This was Death; I’d seen it many times and knew the feel of it. The “vibes,” as they say, were strong and nasty. It took a moment to shore up my own protections, but I knew I was going to have a vile taste in my mouth for some time to come.
“Why didn’t you tell me when I first walked in?”
Barker shrugged. “You always say you don’t want to know anything beforehand. That’s the way every sorceress that I’ve ever worked with has been.”
He was right; that’s standard procedure. I was used to the nasty stuff; this one had just taken me more by surprise.
The bed was in the center of the room. The sheets were all crumpled and pulled half off. There was no body anywhere to be seen, just an odd dark stain in the middle of the bed and what looked like a knife slash through the sheets.
Then where did death come into this equation? I reached out with my senses, touching the atmosphere, trying to get a feel for what had happened in this room. There were images, but confusing things that I could make little or no sense out of. Like fast cuts in a movie, only hyped up faster and faster. Later I would try to sort out what it was, but there wasn’t a chance in hell that I could get anything here.
“I told CSU to hold off until you got here and had a look around,” said Barker. “There are times I think they call you guys in on stuff that just plain ordinary white bread police work could take care of. But this thing, it feels different.”
I happened to agree with him. Regrettably, thanks to a lot of crime shows on television, people have some major misconceptions of what a sorceress can and cannot do.
I pulled on a pair of gloves; no need to contaminate the crime scene with any extra evidence and began to do a sweep around the room.
“Someone in dispatch tagged the name Gillman when the call came in and kicked it up to us,” said Flynn. “Soon as we got here and smelled that stuff from the kitchen, we had probable cause to enter the premises and find out what was actually going on. There’s no sign of Gillman anywhere. His car, a Mercedes hybrid, is still in the garage and his wallet, along with a fistful of cash, is sitting over there on the bedside table.”
Lovely, just lovely!
Whatever it was on the sheets felt sort of slimy to the touch. There were bits of viscous material adhering to the Egyptian cotton. There were a couple of spells that I could do later on, when I had these back in my work room. I figured to let CSU check it for all the usual trace elements. Once they were through, that would give me an idea of what I didn’t need to look for. Less duplication of efforts.
In the office area were three computers, two laptops and a desktop model. A bouncing ball screen saver turned from yellow to red, changed its path and began to morph into some other odd shape out of a programmer’s slightly bent imagination. I figured that anything to do with Gillman’s business that happened to be on here would be password and firewall protected. It would be up to cyber unit to get the appropriate warrants and see what they could see.
I was about to walk away from the computer when an idea hit me. I hit the space key and the screen changed to the standard computer front page. I moused the cursor up to the top and clicked on the history button. Much to my surprise, it dropped down, followed by a password box appearing in the middle of the screen. I would leave it to the techs to actually break into the programs. I know a few magic users that have come up with spells to augment their use of computers and other tech. Regrettably, I’m not one of them. I guess in some ways, when it comes to combining tech and magic, I’m a bit of a Luddite.
Apparently, he had erased most of his web surfing history, a habit I need to get into, so only the last two or three places he had been in showed up on the list. They were mostly sites dealing with Tulsa and local history. I made a mental note to look them up myself, not that the detectives involved in the case wouldn’t, but sometimes it helps to have several sets of eyes looking at evidence.
I did a general magical sweep of the entire condo. Other than that aura of death that hung so intensely over the bedroom, there was nothing. The place was, magically speaking, as pure as the driven snow. That bothered me more than a little. While it is not as all-pervasive as a lot of people think magic is, most people, at some point in their daily lives, will cross paths with it and carry tiny little traces of it into their homes and other places that they go. But in this case, there was nothing; it was as if the place had just been built and no one had lived here and no one had even looked at the place with an eye toward buying it.
“This place has been processed,” I said, not even realizing that I had spoken aloud.
“What are you talking about?” asked Flynn. “I told you CSU is holding off until you finish your scan of the premises. They haven’t touched anything in here.”
After I explained my discovery, Flynn just shook his head. “Is that even possible?”
“Maybe, but it would take someone who knew the Craft in ways that I can’t even begin to imagine. Everything I know says that if you erase something, even if it is gone, there are traces of what it was left behind. There’s always something,” I said. “I suppose the very absence of something is in itself important.”
Flynn closed his eyes for a moment. “I would draw your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime, said Holmes. The dog did nothing in the nighttime. That was the curious incident.”
Flynn was a long time Sherlockian and had invited me to several of their events, but for one reason or another I had never gone. On occasion, he had quoted Holmes to emphasize his understanding of a situation.
“My blushes, Watson,” I fired back at him.
“Seeing what would make you blush, Thomas, would be not without points of interest, and definitely worth it,” he laughed.
I felt my face flush red for a moment and suppressed an urge to pick up something and throw it at him. My luck, it would be either expensive, which actually I doubted, given some of the décor in this place, or it would turn out to have some sort of importance to the case. Men! Just when you think you might be on the verge of having a professional adult communication with them, they revert to their inner fourteen-year-old boy.
✽✽✽
I took a couple of cookies out of the jar on Jordan’s desk. Double chocolate chip with a hint of peanut butter around the edges, I don’t know where she got them. She will not divulge that information, but they are wonderful.
“You’re looking especially pensive this afternoon, sweetie,” she said, turning away from the computer screen. Jordan had a touch of Polynesian in her ancestry, and it showed in the slight angle of her eyes; it gave her that exotic look that guys like. I’ve seen her walk into a party or a bar, practically snap her fingers and guys were swarming all over her, ignoring me in the processes. Hey, it’s something that I have had to deal with all my life.
“Oh, it’s just this case. I saw something that I’d never seen before when I went out to do a sweep on a condo,” I said.
Strictly speaking, we aren’t supposed to talk about the details of cases to anyone not directly working on it. But on more than one occasion, I’ve used Jordan as a sounding board, and that was what I needed to push me in the right direction. Sometimes that didn’t work, but it did make me feel better to just talk it out.
“Okay, what does that mean? Or does it even mean a thing? You’re the one who’s always harping on just how much you don’t know in regards to sorcery and magic. Isn’t this something like a stage magician coming up with an illusion that no one else has seen?” she said.
Jordan picked up two dollar-sized coins from her desk and began to roll them back and forth through her fingers, first making one coin vanish, then another. I knew exactly how she had done it; I had helped her learn, but I could see the point, sort of.
I bit into one of the cookies and rolled the chocolate chips around in my mouth. I savored the taste for a minute, letting everything else that was bugging me just roll off me like a duck in water.
“What you need, Megan, my dear, is to just forget about work for a while. Forget about sorcery and anything else to do with your life. Just take the rest of the day off, go sit by the Arkansas River, pour a couple of good stiff drinks down yourself and ogle the guys in those tight biker shorts. I’ve got a report that, if I don’t finish, my boss is going to crucify me in the main plaza or I would come with you,” she said.
I was on my way to the elevator when my cell went off. It’s the unusual day when my cell doesn’t ring at least a half a dozen times. Sometimes I catch myself wondering how people did their jobs before portable phones, and then I kick myself for being stupid and shallow. I really would have preferred to ignore it, but I run two lines through my phone, one for work and one personal. This was my work number ringing.
“Megan, is that you?” came my mother’s voice.
“Mom, you know that you’re supposed to call on my personal number. This number is the one that the office calls me on. That’s why I’ve got the other line, for, you know, personal business,” I said.
Mom knew that, and she had always been scrupulous about calling on the right line. This didn’t bode well.
“I know, dear, and before you ask, I’m fine and so are the relatives, at least as far as I know right now. It’s just that something very strange happened and I thought you should know about it. It’s about your grandmother.”
“Granny?” My ears perked up at that, considering the fact that grandmother had died just over five years ago, quite peacefully in her sleep. “What happened?”
“Last night I went out into the sunroom and found your grandmother’s shooting award plaques all sitting on the floor. It wasn’t like they had fallen because of a passing truck. They were stacked up neatly over in the corner, just so perfectly you could have put a level on the things,” she said.
Now that got my attention. I knew Misha couldn’t do that. Even as a ghost, a cat would need opposable thumbs to do that. Besides, the only thing she was ever neat about was her personal grooming.
“That would be one for the record books if it were a total accident because of a truck passing by,” I said. I’m usually pretty good at asking needed questions, but this one had me stumped. “Was there something else that happened?”
“You could say that. I came out of the kitchen this morning and I saw Mother sitting over in the recliner next to the door.”
Since we had taken that recliner over to my cousin’s in Bartlesville a couple of years ago, that would have been a major thing to see. Now a piece of Alaskan Inuit statuary sat there, one that Mom usually draped her coat over when she came in the house.
“You’re sure that you saw Granny and her recliner there? What was she doing?”
“Working a crossword puzzle, I think. She had one of her magazines in one hand and a pen in the other. Then she looked up at me, then looked over at that picture of you on the far wall and just looked so sad. That scared the bejesus out of me.” I could hear Mom’s voice on the edge of cracking.
My mother is not the sort of woman who is frightened easily, so this worried me more than I was willing to admit to myself or to her.
“So what happened next?” I asked, since it was the only thing I could think of to say.
“She just wasn’t there, no slow fade-out or flying off through the wall, moaning. No rattling of chains or anything like that,” she said.
“Chains? Grandma? Mom, you weren’t supposed to know about that, especially the whips,” I said.
“Yeah, right, my love, like I didn’t know your grandmother had her own way of enjoying things. And thank you for trying to cheer me up with a little laughter. I must seem like a crazy old woman sometimes,” she said.
“Crazy you might be, but you’re only sixty-two, so in this day and age, that doesn’t count as old,” I said. “Listen, if Grandma shows up again, tell her to stop bothering you. And if she has some kind of message for me, to come directly to me. If she’s busy, then she could just text me.”
I hung up on my mother and was more than a bit concerned now, but there wasn’t anything that I could do about it. As far as we knew, my grandmother was not haunting the Nowata house; she had gone on into the light and was not hanging around in purgatory. Two years ago I had cause to check, and once you’re out of there, you don’t go back until after your next incarnation.
I suppose I could go up and do a cleansing ceremony but, given that I was in the house less than three days ago, I wasn’t sure that was needed. All my wards were in place and functioning the way they were supposed to; a couple were reinforcing ones that Grandma had erected, and there were even some that her teacher had set up that were still working. So the house was fine, and I seriously doubted that my dear mother was having a psychotic breakdown. There are a lot of things on her bucket list, but that isn’t one of them.