In Plain Sight

22 The Walk

“Why am I meeting you at the morgue on a Monday night?” Danny Pak asked as Alex arrived in the building’s lobby; Alex had called Danny right after he’d hung up with Iggy. “I just got out of trouble that was caused by you. Couldn’t this wait a couple of days?”

Alex grinned and slapped Danny on the shoulder.

“Sorry,” he said, looking around for Iggy and not finding him. “Let’s just say I need you for this one?”

The lobby of the city morgue looked like any office building lobby you might find. There was an aged couch along one wall, surrounded by a few chairs, with a bank of elevators against the back. A reception desk stood opposite the waiting area, manned by a doorman. The only indication that this was not a typical office complex was that the elevator doors were suspiciously large and the man behind the desk wore a police uniform.

Danny rolled his eyes at Alex. “You don’t need me,” he said. “The coroner likes you better than he likes me. Old coot,” he added.

“It doesn’t matter if he likes me,” Alex said in a low voice. “He’s not going to let me take some of Charles Beaumont’s property with me no matter how well he likes me.”

“Is that what this is about?” Danny said, exasperation in his voice. “First of all, Beaumont didn’t have anything on him when we found him. Second, if he had, it would be in a box under Lieutenant Callahan’s desk back at the Central Office. Third, there’s no way Callahan is going to let you take police evidence, whether I ask him or not.”

The door creaked as Iggy pulled it open and entered the building. He wore a tweed suit with a matching flat-cap, and had a pipe clenched in his teeth. Alex nodded to him, then turned back to Danny.

“True,” he said. “Beaumont didn’t have a pocket watch or a wallet or keys, but even if he had, I don’t need any of those.”

“Well what do you need?” Danny asked, a note of futility in his voice.

“One of the man’s shoes,” Iggy piped up.

“Really?” Danny said, his voice drifting from despair to sarcasm.

“Really,” Alex confirmed. “And that’s why I need you. Beaumont’s clothes are still here, and I need you to sign out a shoe for me.”

“Do you know how that’s going to look if Callahan ever sees the sign-out sheet?” Danny asked.

“He won’t have any reason to look at that,” Alex said, rubbing his hands together. “Especially if we learn something new about who paid for Beaumont to steal that case. Now come on.”

He waved at the officer behind the desk and walked to the elevator with Danny and Iggy in tow.

“Have I ever told you just how much I hate you?” Danny asked as they waited for the car.

Ten minutes later they were on their way back up to the main floor with Charles Beaumont’s left shoe. It was a quality brand, and the leather was well maintained and supple.

“So how is that going to tell us anything about who hired Beaumont?” Danny asked.

Iggy explained Alex’s theory that Beaumont had gone somewhere else before arriving at the Brotherhood of Hope Mission.

“Wouldn’t he have infected anyone he’d gone to see?” Danny asked.

“Probably,” Alex said.

“Alex, I would know if any more bodies had been found,” Danny said. “There weren’t any.”

“Whoever is behind this might have an antidote,” Iggy said. “If they were immune, there wouldn’t be any bodies.”

“They might not have been home,” Alex suggested. “Remember, someone took those jars from Beaumont’s place. We assumed it was the same people who killed Jerry Pemberton, but what if it wasn’t?”

“Then they would have searched Beaumont’s place after killing Pemberton,” Danny reminded him. “Since they didn’t, we know it was Pemberton’s killers who found the jars.”

Alex had to concede that Danny was right about that, but he still felt that the secret of where Beaumont had gone when he ran out of his apartment held some truth, some key that would make the whole sordid mess make sense.

“So where are we going?” Danny asked once they all reached the street.

“Beaumont’s place,” Alex said, spotting Danny’s car and heading for it. “We have to go back to where this chain of events started.”

Danny shook his head, but followed. Twenty minutes later they were parked on the street outside the modest building that was Charles Beaumont’s former residence. The police cars were gone, and no evidence remained on the street of the activity that had taken place the previous morning. Alex led them up to the fifth floor and found a man in a dark suit sitting on a chair in the hallway beside Beaumont’s door. Alex shot Danny a meaningful look and the detective stepped up to the fore of their group.

“You with the FBI?” he asked the man who’d been eyeing them since they exited the stairs.

“Beat it, newsie,” he growled in a basso voice. “There’s nothing to see here.”

Danny flashed his detective’s badge. “I’m with the police. My friends and I need access to Beaumont’s apartment for a few minutes.”

The man scrutinized the badge for a minute, then shrugged.

“I can’t help you, detective,” he said. “I have strict orders not to let anyone in.”

“Look, Agent…?”

“Meyers,” the man supplied.

“Agent Meyers,” Danny continued. “I promise not to touch anything. We just need to look at the table in the middle of the room. I’ll take the heat if anyone finds out.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Meyers said, and chuckled. “The person who gave me those orders is way above your pay grade.”

Alex stepped up.

“About this high,” he said, holding up his hand. “Snappy dresser with platinum blond hair down to her shoulders?”

“How did …?” A look of disbelief crawled inexorably across Agent Meyers face.

“We’re acquainted,” Alex said. “Look, she already doesn’t like me, so if she gets mad, just tell her Alex Lockerby told you it was okay.”

“How does that make me look like anything but a dunce?” he asked with a laugh.

“Trust me, young man,” Iggy said. “The Sorceress is perfectly willing to believe the worst of my friend here.”

“All right,” Meyers said, standing up. “I’ll let you go in, but I have to watch you the whole time.” He took out a key and unlocked the door. “And don’t worry about touching anything. That won’t be a problem.”

He pushed the door open and turned on the light. The apartment was completely bare. Everything from the furniture to the carpets to the coffee pot was gone. The FBI had carted it all away, no doubt to some lab to go over every inch of it.

“Uh-oh,” Danny said, stepping in and looking around. “Is this a problem?”

Alex didn’t know, and he said so.

“I wanted to use the overturned chair as a starting point for a finding rune,” he said.

“If you can use a finding rune to track Beaumont’s movements,” Danny said, an incredulous look on his face, “why didn’t you do that yesterday?”

“The success of a finding rune depends on how much information the caster has,” Iggy said in the manner of a university professor lecturing to a class.

“The magic needs something to latch onto,” Alex continued. “I knew where Beaumont lived and what he did for a living, but I didn’t suspect he’d gone anywhere but the mission. A finding rune wouldn’t have shown me anything yesterday.”

“So,” Danny said. “The fact that you believe he went somewhere is going to make the rune work?”

“No,” Alex said, crouching down to stare at the floor. There was a faint outline of chalk where the plague jar’s contents had spilled, but the area of floor inside it was scratched and clouded. “We need something that will physically tie Beaumont to wherever he went.”

“That’s why you needed his shoe,” Danny said, putting it together. “Because wherever he went, his shoe was there too.”

“Very good, detective,” Iggy said. “Now all we have to do is tie that shoe to the place where Beaumont began his journey and the rune should lead us to where he went.”

“Didn’t you say he started this trip right here in this apartment?” Agent Meyers asked.

“Yes,” Alex said, moving a short distance from the chalk outline toward the door. “But the more precisely I can tie the shoe to Beaumont’s flight, the more accurately the finding rune can follow his trail.”

“So, what are you looking for?” Meyers asked, still standing in the doorway. Danny laughed and stepped forward to a spot about two feet from where Alex was scrutinizing the floor.

“This,” he said, pointing to a spot where the finish on the floor was scratched and discolored. “Beaumont stepped in some of the liquid from the jar on his way out the door, remember? It left a footprint here.”

“I remember,” Alex said, squinting at the spot. “How can you tell it’s there?”

“Because it’s been sanded,” Danny said. “Look at the spot where the jar spilled. The FBI didn’t want to risk leaving any residue for future tenants to discover.”

“How did I miss that?” Alex wondered, moving over to the spot. “Thanks.”

“Why not break out your ghostlight and be sure?” Iggy suggested. Alex showed him a sheepish grin.

“I’m out of fuel for the ghostlight burner,” he said. “I used it up on that business with Evelyn Rockwell.”

“You didn’t tell me what happened with that,” Iggy reminded him.

“Later.” Alex didn’t want to revive those events just now, and he pushed the memory of Evelyn’s tortured scream out of his mind.

He took out a piece of chalk and began drawing a complex, geometric figure on the floor. It didn’t have to be made of special inks or even particularly straight as it was just a physical link between the rune he’d drawn in his rune book and the floor.

“I think this is going a bit beyond not touching anything,” Agent Meyers said, concern in his voice.

“Don’t worry,” Iggy said, pulling out his folded handkerchief. “We’ll clean up after ourselves.”

When Alex finished, he dropped the chalk back into his pocket and then tore a finding rune out of his book. Placing the shoe in the exact center of the chalked figure, Alex tucked the rune into the shoe and then lit it. As the paper vanished, the energy of the rune filled his mind.

“Follow the path of Charles Beaumont,” he said, willing the magic into form.

A moment later the shoe began to shake. It spun around in a full circle, then snapped to a position with the toe pointing out the still-open door.

“It’s found it,” Danny said with a grin.

“I’ll be,” Meyers said, eyebrows flying upward.

Alex picked up the shoe while Danny scrubbed the chalk figure off the floor with Iggy’s handkerchief. It tugged in his grip, pulling him inexorably toward the door.

“Thank you, Agent Meyers,” he said, leading everyone back out into the hall. “You’ve been a great help.”

Alex followed the pull of the shoe along the hall to the stairs, then down to the street. The shoe led him around the building and into the outer ring, moving between two slum tenements.

“He turned right.”

“The mission is to the left,” Iggy said. “I guess you were correct.”

“Should I get the car?” Danny asked.

“No,” Alex said, moving off down the dark street. “It can’t have been far or he would never have made it all the way back to the mission.”

The tenements gave way to seedy shops, liquor stores, and the kind of nightclubs that were fronts for illegal gambling and prostitution. Alex didn’t have to worry about anyone bothering them. The organized criminal element kept the muggers and the bums out and away from their profit-making enterprises. Not to mention that on these kind of streets, people made an effort not to notice who their fellow travelers were.

Beyond the businesses, a row of shabby homes and apartments that were little more than flop houses sprang up. The shoe tugged Alex in the direction of a three-story apartment of the rent-by-the-week variety. It had a glass door that was so encrusted with dirt and grime that the lobby beyond was just a blur of faint light. When Alex pulled open the door, he found the dimness of the light had more to do with the single, naked bulb hanging from a wire than the thickness of the grime on the glass.

A shabbily dressed woman, whose stained blouse was opened low enough to give a good view of her bosom, looked up from a gossip magazine. When she saw Alex, she put on a smile that was more of a leer and leaned forward, showing even more of her breasts.

“What can I do for you, honey?” she said in a voice that indicated renting rooms wasn’t the only service she offered.

“You can tell us if anyone’s checked out of this dump in the last five days,” Danny said, flashing his badge. The woman’s face soured and she stood up straight.

“A couple of people,” she said with a shrug.

“Upstairs,” Alex reported, feeling the tug on the shoe. Danny looked at the woman, holding her eyes for a long moment.

“We’re going to go have a look around upstairs,” he said. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Nope.” She shrugged.

“We should look at the registration first,” Iggy said. The woman laughed.

“The kind of folk who come through here are usually named Smith,” she said. “At least the ones that ain’t named Jones.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Danny said. “Let’s check the room first.” He shifted his gaze to the woman, who now wore a look of interest in what they were doing. “You stay here,” he said.

The interest faded from her eyes and she picked up her magazine.

The shoe led them up to the second floor, to a room in the back. When they reached it, the shoe turned to point at it. Alex released the spell and the shoe shuddered, the pull from it disappearing. He slipped it into his jacket pocket and left it there, sticking out. His hand was just about to knock when Iggy grabbed his arm.

“You smell that?” he asked.

Alex had been too excited to pay attention, but he was now. A sickly sweet odor was emanating faintly from the door.

“Ugh,” Alex said, recoiling. “What is that?”

“Putrefaction,” Danny said. “Something or someone is dead in there, and they’ve been dead a while.”