In Plain Sight

2 The Stiff

Detective Pak opened his mouth and closed it again. “What?” he finally managed. “I just wanted to know why the fire went out?”

“I’d have to look around a bit before I could tell you that.” Alex shrugged.

“But you just got here… and you know he was murdered?”

“Of course he does,” a new voice interjected. Alex turned to face the sneering face of Lieutenant Francis Callahan. “Lockerby here is always looking to pad out his bill with wild theories and guesswork, that means he’ll have to break out his expensive magic.”

Callahan was everything an Academy recruitment poster could have wanted — tall, square-jawed, with wavy brown hair, blue eyes, and perfect teeth. Worse than that, he’d made Lieutenant the hard way, by being good at his job. Every cop on the force liked and respected Frank Callahan — and Frank thought Alex was a waste of skin.

“Shouldn’t you be out finding someone’s dog?” Callahan asked.

Alex felt his face begin to flush and quickly willed that away. Callahan could get under his skin, but only if he let him.

“Of course any client that comes to you has probably lost their marbles,” Callahan went on. “So you should probably find those first.”

“I don’t think you’ve lost your marbles, Lieutenant,” Alex said, smiling warmly. “But since you did hire me, I’ll be happy to look for your dog. Assuming he’s missing.”

A chuckle ran around the room and Danny covered his mouth with his note pad. Callahan’s face reddened, but he regained control quickly.

“That wasn’t my idea,” he said. “You can thank your friend here for that.” He thumped Pak on the chest. “But since you are here, what makes you think this is murder, and not another poor shlub who fell asleep while he was smoking?”

Alex turned and pointed to the round table next to the ruins of the chair.

“What’s missing?” he asked.

“Decent booze,” Callahan said.

“Good literature?” Danny wondered.

“Ashtray,” Alex supplied. “There’s no ashtray here, and there isn’t one in the kitchen either. Not on the table or by the sink.”

“So it was in his lap when he burned,” Callahan said. “The coroner will find it — eventually.”

“How many ashtrays do you have in your house, Lieutenant?”

Callahan nodded, understanding blooming in his eyes.

“Right,” he said, then he turned to one of the uniform officers in the room. “Check the bathroom and the bedroom,” he said. “Let me know if you find any ashtrays.” He turned back to Alex. “Anything else?”

Alex walked over to the round table and picked up the open pack of cigarettes.

“There are three cigarettes missing from this pack,” he said. “What do you do with your old pack when you open a new one?”

“Check the trash,” Callahan told one of the other officers, then turned back to Alex. “He still could have thrown it away before he got home.”

“It’s possible.” Alex nodded.

“What about the fire?” Danny asked. “It seems to me that it shouldn’t have burned out so quickly.”

“You’d like it better if it burned down this whole building?” Callahan said with a raised eyebrow. “Seems to me we got lucky.”

“Fires from people smoking in bed usually do more damage, Lieutenant.” Danny shrugged. “Especially when they char the body like that.”

The recliner and a small writing table occupied most of the space to the right of the door. To the left were a couch and two chairs surrounding a coffee table, with a cabinet radio in the corner. The kitchen was just beyond with a sink, counter, and icebox behind a small table and single chair. Alex set down his bag on the coffee table and opened it up.

“If there’s anything weird about the fire, I’ll know in a minute,” he sad, taking his oculus out of the bag.

“Not just yet,” Callahan said. “I want to make sure there’s something here before I put you on the department’s dime.”

A moment later the officers sent to check for ashtrays and empty cigarette packs reported finding none and Callahan sighed.

“All right, scribbler,” he agreed. “Go to work.”

Alex strapped his oculus to his head and began adjusting its various lenses. The oculus looked like a short telescope attached to a leather pad that covered Alex’s right eye. The tube had several focusing rings running around it, like a camera, and half a dozen colored lenses could be moved in and out of the field of view. All of this made it possible for Alex to see into differing spectrums of light.

None of this was very useful on its own, but with the right light source…

He reached into his bag and pulled out his multi-lamp. This looked like a small, ornate version of the kind of lantern train switchmen used in rail yards. It had an egg-shaped body with four crystal lenses set in it at regular intervals. Three of the crystals were covered with leather caps so the light within could only shine out of the one, uncovered lens.

Opening the front of the lamp revealed a frame with metal clamps affixed to the bottom. Alex selected a burner from the valise with the word silver written on it. The burner was basically a reservoir that held a very specific kind of oil, with a wick attached to the top. Clipping it into place in the lamp, he lit the wick with a match and it began to glow with a bright, white light. He felt the runes in the lantern as they activated, like the one on the strongbox in his office.

Alex closed the lamp, adjusted his oculus, then began sweeping the room with the lantern. Silverlight was made by mixing an alchemical compound of colloidal silver with various accelerants and then burning it. The rune-inscribed lens in the lamp focused the light and the ones in the oculus made it visible, revealing the little apartment in black and white, like a photographic negative.

The real magic of Silverlight, was that it revealed otherwise hard to see things, like fingerprints, blood, sweat, and other biological fluids. These lit up like neon when exposed to Silverlight.

Alex swept the lantern over the corpse in the chair. There wasn’t much to see since most of the evidence had been burned away, but he liked to be thorough. He shifted his gaze to the floor, then moved around the room, away from the corpse in widening circles. Once he checked the entire room, he moved to the bedroom, then switched the burner in the lamp to Ghostlight. Ghostlight burned a bright green and revealed magical residue and anything supernatural. Finally, Alex put out his lamp and returned it to the case, then stripped off the oculus.

“Well, I know why the fire died out early,” he said to Danny. “Whoever killed him used the booze to get the fire going, but didn’t use enough. It burned too quickly and the fire didn’t have enough heat built up to keep going.” Alex stepped over to the recliner and squatted down, pointing at the carpet. “They were messy when they doused him. You can smell some of the alcohol right here.”

“Mark that,” Callahan said to Danny, who tore a page from his notebook and set it on the rug.

“Then there’s some blood spatter here,” Alex said, chalking a circle on the floor near the middle of the room.

“Speak English, scribbler,” one of the uniforms growled as Alex shooed him away from the spot he was chalking. He had a sour face and the look of a man who’d rather be somewhere else.

Alex rolled his eyes and Danny grinned. Danny had asked this question before and already knew the answer.

“Have you ever seen someone flick a brush full of paint?” Danny asked the officer.

“Sure.”

“Well it’s like that. When blood falls on something, it forms dots, but when it’s thrown, the dots form little streaks.”

“So, what does that mean?” the sour-faced officer asked.

“It means,” Callahan interjected, “that someone was hit hard enough to bleed, and the blood spattered.”

Alex nodded. “My guess? It was whomever was tied to that chair.” He indicated the lone chair at the kitchen table. “There are scratches on the floor here,” he pointed to the barely distinguishable marks. “They should fit the pattern of the legs.”

“So you’re thinking Mr. Pemberton here was tied up and beaten before he was set on fire,” Danny said.

Alex nodded.

“Or,” Callahan said, “he might have cut himself any number of ways and put that chair there to change the light bulb in the ceiling. If you’re right, the question is why someone would do this to him?” He turned to one of the uniforms. “What did your canvass turn up on our victim?”

The officer flipped through his book and read. “Jerry Pemberton, age forty-two, lived alone, regular habits.”

“Did he smoke?” the Lieutenant asked, looking meaningfully at Alex.

“Don’t know,” the officer said. “And no one seems to know what he did for a living.”

“He was a customs inspector for the port authority,” Alex supplied. “He worked in a secure warehouse down at the Aerodrome.”

Callahan looked confused and Danny’s mouth dropped open like a fish.

“How?” he said. Alex pointed to a wooden plaque hanging above the ruin of the recliner.

“It’s an award for ten years of service.”

“You sure this guy was roughed up before he was killed?” Callahan’s face had gone from mild disgust to intense concentration, and his voice was hard and flat. Alex shrugged.

“Pretty sure, though there is one way to be certain.”

“Let me guess, one of your expensive runes?” The Lieutenant’s lip curled into a sneer.

Alex flipped through is book and opened it so Callahan could see an immensely complex design, rendered in gold and sparkling red lines. It looked like a stained glass window in a cathedral.

“The red lines are made with powdered rubies,” he explained.

“How much?” Callahan asked.

“What does it do?” Danny said at the same time.

“This is a Temporal Restoration Rune,” Alex said. “No, it’s not like those runes people use to reattach handles to teacups or mend broken mops. This will restore Mr. Pemberton’s body to the way it was at the moment he died.”

“How much?” Callahan asked again.

Alex looked at him for a long minute before answering, letting the tension build.

“Normally I charge a C-note,” he said. Danny whistled and there was a murmur from the assembled officers. “But for you, Lieutenant, I’ll cut you a break, sixty.”

Callahan’s brow wrinkled up as he weighed his options. Alex just watched. His cost to make the Rune was only about thirty-five bucks — powdered ruby was expensive by the pound, but very little was actually required for the rune. Still, it did take several days to create and Leslie had been right, they needed the money.

“Do it,” Callahan said at last.

Alex tore the page out of his rune book and stepped up to the blackened corpse. He’d been a private eye long enough to get used to the sight of dead men. That made him wonder just how jaded he’d become.

“I need all you fellas who had lunch in the last hour to leave the room,” he said, then turned to Danny. “Be sure to take good notes — this will only last about ten minutes. When you monkey with time there are…repercussions. As soon as the spell breaks, the body will rapidly decompose.”

“Why do I have to leave?” one of the uniforms grumbled.

“Because I don’t want to have to clean your puke off my jacket,” Alex said.

“Is it that bad?” Danny asked.

Alex nodded, then licked the back of the page and stuck it to the dead man’s chest — what was left of it. Taking a match from his pocket, he lit it and touched the paper. The rune exploded with light, burning red and gold and white. It pulsed once, then twice, then faster and faster before it detonated into a shower of sparks like a skyrocket. When the embers touched the body, it began to roil and churn.

Alex was tempted to look away at this point — he could take blood and death, but the sight of a dead man’s guts wiggling like they were live snakes turned his stomach. He kept his eyes fixed on the corpse, however, knowing that Callahan would never let him live it down if he didn’t.

Tissue foamed up and the blackness seemed to contract, leaving pink skin behind. In the head, white blobs became eyes in the skull and teeth leapt up from the ruin of the chair and popped themselves back into the jaw. Muscle and then skin crawled across the face, running like wax until at last the body was whole again.

If whole was the right word.

“Good God,” Danny said as the remains of Jerry Pemberton were finally revealed. Deep purple bruises covered most of his body and his eyes were both swollen shut. Whoever had worked him over had given him one hell of a beating.

“Get pictures,” Callahan said, breaking the spell that held everyone enthralled. He looked pale; most of them did, but he kept his focus. All business.

Officers moved in with cameras and began snapping away while Danny scribbled as fast as he could on his pad.

While they worked, Alex went over to a little writing table in the back of the room. There were lots of fingerprints on it when he scanned it earlier with the oculus. Without any suspects, fingerprints weren’t very useful to the police, but that wasn’t what interested him. Inside the desk’s single drawer was a blank pad of paper. He hadn’t paid much attention to it before, but something about it bothered him. He wanted a closer look.

Taking the pad across to the coffee table, Alex removed a vial of black powder from his kit. He tore a very simple rune out of his book and stuck it to the pad, then carefully poured a few grains of the black powder onto the rune. Striking a match from the book in his pocket, he lit the rune paper and it vanished in a puff that catapulted the black powder up into the air. After a long moment, it began to settle on the notepad, first in random, haphazard dots, but gradually forming lines. In a few seconds the lines revealed the impressions left on the paper from whatever had been written on the missing sheet above. It was a crudely done drawing of a building, showing the points of entry and what looked like locked doors. The words Secure Area had been written in a shaky hand on one side.

“Danny,” he said, motioning for the detective to join him. “I think I know what this is all about,” he said in a low voice. He showed the pad to Danny, and, after a moment, the detective began to nod.

“Lieutenant,” he said. “I think Alex has got something here.”

Callahan made a noise in his throat that clearly indicated that he doubted that, but crossed to where they stood.

“It looks like someone wanted to rob the customs warehouse,” Danny said pointing to the drawing.

“Where’d you get this?” the Lieutenant asked Alex.

“I used a rune to reveal what Pemberton wrote on the page just above this one before it was torn off.”

“What makes you think this is the warehouse where he works?” Callahan said. “It could be a map of his mom’s kitchen and this is where she hides the brownies.”

“Lieutenant!” Danny protested, but Callahan waived him silent.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I want to be sure you’re right before we go off half-cocked. How do we know Pemberton drew this for the people that killed him?”

“Look at his fingernails,” Alex said, walking back over to the body. Three of the nails on his right hand had been torn off. Danny looked confused but Callahan sighed and nodded his head.

“They stopped when he gave them what they wanted,” he said. “Otherwise they would have torn off all his fingernails.”

“Whoever killed Jerry Pemberton wanted to know how to get into the customs warehouse at the aerodrome,” Alex said. “If Pemberton was killed last night, there’s a good chance your killers will show up there tonight.”

“Unless they’ve already been and gone,” Callahan said.

“No,” Danny said, shaking his head. “If they went straight to the warehouse, there wouldn’t be any reason to cover up Pemberton’s murder. By the time we got here and figured it out, they’d already be gone.”

“He’s right, Lieutenant,” Alex said. “All you have to do is lie in wait and Pemberton’s murderers will come straight to you.”

“Pretty neat,” he said. “All right, finish up here, detective. I’ll go over to the precinct and put together a squad to stake out the warehouse.” He put on his overcoat and hat and headed for the door. “Nice job, scribbler,” he said to Alex. “Maybe you aren’t useless after all.”

Danny grinned at Alex as the lieutenant left. “I think he’s beginning to like you,” he said with a smirk.

“As long as he pays me,” Alex said with a shrug. He was used to not being liked by cops as well as his fellow runewrights for being a private detective.

“I’ll make sure they cut you a check,” Danny said. “It’ll probably take a couple days though.”

“No problem,” Alex said. “I know you’re good for it.”

He felt a magical tremor hit him, just a tiny brush against his senses, but he felt it.

“Are your boys about done with that corpse?” he asked. “Cause your ten minutes are almost up.”

“What happens then?”

“It crumbles into dust,” Alex said.

Danny made sure the photographers had taken all the pictures they wanted, then had everyone step back. Alex felt the pulses of the decaying magic coming faster and faster until, at last, the earthly remains of Jerry Pemberton disintegrated into a pile of fine, white ash.

“You need me for anything else?” Alex asked, packing away his oculus and the multi-lamp. Danny looked around and shook his head.

“Thanks,” he said. “You really helped us out.”

“Just keep your head down when they bring these bastards in.” Alex patted him on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t put it past them to be packing.”

“I’ll be careful,” he said.

Alex put on his hat and picked up his bag. The pad with the drawing of the warehouse was on the coffee table so he picked it up too.

“Say hi to Amy for me,” he said, passing the notepad to detective Pak. Danny’s face grew stern but he wore a smile with it.

“You stay away from my sister,” he said as Alex stepped out into the hall.

Alex was in such a good mood that he took the stairs rather than taking the self-service elevator. Working with the police could be tense and uncomfortable, but it paid well. Leslie would be thrilled. For the first time in half a year they’d be ahead on the bills instead of desperately behind, racing to catch up. It felt good.

Something bothered him though — a thought in the back of his mind. Something to do with the notepad he handed to Danny. He thought about it for a moment, but it continued to elude him. Shrugging, he decided not to let doubts ruin his good mood, so he pushed the thought from his mind and whistled as he made his way back out onto the rain-swept street.