Coven (20 page)

So Lydia’s a
troublemaker,
Wade thought. This could be
interesting. “What did he think of the break in at the
clinic?”

“
He’s burying it,” she
said. “Says it’s not worth pursuing. He also says you go through
women faster than he goes through cigars. Is that true?”

That depends on how much
he smokes,
Wade thought. “You don’t believe
everything you hear, do you?”

“
Of course I do. I’m a
gullible woman. Oh, and here’s something you might find
interesting. I talked to the physician this morning. He told me
about the files that got ripped off.”

“
What kind of files were
they?”

“
Just basic medical
records, a rundown on each student’s medical history, major
operations, illnesses, drug allergies, stuff like that. All big
campuses keep those kinds of records on their in house
students. But the missing files are only those of the students
specifically registered for the first summer session.”

“
I’m
registered for the first summer session,” Wade exclaimed. “One
of the files must’ve been mine.”

“
That’s right.” Lydia began
to diddle with an unlit Marlboro. “The question is, what good are
medical files to a thief?”

It made no sense.
Who would steal files?
he
wondered. But whatever this was, Wade’s own files were involved,
and sitting right in the middle of it was a Spaten Oktoberfest beer
cap. The average burglar didn’t drink expensive imports. He drank
Bud. Only one store in town sold Spaten to go, and Wade knew only
one person who drank it regularly.

Tom.

Tom’s Camaro hadn’t been in the parking lot
last night, had it? Come to think of it, it hadn’t been there this
morning either.

««—»»

Czanek walked into Andre’s, surprised to
find it half full at this hour. In the back booth, a shadow waved
at him.

Czanek, of course, knew “Mr. Tull’s” real
identity: Jervis Phillips, an upstate resident herded to Exham by
rich parents. The boy had left a message on Czanek’s answering
machine. There’d been a problem.

“
Good afternoon, Mr. Tull.”
Czanek took a seat. A cold Heineken stood in wait for him. “Our
little insect’s not working?”

“
It works great,” said
Jervis, “but I have a question. Did you plant one of those things
for another client? On campus?”

What a question.
As a matter of fact, Czanek had, but how could the
boy know that? “I’m not obliged to say, Mr. Tull.”

“
Like maybe at the sciences
center, in Dudley Besser’s office?”

Czanek’s gaunt face
drooped.
Right on the money.
“How did—”

“
I heard it,” Jervis
Phillips said. “My receiver picked it up; I recognized Besser’s
voice.”

“
That’s impossible,” Czanek
declared. “It’s out of range.”

“
If it’s out of range, how
come
I’m
picking
it up?”

“
I…hmm. Good question.”
Czanek felt inept, his pride excreted upon. “I would never have
agreed to plant your bug if I thought there was a chance of this
happening. And that’s just it—there isn’t. These things only
transmit eight hundred feet or so.”

“
Besser’s office is over a
mile from my dorm,” Jervis replied. He absurdly pulled the filter
off a cigarette.

Czanek stared perplexedly into his beer. He
was a bad man—even he would not argue that—but he had ethics. The
sins of others were Czanek’s treasure. He was a destroyer of
reputations. He’d ruined marriages, families, careers. He’d
promoted divorce, abortion, estrangement. Like an alchemist, he
turned love into hate, but he was not ashamed. If he didn’t do it,
someone else would. Czanek’s pride was his justification—to do an
unspeakable task with grace. The kid had paid him to do a job, and
Czanek had fucked it up. It was this simple fact he could not
accept.

“
Okay,” he told Jervis.
“I’ll give you your money back.”

Jervis started his second beer. “I’m not
asking for my money back, I just want to know what’s going on. I
heard some strange shit last night. There were four people in that
office. One guy was Besser, but there was another guy who’s a
friend of mine. What the hell is a student doing in Besser’s office
at two A.M.?”

“
I don’t know,” Czanek
admitted.

“
And the dean’s wife? I
made out her voice too.”

Czanek gulped hard. The kid had too many
pieces. “You said there were four people. Who was the fourth?”

Jervis seemed to catch a chill. “That’s the
strangest part. The fourth person’s voice sounded like running
water or something. I can’t describe it. It was just…weird.”

Czanek’s embarrassment crested. “All right,
between you and me, last month I bugged Besser’s office for another
client. The client thinks Besser may be fooling around with his
wife.”

“
You mean Dean
Saltenstall,” Jervis prodded. “Everybody knows that his wife cheats
on him. Even the
dean
knows that. Why would he hire you to find out something he
already knows?”

“
Because he has a
tremendous life insurance policy,” Czanek admitted. “If you were an
old homosexual millionaire married to a
thirty five year old bombshell, wouldn’t you want to
know what your wife was up to, regardless of any mutual sexual
agreements made within the marriage?”

“
So that’s it,” Jervis
said, smoking slowly.

“
Here’s what I’ll do,” the
detective offered. “I’ll go into Besser’s office tonight and
replace that bug with one on a different frequency. Then it won’t
butt in on your transmissions anymore, and the problem’ll be
solved.”

Jervis lit still another cigarette.

This kid smokes more than a coal
furnace.

“
I’d appreciate that very
much, Mr. Czanek.”

Czanek watched Jervis
leave. The kid was cracked—Czanek could see that—just like most of
Czanek’s clients. Paranoia, jealousy, and inferiority complexes
were more nuggets in Czanek’s treasure. But that wasn’t what
bothered him. It was what the kid had said.
The fourth person,
he thought. A
voice like running water.

The kid, it seemed, knew more about Czanek’s
case than Czanek did.

««—»»

County police headquarters
loomed like a neoteric brick fortress. TV cameras probed the
enclosed entry. Two uniformed cops ID’d Lydia at the door and
searched her suitcase. She took out a tiny pistol in a wallet
holster and gave it to them to lock up. Then they frisked Wade, a
bit too thoroughly for his liking.
The
only gun I’m packing is the love gun, buddy.
These boys didn’t fool around.

They passed doors with queer plastic signs:
Toolmarks, SEM, Electroporesis, and finally Spectrometry.

A sergeant showed them in and left.

The room was long and narrow. Bulky machines
hummed in ranks, regurgitating rolls of paper. One machine sported
a face of dials and jumping meters, with a hatch for a belly. Lydia
told Wade this was a BV Model 154 peptide analyzer. It identified
trace foreign substances in the digestive system by measuring
peptidal deviations. It cost $100,000.

A stoop shouldered
bald man was reading a book at the desk. Wade caught the
sensational title:
U.S. Bureau of
Standards, Japanese Automotive Paint Index, 1991 1992.
A tag on his lab coat read “Glark, TSD.” “I hope
you’re the cop from Exham,” he said.

“
That’s me,” Lydia said.
“Thanks for making a space for me.”

“
What have you
got?”

“
Oxidized residuum, two
eight inch counterabrasions.”

“
Depth?”

“
About .23
mils.”

Glark whistled. “Anything that thick should
be easy. Let’s get to it.” He seemed not to notice Lydia’s cutoffs
and top. Was he a county eunuch? Rust, evidently, was his
turn on. Lydia withdrew from her case, of all things, a King
Edward cigar box. Glark pulled up a stool behind the biggest
microscope Wade had ever seen. It had the word “Zeiss” on its
condenser. Glark removed a cutting of old grayed wood from the box.
He placed the “cope” under the triple objectives and focused down
through dual eyepieces. His mouth twisted up. “This is funny,” he
said.

“
I know,” Lydia commented.
“That impactation was the first strike; I’m assuming the striking
object hadn’t been used for a long time.”

“
You assume right,” Glark
said. “And I can tell you, if it’s stainless steel, it’s something
way down in the low scales.”

“
How could it be stainless
steel?” Wade asked. “Stainless steel doesn’t rust.”

“
Anything made of metal
rusts,” Glark grumbled to him. “Lead rusts, titanium rusts,
aluminum, lithium, mercury, anything. If it’s metal, its surface
molecules rust. You just can’t see it without some form of
magnification.”

“
I knew that,” Wade said.
“I was just testing you.”

Glark frowned. Lydia leaned over. Wade found
her cleavage much more interesting than whatever they were
inspecting. “The color’s what threw me,” she said. “It’s too…”

“
Asperous,” Glark finished
for her. He changed to a higher objective. “It’s old, whatever it
is, and I don’t mean the residuum, I mean the source metal. Usually
you can see the alloy constituents, but I don’t see any here. This
stuff is crude, adulterated.”

“
Do you think it’s
indexed?”

“
Unlikely,” Glark said.
“But let’s run it anyway.”

Wade smirked. This was Dullsville. He
followed them to a bank of low machines. Glark closed a circular
lid and turned on a CRT. Actually four machines made up this
apparatus. Lydia explained that the process was called A/N
spectrophotometry spectrography. Wade didn’t know what the “N”
stood for, but he thought he could make a pretty good guess when he
noticed a label on the hatched machine: “Warning, this device
contains radioactive isotopes.”

Great,
Wade thought.
A miniature Three Mile
Island.

Lydia went on to explain. A trace substance
was burned at a phenomenal temperature. The light from the
combustion was then focused through a prism structure and
photographed. The photograph was processed as a line of colors
ranging from white to dark purple. This was called the source
spectrum. The colors represented the trace substance’s
constituents, which were then identified by comparison against
indexed control samples. The total cost of the four machines was
over a million dollars.

Wade noticed bright white
light leaking from the hatch lid’s seam. Numbers and letters, the
numerical equivalents of the combusted molecular factors, began to
pop up on the CRT. Within seconds the machines clunked off. A slit
in a fat Canon film processor ejected a slip of paper, the source
spectrum.
All this work for that?
Wade thought.
A million
fucking dollars?

Lydia and Glark began to pore over thick
ring bound books full of similar colored strips. Wade doubted
that he’d ever been this bored in his life.

“
I think I found it,” Glark
announced almost an hour later. He removed a laminated sheet from
the binder. Atop read the index listing: Antiquations.

Lydia looked at it and frowned. “Iron? How
could it take us so long to find iron?”

“
Because it’s not
commercial,” Glark said. “We couldn’t find a manufacturer’s index
because there is no manufacturer. This control sample isn’t exact
but it’s close enough to give us our answer.”

“
I don’t get it,” Lydia
said.

“
The tool that caused your
impactation was
hand forged,”
Glark enlightened her. “According to this index,
you’re looking for something that’s at least three hundred years
old.”

—

CHAPTER 17

At the red light, the Camaro rumbled through
Hooker headers and chambered pipes. Bright red tails, like liquid,
reflected off the slope of the immaculate white hood. The car
shimmered.

Tom stared. The sister was showing him
things.

Beyond the dusk, Tom saw
cities, or things like cities: a geometric demesne of impossible
architecture which extended along a vanishing line of horrid
black—a raging
terra dementata.
Concaved horizons crammed with stars, or things
like stars, sparkled close against the cubist chasms. He saw
buildings and streets, tunnels and tower blocks, strange flattened
factories whose chimneys gushed oily smoke. It was a necropolis,
systematized and endless, bereft of error in non Euclidean
angles and lines. It was pandemonium. Gutters ran black with
noxious ichor. Squat, stygian churches sang praise to mindless
gods. Insanity was the monarch here, ataxia the only order,
darkness the only light.

Ingenious, unspeakable, the monarch stared
back.

Tom saw it all. He saw time tick backward,
death rot to life, whole futures swallowed deep into the belly of
history. And he saw people too. Or things like people.

Tom shook out of the terror’s glimpse. The
light changed green and he pulled through. In the passenger seat,
one of the sisters grinned. She was hideous. White faced,
red lipped, and hungry—always hungry, for food or whatever.
Thank God the sunglasses hid her eyes. Tom could feel the madness
buried there, the sheer disorder.