Harm None: A Rowan Gant Investigation (36 page)

“Yeah, I thought so. Look, I appreciate your
concern and all, but I gotta draw the line somewhere. Since I’m the
one with the badge, I’m goin’ and you’re stayin’.”

Ben moved past me as he made the declaration.
I waited until he reached the front door before I released the
compact ball of energy I had formed inside my mind. It sailed
invisibly along a crackling ethereal arc and enveloped my friend
with a light aura of static. Its earthly manifestation came with a
familiar electric snap when he reached for the doorknob. The only
thing that remained for me to do was make a suggestion.

“If that’s the way you feel, okay,” I called
after him. “By the way, what’s that crawling on your arm?”

Ben looked down at his sleeve absently, and
his eyes suddenly grew wide in horror. His face began to pale as he
slapped at his arm and let out a surprised yelp. The rest of us in
the room saw nothing. Only I knew what he was witnessing, and that
was only because I had been the one to create the illusion. An
illusion that took advantage of my friend’s irrational fear of
spiders and was done in the name of making my point.

“Jeezus!” he shouted aloud as he whipped
about, quickly slipping himself out of his sport coat and shaking
it violently. “Holy fuckin’ shit! How the hell did that goddamn
thing get on me?!”

“Calm down, Ben,” Felicity told him. “It’s
gone.”

She was correct. In truth, it had never
actually been there. What he had seen had only been in his head,
and that spectre could last no more than a few brief seconds. It
was definitely gone.

“Whaddaya mean gone?” he shouted, still
slapping his jacket against the door. “Did you see that fuckin’
thing? It was huge! It was a goddamn tarantula!”

“She’s right, Ben, it was never even there,”
I expounded. “It was just a glamour.”

“There’s nothin’ glamorous about it!” he shot
back, still visibly shaken but starting to calm. “It’s a friggin’
spider.”

“No, Ben,” Felicity corrected, “a glamour,
not glamorous. It was an illusion. A phantom image. All courtesy of
your best friend here.”

“Whoa, cool,” R.J.’s voice came from behind
us, followed by Cally sternly shushing him.

“You mean like it was a spell or somethin’?”
he asked as he gingerly inspected his jacket, holding it at arms
length.

“You could call it something like that,” I
explained. “It’s really just some basic hypnosis, the power of
suggestion, and admittedly a little psychic energy thrown in for
good measure. Sorry, but I figured you’d be a little more receptive
to the idea if you experienced it first hand.”

“You’re tryin’ to tell me that this asshole
might be able to do somethin’ like that?” He was carefully slipping
his sport coat back onto his large frame, still appearing somewhat
uneasy and keeping an eye out for the imagined spider.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I just don’t know.”

“So what if he can? What’re you gonna do
about it?” he queried.

“Catch it before it happens. Try to block it.
Warn you,” I outlined. “I don’t know. In any event, I’ll be much
better prepared to recognize a glamour than you will.”

“Well, as long as I ignore spiders crawling
on me, I should be okay,” he protested.

“He would most likely do something worse.
Remember, I just scared the hell out of you, and I’m your best
friend. Like I said, I used only a small”—I laid heavy emphasis on
the word small—“amount of the psychic energy I could muster. I
doubt he’ll be anywhere near as nice.”

“Is he shittin’ me?” Ben asked Felicity
seriously.

“As much as I wish he was,” she frowned, “no.
He’s telling you the truth.”

“Lovely. You know I oughta kick your ass for
that stunt,” Ben told me with a slight grin then glanced back to my
wife as if for approval.

“Hey, it’s between you two.” She held up her
hands in a mock leave-me-out-of-it gesture and then suddenly grew
earnest. “Do me a favor, Ben. If you’re going to take him with you,
this time don’t bring him home with any stitches.”

“Count on it.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I
mumbled.

“She just knows your track record, white
man,” he turned back to me. “Just one question. Why’d you hafta
pick spiders? You know I can’t stand the things.”

“Actually, I didn’t, you did. All I said was
‘what’s that crawling on your arm?’ Your own fears and imagination
did the rest of the work for me.”

He shook his head. “Just what I needed ta’
hear.”

* * * * *

I was still clipping my visitor’s badge onto
my pocket when Carl Deckert met the two of us at the door to the
MCS command post. His normally laid back demeanor had been replaced
by one of frantic urgency as he held the door open and hustled us
into the room.

“I’ve got something you might want to have a
look at,” he told us as he excitedly waved a sheaf of papers at us.
“You’re not gonna believe it.”

“What?” Ben queried, following him to a
nearby desk. “Whaddaya have?”

Shadows fell darkly across the corner area
from the flickering fluorescent tubes in the ceiling lights as they
dimly sputtered away towards uselessness. Deckert reached out and
craned the flexible neck of a small lamp forward and switched it
on, effectively illuminating at least part of the desk’s scarred
surface.

“I just got this right after you hung up,” he
spoke rapidly as he shuffled through the papers and slid an
eight-by-ten photo beneath the puddle of light. “The lab lifted
this from the little girl’s vinyl book bag.”

The black-and-white-toned image depicted a
curving pattern of lines arcing around into what might have been a
tight whorl. Might have been, because they abruptly ended in a
blank, smeary looking splotch.

“This one is from the Barnes woman,” he
continued and slid a similar grey-toned image in next to the
original.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Ben slowly enunciated the
words as he leaned forward to inspect the fingerprint photos more
closely.

Not being familiar with fingerprint analysis,
I appealed, “Somebody want to fill me in?”

“It’s a partial right
thumbprint,” Detective Deckert explained. “The one you turned us on
to with your
vision
or whatever you call it.”

“Yeah, I kinda caught on to that,” I
acknowledged. “But I thought it was too smudged to do anything
with.”

“That’s what we thought,” he continued. “But
that was before we got the second print which just happened to be
quite a bit clearer.”

“They both look smudged to me.”

“It’s a scar,” Ben volunteered, completing
the explanation for me, then turned to Deckert. “Any hits from
AFIS?”

“Not yet,” he returned. “It’s been scanned,
and they’re trying to do a digital image match, but that takes a
little longer. The first one didn’t hit, but this one is clearer,
so maybe...”

“One of you Detective Storm?” a voice issued
from behind us.

We turned to find a uniformed officer peering
at us expectantly, a manila envelope tucked under his arm.

“That’s me,” Ben answered.

“Got something here from Capitol Bank for
you.” The officer held out a clipboard and pen. “I need ya to sign
for it.”

Ben quickly scribbled his signature on the
paperwork then exchanged the clipboard for the envelope and
muttered a quick “thanks.” He was already ripping it open before
the officer was out the door.

“Hey Storm!” another voice called from across
the room. “Got a cellular call from a Special Agent Mandalay on
line two. Wants to talk to you.”

“Tell ‘im I’m not here,” he shouted back as
he rifled through the contents of the envelope.

“He’s a she,” the voice returned.

“Then fuckin’ tell HER I’m not here,” he
shouted back angrily.

“What are you looking for?” I queried as I
watched him quickly shuffling through the papers.

“Ten print card,” he answered. “All bank
employees are printed for security and exclusionary purposes.”

“Exclusionary purposes?”

“Like if the bank gets broken into or
robbed,” Deckert explained. “Employees’ prints are going to be all
over the place, so we need copies in order to exclude them from any
of the prints lifted during the investigation.”

“Here it is,” Ben intoned urgently and tossed
the heavy stock card face up on the desk.

Each of the outlined squares contained a
neatly inked copy of Roger Henderson’s fingerprints. The black and
white study of irrefutable personal identification stared back up
as the three of us brought our eyes to bear on the right
thumbprint.

What met our triple-barreled gaze was a
curving pattern of lines arcing around into what might have been a
tight whorl. Might have been, because the lines ended abruptly in a
blank, smeary looking splotch.

“It’s him,” I whispered.

“Get the prosecuting attorney on the horn,”
Ben ordered Deckert calmly as he handed the rest of Roger
Henderson’s employee file to him. “Then call Benson. I want a
warrant yesterday.”

“I’m on it,” Deckert was already dialing the
phone.

“Detective Benjamin Storm?” a demanding,
almost angry, female voice came from behind us.

We turned once again and were greeted by an
attractive brunette woman who appeared to be in her late twenties.
She was dressed in a nicely fitted grey suit that scarcely managed
to conceal the forty-caliber bulge at her right hip.

“Yeah,” Ben answered.

She thrust her hand forward. In it was a
large leather case, held deftly open with her index finger as she
prominently displayed her badge and FBI identification.

“Special Agent Constance Mandalay,” she
announced indignantly. “I thought you weren’t here?”

Ben looked her coolly in the eyes without
blinking and answered her accusation head on. “I lied.”

T
he
two of them engaged in a short-lived staring contest as Agent
Mandalay slipped her identification back into her jacket and folded
her arms across her chest. Petite-framed and standing no taller
than five-foot-six, she was forced to look up at Ben, but that
wasn’t unusual as most everyone else had to do the same.

Ben stood with his hands on his hips, eyes
tightly locked with hers. To the outside observer, they seemed to
form a brief living caricature of David and Goliath. Had the
urgency and gravity of the current situation been of a lesser
degree, I am certain the standoff would have elicited a number of
laughs.

“Well, at least you’re honest about that.”
Agent Mandalay maintained her resentful demeanor as she spat the
comment. “How long did you plan to keep ducking my calls? You had
to know I’d show up here eventually.”

“For as long as I needed to,” Ben retorted,
continuing with the precedent he had set for truthfulness. “And
unfortunately, yes, I knew some Feeb would come walkin’ through the
door at some point. Hell, I’m surprised ya’ waited this long.”

“Had it been up to me, we wouldn’t have,” she
shot back. “I was ready to come down here when you made your
queries through VICAP. You should have called the Bureau for help
with the first homicide. We have a lot more experience in this
field than you do. We have experts on occult practices that...”

Ben cut her off mid-sentence, “I got my own
expert, thank you.”

“Who? Him?” she stated incredulously as she
waved her hand in my direction. I assumed she recognized me from
the media coverage. “He claims he’s a Witch, for Chrissake! I’m
talking about people with PhD’s, not some flake you picked up off
the street.”

I was mildly insulted, but then, I was also
quite used to the ridicule and demeaning commentaries from
uninformed, closed-minded individuals. The fact that I made no
secret of my religion forced me to deal with it on a daily basis.
Fortunately, witch burning was no longer an accepted practice, so
verbal debasement and occasional graffiti were pretty much the
worst I had to face. Because I had become so jaded to it, her
comment was easily and quickly disregarded.

Ben, on the other hand, was furious. Ever
since I had known him, he had been very protective of his family
and friends. Even though he had wallowed in his own disbelief until
just recently, he had never passed judgment upon my religion or me.
The look that suddenly crossed his face was testimony to the fact
that he was not about to allow someone else to do so.

“You wait just one goddamn minute!” he
asserted, angrily thrusting his index finger at her. “Don’t come in
here with your holier-than-thou attitude and start insultin’ people
you don’t even know. Whether you like it or not, Rowan Gant is part
of this investigation. A VERY IMPORTANT part.”

“Yes he is. He should be a suspect.”

“Don’t even go there! If it weren’t for him,
we’d all still be scratchin’ our asses tryin’ to figure out what’s
goin’ on. I’ll put him up against your PhD’s any day of the
week.”

“Is that why you have four homicides and a
kidnapping to deal with?” Thick, bitter sarcasm dripped from her
comment.

“I’ve got four homicides and a kidnappin’ to
deal with because there appears to be a bumper crop of sick
assholes this year,” he echoed. “Now, in case you haven’t noticed,
I’m busy. Because of Rowan, we know who the sonofabitch is, and I’m
tryin’ ta’ get a warrant, so we can stop him from killin’ this
little girl. If you wanna help, fine. If you wanna cop an attitude
and cause me a lotta grief, then you can take your fuckin’
Ivy-league-piled-high-and-deeps and shove them up your...”

“Ben!” Carl Deckert’s voice sliced surgically
through the air as if on cue, preventing Ben from completing his
verbal instructions to Special Agent Mandalay. “The warrant’s
signed. Benson’s on the phone.”