Stones Unturned (20 page)

Graves narrowed his eyes. He moved around behind Kovalik, reached out a ghostly hand. and laid it upon the back of the man's neck.

Kovalik shivered.

When the ghost glanced up, he saw Clay staring at him.

"You'd have been surprised to hear, back in those days, the way they raved about Graves. Most of those guys, skin color didn't matter to them. Not when it came to Doctor Graves. I'd go so far as to say that his cases, his exploits, probably made a big difference in their attitudes."

The aging FBI man nodded as though in remembrance. "They certainly did for me."

"And Zarin?" Clay prodded.

"Like I said, not much to say. Graves was the first one to capture Zarin. After that, the lunatic went to prison for a while. He got out. Graves was murdered during a period when Zarin was on the street. Eventually they arrested him again, but this time it stuck. The evidence against him was extraordinary.

"An incident occurred in prison. Zarin attempted to escape, according to the files. He was crippled —"

For the first time that day, Clay's aura of calm was disrupted. He sat forward, narrowing his eyes as though unsure what he was seeing. "What? Are you sure?"

Kovalik shrugged. "Of course I'm sure. It's all in the file."

"The first I've heard of it, that's all. Sorry, go on."

Dr. Graves was barely listening. His mind raced, and the spectral stuff of his essence shuddered. Ghosts could not feel changes in temperature, but he shivered. This was the first he'd known of Zarin's injury. He caught Clay glancing at him and shook his head to indicate that this was news to him.

"I'm unclear on the details. I can pull the file and get back to you on it. Anyway, once he realized he was going to be in prison for the rest of his life and that even if he got out, he'd never walk again, Zarin gave a detailed account of his crimes to the Bureau. Everything. The details were sometimes hideous, as I recall."
"But he didn't confess to murdering Doctor Graves," Clay said.

The gray-haired, stork of a man tilted his head. "That's right. There were two crimes that the Bureau had figured Zarin for that he absolutely refused to admit any culpability in. The way he almost embraced the rest of his sins created the consensus that he might have been telling the truth."

The ghost moved up beside Clay and leaned in.

"Ask what the other crime was, the other thing Zarin wouldn't admit to," he whispered.

Kovalik narrowed his eyes as though he had heard, and perhaps he had. Not the words, but something. Older people found it more difficult to hear the living, but some of them developed a greater ability to sense the dead as they neared their own final years.

Clay asked.

"Another assassination. The murder of Roger Alton Bennett, who was the mayor of New York at the same time Graves was killed."

"I remember," Clay said. "He fell from the Empire State Building. That was a murder? I thought a suicide."

Kovalik smiled. "The Bureau. That's what you were supposed to think."

"That was only a few weeks after I was killed," the specter whispered to Clay.

Again, Kovalik frowned. "Did you hear something?"

"You never solved Bennett's murder either?" Clay asked, ignoring the question.

"Neither case was ever solved. The Bureau worked on both of them for years and came up with absolutely nothing. Zarin had tried some anarchy at the Empire State Building once before, the way I remember it, and Doctor Graves stopped him. They spent a lot of time on that connection, and you can see why. There's some logic there. But Zarin denied it, and no one could ever prove a thing.

"In the end, they gave up. They already had Zarin, so there seemed little point. If you want to know more, I can get you the file on Zarin, but it won't tell you anything more about the Graves murder."

The ghost moved nearer to the desk. Kovalik shivered, and for just a moment his gaze shifted from Clay to the place where Doctor Graves's ectoplasmic form shimmered in the air. Graves had not manifested. For all purposes he was still invisible. But Kovalik had noticed something, some disruption.

"What happened to Zarin?" Clay asked. "Where is he now?"
Troubled, Kovalik forcibly returned his gaze to Clay.

"I can't tell you that, Joe."

Clay stiffened in his chair. All the friendliness went out of his face. He stared at Kovalik, and the old man met his intimidating gaze with steely resolve.

"I can't."

Clay sniffed dismissively. "You can do whatever you want, and you know that, Al. It's always a choice. You've kept your mouth shut about terrible things in the past, ugly things. I thought you promised yourself you'd never make that mistake again."

"Joe —"

A look of utter remorse and grief passed across Kovalik's features. Graves had to turn to see what had caused this reaction, and he saw that Clay had altered his features. Where the dapper man with the salt and pepper hair and the well-tailored suit had been now sat a small blond girl with blue eyes and a red ribbon in her hair.

The girl — or Clay, wearing the form of the girl — spoke in Russian.

Graves was fluent.

"You could have saved me, just by speaking up," the little Russian girl said. "The bullet hit me in the throat, so I couldn't scream. The assassin wanted my daddy, but he had to make sure I didn't make scream. When Daddy was dead, I didn't matter anymore. He left me there to bleed to death. And you could have stopped it."

Dead these many years, Graves still flinched. In horror, he propelled himself away from Kovalik and the little girl. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the girl was gone, and there was only Clay.

Clay, who had had so many lifetimes, trying to figure out what God had intended by leaving him here in this world, and who had been so badly used by so many.

"Jesus, Joe, you didn't have to —"

"Silence is not an option, Al."

Kovalik nodded. "All right. All right. Zarin's still alive, but he's not in prison anymore."

"He's . . . what?"

The FBI man waved the protest away. It was obvious he just wanted to get through the truth. "He's in his old hideaway in upstate New York. The guy's a cripple. He can't go anywhere. And he's more than a little crazy. He's surrounded by helpers he believes are his, I don't know, minions or lackeys, call them what you want. They're Bureau agents."

"Oh, for God's sake," Clay sighed, shaking his head. "Can't you people ever just leave well enough alone?"

The ghost listened in growing horror.

"He's dangerous as hell," Kovalik went on. "But his inventions have proven invaluable to this country. He thinks he's creating them for an international terrorist cell, to further his anarchist agenda, and his supposed assistants give him reports telling him all about his success, the effect he's having, but it's all bullshit. Like
The Truman Show
."

"I don't even know what that is," Clay said, his tone quiet and a bit sad.

Kovalik sighed. "You're going to rock the boat, aren't you, Joe? You're going to fuck that whole setup."

Clay nodded.

The FBI man closed his eyes and took a deep breath. After a moment, he chuckled softly and opened them again.

"I'd like to at least know why you care. Why try to solve Graves's murder now? The guy's been dead for more than sixty years."

A flash of anger went through Dr. Graves.

With an instant's focus, barely a thought, he manifested fully, there in the room, standing beside the chair where Clay sat.

"Because
I
need to know!" he said through gritted teeth.

"Jesus!" the old man said, pushing away from his desk, legs pistoning to drive his chair backward until it struck a bookshelf. A framed photo of Kovalik with his wife tipped and fell, glass cracking on impact.

Graves crossed his arms, glaring at the FBI man. The sunlight streaming through the window passed right through him, and he knew precisely the effect his appearance would have. One look at him, one look
through
him, and there was no denying what he was.

"I can't rest until I have an answer, Agent Kovalik. It haunts
me
, you understand? If the FBI can't solve my murder, then it's up to me, isn't it?"
"Jesus," Kovalik said, whispering now.

His hands shook as he pointed at Graves, and his face had paled so much that the man himself looked almost like a phantom.

"You . . . you can't be . . ." Kovalik said, then glanced at Clay. "He can't be . . ."

Clay stood, brushing lint off of the sleeve of his suit jacket and straightening his stylish tie. "Al Kovalik, meet Doctor Leonard Graves. You should be honored, Al. Most people need a medium for this kind of introduction."

The FBI man just shook his head back and forth, staring first at Graves and then at Clay.

"Yes," the ghost said, gliding toward the man and passing right through his desk. "We'd like the file on Zarin, and whatever you have on my murder. And yes, sir, we will be paying Professor Zarin a visit. And while we're gone, there is one final favor we require of you."

Shaking, Kovalik glanced at Clay. "Joe?" he asked, expression as pleading as his tone.

"Listen to the vengeful ghost, Al, or he'll haunt you the rest of your life. Almost as much as the things you let them get away with all those years ago, the things you let them make me do."

Anguished, gaze heavy with shame, Kovalik turned toward the ghost again.

"Yes?"

"Go to Connecticut, to my childhood home. Joe will give you the information you need. You're going to exhume my remains. As I understand it, technology has provided a great many new tools for autopsy since my time in the world."

Clay rapped on the desk to draw Kovalik's attention.

"We need a cause of death, Al."

The gray-haired man took a long breath, steadying himself, grasping at these words as the one solid thing he could hold on to.

"But, Joe, everyone knows the cause of death. He was . . ." he glanced nervously at the ghost. "Doctor Graves was shot in the back."

"No," Clay said. "No, I don't think so."

From the corner of his eye, Conan Doyle watched as Eve played with the fire on one of his Bunsen burners. The vampiress yawned lazily as she leaned on one of the workstations in his laboratory, turning the knob on the burner, making the blue flame larger. The morning sun was kept out of the lab by heavy shades. She ought to have been in bed, but she was too wired from the night to sleep just yet.

Instead, she was fidgeting.

Conan Doyle shot her an impatient look. "Don't play with that, please."

"Sorry," she said, shutting down the flame and turning her back to the table.

The Black Shuck lying at her feet began to growl. "Shut up," she snarled at it. "Why don't you go bother Squire or something?"

She stepped over it and headed toward Conan Doyle. Shuck rose to its feet and followed.

"It appears that you have yourself a new friend," Conan Doyle said, tapping some of the ashen remains found upon the bed at the Beacon Street apartment into a bubbling concoction in a container over another Bunsen burner.

"It won't leave me alone," she complained. "I tried to get some shut eye but it cried outside my door the whole time, and when Squire tried to take it downstairs, it practically bit his arm off."

Conan Doyle chuckled. "It likes you," he said, leafing through an ancient text to be certain he hadn't forgotten any of the ingredients.

"Yeah, and I love it like a garlic cocktail," she spat, looking down at the beast sitting by her side. "Don't I, you ugly son of a bitch?"

It yelped in response, whining pitifully, as if understanding the hurtful things she had said.

"So the ashes were definitely demonic in nature, now what?" Eve asked.

"From our informants within the police department, we've learned that the woman who was murdered — Mrs. Barbara Hoskins — lived in the Beacon Street apartment with her teenage son, Charlie, who had suffered extensive brain damage after a suicide attempt a little over three years ago."

"So her son was a demon?" she asked.

Conan Doyle nodded. "Yes — a changeling, I imagine."

"Like Danny," Eve said, and he could see that her thoughts were taking her into territory that he'd already visited a number of times since learning the origin of the burned remains. "You do realize that the kid's missing?"

"I'm aware," Conan Doyle said, satisfied with his preparations.

"You don't think there's any kind of connection, do you?" Eve asked.

He walked to the door of his lab and opened it. "Ceridwen?" he called into the solarium across the way. "If you would be so kind as to come here."

"I cannot be certain," he replied at last, then turned to kiss Ceridwen gently on the cheek as she came up behind him.

Taking Ceridwen's hand, he led her back to his bubbling preparation. "All I need is one drop," he told her, still holding onto her hand. Conan Doyle picked up a scalpel from the table, running the blade through the Bunsen burner flame to sterilize it before bringing it toward one of the Fey princess's fingers.

"I hope you realize how honored you should feel that I'm allowing you a sample of my blood," Ceridwen said, as Conan Doyle skillfully pricked her index finger with the scalpel's tip.

"I am honored every moment you allow me to remain in your presence," he said, giving her finger a squeeze to help form the bead of crimson that was crucial to his spell.

"All right, I'll bite," Eve said. "What is the Faerie blood needed for?"

Conan Doyle held Ceridwen's finger over the bubbling liquid, waiting for the bead of blood to drop. "This conjuration will allow me to see an image of the demon changeling's sire."

The drop of Ceridwen's blood finally fell into the roiling, brackish fluid.

"Thank you, my dear," he said, handing her an alcohol wipe to cleanse the wound.

A thick, swirling smoke started to form above the potion.

"So, you think the demon who killed those people and went around wearing that skin Squire and I found last night is this Charlie's sire? You think the kid's father is responsible for offing him?" Eve asked. "Why would he do that?"