The Witch's Key (18 page)

“You ready to go in and meet him?”

She lifted her shoulders and dropped them like a
twitch. “Sure, why not? Let’s go.”

I turned to India and offered my hand. “Thank you for
everything,” I said. “I appreciate you helping us out on your day
off like this.”

She smiled warmly, taking time to visually rake my
body over before replying. “My pleasure, Detective.” And after
wetting her lips, she added, “Come back any time.”

I think I managed a flirtatious smile back before
Lilith pushed me through the door into the room, saying, “Yes, yes,
very nice of her. Now let’s go before visiting hours are over,
shall we?” She turned to India. “Glad you got to see me, hon. Good
luck keeping fat guys from riding those handlebars of yours.”

I could only imagine India’s expression, but having
tripped through the doorway, it was all I could do to stay on my
feet. Lilith stood behind me as I approached Pops, clearing my
throat through a nervous smile. “Hey Pops?” I stepped aside and
presented Lilith with a sweep of my hand. “I’d like you to meet my
friend, Miss—”

“GYPSY!” He cried, in a voice that sounded both
excited and scared. “No! It can’t be.” He pulled the covers up to
his chin like a frightened child.

“Pops, relax. This is my friend, Lilith. She just
wants to—”

“Please! I beg you. She’s a witch! Make her go
away!”

“What?” Lilith muscled me into the wall with her
elbow. “Did he just call me a bitch?”

“Lilith, wait.” I pulled on her sleeve to stop her,
but the appearance of her aggression sent Pops cowering beneath the
covers entirely. “He called you a witch,” I said, “not a
bitch.”

She backed off. “Oh. Well, that’s okay.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” came a much shakier voice
from under the covers. “I’m an old man. I beg you.”

“Don’t worry, Pops.” I took Lilith by the hand and
began pulling her towards the door. “We’re going now. It’s all
right. Don’t fret. No one’s going to hurt you.”

I wanted to get Lilith out of the room before going
back to comfort Pops, but India was still out in the hall, and with
the ruckus causing a stir among the other residences, it’s no
surprise that we were asked to leave under no uncertain terms.

Outside in the parking lot, I asked Lilith why she
thought Pops called her a witch.

“Because, you heard him. He’s an old man.”

“He also called you, Gypsy.”

“Maybe not.”

“What do you mean? I heard him.”

“Maybe he called you, Gypsy.”

“Lilith, the man acted like he knew you from
somewhere.”

“Yeah, well, like I said.” She opened the car door
and jumped in behind the wheel. Almost before her door shut, I was
in the seat next to her. “He’s an old man, and obviously
delusional.”

“He’s lucid and creditable.”

“So, you’re saying that I know him and that I’m lying
to you?”

She dropped the car into gear and spun the tires for
the first thirty feet. Her eyes remained focused ahead, but I knew
that her attention was more on me than the road. I watched her with
a feeling of such utter distrust that I had not known since my
dealings with her in the early days of the Surgeon Stalker case.
And though I knew Lilith so much better than in those days, I could
not find it within me to give her the benefit of the doubt until
she gave me something semi-believable to chew on.

“Lilith.” I jabbed my finger in the air, but at her.
“I don’t like the way you play me.”

“I’m not—”

“Uh-uh. Hear me out this time.”

She waved her hand as if casting the subject aside.
“Whatever.”

“Look. I’m not saying that you know Mister Marcella,
but he obviously thinks he knows you. And though I don’t know
what’s going on here yet, I am certain there is something you’re
not telling me.”

She rolled her eyes and scoffed.

“Well, yes,” I said, “of course it’s something you
don’t want me to know about.”

She turned to me with a sudden jerk. “What did you
say?”

“You heard me.”

“I did, but why did you say that?”

“Because of what you said.”

Her eyes narrowed sharply. “I didn’t say
anything.”

“You did, too. I said there was something you weren’t
telling me, and you said, ‘Maybe that’s because there’s something I
don’t want you to know’”.

“No, I didn’t say that. I thought it.”

“What?”

“You read my mind. I think that elixir you drank is
beginning to work.”

“Really?”

“I think.”

“Okay. So now that the cat’s out of the bag, why
don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

“Oh no, the cat’s not out of the bag yet. You’re just
now realizing that there is a bag.”

“Lilith.”

“Sorry. I’m just not feeling it right now.”

I tossed my head back against the seat. “Fine. You
feel like driving me to the justice center?”

She nodded out the window. “Already heading that way,
in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Read my mind, huh?”

She shook her head. “Nah, I just wanted to get rid of
you for a while.”

“I see. Will you be home tonight when I get
back?”

She shrugged. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“On what time you get home.”

“It’ll be somewhere between sunset and sunrise.”

“Oh,” she said, and winced a little. “In that case,
don’t count on it.”

Carlos and Spinelli were excited to see me back at
the justice center. They had considerable luck on several fronts of
the investigation and could hardly wait to tell me. Carlos,
especially, seemed overly charged. He held his cell phone up and
shook it at me to bolster his point.

“Tony, I’ve been trying to call you for hours. Where
were you?”

I patted my pockets randomly. “Sorry. I must have
left my phone at the apartment. What’s up?”

“That Skull and crossbones, you were right! It’s made
of human bone.”

“It is?” I said, trying not to sound too
surprised.

“Yes, but Spinelli tells me it’s like a couple of
hundred years old.”

I looked at Spinelli. He seemed less excited about
the bone than Carlos, though clearly he had a plate full of tidbits
that he was eager to tell me about. “Dominic,” I said. “You want to
start with that?”

He reached into an envelope and tossed me the bone
from inside. “As Carlos mentioned, the bone is human. I only let
the lab have it long enough to confirm that. Their best guess is
that it’s anywhere from a couple to four hundred years old.”

“Nice, but that doesn’t narrow it down enough to help
us any.”

“I know. We could let them have it longer to do more
testing on it, but it’s probably not necessary. I did some research
and I think I’ve discovered its likely origin.” He reached into the
envelope again and pulled out a thin stack of documents. “Here,
look at these.”

I took the papers and glanced through them quickly.
They looked like something he had downloaded off the Internet. The
first page included pictures from what appeared to be an
archeological dig. In one, a nearly identical bone to ours lay in
the dirt beneath a reference ruler. The only exception, it had the
letter K carved on the skull’s forehead. The rest of the documents
were text, explaining the nature of the dig, the where, when and so
on. I thumbed through the half-dozen pages and gave them back. “All
right. How `bout just giving me the skinny on it?”

“Sure.” He took the papers and stuffed them back into
the envelope. “This is part of a report, archived at Cambridge
University. It documents a field trip undertaken by anthropology
students in the nineteen-sixties. They were given permission to dig
at a site near Plymouth that was slated to become a shopping mall.
The site turned out to be a gold mine of artifacts and antiquities
dating back to the early settlers at Plymouth Rock.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Wait. There’s more. What you’re looking at in these
photos is something called a witch’s key. It seems that witches and
warlocks used it in Pagan ceremonies to seal the fate of an
adversary. Traditionally, a witch would make one of these keys and
carve her initial in a single capital letter on it. She would then
cast a doomsday spell on the key, intended for a specific
individual, and plant it in a secret place. If, by chance, the
intended victim were to find the key, then the spell would reverse
itself and the witch would die instead.”

“Charming. Sounds a lot like the witch’s ladder of
death.”

Spinelli nodded. “Similar, yes, only the ladder of
death does not reverse its spell if found by the intended victim.
It merely voids the spell all together. That’s probably why the key
fell out of favor and the ladder became the fetich of choice.”

I stepped back, scratching my chin, as my mind
wandered back to a conversation I had some weeks before. Carlos
noticed it right away and pressed me before I could disregard my
suspicions.

“What are you thinking?”

I shook my head to dismiss it. “Nothing.”

“No. It’s something. Tell me.”

“All right, fine, but really, it’s probably
nothing.”

“Let us be the judge,” said Spinelli. “You know how a
small detail can easily become a large oversight.”

I gestured my general acceptance of that theory. I
had to. After all, it was mine originally. “All right. It’s
Lilith,” I said, and I let my mind take me back to the night of our
return to prime. “She once told me that her family came over on the
Mayflower.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, it was right after we went through the rite of
passage thing. She told me how all the women in her family were
witches and that they came over on that ship.”

“The May Flower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620,”
said Spinelli.

“I know.”

“And you didn’t think that was relevant?” asked
Carlos.

I gave him a guilty shrug. “Coincidental maybe, but
not necessarily relevant.”

“No? Well, how about this?” Spinelli reached into his
envelope and pulled out a picture of Lilith. I had seen it before.
It was the one he showed me at the café, the one he took while
conducting his surveillance on her.

“Yes? What of it?”

“I showed this picture to Leonard Kingsley this
afternoon.”

“Who is Leonard Kingsley?”

“He’s a brakeman on a CSX. He told me he saw one of
our vics with a woman the night before he died.”

“Which vic?”

“Raymond Kosinski. Kingsley said that Ray and this
mystery lady were standing along the tracks when his train rolled
into the yard around sundown. He said he waved to the two and
Kosinski waved back, but the woman didn’t. She just looked up at
him with these cold dark eyes that seemed to pierce right through
him.”

“His words or yours?”

“His. He also said it gave him the willies. So, I
showed him the picture of Lilith and he identified her on the
spot.”

“Is that so?” I took the picture, glanced at it
briefly and handed it back. “What was she wearing?”

“Lilith?”

“The woman with Kosinski.”

“Black,” said Spinelli. “Kingsley claimed everything
about her was black: her clothes, hair, eyes. Everything. He said
she looked like the Grim Reaper.”

“You say this was in the evening?”

“Sunset.”

“Ah-huh. Was the sun behind him or in front of
him?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Did you ask?”

“I may not have.”

“You know that everything looks black when the sun is
in your eyes.”

“He said he’d swear to it.”

“Tell him about the locket!” said Carlos.

“What locket?”

“Yeah, Dominic found it this afternoon.”

Spinelli reached into a second envelope and produced
a small oval medallion. It looked brass-like in color, with bits of
tarnished silver-plating hanging up in the deeper crevices, showing
its obvious years of wear. “I picked it up on site,” he said. “Dell
finished up there around noon and let me look around. His men were
gone when I found it, so…”

“So you haven’t told him yet.”

“What’s to tell? He’s still treating it like a
suicide.”

Carlos said, “Tell him what’s inside, Dom. Go ahead,
tell him!”

They both snickered like a couple of giddy school
kids. “I’m getting to it.” He held the medallion out and flipped
open a small lid on the top, revealing a tiny lock of hair
inside.

“Is it human?” I asked.

“It is. I gave the lab a sample, and initial analysis
confirms it. And there’s something else.” His expression became
more serious. “You notice the hair is black?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we know it’s not the victim’s hair. His was
brown. A fair assumption would lead us to believe that this locket
and the hair inside belong to our suspect.”

“Why, because Lilith has black hair?”

“Because the hair is black,” said Carlos. “We’ll just
go with that for now.”

“Fine,” I said. “So, where does that leave us?”

The two seemed to fade from the question. Perhaps to
compensate, Carlos asked, “How about old man Marcella? Was he any
help to you?”

I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. “Good God, what a
disaster. I took Lilith to see him, you know.”

“And?”

“He totally freaked out. He called Lilith a witch and
then hid under the covers.”

“You’re kidding?” Spinelli laughed. “Did he call her
a witch, or accuse her of being a witch?”

“A little of both,” I said, and I hesitated. “He
called her something else, too.”

“Gee, I can think of a few names,” said Carlos. “What
did he come up with?”

“Gypsy.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“What did she do?”

“Not much. I asked her about it later and she shut me
down. But you know, that does bring up another interesting
coincidence.”

The two of them huddled closer. “Do tell.”