Trio of Sorcery (17 page)

They didn't get back to their respective apartments until dawn. The telephone woke her up about noon. She fumbled her way to it—she'd fallen into bed still clothed and just rolled up into the blankets—and answered.

“Joe O'Brian,” he said after her bleary hello. “Don't bother trying to tell me you had nothing to do with it. Lavinia says otherwise. Am I welcome in your apartment yet?”

“Uh…yeah?” she said.

“Good. Get your spook squad together in an hour. I'll bring the grinders and beer.” Before she could respond, he hung up.

When Joe arrived, out of uniform, he was carrying two big sacks of grinders and a case—and had Lavinia in tow. Di had managed to wake everyone up and get them assembled, though there were dark circles under their eyes and all of them—including her—were still feeling kind of shocky.

Joe didn't say much after she let him in, just distributed the sandwiches and beer and let everyone settle down.

“Right,” he said, taking charge of things. “First of all, is there any evidence I have to make disappear?”

Di shook her head. “Zaak and I were careful. We wore gloves, I never had any blood on me and I made sure Zaak didn't get any on him. I don't think the little girl has any idea how many people there were or who we all were, and I think I left a pretty plausible looking scene. I even polished my prints off the junker car where I touched it.”

Joe let out his breath in a sigh of relief. “Good job,” he said, breaking into a smile for the first time since Di had met him. “All right, here's what I know. Tomas—that was Tamara's real name—was turned down for sex change operations three times. No one would talk on the record, but the last shrink said—off the record—that no doc in his right mind was going to do that kind of operation on a raving loony like Tomas. We found all kinds of interesting things in that house, including a rent-a-cop uniform, so now we know there wasn't a confederate. But the big one was this—Tomas was operating as Tomas-the-bookie as well as Tamara-the-tea-leaf-reader, and one of the clients was named Fitzhugh.”

As one, their jaws dropped.

“Well…that explains a lot,” Zaak said, recovering first.

Di nodded. It did—how Tamara knew about Melanie and Chris, probably how Tamara knew about the shopping trip too—

“We're getting the details out of Fitzhugh now, but damn if Tomas wasn't slick. ‘Tamara' was never around when the old man was, so he never laid eyes on his wife's pet psychic. We're gonna spin it as debt and extortion, and that's what the Fitzhughs think it is, but I want the real reason. That's why I brought Vinnie.” Joe nodded at Lavinia, who was casually, but fastidiously, eating her meatball grinder with a knife and fork.

Di put down her sandwich and got the still unopened bag into which they had stuffed Tamara's canvas circle and every bit of occult paraphernalia they could find. She spread the canvas out on the floor and was reaching back into the bag, when Lavinia exclaimed, “Of
course!
Cybele!”

“Who?” said Joe, as Di snapped her fingers and echoed, “Of course!”

“Cybele is the Phrygian earth goddess, which is not important. What
is
important is that like most ancient goddesses she has both a light side and a dark side—and that historically her male followers castrated themselves to turn themselves into priestesses.” Lavinia was off and running then, explaining that Tomas was probably invoking Cybele's dark side in hopes of getting the sex change he wanted by magic. Her explanations digressed into the realms of Anatolian mythology. Zaak followed her account
with great interest, Emory and Marshal with frowns of concentration; Em and Joe were nodding but looking vaguely lost whenever Lavinia swerved off the modern path.

Now Di was very glad Joe had brought Lavinia, who was, aside from being a Guardian, a first-class scholar of Indo-European religions and mythology. She'd never have figured out Phrygian from those glyphs on the canvas, but once Lavinia did, it all made perfect sense. So to speak.

She wondered if Tomas was not a Gypsy at all, but some wandering Anatolian…even a descendant of those long-ago priests of Cybele.

Whatever the case, one thing was absolutely true. It was seldom wise to awaken one of those old, old gods and give them a foothold in the modern world. Their worship was often violent and bloody, and the sacrifices they demanded were generally extravagant. The Greeks and Romans had given Cybele room among their gods as the Magna Mater, or Great Mother, but there were dark things said about the worship of the Magna Mater, and human sacrifice was the least of them.

Who knows what that thing was that was in the basement.
There wasn't a lot known about Phrygian myth, so it could have been a Satyr, some sort of Minotaur, or something Di had never heard of.

Lavinia finally wound down, and Di returned the stuff from Tamara's lair to the trash bag it had been stored in. At Joe's look of inquiry, she said, “Incinerator in the
basement,” and he nodded. He even helped her take it and the rest of the burnable trash down there, and they stood together to make sure it all went to ash.

“So. Can I count on you and your spook squad again?” he asked casually, as they watched the flames. “Can't exactly ask Lavinia to go hiking across country in the middle of the night or breaking into spooky old houses in the middle of nowhere. She'd probably break her hip.”

Di snorted. “She's tougher than you think. She's more likely to bitch the whole time, but…yeah.” She thought about it a moment. Even after being confronted with a very dead body last night, her friends had handled themselves well. Earlier, they hadn't been put off by the dybbuk, and this afternoon, no one had said anything about bailing or not wanting to be involved. Finally, she nodded. “You can count me in. I'll have to talk to the others, but—”

It was Joe's turn to snort. “After all these years in my department, kid, I can tell you there's two kinds of people out there. The ones that see the weird shit and just block it out and never want to think about it, and the ones that get addicted to it. Your bunch is addicted. You'll see.”

By the time they went back to Di's apartment, Lavinia had her coat on and was saying goodbye. Zaak was promising to take the bus to visit her next weekend. “A pity I cannot convince Diana to do the same,” Lavinia said dryly.

“Diana has only just moved here and hasn't figured out the bus schedule yet, old woman,” Diana replied, just
as dryly. “I'll let Zaak be the trailblazer. Thanks for coming over and giving us the lowdown, Joe.”

“My pleasure. I just like to have all the pieces to put together, you know?” He shook hands with everyone, there was the usual jockeying at the door, and then he and Lavinia were gone.

This time it was Emory who put his back to the door. “Okay, we have to know. Are we still in?”

I guess Joe was right.
“You're in as long as you want in,” she affirmed. “Joe was just asking if he could count on us for next time.”

“There's going to be a next time?” Emory exclaimed with glee.

“Idiot.” Em punched him in the bicep. “He wouldn't have asked if there wasn't.”

Zaak looked as if he had suddenly run out of steam, though not enthusiasm, and yawned hugely. “I think I need to sleep lunch off,” he said ruefully, as he set off a chain reaction of more yawns from the rest of them. “Good thing I don't have Monday classes.”

Di groaned, as did Marshal. Di added, “No class, but dammit, if I don't get that library book back today, I'm going to get fined.”

“I've got a freshman to tutor,” Marshal said, making a face. There was more congestion at the door, then they were all gone, and she went to grab her book bag. She had her hand on the knob when there was another knock.

It was Marshal.

“I figured we could go together,” he said. “I'm going to introduce you to a friend of mine who's organized a karate club, so you can get hooked up for when you can't carry a gun. And maybe I could find out if you'd rather go to the Carlos Montoya concert or something else with me on Friday.”

She stopped dead in her tracks. “Marshal, are you actually asking me on a date?”

He tugged her elbow to get her going again. “Is that so strange?”

“It is for me,” she admitted. Then she grinned. “Carlos Montoya sounds great!”

And the possibility of having
something
like a real, normal life?

Priceless.

This novella takes place a few months after the end of
Sacred Ground,
in 1995. Cell phones are not commonplace; they are the size and weight of a brick and all they do is make phone calls. Satellite television is available, but it requires one of those big honking dishes that sit in the front yard—dishes that are at least ten feet in diameter and move from satellite to satellite to get their feeds. They cost a small fortune, and generally you rent them. (And we had one in our yard.) The Internet as we know it is in its infancy; Microsoft released the Windows 95 operating system, which included built-in support for dial up networking and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), key technologies for connecting to the Internet. When Windows 95 with Internet Explorer debuted, the Internet became much more accessible for many more people. Most people connected by dial-up, and 14k connection speeds were considered blinding. There is no Homeland Security, no Patriot
Act. And eBay has just started. So has Craigslist.
Newsweek
printed an article by Clifford Stoll, in which he wrote, “The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.” If the world in this story seems vastly different from the world of 2010…it is.

Outside the window, it was an absolutely amazing fall day, the sort of day that made you glad to be living in Oklahoma, where mild fall weather could stretch well into November. Jennifer Talldeer would have loved to have been outside, but she had bills to pay and the paperwork part of being a private investigator had to be done or no one would be paying her. The tapping from the other keyboard ceased, and Jennie looked up to see that her partner (in every possible sense of the word), David Spotted Horse, was frowning at the computer screen.

She resisted the urge to ask what was wrong. It was probably his law school coursework; after getting his PI license he had decided to go back to school and get his degree, then pass the bar. It had seemed like a great idea at the time, and he
was
only taking a couple of courses per semester. But there was often a conflict between what was
legal and what was right, and David was often left fuming, knowing that the answers that would get him great grades were not necessarily the moral high ground. When he was angry, he got focused on the cause of his anger, and that wasn't a good thing in a PI; that meant the work suffered.

He was also a pain in the ass when he was angry, a state that made part of Jennie question whether the decision to share business, house, and bed with him had been the right one after all.

There were other lingering issues in their relationship. She knew he wanted to get married—“make it legal”—and when he got into one of his moods, Jennie had niggling little doubts that maybe getting married would make things worse. And then the coldly logical part of her brain would point out that
now
it was easy, if things really went sour, to just say, “Sorry, David, it's been real,” cut him a check for his part of the business, and show him the door without legal tangles to sort out or any reason to feel guilty.

Think about it,
that chilly voice in her head would continue,
he's gotten a great ride out of you—thanks to you, he has that license, and thanks to you and Grandfather, he's getting to be respected in Medicine circles. If you have to call it quits, he is way ahead of where he was when he walked back into your life.

Sometimes it all felt positively schizophrenic. She
knew
he loved her. She'd seen how he was with her own eyes—well, her spirit eyes—when she almost died. And most of the time, she knew she loved him. She'd been
infatuated before, and this
wasn't
infatuation. But if there was one thing that Jennifer Talldeer was good at, it was second-guessing herself and analyzing everything half to death. It was part of what made her a good PI, but it wasn't the sort of thing you could just shut off.

David looked up, saw her watching him, and shrugged sheepishly. “Is there any way to turn off this talking paper clip? It keeps trying to correct my English. And no, I don't want to send a letter to Broccoli, California.”

She blinked.
“Broccoli?”

“Berkeley.” He sighed. “This thing could give your Grandfather lessons in contrary.”

She laughed, all her misgivings forgotten, and walked him through turning off the “helper” and adding a word to the dictionary. They'd recently bought a second PC for David, since he was getting his own cases and had gone back to school, and of course the fresh-from-the-box software hadn't been properly beaten into shape yet. “You could still take it out and shoot it,” she reminded him, when the thing balked momentarily at doing what he told it to do.

“Don't tempt me,” he growled. “Damn thing, can't even scalp it.”

The phone rang, interrupting what could have been one of David's funny pseudo-Luddite rants—pseudo, because David wasn't really anti-tech—and a glance at the caller ID made her wave frantically at him to hush.

She picked up. “Talldeer,” she said.

“Explain to me how you got those artifacts away from
Jack Collins, and please, please tell me that you didn't do anything illegal,” said the weary voice of the chief of police in tiny Luska, Oklahoma. “I have a big old box sitting on my desk, right this minute, that has everything in it you described to me.”

She smiled. Jack Collins, scum that he was, had been selling Native American artifacts on a new online auction site called eBay and it had taken the devil's own time to track down the real person behind the anonymous ID. He claimed that he'd inherited the stuff he was selling from his grandfather. She knew, but could not prove, that the items were looted. When she'd gotten his real name and address, she'd gone to the chief and explained the situation, and then they both tried to talk to Collins separately. Most of the artifacts hadn't been all that important, and it wasn't as if he was selling bones, but a couple of pieces had been Medicine objects, and they needed to be in proper hands, not hanging over someone's mantelpiece.

Collins, predictably, had laughed in her face, told her to go to hell, and slammed the door. The chief hadn't had any luck either.

“Nothing illegal,” she said demurely. “I only convinced him that a hundred dead Ghost Dancers were coming for him.”

The heart and soul of that plan had been David's. David was into serious car audio competitions, which turned out to be the key to everything. He'd discovered, quite by accident, that subsonic tones played through certain
speakers could rattle the walls of a house without anyone actually hearing anything.

Now, something like having your walls shake for no cause was guaranteed to make almost anyone convinced they were being haunted. When David suggested that this trick might convince their target that holding on to the artifacts was a bad idea, Jennie had agreed that the idea had a lot of merit.

They needed more than that to deal with a hard case like Collins, though, so David did a little more research. It turned out that Collins had ticked off the guy who did the maintenance on the co-op satellite dish he rented. Normally when someone didn't pay the satellite bill, the maintenance guy would arrange for every channel to—briefly but repeatedly—play a nastygram telling the renter to call the 800 number and settle up with the company.

Being able to “take over” the satellite feed was exactly what they needed. At Jennie's request, and because Collins had pissed him off, Cliff had arranged a very different feed—one that made it look as if the television was possessed. Cliff had friends with video cameras, Hollywood aspirations, and extremely creative minds.

Add to that a half a dozen little dirty tricks out in the yard, and Collins had spent a terrified night locked in his bathroom. And this was the reward. The box of artifacts had been on the chief's desk this morning and all anyone had seen of Collins was the dust from his truck.

“So long as nothing's going to come back across my
desk, Ms. Talldeer, we're good.” There was a dirty little chuckle. “So officially, I don't know about anything, and you never left Tulsa County.”

“I have witnesses,” she replied. “Lots of witnesses. I was at an ICOT meeting.” She was too. It had been Cliff and David and their friends who'd been trespassing on Collins's property.

“I'm glad to hear that. That's all I needed to know, Ms. Talldeer. You all have a good day.”

She hung up the phone and shook her head at David's expression. “You enjoy that sort of thing way too much,” she said.

“Don't pretend you don't,” he countered, and sighed. “Now back to the real world—”

The phone rang again, and the caller ID showed an unfamiliar name and number. She picked up on the second ring. “Talldeer and Horse, Private Investigations,” she said formally, hoping it was paying work. There was never enough paying work. “How may I help you?”

“You'd be Ms. Talldeer?” said a voice as unfamiliar as the name on the other end of the line. Begay?

“I would. How may I help you?” she replied.

“I—do you watch people? Do surveillance?” The man sounded hesitant.

“That's one of the things we do. Would you prefer to discuss this on the phone or in person?” She was getting a very odd feeling from this conversation. She wasn't sure why. David had stopped even pretending to type.

“In person, please. Can we meet at Goldie's on Thirty-first? In an hour?” All right. He wasn't asking to meet at a bar, or worse, Lady Godiva's Gentleman's Club. That much was in his favor. “I think we can manage that. Should I ask for you by name?”

“You'll know me when you see me, but the name's Nathan Begay. Thank you. I'll see you there.”

He hung up. Jennie replaced the handset and looked at David's expectant face.

“Well, I
think
we have a client….”

Nathan had been correct. She did know him the moment she saw him. There were just not that many people in Tulsa whose faces practically shouted, “Navaho.” In fact, she would venture to say that there weren't any other Dineh within the city limits. The desert-weathered skin was part of it, but to the discerning eye, there was a Dineh
look;
she often thought that the Dineh were not unlike the land they lived in; their faces looked like wind-carved sandstone.

He was obviously looking for her as well, and waved as soon as she got through the door. If he was annoyed or disappointed that she'd brought David along, he didn't show it. They slid into the booth on the opposite side from him. There was nothing in front of him but coffee; she took the cue and ordered the same. Since it wasn't more than three, and the eatery was practically empty,
and since the little teenage waitress clearly would
much
rather have been discussing her latest boyfriend with the girl in the other section, they didn't even get dirty looks for so minimal an order.

Begay looked woeful. “This is gonna sound bad,” he said. “But…I want you to follow my gal. My ex-gal. That's why I didn't want to talk over the phone.”

Jennie blinked slowly. “You're correct. It does sound bad. You do know this state has stalker laws, right?”

He nodded. “And I could tell you that this isn't what it looks like, and you wouldn't believe me.”

“We wouldn't disbelieve you, either,” David pointed out, his tone carefully neutral. “It's not our job to believe you. It's our job to do what you hire us to do—so long as we don't break the law doing it and so long as you don't use what we give you to break the law afterwards. Has she got a restraining order against you? We'll find out if she does, you know.”

“No. No, nothing like that.” Begay turned his cup around and around in his hands, staring down at the black surface of the coffee. “I guess I should start at the beginning,” he said, his voice heavy with reluctance. “It started in Albuquerque. Caro—Caroline—is a jeweler, She wanted to learn traditional Dineh silversmithing and my brother gives classes. That's how we met—at my brother's. We hit it off right away, and then we did more than just hit it off. I'm a welder so I can work anywhere, and when she moved back home to Miami, I came along too. Things were good. I mean, at least I thought things were good. I'm a rez boy, pretty
solid in the Good Red Road. She's Chickasaw, but she hadn't paid—I mean she'd never been into—” His heavily tanned skin flushed a dark red.

“Pretty assimilated,” David said shrewdly, and Begay nodded.

“She kinda liked that I had a foot in both worlds,” he continued. “She saw how I didn't have to be assimilated to do all right in the world. Went to a couple of gatherings with me, couple ceremonies while we were still in Albuquerque. After a while, she started looking things up and talking to people, and it wasn't just for her jewelry. One thing led to another and she decided she was gonna get back into her heritage. I thought that was a good idea at the time.”

“At the time?” Jennie prompted, telling herself not to frown.

“Well, the first thing she got into was the dancing, and I thought that was a great idea, but then after a while she wouldn't—I mean, she didn't want me around when she was practicing, and then she was practicing more and more, and then”—he shook his head as if it weighed a hundred pounds—“then she told me not to come around any more at all. And I don't know why. And now she doesn't let anyone come visit, not even her old friends. I know, 'cause they asked me about her. I don't know what's going on—” He looked up at Jennie, and although his face was almost expressionless, there was pleading in his eyes. “I just want someone to go out and watch her. Make sure she's all right. That's all. If it's something I did, or didn't do…I'd like
to know, but mostly I want to be sure she's not doing anything…dangerous.” Then he stopped, and took a deep breath. “No. I'm lying. I think something's wrong. I think there's something wrong with her. Whatever it is, I want to fix it if I can, or help her if I can't fix it. I want to hire you to find out what it is, so I can do that. Does that make sense?”