Water to Burn (8 page)
Authors: Katharine Kerr
“Your car was in Johnson’s possession during the time he attempted another murder,” Ari said.
“I know.” Evers was whispering again.
“Do you know anything about the blue Toyota sedan?”
“Only that it belonged to Johnson.” The color was beginning to return to Evers’ face. “Or, wait! There was an article in the paper that said it was stolen.”
“Just that, yes. Did Mrs. Politt also use heroin?”
“No. Doyle wouldn’t let her. He was living with her, at least when he was around. He’d disappear for a couple of weeks and then come back.”
“With more heroin to distribute, yes. We know that part of the story.” Ari stood up and shot me a glance. “I think we’ve learned what we can here. The occult silliness isn’t a legal matter.”
“Right,” I said.
As we started for the door, Evers got up, but he stayed behind his desk. His color had returned to normal, and as he said good-bye, his voice sounded stronger as well.
At the door I glanced back and said, as casually as I could, “By the way, was one of the other coven members named Caleb?”
“No, they were both—” Evers said, then caught himself. “Oh, shit!”
Ari smiled, I smiled, and we returned to the chairs. Evers slumped down in his and covered his face with both hands.
“You might as well tell us their names,” Ari said. “It will save you a great deal of future trouble. If they’re not relevant to the investigation, nothing will happen to them.”
“Yeah? Well, they’re not.” His voice sank too low to sound defiant. “Look, none of this is going to get on TV, is it?”
“Not if you cooperate.” I paused to take a notebook and ballpoint pen out of my shoulder bag. “The names and contact information, please.”
Evers gave it. I wrote down the names, phone numbers, and addresses of two women, friends of Elaine Politt, according to Evers.
“All right,” I said. “Since we’re still here, I want to know a little more about this so-called coven’s activities. Were you all involved in selling heroin?”
“No!” Evers leaned forward and slapped his hands palms down on the desktop. “I was one of the suckers who bought it, that’s all. My girlfriend told me over and over to leave it alone. I should have listened to her. Uh, God, how many men say that, after they make stupid mistakes?”
“Too many,” Ari said. “Go on. What was the coven to you?”
“A stupid amusement.” His voice had dropped to a whisper. “We did stupid things, like the curses. Write someone’s name in blood on piece of paper and then send it through a shredder.”
Ari leaned forward. “Where did you get the blood?”
“From meat packages, those little plastic trays, y’know? The blood collects under the steaks or whatever.”
“A modern update for an old idea, huh?” I said. “What else? Invoking spirits, I suppose.”
“Yes. They were supposed to tell you the secrets of the universe.” He winced and shook his head. “I don’t know why I believed any of it.”
“You were loaded,” I said. “That’s why. What about—” I paused to pretend I was trying to remember something. “This is probably not very important, but what about weather magic? Were you trying to command the spirits of the wind, for instance?”
“A lot of hot air.” Evers tried to smile. “That’s what those spells commanded. But there was some talk about elemental spirits, water, fire, and air, yeah, air was one of them. There were these tablets we studied.”
“The Enochian watchtowers?” I said.
“Yeah. Doyle talked about John Dee a lot, but what he said didn’t match what I read about Dee and Kelley. Doyle thought he knew everything, but he obviously hadn’t studied the history very carefully.”
Or else, I thought to myself, the history in his world level was different from ours. Aloud I said, “So you studied the elemental tablets.”
“Yes. Elaine was really keen on the water angle. She loved living near the ocean, and so she wanted to contact the water spirits.”
His last remark made me wonder if I’d just found an important clue. I was willing to bet that someone in that coven had done or was still doing something that troubled Fog Face. Maybe one of them would know something about the murder of the child down at Ocean Beach.
“About these spirits,” I said, “did Doyle ever talk about making blood sacrifices to them?”
“You mean human sacrifices?”
“Yeah, particularly children.”
“No. Nothing like that!” Evers slammed his hands on his desk again. “Hell, I wouldn’t have put up with it for a minute if he had. I may be a goddamn junkie now, but I never would have gone along with anything like that.”
I believed him. My important clue vanished.
“All right,” I said. “Well, I think I’ve heard what I need to.”
I put the notebook back in my shoulder bag and glanced at Ari. He stood up, and I followed.
“Thank you for cooperating,” Ari said to Evers. “You may receive a follow-up call from Inspector Sanchez.”
Evers stayed slumped in his chair, and we left for real.
Out in the corridor, we paused by the elevator. Ari opened my shoulder bag and took out two devices. One teardrop-shaped bit of metal looked something like an ordinary earphone, but much smaller. I realized that Ari could have combed some of his hair over it, and no one would have noticed. The other device, a small square gray box, looked like nothing I’d ever seen. He clipped the one onto his left ear and held the other out in the direction of Evers’ office.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“An illegal wiretap, of course. Shush.”
As much as I disliked being told to shush, I did and kept a watch on the corridor. In a few minutes Ari made a small mutter of satisfaction and removed the earpiece. He put the devices back into my bag.
“As I thought,” Ari said. “He called both women and told them we’d been to see him. Unfortunately, he didn’t say anything incriminating, and neither did they. He did, though, call one of them Sweetie.”
“Which may be why he didn’t want to tell us their names.”
While we waited for the elevator down, I had the distinct feeling that someone was staring at me. I turned around, looked in all directions, but saw no one. Once the elevator car arrived, the feeling disappeared.
As soon as we returned to the apartment, Ari phoned Inspector Sanchez to report in. I sat down at my computer desk and contemplated the blank screen of the monitor. In the past, I’d occasionally seen clues and pictures appear when the system was down—just image objectification, of course—but it stayed stubbornly dark. Still, Evers’ remark about spirits and the secrets of the universe nagged at me.
“That’s done.” Ari strode back into the living room. “Sanchez will follow up on the other two coven members.”
“Damn! I was hoping to interview them myself.”
“So was I, but I think we’re being put in our place. I doubt if they have anything valuable to contribute, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
“Let’s hope. I—” I paused, staring at him. “Grimoires.”
“What?”
“Sorry. The Collective Data Stream just reminded me that I’ve got some grimoires. You know, books of spells and magical lore.”
Ari rolled his eyes but said no more. I got up and went to my bookshelf, where I kept two scholarly editions of late medieval grimoires hidden behind a row of books on nutrition.
“You used a couple of words that triggered this,” I said to Ari. “Put in place, valuable—they made me think of hidden treasure. If I’m not mistaken, that’s one of the things spirits are supposed to do for you, finding lost treasures.”
Sure enough, when I leafed through the first grimoire, I found a passage describing a guaranteed way of discovering buried gold. Since the spell began with biting out the heart of a living dove, I ignored the rest of the details.
“This Caleb guy,” I said, “the one I told you about when we were coming home from Aunt Eileen’s.”
“The treasure hunter?”
“That’s him, yes. I’m wondering if he’s our Brother Belial, and he was looking to invoke some spirits that could help him find it.”
“You could call your sister and ask if this fellow’s tall and thin.”
“Brilliant idea. I’ll do that.”
Kathleen, however, sank my hopes of a quick ID on the hooded man. Caleb Sumner was short and pudgy, she told me, and had a tenor voice.
“He pronounces some words kind of funny,” Kathleen said. “I mean, he keeps dropping his R’s like some New England people do, but beyond that. When he says light and night, it’s sort of like loit and noit.”
“When he’s answering a question, does he say ‘yeah yeah’ instead of just ‘yeah’?”
“Yeah, he does.”
“I bet he’s from Martha’s Vineyard.”
“The island? No wonder he’s so good with boats, then. Jack says he really knows his stuff. Other than that, he’s a total dork, if you ask me, not that anyone does.” Hurt crept into her voice. “Jack won’t hear a word against him.”
That bit of information struck me as odd, because Jack was normally suspicious of everyone who tried to befriend him. Like many rich people, he worried that these potential friends were trying to get into his bank account.
“Does Caleb come to the house a lot?” I said.
“Not a lot, not since Woofie Five bit him.” Kathleen paused for a laugh. “Really hard on the ankle, which was all the poor little love could reach. He’s the Yorkie mix.”
And as nasty a canine critter as you could find, or at least, so I remembered him. In this case, however, I was prepared to cut Woofie Five some slack.
“Did Caleb do something to set him off?”
“No. It was just the bad vibe.” Kathleen hesitated, thinking in her usual slow way. “Aunt Eileen told me that you’re still going with that British guy. The one from InterCop or whatever it’s called.”
“Interpol, and his name’s Ari Nathan. He’s Israeli. He just sounds British. Actually, we’re looking for an apartment together.”
Kathleen squealed in honest delight. “Oh, that’s great news!” she said once she’d finished squealing. “Congrats!”
“Well, it’s not like we’re engaged or anything.”
“I could guess that, knowing you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just your fear of commitment. That’s what Sean calls it, anyway.”
“Well, he could be right about that.”
“It’s probably because we lost Dad.”
“Oh, don’t you get all psychological on me!”
Although she didn’t laugh, I swear I could hear her smiling, it was that loud.
“Anyway.” Kathleen paused again. “But, Ari, if he’s a cop, he must know what criminals are like, right?”
“It comes with the job, yeah.”
“I wonder if he could take a look at Caleb for me. You’re coming to the party Sunday, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, for sure. Will Caleb be there?”
“You bet. Jack insisted. Ari could tell me what he thinks of him.”
“Better yet, Ari could look him up on a database if we can get his fingerprints on a glass or something, which should be easy if you’re serving finger food.”
“I gotta say, Nola, you always have awfully useful boyfriends. I hope Ari’s not the jealous type, though. Caleb’s mentioned a couple of times that he wants to meet my sister, though maybe he was just joking around. Trying to flatter me, y’know.”
An alarm went off like a foghorn in my mind. All I said was, “You get a lot of that, yeah. Are your sisters as beautiful as you?”
“Yeah, just like that.” And to give her credit, she sounded honestly disgusted. “I get real sick of it.”
“I bet. What time Sunday?”
“Around four or five. See ya then.”
With that she clicked off. I told Ari the news.
“Odd all around,” Ari said. “But then, anything to do with your family tends to be. I’ll have a legitimate reason to ask for a match on this fellow’s prints if we can get them. This Drake’s treasure business—it sounds to me like some sort of confidence game.”
“Getting Jack to put up cash, you mean, and then disappearing?”
“Precisely that. From everything you’ve told me,” Ari went on, “your brother-in-law sounds frightened of him.”
“Yeah, he does, and that’s not like Jack at all.”
“Which reminds me. I meant to ask you about this boat of his. I’m assuming it’s not a commercial fishing craft.”
“No, though it’s big enough to go pretty far out to sea. It doesn’t have sails, just an engine, but it’s got a cabin and a galley. I don’t know anything about boats, or I’d tell you what kind it is.”
“Have you ever gone out on it?”
“Only when it’s been docked down at Tiburon. Sometimes Kathleen throws parties on it. I get seasick too easily to want to go very far on the thing. Why?”
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