“That would still work,” Detweiler said. “King got in through the back stairs, then locked and bolted the door. He kills Gordon and uses one of these escape runes to get away.”
“There are two problems with that,” Alex said. “The first is that escape runes are powerful, they’re expensive, and there aren’t many runewrights who can make them.”
“That doesn’t mean that King didn’t get his hands on enough to get his revenge,” Detweiler said. “What’s the other problem?”
“Escape runes are fueled by the user’s life energy. That means that every time King used one, he’d be burning a year or more off his own life. The spell could very well kill him at any time.”
“You said that King’s wife died, his son disgraced some skirt and disappeared, and he spent twenty years in prison,” Detweiler pointed out. “Sounds to me like he’s a man who doesn’t have anything to lose.”
Alex hated to admit it, but the Lieutenant had a point. He and Iggy had ruled out using escape runes, but that was before he knew about Duane King and his story. Detweiler was right, King was a man with very little to lose, one who might be willing to trade years of his own life for revenge.
“Do me a favor, Lieutenant,” he said. “Go ask the men you had stationed here if they checked the door to the back stairs when they came on duty. Also ask them if they swept the apartment.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Alex said. “If it was locked and bolted when they got here, and they cleared the apartment, then we still have the problem of how the ghost got in.”
Detweiler grumbled, but headed back down the hall and down the spiral stair. Alex ground his teeth together. He’d swept the entire room with his ghostlight and the only magic he found were three alchemical bottles on a shelf. One potion was to regrow hair, one was for indigestion, and one was for virility.
That one looked well used.
Alex blew out the burner and replaced it with the silverlight. This time the room lit up with bluish-purple marks, mostly fingerprints. Alex examined the blood on the floor. There was cast-off spatter from the knife, indicating that the killer was left-handed.
As Alex examined the spatter on the wall he wondered why there didn’t seem to be any voids.
The killer must have come up behind him, which means he’s right-handed, not left-handed.
The killer being behind Gordon explained the lack of any voids where the dead man’s blood would have landed on the killer, but what about the knife? It was unlikely that the killer had a rag handy to wrap up the bloody knife, so it must have dripped on the ground.
Kneeling down, Alex examined the floor carefully. There were a few drops of blood outside the pool. That explained it — the blood pool was obscuring the cast-off from the bloody knife.
Standing up, Alex mimed coming up behind Gordon and cutting his throat. He would have had to step back when the body fell.
Turning his light on the floor again, Alex found a tiny stain out and away from the body. It looked like it had been obscured by someone walking on it, either the killer or one of the policemen who found the victim. After a minute of searching, he found another near Gordon’s desk.
The waste basket next to the desk was made of a tightly woven wire. As Alex examined it, he found one last drop of blood on the top of the narrow rim.
Excitedly, he picked it up and emptied its meager contents onto Gordon’s immaculate desk. He doubted the dead man would mind.
“Bad news,” Detweiler said, coming back into the room. “Both the officers say they checked the door and it was locked and bolted. They also said they cleared the apartment.”
“So Duane King wasn’t already hiding in here when they arrived,” Alex said. It was starting to look like King had access to some magic that Alex didn’t know.
A sudden chill ran through him and he wondered if the ghost was somehow connected to the glyph runes. After a moment he gave up the idea as a long shot.
None of the crumpled papers or the banana peel that made up the contents of Marcellus Gordon’s waste basket looked important, but Alex was starting to feel a little desperate. He changed burners back to the ghostlight and inspected the trash again.
This time something glowed.
Alex did a double take, focusing his lamp on a tiny fragment of a paper. It looked like the corner of something and it had definite magic residue on it.
“Find something?” Detweiler asked.
“Maybe,” Alex said, taking off his oculus so he could better inspect the tiny paper fragment.
It was a heavy gauge paper with a residue on the front that was tacky. On the back was some kind of label. It was the label that glowed under the ghostlight, so Alex examined it closely.
“There’s a rune here,” he announced.
“Is it one of those escape runes?”
Alex shook his head. Escape runes were difficult and complex, and this rune was far too simple. What he could see of it anyway.
“It’s torn,” he said. “There’s only about half of it left, but it does confirm that there was magic in this room at some point.”
“Lieutenant,” someone yelled from down the hall.
“Figure it out, Lockerby,” Detweiler said, turning back to the hall. “I want Mr. King behind bars before he has a chance to kill again.”
The half of the rune on the torn paper wasn’t much, but it was the only clue available. He didn’t recognize it, but then he had no way of knowing how much was missing. It was a rune of the geometric school, which let out the glyph runewrights, but that didn’t make him feel much better.
Taking out his notebook, he copied the half-rune as exactly as he could. Later he’d go home and draw it bigger; maybe then he’d recognize it.
“Lockerby!” Detweiler shouted, his tromping footsteps coming up the hall. “Get out here!”
Alex had no idea what the Lieutenant was upset about, but he didn’t want to be caught flat footed, so he blew out his lantern and dropped it and the oculus into his kit.
“What’s the matter, Lieutenant?”
Detweiler rounded the corner with a crumpled paper clutched in his hand. His face had gone red again and his teeth were bared.
“Duane King is not the ghost,” he shouted, throwing the crumpled paper at Alex. “That telegram just arrived from Florida. King died in Miami six months ago.”
Alex unfolded the paper and read the neat typewritten words. According to his parole officer, King had been killed in a fire in boarding house. His body was buried in a common grave in the city cemetery.
Alex read the telegram again, just to make sure he’d actually read it right. He wanted to say something reassuring, something that would make this information make sense, but nothing came to mind.
“That’s it,” Detweiler said, somehow angrier at Alex’s bewilderment. “You’ve been messing this case up from the start, leading us around by the nose, leaking to the press, and generally making me look the fool.”
“Lieutenant,” Alex began but Detweiler cut him off.
“I’ve had enough of your antics,” he shouted. “Preston, get in here and arrest this meddler.”
24
The Cooler
The basement of the Central Office of Police was a series of rooms, cages, and holding cells known collectively as the Cooler. After Officer Preston had put Alex in handcuffs, he’d been driven to the Central Office and thrown unceremoniously into a large open cage with a few drunks and a sullen-looking pickpocket.
The police had confiscated all his possessions, including his suit coat with its shield runes. Apparently they’d dealt with runewrights before and had procedures for handling them.