Now it was Iggy’s turn to sigh. It actually made Alex feel a little better: if the mind of the great Sir Arthur Conan Ignatius Doyle was stumped by this, what chance did he have?
“I did what you said,” Alex said, speaking just to fill up the silence that had descended. “I eliminated the impossible so that whatever was left should have been the truth, right?”
Iggy chuckled at that, but it wasn’t a dry, ironic chuckle of agreement, this was amusement. Alex looked over to find the old man grinning behind his mustache, his teeth clenched on the cigar, and his eyes shining in the glow of a passing streetlight.
“Thanks, lad,” he said. “You just reminded me that there’s a corollary to that formula.”
Alex sat up, interested.
“If you eliminate the impossible and nothing remains,” he said, taking his cigar out of his mouth and considering it.
“Yes?” Alex prompted.
“Then some part of the impossible, must be possible.”
“Well, I’m sure Duane King’s ghost isn’t committing these murders,” Alex said. “So where does that leave us?”
“Think about it,” Iggy said puffing on his cigar again. His shining eyes and wide grin told Alex that he’d already come to a conclusion.
Alex thought about it, turning the problem this way and that in his head. There really was only one satisfactory answer.
“Duane King didn’t die in that fire,” Alex said. “Either the cops messed up or King made sure they thought it was him. Either way, he’s still alive, and he’s still the killer.”
“That’s my read on it,” Iggy said, finally sitting back against his seat.
“Okay, I’ll tell Detweiler in the morning,” Alex said, so tired he couldn’t even remember what day it was.
Iggy sat back up and gave him a withering look.
“Detweiler isn’t going to believe a word you say,” he said. “You’re going to have to find King yourself and bring him in before the lieutenant will take your word for anything. And, if you go to him with something less, he’ll press those charges, tabloid or no.”
“Great.” Alex rubbed his temples. How was he going to find one not-as-dead-as-reported ex-con in New York City?
“So,” Iggy said, his senior-detective voice firmly in place. “What are you going to do to find our ghost?”
Alex thought about that for a long moment.
“I have to find out how he haunts,” Alex said. “I’m pretty sure he’s using an escape rune to get away from the crime scenes. It’s the only thing that makes sense after Marcellus Gordon. If he’d left any other way, the cops would have seen him.”
“I agree,” Iggy said, nodding. “He’s killing for revenge, so he doesn’t care about spending his own life.”
“So that leaves the question of how he’s getting into the crime scenes. The cops watching Gordon’s place swore the place was locked up tight.” He rubbed his chin. “Is it possible King could have used an escape rune to get in?”
Iggy shook his head.
“There are only two ways to link an escape rune to a location,” he said. “One…”
“Draw the link rune on the spot you want to land on,” Alex supplied. That’s how the second part of his own escape rune worked. If he triggered the rune, he and anyone within ten feet would be teleported to a spot about one hundred feet above the North Atlantic, then he would be teleported again, landing right on the rune he’d carved into the floor of the brownstone’s library.
“And two…” Iggy prodded.
“Use latitude and longitude in the escape rune itself,” he said. That was how the first part of his rune worked. The coordinates of the spot over the North Atlantic were coded right into the rune tattooed on his left forearm. It was, of course, horribly imprecise, but that didn’t matter when the point of it was to dump a ten-foot radius worth of bad guys into the ocean. It would never be precise enough to allow someone to teleport to a specific room.
“Any chance King snuck into all those homes a month ago and carved link runes under their desks to get ready for this?” Alex asked.
Iggy didn’t dignify that with an answer.
“I don’t suppose King inherited a bunch of money while he was in prison, so he could afford a couple dozen unlocking runes?” Alex asked.
Unlocking runes could have gotten King through the locked and bolted door at the Gordons, but that was about one hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of runes. An ex-con wouldn’t have that kind of cash on hand, so that was out.
Something twitched in his brain. Something about carving link runes under the murdered people’s desks, but he was too tired to suss it out. Besides, he knew that there weren’t any runes in those rooms, under the desks or otherwise.
Or were there?
“Wait a minute,” he said, digging out his notebook. “I completely forgot to tell you, I found a fragment of a rune in Marcellus Gordon’s trash.”
He flipped open to the page where he’d drawn what had remained of the rune and passed it to Iggy. The old man flicked his gold lighter and held it up to see what Alex had drawn.
“I don’t know what it is yet,” Alex began, but Iggy handed him back the book.
“It’s an obfuscation rune,” he said. “Write out a document, then draw the rune with the same ink and the text becomes unreadable. Some business men put them on important papers and contracts.”
“What use is a contract that no one can read?” Alex asked.
“Use the ink to draw the rune on a glass lens and anyone looking through the lens can read it,” Iggy explained. “They also have a side effect of blocking any kind of linking rune.”
“Watson must have used it on some business papers,” Alex said. He hadn’t found any unreadable papers, but since the rune was in the trash, it was likely Watson destroyed it.
With a sigh, Alex closed the notebook and put it back in his pocket.
Another dead end.
The cab eased to a stop in front of the brownstone, and Iggy paid the cabbie while Alex got out. He had no idea what time it was, but he needed to get to bed. Not because he was exhausted, but because tomorrow he had to find a dead man, recover a motor, and save a kidnap victim all in time to have a date with an angel.
Cheer up, he thought as they mounted the stairs to the front door. Tomorrow couldn’t possibly be worse.
25
The Search
Despite his going to bed well after midnight, Alex was up and at his office at nine sharp. In the detective business, he didn’t get many customers at that hour, but the time was useful to tackle the various tasks that needed to be done to finish cases and keep his business running.
“Wow,” Leslie said as he entered the office. “Things must be worse than I thought if you’re here on time.”
“You have no idea,” Alex said. He’d managed, with the aid of three cups of Iggy’s strongest coffee, to wake up and take the crawler to the office, but his mind was still fuzzy. “Please tell me there’s coffee,” he said.
Leslie stepped over to the little table that sat beside the filing cabinets and picked up a steel coffee pot sitting on a tick square of cork. Moving past Alex, she went into his office and then into the little bathroom attached to it, filling the pot with water. The office didn’t have a stove and the radiator connected to the boiler in the basement was off for the summer, but there were other ways to brew coffee, especially in New York. When Leslie returned, she put the pot back on the cork pad and opened the slender drawer in the front of the side table. Inside lay a decorative wooden box with paper flames of red and orange lacquered to its sides and top. Opening the box, Leslie took out a small, brown rock that pulsated with red light from somewhere deep inside. The light gave Alex the impression that the stone was breathing.