"No," Vollman said. "As your partner reminded us earlier, that has become almost a mundane practice in these times."
"What then?" I was afraid that I already knew the answer.
And I was right, I did. "Something very, very bad," Vollman said. "There are a variety of spells, invocations, and rituals contained within the Opus Mago. Each, it is believed, permits access to a spiritual entity of immense power and great malevolence. One, supposedly, contains the means for calling up Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec snake god, which has grown immensely powerful from the all blood sacrifices made to it over centuries."
"But all that human sacrifice stuff ended hundreds of years ago, once the Spaniards took over," I said.
Vollman looked at me and shrugged. "If you choose to believe so."
"What else?" Karl asked. "There's got to be more than that."
"Indeed there is, Detective," Vollman told him. "For example, there are those who say the book describes a ritual for awakening one or more of the Great Old Ones, those creatures that supposedly existed before man, and which still await the day when they may supplant him."
"Now I know you're yanking our chains," I said. "That stuff's right out of Lovecraft, and you already said he made it all up."
Vollman shook his head. "No, Sergeant, I only said that Lovecraft made up the Necronomicon. The veracity of his other material is… open to dispute, shall we say. Some maintain that he discovered things that man was not meant to know, and it was that knowledge which eventually drove him mad."
"You keep saying things like 'there are those who say,' and 'it is believed,'" I said. "So, you haven't looked at the book yourself."
"No, I have not, nor did I ever wish to," Vollman said. "But I have, over the years, talked to several people who did." He gave me the thin smile again. "They were the ones who survived the experience, with their sanity intact, of course."
"So, all right," Karl said. "This Opus Mago is a recipe book for cooking up different kinds of Truly Bad Shit. And it's been stolen by somebody who plans to whip up a big, smelly batch of ian thiv>
"Inelegantly put, Detective," Vollman said with a nod, "but an admirably succinct summary, nonetheless."
"Big question is," I said, "how are we going to know when he makes the attempt?"
Vollman's thin face, which would never be used to illustrate "cheerful" in the dictionary, became even more solemn. "You will know, Sergeant," he said. "Have no concerns on that account. You will know."
The first of the murders occurred four nights later, and we almost missed it.
The case could easily have been written off as a routine homicide. It would have been, too, if Hugh Scanlon hadn't given me a call.
Turned out, it was the right thing to do. This homicide was anything but routine.
A lot of "regular" detectives don't like the Supe Squad very much – I think they take that "when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you" stuff too seriously. But Scanlon's all right. I knew him from when we were both in Homicide. I eventually moved on to Supernatural Crimes for reasons of my own, but Scanlon kept working murders, and he's a Detective First now.
The crime scene was the alley behind Tim Riley's Bar and Grill, and by the time Karl and I showed up, the routine was well under way. Nudging some rubbernecking civilians aside, I lifted the yellow crime scene tape so Karl could duck under it. Then I followed him down the alley, the smell of rotting garbage strong enough to gag a sewer rat.
We made our way through the usual collection of the M.E.'s people, forensics techs, uniformed cops, and Homicide dicks, all of them busy or trying to look that way. Mostly they ignored us, apart from one or two hostile glances. But eventually Scanlon spotted us and came over.
"Vic's a white male, around thirty, throat cut, bled out where we found him," he said. Scanlon's never been known to use two words when he can get by with one.
"So why call us?" I asked him. "Sounds like a bar fight that moved out here, then went bad."
"I thought so, too," Scanlon said. "Then I saw something. Come on."
He led us over to where some forensics guy was taking photos of the body, his strobe flashing in the semi-darkness.
"You about done?" Scanlon asked him.
The guy looked up and realized he wasn't being asked a question. "Yeah, sure, all finished," he said, and backed off.
Scanlon produced a pencil flashlight and clicked it on. The beam lingered for a moment on the throat wound that looked like a sardonic grin, then moved up to the victim's face. The dead guy had a thick head of brown hair, and some of it was combed down over his forehead. With his free hand, encased in a latex glove, Scanlon lifted the hair away so that we could see the victim's forehead clearly, and then I understood why we'd been called.
Three symbols I'd never seen before were carved into the victim's forehead – one over the left temple, another over the right one, and a third square in the middle.
The man in the alley wasn't just a murder victim.
He was a sacrifice.
• • • •
Inside the bar, Karl made the rounds of the customers while I had a word with the bartender, a pretty brunette in her mid-twenties whose nametag read "Andrea." She wore black pants on her slim hips, and a matching shirt, the cuffs folded back a couple of turns to leave her forearms bare.
I described the vic for her and asked if she remembered serving him.
"Yeah, sure. He was the double Scotch and water. Sat over there" – rea gestured to the right with her chin – "third stool from the end."
"Notice anything unusual about him?"
She glanced back toward the spot where the vic had been sitting, as if it helped her remember. "Well, he wasn't exactly killing that Scotch. When I figured out he wasn't coming back, I cleared the space. Glass was still full – he hadn't touched a drop."
Why would somebody come into a bar, order booze, then not have any? Unless he came to do something besides drink.
"He didn't stiff you, did he?"
"Hell, no. He paid when I served him, just like he was supposed to. It's either that or run a tab, but I'm only supposed to run tabs for regulars." Andrea leaned closer and lowered her voice a little. "Listen, um, the guy paid with a twenty, and left his change on the bar. I didn't touch it until I was taking the glass away. By then, I figured he was either absentminded, or a hell of a good tipper. What should I, you know...?"