The cop, a redheaded beanpole named Sadler, flipped bck a page in his notebook. "Prescott, Benjamin R," he said. "Moved down here from the ICU earlier today."
I wish I could say that the news surprised me, but by then the surprise would have been if he'd said a different name. My guts weren't clenched, the way they'd been with the witchfinders. Instead they were cold, freezing cold, as if a big ball of ice had formed there and was planning to stay a while. Like maybe the rest of my life.
I asked Sadler, "Witnesses?"
"Nah. Couple of nurses heard screaming and ran over, but the guy's door was locked – from the inside. One of them had to go back to the nurse's station to get a master key. When they got the door open, nobody was in there but the vic, or what was left of him." He shook his head. "Sounds like your kind of thing, huh?"
"Yeah, sure. My kind of thing."
I turned away and went to the doorway of room 333 and stood there while a couple of forensics techs inside went about their business.
I let my gaze wander around. Standard-looking hospital room: green walls, patterned linoleum floor, a single window open wide; I didn't know if the window had been like that earlier, or if a cop was hoping to let out some of the stench. If that was the point, it hadn't worked real well so far. The sickly-sweet smell of burned flesh was so thick, you could almost see it in the air.
The rest of the room was pretty much what you'd expect. Narrow bed with mechanical stuff underneath it for raising and lowering; a small wooden armoire; a nightstand; one of those rectangular tables on wheels that they use for meals; a couple of uncomfortable-looking chairs.
There were a couple of differences from the average hospital room, though. Like the four bloody, naked limbs – arms and legs, two of each – stacked neatly in one corner, and the charred thing that lay in what was left of the bed.
Some of Prescott's abundant body fat had been liquefied by the intense heat. You could see it, runny and yellowish, sticking to parts of the bed frame. There were a couple of congealed pools of it on the floor, one on each side of the bed.
I stepped closer to the monstrosity on the bed. Might as well drink from this cup all the way to the bottom. A quick look at what had once been Prescott's head didn't tell me anything useful. A really hot fire will explode a corpse's eyeballs, so there was no way to tell whether the empty sockets that stared accusingly at me had been victims of the fire, or maybe the claws of something right out of Hell. I couldn't bring myself to check Prescott's crotch, to see if his balls were still there. I just couldn't.
Apart from some scorch marks on the wall behind the bed, the rest of the room had been untouched by the flames. The blaze had been localized and focused, no doubt because that's what a very old and deadly curse had specified.
The curse that I had invoked.
Sure, Prescott did the translating, but that's not what caused the curse to kick in – it's revealing to somebody what you've learned that does it.
Which is exactly what I asked Prescott to do.
Which is why Prescott died, in agony and horror.
I think Karl said something to me, but I waved him off. I stood there, looking at the remains of what had been a pretty good man and wondered if he'd damned Stan Markowski in his final moments. If he did, I wouldn't blame him.
But even he couldn't have damned Stan Markowski nearly as hard as I was right now.
After a while, I went back to acting like a cop. What else was I gonna do?
As I turned, my foot knocked againstomething metal. A wastebasket. I looked and saw some used Kleenex, the remains of a tube of Life Savers, a bent straw, a couple of used cotton balls. And a big FedEx overnight envelope. It was addressed to Prescott, care of the hospital, with a return address at Georgetown University. Looked like his assistant back on campus had sent the stuff that Prescott wanted. Like the remaining untranslated pages of the Opus Mago.
Then what the hell happened to them?
I turned to one of the forensics guys, Billy Santoro. "You come across any paper around the corpse, maybe something written in a foreign language?"
"No, no papers, Stan. Some ashes that might've been paper, but nothing that's got any hope of recovery. Fire was just too hot, you know?"
"How about a laptop?"
"We found something, was probably a laptop once. But now it's just a bunch of warped metal and melted plastic. You can look at it, if you want."
"No, I guess not. Thanks."
Well, so much for that brilliant idea. If Prescott had learned anything useful from the Opus Mago fragments, it had died with him. Even if my hunch had panned out, what would I do with a bunch of papers written in Ancient Sumerian?
Find another translator, who can get dismembered, blinded, and burned alive for his trouble? One's not enough?
I looked at the corpse one more time. Just punishing myself, I suppose. I didn't need to see it again – that charred mound of gunk and bone was going to have a starring role in my nightmares for a long time to come.
As I turned away, something glittered in the corner of my vision.
It came from the corner where Prescott's severed arms and legs were stacked. They hadn't bled much, without a heart to provide pumping action. I walked over, and tilted my head a little. There it was again.
I squatted next to the pile of flabby, pale flesh, careful not to touch anything. I looked closer.
A cell phone. Prescott had been holding the phone in his hand when the arm was severed. Not surprising, then, that his big paw was squeezed tight around it.
I looked over my shoulder and saw that Billy was still taking samples of Prescott's ashes and putting them into small plastic bags.
"You do these yet?" I asked him. "The arms and legs?"
"Not yet," he said. "Thought we ought to concentrate on the torso first. We'll get to the rest of him pretty soon. I figure there's no hurry."
"No. No hurry at all."
He went back to work. Using my body to hide what I was doing, I slowly leaned forward, got two fingers around the phone, and carefully worked it loose from Prescott's grip.