I knew I was tampering with evidence in a homicide investigation. But the cause of death wasn't exactly in dispute, even if nobody but me and Karl would ever know for sure what had happened here.
I slipped Prescott's phone into an inside pocket of my suit coat, then stood up. Walking over near the window for better light, I casually pulled the phone out again. As far as anybody could tell, I was messing around with my own phone, just like millions of people do every day.
I opened the phone and, with a little work, found the list of outgoing calls. The last one Prescott ever made had been to a number I knew well – it was my phone, at the squad room. Length of calclass="underline" 11:46.
Sweet Mother Mary on a motorcycle.
"Come on," I said to Karl, who'd been staring at the body from another corner of the room.
"Where we goin'?"
"Back to the squad, so I can check my voicemail."
As I drove us out of the hospital parking lot, Karl said, "It's my fault."
I turned and looked at him, and his face reminded me of a man I'd once seen at the funeral of his three children. They'd been murdered by his wife, before she killed herself.
"What the fuck are you talking about, Karl?"
"Prescott. What happened. It's my fault."
"You're wrong about that, partner. You are totally fucking off base. I'm the one who roped him into all this shit."
"Doesn't matter. You told me, Stan! You said to get additional warding for his room. I called two witches I know. One's moved out of town, I left a message with the other one's answering service. She didn't call back, and I forgot, Stan. I should have tried somebody else, even looked in the fucking Yellow Pages, if I had to."
"Karl, listen, you didn't–"
"But I just forgot. With people dropping dead bodies on us and Internal Affairs and the SWAT raid, and the rest of it..."
"Listen, man, don't be–"
"It could've made the difference, Stan! It could. If the protection was stronger, the fucking curse might not have been able to get him. Instead, he went out as hard as any motherfucker I ever saw, or even heard of. The dude was trying to help us, and for that he had his fucking eyes gouged out, and got his arms and legs chopped off, and then he was burned alive..."
Karl buried his face in his hands and started to cry.
If I wasn't driving, I just might have joined him.
• • • •
Back at the squad, we reported to McGuire what we'd seen, what we knew, and what we suspected.
He sat back and ran a hand slowly over his big jaw. "All right," he said. "I'll assign a couple of other detectives to it, just so we can say we investigated and filed a report. I'll need you to brief them before they go out, so that they don't waste a lot of time reinventing the wheel."
Fine. Now I'd have to explain to a couple of other cops just how bad I had fucked up. McGuire was right to do that – I just wasn't looking forward to it.
"You figure this was Sligo, shutting Prescott's mouth?" McGuire asked. "He's got a copy of the Opus Mago. He'd probably know about the curse, and how to make a murder look like one."
I thought about that, then shook my head. "No, if it was him, he'd want us to know it – he wouldn't try to hide his work by imitating the curse, the arrogant prick."
"Besides," Karl said, "it happened in broad daylight. Sligo's a vamp, remember?"
"Yeah, you got a point there." McGuire looked closely at me, then gave the same scrutiny to Karl. "You guys need some time off?" he asked quietly.
Considering everything that was going on right now, he was being extremely generous. But there was no way I wanted to spend the next few days sitting around my house thinking – or worse, drinking myself stupid.
I looked at Karl, who gave me a small headshake. His face had lost a little of the stricken look it had worn at the hospital, but only a little.
"We'd just as soon keep busy, boss, but thanks," I said.
McGuire took a case file from a stack sitting on his desk and put it on his blotter. Opening it, he said, "Then get back to work and catch this motherfucker, before he kills anybody else."
e susiv>
I'd told Karl I wanted to check my voicemail, and why. He said he'd start going through the files, to see if he could find a connection between Sligo and Jamieson Longworth. Then he reminded me that sunset was about an hour away. "You've got an appointment, in the parking lot," he said.
"Yeah," I said, "if she shows up."
"She seemed pretty definite about it this morning. Think she'd change her mind?"
"No, I'm just hoping that Longworth's threat turns out to be empty bullshit, that's all."
"Yeah, I know," he said. "Don't forget, I'm going down with you when it's time. Help you wait."
I nodded my thanks. "I wouldn't have it any other way."
"To access your voicemail messages, please press 8." The computer's recorded voice was as polite as ever. I touched 8.
"Please enter your four-digit extension number."
4294
"Please enter your security code."
3475833
"You have eight new messages. These are your options while listening. To listen to a message, press 5. To go back to the beginning of a message, press 7. To delete a message, press 2 twice. To save a message, press 4. To advance to the next message, press 3. To end this session, press 9 twice. Ready."
5
"Going to the first new message."
"Sergeant, this is Sonia, over in Human Resources. Your leave record for last month hasn't been–"
22
3
"Stanley, this is Father Cebula at St Casimir's. We've got the annual Corpus Christi banquet coming up–"
22
3
"Hey, Stan – Lacey. What do you get when you cross a female ogre with a werewolf? You–"
4
3