cycle, or whatever it was, with no real leads and no way to know how many more deaths had to occur before the shit really hit the fan. We didn't even know what form the shit would take.
But it was going to be some seriously bad shit, I was pretty sure of that.
The taxpayers of Wilkes-Barre must be pretty generous, because their police department is located in a nice new building that always made me a little envious whenever I visited – not that I'd ever admit that to Lacey. Anyway, there's a downside to working there. It is in Wilkes-Barre.
Even if I hadn't been in the building before, I wouldn't need to ask where to find Lacey. Along with the rest of her unit, she was in the basement. The Supe Squad is always in the basement.
Their P.A. was a young black woman named Sandra Gaffney, who was getting her PhD in Criminal Justice from Penn State. She took this gig to support herself while writing her dissertation. You can tell right off she's not a typical civil servant – not only is she intelligent, she's actually pleasant most of the time.
'Hey, Sandy,' I said. 'How's it going?'
She looked up from her computer and gave me a smile. 'Hey yourself, Sergeant. You drop by to see how some real police work is done?'
'You got it,' I said. 'Detective Brennan said she'd give me some pointers. She's expecting me.'
'I'll give her a buzz.'
Sarah picked up her phone, punched in three numbers, and muttered something I couldn't hear into the receiver. I noticed that next to her computer she kept a small stuffed toy bear with a dirty face, who looked like he'd seen better days.
Hanging up the phone, Sandra said to me, 'She'll be right out.'
'Thanks. How's the research going?'
'Pretty good. This place gives me more data every damn day.'
Detective Lacey Brennan came around the corner. A little taller than average. Blonde hair, worn short. Blue eyes. Killer body – not that I ever paid much attention.
'Guy walks into a bar,' she said. 'Orders a cocktail, sips it for a while. But it turns out that he's a werewolf, and while he's sitting there drinking, the full moon comes out. So the guy transforms, right? Fur, fangs, the whole nine yards. Then he trots over to the window and sits there, on the floor, howling at the moon. Well, there's a couple of tourists from East Podunk sitting a few stools away. They take all this in, you know, then one of them turns to the bartender and says, 'Fuck – we'll have what he's having!''
Behind Lacey, Sandy justder and sak her head. I looked at Lacey, kept my face impassive, and asked, 'Yeah? Then what happened?'
She gave me a knuckle punch on the arm. Being a real he-man, I didn't show how much it hurt.
'Come on,' Lacey said. 'The file's on my desk.'
I followed her into the squad room, which looked in most ways like every other detectives' bull pen I've ever seen, except with fresh paint and newer carpeting.
Of course Supe Squads tend to have some features you don't find in, say, a Homicide unit. I passed a wall rack containing several sizes and varieties of wooden stakes, and next to that was a glass-fronted case full of magically charged amulets. A poster on the opposite wall listed the six known defenses against ogre attack. Then there was a big bulletin board full of wanted posters showing renegade vamps, bail-jumping werewolves, a child- killing troll, and one I recognized from our own squad room: an artist's rendering of a wimpy-looking dwarf with a severe widow's peak. His name was Keyser something-or-other, and he was supposed to be the kingpin of a shadowy gang of fairy-dust smugglers. Some crooked supes call him the devil incarnate, but others say he doesn't even exist.
Lacey's area was at the back of the room. Sitting at a desk near hers, scowling at a computer printout, was her partner. Johnny Cedric lost an eye a few years back, during a raid on an illegal coven that had gone very wrong. Could've taken a disability pension and moved to Florida, but he chose to stay on the job. I kind of admired that, even if he was always bragging about how the sinister-looking eye patch got him laid a lot.
'Hey, look what the bat dragged in,' Cedric said.
'How's it going, Cyclops?' Cops aren't known for their sensitivity.
'Not bad,' he said. 'Still trackin' it down and tryin' it out. You over here about our dead guy?'
I nodded. 'The M.O. sounds like a couple of corpses we've had turn up in our neck of the woods.'
'Oh, yeah, Lace was telling me about those. How recent?'
'Both in the last week, and we're pretty sure they're related to a torture-murder we had the week before.'
'Christ. I hope the bastard hasn't relocated here permanently. Not that I'd blame him, of course. Anyplace is better than Scranton, even if you're a serial killer.' He squinted at me with his good eye. 'You guys got anything?'
'Not a lot,' I told him. 'One name that's come up is a wizard named Sligo. Supposed to be a big deal black magic practitioner. Ever hear of him?'
Cedric thought a moment before shaking his head. 'Uh-uh, doesn't jingle. He's not in the database?'
'Not under that name, anyway. He's supposed to be from Ireland, so I sent a query to Interpol. Haven't heard back yet.'
'You wanna finish up the incident reports, Johnny?' Lacey said. 'I'll entertain our visitor.' Then she turned to me. 'Come on, pull up a chair. I'll show you what I've got.'
I was sure the double entendre was unintentional. Well, pretty sure.
I grabbed an empty chair and dragged it over next to Lacey's desk, as she pulled a file folder from one of the drawers, placed it on the blotter, and flipped it open. When she did, I noticed that the ring finger of her left hand was missing the wedding band she'd worn as long as I've known her.
Trained detectives notice stuff like that. And sometimes, we're even smart enough to keep our mouths shut about it.
The file contained the usual paperwork you find in any police report, and a set of crime scene photos. The pictures showed a young-looking guy lyng on a concrete floor, surrounded by a pool of blood. Something long and thin was wrapped around his neck, looked like a ligature of some kind. In the background, I could see metal bookshelves full of thick bound volumes.
'Where'd you find him?' I asked.
'Basement of the Osterhout Free Library,' Lacey said.
I looked at her. 'The killer comes in, offs somebody in a library, and still gets away clean? I would've thought they'd get him for violating the noise policy, if nothing else.'
'The basement doesn't see a lot of use these days, apparently,' she said. 'What's down there is mostly bound collections of old magazines. With all the stuff that's available online these days, why bother? Although I've always had a warm spot for the place in my heart, or maybe lower.'
'Why's that?'
'I gave my first blowjob down there – to my high school boyfriend, when I was fifteen.'
I decided that was someplace I didn't want to go. 'So who's the vic?'
She checked the paperwork. 'Ronald Casimir, twenty-five. Graduate student at Wilkes University.'
'That might explain what he was doing in the library basement,' I said. 'Research of some kind, maybe.' Or he could have been in the market for a good blowjob. I looked closer at a couple of the photos. 'Is that a garrote?'
'Bingo – you got it in one. Haven't seen one of those used around here before.'
'You sure this isn't some Mafia thing? They use wire sometimes, don't they?'
'Not any more,' Lacey said. 'I talked to a guy I know, works the State Police Organized Crime Task Force. He said the wise guys mostly stopped using garrotes back in the Fifties, once reliable silencers were available. Tradition usually gives way before technology, except maybe in Scranton. And besides, there's this.'
She flipped through the photos and pulled one out of the pile. It was a close-up of a man's naked abdomen.
Three esoteric symbols had been carved in the corpse's flesh.
'That look like Guido's work to you?' Lacey asked.
After a long moment, I replied, 'No, but it looks a lot like the kind of stuff I've been seeing on corpses in Scranton, recently.'
