Signatures
A fantasy novel
James A. Hetley
www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café Edition
January 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-472-7
Copyright © 2015 James A. Hetley
I
I’ll say it right up front, parts of this story are lies.I’ve left important stuff out and added other things to serve as decoys. I’veplayed a shell game with locations and dates so you can’t tie this story down.And, like the bit at the start of that old TV show said, the names have beenchanged to protect the innocent. Or the guilty, as the case may be.
I did things I’m not proud of, laws broken and promises brokenand hopes broken, and the statute of limitations hasn’t run out on any of them.More to the point, there’s this trick I’d rather no bright boy or girl figuredout how to do again. It’s dead and gone now, and I’d like it to stay dead. AndI don’t have to obey that oath to protect and to serve anymore.
I did the best I could, with what I knew.
~~~
I sat in the passenger seat and stared out through therain-streaked windshield, grumbling to myself. Detective Sergeant Cash had aproblem. She thought I could help — she’d run into something where memory and aquarter-century of following the nasty twists and traps of criminal magic couldbe more important than youth and vigor and a sense of invincibility.
I hoped I’d retired from all that when I handed in my badge.Wrong. So I’d climbed into her old State Patrol cruiser and we went for alittle ride.
We pulled up to yellow crime-scene tape down near thewaterfront — a couple of local cruisers, the Medical Examiner’s meat-wagonwaiting, a beat cop standing by to keep the civilians moving along. Theneighborhood was a dump, old warehouses with the doors kicked in and graffitikid-gang messages spray-painted on brick walls, broken sawtooth skylights inplaces where the whole roof hadn’t started to cave in. I heaved my bulk out ofthe cruiser into the chill drizzle and decaying city stink of a Novemberevening, nodded to the cop, and ducked under the yellow tape.
He’d wiped the welcome off his face and edged away, trying notto show it, as soon as he’d read the shield decal on the cruiser door andrecognized Cash and knew what I must be. I was used to that.
Cash led me through what had once been an office door.Detective Sergeant Nefertiti Aswan Cash — long and lean and walnut skin andcorn-rowed hair under her Smokey-Bear hat, silent like a hunting lionessthrough the tall-grass savannah of her ancestors. Inside matched the atmosphereoutside — dark dusty abandoned rooms with empty desks and overturned, guttedfile cabinets, piles of mildewed cardboard and piss-smelling rags for winobeds, a few circles of char through the vinyl tile to cracked concrete markingcook-fires. We followed an aisle of more yellow tape that kept our feet out ofthe evidence. Around a corner and through a missing door into the mainwarehouse bay, we found the crime-scene crew and the portable light standsthrowing harsh blue-white halogen glare into shadow.
A dead man lay on the dirty concrete slab, face up. Surroundedby his guts, artistically arranged without benefit of surgery. My own gutlurched. I’d seen that pose before. Photos strobed in my memory, the earliestones black and white, old Speed-Graphic stuff, the later ones in color andclose-up details with the cold clinical lighting of tripod-mounted Nikons withmacro lenses and ring-flash.
I didn’t want to remember those photos and the scenes theycame from. I couldn’t forget them.
Blood puddled around the corpse, around each severed organ,but nowhere near as much as you’d expect. The killer had known the trick ofgathering the power around him and reaching inside a man to pull out this andthat without breaking the skin. Magic. There were other fluids, too, slowlydrying, stiffening, a few hours old.
I squatted, keeping clear of the mess, and sniffed. This waswhere decades of tobacco and sour-mash whiskey helped — muting the stink of deathso I could reach beyond that into the world between and smell what hid there. Iran my right hand up and down his corpse, not touching, searching for his aurato get a sense of how long ago he’d died. Too long. No trace.
I touched things, rubbed stuff between my fingers and tastedit — wizards like me don’t need to worry much about blood-borne disease — feltthe vibrations. Remembered.
Albert Kratz. I stared off into the shadows, both the realones in the abandoned warehouse and those haunting my nightmares. “Bastard. We all thought he died in thefire.”
“Yeah.” Cash broke the cycle of memories and then started themup again, picking off points on her fingers. “Bone crumbles, human ash, thatplatinum bracelet with the Kabalistic bits engraved on it that fit too tight topull off over his hand. Teeth that pretty much matched his dental records, ifyou allow for the fillings melting out. Albert Kratz, AKA Albertus Magnus.”
That was Cash, files in her head from cases older than shewas. Kratz didn’t go that far back, but I knew she burrowed deep. Andremembered everything. I’d taught her a lot, but pure talent goes way beyondteaching.
“God damn him straight to hell.” I don’t swear much, not outloud. Words carry too much power in my profession. But that could qualify as aprayer, if you want to get technical. Anyway, this deserved a few choicecurses.
Cash nodded. “I walked in here, remembered the photos in yourcase files, and knew who I had to call. You’re the only one still around whodealt with him.”
I stared at her for a few moments, one eyebrow lifted.
She grimaced. “Okay, okay. But you know damn well Sandy wouldn’ttell me if my hair caught fire.”
Sandy Cormier had been my assistant on the Kratz team, longyears ago. And Cash was right — those two women never did get along.
I wouldn’t want to drag Sandy into this. She’d left the forceeven before I had. I shrugged and waved at the mess on the floor. “Who was he?”
“Diplomatic courier. Name was Robert Smith. That’s what theState Department told us, anyway. Don’t know why they didn’t just use ‘John Doe’on his passport
