The official tale was, a faulty valve had bled pure oxygeninto the room, where it hit a flammable solvent. Spontaneous combustion. Boom.Me, I remained skeptical. I had this suspicion, just a suspicion, that hospital staff would take a pretty heavy course onkeeping flammables away from oxygen. Not just “No Smoking” signs, either, butlimits on what was allowed in the building in the first place and where itcould be stored and used.
Malfunctioning oxygen valve, maybe, flammable solvent maybe,but I suspected something simpler. Like a hand grenade. Sandy had been able tocome up with bombs for both our cars . . .
Had Cash been in the room when it happened? I didn’t darecheck. I just had to go with the no-casualties report and pray.
I sent her colonel an email message, public-key encryption toa password-protected address he’d said only he could read, still not mentioningany names, saying I had to think the breach in security tied back to mesomehow. That I didn’t dare guard her, even visit her, until I got that sortedout. Please arrange other security, give my excuses to her, etc.
And I had to assume he had a way to bypass the secrecy, withthe witness protection protocols and all. That sort of thing was need-to-know,and I wasn’t on that list.
Anyway, I shut down my computer after wiping any copy of thatmessage, checked my weapons, and went bird-hunting. Non-lethally, of course. Istopped by at Sandy’s apartment on the way down, but I couldn’t find any signthat she’d come back. I went through the place again, with a clear head andtime, and still didn’t find any clues a serial killer might have left behind.Found a new message on her answering machine from that FBI supervisor, askingif she’d heard from Bycheck. I left it there, blinking and beeping to itself.
Serial killer. I still couldn’t wrap my head around what I’dworked out. John Doe. Wolfgang. Reverend Fred and his sweetie-boy. I had tocount Bycheck. Those all tied together. The attacks on me hadn’t been serious,she was just trying to cover her connection to the other crimes, perhaps makeme back off a step or two.
Cash she hated with a blind jealous rage.
The woman and her kid, those had hurt Sandy. She hadn’texpected collateral damage, innocents caught in the blast. She knew we alwaysparked away from other cars. I’d made that part of the new Gospel according toJohn, the revised magic-cop catechism written by John Patterson, Member ASFT. I’dtried to institutionalize paranoia for cops dealing with rogue wizards,reinforced by recent events.
Along paranoid lines, I’d left a few new layers of guard on myplace, given that she had keys and knew the codes for my alarm system. I didn’tthink she’d come back there, either,but I’d found some flaws in my mental model of Sandy Cormier.
Meanwhile, back at bird-watching . . . that wasanother thing I’d worked out, during my three-legged prowl through the nightand fog. I’d been thinking of reaching into forbidden magic to hunt Kratz down.Now that his changed and unknown face had morphed into Sandy’s familiarfeatures, that cost/benefit ratio improved. I knew what she looked like, knew her car, knew her signature like I knew myown. She would change her habits, probably would ditch that old Mercedes — shemight be crazy but she wasn’t dumb. I still had a better chance of finding herin this city than I’d ever had with Kratz.
And I felt sure that she hadn’t left the city. The things she’dtaken, more importantly the things she hadn’ttaken, said she didn’t plan on going far. I know her kitchen like I know myown. She hadn’t even packed a lunch.
So I needed to get back in touch with Mrs. Red-tail. I’d foundher smart and keen but she flew slow enough for me to grab onto and ride andwatch and understand what I was seeing. She didn’t seem to mind when I slippedinto her head, and she recognized Sandy as a witch.
I’d decided on a different route this time. I had worked up alist of things to try, things to avoid if possible, but I knew I was walkingblindfolded into a minefield. Blindfolded, with a broken leg, and with thisimage in my head of a steam locomotive roaring down toward Little Nell tiedacross the tracks and screaming. Not that Cash had any resemblance to thecurly-headed brainless blond heroine of silent movies.
But Cash strapped to a hospital bed to force her to actsensible and with an arm and a leg hanging in midair from weights and pulleys —that came too damned close to being tied up helpless across the railroadtracks. I hoped she hadn’t been inthat room when the shit hit the fan. Or the oxygen hit the acetone, or thegrenade popped.
All I could do was hope.
Would Sandy have bombed an empty room? That was another thingI’d chewed on, 4 AM in the dark foggy alleys and byways of our fair city. Cashcould be damned hard to see, to hear, to feel,when she wasn’t being brazen. Quiet, like I’ve said. I hadn’t heard her comingdown the hall to my office, way back when. Hell, I hadn’t even heard her whenshe was walking right next to me — that stalking leopard impression she gave.It was part of those stealth-magic witchdoctor genes, I guess.
I doubted if Sandy could have buggered that oxygen valve fromoutside, going by “touch.” That would be ideal, if I was planning some suchtrick. Wait a while for the gas to spread, then open the door and toss in thebottle and duck. Boom. You wouldn’t want to be in there when it happened,wizard or not. Shields might block flying stuff and flame, but they don’tsupply oxygen or keep out poison fumes.
More likely she’d fuzzed herself to walk past the informationdesk and then the nurse station, opened the door just enough to reach inside,and tossed a grenade far enough to land on the bed. No
