“That seems a little harsh.”
Bill shook his head. “I don’t mean it that way. You know how some guys treat girls as arm candy? Well, she treats guys that way. It’s nothing malicious, and they know their purpose. Hell, most guys would do anything to get in her pants, you know? But I would look at her stalkers.”
“Stalkers? Plural?”
“Yeah. She’s always complaining about geeks following her around and old guys staring at her. She attracts them like a magnet.”
“Any names?”
“Naw, not really. Except Eleanor Johansson’s father. But he letches after all the girls, even his daughter. I think he just likes to look. I’ve never heard a girl say he’s tried to touch her.”
Two votes for Martin Johansson. Definitely someone I needed to check out.
I still had a couple of hours before I needed to meet Novak, so I dropped by my house. Our neighborhood dated to the middle twentieth century, clapboard and brick one and two-story homes built by prosperous businessmen and professional people. Not nearly as large or fancy as those in Roland Park where Sarah lived but nicer than the working-class row houses that covered so much of old Baltimore. I used my computer to check the department’s Missing Persons database. They hadn’t written Sarah off, they just weren’t working on her case. I flipped a priority tag on her and inserted my name as the case contact.
I had worked Missing Persons for about six months, so I knew the routine. I ran the standard searches for traffic citations, towed vehicles, train and plane ticket purchasers compared to her picture, arrests, Jane Does, and everything else I could think of. Nothing turned up, but I felt I had eliminated the standard means Sarah could have used to disappear. Her credit card still hadn’t been used.
Chapter 7
I picked up Novak at the station so we could head to Washington. On the way out of the building, Whittaker caught up with us.
“James. Ruth Harrison will meet you in DC.”
Best news I’d heard all day. I gave him a smile. “Fantastic. Thanks.” Ruth was a detector—magik, magikal residues, spells, artifacts. If magik or any kind of Rift influence had even breathed in a stadium, Ruth could tell.
Before the First Atomic War, Washington and Baltimore had been separate cities—although the space between them was filled with suburbs—each with their own police departments. When the nukes hit Washington, that changed. Multiple police departments proved to be too unwieldy and uncoordinated, especially later when dealing with beings crossing the Rift.
Although it made sense to use scarce resources wisely, the distance between North Baltimore and South Washington was daunting for those of us whose responsibility spanned the entire metropolitan area. I hit the freeway out of Baltimore, and as soon as I had an open space in front of me, I drew a rune in the air in front of the dash. A matching sigil lit up in red, and I sent my magik into the converter. The sigil turned silver. The car lifted off the ground and gained altitude.
“What the hell?” Novak looked to be even more terrified than he had facing the purple pizza-trash eater.
“I’ve modified the car,” I said, pushing the accelerator to the floor and setting the cruise control. We leveled off fifty feet above the freeway at one hundred fifty miles an hour.
“Modified the car?”
“Yeah. I’m a magitek, remember? Installed a magitek converter, baffles and directional controls. Hell, it would take us forever to get to DC in this traffic if we stayed on the ground.”
“I-I didn’t know you could do something like this.”
“Sure. I mean, most people just think of us controlling the light switches in a house, or enhancing the velocity of a pistol like the Raider, but there’s a lot of things we can do with electricity and machinery.”
The converter I had installed in the Toyota took the magik I fed it and turned it into kinetic energy. Although the car was a normal hydrogen-electric hybrid, I hadn’t changed the hydrogen cell or plugged it into an electric socket in over a year.
Most people had no concept at all of magitek, and that included other mages. There were three kinds of magitek devices—enhancers, converters, and disrupters. The latter were considered quasi-legal. They had legitimate uses, but a lot of illegitimate uses as well.
The majority of those mages with tek ability worked in engineering labs and factories, creating and building the enhancers and converters used to channel magik into operating electrical and mechanical devices. If that was all it could be used for, it was still pretty neat, although limited. I didn’t doubt that Diana Benning enjoyed waving her hand and having the lights come on and her favorite music play. Parlor tricks.
If I hadn’t become a cop, that is where I would have been with my university degree in magikal engineering—sitting in a cubical in a windowless building somewhere, designing magikal blenders or datanet routers and going completely stir crazy.
Some teks were experimenting with wormholes. Instant transport. Maybe a trip to the stars someday. Teks doing that kind of work had enhancers implanted in their brains. Expensive, and considered radical. Many of the churches were against it, and the ethics were hotly debated, along with other types of mechanical and electronic enhancements.
I hated arguments, so I never mentioned the enhancement I had. Nobody’s business but mine.
Of course, there were downsides to being a magitek that no one liked to talk about. Don’t even get me started on the registration laws. I was prohibited from working in certain occupations. The law barred me from coming within a mile of a nuclear power plant or weapons facility. With the surname James, I was surprised there wasn’t a special provision that made that limit fifty miles. I often wished my grandfather had really thought the thing through. I mean, in what world would a magikally enhanced nuclear
