Cry Me a Murder (part nine): The other side of Zero
#9 of Cry Me a Murder
Terminated?
I was one grade away from being targeted for termination by the MI-16. I had already killed three MI-16 agents, and if the MI-16 decided I was to blame for the death of Jack Tell, they would come screaming at me, like a battalion of kamikaze bombers.
I was sure I could take them on, one at a time by shifting into demon form. But every time I shifted, I was inching myself closer to the abyss. Part of me wanted to return to the darkness and to stay in there. But the part I knew best, my human half, knew I would go insane in the dark void - maybe even cease to exist and become demon, full stop. I was caught in a tug-of war between two worlds, with one leg in each camp.
I twiddled the phone in my hand, about to call Quinn. I so wanted to give up, wanted to throw in the towel and tell Quinn to shove his paycheck into the darkest orifice he could find. I wanted to stay with Irene and help her run the Phantom Cat nightclub. Maybe I was no Joe Pass on guitar, but playing Corcovado for fifty paying guests was safe work.
Safe, and dull. What had happened to all my ambitions of becoming a private detective?
I could never put a lid on my demon half, or stop the voices in my head. But I had already come this far, without shifting. Or rather, without shifting knowingly. But I was growing confident, I could solve this case without shifting all together.
It didn't take a demon to see how Darleen and Slater had worked together to wrestle Chris out of the clutches of Jack Tell. Darleen and Chris shared the same strange healing power. Only, Chris cried rubies instead of random crystals.
Of course the old man resisted when Darleen asked him to let go. He'd found himself a golden goose in the son he had ignored for years. Too bad his paternal love was limited to that of slapping the boy around every time he was strapped for cash.
When Jack Tell proved too stubborn to let go of the kid, and too greedy to give a damn. Mr. Tejon was called in to negotiate. But he was growing scared. The more time Tejon spent with Chris and his mother, the more terrified he grew with the boy's connection to a dark world he didn't understand. Eventually he decided to remove Chris, without getting his hands dirty. From his years in international affairs, he knew better than that. When his plot to fix Chris' wheelchair failed, the murderer caught up with Tejon and dragged him into the view of the kitchen CCTV to finish him off. The only camera that was online during the power shortage. The killer wanted not only blood; he wanted to show me, I wasn't the only demon-kin around.
Nurse Richards packed up and left with the rest of the surviving guests.
Had she been planted in the enemy camp all this time, or had she been kidnapped by Darleen and Slater?
If I were to find her, I needed to know her background.
"I'm going back to the convent," she'd cried while she was stuck in the elevator. With only two convents within a hundred miles, Mother Mary's Blessing -a catholic nunnery, and Sisters of Iuna, it took only a phone calls to learn nurse Richards was a long-time sister of Iuna; a cult devoted to the local deity of Iuna, matron saint of light and protection. The sisterhood devoted their lives to protect the needy and the innocent, and there was no doubt she was protective towards Chris Tell. But maybe this time, she had gone zealot, and protection turned into killing?
I borrowed Fernando's beat-up pickup and was mapping the route to the Sisters of Iuna convent, when something moving caught my eye. A single leaf dropped off a plum-tree and landed softly on the surface of Miguel's fish farm. The water was in motion and bubbles rose to the surface near the pump. Within seconds, the current caught the leaf and carried it lazily towards the far end of the pond. Here its brief journey ended by the concrete wall. I was reminded of another falling leaf I'd seen the day I arrived. Only, that one leaf had not been green, but bright red. Red, Like a ruby. Miguel was down by the pond that day, bleeding from his wounded arm, but he wasn't working on the pump that day. He was ditching the one ruby he believed to be cursed. A single gemstone the size of a maize kernel. He threw it high with his good arm and we both watched it blink in the sunlight before it hit the water. The wound was deep and bleeding, days after he hurt his arm, yet nobody had healed it; not Darleen, nor nurse Richards. Miguel was alone with a troubled past and a lovesick heart. He was in love with Catalina and in love with his fish-farm. Even though his bad arm would have hurt like hell, he spent days working on the pump. It came with a small LCD screen that monitored the oxygen level, the pH value and phosphate content. Everything was logged and saved to memory, like the CCTV inside. But this one captured numbers instead of murders. If the ruby was a cursed relic from the abyss, maybe dispatching it had caused fluctuations to some of the values. The control unit held data points from the past two weeks, but every value was rock solid and had remained consistently so, from the day they booted the system to this very second.
Stupid, I thought. It's only a piece of rock, why would it make any change to water quality, I thought and laughed out loud.
Wait!
How could the flow have been stable the day before, while the power was out for hours? A power-cable ran from the pump, across the path and into to the wooden tool shed. Inside, I discovered the cable was attached to a knee high device left on the floor. I didn't need a degree in electrical engineering to recognize the missing UPS from Fernando's "control room." Miguel had borrowed it to power the system while he worked on the pump, only to be arrested before he could put it back, and nobody knew the UPS was here because nobody set foot in the enclosed farm. Nobody except myself and Slater, who found the hidden bag of rubies "near the pump" he explained. But why hadn't the stream dragged the bag along, just like the fallen leaf? Unless someone had planted the bag to frame Miguel.
If I could only find the single ruby he tossed into the pond that day.
I stripped out of my clothes and lowered myself into the water by the far end of the pond, right next to the plum-tree leaf. The water was chill and curious fish of all sizes brushed against my arms and legs. The water stung in my eyes and I had to force myself to keep them open while I searched the cement floor of the pond, carefully brushing the thin layer of mud and dirt from the concrete with my bare hands. After what seemed like an eternity, my lungs were about to burst and I surfaced to gasp for air. I checked my watch, only to see I'd been under for less than forty seconds before my lungs gave up. I cursed my addiction to cigarettes and promised myself to quit smoking once this case was over, but smoking also keeps my symptoms at bay. I waited a few minuets, catching my breath before diving under again. The water stung my eyes and seemed darker than the first time I dived. I raked the smooth bottom my hands, blindly clawing for anything harder than fish shit and wispy seaweed, but thirty seconds later, I surfaced empty handed once again and rasping for another round of air.
I pounded the tiles with my fist. This wasn't fair; I'd never asked for any of this to happen. I never asked to be half demon or to have friends who howl at the moon and hand unsolvable cases over to me, cases that involve tentacles and pulsating gateways to hell.
"You're lying!" said a voice behind me; it was the voice of a child, but the words he spoke changed in my mind the second after he had spoken them, my memory echoed the two words "Lying! You're Lying." Had it been a playful voice? Or an angry one I spun around to face the child, but found noone there.
"Are you in my head" I asked.
"Liar!" Repeated the voice, soft and bubbly like the noise from the pond. "You always wanted this."
"Go away," I shouted and held my ears, well knowing it would not drown out the voice because it originates, not from the outside, but from inside my brain.
"I already have two voices lodged in there," I groaned. "I don't need another one, telling me what to think."
"You want to be a detective?" giggled the voice.
"SO? Every kid wants to be Inspector Gizmo."
"Special, so special." The voice was now that of my sister Katryn, and the words were her response when I first told her I was hearing voices, ten years ago.
"The tentacles are real," said the child again - somehow it was hovering over the pond, but this time I recognized the voice from my father's home videos. It was my own voice from when I was six. Innocent, playful and ten years away from insanity.
"If you don't stop him," said my own voice, "the tentacles will return."
Touché! I thought. The tentacles were real, so were the murders, and the fact I had boasted to agent Dakota how I could crack the case single handed, only hours ago.
"Stop WHO? I cried. "Chris?"
There was no reply; the voices had blown away with the afternoon breeze.
I lowered myself into the water again. The water, now muddy and smoky from the whirling dirt reached my upper chest when I stood up straight. If I couldn't use my eyes to search, maybe I could feel my way. Step by step, I paced the far end of the pool, shuffling slowly and probing the mud with my feet. I took fifteen paces towards the pump, one step to the side, turn and shuffle back again. I repeated the pattern, until something sharp stabbed the bottom of my foot. I froze midstep and stomped on the offending object to keep it in place. I took a deep breath and knelt into the water, retrieving the sharp object -it was a single, cursed, beautiful ruby.
Professor Carswell of the University of San Blas was a tall, skinny man in his mid-fifties, with trousers two inches too short and left a gap that exposed his mismatched socks. He was either color blind or living on his own. He remembered Paul Slater well; a bright student with a vivid imagination matched only by his appetite for women and surfing. "He almost didn't pass," said the professor, thanks to a shark attack that nearly cost Slater a leg, and left him permanently disfigured all over his upper body. He missed a semester while confined to a hospital bed and being tended to by a nurse who raised his spirits. Apparently, She also jumped in the sheets with him before changing them, because they left the hospital together, hand in hand.
"Her name was Diana, I think?" Pondered the professor," or maybe Eileen?"
"How about Darleen?" I suggested.
"Yeah, that's it. You know her?"
"They're still together."
Carswell smiled. "Good! maybe she can talk some sense into him."
"A lot of people have been in need of sensible talking, lately. What was Slater's problem?"
Carswell took off his glasses and polished them with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. "Where do I even start?" He opened a large folder and browsed a pile of A3 sized prints. I recognized the halls and the steps of the Nahuales cave from the photos, but they also showed details I'd missed during my brief visit there with Slater. Carswell pulled out a close up of the doorway of the mural and pointed his desk lamp at the inscription above the door.
"Slater was convinced the inscription reads MARIAH, as in love." Carswell focused his magnifying glass on a blank space next to the inscription. "But look at the white space before the M, and after the H. It's two letters too wide. The original would have read TA-MARIAH: this mural shows an group of outside emissaries visiting the lost library of Tamaria."
"The last time I took out a library book was six years ago. I wouldn't know a lost library if I found one."
Carswell laughed. "Tamaria was like the library of Alexandria, but older. According to Mexican history, this library was open to the most learned men until its destruction during the Greek occupation in 1500BC. My guess is, Aristotle told his student Demetrius about Tamaria, and it was he who convinced King Ptolemy to rebuild a new construction."
"The Balam cat-people knew how to read?"
"Cat-people!" Carswel sniffed, and handed me his loupe. He pointed to one detail all the Balam heads had in common: the heads were proportionally larger than their bodies and all displayed the same, unsmiling, frozen expression.
"Large heads with frozen smiles?" I asked.
"Masks," replied Carswell. "The Balam dressed in animal costumes for ceremonial purposes, just like norse berserkers in bear skins, or south American jaguar men in leopard hides."
"So... the Balam tribe were not were-creatures?"
Carswell looked at me intensely over the rim of his wireframe spectacles, like he would look at some hopeless student.
"Were...creatures...indeed" He emphasized each syllable, as to highlight the stupidity of my question, and I quickly changed the subject to the identical bracelets every Balam in the mural wore around the right wrist. They were shaped like two interwoven branches, with red dots in between that looked like berries. Seeing my interest in the subject, Carswell warmed to me again. "Laurels," he said, "represent wisdom. Gaining admission to the library of Tamaria was an exclusive honor awarded to the privileged few. The bracelet was like a library card, and owning one..." Carswell whistled. "It wasn't a common thing. Then, imagine a tribe with enough bracelets to send a whole convoy into the library."
"And the red berries between the laurel leaves. What would that be?"
Carswell unlocked a drawer in a heavy steel cabinet and took out a bundle of faded, blue velvet, which he unwrapped under the desk-lamp.
"This is an original bracelet," he whispered, glancing around nervously, as if he expected thieves to materialize out of thin air to steal the artefact. "The bracelets could be forged, so they added gemstones to the design - rubies to be precise." Several rubies had fallen out of Carswell's bracelet, leaving corn-sized holes in the filigé, but enough had survived over the years. Dusty but bright red and resembling the tears of Chris Tell. "The secret was," said Carswell. "The bracelet didn't open the door - the rubies did."
Carsewell said no more, but simply nodded and expected me to understand the extreme value of the library bracelets. Back in 1500BC, San Blas was the trade capitol for the Balam tribes, much like Timbuktu or Samarkand centuries later. The site now known as the Nahuales cave was a greeting room for guests and traveling caravans wishing to trade with the Balam. Foreign chiefs were welcomed and treated as honored guests with drinks and fruit, but surrounded on all sides by colorful paintings, screaming:
hey! Motherfucker; we're wise, powerful and we can claw you up, so don't think you can dick with us when we do business.
The murals was a brute display of money and power - but what better way to secure a fair trade?
"But the tribal sacrifice, and the abyss?" I asked.
Carswell laughed. "All in Slater's mind, a strange fancy of his, he even built his thesis around that myth. We dismissed it of course."
"We?"
"The external and myself. Gods! how Slater argued to have us accept it."
"But he still got his degree?"
Carswell let out a heartfelt sigh. "Professor Altschuler, the external had a sudden change of heart, and allowed Slater to pass the course. I mean, the thesis was well written, even if his interpretation of the mural was ...unorthodox."
Professor Carswell took off his glasses and gazed into infinity, thoughtfully rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Pity," he said. "This was the last time we called on Dr. Altschuler as an external."
"Maybe he let slater pass, before retiring?"
"Retiring?" Carswell looked puzzled, "no!", then with some afterthought he added
"Professor Altschuler is a hopeless alcoholic."
Professor Altschuler lived alone on the outskirts of San Blas. His bungalow, once fashionable was now in disarray, the garden overgrown, the woodwork peeling, and the windows were covered in year-old grime. When I rang his doorbell, the professor peeked out from behind a curtain and looked me over with bloodshot eyes framed in grey puffy bags. Minutes later, he opened the door two inches. His breath carried the faint but tell-tale sweetness of straight vodka. Every alcoholic knows how to hide his habit behind the wall of vodka, which carries no scent, unlike bourbon or beer. But the odor of unwash that radiated from the professor could not be covered up if he showered himself in Talisker. He invited me inside, and I seated myself on a couch between two piles of Mexico City Gazette dating back several years.
"Drink?" Altschuler offered me a half-gallon bottle of Ranting Griffon Vodka.
"I don't drink," I said in near accordance with the truth.
"I don't trust anyone who doesn't drink," slurred Altschuler. "People who don't drink have something to hide."
"I'd like to ask you about a former student: Paul Slater."
"Aw, MAN! Altschuler slumped into a worn recliner by the TV. "Slater is the reason for my present condition."
"I know you rejected his thesis, but was it really that bad?"
Altschuler stared at the TV for a long time. It wasn't turned on and the screen projected only a colorless reflection of the professor. I began to fear he had gone catatonic on me, but the occasional swig from his bottle proved he was still with me. By mentioning Slater's thesis, I had ripped into a painful memory, but he had something he wanted to share, and he was now searching for the words in that labyrinth of cooked neurons that was once a brilliant mind.
"I got his thesis right here." Altschuler staggered to his bookcase, crammed with reports and theses dating back to the seventies. The older ones were typed on thick, yellowing paper, the recent ones printed in inkjet with covers showing scanned images of antique artifacts.
"Slater came to my house a week after we rejected this." He pushed a worn copy of Slater's thesis across the table with an ivory letter opener, as if he was afraid of touching it barehanded.
"He called me up the night before his defense, said he had some new evidence he'd like to discuss. Half an hour later, he showed up at my door, barefooted and shirtless. I was about to make a comment, when I realized something was wrong -dead wrong."
"He was disfigured from the shark attack?"
"That's the problem!" slurred Altschuler and breathed fumes of vodka in my face that made me take an involuntary step back. "There was nothing to see!" he rasped. "No scars, no wounds, no bandages. When Carswell visited him in the hospital one week earlier, Slater was barely conscious. But now he didn't have as much as a single nick from shaving."
"That's incredible."
Altschuler leaned on the desk with both hands, he stared at the texture of the dark oak while breathing in shallow gulps
"Do you... believe in demons, Mr Kent?"
"I do. In fact, I've known a few."
Altschuler looked up but held on to his desk; the only thing in recent years that hadn't slipped through his fingers.
"You're not mocking me," he said. "I can hear it in your tone of voice."
"Mocking someone won't get me to the bottom of the case."
"He's a monster," said Altsculer, his voice little more than a whisper. "Slater changed before my eyes. He changed into a monster, a nightmare creature all covered in fur and with horns mounted on a lion's head." Altschuler took a massive draught from the bottle. "Want some?"
"Err. No.. I had vodka for breakfast."
"Slater, or whoever he had turned into, lifted me off the ground by the scruff of my neck and shook me like a puppy. Imagine that, a student half my age shaking his external like some ragdoll. Slater's voice no longer human, dropped to a terrible growl.
Do you believe me now? He repeated...Do you believe me now?
He could have snapped my neck like a pretzel stick." Altschuler slumped into his worn leather couch, his gaze once again turned to the unplugged TV. It was the first time he'd shared his story with anyone. His hands trembled from exhaustion but he looked lighter now the load of his secret had been lifted off his shoulders.
"Do you think there's more of them out there?"
"I know there's at least one more of his kind," I said. "And if Slater is not stopped, we may only have seen the beginning.
"You need a drink," said Altschuler and offered me his bottle. "We both do..."
This time I accepted.
TO BE CONCLUDED