Signatures Read online

  There was that hunting cat again. I reminded myself for maybe the hundredth time that I never wanted to become her prey. Cash was just about the best cop I knew, the best I’d ever known, smart and tough and dedicated, with that twisty edge to be able to follow twisty minds and catch them, able to step back from a problem and tell where the “book” would work and where it wouldn’t. She made me proud — I’d helped train her, the first couple of years out of college and the police academy, before she moved on to the state force.

  Yeah, if she thought she needed me on a case, I’d go.

  She’d parked her cruiser at the curb, smack in the middle of a no-parking zone, but the meter-maid would ignore it. Professional courtesy. I relaxed a touch — the Professional Regulation unit still used those big old-model Crown Victorias.

  The rest of the State Patrol had switched to downsized cruisers, but I guess some rare genius remembered just what “Professional Regulation” did and who they worked with. The shotgun seat up front was a custom job and sat on extended rails, enough room for a big butt and big belly, and they’d mounted the radio head clear of my knees.

  She cranked it and pulled out into thin traffic, windshield wipers thumping, left and right and a couple of blocks and right again down toward the waterfront, she stopped at a light and turned to me.

  “You and Sandy still getting together?”

  Odd question, no context. I nodded. Sandy. Sandra Cormier, classmate to Maggie and me at college, roommate of Maggie’s. The funny thing was I started out dating Sandy and ended up with Maggie in the silly bed-hopping of our freshman and sophomore years. We’d eased back to being friends again after a period of Category 5 hurricanes, practically a three-way, but Maggie was just more comfortable to be with. I never could have lived with Sandy, even though the sex had been good.

  Couldn’t live with her now, but the sex was still good, even at our age. Wizards and witches usually live alone — that mental noise thing, again. Anyway, Sandy showed up at my apartment door one evening a week after Maggie’s sentencing. She told me she was taking me out for drinks and she’d lay a compulsion on me if I didn’t come along quietly.

  I didn’t argue. A drink or two or ten sounded like a good idea. We ended up in bed, of course, crying all over each other. She filled a hole in my life, if you don’t mind cross-gendered innuendos.

  II

  We pulled up to that crime-scene tape, went inside, and I found a bunch of nasty memories risen all too solid from their grave.

  I sniffed along Kratz’s trail through rat-piss shadows and trash in the warehouse to another kicked-in door that led out into cold drizzle and a dark musty alley, the sort of place your mother warned you to stay out of. I could feel that the place was empty, safe except for the chance of breaking an ankle in a pothole hidden by the shadows.

  One thing caught my eye, out of place, a bit of red spray-paint graffiti next to that door. It looked fresher than the rest, almost new, and splashed a Russian Orthodox cross over the grime, the one with the extra cross-bar at the top and a third one lower at a slant. It didn’t fit. I stepped over to it and sniffed. Yes, fresh paint, day old or less. But I didn’t sense magic involved, no signature, just paint. I waved at one of the forensic photographers and pointed at the cross. She gave me a thumbs-up back. Either they already had it or would get it, no sweat. They knew their jobs.

  So I headed out. Cash followed me, a ghost in the twilight, keeping well back beyond the edge of my space, my touch. She knew how far — we’d worked this two-legged bloodhound bit a dozen times before. The buzzing residue vanished into wet night air. No surprise there. Kratz had been crazy, but nobody ever claimed he was stupid. He could break his trail just by climbing into a car and driving off.

  A big car, probably, like my old Lincoln, which didn’t narrow the search a hell of a lot. He’d been just as fat as the average high-powered mage. We’d guessed that was why his miserable carcass had burned as well as it had.

  Or hadn’t, it seemed. Maybe he’d soaked some graveyard bone in his own blood, to provide that DNA for the lab-rats to tease out of the ash. Other tricks he could have tried, now that I had to think about it, wizard tricks. We’d been so sure. . . .

  I stood there, staring into the dark drizzle, wondering. Cash came out of the shadows behind me and stood there, doing the same thing.

  Finally she broke the silence. “Any chance we’ve got a copycat?”

  I shook my head. “After all these years? Copycats usually do current stuff, newspaper stuff. And it’d have to be someone on the force or with contacts inside the force. Details — things about the crime scenes that never made the papers.” As if a newspaper would ever print those pictures. Talk about killing circulation.

  “More than that, the bastard had one of the most distinctive signatures I’ve ever tasted — part of being a certified psychopath, I guess. Best I can describe it, he’d set your teeth on edge, sort of like a mistuned violin played by a beginner. Or maybe a twin-engine plane with the engines out of sync — a beat-note that made you want to puke just listening to it.”

  She mulled that over for a while. I could hear the straight forensics guys and the local force’s current mage working inside, pointing out this and that to each other, bagging chunks from the butcher’s shop and shining UV light around and placing numbered tags on spots of blood, all the other stuff you do on a crime scene these days. Occasional bits of strobe flash leaked out to us in the alley, depending on their aim. I’d been there so many times, I could see them working just by the sounds.

  I broke the silence. “Can you get me copies of the ME’s report, the lab work, photos, the whole nine yards?”

  “Be a hell of a lot easier if you took the Colonel up on his offer. With the diplomatic courier angle, we can claim an interest. If the FBI doesn’t shove us all to one side and clamp down in the name of National Security.”

  “Forget about that state patrol job. I never wanted to be a boss. Bureaucratic baloney up the ass. I don’t even like giving orders to myself.”

  That drew another shrug, barely visible in the darkness. “Your karma. Like I said, we need you. Last I heard, the state hadn’t passed a law that says we can draft you.” She stood there in the shadows, silent. Then, “I wonder where he was hiding for all those years.”

  That question had been bothering me, as well. “Must have been out of the country. Back when, we never went more than a year without hearing from him, seeing his MO. At that, I wonder if we found half his victims. Sometimes the bastard would call one of us up in the middle of the night and tell us where to look. Taunting.”

  Cash was no dummy, not a thickskulled Watson to serve as a foil for my brilliant Holmes. She’d earned her rank and then some, a black woman in a white-male cop’s world. She jumped right over my words and finished the thought.

  “To hell with where he went — why’d he come back? I can name a couple dozen places where he could play to his twisted little heart’s content and nobody would care. Care? Hell, some countries, the government thugs would hire him.”

  She stopped and stared at me. I stared back. She nodded as another piece clicked into place. It didn’t make the jigsaw puzzle any prettier, though.

  “Be real useful if you could find out what John Doe in there was carrying.” I was the one who said it, but we both hit the finish line together.

  “Anything else I need to see?”

  She thought about it for a moment and shook her head. “Nah. The city’s latest witch-sniffer knows his stuff. He just doesn’t have your memory.”

  Sometimes I wished I didn’t have my memory. “I didn’t recognize him. Where’s he from?”

  “Heard he went to Penn State on GI benefits and then got a job with the New Orleans force. Got tired of his weekly dose of vampire hoaxes and all-too-real Voodoo. Yankee white-boy, never got into that gris-gris world, no taste for gumbo or for chicory in his coffee. Name’s Pennington. Been up here for two years now.”

  Ouch. Two years on the local force, and I didn’t recognize him. I’d been living under a rock since Maggie’s trial.

  Cash read my mind. “Pull yo’ head out of yo’ ass, honkey.” She only revved up that street-jive when she wanted to slap sense into someone. “Your girlfriend screwed up and left her signature on a magical crime. You’ve been in a funk ever since. Five other mages testified against Maggie Driscoll, and then there was the physical evidence. You didn’t put her in the Big House. She put herself there.”

  I couldn’t see any point in arguing, so I started hiking back to her cruiser. Everything else in Maggie’s case had been circumstantial. The evidence could have pointed in ten different directions, pointed to ten different people. I had to be the one who tied it all up in one neat package with her name dangling from the bow.

  I decided to change the subject. “What’s with the super-cop costume? Your colonel’s gone all starch and polish? Last time I saw you on a case, you were wearing a track suit and running shoes.”

  “Recruit graduation at the Academy this morning, putting on a show for the new kids. Boss said we had to look like real cops, even if we think we’re prime-time TV prima-donnas. Heard the call for this mess before I got home to change, then headed straight over to your office when I saw what they’d found.”

  Around the corner of the warehouse, the city cruisers and mobile lab still waited in spitting rain, flashers blinking blue light off the walls and broken glass and wet pavement. It made a depressing scene, one that I’d walked through about a hundred times too many, on my way to or from something Al Kratz or his spiritual kin left behind. Over twenty years of somethings. That was what had really burned me out. Maggie had just underlined it. The last straw, like I said.

  Hell, Kratz hadn’t even been the worst. Top rank for that went to a perp we couldn’t prosecute, a “national security” case where the Feds confiscated our files and damn near confiscated our brains as well. I was lucky to still be walking the street rather than living on some quiet island with a minder from the CIA or the NSA running my shit through a gas-chromatograph to make sure I wasn’t slipping out chemically-coded messages through the sewer outfall.

  I shook off those thoughts. Cash was staring at me, like she’d read my mind again. I wondered if she actually was sensitive, if the testing had missed something. The answer, of course, was “no” — Cash was just a sharp and observant woman, sharp as a shiny new razor blade.

  She lifted a hand off the cruiser door and waved an apology. “Look, man, I’m sorry to drag you into this. I know it hurts. If I could do the things you do, I’d leave you dozing in the sun.”

  I opened the passenger door and heaved myself inside, settling into that custom seat. “Yeah. And if you could do the things I do, you wouldn’t be wearing that uniform. You’d be open to a couple-dozen attacks that won’t affect a normal person. And they’d never trust you with anything more important than the access codes to the copier. That’s why they ran you through testing until you wept blood before they’d let you on the unit. Your Colonel is blowing smoke rings out his ass if he thinks he could ever get a trained wizard confirmed to captain on the State Patrol.”

  To most people, we’re freaks. That is, if we’re not straight-out Spawn of Satan complete with cloven hooves hidden in our shoes and tails tucked down our pants. Wizards, known or latent, make up maybe one percent of the population. They probably always have. Your average John Doe is scared shitless by magic, afraid of anyone who can use it. And fear breeds hate.

  Besides, my abilities are a good-news, bad-news joke. You want to live to be eighty, ninety, or die at sixty of a stroke or heart attack or diabetes? That’s the average natural life expectancy of a male wizard. Women stretch it another three years or so, just like normal people. Something about the scrambled connections in the corpus callosum or the other screwed-up bits in our brains, the way our bodies handle lipoproteins, other things.

  And few wizards or witches reach a natural death.

  Hell, if that new mage — Pennington, I glued the name into my memory with his face and “signature” — went to college on GI benefits, he must have slipped past pediatric testing and the enlistment physical or they never would have sworn him in. He probably manifested under combat stress and ended up with an instant discharge “for the good of the service.” Army, Navy, Air Force, they’re just as touchy about magic in the ranks as they are about homosexuals. Don’t want some private getting pissed at his damnfool lieutenant and causing a little accident under fire.

  Sure, they have mages in the service. Trained mages, officers in special units with straight commanders who keep a beady eagle-eye on everything they do. They wouldn’t touch anyone who might go on to mage training after service.

  Yeah, “queers” make a good comparison. Both of us live on the thin edge of what society will tolerate. Which side of that edge can change in a heartbeat. It colors everything we do.

  “You want me to drop you off at your office or your apartment?”

  Cash broke me out of dark thoughts. She’d driven us all the way back uptown in that little reverie, smooth and competent and silent like everything she did. I could get used to having that kind of woman around. But any “relationship” with a wizard could kill her career just as dead as if she could levitate a paperclip.

  “Apartment, please. I was about to knock off for the day when you showed up.” And I didn’t feel like dragging this mood into Charlie’s Bar and Grill — nice guy, he didn’t deserve my dark cloud chasing off the paying customers. And I had beer in the fridge.

  Beer, or maybe a shot or five of Jack Daniels. I could still taste Kratz in the back of my throat. That bastard’s stink hung around like a skunk’s spray.

  A couple more turns, and she pulled the cruiser over to the curb in front of my apartment. She’d driven to the precise point where she had to make a choice before breaking into my thoughts. I still wondered if the state testing had missed something.

  Not my problem.

  We sat there for a minute, then two, then three. I was chewing on bad thoughts and figured Cash was. But she turned to me and cocked her head to one side.

  “You ever hear from Maggie?”

  Not what I expected. But she’d known and worked a lot with both of us, back when.

  “You think that’s likely? She’s doing ten to twenty behind copper mesh and cold iron, and I’m the one who put her there. Sorta drives the nails into the old relationship coffin.”

  Hell of it was, I did hear from her every few weeks, letters on prison stationery with bits censored and the “signature” of some mage or another on the paper telling me that The Man still felt nervous about her record and her skills. She didn’t seem to carry a grudge. I would have.

  And she still claimed she was innocent.

  I unbuckled the seatbelt, started to hoist myself out of the cruiser, and Cash reached across to touch my wrist. “I’ll pass those reports on to you, soon as we get ’em. And about your Kratz MO — someone called that corpse in, anonymous. From a pay phone. Just like you said he used to do, when he felt like thumbing his nose at the cops.”

  She was strictly business, from the words and tone. Something besides business lurked in her touch and in her eyes. She wasn’t afraid of magic.

  She’d had a schoolgirl crush on me when I was training her as a rookie cop. Damned if I know why. Totally off-limits in about five ways, and I’d ignored every signal she’d sent. Then she went off to the state unit, and I’d filed it away as a closed case. Maybe it wasn’t.

  She wasn’t afraid of the scandal a white man and a black woman would cause, either. But that social stigma had faded a lot since I was young. Maybe the human race was proving it could evolve at least a little.

  A fat, balding old man with a skinny attractive young woman of any color, now — that bit of back-biting was still alive and well. She didn’t need that. I didn’t, either. No way I was going to follow up on what she seemed to be offering.

  “Thanks. I don’t have a clue how I’m going to move on this. Sit and think for a few days, probably. Took us almost ten years to nail him, last time. The bastard may be crazy, but he’s crazy like a fox. He won’t make the same mistakes twice.”

  And then there was the government angle, whatever government it was. I didn’t need that complication.

  She looked me in the eyes, a slight smile on her lips. She knew what she was doing and knew I knew. A dangerous woman in several senses of the word. “See you around.”

  Her cruiser pulled away with a growl of muted power and left me on the wet sidewalk in front of my apartment. Left me with the taste of Al Kratz still buzzing in the back of my throat.

  I shook my head. I didn’t need any of these complications. Maybe enough sour-mash whisky would wash that taste from my mouth.

  Taste. I shouldn’t still be remembering it, carrying it. I stopped mooning over Nef Cash. I sniffed — damp November air, chilly, drizzle still threatening to turn into something else. Wet pavement smell, exhaust from the cruiser, the earthy scent of autumn leaves blown in from the park, a waft of scorched garlic from the Chinese restaurant in the next block.

  Al Kratz.

  Not memory. Here. Faint, as if he’d passed an hour or two ago. My address was in the phone book. I never saw the need for an unlisted number, even when I was on the force. Now, private practice, I wanted people to be able to call me outside of office hours if they had a problem.

  And Al Kratz knew who’d nailed him the last time.

  I stepped across to the outer door of the apartment building. His signature polluted the door knob. And you wouldn’t need to be a wizard to get through the electric inner lock. Just buzz apartments until someone hit the release, a move straight out of a hundred detective novels.

  He’d have more trouble getting into my place, but he could do it. Any security system, electronic or wizardly, just raises the price of admission, slows down or scares off the amateurs. Al Kratz hadn’t been an amateur since he was maybe six.