Soul Harvest (The Rift Chronicles Book 3) Page 4

  I thanked her, gave her my card, and told her I might need to speak with her again. Checking my chrono, I saw that I had just enough time to catch Katie Starling when she finished her last class of the day.

  I had a picture of Katherine ‘Katie’ Starling, a tall slender Native American with long black hair and a model’s face. I almost didn’t recognize her when she came out of the classroom building at the university. She was as flashy and flamboyant as Darlene was nondescript. Her hair was purple on one side and lime green on the other. Her makeup was also far from demure and made it hard to tell what she actually looked like.

  “Katie Starling?” I asked as I stepped in front of her, holding out my ID. “I’m Captain Danica James, Metropolitan Police. I need to ask you a few questions.

  She reacted the way young, rich drug users normally reacted. Having spent some time on the drug squad, I knew it well. Shock, paranoia, then complete denial flashed across her face. She smelled of weed, but since that was legal, I wondered what else she experimented with.

  “I don’t know nothin’.”

  “Including grammar? Dr. Stolnikova would be mortified,” I said. “I’ve been told that you do know Julia Danner. And if you give a damn about her, you’ll help me find her. I think she’s in mortal danger.”

  A different kind of shock played across her face. “Julia?”

  “You know her entire family has been murdered, don’t you?”

  “Uh, yeah. I saw it on the news.”

  “She escaped. I need to find her. Got time for a cup of coffee?”

  Katie licked her lips, her eyes searching my face. “Yeah, okay.”

  I suggested a popular café just off campus, and she nodded. We set off in that direction.

  “I spoke with Darlene,” I said. “Just to bring you up to date, Julia’s entire family and all their servants were killed. Julia wasn’t there for supper, and she didn’t come home that night. What I’m concerned about is, whoever killed her family is probably looking for her. Do you see what I mean? She escaped. She’s our only link to who did this, and they surely don’t want her to talk to the cops.”

  “Uh, yeah. That makes sense.”

  We walked to the café, where I ordered coffee and Katie ordered a milkshake.

  “Darlene told me that Julia’s been seeing a guy named Freddy,” I said. “Do you know him?”

  “Yeah, I know him, but I don’t know where to find him. He’s a student, I think, but not here. Maybe one of the UM campuses?”

  When a girl’s best friends knew nothing about her boyfriend, it was because she had something to hide. I was getting an increasingly uneasy feeling about Julia.

  “Do you know his last name?”

  She shook her head. “Some people call him Fast Freddy, and I heard someone call him Freaky Freddy once.”

  “He’s in the scene?”

  Katie hesitated. “Uh, yeah, I guess you could say that.”

  “Is he a dealer?”

  I hoped the girl never tried to play poker. Her face showed the inner struggle she was having, even through the weird makeup.

  I leaned forward, my elbows on the table. “Katie, we’re talking life and death. Someone went to a lot of trouble to wipe out Julia’s entire family. I don’t know why, but if anyone has the answer, it’s Julia. But I’m afraid that if I don’t find her soon, we won’t find her alive. I’m not the drug squad. I work for the Magi Council.”

  “Yeah, he’s a dealer. Downers, uppers, astropene, quararg, nesforl, as well as magikally enhanced weed. He’s like a one-stop shop.”

  “And Julia’s doing all that?”

  Katie shook her head emphatically. “No, just the weed. She’s smarter than to get into that other shit.”

  “I hope you are, too.”

  “I don’t get my weed from Freddy. I don’t trust him.” She gestured toward the window. “I get mine legally.”

  There was a cannabis shop across the street from the café.

  I thanked her and paid for our drinks. “If you hear from her, call me,” I said, handing her my card. “And if you find out where I can find Freddy, definitely call me.”

  As I stood to leave, she looked up at me. “You really think she’s in danger?”

  “Yes. I hope she’s still alive, and if she is, she’s definitely in danger.”

  Chapter 6

  I went back to the office and put Luanne to work searching for any and all male college students in the Metroplex with a first or middle name starting with ‘Fred.’ I knew the list would be extensive, but once I had it, I could parse it into a number of different searches.

  While I was talking to Luanne, Carmelita came in and stood there waiting until Luanne and I finished.

  “Any luck at the library?” I asked her.

  “I showed Julia’s picture around and people recognized her. One of the librarians said Julia regularly flirted with boys, but she didn’t recall her meeting with or being with one particular boy. The last time Julia was there was the day before the murders.”

  I filled her in on what I discovered talking with Julia’s friends. As we talked, I realized the coffee I had with Katie hadn’t filled the void in my stomach.

  “I’m hungry. Did you have lunch?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  On our way to a sandwich shop around the corner, Carmelita said, “Oh, by the way, I think they’re getting ready to open that church you were curious about.”

  “So soon? The place was totally gutted.”

  “There’s a sign out front inviting people to come worship this Sunday.”

  “Does it say what kind of church it is?”

  Carmelita shrugged. “I asked Uncle Rodrigo, and he said it wasn’t Catholic. With a name like that, he said it was probably some Protestant evangelical sect.”

  “Uncle Rodrigo?”

  “Yeah, he’s the archbishop of the Baltimore diocese.”

  “And a mage?”

  “Of course. Magik and religion aren’t mutually exclusive. I mean, the existence of demons is a provable fact.”

  She had me there.

  On the way back from lunch, we took a tour by the church. It certainly looked a lot better. The scorch marks were all gone, and the stonework looked brighter than it had. New wood framed the stained-glass windows and the doors, one of which stood open.

  We climbed the steps and peered inside. The place smelled of new wood and paint. Shiny wooden pews marched from the rear up to the altar rail. Arched wooden trusses soared from the floor to the peak of the roof.

  A man wearing a long black cassock with a white surplice over it stood there. Catching sight of us, he smiled.

  “Curious?” he called in a cheery voice. “Come on in and take a look around.”

  He hastened toward us. As he drew nearer, I saw that he was a large man—as tall as I was—and rotund. His dark hair was receding, he wore dark-framed glasses, and his ruddy face was split in a large smile.

  “Come in, come in. Welcome to Harvesting Souls Church. I’m Reverend Charles Wilding.”

  “Good afternoon,” I said. “We saw that the church had been renovated and were a little curious.”

  “Yes. Luckily for us, the previous owners just wanted to be rid of the place, so the church was able to buy it for a good price. Donations from the very welcoming community have enabled us to restore it, and once again, it’s a house of the Lord.”

  From somewhere in his clothes, he produced a pair of brochures. “Here is a little something telling you about the church and our philosophy, and a schedule of services and events. I hope you’ll be able to join us this Sunday as we give thanks to the Lord and pray for his continued blessings.”

  He was very friendly and gave us a tour of the sanctuary, showing us the stained glass, and bubbling on about the place. I wanted desperately to ask him about the demons and vampires but refrained. It just didn’t seem polite. It took us about fifteen minutes to finally work our way out the door and back onto the street.
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br />   “Whoa!” Carmelita said. “Is he enthusiastic, or what?”

  I agreed. The last person I met who was that excited about something was the realtor who sold Kirsten and me our house.

  We went on back to work to discover that another Magi Family leader had been killed by a sniper. Caught up in the chaos that always engulfed Police Headquarters, I didn’t think anything more about the Reverend Wilding.

  “I sent the Fred list to you,” Louanne said when I showed up at the office the next morning. “The ones that have any kind of police record—even a parking ticket—are highlighted. I also split the list, with all the men under thirty separated from the older guys, and the ones enrolled at a college or university are also marked.”

  “You’re wonderful,” I said.

  “I know.” She winked at me. “Try to remember that when it’s time for my next raise.”

  I called up the files on my computer and first looked at the students with a police record. Only one hundred seventy-six. Who knew the name Fred was so popular?

  I printed out their pictures and then checked Katie’s class schedule. She finished her classes that day at two o’clock, so I had plenty of time to drive over to the scene of the most recent assassination. I grabbed Carmelita and Novak, and we took my car.

  Noah Carpenter had recently lost his son to an HLA assassin. We had caught that murderer and broken up the violent HLA radical cells in the Metroplex. Now his widow had to deal with losing her husband as well as her son.

  Carpenter had left his office in downtown Baltimore to meet some business associates for lunch across the street. The sniper had taken him out while he waited for the light to change.

  Standing on the corner where Carpenter had stood, I looked around at all the tall buildings surrounding us. Some of the older and shorter ones—relics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—had windows that opened. The more modern buildings didn’t. A group of uniformed cops milled around on the sidewalk across the street.

  “Any idea where the sniper was?” I asked.

  “I had a dozen men searching through the older buildings,” Mychal said, “but we didn’t find anything. There are at least four or five empty office spaces that overlook this corner. No one heard the shot.”

  “Silenced, probably,” I said. “Same bullet as used in the Romero killing?”

  Mychal shrugged. “Possibly. Remember that we didn’t find much of the bullet that killed Romero, but Kelly thinks it’s possible. Soft-nosed high-velocity bullet. Shot him in the chest.”

  My phone rang. “James.”

  “We have a major problem,” Police Commissioner Whittaker said. “Meet me at Trombino’s as soon as you can get there.”

  “I’m standing across the street from it. That’s where Noah Carpenter was going when he was shot.” Trombino’s was the upscale Italian restaurant in downtown Baltimore. I had been there a couple of times, most recently with Aleks. There were three cops standing in front of the place talking to some civilians.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Whittaker said and hung up.

  We walked across the street. One of the cops noticed me and came over.

  “Captain. A couple of employees showed up for work—the place opens at eleven for lunch—but everything’s locked up. They tried calling the owner and the manager, but no one answers.”

  He motioned me to follow him to a window. I looked in and saw a pair of legs on the floor in the doorway to the kitchen.

  “I need some authorization before I go busting into the place, ma’am,” the cop said.

  He followed me back to the door where I used my magik on the lock. As soon as I stepped inside, the smells of the Danner house assailed my nose. A quick search of the place turned up four bodies.

  I assigned Carmelita and Mychal each to one of the four employees who had been outside, and I took the other two employees aside.

  “Who were these people?” I asked the middle-aged man, who turned out to be one of the lunch cooks.

  “Joseph was the night manager, and the others were the cook, a dishwasher, and the head waitress on the night shift,” he said. “They would have been cleaning up after dinner. The place closes at eleven.”

  “How many more people on the night shift?” I asked.

  He took me to their break room and pointed to a schedule posted on the wall. Between him and one of the waitresses, they identified all the people on the schedule.

  “Where are the rest of the people who are supposed to be working today?” I asked. I had four employees who had been waiting outside, but the schedule showed eight people, plus the day manager, who hadn’t shown up.

  “I don’t know,” the waitress said. “All of us were off yesterday.”

  With a sudden feeling of fear, I took another look at the schedule. None of the people who worked the previous day had come to work. The employees we were talking to said that none of the people who had worked the previous day were answering their phones.

  About that time, Commissioner Whittaker walked through the door. I went to meet him.

  “We have at least five calls of deaths that mirror what you saw at the Danner house,” he said, “and six more people in the ER are being treated for thallium poisoning. Two people have died. All of them either work here, or ate here yesterday.”

  Chapter 7

  Kelly Quinn went straight to the kitchen and searched out every salt container. After checking them all, she raised her head and looked across the room at me, then nodded.

  “Is the magikal binding the same?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  Carmelita came out of the restaurant’s office. “What the hell?”

  I had a sinking feeling. “It looks as though the Danner murders were a testing ground. A dress rehearsal. I need a list of every reservation, every payment from yesterday. Send cops around to every employee’s home, and send someone to every hospital.” I shook my head, then turned to the waitress. “How many people come in here on a normal Wednesday?”

  Before she could answer, the cook said, “Wednesday lunch we usually serve about two hundred meals. Wednesday dinner about the same. Half of that for Saturday lunch, and double on Friday and Saturday evenings.”

  It made sense. Weekdays they got the people working downtown for lunch. The area was a ghost town during the day on weekends. The tourists spent their time and money closer to the harbor.

  We had already determined that the lunch shift came in at ten o’clock and the doors opened at eleven. The restaurant closed at two-thirty to clean up for dinner, and the evening workers started between three and four-thirty, depending on their jobs. As was common in restaurant work, an employee got a shift meal. And considering restaurant wages, I doubted anyone turned down food prepared by Trombino’s chefs.

  The state of the employees’ washrooms made me glad that I wasn’t responsible for cleaning them. Several people had been violently sick in both employees’ washrooms and in the customers’ washrooms as well.

  The computer in the office revealed that several employees had clocked out early the previous evening. The first to leave was one of the cooks, who bailed out at eight o’clock.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Whittaker said, falling in beside me when I went outside to get some fresh air.

  “I have Carmelita and Luanne in the office trying to figure out who all yesterday’s customers were,” I said. “But when one person pays for the table, and the people eating together aren’t related…”

  “We’ll find some of them only after they’re dead,” he finished.

  “Oh, I imagine most of them are already dead,” I told him. “The ones who made it to hospital were mostly yesterday’s lunch crowd. They got sick and their families called an ambulance or took them in. If you ate here last night and left at eight or nine, you’d be dead between midnight and two or three o’clock. And if you took the whole family out to dinner, and you all got sick, it would be a scene like the Danner family
.”

  He shook his head. “We’ll be finding bodies for days. Maybe weeks. What kind of monster would do such a thing?”

  “Whoever it was, they targeted a place frequented by the Magi. You practically have to get a credit check just to walk into the place. I think we need to warn the Council.”

  “We need to crack down on sources of supply,” he responded. “Every place that sells thallium needs to be identified, and every place that uses it.”

  “There are other poisons,” I said. “A talented chemist with the right set of magikal talents could make something far worse.”

  “But, why?”

  “Akiyama or Moncrieff could be doing it to weaken their enemies,” I said, “or the HLA could be trying a new tactic, or we could see a ransom demand. Pay us, or shut down every restaurant in the Metroplex. I’m sure there are more possibilities, but those are the ones that come most readily to mind.”

  “Could it be a copycat?”

  “If it is, we have even larger problems.” I turned so that he looked at my face. “We haven’t released the Danners’ cause of death. All we’ve said is that we suspect foul play. No one outside my team and Kelly’s team knows it was thallium poisoning.”

  I broke away from the horror show at Trombino’s and took the pictures of all the Freddys up to Johns Hopkins. When Katie came out of her class, she spotted me immediately. We stood staring at each other for a moment, then she deflated, and trudged over to where I was standing.

  “May I help you?”

  “I certainly hope so. I have some pictures I need you to look at, and I’ll pay in milkshakes.”

  “It’s been a crappy week, and I’m eighteen. How about a beer?”

  “It’s been a crappy day. You’re on. Where?”

  She took me to a place near campus advertising one hundred twenty beers from all around the world. I ordered an Irish porter, and she ordered a Belgian ale. We sat by the front window where the light was best.