Beastly Bones (3 page)

“I do hope you'll reconsider Gad's Valley, sir,” I said. “You know I would be an excellent paleontologist.”

“Of course you would. Don't be thick. By the same token, you would make a fine dishwasher or a street sweeper—that doesn't change the fact that you have more important work to do here. You matter, Miss Rook. What we do matters. You may be eager to see this case tucked away, but like it or not, you've stumbled upon a pertinent point. Population data in the field of transmutational cryptozoology is hazy at best, but chameleomorphs are rare. Very rare. That Mrs. Wiggles ended up in our proverbial backyard is staggeringly suspicious, statistically speaking. We will speak to Mrs. Beaumont in the morning,” Jackaby declared. “And that's the end of it.”

We would see Mrs. Beaumont in the morning—Jackaby was right about that much—but it was far from the end of it. Neither of us knew it at the time, but we were only at the start of something much, much bigger.

Chapter Five

T
he following morning I dressed early and descended the spiral staircase to find Jackaby puttering in his laboratory. The daylight streamed through myriad glass tubes and bottles arranged along the windowsill, casting the room in a medley of warm, vibrant tones. The kittens were tumbling about in the finished enclosure in the corner, unperturbed by their captivity. Over his usual attire, my employer had draped a leather apron that might have looked more at home on a blacksmith. He was examining the uneven surface of a thick disc of amber glass, just a little wider across than a dinner plate. From behind it, his face bulged and rippled in golden waves.

“Good morning, sir,” I said. “Sleep well?”

“Not generally. Help yourself to a bit of fruit. It's oranges this week.” He dropped the heavy glass on the table with a clunk, and waved a hand in the general direction of the cauldron. The cauldron was perpetually brimming with food, powered by some impossible enchantment. Admittedly it only ever produced fruit, and rarely of exceptional quality, but it was miraculous nonetheless.

I selected an orange off the top and sat down, looking more closely at the lumpy glass on the table. The slightly raised nub to one end looked like a slender handle. “I would offer you juice, but I underestimated the efficacy of my catalyzing agent this morning,” said Jackaby.

“Come again?” I asked.

“Breakfast science. The thermochemical reactions involved proved more intense than I anticipated.” He tapped the amber glass with his knuckle. “Jenny was not thrilled about her pitcher, either.”

“How did you melt—”

A firm rapping issued suddenly from the front door, and Jackaby pulled off his apron. “Who do you suppose that is at this hour?” he said, heading out into the hallway. I abandoned my orange and followed close behind.

The man on the front step was dressed in a stiff blue coat, as he had been when we first met—but in place of twin silver bars, his lapel now bore a silver eagle and a badge declaring him commissioner of the New Fiddleham Police.

“Marlowe,” said Jackaby.

“Jackaby,” said Marlowe.

“Good morning, Commissioner,” I said. “You're looking well. How is the new appointment treating you?”

Marlowe sighed. “It's just
acting
commissioner
, Miss Rook. And
acting
is a stretch. The only
actions
I've made in the past month have been to wade through bureaucracy and argue with politicians.”

“Well, there are no bureaucrats nor any politicians on the premises,” I assured him. “Jackaby puts up wards against that sort of thing. Salt and fresh sage, I think. Would you care to come in? I'll put the kettle on.”

The commissioner shook his head. “Thanks, but I've come on police business.”

“What sort of business would merit a personal visit from the
acting
commissioner of the New Fiddleham Police?” Jackaby asked.

“Bad business, I'm afraid. It's about a personal friend of the mayor. I understand you've met Florence Beaumont?”

“Is that what this is about?” said Jackaby. “You can assure the woman that Mrs. Wiggles and her kittens are being treated with the utmost care. Better yet, we will tell her ourselves. We'll be returning to Campbell Street presently. We have some other matters to discuss with Mrs. Beaumont, as it turns out.”

“Is that so?” Marlowe grunted. The commissioner's eyelids looked heavy, but I could see that he was watching my employer intently. “Then you're going to need to bring a medium—unless communing with the dead is something you do now.”

My breath caught in my throat.

“All too often, in fact,” Jackaby replied, missing the implications entirely. “I had one nattering at me all morning about her glassware. I never have bothered with the trappings of spiritualism, though, if that's what you mean. I don't go in for hand-holding and flickering candlelight and all that falderal.”

“Mr. Jackaby,” I said.

“Although I was once told that I look quite fetching in a loose headscarf.”

“Mr. Jackaby!” I said. “He means that Mrs. Beaumont is . . .” I swallowed.

Marlowe nodded. “Dead.”

Jackaby straightened, his brows furrowed. A somber focus finally crept into his cloud-gray eyes. “Murder?”

Marlowe nodded.

Jackaby took a deep breath. “I see. And your sources have obviously informed you that we paid the lady a visit only yesterday. I assume you've slid me into the top of your suspects list, as usual, then?”

“Don't flatter yourself. I'd love to know what you were doing at the scene, but maids have reported seeing the woman alive well after you two left to make a mess of Market Street.” I cringed slightly. “I'm not here to arrest you this time. I'm here to . . .” Marlowe took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “I'm here to enlist your services.”

Jackaby raised an eyebrow. “What did you say was the manner of Mrs. Beaumont's death?”

“Call it
unnatural causes
,” said Marlowe. The corners of my employer's mouth twitched upward. Marlowe rolled his eyes and nodded obliquely toward the street. “Just hurry up. I've got a driver waiting.” He stamped off down the front step, not bothering to ask if we would be right behind.

Chapter Six

O
ur ride through the early-morning streets was a cold one, and so was the body at the end of it. Mrs. Beaumont lay on her back at the feet of a plush divan when we arrived, the intricate swirls and rosettes of a Persian carpet splaying out beneath her. At a glance, she could have been sleeping. I found myself watching her chest, waiting for some sign of breath—but as the seconds ticked by, I began to feel a knot of queasiness rising in my stomach, and I looked away.

“Maybe it's best if you wait outside, young lady,” said Marlowe.

I shook my head. “If you've enlisted Mr. Jackaby, then you've enlisted me as well, Commissioner.” I plucked up my nerve and my notepad, and began to record the scene before me. Marlowe turned his attention to my employer, who was already bent over the body.

“First impressions?”

Jackaby stood beside the corpse. His hands hovered over the body, stirring the air. “There has been an abomination in this house.” He pulled back with a grimace, rubbing invisible particles from his fingers with distaste.

“You mean like a murder?” Marlowe suggested flatly.

“Worse,” said Jackaby. He stepped to the woman's head and knelt. He drew a magnifying glass from his pocket, but rather than gazing through it, he held it by the glass and used its stem to gently nudge the lace collar away from the woman's neck.

“I was wondering how long it would take for you to find that.” Marlowe paced around the body and stood across from Jackaby. “What do you make of it?”

I inched closer and peered over my employer's shoulder. On the woman's right side, just beneath her jaw, was an oblong blemish the length of my forefinger—a violet bruise, dappled with dark plum spots. Within the mottled oval was a pea-sized circle of deep red where the woman's skin had been pierced.

“Peculiar,” said Jackaby. “There ought to be two.”

“There's no exit wound,” Marlowe informed him. “It's the only mark we've found on the body. Doesn't look like a typical gunshot, but I've asked the coroner to look for bullet fragments, all the same.”

“He won't find any,” said Jackaby without looking up. “It's not a projectile; it's a puncture. The assailant struck the jugular directly. Exsanguination is almost certainly the cause of death. The lack of blood about the body and the burst capillaries around the injury indicate suction . . .”

“A vampire,” I said.

Jackaby tucked the magnifying glass back into his coat. “A touch too glaring for my taste, Miss Rook, but that would be the most obvious conclusion.”

Marlowe groaned and rubbed the bridge of his nose with one hand.

“You disagree?” Jackaby said, rising.

“Of course I disagree. The ‘most obvious conclusion' is a lunatic with an ice pick or a jealous lover with a letter opener . . .” He took a deep breath. “But the most obvious conclusion keeps falling short—which is why you're here. So, that's your first guess, then? You're opening with
vampir
e
?”

“I'm not ruling out the Russian strigoi or Chinese jiangshi. This is a country of immigrants, after all. There are also countless numbers of demons and ghouls known for bleeding their victims dry, but vampires certainly make the list.”

The commissioner's eye twitched, and he sighed. “Not a word of this leaves this room. I mean that, and stay away from the press, both of you. Reporters haven't stopped hounding me for details from our last case—and they would have a field day with a vampire in New Fiddleham. This town is still reeling from one supernatural serial killer. The last thing we need is to spread panic about a second.”

“So you've brought us here just to shut us up?” said Jackaby. “You know very well you can't make this go away by not believing in it.”

Marlowe stared at the corpse on the carpet for several seconds. “Yeah, I know,” he grunted. “I didn't believe in redcaps or werewolves a month ago—but apparently they didn't much care what I believed. I think it's fair to say I'm a little more open to the existence of monsters today.”

“Charlie isn't a werewolf,” I said defensively. “And he's not a monster.” Charlie Cane was the junior police officer — the only police officer—willing to listen to us during our last case. He was paranormal, it was true—possessed of the ability to assume the form of a great hound—but he was still every bit a gentleman. Charlie had sacrificed his greatest secret to protect the city—to protect me—and yet he had been rewarded for his courage with exile into the countryside.

“You're right about that. He's a sharp officer who knows the value of discretion, which is one of the reasons he kept
this
strictly confidential.” Marlowe pulled a slim envelope from his pocket. It bore Charlie's pseudonym,
C. Barker
, and I recognized his handwriting at once. I reached for the envelope, but Marlowe withdrew it. “Strictly confidential.”

“Understood, sir,” I assured him. “Not a word outside this room.” Jackaby nodded, and Marlowe relinquished the secret report.

“ ‘Madeleine Brisbee' . . . ,” Jackaby read over my shoulder. “Why is that name familiar?”

“My word! She's the woman from the article,” I said. “The one who passed away out by the excavation site! But, they said foul play was not suspected. She was ill . . .”

“Don't believe everything you read in the papers. She was found on the rocks—banged up from a short fall. No broken bones, though, no blood, nothing that should've been fatal. Local doc called it overexertion. Local cop disagreed.”

“I take it the local cop was Charlie?” I said.

“Cigar for the lady,” Marlowe said flatly. “Our boy hasn't lost his edge just because he's living outside the city limits. He kept his suspicions quiet—but he made a sketch to include in his report. It's there on the second page.”

Flipping to the next paper, I found a rough pencil sketch of a woman's head and neck, complete with a shaded oval just beneath her jawline, one dark spot inscribed within it.

“Commander Bell told him it was nothing, just an indentation from the rocks, but Charlie wasn't convinced. The sketch arrived in yesterday's post, so you can imagine my surprise when my men brought in an identical report about Mrs. Beaumont this morning.”

I folded the paper and returned it to the commissioner. “People are dying in my city, and I've got nothing but children's stories to tell their families,” Marlowe said. “I need to know exactly what we're dealing with. I've got my men on alert here in New Fiddleham, but even if he had the manpower, Commander Bell has no idea how to handle something like this, and I'm not even sure he would believe us if we involved him.”

“Yes. Nothing more frustrating than a bullheaded lawman.” Jackaby raised his eyebrows meaningfully at Marlowe, but the commissioner ignored him.

“Charlie is lucky enough the press didn't recognize him the first time they came to the valley. He's already put his neck out farther than he should. What we need is a thorough, discreet report from somebody accustomed to working outside the usual parameters of the law.”

“What a coincidence,” Jackaby said. “I've been thinking of putting that very thing on my business cards. So you're sending us on assignment?”

“I'm not sending you anywhere. The valley is out of my jurisdiction. He doesn't know it yet, but I have a strong feeling your old friend Officer Barker will be forwarding you an official request for a consultation by this afternoon. For all Bell need know, you'll just be looking into a related petty theft. That should provide you ample excuse to explore the scene of the murder. Whatever did this, it started in Gad's Valley, and if it left behind so much as a boot print, I want you to find it.”