Moonheart (16 page)

When the barman finally dared to step back into Patty's Place and looked in, he saw only the shambles of the restaurant and, in the midst of a cleared space, the corpse of the constable, his limbs splayed awkwardly like the cotton arms of a rag doll. His clothing lay about him like a tattered pall. His skin was charred black and his eyes stared sightlessly into unknown distances.

The contents of the barman's stomach rose up in his throat and he turned away to throw up. In the distance, strident sirens could be heard approaching.

11:45, Wednesday evening.

Tucker sat in his office, his desk lit only by a tabletop lamp. The yellow glare mercilessly highlighted the black on white of the statements he was reading. The rest of the room was in darkness. He reread snatches of the barman's statement:

"There was this sound... sorta like drumming. It came from all around. And then these... I don't know. Shapes. Vague shapes seemed to be everywhere. Then the... the constable stood up, pulling out his gun. I didn't know he was a cop then..."

Tucker leaned back in his chair and wearily rubbed his eyes. Vague shapes. What the hell was that supposed to mean? For that matter, what the hell was Thompson doing pulling his piece in a crowded restaurant, for Christ's sake? Tucker looked back at the statement.

"Then he changed into something... like Lon Chaney Jr. in
The Wolf Man,
you know? I swear! I never saw anything like it!"

Tucker had interviewed the barman himself and remembered the fear etched in the man's face. His name was Timothy Driver. Thirty-six years old. Married. One child. He'd been employed at Patty's Place for fourteen months. No criminal record. No record of psychiatric problems. Just a plain joe. Not the kind of a guy to make up a bullshit story like this.

Tucker sighed. He had another twenty-some witnesses to corroborate Driver's story. Not to mention the restaurant itself. The place was in shambles. Not to mention Thompson's body. Je
-sus!
He'd looked like someone had taken a blowtorch to him.

"He was growling like some kinda animal," Driver's statement continued. "Then he attacked this guy in the doorway." Driver had identified Foy from one of the photographs they had of him on file. "The same guy he was pointing the gun at, you know? He howled and just went for him. I never saw anything like it. This other guy just waited with his arms outstretched. And when the— what the fuck do you call something like that? When the monster got near him, this guy's hands just lit up. I tell ya, I was out that door so fucking fast..."

Just what were they dealing with here?

Tucker tapped his fingers against each other and went through what they had. Facts. They had twenty-three witnesses' statements corroborating Driver's. Facts. Thompson was tailing Sara Kendall. Obviously she'd been waiting there for a meeting with Foy. (Wait'll he got his hands on her! Swearing she didn't know anything...) Facts. Thompson pulls his gun, then turns into the wolfman. Foy blasts him with— what? Then both he and the Kendell woman split.

These weren't facts. From the moment Thompson pulled his piece, the whole thing turned surreal. Except what had happened to Kendell and Foy?

"They never came out," Driver's statement read. "I'll swear to that. I was standing where I could see both the front door and the one on the side, and they never came out. I was the first one in— it couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes after... you know, it all started to happen. But they weren't there. I can't figure it out. That Foy guy took a bad hit. He wasn't going to be traveling anywhere very far. Or very fast."

Foy took a hit. But by the time Tucker got there, there wasn't even any evidence that Thompson had ever turned into this monster. They just had the statements of the witnesses to go on. Who was to say that Foy's wound was real? Who was to say that any of this was real? He'd talked to Hogue after the first few statements were taken, and Hogue was just as baffled as the rest of them. Some sort of mass hallucination, he tagged it.

"Like UFO sightings," Hogue had explained. "There's no way we can know exactly what it was they
did
see. What has happened is, somehow, they've convinced themselves that Constable Thompson turned into some sort of a monster. The recent glut of movies like
The Wolfen
and
An American Werewolf in London
are as much to blame as anything."

"Twenty-four people all dreaming they saw the wolfman?" Tucker had asked. "How the hell's that possible?"

The antagonism between them had been set aside. This was so far outside the boundaries of his own experience that Tucker was suffering from a sense of helplessness.

"What we're obviously dealing with," Hogue said, "is a very powerful telepath. To be able to project his will on that many people..."

Tucker massaged his temples as he thought back on their conversation. Maybe telepathy explained what the witnesses saw, but it didn't explain how Foy and Kendell had pulled their disappearing act. At least he'd managed to keep it away from the press, swearing the witnesses to silence in the interests of national security. He doubted the cock-and-bull story about an armed robbery foiled by an off-duty policeman would hold up for very long. But it might hold up long enough for them to get a handle on the situation themselves.

The trouble was they just didn't have anything hard. The facts were Thompson was dead and Hengwr, Foy and now Sara Kendell were missing. Everything else was just speculation and weirdness. The coroner's report was in on Thompson. He'd died of massive burns. Concentrated burns. Jesus. What a way to go. Fried. Like a goddamned slab of beef that someone had taken a torch to.

Opening his desk drawer, Tucker shook a couple of aspirin from a bottle, looked for something to wash them down with, then swallowed them dry, grimacing at the taste. As he was replacing the bottle, his gaze went to the four warrants that Madison had dropped off earlier in the evening. He'd dragged Judge Peterson from a dinner party to get them signed. Now all Tucker had to do was serve them.

He pulled them out and spread them on his desk, one by one. Thomas Hengwr. Kieran Foy. James Stewart Tamson, aka Jamie Tams. Sara Kendell.

Where did he start? With Tamson, he supposed. But if he was anything like Foy... How do you pick up someone who can vanish? Someone who can fry you with— what the hell did Hogue call it? Some kind of pyrokinetic power. Shit. Dealing with this was like trying to take out a houseful of terrorists, armed to the teeth, while all you had was a peashooter.

Tucker stared into the darkened corners of his office. Was one of them sitting there right now, watching him? What were their capabilities? Better still, what were their weaknesses? This had gone a little beyond grabbing a couple of spooks so that Hogue and his pals could give them a once over in the lab. Now one of his men was dead.

Tucker had a privileged position on the Force. He made as much as a Deputy Commissioner, for all his rank of Special Inspector. He was a troubleshooter— something the brass would never admit existed in the first place. He kept the rank of Inspector, but didn't work out of an office like his colleagues. He was on the street more often than not. He was answerable only to Madison, who in turn bypassed the Commissioner and reported directly to the Solicitor General.

He had a Corporal and five Constables under him. That was his squad. He had access to the rest of the force's manpower and resources, but he and his squad did the main work. Their specialties were big drug busts, terrorists, organized crime, security on visits from foreign heads of state (where they worked in conjunction with the Secret Service), stop-gapping security leaks— international, national, or internal.

It was work Tucker liked. He felt he was accomplishing something. And even though three got off for every one he put away, he was still doing something. But this... this Project Spook. The whole fucking operation stank. Thompson's features swam into his mind's eye— the way he'd looked this morning when Tucker had debriefed him, and the way he was now: a stiff in the morgue. Vacant. Empty. Nobody home.

Tucker gathered up the warrants and stuffed them in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. He'd go down and pick up one of his squad and have a little chat with Jamie Tams. Collins would do nicely. After all, he'd been Thompson's partner. Tucker flexed his fingers. Remembering his two meetings with Tams earlier in the day, he doubted that Jamie had any of the paranormal attributes that Hogue claimed Foy and Hengwr did. And if he did... Tucker decided that at this point he just didn't give a shit. Tams was simply going to have to have some fucking good explanations. At least he'd better if he knew what was good for him.

Jamie was worried. Normally Sara rang up when she wasn't going to be home for dinner. It was getting very late— going on midnight— and after the past day's events...

He turned from the window overlooking O'Connor Street and crossed the study to his desk, following one of the well worn paths that had left faded trails in the Persian carpet his grandfather had covered the floor with those many years ago. Sitting at the desk, he regarded Memorial's terminal for long moments. The word PROCEED flickered blue on the screen.

Jamie thought for a moment, typed in the word BONES, then thought some more. He was trying to run a check through Memoria's banks to see what references she could come up with on Sara's artifacts, but was having a hard time concentrating. Blue had taken his bike down to the store around six-thirty and returned with the report that the place was all locked up, and no, there didn't seem to be anything unusual around the shop, and no, he hadn't seen Sara along the way, and no, she wasn't in Kamal's with Julie nor at the smoke shop. Nor, Jamie had ascertained, was she at the apartment of any of her small circle of friends.

So where was she?

He sighed, typed out a qualifier ANTLERS. Nothing. QUARTER MOON. Nothing. What were the designs that ran along the rim of the bone disc? He scratched his chin through his beard, then typed in CELTIC RIBBON-WORK.

Data from his files flashed by on the screen and Jamie scanned it half-heartedly. He kept his finger depressed on a key and a small white cursor sped rapidly down the screen.

Maybe he should try the hospitals, he thought. Or the police... No. Scratch that.

A light beside the computer began to blink and the screen darkened. When the light stopped blinking, BONES remained at the top of the screen. Under it were the symbols: ???

Jamie frowned, finding it hard to divide his attention between what was happening in Memoria and what was going around in his head. He knew he wasn't going about this right, but theoretically working on this puzzle should have kept him from thinking about Sara. Should have, but didn't.

He expected her to come bounding into his study at any moment. Or at least call. He didn't like feeling like a worried old hen— the image didn't suit him. Except here he sat, brooding like a father with his daughter out on her first date. Except
that
father didn't have on his mind what Jamie had on his. And—

What was he doing? Jamie asked himself. It was getting bad when he started having conversations with himself.

He entered GAMES and diligently went through the long list that appeared on the screen. What else could he qualify "bones" with? The refrain to an old song ran through his head: "Take off your skin and dance around in your bones..." Right. Just the thing. It was probably something very simple. Or it could just be something that wasn't entered in Memoria's voluminous memory banks. His Aenigma files were incredibly bulky, storing not only what information he'd garnered for himself over the years, but also much of his father and grandfather's findings as well, though he was not nearly finished sifting through their journals. Plus there was the information that his correspondents sent him. Unfortunately, the information he wanted was probably something he had no reference to at all.

He tapped his finger on the desktop. What if that Inspector
had
arrested Sara? How could he find out? Look up the RCMP in the yellow pages and give them a ring? Sure. And they'd just answer whatever he had to ask them. Why not ask for a crystal ball while he was at it?

His finger stopped tapping. Crystal ball. For a moment his worries dropped from him. Feeling the first taste of excitement he'd had since he started this search, he typed out ORACULAR DEVICES.

Bingo! Now here was a meaty list. He ran the cursor down it, pausing at an unfamiliar word. WEIRDIN. He did a reference check and came up with the definition: ADJ./SCOTS ORIGIN/EMPLOYED FOR THE PURPOSE OF DIVINATION. That wasn't good enough. First of all, it was in a list of oracular devices— as a noun, not an adjective. Secondly, he wasn't familiar with the term— at least not in this particular connotation. Curious now, he asked the computer for more information.

The screen shimmered, like an old man clearing his throat before expounding on some anecdote, then a new body of print appeared. Jamie grew more puzzled as he read it through.

Screened images began to appear on the screen, showing either side of a round disc with a description to the right of the image. As they started at the bottom of the screen and slowly drifted upwards to disappear into the topmost portion, Jamie stared. He typed a request and Memoria started the images again from the beginning. As the first hit center screen, Jamie pushed hold. There it was. The ribbonwork, antlers on one side, quarter moon on the other. Sara's bone disc.

The legend to the right read:

PRIME ONE