The Long Way Down (24 page)

“Implying they needed other souls,” Corman rumbled.

“I think that was why they needed Detective Holt,” I said. “He made sure the case jackets on everyone they murdered ended up on his desk so he could stall the investigation, just like he did with Stacy Pankow. As long as he stayed happy and addicted, he was their get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Bentley paced, thinking aloud. “The natural connection is the souls and the Box. One opens the other, somehow.”

“They had almost everything they needed, just one—” I paused, grimacing as I remembered. “Damn it, we have to move. The guy they called Tony, he was going to claim the last soul they needed, and it was all set to go down tomorrow night. That doesn’t give us a lot of time.”

I frowned, catching the looks on their faces. “What?”

“Daniel,” Bentley said, “you were unconscious for over sixteen hours. It
is
tomorrow.”

• • •

Trying to organize a group of magicians was usually a battle akin to herding cats. When times were dire, though, we managed to get things done. Jennifer and Corman stayed behind to clean up the morgue, wiping away any sign we’d ever been there, while Margaux went to find her sometime-boyfriend and sweet-talk him into twenty minutes of unfettered Internet access. Before long, Bentley and I sat side by side at a pair of computer desks, alone in a dimly lit staff lounge. A Closed for Cleaning sign hung on the outside of the glass door.

I scoured Carmichael-Sterling’s website while Bentley hit the online newspaper archives, trying to track down the mysterious Tony. Outside, the sun dripped behind the city skyline, dyeing the clouds blood orange.

“He talked about construction permits,” I said, clicking furiously. “Maybe he’s a contractor of some kind.”

Bentley slipped a pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses from his vest pocket. “But highly placed. An architect, perhaps?”

Sifting through the archive of press releases, I struck gold.

“Not
an
architect,” I said, “
the
architect. Tony Vance, golden boy of the Berlin neo-deco movement and sole designer of the Enclave Resort and Casino. The whole damn thing’s his baby from the ground up.”

Bentley looked over at me. “Curious. You made it sound like he wasn’t an enthusiastic participant.”

“He wasn’t. Meadow Brand tore him a new one for dragging his heels on the soul-collection thing. When we fought at Spengler’s place, he didn’t even get involved. He just stood on the sidelines and watched. I’m hoping I might be able to talk some sense into the guy, get him to come over to our side.”

“It wouldn’t hurt. Oh. Oh dear.”

I peered over his shoulder to get a look at the screen. “What is it?”

“Two months ago, Lauren Carmichael’s husband and son were murdered in a home invasion. She was conveniently working late that night. Sheldon Kaufman’s sister died two weeks later, casualty of a convenience store robbery. Just a day after that, Meadow Brand’s father was stabbed to death in what’s being reported as a mugging gone wrong.”

Why don’t you just kill your wife?
Sheldon had asked Tony back at the golf course.

Because I don’t love my wife.

“Christ,” I breathed. “It’s not just any souls they need. Family members. Blood relations, maybe. Someone they have a personal bond with.”

“An intimate sacrifice,” Bentley said.

It’s Amber
, Tony had said.
It has to be Amber—she’s the only one who qualifies.

“A sacrifice to the Box. Or just to the lock that seals it shut. All right, see if you can dig up a home address for Tony Vance. I’m going to find out who Amber is. We’ve got to get to her before he does.”

My head swirled with maybes. Maybe Tony would lose his nerve. Maybe he’d drag his heels just a little longer. Maybe he’d show his hand too soon, and Amber would fight him off or get away from him in time. There was still a chance.

I love social media and the people who are careless with it. Tony had an open Facebook profile. I rummaged through his pictures and posts, looking for a clue. Then I found one, and wished I hadn’t.

“Bentley.”

“Did you find her?” he asked, peering over his bifocals.

“Amber’s his daughter, Bentley. She’s eight years old.”

Twenty-Nine

I
paced a hole in the staff lounge’s cheap blue carpet, trying to focus. We needed Tony Vance’s home address, and fast. While Bentley searched the net, coming up empty, I contemplated a dozen angles and discarded them all. My watch read a quarter after seven; even if I could sweet-talk somebody at the company office into giving me what I needed, there wouldn’t be anyone there at this hour to answer the phone. Then I looked back to my screen, still showing Tony’s profile, and snapped my fingers.

The last picture in the album was a shot of little Amber, cherub-cheeked and triumphant, at an elementary school gymnastics competition. A brightly painted sign in the background told me what I needed to know.

“Bentley, look up an address for Springlake Montessori.”

“She won’t be at school. It’s far too late—”

“No,” I said, sitting down beside him. “I just need to know where it is. The founders of Carmichael-Sterling Nevada, Lauren and her inner circle, are all transplants from the company’s Seattle office. They bought Sheldon Kaufman a house—that’s how I connected the Kaufmans with Carmichael-Sterling in the first place. I’m betting everybody got one. I can get a list of all of the company’s properties from the Clark County assessor’s office, but not who lives there.”

Bentley nodded, typing away. “And Tony Vance’s home will probably be the property nearest his daughter’s school.”

“Exactly. It’s the best lead we’re going to get.”

“What are you going to do?” he said, furrowing his brow.

“Stop him. That girl isn’t dying tonight. Not on my watch.”

Ten minutes later we had an address. I jotted it down on a scrap of paper and pushed my chair back.

“I need you to round up whoever you can,” I told Bentley, “and get over to Spengler’s house. Someone’s going to come looking for him sooner or later, and the cops won’t be far behind. Do a locust job.”

A locust job was the magician’s equivalent of erasing the porn from your dead buddy’s hard drive before his mom sees it. They’d scour Spengler’s house for any enchanted relics, journals, grimoires, and occult ciphers, anything that could raise a citizen’s eyebrow. It was never hard to enlist folks for that kind of work—and not just to protect our shared secrets. In a locust job, you keep what you take.

I drove to the address I hoped was Tony Vance’s house. I didn’t pray, as a rule. If there was a God, we weren’t on speaking terms, and I didn’t think either of us cared what the other had to say. Still, pushing the pedal hard enough to make the engine whine, streetlights strobing across the dirty windshield, I was tempted. Then I remembered God’s track record when it comes to helping out little kids.

I was the only person fighting for Amber Vance’s life tonight. Succeed or fail, what happened was on my shoulders alone.

• • •

Judging from the size of Tony’s house, being Lauren Carmichael’s lackey paid well. A low brick wall, more ornamental than protective, encircled his estate and its emerald green lawn. I ditched my car on a side street and came in from the back, hopping the wall and staying low as I skirted a playground. A swing dangled from rusty chains, listlessly rocking in the wake of a chill night breeze.

I peered into the garage. A new Mercedes sat on the other side of a small window, but the garage was big enough for two cars. No way to tell if Tony was home or not. Worse, since he’d sat out the fight at Spengler’s place, I had no idea what he was capable of. I’d just have to improvise.

A place this nice would have an alarm system on the front door, especially if Tony was hiding some of Lauren’s dirty little secrets inside. I wasn’t prepared to deal with that kind of security. My best bet was the door connecting the attached garage to the rest of the house. Most people don’t think to alarm those, and even fewer are in the habit of locking up when they come and go because they think their rolling garage door can keep them safe. Bad assumption.

I scavenged a fist-sized rock from the yard, one that came to a blunt point, and wrapped my coat around it to help muffle the noise. A few firm taps broke out a corner of the garage window. I paused, listening for the whine of an alarm. Nothing stirred but the wind. A few minutes later, methodically busting out the glass and clearing the broken window one shard at a time, I’d made an opening big enough to climb through.

I slipped through the window and onto the garage floor, crouching in the puddle of broken glass. Ears perked, I crept to the inside door and gave the knob a slow turn. Bingo. Light streamed from a silver wall sconce in the inside hallway, casting a warm glow against the blue Victorian wallpaper.

Drifting from room to room like a ghost, I searched for signs of life. The plan was simple. If I found Amber first, I’d get her to safety any way I could and deal with the consequences later. If I found Tony first…well, I still hoped I could reason with him. He’d trudged along with the rest of the group, showing none of their enthusiasm or their bloodthirstiness, to the point that I wondered if Lauren had some kind of leverage over him. If I could turn him around, he’d be our best chance at shutting this whole thing down.

I jiggled a doorknob in my hand. It was firmly locked. Odd, when the rest of the house lay wide open. Curious, I crouched and dug my lockpick case out of my pocket. The antique tumblers rolled over like a dog doing tricks. I let myself in. Shelves, drafting tables, and cluttered cubbyholes lined the walls of the octagonal study beyond the door, lit by a frosted-glass ceiling globe. The centerpiece of the room stood upon a wooden table, a scale model of the Enclave some four feet tall and built to exacting precision.

I circled the model warily. Something about the scalloping spear of its tower, the reproduction so pristine I could see my warped reflection in the curve of its windows, set my teeth on edge. Little smiling people, refugees from a model train set, streamed into the black maw of the casino’s front doors. None were walking back out.

A chrome thermos sat on the edge of a messy desk next to a half-finished mug of coffee. I touched the side of the mug. Still warm. If Tony and Amber were both gone, I needed to figure out where he’d taken her. Rummaging through the documents and clutter, leafing through bid bonds, construction reports, and tattered memos, my sense of uneasiness grew. I was no architect, but even I could see something was inherently wrong with the tacked-up blueprints. Stairwells leading to nowhere. Curving halls doubling back on themselves. Most of the plans were perfectly mundane, but the more I looked, the more the little details stood out, the incongruities that had no reason to exist.

The corner of a book poked out from under a stack of drafts. The title caught my eye:
Torments of the Inquisition
. Most of the book was a dry history, the pages as pristine as the day they were printed. A fat chapter on torture methods though, illustrated with woodcuts and diagrams, had more highlights and margin notations than a college calculus textbook.

“Reproduce w/16v electric motor, connect to pneumatic tube system.”

“Plexiglas again—Meadow always wants Plexiglas.”

“Hold design until L. does final work-up of the Throne. Still need de Rais’ help to finish the connecting patterns.”

Tucked in next to the depiction of a ferocious, spike-lined chair for heretics was a sketch on engineer’s graph paper. Tony’s twenty-first-century version was lined with hypodermic needles and connected, at the back, to a cluster of rubber hoses. Flowery script on a yellow sticky note read, “Love the design, but can we make the whole thing transparent? -M.”

I looked back at the scale model of the Enclave.

What the hell are you people building?
I thought, rummaging through Tony’s cubbyholes and shelves. I grabbed anything that looked relevant. Blueprint scraps, notes, their little catalog of torture, stacking it all up to take with me. Then I tugged open a drawer, and everything went wrong.

It felt like that sickening stomach lurch as your car slides toward a collision, when you pump the brakes even though you know nothing is going to stop the impact. The drawer pulled out stiffly, too stiffly, and I looked down and saw the cord on the inside of the empty wooden nook just a second too late.

The cord sprang free, slithering back into the wall. The study door slammed closed. I ran over and yanked on the knob, but a hydraulic arm at the top of the doorframe kept it wedged firmly shut. Tony’s mechanical genius extended to his own home: there were worse ways to trap a would-be thief. Taking a few steps back, getting ready to throw my weight at the door, I froze. From behind me came a soft, relentless hissing.

I had snakes on the brain after Lauren’s death-curse, but the pungent scent rising in the room alerted me to a more dangerous threat.

Gas!

The lid of Tony’s thermos sat slightly open and off-center. I pulled at the flask and found it bolted to the table, nothing but a piece of clever camouflage. I lifted the lid to reveal a brass-tipped nozzle connected to a tube. It looked like he’d rigged an extension of the house’s natural gas line to pipe into the study. Inhaling natural gas isn’t fatal right away, but I needed to find a way out before the sheer amount of it choked the breathable air out of the sealed room.