"Crime Spells" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenberg Martin H, Coleman Loren L, Weldon Phaedra M., Resnick Mike, Stackpole...)III was dead asleep when my pager On these odd Fridays, I was sure my colleagues in homicide didn’t know what to make of me. I can guarantee you that the Black Hats at the synagogue-in Fairfax, off Route 236-thought my presence among them pretty weird. Me, too. Most days, I didn’t understand why I chose to study with the rabbi or occasionally come for a Sabbath meal and good conversation. We’d met years ago on a murder I and Adam-my best friend, my partner-caught. Later, he’d tried to help Adam. Couldn’t, and Adam died. I don’t know if he thought he was helping me now. Mostly, I was the student. I listened. I asked questions, very pointed ones, mostly about Kabbalist mysticism. The rabbi had interpreted a spell left at the scene of that case, so he knew his stuff. Not like Madonna-kitsch. Oh, sure, Kabbalah was magic, just as the But. That’s different from saying magic doesn’t exist. And Judaism has its protective spells and amulets. Every letter of the Hebrew alphabet has magical connotations. Name-magic, some of it. Heck, even Solomon bound demons to build the First Temple. So we talked. Sometimes, we drank bad coffee, but only if his secretary was in that day. I crept downstairs, guided by nightlights. The lights were on timers, as was the oven, the compressor on the refrigerator. The refrigerator light bulb was unscrewed. How Orthodox Jews made do before the invention of the automatic coffeemaker, I’ll never know. Halfway down the stairs, though, I caught the unmistakable aroma of fresh coffee. Dietterich shrugged. He was a bearish man, with a thick tangle of brown beard that was showing more threads of silver these days. In his black robe and slippers, he looked like someone’s scruffy, huggable uncle. “I had… a dream. Don’t ask me what. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep, and I heard you moving around, so…” Another shrug. “You’ll need coffee.” “You turned on the coffeemaker. Isn’t that forbidden?” “ “Well, they usually call me when it’s too late.” He handed me a travel mug. He The coffee was hot and smooth going down. Clearly he hadn’t taken lessons from his secretary. This was a bigger relief than you can imagine. “I suppose that’s true.” “Think of this as an advance, a down payment. Save one life, it’s as if you saved the world. Making coffee so you don’t end up wrapped around a tree seems a no-brainer.” “What about the Guy Upstairs?” For the record, I wasn’t sure where I stood on the God thing, but I can tell you this: I’ve seen what evil does, and I have no trouble bringing evil down. I’m not wrath of God about it. It’s what I do. “Hashem can take a joke.” Dietterich hesitated, then said, “Jason, why do you come here? Don’t misunderstand me. We’re friends. But, in you, there is something missing. Here.” His bunched fist touched his chest. “You’re a detective, a seeker. You strive toward light where others see only darkness. But I still think you are a little bit like my hand here. You need to open, just a little.” His fist relaxed. “Like opening a door to a second sight. You can’t hold anything in your mind unless you open your heart.” I don’t know how I felt. Not embarrassed. More like I’d been filleted and gutted. He read my face. “I’m sorry. I’m intruding.” “No. Don’t apologize. A lot of the time I’m stumbling around in the shadows.” “Then do something about it.” He moved a little closer and pulled something out of a pocket of his robe. A glint of metal, a sparkle. “I don’t know why I haven’t given this to you before now. But now… The metal was like nothing I’d seen. In fact, my mind must’ve been playing tricks because the light was very poor. The metal wasn’t smooth but woven: gold filaments, I thought, and maybe silver? A hint of blue in the weave. I made out a five-by-five grid. A different gem sparkled in every square, both illuminating and magnifying a strange character-were they letters?-incised in the metal beneath. I counted five different symbols. Two were like runes, but the other three looked more like crude Egyptian hieroglyphs. The center square was unique, with a character repeated nowhere else in the grid: a squashed teardrop canted right, tip down, broader bottom adorned with inwardly curved hooks or prongs. I thought: He opened his mouth, but my pager “It’s fine, fine. We’ll talk later.” He made a shooing motion. “Go. Save the world.” The crime scene guys had finished with pictures and were working the room. Kay Howard, the deputy M.E., was hunkered over the body. My partner, Rollins, was downstairs talking to the night clerk, a diminutive Indian with coke-bottle glasses and an accent that got thicker the more questions we asked. I waited, resisting the urge to crowd Kay, something that comes easy when you’re as big as I am. People say I look like Patrick Ewing, except Ewing has the beard, and I’m two inches shorter and about eighty billion bucks poorer. I saw an opening when Kay bagged the hands. “Anything?” “Well, she went right for the eyes.” Her gloved finger traced a bloody orbit. “Very clean, no ragged edges, no evidence that she hesitated at all. She got him a good shot on the right.” Kay gestured toward the evidence bag with a black-handled, blood-soaked pocketknife. The blade was serrated along two thirds of its length, then tapered to a sharp, slightly upturned point. A quarter inch was missing from the tip. “We’ll probably find the tip somewhere in the brain, or maybe wedged in the sphenoid at the back of the orbit, but that’s not what killed him.” Kay indicated a deep, ragged, fleshy necklace extending from MacAndrews’s right to his left ear. Congealing purple blood sheeted the dead man’s chest and there were drippy arcs painted on the wall immediately above the headboard. A slowly coagulating river of purple-black sludge stained his forearms, though I could just make out what looked like a tattoo on his left bicep. (Or it could’ve been a cockroach. If his toenail fungus was any indication, personal hygiene wasn’t among MacAndrews’s finer qualities.) “She got both the arteries and didn’t stop. Sawed right through the trachea.” She looked up, and I saw a glint of steel in her eyes, a little defiance. “If it wasn’t so politically incorrect, I’d say good riddance.” “The guy was an asswipe pimp. Won’t hear me disagree.” “I did not hear that,” said the tech. He was fiddling with the DVD player. “I’m not even in the room, and if I “So let’s see what our bad boy here was watching,” I said. The film was clearly homemade but grainy, as if it might be a transfer from a VCR tape. It felt… The room could’ve been anywhere, and the camera stayed tight on a single bed with a dirty brown blanket and a single pillow. No pillowcase. Nothing on the walls I could see right off the bat, though there might have been something on the corner of a night table protruding into the frame. Cigarette pack? And something green and white on the bed, near the pillow. Something else propped alongside. No sound. A girl lay over the blanket, her head propped on the pillow. Ten, maybe twelve years old. She was Asian, with long black hair scraped back in a ponytail. She was naked and when she moved, she did so sluggishly as if moving through water. Drugged. The man was also naked except for the black ski mask. There might have been something on his right ass cheek-a large mole, maybe-but I couldn’t be sure. He loomed over the bed, then turned and flashed a V. Then he reached to his right, somewhere off-camera. When his hand came back, I saw the tongue of a clear plastic bag in his fist. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” said the tech. Kay let go of a small, sick gasp. “God.” I didn’t say anything, but I knew: God had as much to do with it as the Tooth Fairy. It took perhaps eight or ten horrible minutes, and that was only because he didn’t flip her onto her stomach and tighten the plastic bag until the very end. Even then, he prolonged the moment, teasing her, rolling the plastic away from her gaping mouth so she might gulp a precious breath or two before cinching the bag tight once more. Kay was crying. The color was gone from the tech’s face. I was dry-eyed and shaking, my guts in knots, a black rage blooming in my chest. Made me want to make an arrest somewhere dark and faraway. Maybe have a little accident, or something. Something. |
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