Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (7 page)

“Somehow,” she said, “that’s even worse.”

“I agree,” said Flood.

“Why bring it up? Have you found a connection between the Heartstoppers and the trafficking through Gooseberry Bluff?”

He made a face. “Nothing concrete, no.”

“Let’s compare the dates.”

“What?”

“The dates.” Joy poured herself another cup of coffee, suppressing a shudder at the smell. “Look, we know that last night was unusual in that it broke the pattern. It came three, four months early. What if there’s a rhythm to the timing of the Heartstoppers and our traffickers? Do you have a calendar?”

For about half an hour that evening Joy didn’t dislike Benjamin Flood that much. They went over the reports from the Heartstopper cases — Minneapolis was the only attack they had a complete file on, but the dates for the others were easy enough to find — and compared them with the three, now four, cases of demon trafficking at Gooseberry Bluff. Once they added in the failed Heartstopper, the pattern was obvious.

“Six weeks,” she said. “Six weeks before every Heartstopper, someone moves a shipment of nameless demons through Gooseberry Bluff.”

Flood nodded. “For the last twenty-one months, anyway. Before that they must have been moving them from somewhere else.”

“Do we think this is connected?”

Flood shook his head. “Well, it doesn’t look like coincidence, but that’s not saying much.” He looked up at her. “We’ll work this angle. That was good thinking.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“We’re not done yet. You still fucked up with Ay.”

“Yes, sir. Sir…it occurs to me that if AD Shil’s murder is connected to this case, I might be in danger.”

“I don’t think you’re that important, Agent. But that occurred to me
yesterday
. I’ve already set you up with a security detail.”

“You did?”

“You didn’t notice? Good — that means they’re doing their job.” He handed her a file and tilted his head toward the door. “They’ll be in Room Twelve. You’d better get in there for the debrief.”

Flood’s aura said that he resented her even more now that she had demonstrated some value. Joy left his office without another word.

Room Twelve was at the other end of the hall. She knocked, and Agent Gray opened the door for her. Hector sat at a small gray table inside the small gray room. He looked stunned. Joy tried to ask Gray a question with a glance, but he just shook his head. Despite his name, Gray bore no resemblance to the room or the table. He was blond, he wore a blue-and-gold tracksuit, and his aura was dominated by indigo. He nodded at Joy and stifled a yawn.

“They pull you out of bed for this?” Joy asked.

“My night to be on call,” he said in a what-can-you-do tone.

Joy pulled a chair out and sat down adjacent to Hector. “How are you, Hector? I’m sorry this is moving fast, but we need to be sure of you right away. You understand? This is an important investigation.”

Hector nodded. “I understand. I…just…” He sighed. “I’m going to lose my job,” he said in a whisper.

“I don’t think that necessarily follows.” She patted him on the shoulder, aware that it was a completely false show of sincerity and solidarity but hoping he wouldn’t read it that way. “Agent Gray here is a truth-teller, OK? So just be honest, and everything should be fine. You’re not into anything you shouldn’t be, are you?”

“No. No, nothing. I swear.”

“OK. I mean, it’s not that simple; we’re going to be here awhile. But I don’t have any reason to suspect you, so we should be fine.” She set the file on the table and flipped it open. “Ready? Your name is Hector Árbenz Ay, and you were born in Escuintla, Guatemala, in 1975, is that correct?”

Hector put up his hands. “What, are we going to go through my entire biography?”

“Pretty much. And the sooner we get started, the sooner we can both go home and get a good night’s sleep. All right?”

He closed his eyes. “All right.”

Hector answered questions for an hour, until his throat went dry from talking and he had to ask for a glass of water. He had hoped that Joy would let up on him after that, but she didn’t. Hector answered question after question about his family, his education, his childhood, his medical history, and his reading habits. Joy Wilkins — if that was her real name — stared at him intently the entire time, as if she were not just studying his face but tracing his outline mentally. She was, Hector thought, very odd.

Agent Gray leaned against the wall through all of this, sometimes glancing in Hector’s direction but mainly studying his nails. Hector knew most truth-tellers heard lies rather than saw them, but a little bit of eye contact would have been polite.

“Gray, you satisfied so far?” Joy asked after an hour had passed.

“Yes.” Gray sounded bored. Hector gave him the finger under the table.

“Let’s talk about the security at the college,” said Joy.

“Do you mind if I stand up and move around a little bit?” Hector asked.

“Go ahead,” said Joy. “Who maintains the wards?”

Hector got out of the chair and stretched. The vertebrae in his back snapped into position. “I do,” he said, “according to President Fitzgerald's specifications.”

“And what is the nature of those wards?”

“They’re only active while the school is locked. The outer one is a simple sleep ward. Walk through it without a password and you’ll start looking for a soft spot to lie down. Occasionally a drunk or a teenager wanders onto the grounds; we just roust them in the morning.”

“What about in the winter?”

“Well, it doesn’t happen as often then, for obvious reasons. If it does, we have extra detection set up, and we can call up the sheriff to help collect them. Honestly, though, I think if one of them just curled up under one of the pines they’d be fine even overnight.”

“What if someone came prepared with a counterspell?”

Hector chuckled, but it turned into a yawn. “It wouldn’t work. The spell’s too strong. It’s amplified by the school’s own reservoirs.”

“What reservoirs?”

Hector gripped the back of the chair he had been sitting on and leaned on it. “Well…I guess I’m not sure, exactly. “That’s how Philip — President Fitzgerald — explained it: a reservoir. All I know is that I cast a pretty straightforward sleep ward every two weeks, and something makes it strong enough to knock out an elephant on coke. Something about the building or the grounds makes it a couple of orders of magnitude stronger.”

Joy turned to glance at Gray, who was looking at Hector. “He’s not lying,” Gray said after a moment. “It might not be true, but he believes it.”

“Thank you for that vote of confidence,” Hector said.

“All right,” Joy said. “What about the inner ward?”

“Just an aversion spell. Fear. Anyone who makes it through to the front door will fly into a panic and start running as soon as they put a hand on it.”

“It’s activated by skin contact?”

“No. Pressure and heat. You can’t fool it with gloves.”

“And counterspells…?”

“I’m telling you, you’d have to be Merlin to get past those wards without the keys. And if you did, I’d know it.”

“Yes.” Joy stretched out the “s” as she closed his file. “I’m very curious about that. There aren’t any cameras on the grounds, are there?”

He shouldn’t have said anything. “No.”

“Hold it,” Gray said. “He’s not telling the truth.”

“Yes I am. There aren’t any cameras.”

Gray stepped away from the wall and leaned across the table. “That’s literally true. But there’s more to that answer.”

Hector bit his lip as Joy stared at him, eyebrow cocked. Finally he said, “It’s something I’ve been working on, and it isn’t perfected yet. If I tell you about it, I may not be able to publish it. This is a matter of intellectual property, you understand? It’s not illegal and it has no bearing on your investigation.”

“Just because you believe that doesn’t mean that’s the case,” said Gray.

“No. No. No.” Hector paced back and forth for a few minutes. They were waiting him out. It was Interrogation 101; the longer you go without speaking, the more the subject feels compelled to fill the silence. But Hector hadn’t been hired to run security without knowing some things about the field; he wasn’t going to give it up that easily.

“I won’t talk about it without a nondisclosure agreement signed by both of you, by your boss, and by the secretary on behalf of the bureau.”

Gray made a noise of disgust or disbelief or both, but Joy Wilkins smiled. “If your technique is that groundbreaking, we can cut some sort of a deal. At the very least we could attach your name to it, credit you as a consultant. The fee would likely be nominal, but it’d be good for your career.”

“Maybe. But it would be better if I could publish first and patent the technique. This is
Spellbook
material.”

“Ooh,” Gray said, sounding unimpressed.

“You can still do those things,” Joy Wilkins said.

“I want guarantees.”

She shook her head. “This is going to take time. Do you have an attorney for this sort of thing?”

“Yes,” Hector said, and then, before Gray could interject, “I’ll get one. Look, I’ll answer any questions unrelated to this specific technique, OK? What else have you got for me?”

Joy picked up her file and stood. “I’ll let you know when I get back,” she said, and left the room.

Hector wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Gray was staring at him now; Hector had liked it better when he was being ignored. He paced a little more. When a few minutes had passed and Joy hadn’t returned, he decided to make conversation.

“Are you married?”

The scowl Gray had been wearing fell away, replaced by slack incomprehension. “What?”

“I was just wondering if you’re married. Or is the whole relationship thing tricky, with the truth-telling and stuff? I suppose on the surface it seems like it would be ideal, but then sometimes — there are just certain truths, small truths, that it’s probably better not to spend your energy on, right? And with kids—”

“I’m divorced. No kids.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I mean, what with your job, too…that’s probably a factor, right? Here you are, it’s after midnight, you’re at the office. It’s understandable that could become a problem. I mean, we all like to think of ourselves as understanding people, but everyone has their limits. Not that I’m assuming that it was your job that broke up the marriage or anything.”

Gray folded his arms across his chest.

“I talk when I’m wired. Wired like overtired, I mean. Not wired like — I’m not a spy or anything. Boy, it’s a good thing you can tell that I’m telling the truth, right?”

“I would like it if you stopped talking now,” said Gray.

“Right. Right.” Hector walked from one end of the room to the other twice. “The thing is, I have a lot of things on my mind, and if I were home I would probably be pacing back and forth in my living room talking to myself, because that’s what I do when I have a lot of things on my mind. And this security problem at the school isn’t even the worst of it, if you want to know the truth. I mean, in the global sense, in the job security sense, in every sense beyond the personal, it’s much worse. But do you want to know what’s really driving me crazy?”

“I really don’t.”

“I know you don’t, and I apologize, but I’m stuck in here and I guess so are you, so I’m going to keep on talking. What’s driving me crazy is that there is this amazing woman that I work with — well, she works at the same place I work at. The college. We don’t work together, we’re in different departments. There aren’t any rules about it or anything. We’re both unimportant, you know? But…” Hector sighed. “She is really something. She is—” He struggled for the right words and realized that he was making odd, meaningless shapes with his hands: claws, splayed fingers, shadow puppets without light.

“You like her.”

“So much. I mean, she is…trust me, she is gorgeous. I like a woman you can hold on to, you know? And she has such a wonderful laugh, and she is so smart…and she's avoiding me. She is not answering her phone, she is not returning my calls, she doesn’t go to the cafeteria, she is never in her office when I try to drop by, you know? And maybe…maybe she thinks it was a mistake, I don’t know. We slept together, did I tell you that?”

“I guessed it.”

“And we were both a little drunk, so maybe I thought it meant something that it didn’t. But I have admired her for so long, and she always blew me off, so I gave up. And then at the faculty reception last week, we end up in the same little conversation knot. You know how at a party, sometimes a little group forms, and then all of a sudden it dissolves, and you’re left standing there with someone you don’t know how to talk to? It was like that, except somehow it didn’t happen that way. Somehow I managed to make the awkwardness my ally. Believe me, no one is more surprised than me. I managed to be charming even though I was convinced that she hated me, and instead of walking away in disgust she laughed, and we started talking. And then we had some more wine, and we talked some more, and then I walked her home because we were both too drunk, and, well. As I am a gentleman, I will not elaborate further.”

“I would appreciate if you elaborated
nothing
further.”

Hector ignored that. “The next morning I make her breakfast, I tell her how beautiful she is, she laughs at my stupid jokes. At the door, she kisses me. She initiates a kiss, you understand? I go home feeling like everything is going to be perfect from now on. I cleaned my bathroom — I hadn’t cleaned my bathroom in months. I took out the garbage, I was humming a little song, you know? I sent her flowers, after I spent two hours debating whether there was something more original I could do.”

“Are you even approaching a point here?”

“Yes. My point is, I never heard from her. Granted, this was Thursday night, it hasn’t been a month or anything. But I am completely messed up about this. One day, two days, yes. I sent the flowers, I expect nothing. I call her Saturday morning, it goes to voice mail. ‘Hey, it’s Hector, maybe you would like to go to dinner this week, my friend runs a place in St. Paul, call me back.’ She never calls. OK. Maybe I need to make a better offer. Monday I stop by her office, but she's not there. I leave a message with the assistant — I hear nothing. Now this is where it is tricky — perhaps she was not in the office at all on Monday, right? If I had not stopped by, I could have called her at home, or sent an e-mail. But I can’t do those things because I already stopped by, you know? If you do that it seems a little spooky.”