That Nietzsche Thing (6 page)

“...I can look up the transaction in the
database, if it would help,” she was saying to Constantine. She was
maybe sixty, with white hair and glasses.

“If you don’t mind, it would be of great
assistance,” Constantine handed over the tablet. The woman tapped
at her keyboard, slowly keying in a multi-digit number into her
computer off the portable screen. Eventually, something on the
store’s computer met with her approval and her face lit up, eager
to help.

“Here it is, yes, March 23rd. $643, $1264
after taxes.”

“What was the transaction
for
?”
Constantine prodded.

“Oh,” she was flustered, looking through her
bifocals at the small screen. “A first edition of
Dark’s Last
Novel
.”

I gasped in shock. Constantine gave me a
look.

“
Dark’s Last Novel
?” Constantine
asked, confused. “Isn’t that in some sort of code?”

“Yes, this was a first edition, from Dark’s
personal printing.”

“$1264 for a book you can’t even read?”
Constantine shook his head.

“It has quite a high collector’s value, sir,”
the woman said. “Very few copies have survived since the
1960’s.”

“What?” I interrupted. “Why?”

“Well, the Rosicrucians, of course,” the
woman said like it was common knowledge.

“Dark’s own people? They buy them all up or
something?”

“Yes,” she nodded, smiling. “Bought them all
and destroyed them.”

“The Rosicrucians?” Constantine asked.

“Yes.”

“Why would they destroy their own founder’s
book?” I added.

The woman shrugged that particular kind of
shrug that universally indicated that all human life was
unpredictable. “As I understand, there was putsch with the ranks of
the Rosicrucians sometime last century. An iconoclastic wing
challenged the orthodox hierarchy. Destroying Dark’s novels was all
part of their purge.”

“Seriously?” I asked in disbelief.

The book store clerk shrugged again.

“Why would Vivian Montavez spend
twelve-hundred bucks on a book?” Constantine hadn’t gotten past
that detail.

“You said she emailed her brother that she
was in Seattle looking for Q, correct?” I said.

“Yes, but—”

“But there you go,” I gestured to the woman,
indicating she should explain.

“Ah yes,” she said rapidly, picking up my
thread. “The title of
Dark’s Last Novel
is unknown. Encoded,
like the rest of the text. But it is referred to by many as
Quelle,
German for the Source, or the Well. It is often
abbreviated as Q.”

It took a moment for that information to drip
down through Constantine’s NeoCon filter.

“She wasn’t in Seattle looking for Q, the
person,” I said, now realizing our trip had been a waste. “She was
here in Seattle to buy a lousy book.”

#

“I don’t get it,” Constantine said. We were
back out on the sidewalk, in front of the Bookstore. “Is Q a guy or
a book?”

“Both, I said, wishing I still had my Kools.
“Neither. It’s just a label hung on an unknown. Same etymology,
different context. Get it? Quelle? Source? Q?”

“Then Montavez wasn’t in Seattle looking for
Q the Genetic Engineer, but Q, some frigging science fiction novel?
All of which were burned by some Branch Davidian cult sixty years
ago?”

“Mmm.” I was searching the sidewalk for the
half a cigarette I’d discarded before stepping into the bookstore.
I found it, still smoldering in the gutter and picked up the nub. I
dusted it off and got a few last puffs out of it. “So much for a
grand conspiracy,” I said, finishing off my smoke.

“That can’t be it,” Constantine said, looking
back at the store. “That just can’t be all there is to it...”

“Maybe, maybe not, but we’re not going to
learn anything else back in there.” I tossed the butt back into the
gutter and stubbed it out. “Q or no Q, the girl is still dead, and
her body is still missing.”

Constantine grunted, not caring at all for my
answer.

Chapter 8

I don’t know if Special Agent Constantine was
growing to like me or if it was just a reward for a job well done,
but he spared me the bus ride and gave me a lift back to the Town
Hall in the dark, black Charger.

Sure, he wasn’t my chauffeur, but I wasn’t
his dancing monkey, either. He drove, and I let the Montavez case
bounce around in my head. I think I’d done a good job sufficiently
confusing Q the book and Q the person in Constantine’s mind, but I
wasn’t confused myself.

I then knew what had gotten Vivian Montavez
killed.

The second I’d heard the old women tell
Constantine the reason for the $1200 charge, it’d hit me. Etymology
be damned, there was some connection between the Rosicrucians,
their guru’s last, encrypted novel, Geneing and the elusive,
possibly mythical, Q.

Vivian Montavez had known this, and now I
knew. I just hoped to God that Constantine didn’t.

The girl had been in Seattle to find Q – the
source – of all these mysteries. A sly move, since taken as a
whole, they were really just a single mystery all tangled up and
confused.

I’d successfully climbed into her head. I was
feeling closer to Vivian Montavez than I really should have. I knew
why she was dead, but was still hazy on who done it. But that
answer would come in time, I knew, as I dug deeper. For now, I
tried not to tip my hand to Constantine and his Feds.

I wanted to catch Montavez’s killer myself
and laud it over Constantine and his three C’s. Fuck him and fuck
his little occupation.

That would teach him to give away my smokes
to some bum.

He was right about one thing, though.
Constantine. He was a boot. A boot standing on the neck of people
of Seattle. He’d get his soon enough.

Constantine drove back at the door of his
Command Center and scurried inside to continue his systematic
erosion of America’s civil liberties. I got the Accord out of the
garage and headed back up to Queen Anne.

I wanted to take another look over the girl’s
apartment and specifically look at her bookshelf for that $1200
copy of Q.

Partly I wanted to find the book as evidence,
but mostly I wanted to get my hands on it before some other cop
figured out how much it was worth. That sort of thing didn’t last
long in evidence lockers. Not in my town.

The key was still in the fake, plastic rubber
plant. The apartment appeared untouched. Whatever else you could
say about the Feds, their Forensic guys were top-notch. They’d
turned the place over for prints and DNA and returned everything to
its original place. It was like they’d never even been there.

Once again, I felt instantly home the moment
I turned the key in the latch.

I’d picked up another pack of Kools at the
corner store, and I dropped myself heavily down on the futon as I
tapped them out on the back of my hand. I twisted and scanned the
vast bookshelf of titles and thought that perhaps a cup of coffee
might fortify me in my search.

I climbed to my feet and went into the
kitchen, still packing my Kools tight in the pack. The percolator
was on the stove where Vivian must have left it, and I found the
ground coffee in the spice cabinet. Two minutes later, the coffee
was gurgling, and I returned to the living room.

Q, Q, Q...I scanned the lines of books. But,
of course, simply Q was not going to be on the book’s spine. It’d
be gibberish. Letters all in a jumble. O’Day had once bored me to
tears over beer explaining how encryption worked. There wasn’t even
a one-to-one relationship in the number of characters in a text, I
remember him saying. Something about salt. A ten-word title might
take four or twenty characters to type out in code. But it didn’t
matter, one quickly scan of the spines turned up no nonsense
letters. Some French, many Spanish, but no gibberish.

I did find an old, dog-eared copy of
Where
the Wild Things Are
on a lower shelf. I smiled and pulled it
out, studying the front cover. It was a favorite of mine as child.
I could remember my mother reading it to me before bed. “Wild
Thing!” she’d boom, and I would reply “I’ll eat you up!” That was
long before I could read the words on the page. Maybe that was
something else Vivian and I had in common, other than Q and a
pack-a-day smoking habit.

I returned the book to its place on its shelf
and went back to the kitchen to check on the coffee.

Was I really there in Montavez’s apartment to
do police work? Maybe yes and maybe no. I had nothing else to go on
but the physical contents of that apartment. If there was any clue
as to who had killed Vivian, it was going to be in there in that
apartment, with her things.

But I had to admit that I was inextricably
drawn to the place. After living rough for so long – bed hopping
with whatever women I could get and sleeping the rest of the time
in the drunk tanks – it was alluring to find somewhere that I felt
at home. The furnishing, the odors, the taste of that coffee, all
seemed oddly comforting to me.

It must have triggered some long-forgotten
memory in me, something from my childhood, like Max in his wolf
suit. I’ve heard of smells and tastes doing that for people. Not
that I could remember living in an apartment like Montavez’s,
either with my folks or without.

My father had been an attorney in Cleveland
and my mother a homemaker. I remember the big house out in the
suburbs. The apartment was all so...urban. I didn’t live in a town
until I’d come to Seattle to work in my uncle’s restaurant, and
then I’d been twenty-two. He was the one who’d hooked me up with
the police gig. His campaign contributions to the last mayor had
earned him some favors. And back then I’d been living with Annetta,
in that house in Green Lake...

I took my cup of coffee back to the futon and
sat down. I lit a Kools and took a long drag, looking around. What
was it about this place?

I let my mind wander, staring at the dark TV.
I was daydreaming of crazed Rosicrucians, burning books in some
Neo-Nuremberg style, Nazi flag waving rally, when snatches of the
War
of the Planets
movie popped into head. I’d only
seen it once, as a kid, but I remembered being particularly
terrified of the mouthless, eyeless killer drones used by the
invading Galronts. How they’d left their human victims slowly
dissolving into a pile of goo. The comparison to Geneing was
inescapable.

Dark and Geneing. What was the connection
there?

Q? I was convinced that Dark’s book and the
shadowy, underworld figure were somehow connected. It just couldn’t
be a coincidence. And I knew Vivian had believed the same thing
before her death. She bought that first edition from the bookstore,
but she’d really been looking for the man, as Constantine had
suspected. Did it detail his identity in some fashion? Could she
decode it? If she had a copy of it on an e-reader, why did she need
a physical copy? And where was it?

I had lots of questions and not many
answers.

I shook myself and reached for the TV remote.
Sitting there in the empty, quiet apartment thinking about spooky,
low budget aliens was giving me the heebie jeebies. I turned the
television on for some noise.

It was showing a breaking news broadcast. A
demonstration downtown. The Mayor was leading a protest against the
Federal Wardship. Good for him, I said to myself. He was screaming
into a gathered collection of press microphones as protesters waved
makeshift signs behind him. He was red-faced, bellowing into the
cameras, denouncing the President and the illegal actions of his
administration. The crowd churned behind him, seething with
collective rage. By the looks of things, it wasn’t going to stay a
peaceful protest for long. I’d watched crowds working themselves up
into a riot before, and they’d looked a hell of a lot like the one
on TV.

My phone rang. I was slow to answer it. Riot
duty was the last thing on my mind.

“Detective Fonseca?” It was Dispatch.
Shit.

“Yep,” I said, taking a gulp of my
coffee.

There was a long, silent pause on the phone,
like the dispatcher was trying hard to phrase something
correctly.

“Hello?” I asked the phone.

“Detective, we have a four fifty-one call,
originating from the University of Washington Campus...”

Four fifty-one? What the hell was that? Not a
homicide, I knew that. “Four fifty-one?” I asked.

“Yes sir, an arson.”

“Arson? Was somebody killed?”

“No sir, that is not my understanding,” the
dispatcher sighed.

“Then call CBRNE, those are their calls.”

“Yes Detective, but...err...” the dispatcher
hedged.

“There are no other detectives on duty, are
there?” I realized, resting my head on my freehand.

“I’m afraid not, sir. Only your card is
listed as on active duty.”

I was it. I was the entirety of the Seattle
Police Department. “Did you inform our new Federal Overloads?”

“Yes sir.”

“And?”

“And now I’m calling you, Detective.”

“Okay, okay,” I exhaled. Did I have a choice?
“Give me the address.”

She read of an address on campus. I instantly
recognized it.

It was O’Day’s lab.

Chapter 9

The lab was burned up pretty good. Someone
had poured gasoline on the server racks and put a match to them.
The Halon system had put the fire out fast, but there was a whole
lot of melted plastic and the acrid smell of fried circuits in the
air.

I looked over the scene with as critical eye
as I could manage. I didn’t know a damn thing about arson
investigations. But this one seemed pretty clear-cut. The gas can
was still laying where it’d been discarded in the corner of the
room. Case closed.