Garrett Investigates (5 page)

The thing snarled, and in a blur of black cloak and pale limbs yanked the woman’s head back by her hair. The knife-hand darted. Flames leaped from Bitner’s revolver, and a sound so loud that Cuan felt its concussion through his chest shook the air. Cuan felt his palm sting, saw the curl of blue smoke from the barrel of his revolver, and realized that he’d fired as well.

At least one bullet must have struck the thing. Cuan saw its body jerk, the shudder that rippled its cloak. The knife scythed away through darkness when its arm flung wide, and struck something solid enough to thump.

The woman screamed, her terror combining with the shrilling of police whistles to drown the ringing in Cuan’s deafened ears. Garrett appeared on Cuan’s right, a slim ebony wand wavering in her hand.

The devil snarled and leaped for Bitner, a jump so fearfully swift Cuan could not track it with his gun. Bitner shouted as he went down, his revolver discharging hopelessly into the air. His lantern shattered on the stones, splashing fire like water from a dashed cup. The beast fell on him, cobalt flames jetting from between its lips, its pinwheeling hands showing dark at the tips.

Cuan raised his gun before he realized he could not shoot, and instead threw himself on the creature’s back, his fingers burrowing deep in the folds of its cloak, seeking purchase on its scrawny throat.

The cloak felt warm, oily, like filthy human skin. He clawed; his fingernails caught, bent, and what they caught on tore. Spring-Heeled Jack shrilled, more alcohol-blue flames billowing from his mouth. The devil reared up, arching backward. Cuan yanked, slick heat flooding over his hands, burning his skin. If it was blood, it splashed his cheek and burned like fire.

He held his grip. He yanked again.

But the burning blood was as slick as a man’s, and his hands slipped and slid. Spring-Heeled Jack twisted in his grip, still wailing, and then—more eerily, cursing fluently like a man. It leaped, the living cloak flaring on every side, but Cuan’s weight flattened its leap and they smashed together into the brick tenement. They crashed into a shanty roof that splintered beneath them, and Spring-Heeled Jack staggered up, wobbling free of the debris, and leaped again.

Cuan slid from its back and skidded along the filthy stones. When he tried to stand, thorny heat spiked the length of his shin. He yelped and fell, realizing as he groped for it that he had lost his gun. One of the bobbies closed on him, truncheon dangling, and Cuan waved the man back.

Across the pavement, Bitner pushed himself into a sitting position and dragged himself away from the burning pool of lantern oil. “Where is it?”

Garrett spoke out of the darkness. She must be moving toward him; Cuan found himself blinded by the beam of her lantern. “Look over by the far wall. I think I got it with my wand.”

“I can’t. My leg is broken. Constable Burns?”

The policeman—Burns—wavered, his expression only a pale blur through the dark, but he turned away. His lantern now illuminated a crumpled shape sprawled across the dented tin roof of a lean-to. “Might be,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder. “DCI—”

She leveled her wand again and gave it a little flick, with no visible result. “I reinforced the paralysis,” she said. “Collar it. Where’s Constable Jamison?”

“Here, ma’am.” He came forward, supporting a staggering woman. The victim, Cuan realized, who was well enough to hold the ragged edges of her dress together at the front. “I’ll go for stretchers if you feel safe enough here with Constable Burns.”

Garrett smiled and slipped her wand up the tight sleeve of her jacket. “We’ll manage. Oh, DI Bitner,
please
do me the courtesy of sitting down until somebody can look at your injuries?”

“I’m fine,” he said, drawing wide his coat to display the blood-spotted tatters of his shirt, the scorched but not blistered area on his throat and cheek, the sizzled hair. “He scraped me up, is all. His claws aren’t all that sharp. Like dog claws. I guess that explains why he used the knife.” But he plunked down beside Cuan nonetheless, and drew up his knees. “Thank you, old man.”

Something rattled in Bitner’s pocket as he reached inside his coat.

Constable Jamison led the woman over and drew his coat off for her to sit upon. “Here, miss, just sit down by the Detective Sergeant, would you?”

She as much collapsed as sat. Cuan pulled off his own coat and draped it around her shoulders. She huddled into it, wide-eyed and unweeping, peering at him over clutching fingers. Her eyes almost vanished behind her tangled locks.

“It’s not moving,” Constable Burns reported. “How long will this last?”

“Until I take it off,” Garrett answered. She swayed, standing over them, but kept herself erect. Across the court, Cuan heard the sounds of people stirring, the rattle of nests of newspapers pushed back, the grind of propped-up doors slid aside as the denizens of the rookery emerged. “Drag it over here, would you, and then relax. We may have a bit of a wait.”

Someone called “Suzy?” It must have been the woman’s name, because she flinched a little, but she didn’t answer, just huddled tighter in her coat.

“She’s here,” Cuan said. A shape emerged from the night, framed by two others. Women, all of them, blowsy and dressed in tatters, reeking of cheap gin.

“Is she—?”

“Alive,” Cuan said, and turned his face aside as Suzy was helped up and led limping away. He should retain her as a material witness—but he found he didn’t care. They had the suspect in custody, though what they’d do with it, he had no idea. Thank God that wasn’t his department.

Bitner nudged his arm. When he looked down, he saw the open mouth of a metal flask. “This’ll take the edge off the leg.”

He let Bitner slip it into his fingers, and paused. “There’s something you should know before I drink this.”

Bitner waited. Cuan felt the stir of Garrett’s coat-tail against his shoulders as she turned, scanning the darkness.

He drew a breath and said, “The name I was born with was Sean Cuan.”

“Why are you telling me that?”

“Because I want your recommendation when I apply to read sorcery at Oxford.”

“You’re Irish.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Cuan said. “You’re a university man. With your letter and DCI Garrett’s, they might consider me anyway.” He extended the flask, untouched, back to Bitner.

Bitner turned and looked him in the eye. “Christ, man, I thought you were going to tell me you had the pox. Drink the damned gin. Of course you’ll get your letter, man. And then maybe you can write me a report on exactly where that
thing
came from.”

“Hell,” Cuan answered, the sharp fumes of gin filling up his sinuses, making his eyes sting. The pain in his leg dimmed a little, veiled behind alcohol burn. “I can tell you that without an education.”

In retrospect, I kind of wish I’d used a different solution for the mystery in “The Tricks of London.” Rather than something frankly supernatural, it might have been more fun to let the current iteration of Spring-Heeled Jack be an impostor using some sort of mechanical and thaumaturgical device. Although what exactly he’d hope to accomplish still eludes me…which is why you wound up with a demon thing instead.

Now, on to the next story.

“The Body of the Nation” is the original story in this collection, never previously published. It’s absolutely Mark Twain’s fault: I was reading
Life on the Mississippi
while trying to come up with a plot for this story, and suddenly it sort of wrote itself.

This story takes place after Abby Irene has come to New Amsterdam, but before she’s met Sebastien.

Under moonlight, the North River Day Line steamboat
The Nation
seemed to rest on the glassy river like an elaborate toy on the mirrored surface of a drawing-room display. If it were not for the long sculpted lines of smoke hanging above her twin chimneys she might have seemed motionless; the paddleboxes enclosing her side wheels disguised their revolution as the moonlight disguised the brilliant colors of her woodwork. Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett knew
The Nation
must be fighting the tidal swell up the Hudson Fjord to hold her position, but the paddle boat was like a swan: what rose serenely above the great river’s surface reflected no hint of the steady striving beneath.

The little stern-wheeled tug that bore Garrett toward
The Nation
could not have been more of a contrast—skittering toward the stately passenger-and-freight vessel like an overexcited water bug.

Garrett shifted her gloved grip on the railing and lifted her face to the wind. Night was no more than a courtesy. The moon’s shining face would have provided sufficient light to navigate by, especially reflected as it was by the river. But in addition, the lights of New Amsterdam lined the right-hand bank, those of New Jersey the left—and
The Nation
herself gleamed at the center, bedeviled by gilt and shining with lanterns.

As she gave no sign that her magnificent languid grace upon the water was the artifact of concealed frenetic activity, she also gave no sign that within her elaborately painted and gilded bulkheads, there lay a dead man. But that was why Garrett was coming to her on this brisk spring night, a sharp wind lifting the hairs at her nape and blowing her long skirts around the shape of the blue velvet carpet bag she braced between her boots. It was only the presence of a dead man that had stayed
The Nation
on her route upriver to Albany even this long.

Garrett stepped back from the rail as they came up alongside. She crouched to pick up her carpet bag, avoiding being poked by her stays as she dipped with the expertness of long experience. The stiffness of her wand rested in its sheath along her left forearm—a minor reassurance.

A moment later and two members of the tug’s crew were steadying her on the rail as she lifted her bag up to the waiting hands of
The Nation
’s roustabouts. They lifted her after, dark hands and pale supporting her with surprising gentleness as she jumped up and was caught. The tug’s bumpers grated against
The Nation
’s oaken side; neither vessel ever quite stopped moving.

Despite their care, Garrett’s temporary lack of self-determination nauseated her with apprehension as the paddleboat’s crew hauled her over its higher rail and onto the deck. They made a point of bundling her skirts tight about her legs. Their expertise was no surprise. Steamers didn’t stop at every landing along the route between New Amsterdam and Albany. If there were only a passenger or two, a few bales of cargo—they’d be tossed on or off board while the vessel was still moving, to shave a few minutes off the route time.

The crewmen set Garrett on her feet and—once she had twitched her skirting smooth—handed over her carpet bag. She lifted her chin and was about to go in search of the vessel’s master when a cultured tenor interrupted her. “D.C.I. Garrett, I presume?”

“Captain O’Brien,” she replied, after a pause to adjust the cuffs of her gloves that was really a pause in order to collect herself. “So, who’s dead?”

The brim of O’Brien’s hat tilted along with his head. Despite the name, he had no brogue—his accent clearly said
Connecticut
, and the coast of it
.
“I would have expected you to have been briefed.”

She smiled. “I was pulled from my supper and told that I must report here. That it was a matter of utmost delicacy and urgency. And that
The Nation
could under no circumstances be further delayed, despite the fact of a murder, and so I would have to do my work enroute. But the name of the victim, or his apparent manner of destruction? No, these things were not considered essential to my performance. And so I am here before you, with barely the tools of my trade and the clothes I stand up in, ready to
detect
, to
investigate
, to
draw conclusions
, sir
.
”

He contemplated her for a moment before nodding. “Very well,” he said. “How about if I let you draw your
own
conclusions, then, since you’re here already? I’ll be happy to share my…” He weighed several words “…observations with you once you feel they will no longer be pejorative.”

“Can you at least tell me if it’s a thaumaturgical case?” Normally, she would only be called for those—or ones where there was a suspicion of black magic…or where the victim was a person of sufficient import that their death interested the Crown. In a symbolic but by no means unreal manner, Garrett was the King’s own hand and eye turned to justice for his people. It was her duty to protect his interests, and to serve them.

“I am afraid I am not qualified to judge that,” O’Brien said. “But the Duke specifically required that you be involved in the investigation before he’d allow us to leave New Amsterdam’s jurisdiction.”

That
was interesting. And it would be very like Duke Richard not to find a way to alert her to his suspicions or desires. He’d just expect her to know, through sorcery…or telepathy.

O’Brien didn’t look down, and despite herself, she felt the corner of her mouth curve upward. She had come here prepared to wrestle politics and permissions. Confronted with this plain-spoken and obviously weary working man…she felt a spark of hope.

Captain O’Brien was slim and wore his modestly creased uniform with—nevertheless—elegance. A blond fringe peeked out below the sides of his cap, and his small hands seemed dainty in white kid gloves. For all his unassuming aspect, Garrett was not fooled. It took something for a man of Irish descent to rise to captain a paddle boat that happened to be the pride of the North River Day Line—and the O’Briens were descended of Brian Boru, High King of Ireland…and
draoi
. Druid, an English speaker would say.

Not that that meant that O’Brien would inevitably be a sorcerer—but wizardry, like scholarship, had a tendency to run in families.

Garrett extended a hand. O’Brien took it. Their eyes met; she was the taller. It did not seem to trouble him.

Beneath her laced boots, the decks shivered as the great paddle wheels drifted to a halt, then began more vigorously to turn in a forward direction, taking advantage of the inflowing tide to push
The Nation
fast and hard for Albany. And Garrett was alone aboard her with a corpse, a crime, and the unknown factors of the crew and captain.

***

In a civilized nation, no vessel with a murdered man aboard would have been permitted to flit casually from the docks, waiting with bad grace and—figuratively speaking—restive stamping for the presence of the Crown’s Own. But the Colonies were not a civilized nation, with civilized checks on the behavior of powerful men. At least two of those men—Duke Richard, the highest aristocratic authority in the New Netherlands, and Peter Eliot, Lord Mayor of New Amsterdam—had a vested financial interest in the North River Day Line’s monopoly and operations.

If a messenger hadn’t raced on his velocipede directly from the offices of Robert Cook, president of the North River Day Line, to the offices of Peter Eliot as soon as the murder was reported…Detective Crown Investigator Garrett would eat her carpetbag full of the tools of the forensic sorcerer.

As Garrett followed O’Brien’s narrow shoulders along the port side rail, she trained her investigator’s awareness on the vessel.
The Nation
was at the top of her line, a broad-beamed behemoth strung everywhere with glittering lanterns that reflected from bronze and red and violet paint and from gilt on every surface. Garrett thought she must have used
The Nation’
s twin sisters in her own occasional trips upriver, though she could not recall having been on this particular vessel previously.

The Nation’s
wood finishings were ornate, scrolled and pierced with jigsaw work like the latest style in houses. Deck passengers milled among the cargo piled and lashed in tidy stacks, and the air of excitement led even those who had booked cabin passage to join them. Normally, these more well-heeled passengers would avoid the dirt and poverty of the decks. There would be a main cabin where they might mingle, and at either end of it a salon for the ladies and a saloon for the men. As
The Nation
was normally a day line ship, and should already have been approaching the safety of her berth in Albany, she did not book out sleeper cabins. And Garrett thought the level of excitement vibrating through the passengers was well beyond what the salon (or saloon!) or even main cabin could have contained. Garrett wondered what the captain had told them, and what additional rumors might be sparking like wildfire from one passenger to the next.

They’d be up all night at this rate.

Well, so would she.

Captain O’Brien paused before a stateroom door, beside which stood a crewman in a dirty-kneed uniform. Mostly, passengers traveled the day line boats on deck, or in the salons—but there were a limited number of cabins available for the shy, or overly moneyed, or those who did not care to mix even with the middle class patrons amid the silver and mirrors in the cabin.

“Here,” he said. He produced a key from his pocket—it was on a numbered fob—and unlocked the door. With no signs of a flourish—only a drab practicality, which—Garrett had to admit—seemed largely appropriate to the somber circumstances—he drew the panel open.

The space within was lit by a single lantern, but that was more than adequate. It was a little room, essentially—more a closet than a chamber—with an easy chair and a shuttered porthole. The curtains had been drawn against the inside. There was a good rug on the floor—anywhere else, it would have been a runner for an entryway—and atop the rug there was a dead…woman.

A book had fallen beside her, and a china teacup figured with cherries lay miraculously unbroken beside her splayed hand. She wore a gown of silk noile of the sort with differently colored warp and weft, so at the peaks of folds it caught the light and reflected back dark burgundy, while the valleys were shadowed and black. Her dark hair was sewn with rubies. More glinted at her neck and ears, amid diamonds and gold.

There were no obvious signs of violence upon her, and no blood upon the floor.

“She’s dressed for a ball,” O’Brien said. “And as you’ve seen, while
The Nation
’s a sharp boat, she’s not the sort of boat that hosts balls. She was traveling under the name
Mrs. Abercrombie.
” He shrugged. “Whether it’s her own—”

“Did she come aboard in Albany?” Garrett crouched beside the body, careful of the hem of her own dress and the possibility of contaminating the body with foreign fibers or hairs.

“She purchased passage and immediately embarked when we docked at the Battery,” O’Brien said. “She entered her cabin, called for tea, and was not seen again. We’re all rather distracted—we have a boatload of botanists going upriver for some sort of international conference on stamens and pistils or something, and as a result the holds are full of perishable goods on ice. We wouldn’t have found her before Albany, except one of the stewards—Carter—heard her fall when he arrived with the tea-tray.” He gestured to the fellow beside the door.

Carter was of average height and build, trim in his white coat, his mousy hair thinning despite obvious youth. His face looked pinched.

“You unlocked the door?” Garrett asked him.

“I had to run for the mate,” said Carter. “Stewards don’t have keys to guest cabins, ma’am.”

“But you saw the body? Through the window?”

He shook his head. “The porthole was covered. She didn’t answer a knock.”

“I see.” Garrett returned her attention to O’Brien. “And no one saw anyone enter or leave this cabin, of course?”

“We are interviewing the deck passengers,” he said. “They aren’t as helpful as one might wish.”

Garrett sighed. She needed a dozen uniformed officers to deal with a potential witness pool this large, with time this limited. What she had was an interfering captain who was trying to be conscientious…unless he was trying to cover his tracks. “That is the nature of eyewitnesses, Captain. Please continue interviewing them.”

Some would be over-eagerly helpful, some pompous, some irritated to be disturbed. All of them, by now, would be deeply unhappy that
The Nation
had been so delayed.

“It might be helpful that she embarked in New Amsterdam and suffered such an immediate fate,” Garrett said. “It suggests that her killer—if she was killed, and is not merely the unfortunate victim of a brainstorm—might still be aboard. You didn’t return to the shore to ask assistance?”

“We have a wireless,” O’Brien said. “Six months ago, we would have sent a boat to shore; as it was, we radioed a coded transmission.”

Garrett did not comment on the fact that the ship would have left its berth early in the morning, for the first tide and a fast run upriver to Albany. The North River’s estuary reached hundreds of miles inland—the tides pushed up it as far as the mountains. Into Iroquois Nation country, in fact—where the war magic of the Native tribes had stopped the westward expansion of the Colonies. There was a guarded peace now, and trade…but the border hadn’t always been friendly.

Garrett estimated that perhaps twelve hours had been lost while politics were wrangled…

Gently, Garrett touched the woman’s hand. She had expected it to be stiff, the fingers wooden and room-temperature. The flesh
was
tepid to the touch…but plastic, soft and flexible. While such things varied a great deal from case to case, a woman who had been dead since breakfast should have showed signs of rigor mortis, and should not yet be relaxing again.