Paradigms Lost (2 page)

One of the things I have always liked about Syl: she isn’t afraid of much and is ready to deal with anything.

She started towards the back. “Let’s go.”

I cut in front of her. “You cover me.”

I approached the door carefully, swinging to the hinge side. It opened inward, which could be trouble if someone slammed it open. I took a piece of pipe that I keep around and put it on the floor in the path of the door so it would act as an impromptu doorstop. Then I yanked the bolt and turned the handle.

I felt a slight pressure, but not anything like something trying to force the door. Sylvie had lined up opposite me. She glanced at me and I nodded. I let the door start to open, then let go and stood aside.

The metal fire door swung open and Lewis flopped down in front of us. Sylvie gasped and I grunted. Drunk like I thought. I reached out for him. That’s when he finished rolling onto his back.

His eyes stared up, glassy and unseeing. There was no doubt in my mind that he was very dead.

I stepped over the body, to stand just inside the doorway, and peered up and down the alley. To the right I saw nothing but rolling fog—God must be playing director with mood machines tonight—but to the left there was a tall, angular figure, silhouetted by a streetlamp. Pressing myself up against the doorframe in case bullets answered me, I called out, “Hey! You up there! We could use some help here!”

The figure neither answered nor came closer; he just seemed to melt silently into the surrounding fog.
It’s a night for seeing men who aren’t there, I guess
. I watched for a few seconds, but saw nothing else and turned back to Lewis.

Fortunately, there wasn’t any blood. I hate blood. “Aw, Christ . . .” I muttered. I knelt and gingerly touched the body. The weather was cool for a spring evening, but the body was still warm.
Dammit
. Lewis was probably dying all the time I was reading
Phantoms.

“Jason, I have a bad feeling about this,” Sylvie said quietly.

“No kidding!” I snapped. Then I grinned faintly. “Sorry, Syl. No call for sarcasm. But you’re right, this is one heck of a mess.”

She shook her head. “I don’t mean it that way, Jason. The vibes are all wrong. There’s something . . . unnatural about this.”

That stopped me cold. Over the years, I’ve come to rely on Sylvie’s “feelings”; I don’t really believe in ESP and all that crap, but . . . she has a hell of an intuition that’s saved my job and my life on more than one occasion. “Oh. Well, we’ll see about it. Now I’d better call the cops; we’re going to be answering questions for a while.”

Normally, I might have asked her more about what she meant; but something about the way she’d said “unnatural” bothered me. I zipped back to the office and grabbed up my phone; I had the local police station on speed-dial. I worked with them a lot. The sergeant on duty assured me that someone would be along shortly. I was just hanging up when I heard a muffled scream.

I had the gun out again and was around the corner instantly. Sylvie was kneeling over the body, one hand on Lewis’ coat, the other over her mouth. “What’s wrong? Jesus, Syl, you scared the daylights out of me! And what the hell are you doing even
near
the body? You know what—”

She pointed a finger. “Explain that, mister information man.”

I looked.

On the side of Lewis’ neck, where the coat collar had covered, were two red marks. Small red dots, right over the carotid artery.

Two puncture marks.

“So he got bit by a couple mosquitoes. Big deal. There are two very happy bugs flying high tonight.”

Sylvie gave me a look she usually reserves for those who tell her that crystals are only good for radios and jewelry. “That is
not
what I meant, and you know that perfectly well. This man was obviously assaulted by a nosferatu.”

“Say what? Sounds like a Mexican pastry.”

“Jason, you are being deliberately obtuse. With all the darn horror novels you read, you know what nosferatu means.”

I nodded and sighed. “Okay, yeah. Nosferatu. The Undead. A vampire. Gimme a break, Syl. I may read the novels but I don’t live them. I think you’ve been reading too much of your woo-woo book stock lately.”

“And
I
think that you are doing what you always laugh at the characters in your books for doing: refusing to see the obvious.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but at that moment the wail of sirens interrupted, which was something of a relief.
That’s the craziest discussion I’ve ever been in and maybe we can just forget she started it.
Red and blue lights flashed at the alleyway—jeez, it must be a quiet night out there. Besides the locals, I saw two New York State Troopers; they must’ve been cruising the I-90 spur from Albany and heard about Lewis over the radio. I felt more comfortable as I spotted a familiar figure in the unmistakable uniform of the Morgantown PD coming forward.

Lieutenant Renee Reisman knelt and did a cursory once-over, her brown hair brushing her shoulders. “Either of you touch anything?” she asked.

I was glad it was Renee. We’d gone to school together and that made things a little easier. “I touched his face, just to check if he was still warm, which he was. Sylvie moved his collar a bit to see if he’d had his throat cut or something. Other than that, the only thing I did was open the door; he was leaning up against the door and fell in.”

“Okay.” She was one of the more modern types; instead of scribbling it all down in a notebook, a little voice-activated recorder was noting every word. “You’re both going to have to come down and make some statements.”

“I know the routine, Renee. Oh, and I know you’ll need to keep the door open during the picture taking and all; here’s the key. Lock up when you’re done.”

I told the sergeant we’d be taking my car; he pulled the PD cruiser out and waited while I started up Mjölnir. It was true enough that I could afford a better car than a Dodge Dart, even a silver-and-black one, but I kinda like a car that doesn’t crumple from a light breeze . . . and it wasn’t as though Mjölnir was exactly a factory-standard car, either.

Sylvie’s statement didn’t take long; apparently she chose not to expound on her theory to the cops, which proved she had more common sense than most people. Mine took a couple of hours since I had to explain about Lewis and why he might choose to die somewhere in my vicinity. A few years back, I’d been in the area when two drug kingpins happened to get wiped. Then Elias got me involved in another case and a potential lead fell out of a closed window. I was nearby. Cops don’t like it when one person keeps turning up around bodies.

It was one-thirty when we finally got out. I took a left at Chisolm Street and pulled into Denny’s. Sylvie was oddly quiet the whole time. Except for ordering, she didn’t say anything until we were already eating. “Jason. We have to talk.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“I know that you don’t believe in . . . a lot of the Powers. But you have to admit that my predictions and senses have proven useful before.”

“I can’t argue with that, Syl. But those were . . . ordinary occasions.” Admittedly, ordinary occasions where she gave me a warning in time to save my life, when I saw no way she could have known what was going to happen . . . “But now you’re talking about late-night horror movies suddenly doing a walk-on in real life.”

She nodded. “Maybe you can’t feel it, Jase, but I am a true sensitive. I felt the Powers in the air about that poor man’s body. And that
noise
, Jason. Big as Lewis was, even he wouldn’t make that kind of noise just falling against the door. Something
threw
him, Jason, threw him hard enough to shake the windows.”

I nodded unwillingly. I’d already thought of that; honestly, I didn’t think Lewis could have made that kind of impact even if he’d been trying to batter the door down.

“Jase, it’s about time you faced the fact that there are some things that you are not going to find classified on a database somewhere, comfortably cross-indexed and referenced. But I’m not going to argue about it, not now. Just do me a favor and check into it, okay?”

I sighed. “Okay, I’ll nose around and see what I can find out. No offense, but I hope this time your feelings are haywire.”

Her blue eyes looked levelly into mine. “Believe me, Jason, I hope so too.”

CHAPTER 2

Picture Imperfect

I got back to Wood’s Information Service at two forty-five. The cops were gone but one of those wide yellow tapes was around the entire area.
Damn
.

I went to the pay phone on the corner (
luckily there still
are
some . . . pretty soon, I’ll have to get a cell phone myself)
, dialed the station, and asked for Lieutenant Reisman. I was in luck. She was still in. “Reisman here. What is it, Jason?”

“You know, I happen to live in my place of business. Do you have to block off the
entire
building?”

“Sorry,” she said. “Hold on a minute.”

It was actually five minutes. “Okay, here’s the deal. You can go in, but only use the front entrance and stay out of that back hallway.”

“But I store a lot of stuff there.”

“Sorry, that’s the breaks. Tell your informants to die elsewhere from now on. Anything else?”

“Yeah. This thing has Sylvie spooked. She’s really nervous about this, and being in the business she is, it gives her weird ideas.”

“So what can I do?”

“Just give me a call when the ME report comes through. If there’s nothing odd on it, it’ll make things much easier.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Look, Jason, medical examiner reports aren’t supposed to be public knowledge, first off. But second, what do you mean by ‘odd’?”

I grinned, though she couldn’t tell. “Believe me, Lieutenant, you’ll know it if you see it.”

“Huh.” She knew I was being deliberately evasive, but she also knew I probably had a reason. She’d push later if events warranted. “All right, Jason, here’s what I’ll do. If the ME’s report is what I consider normal, which includes normal assaults, heart attacks, and so on, I’ll call you and tell you just that, ‘normal.’ If I see something I consider odd, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks, Renee. I owe you one.”

“You got that straight. Good night.”

I went back to my building and up to my bedroom. I was drifting off to sleep when I sat bolt upright, suddenly wide awake.

The figure I had seen in the alley, backlit by a streetlamp. I thought it had moved away too fast to follow in the fog. But the “Tamara’s Tanning” neon sign had been on its left, and the lit sign for WKIL radio on its right. One or the other should have flickered as it passed across them.

Both had stayed shining steadily. But that was impossible.

It was a long time before I finally got to sleep.

I got up at twelve-thirty; that yellow tape would keep away the customers who might drop by, and as a consultant I keep irregular hours anyway. I was just sitting down with my ham sandwich breakfast when the phone rang. “Wood’s Information Service, Jason Wood speaking.”

“This is Lieutenant Reisman, Wood. I’ve just read the ME report.”

“And?”

“And I would like to know what your girlfriend thinks is going on here, Mr. Wood.”

“Syl’s not my girlfriend.”
Not exactly, anyway
, I thought. “What did the ME find?”

“It’s what he
didn’t
find that’s the problem.” Renee’s voice was tinged with uncertainty. “Your friend Lewis wasn’t in great shape—cirrhosis, bronchitis, and various minor malnutrition things—but none of those killed him. He’d also suffered several bruises; someone grabbed him with great force, and after death the body was thrown into your door. But death was not due to violence of the standard sort.”

“Well, what
did
kill him, then?”

“The ME can’t yet say
how
it happened,” the lieutenant said quietly, “but the cause of death was blood loss.” She took a breath and finished. “There wasn’t a drop of blood left in his body.”

I made a mental note that I owed Syl a big apology. “Not a drop, huh?”

“Well, technically speaking, that’s not true. The ME told me that it’s physically impossible to get
all
the blood out of a corpse. But it was as bloodless as if someone had slit his throat with a razor and then hung him up to drain. The thing that’s
really
bothering the ME is that the man had no wounds that account for the blood loss. He’ll have the detailed autopsy done in a few days, but from what he said I doubt he’s going to find anything.”

“You’re probably right. Well, thanks, Renee.”

“Hold on just one minute, mister! You at least owe me an explanation.”

“Do you really want one?”

She was silent for a minute. Then, “Yeah. Yeah, I do. Because there’s one other thing that I haven’t told you yet.”

I waited.

After a few moments, she said, “All right, here it is. This body is not the first we’ve found in this condition. The others all had wounds that could explain the loss . . . but the ME told me privately that there were certain indications that made him think that they were inflicted after death.”

“Okay, Lieutenant, but you are not going to like it.”