San Francisco Night (17 page)

Chen used an Uber taxi to take her to the hotel, but had it drop her several blocks away. She was carrying a large shoulder bag and was wearing a bulky jacket over her sweatshirt and jeans, the better to hide her Glock in its underarm holster. Chen generally favored wearing her weapon on her hip but she was off-duty and the gun was better hidden. She walked slowly down the sidewalk, pretending to talk into her cellphone. She paused a short distance from the hotel entrance, waved her arm animatedly and did a complete three-sixty as if she was in the throes of an argument. There was a guy in blue overalls sitting in a cable van, and a couple of hooded teenagers standing at the entrance to an alley, smoking and bobbing their heads in time to music only they could hear.  There was a coffee shop on the other side of the road and half a dozen customers were sitting on stools facing her. She couldn’t risk looking at them closely so she started walking again.

She strode through the lobby and straight to the elevator, holding her phone to her ear and conducting an imaginary conversation with herself. There was an elderly man behind the reception desk and two people sitting in the lobby, a man in a wheelchair reading a newspaper and a middle-aged woman fussing over a Chihuahua that had been forced to wear a tartan coat.

She got into the elevator and pressed the button for the eighth floor, and for the top floor. The elevator went up and she got out on eighth, walked down a corridor to the emergency stairs and walked down two flights to the sixth. She stood for a while at the fire door leading to the corridor, looking through a small window until she was satisfied that the corridor was empty. She pushed the door open and listened carefully.  The corridor didn’t contain 624. It led to the lobby and she checked the lights above the elevator doors. The one she had used had gone up to the top floor and had stayed there. One of the other elevators was on the ground floor, and the third was on the second floor.

She stopped and listened again. There was a sign opposite the elevator doors that indicated that room 624 was to her left. She had the keycard in her hand as she walked towards the door. When she was six feet away she had a quick look around to reassure herself that she was alone in the corridor, quickly opened the door and slipped inside.

She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, her heart racing. She steadied her breathing and then went through to the bathroom. His toothbrush and toothpaste were in a tumbler and she put them and his comb into his washbag. What few clothes he had went into a carrier bag she had brought with her. There were three leather-bound books on the bedside table and she put them into the bag with the clothes. On the dressing table was a carrier bag from a shop called Pagan World containing a crystal ball and what looked like dried herbs and twigs.

She saw the camera bag by the side of the bed and she picked it up. She unzipped it and her eyes widened as she looked inside. She reached inside and pulled out the pink hairbrush. “You bastard,” she muttered under her breath.

Nightingale could see from the look on Chen’s face as she let herself into the apartment that she wasn’t happy. “You’ve got some explaining to do,” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

She dropped the camera bag and pulled out the baseball cap and threw it at him. As he was staring at it, she pulled out the pink hairbrush and waved it at him. “What are these?”

“It’s not what it looks like,” he said.

“That’s not an answer and you know it,” she said. She threw the hairbrush at him and it hit him in the chest. He bent down and picked it up.

“I can explain,” he said.

She took off her coat and he stared at the holstered Glock. She pointed her finger at him, as if reading his mind. “Just stay where you are,” she said. “You know what a trophy is, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“Because these look like trophies. The sort of things a serial killer would take to remind himself of what he’d done.”

“I’m not a serial killer, Amy.”

“So explain what you’re doing with a child’s baseball cap and a pink hairbrush?”

Nightingale grimaced. “I needed them to help look for the kids.”

“Brett and Sharonda?”

Nightingale nodded.

“So how did you get them?”

“I went to their homes. I spoke to their mothers.” He sighed. “And I stole them.”

She stared at him in horror, lost for words.

“For the best of reasons, Amy. And stole is the wrong word. I’ll give them back.”

“I should never have let you stay here,” she said. “When the cops hauled us in I should have just told them the truth and let them hang you out to dry.”

“Will you let me explain?” asked Nightingale.

“Try,” said Chen. “Give it your best shot and then get the hell out of my apartment.”

Nightingale held out his hand for the bag and she gave it to him. He unzipped one of the side pockets and took out the pouch containing the crystal. She frowned as he undid the pouch and slid the crystal onto the palm of his hand. She reached for it but he shook his head. “No, you mustn’t touch it. You’ll sully it.”

“Sully it?”

“It has to stay pure. If it gets sullied it has to be smudged and that takes time.”

“You’re talking in riddles,” she said.

“It’s complicated,” said Nightingale.

“If you say that one more time…” she said, exasperated.

“I can use the crystal to check if they are alive or not, but to do that I need something personal. I borrowed those items so that I could use the crystal on them.”

“And?”

“And both the kids are alive.”

She looked at him in disbelief. “Show me,” she said.

“It takes time. And I have to shower.”

“Yeah, well you could do with one,” said Chen. She pointed at the bathroom door. “Get to it.”

Chen stared at the crystal as it slowly turned anti-clockwise over the hairbrush. “You’re twisting it,” she said.

Nightingale was kneeling on the floor, wearing his bathrobe and nothing else. His hair was still damp from the shower. “I’m not,” he said.

“Let me try.”

He shook his head. “You can’t. The crystal has to be in sync with you. This is my crystal, it’ll only work for me. And like I said, if you touch it…”

“I know. It’ll be sullied.” She sat back on her heels. And watched as Nightingale held the crystal over the baseball cap For almost a minute it hung motionless and then it began to swing slowly until it was circling the cap.

“This crystal, can you use it to find out where the children are?”

“In theory, yes. But it’s much more..” He left the sentence unfinished.

“Complicated?”

He shrugged. “I need to use the crystal ball, and the other stuff you brought with you.”

“And that will tell you where the kids are?”

“Maybe. It’s not an exact science.”

Abaddon and Judas met on a bench at Fisherman’s Wharf. Judas had brought a bag of cherries, and they shared them as they spoke, carefully putting the stones back in the bag. They spoke quietly, their conversation inaudible to passers-by, drowned by the honking of the Sea-Lions on Pier 39.

“The Elemental failed,” said Judas.

“Yes,” replied Abaddon. “This man is something special. We must not underestimate him again.”

 “Twice now that he’s escaped with his life.”

“Yes, there’s no need to remind me.”

“Third time lucky,” said Judas.

“It’s not about luck,” said Abaddon. “We need to get ahead of the game. He can’t possibly know what he’s dealing with yet, so we must also ensure he can’t be given too much information. We need to think carefully about who might help him, and see that they don’t. More work for your scissors, perhaps?”

Judas gave a shiver of excitement.

“Oh, I do hope so. I really would have liked more time with the last one, but he wasn’t as strong as I’d expected.”

“He has not returned to the hotel?”

Judas shook her head. “He will know we are searching for him.”

“You must find him, Judas. You must find him and kill him. But before you kill him, you need to find out everything he knows.”

“I will,” she promised.

Abaddon got up from the bench and walked away. Judas popped the last cherry into her mouth, got up, dropped the bag of stones into the nearest litter-bin and walked off in the opposite direction.

“I have to be honest, that robe really doesn’t suit you,” said Chen, as Nightingale lit the two small blue candles which stood on either side of the solid crystal ball in the middle of the coffee table.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” said Nightingale. “There wasn’t much on offer in the shop.”

“But why a bathrobe at all?”

“The real adepts do it naked,” he said. “So count your blessings. And while it’s okay for you to watch, don’t interrupt. Concentration’s very important.”

Chen raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

Nightingale sprinkled herbs from a brass bowl into each flame, then made a small pile of lemon twigs in the bowl. He put Sharonda Parker’s hairbrush and Brett Mitchell’s cap on top of the pile and said a sentence in a strange language.

“Is that Latin?” said Chen.

Nightingale gave her an admonishing look and held a finger to his lips.

“I was just asking,” she said.

“No, it’s not Latin. It’s a language that pre-dates Latin. Now don’t talk.” Nightingale lit the lemon twigs with his lighter, picked up his pink crystal and held it by the chain six inches above the flames.

“Asmla oscsub ascihc odsidrept Sharonda Parker. Asmla oscsub ascsihc odsidrept Brett Mitchell.”

The crystal started to swing round slowly, then moved backwards and forwards regularly, from the north-east to the south-west.

“Asmla oscsub ascihc adidrept Sharonda Parker. Asmla oscsub ascihc adidrept Brett Mitchell.”

This time the crystal ball on the table clouded over and Nightingale repeated the incantation for the final time.

“Asmla oscsub ascihc adidrept Sharonda Parker. Asmla oscsub ascihc adidrept Brett Mitchell.”

The cloudiness cleared, and inside the crystal ball appeared the image of a huge mansion, seen from above, perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. There was an extensive lawn in front of it with a fountain playing in the center, and several garages or stables off toward the right. The main building was white, with black beams to give a Tudor look, though there was no chance of a genuine Tudor mansion in California. At each side of the vast edifice, a somewhat confused architect had added a square castellated tower. There were a few outbuildings dotted around but no sign of people, and no indication of where it might be.

“What the hell is happening?” whispered Chen.

“It’s called a Spell Of Propinquity. It can show where a missing soul is to be found.”

“So the ball is a projector?” she asked.

“No, it’s a focus for the energy of the crystal.”

“Bullshit. It’s some kind of projector. Where is that place?”

“No idea,” said Nightingale. “I was hoping for some local knowledge here. Take a good look now, it’s fading.”

The burning herbs in the brass bowl flickered and went out, and the image disappeared. Nightingale sighed. “That’s where they are, but we’re no further forward if we don’t know where it is.” He stretched. “You’ve never seen a mansion like that?”

Chen shook her head. “There are a lot of rich people in San Francisco. The Bay area has more Fortune 500 headquarters than anywhere else outside New York. We’ve got YouTube, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, WalMart, Gap, more multimillionaires than you can shake a stick at.” She frowned. “Google,” she said.

“Yeah, you said that.”

She shook her head. “No, Google. The search engine.” She went over to a desk on which stood a high-end Apple laptop. Nightingale went to stand behind her. “Jack, put some clothes on, will you? That robe leaves nothing to the imagination, seriously.”

Nightingale went through to the guest bathroom where he’d left his clothes. By the time he’d changed, Chen had a series of photographs on her monitor. “I Googled ‘cliff top mansion Tudor style San Francisco area’ and came up with hundreds of pictures,” she said. “Most aren’t local.” She scrolled down. A lot of the pictures had been thrown up by the word ‘Tudor’ rather than the location, and a lot of the houses were old and clearly in England. She homed in on one and clicked on it to enlarge it. It wasn’t the one that had appeared in the crystal.

Nightingale bent closer as she scrolled down the rows. He pointed at the fifth row.

“Stop, that’s it,” he said. “Click on that one.”

She enlarged the photograph and gasped. “That’s it,” she said. She clicked on to the link connected to the photograph and they went through to a page called Homes Of The Stars. She scrolled down to the photograph they’d seen and Chen read the copy. “The mansion is called The Elms,” she said. “It’s where Jerry King and Suzi Brook live.”

“Who?” asked Nightingale,

“Pretty much the biggest music names on the West coast.”

“I try not to listen to music by people who are still alive,” said Nightingale. “Tell me about them.”

“Seriously?” she said. “You didn’t hear their story? They were in a band producing their own stuff for the internet when one of their videos went viral on YouTube. Inside a month they were on Letterman, their first album went triple-platinum, had a contract for five more, a sold-out national tour. Says here they bought an old mansion overlooking the bay and spent a boatload renovating it. Not that too many people get invites, they’re shy on publicity, I’m told.”

“What are they? Husband-wife? Girlfriend-boyfriend?”

“No one knows for sure,” said Chen. “They’re a bit of an enigma. He’s just turned twenty-one, she’s nineteen.”

“When did all this happen?” asked Nightingale.

“Around two years ago, I think. Fastest thing you ever saw. Way faster than Justin Bieber’s rise to stardom. Funny though, they sell millions, but I never met anyone who actually liked their stuff.”

“So you wouldn’t have any?”

“Well, it happens that I do. My sister bought me a CD for Christmas. Never actually listened to it.”

“Maybe you should give it a try?” said Nightingale.

“It’s pop. I’m not a big fan of pop.”

“Me neither,” he said. “All sounds the same. Maybe just one track.”

“OK.”

She walked over to the bookcase and opened one of the CD boxes.

“Here you go, In Your Face. Just the first track, eh? Long After Dark.”

She pressed PLAY and the room filled with bouncy music. A catchy tune with two young voices apparently shouting at each other. Nightingale was no fan of pop music but despite himself he found his foot tapping in time to the tunes.

The music stopped. Nightingale looked at the display on the CD, it just showed the album length, 58m 18s. They’d listened to it all. He looked at Chen who was shaking herself, as if just waking up.

“Wow. Guess I drifted off there. What do you think?”

“Not sure, I think I drifted off too. So, they happened two years ago, eh? Around the same time as Speckman and Lucille Carr first hit it big?”

“More or less. But how can there be a connection between a football player an actress and two teen musicians?”

“They all got lucky. Except maybe it wasn’t luck.”

 “You’re kidding me, right?” she said. “You really cannot be serious. Those guys have all the money they would ever need, what would they want with kidnapping and Satanism?”

“I think maybe it works the other way around,” said Nightingale. “Maybe the Satanism came first. We’ve found four people so far who were nobodies two years ago, then their luck changed and now they’re huge. And they’re all involved in abduction and murder.”

“You say. I’m seeing no evidence of any such thing, just some burning herbs and a picture in a crystal ball. You’re talking about multiple butchery. Ordinary people just don’t do things like that.”

“But they’re not ordinary people anymore,” he said.  “They’re the Apostles.”

“So you say.”

“What do you know about Speckman and Carr?”

“I know they’re both good, upstanding citizens. You never hear of them crossing any lines. They’re as rich as hell, sure, and they’re both incredibly successful. But they’re not child-killers.”

“Amy, if they were, they would hardly advertise the fact, would they? What about Speckman a few years ago. Where was he then?”

She shrugged. “Everyone knows the story,” she said. “At least all San Franciscans do. Speckman was a second-string running back at SFU, then suddenly he starts making waves, playing out of his skin. He was a wild card pick for the 49ers and has started every game since. Rushed for 1597 yards last season, 27 touchdowns and already on course to beat that this year. From nowhere to multimillionaire in two years.” She saw Nightingale raise his eyebrows and she held up her hands. “Right person, right time,” she said. “It happens.”

“Same as Speckman and Carr? Just lucky?”

“Sometimes people do get lucky, Jack.”

Nightingale nodded at the television on the wall. “You said that was hooked up to the internet? Can you get some of Speckman’s games?”

“Sure. I’ll set it up while you make us coffee.”

Five minutes later they were sitting on the sofas watching Kent Speckman work his magic on the football field.

“Don’t watch him,” said Nightingale. “Watch what’s going on around him.”

Speckman was charging down the field, the ball tucked under his arm.

“I don’t see it.”

“It’s as if they’re letting him through. They’re all just of a fraction of a second too slow.”

Chen laughed. “That’s because he’s fast.”

Nightingale shook his head. “Show me a video from three years ago.”

Chen used her remote to scroll through a menu and another game flashed up onto the screen. She frowned as she watched Speckman make a much less successful run. He was brought down after just a few seconds and the ball slipped from his hands. She flicked through half a dozen short clips and in none of them was he particularly successful. “Okay, but he improved,” she said, exasperated. “He trained hard and he improved.”

“Is one possibility. But again, look at the people around him. Look at how they are reacting to him.”

She watched several more videos of Speckman’s early games, then called up his most recent. She sat back on the sofa frowning as she watched him run. “I hate to say this, but you’re right. Before they would just charge him and take him down. Now they hesitate. Not by much, it’s a fraction of a second, but it’s enough to give him an edge.” She shook her head. “That’s impossible.”

“What is?”

“You know what is. You expect me to believe that Satanism has done this? Black magic?”

“That’s what black magic does. It gives you the edge. And the more Satanic power you have, the bigger your edge.”