Ghost of a Chance

He flipped open to the page where he’d drawn what had remained of the rune and passed it to Iggy. The old man flicked his gold lighter and held it up to see what Alex had drawn.

“I don’t know what it is yet,” Alex began, but Iggy handed him back the book.

“It’s an obfuscation rune,” he said. “Write out a document, then draw the rune with the same ink and the text becomes unreadable. Some business men put them on important papers and contracts.”

“What use is a contract that no one can read?” Alex asked.

“Use the ink to draw the rune on a glass lens and anyone looking through the lens can read it,” Iggy explained. “They also have a side effect of blocking any kind of linking rune.”

“Watson must have used it on some business papers,” Alex said. He hadn’t found any unreadable papers, but since the rune was in the trash, it was likely Watson destroyed it.

With a sigh, Alex closed the notebook and put it back in his pocket.

Another dead end.

The cab eased to a stop in front of the brownstone, and Iggy paid the cabbie while Alex got out. He had no idea what time it was, but he needed to get to bed. Not because he was exhausted, but because tomorrow he had to find a dead man, recover a motor, and save a kidnap victim all in time to have a date with an angel.

Cheer up, he thought as they mounted the stairs to the front door. Tomorrow couldn’t possibly be worse.

25 The Search

Despite his going to bed well after midnight, Alex was up and at his office at nine sharp. In the detective business, he didn’t get many customers at that hour, but the time was useful to tackle the various tasks that needed to be done to finish cases and keep his business running.

“Wow,” Leslie said as he entered the office. “Things must be worse than I thought if you’re here on time.”

“You have no idea,” Alex said. He’d managed, with the aid of three cups of Iggy’s strongest coffee, to wake up and take the crawler to the office, but his mind was still fuzzy. “Please tell me there’s coffee,” he said.

Leslie stepped over to the little table that sat beside the filing cabinets and picked up a steel coffee pot sitting on a tick square of cork. Moving past Alex, she went into his office and then into the little bathroom attached to it, filling the pot with water. The office didn’t have a stove and the radiator connected to the boiler in the basement was off for the summer, but there were other ways to brew coffee, especially in New York. When Leslie returned, she put the pot back on the cork pad and opened the slender drawer in the front of the side table. Inside lay a decorative wooden box with paper flames of red and orange lacquered to its sides and top. Opening the box, Leslie took out a small, brown rock that pulsated with red light from somewhere deep inside. The light gave Alex the impression that the stone was breathing.

The rock was a boiler stone, the invention of Sorcerer Malcolm Henderson, one of the New York six. By itself the stone was an unremarkable, if slightly creepy, rock, but submerge it in water and it became hot enough to boil that water. Most buildings in the city had their boilers converted to use boiler stones instead of oil or coal. Alex was grateful tat they could also be used to make coffee.

“Things aren’t really that bad, surely?” she asked, dropping crystals of instant coffee into the pot as the water began to boil. Before Alex could protest, she added a second scoop. Leslie knew his habits almost as well as he did.

“Well, I almost got arrested last night,” he said

“How does someone almost get arrested?” Leslie asked.

“Remember Duane King?”“Yeah. The guy who the old Suffolk County Assessor cheated out of his land.” Leslie nodded.

“Well, I told Lieutenant Detweiler that he was the ghost killer.”

“Let me guess,” she said, refilling Alex’s cup. “He has an alibi.”

Alex nodded, as he drank deeply again.

“Real good one,” he said. “He’s dead.”

“Ouch,” Leslie said, a pained look on her face. She picked up the coffee pot by its wooden handle and poured Alex a cup. “I’m guessing the Lieutenant didn’t take it well. So what now?”

Alex accepted the cup and took a long sip of the scalding liquid. It burned his tongue but he didn’t care.

“Now, I have to prove that King faked his death and is actually the killer.”

Leslie raised her eyebrow at that.

“It sounds like I’ve got a full morning ahead of me,” she said. “Did you get those runes written that I asked for?”

“Last night,” Alex said, finishing his second cup. “They’re in the lockbox, but what does that have to do with your morning?”

Leslie smiled sweetly at him and sauntered around behind her desk.

“Because,” she said, “I either have to get these runes to the people who ordered them, or I’ve got to go out and find a job that can pay me.”

“I made up two weeks of your back pay,” Alex said in a hurt voice. It was a game they played. He knew that Leslie wouldn’t just quit, she’d go down swinging. So would he for that matter, but her bringing it up meant they were still in danger.