In Plain Sight

Alex flipped through is book and opened it so Callahan could see an immensely complex design, rendered in gold and sparkling red lines. It looked like a stained glass window in a cathedral.

“The red lines are made with powdered rubies,” he explained.

“How much?” Callahan asked.

“What does it do?” Danny said at the same time.

“This is a Temporal Restoration Rune,” Alex said. “No, it’s not like those runes people use to reattach handles to teacups or mend broken mops. This will restore Mr. Pemberton’s body to the way it was at the moment he died.”

“How much?” Callahan asked again.

Alex looked at him for a long minute before answering, letting the tension build.

“Normally I charge a C-note,” he said. Danny whistled and there was a murmur from the assembled officers. “But for you, Lieutenant, I’ll cut you a break, sixty.”

Callahan’s brow wrinkled up as he weighed his options. Alex just watched. His cost to make the Rune was only about thirty-five bucks — powdered ruby was expensive by the pound, but very little was actually required for the rune. Still, it did take several days to create and Leslie had been right, they needed the money.

“Do it,” Callahan said at last.

Alex tore the page out of his rune book and stepped up to the blackened corpse. He’d been a private eye long enough to get used to the sight of dead men. That made him wonder just how jaded he’d become.

“I need all you fellas who had lunch in the last hour to leave the room,” he said, then turned to Danny. “Be sure to take good notes — this will only last about ten minutes. When you monkey with time there are…repercussions. As soon as the spell breaks, the body will rapidly decompose.”

“Why do I have to leave?” one of the uniforms grumbled.

“Because I don’t want to have to clean your puke off my jacket,” Alex said.

“Is it that bad?” Danny asked.

Alex nodded, then licked the back of the page and stuck it to the dead man’s chest — what was left of it. Taking a match from his pocket, he lit it and touched the paper. The rune exploded with light, burning red and gold and white. It pulsed once, then twice, then faster and faster before it detonated into a shower of sparks like a skyrocket. When the embers touched the body, it began to roil and churn.

Alex was tempted to look away at this point — he could take blood and death, but the sight of a dead man’s guts wiggling like they were live snakes turned his stomach. He kept his eyes fixed on the corpse, however, knowing that Callahan would never let him live it down if he didn’t.

Tissue foamed up and the blackness seemed to contract, leaving pink skin behind. In the head, white blobs became eyes in the skull and teeth leapt up from the ruin of the chair and popped themselves back into the jaw. Muscle and then skin crawled across the face, running like wax until at last the body was whole again.

If whole was the right word.

“Good God,” Danny said as the remains of Jerry Pemberton were finally revealed. Deep purple bruises covered most of his body and his eyes were both swollen shut. Whoever had worked him over had given him one hell of a beating.

“Get pictures,” Callahan said, breaking the spell that held everyone enthralled. He looked pale; most of them did, but he kept his focus. All business.

Officers moved in with cameras and began snapping away while Danny scribbled as fast as he could on his pad.

While they worked, Alex went over to a little writing table in the back of the room. There were lots of fingerprints on it when he scanned it earlier with the oculus. Without any suspects, fingerprints weren’t very useful to the police, but that wasn’t what interested him. Inside the desk’s single drawer was a blank pad of paper. He hadn’t paid much attention to it before, but something about it bothered him. He wanted a closer look.

Taking the pad across to the coffee table, Alex removed a vial of black powder from his kit. He tore a very simple rune out of his book and stuck it to the pad, then carefully poured a few grains of the black powder onto the rune. Striking a match from the book in his pocket, he lit the rune paper and it vanished in a puff that catapulted the black powder up into the air. After a long moment, it began to settle on the notepad, first in random, haphazard dots, but gradually forming lines. In a few seconds the lines revealed the impressions left on the paper from whatever had been written on the missing sheet above. It was a crudely done drawing of a building, showing the points of entry and what looked like locked doors. The words Secure Area had been written in a shaky hand on one side.

“Danny,” he said, motioning for the detective to join him. “I think I know what this is all about,” he said in a low voice. He showed the pad to Danny, and, after a moment, the detective began to nod.

“Lieutenant,” he said. “I think Alex has got something here.”

Callahan made a noise in his throat that clearly indicated that he doubted that, but crossed to where they stood.