joegoda | Aspects : Book 3

I met Blackwolf standing on the steps of the Police Station. The central police station of Tulsa is a very old brick building, full of history and weight. The police station had seen the city through the Race Riots of the early 1900s, through the oil boom and the oil crash. It was also, so far, one of the last offices that had not been victim of the county's move to what is lovingly called the 'Borg Cube', which is a large glass and steel structure about fourteen blocks away.

Blackwolf nodded at me with his small smile and nodded at me. "Stragglers, Chester? That's not like you."

He was indicating the two young women standing on the sidewalk, about thirty feet behind me. Goth looked positively uncomfortable, trying to keep her eyes forward and defiant. Barbie, on the other hand, was sitting on one of the steps, looking miserable, waiting for whatever was coming next. I told Goth to quit looking so damn butch and sit with Barbie. Goth crossed her eyes at me and stuck out her tongue, but did what I asked of her.

"Hi Frank," I said, reaching out my hand to shake his.

He was smartly dressed in his brown suit, white shirt and blue tie. His shoes shined mirror like in the early afternoon sun. He looked like a well dressed Native American tree trunk.

Frank Blackwolf was a big man, a virtual Sherman tank of a man. He was not only tall, but broad as well, and very little of it fat. I was witness to him single-handedly lifting a Cadillac Eldorado off a person. Well, okay. He used both hands, and it was an obvious strain on him and he had to have some weeks of physical rehabilitation to recover from two torn rotator cuffs and massive burns on his hands and upper arms. And his hair took a while to grow back. But still... come on. He did it all by himself. And I still feel a bit of guilt about it.

I noticed that he had started to wear his hair longer than before and had tied it neatly in the back, after the style of his grandfathers. It was a thing I was glad to see. It meant that maybe Frank was starting to recognize his heritage. That heritage was of a long line of shaman and shape-shifters.

Frank and I had gotten acquainted a while back, when the area around Tulsa became the focal point of a rip between the dimensional worlds. He brought me in to help him investigate a string of odd murders and goings on that had eluded any sort of solution for fifty years. Actually, the phrase 'brought me in' may be a bit generous. I was the prime suspect in a murder at the time. The only thing that cleared me was that I'm not the type to chew the face off another person, whereas a demon from the other side of the Transition Gate, the Otherwhere, is perfectly capable of the act.

In the end, He, I and my circle of friends gathered together to kick some Otherworld butt on the other side of the Transition Gate and keep Hell on earth at bay. For a while, anyway.

"They're not exactly stragglers, Frank. They're just a couple of curious kids who broke into my apartment." I lowered my voice. "I think they were looking for the journals."

I hadn't told Frank much about Robert Plumb and the two witches, Madame and Madeline or Plumb's journals. He knew that I was raised up by a triad of three very powerful magicians, but he didn't know their names. All he knew about the books were that they existed, and he understood why it was important for them to not fall into the wrong hands.

If the journals, which were the notes and documentation of various magical theories and actual spells from the three hundred year life of Robert Plumb, were ever recovered by any agent of a particular bad guy known only as the "Evil One"... well, that would be what I call Very Bad, with a capital B.

That was pretty much what Frank knew. That it would be Bad. And for Frank, that was enough.

"Huh." He said. "Want me to arrest them?" The question wasn't serious.

"Naw," I said, giving him back his own small smile. "It was some sort of imitation rite. They're just kids. I'll deal with that after I deal with whatever you've got."

"Suit yourself," he said, giving a brief shrug. "Think you can get rid of them for a bit? I want your opinion on something, and it's not exactly a think those kids should hear."

"One of those things?" I sighed. It was never 'Hey Chester! I just thought you'd like to go play darts at McNellies'. It was always on of 'those things'.

"Unfortunately, yes." He turned his brown eyes toward the girls. "Get rid of them, okay? So we can talk."

I shrugged. "Okay."

I turned to the girls and called to Goth. "Goth, take Barbie down to Gypsy's. I'll be there when this is done, okay?"

She answered me with a glance over her shoulder and a short nod. Something was bothering her, making her a bit nervous, but I couldn't tell what. There was something... a look in her eyes that. I paused in my thinking. Her brown eyes. Her intensive brown eyes. I turned to look at Frank, who stood waiting, looking at me with his intensive brown eyes.

You know that feeling when you think you know something, but you don't investigate that something because even though you know what you know may very well be true, it might not be and even if it is, to simply ask the question would cause so much rocking of the boat that there is a little voice in your head that tells you to just drop it because really it's too much trouble and how much mess can you stand in one life time and that if someone has a child they don't even recognize what sort of answer would you expect to come from them and besides, how would you phrase the question? It's not like I can just go 'Oh, say, Frank. Goth is the daughter you didn't know you had. How you do you feel about that?"

On the other hand, I had this sneaking feeling that Goth knew exactly what I suspected to be true. Should I ask her about it? No. It's not my business and not my place to pry. If and when she decided to talk to me about it... Aw, the heck with it. I put it out of my mind.

The two girls got up from their seat and started walking. Goth tossed a brief look back, and gave me one of those knowing little smiles of hers. I was beginning to suspect she was a telepath as well. Wait! I was pretty darn sure she was. She and Barbie were certainly communicating somehow back at the apartment. I filed that away to talk to her about later.

As soon as they had moved out of sight, Frank took me by my elbow, something only he can do because I can't beat the crap out of him, and he led me up the steps and into the city building. Or what used to be the City Building before the Borg assimilated everyone. Frank still had his office here and so did most of the rest of the police force. The records division of the Tulsa Police Department was too big to move quickly, so the department had another six months before they'd be forced to set up shop in the Cube.

One other department was still in the old brick building. It was in the basement, and it was something I really didn't want to see. There were dead people there, and though I had seen my share of them, I still didn't like it. The City Morgue.

"Frank," I complained, "you know I don't like to go there." I followed him down the short hallway and entered the incredibly tiny elevator behind him. These were the original elevators in the Tulsa City Building. Built during simpler times when wheelchair accessible was a thought in the far future. There was just enough room to swing one very small cat, and even then, it would still probably hit the walls.

"I know, Chester." He didn't sound very sympathetic. "But I need your particular expertise in this one thing." He smiled, tightly, which is the only way he can smile, I think. "I promise it won't take very long." He pushed the bottom button, the one marked 3B. Third sub-basement. Bottom most part of the Basement. Also the coldest part of the building, which I guess is sort of necessary when you deal with dead bodies.

"Well," I said, "as long as you promise."

He chuckled at that, a deep and rumbly bass. "Do you know," he began, switching gears, "of a man named Jesse Wickersham?"

Nope. Never heard of him, and I told Frank so.

"Ah." He was quiet while the elevator purred. "I was hoping you had. You two sort of run in the same circles."

"Circles, Frank?" I raised my eyebrows. "I don't have much of a 'circle'. There's my chums, and you know all of them. And there's you. That's the extent of my 'circle'."

"All right." Frank waited for the doors of the elevator to slide slowly open. "I want your opinion on this one thing, and then I'll tell you about Jesse Wickersham."

"You can't tell me now?"

"Nope." He shook his head. "I don't want it to color your opinion."

Huh.

He took me past the checkpoints, of which there were two. He had the badge and he had the pass and every guard looked at me like I was some bad guy who deserved to be locked up on the eight floor. That could have been my imagination, though. It was just as likely the guards had heard about Blackwolf and the fact that he worked the equivalent of Tulsa's X-files. He got handed the weird cases, and when they got too weird for him, he handed them to me.

The M.E., the Medical Examiner, was an old guy named Quincy. Yes sir. Just like the TV show, that no one under the age of 30 remembers. He was just about as irascible as the character that Jack Klugman made, too. I liked him.

"Hi Quince," I said, standing at the door way of an incredibly bright room. I think the Morgue had more than it's share of florescent lights. More than any hospital room I ever visited, that's for sure.

The room wasn't very large. Maybe twenty feet by twenty feet. It's walls were all tiled in hospital green and two of the walls were taken up by double stacked doors, neatly spaced and neatly placed one above the other. The sort of doors that one would expect in a morgue. Doors about the size of an oven door and all shiny and clean and metal. There were fifty of them. I know. I counted them once. Those doors gave me the creeps.

The wall to my right was where all of Quincy's medical stuff was. Quincy's desk sat closest to the door where I stood, immaculate with it's calendar blotter placed neatly in the center with three pens neatly arranged on the writing side of the calendar. He also had a calendar above his desk, hanging on the green tiled wall. It showed a tranquil scene, with green, green hills and trees in full color of autumn. He told me once that the scene reminded him of the Summerland, where he believe all good people go when they die.

Next to the desk were his file cabinets. Ordinary looking black hulks of metal that contained the names and medical statistics of every one of his patients. Quincy didn't call them victims and he didn't call them corpses. They were his patients, and each one that came in and went out was given the loving care of a mother hen watching over her chicks. Which, in many ways, Quincy was.

He was also a fat man, round and short and if he had worn a beard, he probably would have passed for a garden gnome. He was, however, bald in the way a cue ball is bald. He had no eyebrows and he wore large round eyeglasses. When he was in a hurry, his lab coat would flare out behind him and he would look like a snowy owl, swooping in from somewhere.

To me, the most interesting thing about him was his hands. His fingers were long, slender, and delicate. I once asked him if he played a musical instrument. He help up a bone saw in one hand and a scalpel in the other and told me that those were his instruments.

"Chester! How nice to see you." He stopped what he was doing, which was taking pictures of the back of one of his patients and flew over to where I stood. I still hadn't crossed the threshold. I really didn't want to.

Frank had already found a chair on the far side of the room, where he sat and watched. His brown eyes, now very familiar, caught everything and lost nothing. That was what Frank did. He watched when it was time to watch, listened when it was time to listen and when it was time to act, he acted.

Quincy, though being fat, was not particularly short. He was about five foot eight, which still put him two inches taller than me. He wrapped his arms around me in a great hug, and practically crushed my face against his shoulder. Then he pushed me away from him so he could look at me.

"You look well, my friend!" Quincy's voice was baritone, like an opera singers baritone. It was rich and full and vibrating all around the room. He played it like and opera singer too, using it to reflect even the tiniest nuance of his emotion. I suspected him of being a drama queen. Definitely a queen, at any rate.

"I am, Quincy, thank you." I extricated myself from his hug. "You look pretty good yourself. Got some sun, too. Finally got out of here and went somewhere?"

"Not very far, I'm afraid." He sung sadness. "I had just made it to the New Mexico border when our friend, Detective Blackhawk called me back." Quincy wafted back to his work table. "Frankly, though I'm saddened to be called away from the ruins near Albuquerque, I am pleased that he had brought me such interesting work." He waved me over to the table. "Do come in, Chester! Tell me what you think of this."

He walked ahead of me, and twitched his index finger at me, indicating that I should follow.

Now, there are places I don't like to enter. It's not the people in them, necessarily, although there are places where I don't like the people. But there are places that are just too... noisy. Noisy emotionally and noisy spiritually. A morgue can be both. Tulsa's was old, and it carried the vibrations of a hundred years of death.

Still, Quincy gave a calming effect to the place, so the noises were a bit dampened, and the emotions were almost kept in their places. I took a step in, stopped and listened and more importantly, felt.

It was an odd buzz. Nothing bad... just the underlying feeling of wrongness. Quincy had done a great job of taking all the negativity that might have clogged the place at one time and reversed it. It was a testament to the man's sensitivity and graciousness. All that I felt were the mild resonances of departed living essences. And I felt that no matter where I went.

So, I stepped all the way in and felt the whispers of the dead pulling at me. I shrugged of the echoes of those no longer on this plane and joined Quincy at the table. I had seen a few dead bodies in my life... more than my share. But I still get choked up when see the body of a young person who will never reach their potential.

It was a young man, not terribly muscular, and not particularly attractive, as I judge men's attractiveness. His face was contorted in shock, rather than pain, as if he had been surprised at the suddenness of it all. His hair was long and neatly combed, and it flowed out to either side of his face.

"You do good work, Quince," I murmured.

"Thank you, Chester." His tone was of quiet reverence. "Poor child," he said, stroking the young man's brow. "He will never do whatever it was he had hoped he would do. He will never have to suffer the slings and arrows of failure or success."

Quincy smiled sadly. "I didn't ask Detective Blackwolf to call you here to mourn with me, Chester. Give me a hand, will you? I want to show you the back of his neck."

I helped Quincy turn the young man over on his side. Quincy gently moved the long and freshly washed hair away from a point just about four inches below the point where skull meets spine. He pointed at a darkly colored spot.

"What do you make of this?" he asked.

I looked at the spot, that looked like a tattoo. It had a central dot, about the size of the head of a pin. From that central point radiated twelve spokes, all about half an inch long.

"What is it, Quince?" I ran a hand over my baldness, and took my glasses off so I could get a better look. I leaned closer and smelled shampoo and decay. "It looks like a tattoo, but it isn't. It's more like..." I sniffed, and there is was, faintly. "Like a burn... like a brand."

"Exactly what I thought, Chester." We eased the body back onto the table, and Quincy smoothed the young man's hair back into place. He looked to be sleeping, and surprised to find that he was doing far, far more. "Knowing a bit of your... specialty... from Detective Blackwolf's stories, I thought you might find the placement interesting."

"Oh?" I thought about it. The burn or brand or whatever it was sat just about where the fifth chakra was on the body. The fifth chakra is the chakra of communication. It is the chakra of vibration and creativity. It is the chakra of self expression. Okay.

"So," I said, tentatively, "he has this spot on the fifth chakra." I shrugged. "Honestly, I haven't a clue, Quincy. To me, it looks like it's just another weird thing that some kid might do to themselves. Like piercing, except in this case it's a brand."

"You might be right, Chester." Quincy folded his hands over his ample stomach and nodded at me, smiling like a happy cherub. "You might be right. Except this particular brand occurs on twelve other people, all of whom were riding the very same number 21 bus at eleven o'clock last night."

Huh. I knew that Quincy was holding back, letting what he had just said to me settle. "And?" I prompted.

"And, all thirteen on the bus died at the same time in the very same way." Quincy paused again.

He was infuriating sometimes. I glanced over at Blackwolf, who just sat like some Creek Buddha, being who he was and doing what he did, and not giving anything away. "Annnd...?" I waved my hands in a circular motion, trying to get Quincy to do his big finish.

"They all died of a massive heart attack, Chester." Quincy once again stroked the brow of the young man on the table. "All of them. Old, young. There was a thirteen year old girl, Chester. She died of a massive heart attack." Quincy sighed and looked at his immaculately shined shoes as if looking for guidance away from his sadness.

When he back up at me, his eyes shone and his cheeks were more ruddy than their normal ruddy color. "Thirteen people, Chester. The youngest of whom was thirteen years old. There are twelve spokes on that brand, and if you count the person wearing the brand, that makes..." He looked at me.

Thirteen. "Yeah," I said. "I got the connection, Quince. Thirteen all the way around. That tells me only one... okay, two things. Maybe." I gave Quincy my own pause, and then asked, "Did all the people on the bus have this brand in the same place on their bodies? Or did it seem to move? Like... the patterns came in pairs. There is another person that has a brand where this young man does. Another pair has it about a hand higher. Another pair has it at the top of their head, and so on... like that?"

Quincy nodded, smiling largely. "You have pretty fairly described the situation to a tee, Chester. That is why I wanted you here. I suspect I know what happened, but I am not in a position to do any thing about it."

I raised an eyebrow. "Quince... you never told me that you knew anything about chakras and things like that."

"My boy," Quincy said, "there is a great deal that I haven't told many people." He nodded at Frank, who nodded back. "Detective Blackwolf probably knows more about me than anyone. Except myself, of course."

Sure. Frank would. Given enough time, I suspect Frank Blackwolf would know everything about everybody.

"Okay. Fair enough." I raised two fingers. "One, the person that did this may be pretty powerful in some sort of magical sense, but I suspect he's superstitious and possibly a bit ignorant of real magic. The number thirteen isn't really any more special than, say... the number four. In fact, there are a whole lot of other numbers that would have been more significant. Like the number three or nine."

I caught Frank's eyes as they swung their beam at me. "And two, all these people died because someone had connected them, like a bunch of capacitors or batteries. I believe that whoever did this found all these people and short-circuited them through their chakra points and drained them. Of course, that's just a guess. And I don't know why."

"Maybe he thought it would enable him to live longer, or maybe he felt that it would increase his magical potential or maybe he was using them to open a gate to somewhere."

I tossed my hands in the air. "I don't know, guys. All I got is what you showed me. Everything else is just guesses." I looked at Frank. "So... this is what you wanted me to see?"

Frank stood up, and the chair creaked it's appreciation. "Yep. This is it. But here's what I wanted you to know. This isn't the first time. It happens once a month, during the dark of the moon. Every month, someone dies in just like this. A little brand on the back somewhere."

He walked over to join Quincy and me. "Up till now, it was one, maybe two people. Usually someone that wouldn't be missed by many. Homeless folk, mostly. Maybe someone living in the John 3:16 mission." He looked down at the body on the table and shook his head. "The one that did this is getting bolder, Chester. I needed your input on this, and more importantly, your awareness."

"You want me to sniff around?" I asked him. "See if I can find the bad guy?"

"That's what I want," Blackwolf said, his voice deep and dangerous. "And if you do, you call me first, all right?"

"Sure." I said. "I'll see what I can do."

Quincy nodded at me, his face somber. "Thank you, Chester. For their sake." He didn't elucidate on who 'they' were, but then, he really didn't have to. Quincy had a strong belief that the savaged dead needed to be championed before they could rest. Maybe he was right.

I started to shake Quincy's hand, to let him know I was on the job, but he turned it into one of those man-bear hugs of his. "Don't stay away so long, Chester. I should tell you about my adventures at Mesa Verde sometime."

I pulled away from him. "Okay, Quince. I'll see if I can find the time to stop by." I turned as I reached the door. "You know I'm lying, don't you?"

Quincy smiled generously. "Of course, Chester! You would never come down here if you weren't required to. I understand that. Perhaps I'll find my way to your place, hey?"

"Works for me," I told him. "Take care, Quince." A wave at the door and I met Frank out in the hall. "Get me out of here, Frank. I like Quincy, but this place just gives me the creeps."

Again, Frank took me by the elbow, and I let him lead me past the guards and up the elevator. Once we got outside, I sat on the steps and waited for my world started to become more stable. Frank dusted off a place beside me and unlimbered his long body to sit beside me.

"Okay," he said. "What do you really think?"

I sucked a breath and blew it out. "I think there's someone... or something that is taking the chakratic energy from it's victims and is using that energy to..." I shrugged largely. "Hell, Frank. I really don't know. I haven't got a single clue what he would use that energy for. Maybe to go home. Maybe to send a message to his boys over in Otherwhere." I looked up at the sky as a jet flew over head. The sky was the color of robin's egg. My favorite Oklahoma sky.

"If he's been doing this for a while," I said after the jet had passed and I could make myself heard again, "and he's just now getting more bold about it, then yes, something heavy is going down and yes, I would reckon we better put a stop to it.

"That's kind of what I thought, too." Frank picked up a pebble at his feet and tossed it away. It clinked down the sidewalk before disappearing into a sewer grate. "I wish we had called you in before, but these... brands or whatever..."

"Chakratic burns," I offered.

"Okay. These burns never held any sort of significance. When all the evidence just points to a heart attack, who's going to look for any sort of foul play?"

"Agreed," I said. Frank was the sort of person who wore his guilt deep.

We were quiet for a while, the big man and I. We watched people come and go, driving their cars, riding their bicycles or just walking along the sidewalk. Most never gave us a second look. Some never even gave us a first look.

"See, Frank?" I nodded at the unknowing populace. "Most people live their lives walking around as if they were the most important thing on the planet. And who knows? Maybe they are. They never stop and think about the magic that exists all around them. They never think, and rightly so, that they are one thought away from things that really do go bump in the night. That their worst bad dreams really do exist."

Frank Blackwolf, Police Detective and Shaman, nodded grimly. "Yep. You're right. Good thing, too, or else we'd have a heck of a job on our hands."

He stood up and dusted the seat of his trousers. "Speaking of bad dreams, let me tell you about Jesse Wickersham. I called him last night. He used to help me on some of my cases before..." He paused and looked away, briefly. If I didn't know better, I would have sworn he was embarrassed. "Just before," he said. "He was... is... a psychic."

"So?" I pried myself up to a standing position. My back complained, which reminded me it was time to get a new bed. "What did this Wickersham guy tell you?"

Frank turned his brown eyes at me again, to underscore the seriousness of what he was about to say. "He told me that he had dreamed about last night's killings five years ago."

"Okay." I waited for Frank to continue.

"Chester," Frank said, "I think Jesse knows who did it. I also think that Jesse won't tell me who did it."

"What? Like he's protecting... whoever it is?"

"Or whatever it is," Frank added. He nodded. "Yes, I think that it is a good possibility that he knows a whole lot more than he told me last night. I was going to go talk to him a bit more today. I wondered if you would mind going with me."

"Human lie detector?" I raised an eyebrow.

Frank gave a brief smile. "Something like that, yeah." The smile faded. "Before I do, though, I better tell you his history." He started walking North.

"Where're we going?" I asked.

"To McNellies," he said. "It's three dollar burger day. I'm hungry."