THE WITCH'S KEY (Detective Marcella Witch's Series. Book 3) Read online

  He wet his fingers and flattened his hair down neatly. “Well, don’t just stand there. Bring the young lady in.”

  “Great. Wait right there.” He shot me a look like I must be kidding. I suppose I was.

  Out in the hall, Lilith and India were talking in whispers. They both zipped it up tight the moment I walked out, and then began giggling when they realized that I caught them talking about me. In my typical, sometimes-paranoid mind, I imagined that Lilith told India about finding me in her bed naked, and about what Lilith had done next, which may or may not have involved my unwitting participation. Judging from the looks I got from India, I could not tell if my reaction should reflect pride or prejudice. I settled on something in-between and smiled bashfully.

  I walked up to Lilith and motioned a nod toward the room. “You ready to go in and meet him?”

  She lifted her shoulders and dropped them like a twitch. “Sure, why not? Let’s go.”

  I turned to India and offered my hand. “Thank you for everything,” I said. “I appreciate you helping us out on your day off like this.”

  She smiled, taking time to visually rake my body over before replying. “My pleasure, Detective.” After wetting her lips, she added, “Come back any time.”

  I think I managed a flirtatious smile back before Lilith pushed me through the door and into the room, saying, “Yes, yes, very nice of her. Now let’s go before visiting hours are over, shall we?” She turned to India. “Glad you got to see me, hon. Good luck keeping fat guys from riding those handlebars.”

  I could only imagine India’s expression, but having tripped through the doorway, it was all I could do to stay on my feet. Lilith stood behind me as I approached Pops, clearing my throat through a nervous smile.

  “Hey Pops?” I stepped aside and presented Lilith with a sweep of my hand. “I’d like you to meet my friend, Miss—”

  “GYPSY!” He cried in a voice that sounded both excited and scared. “No! It can’t be.” He pulled the covers up to his chin like a frightened child.

  “Pops, relax. This is my friend, Lilith. She just wants to—”

  “Please! I beg you. She’s a witch! Make her go away!”

  “What?” Lilith muscled me to the wall with her elbow. “Did he just call me a bitch?”

  “Lilith, wait.” I pulled on her sleeve to stop her, but the appearance of her aggression sent Pops cowering beneath the covers entirely. “He called you a witch,” I said, “not a bitch.”

  She backed off. “Oh. Well, that’s okay.”

  “Please don’t hurt me,” came a much shakier voice from under the covers. “I’m an old man. I beg you.”

  “Don’t worry, Pops.” I took Lilith by the hand and pulled her towards the door. “We’re going now. It’s all right. Don’t fret. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  I wanted to get Lilith out of the room before going back to comfort Pops, but India was still out in the hall, and with the ruckus causing a stir among the other residences, it’s no surprise that we were asked to leave the premises immediately.

  Outside in the parking lot, I asked Lilith why she thought Pops called her a witch.

  “Because, you heard him. He’s an old man.”

  “He also called you, Gypsy.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “What do you mean? I heard him.”

  “Maybe he called you, Gypsy.”

  “Lilith, the man acted like he knew you.”

  “Yeah, well, like I said.” She opened the car door and jumped in behind the wheel. Almost before her door shut, I was in the seat next to her. “He’s an old man, and obviously delusional.”

  “He’s lucid and creditable.”

  “So, you’re saying I know him and that I’m lying to you?”

  She dropped the car into gear and spun the tires. Her eyes remained focused ahead, but I knew her attention was more on me than the road. I regarded her with distrust, the likes I hadn’t known since my dealings with her in the early days of the Surgeon Stalker case. And though I knew Lilith so much better than in those days, I couldn’t find it within me to give her the benefit of the doubt until she gave me something semi-believable to chew on.

  “Lilith.” I jabbed my finger in the air. “I don’t like the way you play me.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Uh-uh. Hear me out this time.”

  She waved her hand as if casting the subject aside. “Whatever.”

  “Look. I’m not saying that you know Mister Marcella, but he obviously thinks he knows you. Now there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  She rolled her eyes to dismiss me.

  “Of course it’s something you don’t want me to know about,” I said.

  She turned to me with a jerk. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I did, but why did you say that?”

  “Because of what you said.”

  Her gaze narrowed. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Yes you did. I said there was something you weren’t telling me, and you said, ‘Maybe that’s because there’s something I don’t want you to know’”.

  “No, I didn’t say that. I thought it.”

  “What?”

  “You read my mind. I think that elixir you drank is beginning to work.”

  “Really?”

  “I think.”

  “Okay. So now that the cat’s out of the bag, why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

  “Oh no, the cat’s not out of the bag yet. You’re just now realizing there is a cat.”

  “Lilith.”

  “Sorry. I’m just not feeling it right now.”

  I leaned my head back in my seat. “Fine. You feel like driving me to the justice center?”

  She nodded. “Already heading that way, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Oh? Read my mind, huh?”

  She shook her head. “Nah, I just wanted to get rid of you for a while.”

  “Will you be home tonight when I get back?”

  She shrugged. “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what time you get home.”

  “It’ll be somewhere between sunset and sunrise.”

  “Oh,” she said. “In that case, maybe.”

  T hirteen

  Carlos and Spinelli were excited to see me back at the justice center. They had considerable luck on several fronts of the investigation and could hardly wait to tell me. Carlos, especially, seemed overly charged. He held his phone up and shook it at me to bolster his point.

  “Tony, I’ve been trying to call you for hours. Where were you?”

  I patted my pockets randomly. “Sorry. I must have left my phone at the apartment. What’s up?”

  “That skull and crossbones, you were right! It’s made of human bone.”

  “It is?” I said, trying not to sound too surprised.

  “Yes, but Spinelli tells me it’s like a couple of hundred years old.”

  I looked at Spinelli. He seemed less excited about the bone than did Carlos, though clearly he had something that he was eager to share with me. “Dominic,” I said. “You want to start with that?”

  He reached into an envelope and tossed me the bone that was inside. “As Carlos mentioned, the bone is human. I only let the lab have it long enough to confirm that. Their best guess is that it’s anywhere from a couple to four hundred years old.”

  “Nice, but that doesn’t narrow it down enough to help us any.”

  “I know. We could let them have it longer to do more testing on it, but it’s probably not necessary. I did some research and I think I’ve discovered its likely origin.” He reached into the envelope again and pulled out a thin stack of documents. “Here, look at these.”

  I took the papers and glanced through them quickly. They looked like something he had downloaded off the Internet. The first page included pictures from what appeared to be an archeological dig. In one, a nearly identical bone to ours lay in the di
rt beneath a reference ruler. The only exception, it had the letter K carved on the skull’s forehead. The rest of the documents were text, explaining the nature of the dig, the where, when and so on. I thumbed through the half-dozen pages and gave them back.

  “How `bout just giving me the skinny on it?”

  “Sure,” he said, and he took the papers and stuffed them back into the envelope. “This is part of a report, archived at Cambridge University. It documents a field trip undertaken by anthropology students in the nineteen-sixties. They were given permission to dig at a site near Plymouth that was slated to become a shopping mall. The site turned out to be a gold mine of artifacts and antiquities dating back to the early settlers at Plymouth Rock.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Wait. There’s more. What you’re looking at in these photos is something called a witch’s key. It seems that witches used them in Pagan ceremonies to seal the fate of an adversary. Traditionally, a witch would make one of these keys and carve her initial in a single capital letter on it. She would then cast a doomsday spell on the key, intended for a specific individual, and then plant it in a secret place. If, by chance, the intended victim were to find the key, then the spell would reverse itself and the witch would die instead.”

  “Charming. Sounds a lot like the witch’s ladder of death.”

  Spinelli nodded. “Similar, yes, only the ladder of death does not reverse its spell if found by the intended victim. It merely voids the spell altogether. That’s probably why the key fell out of favor and the ladder became the fetish of choice.”

  I stepped back, scratching my chin as my mind wandered back to a conversation I had some months before with Lilith. Carlos noticed it and pressed me before I could disregard my suspicions.

  “What are you thinking, Tony?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “No. It’s something. Tell me.”

  “All right, but really, it’s probably nothing.”

  “Let us be the judge,” said Spinelli. “You know how small details can become large oversights.”

  I gestured my general acceptance of that notion. I had to. After all, the theory was originally my own.

  “All right,” I said. “It’s Lilith. You see, right after our return to prime, she told me that all the women in her family were witches and that the first ones came over on the Mayflower.”

  “But it was the Mayflower that landed at Plymouth Rock,” said Spinelli.

  “I know.”

  “And you didn’t think that was relevant?” asked Carlos.

  I gave him a guilty shrug. “Coincidental maybe, but not necessarily relevant.”

  “No? Well, how about this?” Spinelli reached into his envelope and pulled out a picture of Lilith. I had seen it before. It was the one he showed me at the café, the one he took while conducting his surveillance on her.

  “Yes? What of it?”

  “I showed this picture to Leonard Kingsley this afternoon.”

  “Who is Leonard Kingsley?”

  “He’s a brakeman on a CSX. He told me he saw one of our vics with a woman the night before he died.”

  “Which vic?”

  “Raymond Kosinski. Kingsley said that Ray and this mystery lady were standing along the tracks when his train rolled into the yard around sundown. He said he waved to the two and Kosinski waved back, but the woman didn’t. She just looked up at him with these cold dark eyes that seemed to pierce right through him.”

  “His words or yours?”

  “His. He also said it gave him the willies. So, I showed him this picture of Lilith and he identified her on the spot.”

  “Is that so?” I took the picture, glanced at it briefly and handed it back. “What was she wearing?”

  “Lilith?”

  “The woman with Kosinski.”

  “Black,” said Spinelli. “Kingsley claimed everything about her was black; her clothes, hair, eyes; everything. He said she looked like the Grim Reaper.”

  “You say this was in the evening?”

  “Sunset.”

  “Ah-huh. Was the sun behind him or in front of him?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Did you ask?”

  “I may not have.”

  “You know that everything looks black when the sun is in your eyes.”

  “He said he’d swear to it.”

  “Tell him about the locket!” said Carlos.

  “What locket?”

  “Dominic found it this afternoon.”

  Spinelli reached into a second envelope and produced a small oval medallion. It looked brass-like in color, with bits of tarnished silver-plating hanging up in the deeper crevices, showing obvious years of wear.

  “I picked it up on site,” Spinelli said. “Dell finished up there around noon and let me look around. His men were gone when I found it, so…”

  “So you haven’t told him yet.”

  “What’s to tell? He’s still treating it like a suicide.”

  Carlos said, “Tell him what’s inside, Dom.”

  “I’m getting to it.” He held the medallion out and flipped open a small lid on the top, revealing a tiny lock of hair inside.

  “Is it human?” I asked.

  “It is. I gave the lab a sample, and initial analysis confirms it.”

  “Okay?”

  “There’s something else, Tony.” His expression became more serious. “You notice the hair is black?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we know it’s not the victim’s hair. His was brown. A fair assumption would lead us to believe that this locket and the hair inside belong to our suspect.”

  “Why, because Lilith has black hair?”

  “Because the hair is black,” said Carlos. “We’ll just go with that for now.”

  “Fine,” I said. “So, where does that leave us?”

  The two seemed to fade from the question. Perhaps to contemplate. Finally, Carlos asked, “How about the old man? Was he any help to you?”

  I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. “Good God, what a disaster. I took Lilith to see him, you know.”

  “And?”

  “He totally freaked out. He called Lilith a witch and then hid under the covers.”

  “You’re kidding?” Spinelli laughed. “Did he call her a witch, or accuse her of being a witch?”

  “A little of both,” I said, and I hesitated. “He called her something else, too.”

  “Gee, I can think of a few names,” said Carlos. “What did he come up with?”

  “Gypsy.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Not much. I asked her about it later and she shut me down. But you know that does bring up another interesting coincidence.”

  “What’s that?” asked Spinelli.

  “Well, it so happens,” I said, “that last night, before you guys came by to pick me up for our jungle recon, Lilith came to me with a puzzle of sorts. It involved a handful of dried beans, which she wanted me to use for a scrying exercise. She hid an object in the house that she wanted me to find by scattering the beans out onto the table and reading its location from the pattern.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Carlos. “That’s typical witch stuff for a witch, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but you didn’t let me tell you what she wanted me to find.”

  Spinelli jumped to it. “Don’t tell me; a locket with hair?”

  I nodded as the churning in my stomach ratcheted a nervous pull across my lip. It wasn’t a smile, but it was as close as I could get to one.

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” Carlos cried. “How do you know it was a locket of hair?”

  “She told me. She showed me a sample of hair and said that she hid the rest somewhere in the apartment for me to find.”

  Spinelli flopped down into a chair and propped his feet up on Carlos’ desk. “I guess she made it easy for you, then.”

  “What do you
mean?”

  “Well, she had to know that you would investigate this latest suicide. When you couldn’t find the locket in the apartment, she brought it to you at work, knowing you couldn’t miss it.”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would she want me to find a locket of her hair at a murder scene?”

  “Maybe she wants to get caught.”

  Carlos laughed at that. “Maybe she wants you to spank her.”

  I laughed back. “Maybe I should tell her you said that.”

  “No!” His face grew flush. “You wouldn’t.”

  I let him stew. “Dominic. Do we still have Lilith’s DNA on file from the Surgeon Stalker case?”

  “Sure, we have some from everyone involved.”

  “Good. Run it against the sample from the locket. See if you get a match. Carlos?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do a background check on the victims. See if any of them have ties to one another or to Lilith. Remember that Lilith’s lineage goes back a ways, so dig deep. Also, see what you can find out about Anthony Marcella Sr. And when you’re done with that…” I hesitated, almost changing my mind about asking him to check out my next request. But a stone, no matter how small, should never go unturned. “When you’re done with that, will you see if you can track down information on Jersey Jake? See if the guy is still alive. Like it or not, he’s as much a part of this mystery as anyone. Try to find out his real name, maybe a next of kin or something. Check all the arrest records for the summer and fall of 1941. We know that he, Marcella and Gypsy were all in town when Gypsy got pregnant. Maybe there’s a mug shot of a vagrant using Jersey Jake as an alias.”

  Carlos straightened his back and snapped me a salute. “Got it, Capitán. In the meantime, what will you do?”

  “First light, I’m going to Gitana Freight Lines’ headquarters to do some snooping around.”

  “You know where it is?”

  “Yeah, out in Quincy, barely an hour’s drive.”

  “Want some company?”

  I shook my head. “No, thanks. I think I’ll use the ride for some quiet time to think. Let me know if you find anything.”

  I suppose it’s the detective in me that drives my suspicious mind. What possesses me to act on my suspicions is something else altogether; probably the compulsive need for me to know what others wish me not to.