Feet of Lead (2/?)

• Olsen's Sin
• Wasabi

Thomm Quackenbush

The woman in the skull makeup went down hard, her head thudding against the floor in a way that made Silva's stomach lurch. Blood poured from the woman's nose, causing the makeup to look all the ghastlier, but what could she expect? This wasn't to say that she deserved to be bloodied--she didn't--but that it was a likelier consequence.

Ana Silva knelt next to the fallen woman, full of apologies, some of which she meant. Others she said because they are what is expected when you have hurt someone you would not have with a few more seconds of consideration.

She'd met Amanda at Carnivale a few years ago, on the hunt for an indigenous shaman who had murdered a little boy for his heart. Silva was not surprised that this supposed shaman was, in fact, some American with a fetish and untreated sociopathy. Amanda had helped her see that the ritual was all wrong for one of their fellow citizens, for which Silva felt she owed her a debt that only compounded every time Amanda took it upon herself to be helpful out of a sense of, Silva guessed, misplaced friendship.

Amanda was a witch, but that didn't carry much weight with Silva. She had a Rolodex full of self-proclaimed witches, some of whom deserved the title. Amanda was among these, but not principally so. Amanda remained near the front because of her tenacity to be a good person, which the detective had slowly learned not to find suspicious.

Silva tended to the woman as best she could until Amanda waved her away.

"You do not have the most nurturing instincts," Amanda said, wiping her nose of blood and, with it, a circle of makeup from her face. It was as though, with fuzzy eyes, the only part of Amanda that could be said to be properly alive was her nose.

"You were in my office in skull makeup. You know I react first."

She gave a disappointed look at this half-truth. "You only react. There is no second step."

"Why are you in my office?" Silva asked. "And how?"

"Witch, remember?" said Amanda. "Getting in here was simple, even if your locks weren't simple to pick. You should do something about both of those vulnerabilities, considering how you choose to conduct your business."

Silva couldn't give the line that she didn't believe in all that warding mumbo-jumbo because she was not stupid. She had seen more impossible things than anyone was meant to and survive. The locks she would have to do something about, though it wasn't much of a brag. She had a window. Though it was frosted, the cracks in it suggested an easier way for someone to get in here than warping the flow of reality with a spell.

"So that brings us back to the why."

Amanda pointed at her makeup. "I was communing with the subjects of your investigation." She said this as though this should be obvious to Silva, but witchcraft was not a subject she was well-versed in or found implicit.

She knew enough though. "Sympathetic magic, like attracts like. Fine," Silva said. "How did you know it was my case, and why did you go to that effort?"

Again, that look, as though she were trying to be obtuse. "Of course, it was your case. No one would trust it to the police, not totally. Would you care to tell me who hired you?"

"I don't know. Not directly. Whoever they are sent an officious intermediary. You know how people like to keep their hands clean."

She cocked her head, then nodded toward the blood on her hands from Silva's punch. "I am aware. I am also not surprised."

"Why did you go to the effort?"

Amanda rose. "You sound ungrateful."

"Do you want money?"

Amanda gave her an exasperated look, the black circles around them emphasizing the white of her eyes. "Must you do this every time I appear before you? If I needed money, I would not come to you. Whenever you have money, you lose it within a week."

Paying bills, to Silva's way of thinking, was not "losing" the money, but she wouldn't argue this point with the witch.

"I did it in hopes you would find my information useful," said Amanda.

Ah, Silva thought, this would be a matter of owing a favor later, of the debt deepening. She did not make a practice of owing people anything, practitioners of magic most of all, but she thought she could make an exception for Amanda. Again.

"You left the box, then?" said Silva.

"Box?" Amanda asked, eyes widening. Silva didn't need to interrogate that point further.

"A gift on the doorstep," she said, "which I will investigate after I hear the information so dire that you had to break into here."

Amanda licked her lips in concentration. How she managed to do this without a tongue turned gray from the makeup was a mystery to Silva, but not one she was required to solve. "It wasn't a murder, exactly."

Now, Silva felt entitled to give her own look of impatience. "Go on."

"They were practicing some sort of scientific worship, the exact nature of which they wouldn't explain."

Silva took a seat behind her desk. "So, you spoke with them?" She sniffed, knowing that she had to correct her phrasing before Amanda did. "Their spirits?"

"That is not the way of spirits, you know. I watched them and put questions, but they did not answer them directly."

"What does scientific worship mean?"

"Electricity. A bright light."

"They were electricians."

"Yes," said Amanda, "but no. This was something else."

"If it is worship, does that mean that there are others?" Silva hated dealing with most cults. They were fine when they were in their "we love everybody, now let's take off our clothes and do drugs" phase, but they never lasted long there before it became something deadly. Or, she granted, before they became mainstream and no one acknowledged how they had begun.

"There may be. They wouldn't make that clear, though why would it only be two of them worshiping something?"

"Worship implies a focus. Do you know what god we are talking about? Some sort of demon?"

"I couldn't see that. Electricity, though. Light."

"So far -- you'll forgive me -- you aren't giving me much."

"I didn't say that I was done," Amanda chided. Silva had to take a lighter touch, she saw. Amanda was the sort of witch connected with the earth and her inner feminist, but she was a puffball. Being the hard-nosed detective would only drive this informant away.

"I'm eager to hear more."

"It was a ritual, on the hill, where they died. They didn't think that would be their death, and they are still clinging, certain that something more should happen," she said, frowning at the memory, sorry for the delusions of the deceased. "I tried to make clear to them that they were dead, but they didn't believe it. They thought something was going to be there for them."

"They believed their ritual would put them in contact with something?"

"Yes."

"What?"

One side of Amanda's mouth twisted. Was she, in some way, still in contact with the dead men? Was Silva, by proxy, interviewing the men? "Otherworldly, that's all I have."

"Otherworldly, as in ghosts?"

"No, not ghosts." She closed her eyes, swallowing, trying to return to the headspace. "Not of this world."

That did the opposite of narrowing things down, though it was a relief that, if she could trust Amanda's testimony, she wasn't necessarily looking for a murderer. Then again, they had died and had not expected to, so it wasn't impossible that the capsules they took--if they existed at all--were not the substance they thought. Tricking someone to swallow a vitamin that is, in truth, cyanide does change the scope of culpability.

An overdose was possible, but none of the notes she had stolen mentioned anything of this. Of course, they bungled the tox screening, but there might still have been vomit residue or some external demonstration of an overdose.

Not of this world and the lead mask, the lights Amanda had brought up, it did point in a direction that Silva did not want to have to explore, nor one that she could bring up to Amanda without the witch feeling that she was being mocked.

The men's homes were a few miles outside Rio. Silva didn't know if she could get into them, but she also didn't know that she couldn't. Better, she was charging for all her incidentals, so it would not be much trouble if she failed.

Amanda wanted a look in the box, mainly since it had come nearly the same time she had, and she, too, did not know the sender. Silva did not see the wisdom of it. Already, Amanda had crossed the boundary between the living and the dead--though not at Silva's behest--and Silva doubted that Amanda would get any more information from them via witchcraft than Silva could get with her own eyes.

Silva, as gently as she could and with more half-sincere apologies for treating Amanda as she would any other person breaking into her office, evicted her.

The box was cardboard, unmarked on the outside. Even if she thought it would do her any good--and how could it?--she doubted that she could get a single print off it. She still thought it was a gift, but the giver didn't want her to know anything more, particularly knowing for certain who they were.

She slit open the tape. Inside were more files, which was almost disappointing. She had begun to build it up in her head enough that she considered that she would find the lead masks within. But this was detective work. Everyone imagined it was gunfights and subterfuge, but most of it was sitting at her desk, burning through a pack of cigarettes, and reading.

Looking at the pictures of the lead masks, it was laughable that she had even asked Santos about radiation. These were crude, handmade. They covered the eyes enough that nothing could be seen through them. Anyone wearing this might fear a bright light--though there are better methods of counteracting that and better materials by far--but not radiation.

But there didn't seem to be fear in these men. She didn't hold much with handwriting analysis. Even in a world where she had seen witches conduct elaborate rituals, handwriting analysis seemed like mystical nonsense. But, looking back at the note, she had to think that this was the penmanship of a calm and confident man. This was a man who had a plan before him, but not a plan about which he has the slightest worry. This was not a man with reservations that this plan was about to end both his and his associate's life. This is a man who, she thought, was surprised that he did not come out of this experience. The men, whatever happened, were caught unaware.

The suits were identical, but what else could be said of men's suits, particularly cheap ones? Had they been dressed in red satin capes, that would have been something worth remarking upon. Suits set them up only to be men trying to make a living as professionals and not doing it well. Amanda suggested that this might have been a cult ritual, but they looked like everyday men. They were not striking. They did not bear a mad gleam in pictures, something that those trying to provoke demons could never manage to lose. She couldn't guarantee it and wouldn't even voice it without evidence to back it up, but she sensed that they were not after the infernal. That was a relief. She didn't have any strong inroads with diabolists who might let her shake them down for information.

She felt a mild paranoia on her drive to their house. She noted that the two lived together from the files, which made matter easier. It meant that she only had to break into one window.

She parked blocks away. It was a different jurisdiction, and she hadn't made too much of a nuisance here, but her paranoia had only grown on the drive.

She sat on a bench and read a paperback, far enough away that no one would imagine she was casing the house, close enough to see if anyone else was.

The police weren't around in the hour she read, so she strolled over there, walked into the backyard, and tested the windows. Someone--the police most likely, but maybe the men themselves--had left a window unlocked. That was practically an invitation.

They had lived as bachelors, and it showed. There were dishes in the sink, crumbs on the floor. The less said about the bathroom, the better. If her apartment looked like this when she died, she would come back from the dead so that she could die afresh of embarrassment.

In the living room, she found a bookcase. The area around it was pristine, in stark contrast to the rest of the apartment. There were chairs and a table on which were a few books. She thumbed through them, but the covers alone convinced her that Amanda might be owed a bigger favor when she called it in.

Books on Madame Blavatsky. Spiritualism. Summoning. And, there, under a notebook, a book about UFOs. Out of this world indeed.

She skimmed the notebook, hoping without vigor that it would contain detailed blueprints for what they had done or something like a diary entry that would enlighten her, but it was all about circuit boards and wiring.

Her evidence was thin. It certainly would hold no water in court, but this case was never ending up there anyway. The way it looked, the deceased had been trying to conjure a UFO. The question was, had they been successful?

Silva didn't put much faith in UFOs. She'd met supposed abductees, but she knew too much about space--which is to say, she knew anything about space--to believe aliens were flying lifetimes to bother humanity. But the abductees had been harassed by something, of this she had reasonable confidence. She had never heard of aliens--or whatever they were--killing humans, just making pests of themselves, acting as sexual violators and livestock exsanguinators.

If she took this to a UFO person, she would have to leave too much out. Her thesis wasn't strong, and they would point that out. All she had was a paperback book she found while breaking and entering and the word of a witch.

She took photographs of the living room, of the books on the shelves and the table. She took sporadic pictures in the rest of the house, but almost so that she had a means of comparison. Aside from the bookshelf, there didn't seem much for her.

She left everything where she found it. None of these books looked obscure. She could find them either in a library or bookstore without trouble, which meant that she had not found any cult manual, just a hodgepodge of disparate sources that might amount to something more to the practiced eye.

She looked in their bedrooms. In the closet, she did not see more suits, not even what one might wear to church. What these men wore in the field were the nicest outfits that they had.

She made her way to the garage. There were a couple of workbenches, soldering irons, wires. It was organized well, so this was the part of their lives about which they cared the most. The rest was in support of this, which made sense to her. These two men were believers in something much bigger than themselves, and that something would bend more to technology than quiet prayer.

She did not like believers. She loved those who had a good idea of what they were talking about. Putting your faith in and giving your life to something that you couldn't touch sometimes ended up with you dead.

She gave the home one more once over to be sure that she wasn't missing a clue or leaving behind one herself.

Silva developed the photos when she got home, searching the details with a magnifying glass, but she saw nothing there that she had not in person.

She called a few libraries and bookstores until she could track down the titles. Within a few hours, she had these in hand. Skimming them--she sensed reading them in total would be an exercise in frustration--she found only that they did not look like something that reasonable people would take seriously. Even unreasonable people would still have their reservations. To her way of thinking, these books were meant for entertainment alone, little different from pulp horror novels.

She didn't want to report these findings to Pereira's principals tonight. Not merely because she wanted more to go on than this, but because it felt that she was getting close to something that it might not be prudent to share, not until she knew what she was approaching. This was far too early in the case to know what evidence she needed most to conceal.

So, UFOs. She looked through the papers, certain that she had seen something like that recently. She always had too many newspapers lying around her office, often bunched up until the smell of them got to be too much to take, and she brought them, bundle by bundle, to the trash. She had no better memory than the next woman but had honed it to pick up on and remember clues

It was a small item, almost told with human interest story glibness. Orange orbs had been reported within the last months in Niteroi. It didn't amount to anything more, just a few sightings of dubious quality, but it could not be discounted. That answer seemed almost too obvious to be wholly true.

Within the hour, she was in a cafe with a wild-haired man by the name of Raoul. Among her connections in the world of supposed alien abductions, he was the one most easy to swallow. She didn't like to cast aspersions on any of her sources, but she preferred those with whom she could catch a cup of coffee without drawing stares.

"You'll get me what you promised?"

"A moldavite big as my thumbnail, Raoul. You have my word," Silva said, knowing that her word meant something to him, hoping she could make good. "Now, what can you tell me about the sightings? Anyone reporting being abducted?"

He frowned, testing the words for a mocking tone, and decided that he found none. "Orb. Nothing too special about them. I haven't heard much else."

This information was worth neither the drive nor the rock she had promised him. "Surely you can tell me something else?"

"Not about that," he said. "Is this about the Lead Masks Case?"

"Is that what they are calling it?" I asked.

"What would you call it that would be better than that?" He took a sip. "I could have guessed you were working it. You getting paid?"

Was he looking more than a green meteor rock out of this? No, that wasn't the kind of bribe he wanted. "I don't work free. You know that."

"So, you think this case has something to do with the orbs?"

Silva stirred some sugar into her coffee. "I'm betting it has someone to do with UFOs, maybe those orbs."

"You know that being cryptic doesn't make it easier to help you," Raoul said. "Why would it have to do with UFOs?"

Silva took a picture of the books from her bag. "Are any of these familiar to you?"

He put it close to his face, squinting at the titles. "Are these significant?"

"They were in the men's home."

"They are not special. You could have a copy in your hand in many bookstores." He looked across the table at Silva, seeming sympathetic. "This may be a wrong path for you."

I took the picture back from him. "It's the path I'm on, whether I want to be or not."

"So, they were trying to find a way to the UFOs?"

"It was more than that," I said. "What do you know about any sort of UFO cult around here?"

He pushed back from the table. "I don't think you want any part of that."

So, he did know about them.

"You might be surprised at the things I want to be a part of and those I am a part of no matter my opinion." Silva edged back her chair, which did its job of bringing him closer to the table once more. "I'm not certain which is it, except that I am a part of it and see no turning back."

"You know that I would rather that you find a way to turn back. Up ahead, you will find nothing that you will like."