Ghostly Echoes (Jackaby #3)(10)
“The last time you assisted on this case,” Marlowe said at last, “you spent a week investigating one body in the valley and managed to bring the tally up to five dead, one severed limb, and two leveled buildings. What you failed to do was bring back any viable leads whatsoever.”
“It wasn’t the entire limb,” Jackaby replied. “It was just the hand. Hudson looks very smart in a hook, by the way. It suits him. And we did come back with a solid lead.”
“Right. ‘A man.’ That was very helpful. Have you thought of anything to add to that? Let me guess—not human?”
“Well, I can’t be certain of that until I’ve seen him in person, but I can give you his name and a precise description,” Jackaby said. “He is called Petrov or some such, and he has an anathematic aura with distinctly lavender accents.”
Marlowe scowled. Jackaby was not your average detective. He was also a seer. I had come to find that he was not actually all that adept at making the sort of connections that Commissioner Marlowe could make, and frankly he missed a lot of clues that leapt out to even an untrained eye like my own. But Jackaby saw something else that no one else could. He saw auras and energies—the reality behind the mask, he called it. He saw the truth, no matter how improbable. Making sense of any of that truth to anyone else was another matter entirely.
“He’s called Pavel, actually,” I chimed in, leaning forward from behind my employer’s chair. “Or at least he was ten years ago.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Jackaby confirmed. “Pavel.”
“He’s not a tall man,” I added. “He’s close to my height, I would say, with thinning black hair and very pale skin. He looks about forty, forty-five years old at the most, but he looked the same age a decade ago. He tends to dress all in black. Does any of that help?”
Spade and Marlowe exchanged glances. Marlowe looked at me. “It’s certainly a start, Miss Rook. You should lead with her next time, Jackaby. She’s better at this than you are.”
“Pavel is back,” Jackaby said, ignoring him, “and what’s more, he has been at his bloody business for a very long time. The McCaffery murder is not unique. You should know that there was a strikingly similar case, ten years ago. The woman’s name was—”
“Jennifer Cavanaugh,” Marlowe finished. “Unsolved.”
“That’s right!” I said. “You’ve read her file, then?”
“I helped write some of it,” Marlowe grunted. “I was a probationary detective in eighty-two. My mentor sergeant was assigned to the Cavanaugh murder. I probably did more legwork on the case than he did. Safe money around the station had the fiancé for the killer. Howard Carson had just accepted a major payment before skipping town, and his colleagues all turned up dead or didn’t turn up at all.”
“No, Carson’s wrong for it,” said Jackaby. “The pale man, Pavel—”
“Has a very unique signature, I know. Single puncture wound to the neck. Exsanguination. Very clean. No witnesses. Cavanaugh’s murder was nothing like it. It was a mess. Bloody. Neighbors reported screams. Alice McCaffery’s case looks very much the same. Whoever killed Cavanaugh and McCaffery, he had a very different approach than your pale man.”
“But you can’t possibly think that the murders are unrelated!” I said.
“We do not, Miss Rook,” Marlowe said, heavily. “There are patterns playing out with eerie familiarity here. The method of their deaths, their occupations and relationships, their preceding circumstances.”
“Preceding circumstances?” I asked.
Again, the mayor and commissioner exchanged glances.
“Twelve years ago,” Mayor Spade began, “my predecessor, Oslo Poplin, organized a council for the advancement of technology in New Fiddleham. The New Fiddleham Technological Center was going to be Mayor Poplin’s legacy. He hired a team of experts to drive the construction and launch New Fiddleham into the forefront of innovation and industry.”
“The future,” I breathed. “They were building the future.”
Jackaby nodded. “Not an unworthy goal.”
“No, but it was an unpopular one,” Spade continued. “For two years it diverted funds from every other facet of public works. Poplin let the parks become neglected and overgrown. Major roads were riddled with potholes. The future was everything to him, at great cost to the present. It might have all been worth it, except that the closer the project came to completion, the more things went wrong.” Spade removed his glasses and polished them clumsily with one loose end of his bow tie. “In the spring of eighteen eighty-two, the lead architect and two chief engineers disappeared. Then a few scientists and inventors who had declined involvement went missing as well. There was a major investigation. For a time, Poplin managed to keep the newspapers quiet about it. The project was still inching forward, and his entire reelection platform was based on its success.”
“But then there was Jenny,” said Jackaby, soberly.
Spade nodded. “People liked Jenny. When the lovely Miss Cavanaugh was found dead and her fiancé was not found at all, word got out. No bribe was large enough to silence the journalists. There was public outrage. The whole project was rocked by scandal, spinning off the rails. And then it blew up entirely.”