I walked quickly to where the three of them were standing. "Don't mean to kibbitz, boss, but did you say something about burning and dismemberment? At Mercy Hospital?"
From the corner of my eye, I saw Karl get up from his desk and head over.
McGuire stared at me for a couple of beats, then said, "Yeah, it's at Mercy. There's a report of a patient in his room found burned to a crisp, arms and legs hacked off. Since there was no fire damage elsewhere in the room, the first responders are thinking black magic as a COD."
My guts, which had just started to relax, were a big clenched fist again. "Did you get a name on this patient?" I asked, dreading the answer.
"No name," McGuire said. "Just the room number: 333."
I glanced at Karl. His expression said he was thinking the same thing that I was.
"Boss, can you let Karl and me take this one?" I turned to Aquilina and Sefchik. "That okay with you guys?"
Aquilina said, "Sure," and Sefchik shrugged. They didn't much care – there would be other calls; they'd catch the next one.
"What's your interest?" McGuire asked me.
"I'm thinking that the vic might be-" I took a second to swallow, even though my mouth was suddenly very dry. "-Benjamin Prescott."
"Prescott?" McGuire's eyebrows dipped in a frown. "Oh, that professor, right? The one who was choking, and you two got to be heroes over. I thought he was in a coma."
"No, he's out of it, and doing some translation work for us. On the Opus Mago."
"Then what the fuck are you two standing here for?" he said. "Get moving."
It's not unusual to find flashing red lights around the back of Mercy Hospital. That's where the ambulances deliver emergency cases to the ER. But flashing lights clustered around the hospital's front entrance – that's something you don't see every day.
I took some doctor's parking space, then Karl and I made our rapid way toward the front door. I made sure that the ID folder with my shield on it was hanging over my breast pocket, since I was in no mood to be stopped by some rookie who didn't know us by sight.
I'd planned to stop at the information desk and get the name of the patient who'd been in room 333, but the harried-looking woman behind the counter was trying to talk to five people at once, and every one of them look pissed off, or scared, or both.
At the elevators, I mashed the call button and we waited for a car to show up. About half a minute later, I was about to say "Fuck it" and look for the stairs when one set of elevator doors slid open with a muted ping.
The only one inside was a middle-aged nurse who quickly left the car before Karl and I got in. I got a glimpse of her face as we passed each other. Being strong, controlled, and emotionally resilient are all part of every nurse's unofficial job description, which is why I was surprised to see that this one had almost certainly been crying.
The elevator brought us to the third floor, and a sign said that those with business in rooms 320 to 340 should turn left. We did, and a hundred feet farther down rounded a corner and that's when I knew we were in the right place – or the wrong one, depending on how you look at it.
Part of the hallway was blocked off by yellow crime scene tape in two places, with one room in the middle. I didn't really need to look and see if it was 333, but I did, and it was.
A uniform named Klein was stationed at the barrier. He nodded at me and lifted the tape up so we could duck under it.
I waited for Karl to say "What do we got here?" but he didn't. I glanced at him and saw that his face was pinched and gray, and we hadn't even been inside the room yet.
A few yards down the hall, another uniform was interviewing a nurse who kept waving her hands around as she talked. I walked up to them. "Excuse me," I said. "Anybody know the name of the vic?"
The cop, a redheaded beanpole named Sadler, flipped bck a page in his notebook. "Prescott, Benjamin R," he said. "Moved down here from the ICU earlier today."
I wish I could say that the news surprised me, but by then the surprise would have been if he'd said a different name. My guts weren't clenched, the way they'd been with the witchfinders. Instead they were cold, freezing cold, as if a big ball of ice had formed there and was planning to stay a while. Like maybe the rest of my life.
I asked Sadler, "Witnesses?"
"Nah. Couple of nurses heard screaming and ran over, but the guy's door was locked – from the inside. One of them had to go back to the nurse's station to get a master key. When they got the door open, nobody was in there but the vic, or what was left of him." He shook his head. "Sounds like your kind of thing, huh?"
"Yeah, sure. My kind of thing."
I turned away and went to the doorway of room 333 and stood there while a couple of forensics techs inside went about their business.
I let my gaze wander around. Standard-looking hospital room: green walls, patterned linoleum floor, a single window open wide; I didn't know if the window had been like that earlier, or if a cop was hoping to let out some of the stench. If that was the point, it hadn't worked real well so far. The sickly-sweet smell of burned flesh was so thick, you could almost see it in the air.
The rest of the room was pretty much what you'd expect. Narrow bed with mechanical stuff underneath it for raising and lowering; a small wooden armoire; a nightstand; one of those rectangular tables on wheels that they use for meals; a couple of uncomfortable-looking chairs.
There were a couple of differences from the average hospital room, though. Like the four bloody, naked limbs – arms and legs, two of each – stacked neatly in one corner, and the charred thing that lay in what was left of the bed.
Some of Prescott's abundant body fat had been liquefied by the intense heat. You could see it, runny and yellowish, sticking to parts of the bed frame. There were a couple of congealed pools of it on the floor, one on each side of the bed.
I stepped closer to the monstrosity on the bed. Might as well drink from this cup all the way to the bottom. A quick look at what had once been Prescott's head didn't tell me anything useful. A really hot fire will explode a corpse's eyeballs, so there was no way to tell whether the empty sockets that stared accusingly at me had been victims of the fire, or maybe the claws of something right out of Hell. I couldn't bring myself to check Prescott's crotch, to see if his balls were still there. I just couldn't.
Apart from some scorch marks on the wall behind the bed, the rest of the room had been untouched by the flames. The blaze had been localized and focused, no doubt because that's what a very old and deadly curse had specified.
The curse that I had invoked.
Sure, Prescott did the translating, but that's not what caused the curse to kick in – it's revealing to somebody what you've learned that does it.
Which is exactly what I asked Prescott to do.
Which is why Prescott died, in agony and horror.
I think Karl said something to me, but I waved him off. I stood there, looking at the remains of what had been a pretty good man and wondered if he'd damned Stan Markowski in his final moments. If he did, I wouldn't blame him.
But even he couldn't have damned Stan Markowski nearly as hard as I was right now.
After a while, I went back to acting like a cop. What else was I gonna do?
As I turned, my foot knocked againstomething metal. A wastebasket. I looked and saw some used Kleenex, the remains of a tube of Life Savers, a bent straw, a couple of used cotton balls. And a big FedEx overnight envelope. It was addressed to Prescott, care of the hospital, with a return address at Georgetown University. Looked like his assistant back on campus had sent the stuff that Prescott wanted. Like the remaining untranslated pages of the Opus Mago.
Then what the hell happened to them?
I turned to one of the forensics guys, Billy Santoro. "You come across any paper around the corpse, maybe something written in a foreign language?"
"No, no papers, Stan. Some ashes that might've been paper, but nothing that's got any hope of recovery. Fire was just too hot, you know?"
"How about a laptop?"
"We found something, was probably a laptop once. But now it's just a bunch of warped metal and melted plastic. You can look at it, if you want."
"No, I guess not. Thanks."