David Coe - His Father's eyes

Howell straightened, then swiveled his head left and right, his brow creasing. He checked the stalls, all of which were empty, before starting toward the restroom door. After two steps, he halted.

Anyone in here ? he said.

His voice echoed off the tiles, but no one answered him.

He took another step, stopped again. Without warning, he whirled, an audible gasp torn from his chest.

What the f- ? Who’s there ?

He sounded more scared than angry, though I could tell he was trying for the latter.

Again, his question was met with silence. He was edging toward the door now, his back to the sinks. This was where he was going to die, and I didn’t see anyone. Not a soul.

He spun a second time, practically jumping out of his skin, swiping at something on his shoulder, something I couldn’t see. His killer seemed to be toying with him now. Was he camouflaged? Had he found some other spell to make himself invisible to Howell, and thus to me?

By this time, Howell was terrified; I could tell from his labored breathing, the tremor in his hands. He took a single purposeful stride toward the door and bounded off of something unseen, the way he would if he had walked into a wall.

Fucking hell! he said, the words choked, like a sob.

A blinding flash of green light made me squint and turn away, even as I heard Howell’s truncated scream in my head. When I peered at the stone again, it was nothing more than sea-green agate.

“Damn it,” I muttered, forgetting that I was camouflaged myself. My oath drew a frown from an older gentleman who was walking past me. He kept going, though, and I ground my teeth together, vowing to keep silent from now on.

I left the men’s room and positioned myself in a corner of the gate area. There I cast the seeing spell again, hoping that Howell might have seen something-anything-between the gate and the men’s room that would tell me more about his killer. But he walked straight from the plane to the restroom, interacting with no one, his gaze sweeping over the crowded airport but settling on nothing in particular. Considering all the trouble I had gone through to cast the seeing spells I had little to show for my effort.

I walked to a deserted spot where I could remove the camouflage spell, and then found Kona again. She was speaking with another detective from the PPD. I hung back until she was finished with him.

“What have you got for me?” she asked.

“A sock.” I slipped her the sock, which she stuffed in her blazer pocket.

“Seriously, Justis.”

“Seriously, that’s about all I’ve got.”

“You mean, after all that mojo you were going to do, you didn’t find out anything?”

“Just that our killer casts a mean camouflage spell and can move around a men’s room without making much noise.”

“So you didn’t see him.”

I shook my head. “I saw what Howell saw, which was nothing at all. The guy snuck up on him, toyed with him for a few seconds, and then killed him with a spell.”

“The killer could still be here, then,” she said. “He could be watching everything we do, and we wouldn’t know it.”

“Or she. And yeah, that’s exactly right.”

She scanned the gate area, her expression curdling. “Honestly, I don’t know how you live every day with this magic shit. It would drive me up a wall.”

“Who says it doesn’t do the same to me?” I surveyed the airport as well. “But let me try something.” It wasn’t a spell I had attempted before, but Namid would have been the first to tell me that such things didn’t matter. If I could hold the elements in my head, I could cast it. It seemed easy enough, though I couldn’t figure out how to do it with only three elements; I’d need seven: me, the other sorcerer, his camouflage spell, my eyes, the gate area, his current location, and the removal of his spell. There were a few unknowns in that list, but I hoped I could conjure around those. I repeated the elements six times and released the magic on the seventh.

Nothing happened.

“Are you all right?” Kona asked, watching me, the corners of her mouth drawn down in mild disapproval.

“I was trying a spell. I hoped I might be able to strip away whatever magic our killer is using to hide himself. If he’s still here.”

“I take it the spell didn’t work.”

“Or he’s long gone.”

“Right. Look, Justis-”

“You have work to do,” I said, keenly aware in that moment of the fact that she was still a cop, and I wasn’t. Not that I’d needed the reminder. “I’ll get out of your hair.”

“I appreciate you coming all this way.”

“No problem. I think I can help you with this, if you want me to keep working on it.”

“I do. And with your new-found notoriety, the higher-ups are more willing to have you around.”

“Except Hibbard.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And nobody likes him anyway.”

We both grinned, though for no more than a second or two.

“I’ll ask around a bit,” I said, sobering. “See if any of my kind have heard people talking about a new player in town. Or about why the old players might take a new interest in domestic terrorists.”

I left Kona there and ran the gauntlet of police, FBI, and TSA check points until I was out of the terminal and back in my car. The drive out of the airport loop proved to be a good deal easier and quicker than the drive in. Afternoon traffic on the interstates, however, was hideous.

I sat in my car, idling alongside about ten thousand of my best friends, the Z-ster’s air conditioner working overtime and the sun glaring off the cars in front of me, and I thought about James Howell. To be more precise, I thought about the final minutes of his life, and possible reasons for his murder.

It was too easy to assume that he was killed because he tried to blow up the plane. How would a weremyste know that, and if somehow his killer was aware of the bomb, why would he or she resort to murder rather than simply alert the police or the FBI? And if this sorcerer knew about the bomb, why would he or she bother with grounding the plane first? That made no sense. The bomb was in Howell’s luggage; it wasn’t in the plane’s cabin or cockpit or cargo area. Disabling the plane wasn’t going to save any lives. That was why Howell was antsy, but not panicked. If Howell hadn’t been murdered, the passengers and their luggage would have been moved to a different aircraft, and that plane would have been destroyed.

The more I pondered this, the less sense it made.

I don’t usually use my phone when I drive, and I’m intolerant to the point of abusiveness of drivers who do. But we weren’t going anywhere, and it occurred to me that I needed more information. I pulled out my phone and punched in Kona’s number.

“Miss me already, huh?” she said upon answering.

“Can you get me the passenger list for Flight 595?”

“Sure. I’ll e-mail it to you. Why?”

“I know a good number of the sorcerers here in Phoenix, and I’d like to see if any of them were on board.”

“I’ll send it right away.”

“Thanks, Kona.”

I switched off the phone and tossed it on my jacket. A few seconds later, the cars around me started to inch forward.

I drove the rest of the way to my office in a fog. I knew I was missing something, a logical, or at least magical, explanation for the sequence of events that ended in Howell’s death. But I couldn’t see it. I kept coming back to the same conclusion: Whoever had killed the man had made his crime more complicated than it needed to be.

It wasn’t that I thought criminals always behaved rationally. Far from it. I’d been a cop for too long to think anything of the sort. But this was . . . odd. That was the best word for it.