CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I FOLLOWED THE AMBULANCE to St. Vincent Charity Hospital. I had a desperate sick feeling that I was somehow responsible for what happened to Nina. When I came in asking about her, they stuck me in a little waiting room filled with hotel paintings, a phone, a box of tissues, and a Bible.
Great . . .
I called the Press again, but they hadn’t had any luck contacting Nina’s family. They’d already left several messages, but her only emergency contacts were her parents, who lived in Minnesota.
Another émigré to the exotic mana-soaked shores of Lake Erie.
I didn’t know much about Nina’s background, but I could guess at it. Mana likes ritual and pattern, and has a habit of infecting, or adapting to, existing codes and patterns. Anyone who had studied magic or the occult before the Portal opened had a leg up. A lot of people came here because their old magical studies suddenly had practical applications.
Nina had probably gone through the obligatory New Age experimentation in college. A little tarot here, a little cabalism there, some Golden Dawn everywhere . . .
Made me think of the students Dr. Shafran complained about.
I sat in a plaid lounge chair, picked up the house phone, and tried to call Dr. Shafran. I figured if anyone knew what the hell I might be dealing with, he’d be the guy.
No such luck. Of course he wasn’t in the office. And I ran his voice mail out of tape three times trying to explain what I wanted. At the end of the third message, I tried to get a grip on myself.
“Okay,” I said to myself, “panicking won’t help anything. Act like a damn professional.”
If the guy wasn’t at work on Saturday, I’d get his home number.
Easier said than done.
The guy wasn’t just absent from normal directory assistance, even the people I knew in the phone company couldn’t pull a listing for him.
In the end, I needed to call Quint anyway.
“What you got for me?”
“Kline, your doctor has a long file. You want the long version or the short one?”
I looked up at the clock and shook my head. “I have time.”
Magetech wasn’t a public company, but the pile of money Quint was able to trace was two zeros beyond what Mazurich had been hiding. Magetech had more patents than a Catholic schoolgirl convention, and the guy’s name was on every one.
However, for someone researching the effects of magic on the world, Dr. Pretorious located himself safely outside its influence. He bought a house in a golf community south of Columbus about three years ago and secluded himself there. I had an address, as well as the market value of the residence—seven figures, and it didn’t start with a one.
After Quint had worked backward through Pretorious’ employment history, and a background check that the CIA would call anal, I asked him, “Could you do a quick look up of another doctor for me?”
“Name?”
“Dr. Newman Shafran, he works at Case Western.”
“Hmm. You shopping around, Kline? These guys are probably too old for you.”
“I’m just looking for a home phone.”
Quint made a melodramatic sigh. “If you insist. Give me a moment.”
I heard typing, then a muffled curse. “Can you spell that name for me?”
I did.
“Give me a moment.” Quint muttered something unpleasant. As he muttered, a doctor walked into the room.
“Hold on,” I said to Quint, who wasn’t listening. I looked up at my visitor. “How is she?”
The doctor was an Indian man about ten years younger than I was. “Medically she’s in no danger at the moment. I understand you were present during the attack?”
I nodded, lowering the phone. “Is she awake?”
The doctor shook his head, “I’m sorry. She’s unresponsive.”
“What’s the matter?”
The doctor sighed. “There’s no physical damage. She has suffered feedback from some magical event. I need the exact history of what happened—”
“Can’t you transfer her out of the Portal’s influence?” I asked. That was what they did with her predecessor when he was infected with semiconscious tumors that started sprouting little eyes.
“That’s not a trivial treatment decision. Without analysis of the enchantment binding her, the effect of taking her out of a mana-dense area could be unpredictable. Can I have that history?”
I gave him what I knew, which wasn’t much.
“Thanks.” He put his hand on my shoulder, “We’re doing what we can.”
It didn’t make me feel better.
When he left, I heard a small tinny voice say, “You bitch!”
I picked up the receiver, “Quint, you still there?”
“Tell me, Kline, are you just trying to make my life interesting?”
“Pardon?”
“Dr. Newman Shafran? Home number? The man doesn’t exist.”
“What, I’ve talked to him . . .”
“No phone, no credit report, address a PO Box. I can’t even find the university records to match his doctorate.”
“I don’t understand. He works at Case. He’s published scientific papers.”
“Sure, dozens—but I swear he walks off the campus and ceases to exist. If I didn’t . . .” he trails off. “I am such an idiot.”
“What?”
“I was going to say, ‘If I didn’t know better,’ but, of course I don’t know better, do I?”
“Know what?”
“The man’s an émigré from the Portal. Of course, no birth certificate, no paper trail prior to a dozen years ago. Hell, even his publications don’t go back more than a decade.”
“But he has a doctorate?”
“Threw me, too. This will be a little weird, you want me to keep digging?”
I shook my head, feeling a little uneasy about Dr. Shafran. I couldn’t believe the man was from the other side of the Portal. He seemed way too much of the world I lived in. But all that was beside the point anyway. I didn’t need to be going off on tangents. “No, Quint, leave it for now. There’s another man who’s more important. The name’s Simon Lucas . . .”
When I left the cell-phone-free bubble of St. Vincent’s, I had missed half a dozen calls. All from Margaret.
I called her back from the parking lot. Once I was in the Volkswagen, out of the snow.
“Where have you been?”
“The hospital, I had to turn off my cell—”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, it was a coworker. Did they find Sarah?”
“Kline, our daughter has a future as a con artist.”
I leaned back in the seat. “I was right, wasn’t I?”
“The police found my car in the airport parking lot. She used her boarding pass—the one we thought I canceled.”
“Thought?”
It turns out that my daughter was nothing if not resourceful. Margaret had, in fact, changed the flight dates. But she had done it via e-mail, and apparently Margaret had never bothered to set the password on her e-mail. Sarah was able to look through all her e-mail and pull up confirmation numbers and credit card info—enough to actually place a phone call to the travel agent last night, undoing Margaret’s changes.
Apparently, doing everything on-line made it even easier for Sarah to impersonate her mother, since the agent had never actually talked to Margaret.
Once her boarding pass was valid again, all Sarah had to do was slip out early enough to make the flight. By the time the cops had caught up to the missing car, the plane had already been boarded.
I shook my head. “What is she thinking?”
“I don’t know, Kline.”
“You have the itinerary? Any layovers?”
“The cops already asked, no. It’s a direct flight.”
“What does she expect me to do? She has to know I’d put her right back on the next flight out, even if there weren’t—”
I was about to say “doom-laden prophecies.”
“Weren’t what, Kline?”
“A . . . a teenage susceptibility to self-delusion and denial. She really should have known better.”
“Something else . . .”
“There’s more?”
“She unplugged my alarm clock.” She paused, and when I didn’t immediately grasp the significance, she elaborated. “If I hadn’t gotten up at four to go to the bathroom, if I had slept in, I might not have been able to get to you before the plane landed. She’ll be there in less than two hours.”
I exhaled.
“Well our little con artist is going to be lucky if I don’t get my own ticket next to her on the way back.”
Of course, Murphy’s Law being what it is, the weather had to screw things up.
I was lucky to make it from St. Vincent’s to Hopkins Airport in under an hour and a half. What had started as a light flurry managed to turn into a full-fledged blizzard before I had completely merged onto I-77 South.
Ten minutes before my daughter ’s plane was scheduled to arrive, I was just one of hundreds of people staring out the windows at Hopkins International Airport. Like everyone else, I was watching the sheets of white pounding the tarmac, and explaining to a cell phone just how the weather had screwed up everyone’s life.
“Nothing?” Margaret said.
“No,” I told her. “Pretty much every outbound flight’s been canceled. I think I’m going to be lucky if they don’t divert Sarah’s flight to Akron or Columbus.”
“That bad?”
“Bad enough that all the hotels around the airport were booked solid before I got here. I was lucky to get the Tower City Hilton.”
“You couldn’t just put her up in your condo like we originally planned?”
“Not a great idea, right now. Long story.”
“It’s what you’re working on, isn’t it? Are you getting death threats again?”
“In any case,” I said, changing the subject, “our daughter has to know that things aren’t business as usual. I’m not going to reward her by pretending this is okay. She’s going to a hotel with me, and back out once the weather is clear.”
“You’re right,” I heard her sniff over the phone. “I just can’t help thinking we might have been too hard on her. It isn’t like Sarah to do this—”
I know. “Suite 1123, Tower City Hilton. I called in the reservation when I was fighting this crap on the freeway.”
“Okay,” Margaret sounded uncertain. “I still wish she could stay with you.”
“She is staying with me. It’s a suite, two bedrooms.”
“Look, that hotel must be expensive at the last minute. You should let me pick up part of the bill.”
“Don’t worry, I can afford it. If anything, we should take it out of Sarah’s allowance.”
“Kline?”
“What?”
“I know you’re angry, but remember, she wanted to see you.”
I rubbed my face. My jaw still hurt from where the dwarf had slugged me. “I know.”
“Call me when her plane comes in?”
“Sure.”
I hung up and looked up at the flight schedule. Twenty-minute delay so far.
“Sarah, what the hell were you thinking?” I whispered to myself as the delay rolled over to forty minutes.