Chapter Two

Stone forced himself to focus on his work over the next few days, hoping it would help him to stop thinking about Madison McClain’s case. It worked for a while—he had classes to teach, assignments to grade, meetings to attend. He even tried going out with his usual pub-crawling group to see if getting good and drunk would work to dispel the image of the miserable little girl. All he got for that was a wicked hangover and a series of uncomfortable dreams featuring a red-eyed, demonic little girl poking a pencil into a zebra’s eye until it screamed and woke him up.

He almost wished he hadn’t even agreed to talk to the girl. It would have made things a lot easier. He’d been so good, too, up until now: concentrating on his work and his magical studies, publishing papers both in prestigious academic journals and in repositories of magical scholarship—in short, aside from a couple of brief side trips into the Land of Weird, he’d managed to avoid involving himself in any sort of real-world supernatural situations.

Four years. That was how long it had been since the whole mess down in Los Gatos. Sometimes it didn’t seem like that long, and sometimes it seemed like the whole thing had happened to someone else, a lifetime ago. He’d tried to put it out of his mind as best he could: most of the principals were gone now, or out of communication: Adelaide Bonham was still alive, but at ninety-three even her sharp mind had faded; Iona Li had left for another job after Adelaide entered the elegant care home in Saratoga two years ago; Tommy, of course, was dead, as was Ethan…and Megan Whitney had long since taken another position at a small university in the Midwest. She’d left less than a month after they returned from the visit to his home in England; as was the case with all of his former relationships, they’d parted on good terms, but he’d gotten the strong impression she’d prefer that he didn’t call her. He heard later that she’d married a lawyer. There had been several other women since then, but none of them had lasted longer than six months. The most recent had ended earlier this year. Despite Stone’s best efforts to the contrary, it was just a fact of life that mages tended to attract oddness, and oddness tended to repel mundanes. At this point, he wasn’t in any hurry to start the process again with someone new.

At least the nightmares had mostly stopped—until he’d met Madison McClain, anyway. He thought he might have managed eight hours’ sleep over the last three days.

After a week passed with no success in his attempts to put the matter out of his mind, he reluctantly bowed to the inevitable: he went to the Stanford library during a midday break, gathered some back issues of several of the local newspapers, and settled down in an out-of-the-way corner of the faculty area to see if any new information had come to light about the case. He decided that perhaps if he could find some closure, his restless mind might stop insisting on chewing the whole business over like a tough steak.

Normally, the fact that his brain refused to stop processing any sort of puzzling or intriguing information in the background worked to his advantage, as it often presented him with solutions to problems he’d long given up on. Sure, it sometimes did so at inopportune times, but on the whole he considered it a positive trait.

The only time it wasn’t was when he genuinely wanted to put something aside. His brain didn’t have an off switch, and it was a perverse bastard, too: the things he wanted most to forget about were usually the ones that it spent the bulk of its spare cycles grinding on.

He found nothing else about Madison’s case, past the initial articles that had appeared after the killing had occurred. Even those were quite light on facts: they included no concrete details beyond the fact that a little girl had killed her mother in north San Jose, and that she was now under psychiatric observation. After that, nothing. It was as if the press had been forbidden to print anything else. Stone figured it was probably because once Dr. Barnett got involved, he’d put the whole case on lockdown to protect Madison’s privacy.

He sighed and prepared to close the paper. That was that, then. There was no chance Dr. Barnett would let him talk to Madison again, he was sure of that. It hadn’t been hard to read the expression on the man’s face: as Stone had suspected, he’d only allowed the conversation to humor Nancy McClain, and now that it had taken place, that was the end of any occult connections, respected professor or not.

As he turned the page over, another headline caught his eye:

 

Man held in train murder of local woman

 

Intrigued, he stopped and focused on the article. As he skimmed it, he felt a chill: a 53-year-old man had inexplicably pushed a 61-year-old woman in front of an oncoming commuter train only a week after Madison had killed her mother. The man had made no attempt to run afterward; other people on the platform grabbed him, and he’d waited docilely for the police to arrive. He had no history of mental illness; when questioned, he became distraught and told them that he hadn’t meant to do it, and that he’d felt as if someone else had “taken over his body.”

“Hmm…” Stone said, tapping his pen on the table. “Interesting…” He pulled out his notebook and jotted down the details of the case, then put the paper aside to photocopy the article before he left.

I wonder if there are other cases like this. He had been specifically scanning the paper for anything about Madison’s case, paying no particular attention to anything else. Now, he started at the top of the stack and paged through them again, this time looking for any unusual or violent murders in the past few weeks.

He found two others, both intriguing in different ways: the first was a young man found murdered in an alley behind an East San Jose bar. The paper didn’t go into details about the killing, but Stone got the impression that the body had been found in a particularly horrific state. Now that he saw the article, he had a vague memory of hearing something about the murder on the news when it had happened.

The second murder—or murders—were even more interesting, partially for where Stone found them described. The other three—Madison, the man in the alley, and the train murder—had all been on or near the front page. This case was on the back page of the front section, reported in only a few sketchy paragraphs. The details were scarce, but the article described a case where six men at a homeless camp in San Jose had been murdered and “arranged around their campfire.” The only other thing mentioned was that police were investigating, had no leads as yet, and requested the help of the public to call in if they’d seen anything suspicious. In other words, the standard boilerplate “mysterious murder” text.

Stone frowned at the article, jotting more notes in his notebook. “Arranged”? What did that even mean? He thought it odd that the paper included so little detail, given that it was a multiple murder. Did the homeless get so little regard around here that even killing a half-dozen of them didn’t rate front-page news? He knew the police were busy—crime, particularly violent crime, had increased dramatically in the area in the last few years—but even so, murder should still be a top priority, regardless of who the victims were.

He sighed, tossed the paper onto his pile to photocopy, and grabbed the next one. It took him another half-hour to get through the rest, and by the time he finished he had found numerous other murders and violent assaults, but the rest of them were gang-related, common muggings, domestic violence, and other “explainable” crimes. He made his copies, stuffed them into his old leather briefcase, and headed back to his next class.

So, he thought as he walked, you’ve got this information. What are you going to do with it? It was a good question, and a perfectly legitimate answer would be “Nothing.” It certainly wasn’t his job to investigate mysterious murders. Even with his magical ability, it could be dangerous to poke his nose into things he didn’t understand. And besides, he had courses to teach. He didn’t have time to play junior detective, fascinating as the cases could potentially be. Especially if they had an occult connection. He’d had quite enough of that, between the nasty business in Los Gatos and the whole affair just after he’d arrived in the USA. Best to leave it to the proper authorities.

That was the thing, of course. If any of these crimes had some sort of magical component—Madison’s, perhaps, or the man who’d pushed the woman in front of the train—then leaving them to the police to deal with probably meant they would never be solved. They might be good at their jobs. He was sure they were. But he’d dealt with mundane police before, and they were hopeless when it came to supernatural crime.

He reached his classroom and paused outside the door, nodding to a couple students as they passed him on their way inside. Still…I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm to just poke around a bit at the murder sites, he decided. By now it had been long enough that it probably wouldn’t look suspicious for him to be there. It wouldn’t take long, he could do it whenever he had free time, and with any luck it would convince him that there was nothing spooky associated with the murders. That way he could let the police handle them with a clear conscience.

That decided, he pushed the door open and forced himself to put the matter out of his mind and concentrate on the day’s lesson on the Salem Witch Trials.