“Sure, I guesses,” she said, shrugging. “They’re stupid. Why would you want to?”
Vladimir took the three of us back into his office. After some digging, he found a folder, filled with page after page of photocopies of painfully scrawled notes in Cinnamon’s hand. “Her answers looked wrong, but consistently wrong,” he said, pointing out flipped and tilted numbers in her notes. “She was writing backwards for minus and upside down for imaginary-”
“Doc,” Cinnamon said, “you makes me look bad.”
“No, Cinnamon, this is amazing, ” I said, taking the folder and paging through her notes, which went from painfully scrawled to largely incomprehensible as she incorporated more and more traditional math. “We’ve got to jump on this right away if she really is this smart.”
“Fuck,” Cinnamon said. “You just wants to give me more work!”
“Cinnamon,” I said, touching her shoulder. “I know schoolwork sucks. I hated it too. But even when I fell in love with tattooing, I had to work at it, hard. I don’t recognize half of this, but, if I’m reading these equations right… you must enjoy the heck out of math.”
She grinned despite herself, and so did I.
“I’m so glad you’re enjoying math, but I have to be straight with you, Cinnamon. The Dean called us all down here because you’ve been skipping your other classes,” I said. Her ears folded back, and she looked away. “We’ve talked it over, and they’ve agreed not to kick you out, for now, but you’re going to have to do your part. You’re going to have to show up-”
She hissed, twisting her head, pulling at her collar. “The other classes suck. ”
“I wish I could tell you that it gets better, but it doesn’t,” I said. “And I know it seems like math is easy to you now, Cinnamon, but it’s going to get harder, too, and you need to learn to deal with it now. You’re going to have to learn to work at things. It doesn’t matter what you want to do, Cinnamon. If you want it… you’ll have to… work at it… ”
I trailed off, staring at the notes. Then I stood up. I was wrong. I did recognize this.
“Mom?” Cinnamon asked uncertainly.
“What’s this?” I asked, pointing at a diagram showing a rectangle-and a pentagram.
“It’s nothing,” she said defensively. “I was just looking for more paths of the brickies.”
“The golden ratio shows up in many figures,” Vladimir said sharply. He looked as defensive as Cinnamon. “ Including the pentagram. There’s nothing demonic about it.”
“I never said that there was,” I said, showing the folder to Doug. “Look familiar?”
“Yeah,” he said, taking the sheets. “This a lot like graphomancy. In fact, this set of golden rectangles is very similar to what’s used by the tagger.”
“And this shows a one-to-one mapping to a pentagram,” I said. “Nothing demonic, but there’s a reason white magic uses circles and black magic uses pentagrams. In graphomancy, a circle is a shield to keep things out, whereas a pentagram is a receiver to draw things in.”
“Meaning?” Vladimir asked, still looking a bit defensive.
“Cinnamon has figured out,” I said, “how a pentagram maps onto a pattern of golden section rectangles. And our friend the graffiti tagger uses similar patterns in his magic. I’m guessing that’s how his graffiti gets so much power. It’s built like a magical receiver.”
“Uh… can I get a photocopy of this?” Doug said, turning the sheet back and forth. “I’m working on a similar problem with Dakota and this… this might help me.”
The door opened, and Jack Palmotti gestured to us. He’d gotten a call a few minutes earlier and had walked out to take it. “Miss Frost,” he said, “Can I see you outside?”
“Wait here, honey,” I said, and followed Palmotti out into the hall. “What is it now?”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” he said, “but that was Margaret Burnham. She called to let me know about some developments in the case, and it slipped out that you were here, trying to do the right thing by Cinnamon,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“No good deed goes unpunished,” I said. “Technically, I’m not in custody of Cinnamon, but the court order doesn’t say I can’t be in the same-tell me there’s not a new court order.”
“There wasn’t until just now,” Palmotti said. “When you were arrested, it was apparently all over the news. The prosecutor saw it, and asked the judge to issue a restraining order.”
“They’ve barred you from seeing Cinnamon at all until the case is resolved.”
This One Thing I Could Do
Calaphase was gone… and I couldn’t see Cinnamon.
That left me in a daze. I sat numbly through my lawyer’s briefings, answering their questions when asked. It seemed to go on forever, and by the time Doug came to rescue me and dropped me off in front of Calaphase’s house to get my car, it was a quarter past noon.
I’d hoped the police would be done with the crime scene by the time that we got there, but instead I found a swarm of them still there, examining the house, the tags, the graffiti-and my Prius sitting smack dab in the middle of the carport of a man who didn’t own a car.
Before we could pull up, the siren of a fire truck drove Doug to the side of the road, far short of the house. As it sped past, I leaned back in the seat. I was tempted to come back later, but there was always the chance they might tow my car. Finally I hopped out, shooed Doug off, and trudged towards the house to try to get them to release the blue bomb to me.
The fire truck stopped right in front of the house, and I could now see smoke curling up from behind it. Great. The tag on Calaphase’s house had caught fire too. Hopefully they’d caught it in time to save the house, but so much for the hope I could take a look at it.
And, similarly, so much for the hope I could quickly get my car. Before two words were out of my mouth, I was stopped, questioned, and detained. By now, I was learning how this worked: these cops hadn’t been at the scene of Calaphase’s death, and had to do their jobs based on what was right in front of them.
So I gritted my teeth… and cooperated.
At first it didn’t seem to help. At this crime scene I had no allies. Rand was nowhere in sight, and Philip didn’t magically come to my aid. But I had reported Calaphase’s death, and that was in the system. So eventually Lucia Bonn, the detective in charge, got the story from downtown. But that just turned the questioning from suspect to witness.
“Thank you, Miss Frost,” Bonn said, reviewing the statement form-they were becoming depressingly familiar. “I don’t need to impound your car,” Bonn said at last. “You can go-and for what it’s worth… I’m sorry about your friend.”
I thanked her, trudged back to the blue bomb and stared at it sadly. The tagger had keyed it, fucker, and then I noticed he’d defaced it with a few stripes-apparently Calaphase and I had interrupted him vandalizing my car when we came to the door.
My eyes tightened as I realized that the cops had not noticed the graffiti on it-they were not as elaborate as the tag, and from the right angle could have been mistaken for streaks of paint. I thought about just going, but then I tromped back and told Bonn what I’d found.
“Oh, damnit,” Bonn said, rubbing her forehead. “Insult to-Jack, go take a look. Thanks, Miss Frost. You are the most cooperative so-called murder suspect I’ve ever seen.”
Great, my fiendish plan was working. Yay me.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide,” I said heavily, feeling my neck. Beneath the bandage, the bite from Calaphase was starting to itch again. “Anyway, if you, or more likely somebody in the DA’s office, really wanted to railroad me, well, you’re the cops, you can do it, whether I cooperate or not. Trust me on that.”
Lucia Bonn suddenly looked very sad. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re right. We can.”
“Not that I’m accusing you of anything,” I said quickly. “You’re just doing your job, tracking down the guy who killed my… uh, boyfriend. I can’t control how you do it. The only thing I’ve got control over is myself, and I don’t see why I should make your job harder.”