“I know that look,” Iggy said. “What do you know?”
Alex just kept grinning. “Do me a favor,” he said. “There’s a reporter in the lobby talking to Leroy Cunningham, blond guy in a brown suit with a dimple in his left cheek. Go tell him that I’ve got another exclusive for him, and this time it’s huge.”
Iggy looked confused.
“What story?” he asked. “What have you figured out?”
“I know how he’s doing it,” Alex said, heading out of the vault and back into the hospital. “The ghost, I mean. I know how he’s getting in to the houses.”
Alex stopped at the door and looked back at the still-confused Iggy. He felt so good that he laughed out loud.
“I know everything,” he said. “Now meet me in the lobby; I’ve got to find a telephone.”
29
The Ghost
Alex couldn’t sleep a wink after getting home from the hospital. Despite that, he still found himself sitting in the third row at St. Mark’s for Mass the following morning. He hadn’t been one for church after he left the Brotherhood of Hope mission where he’d spent his teenage years. When Father Harry died, however, he took with him that anchor of faith which Alex had always taken for granted. Now he went to church every Sunday, rain or shine. He told himself that he was doing it to honor Father Harry, but in truth, he needed that connection to what Father Harry had represented. He had been there for Alex like an immovable object, a compass needle invariably pointing north. A moral surety in an ever-changing world.
Father Harry was a constant reminder that being a good man was a choice. It didn’t happen by accident.
As Alex listened to the sermon, he hoped Father Harry was proud of him. He’d certainly done his share of good deeds, saving the city at the cost of decades of his own life, finding Leroy when Hannah had no hope of paying what she would owe him for the job.
It was like Iggy always told him, he thought, somewhat sourly, no good deed goes unpunished. Still, he couldn’t be too cynical in church, not with Father Harry looking down on him. In that sense, Harry was still his anchor.
“How was the Mass?” Iggy asked when Alex got home.
“Turns out God wants us to be nice to our neighbors,” Alex said, hanging up his hat.
“I’ll alert the media,” Iggy said.
“Any word from Detweiler?”
“No,” Iggy said. “I’ve got lunch ready. It’s just some cold chicken and bread for sandwiches.”
Alex chuckled. It was a meager fare by Iggy’s standards.
“You’re slipping,” he said.
“I was up late,” Iggy replied, sitting down at the table. “I’ve been thinking,” he said as Alex joined him. “What if the glyph runes are older than Archimedes?”
Alex shrugged.
“Does it matter?”
“It might,” Iggy said, assembling some sliced chicken and cheese onto a piece of bread. “I mean the Mayans weren’t the only ones to have a pictographic language. The Aztecs and the Egyptians did as well.”
“You’re wondering if some of those Egyptian hieroglyphs are actually runes or runic constructs?”
Iggy nodded, slathering his sandwich with mustard.
“I doubt if anyone has ever shined a ghostlight on any of those ancient writings.”
Alex took a bite of his own sandwich, chewing absently as he thought. Iggy had invented the ghostlight, so he was pretty sure the old man war right. Something about last night kept bothering him though, something he couldn’t quite identify.
“I thought maybe,” Iggy continued, “we could go over to the museum and use your ghostlight on whatever Egyptian junk they’ve got. The odds aren’t good, but you never know. We might get lucky.”
Alex put down his sandwich. Last night when Jimmy Cortez had first broken into the museum’s vault, he’d told his men to grab jewelry. That made sense, because jewelry would be small and worth more than just the cost of the metals of which it was made. But Jimmy had said something else — that his men were supposed to look for something specific.
“The entropy stone,” Alex said.
“What?”
“When Jimmy Cortez and his crew broke into the vault, he told the others to find something called the entropy stone.”
Iggy stopped chewing and set his sandwich aside as well.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “The treasure of the Almiranta was gold taken by the conquistadors. It came from Central and South America. Some of it might be Mayan.”
“Are they looking for the glyph version of the Archimedean Monograph?” Alex asked.
Before Iggy could answer, there was a knock on the door.
“We need to take a ghostlight over to that museum,” Iggy declared as Alex headed for the door.
He was right. Whatever Jimmy and his fellow glyph runewrights had been after, it was worth finding.
When Alex opened the door, he found Lieutenant Detweiler and three of his officers on the stoop. The Lieutenant didn’t look particularly happy, but he obviously wasn’t there to arrest Alex, so it was a win.
He held up an envelope made of heavy-looking paper. A gold foil seal had been placed over the point of the envelope’s flap. Even at a distance, Alex could see it bore an obfuscation rune.
“How did you know?” Detweiler asked.
“Come in,” Lieutenant,” Alex said. “We need to invite a few other people to join us and then I’ll explain everything.”
An hour and a half later, the brownstone’s kitchen was full of people. Detweiler and his contingent of police were present along with Detective North and two more officers he’d brought along. Captain Rooney sat next to Detweiler at the far end of the oak table. The Lieutenant had strenuously objected to the inclusion of Billy Tasker, but Alex had insisted. Now the reporter sat near the head of the table by Iggy.
“Now that everyone’s here, we can get started,” Alex said, standing up to address the crowded room.
“You said we should be ready to apprehend the ghost,” Rooney said. “How exactly are we going to do that in Dr. Bell’s home? He wasn’t a member of North Shore Development.”
“That’s true,” Alex said, “but the ghost is going to come here nevertheless.” Alex held up the envelope Detweiler had brought with him. “Last night, I telephoned Lieutenant Detweiler.”
“In the middle of the night,” Detweiler grumbled.
Alex put his hand over his heart and affected his most contrite expression.
“My most sincere apologies, Lieutenant,” he said. “But I was worried the ghost might strike again if you didn’t act quickly.”
“What did he have you do?” Captain Rooney asked, looking a bit perturbed, though whether that was because Alex was giving his men orders or because Detweiler followed them, Alex couldn’t tell.
“Lockerby told me that there would be a letter waiting at one of the potential victim’s homes,” Detweiler said. “We searched for the envelope Lockerby described. This morning we found one on in a pile of unopened mail at the Zimmerman home.”
“This envelope here,” Alex said, holding it up so all could see.
“What does that have to do with the ghost?” Detective North asked.
“This is how the Ghost has been getting into his victim’s homes,” Alex explained. “We know he’s been using an escape rune to flee the scenes of his crimes. It’s a very rare type of rune that costs the user’s own life to transport him to a fixed location. To use one, a runewright would have to make an anchor rune in the spot he wanted to travel to.”
“So someone snuck in and put one of these anchor runes in the houses of the victims?” Tasker asked.