He leaned back in his chair. Studied me, then said, "So you're giving up on Pamela Larsen's case?"
"No, and you know that. I've got your files."
"So you plan to continue alone?"
"I do."
He smiled. A week of working together and I've never seen the bastard do more than twitch his lips. This made him smile. If my coffee wasn't so hot, I'd have thrown it at him. I was still tempted.
"How far do you think you'll get with that, Olivia?" he said. "You're a liberal arts grad who's never held any job other than"--he looked around pointedly--"here. You are in no position to investigate a string of twenty-two-year-old murders. Really, I didn't think you were that naive."
"Good-bye, Gabriel."
He got to his feet. "You have twenty-four hours to reconsider. If you attempt to retain my services after that, you will find my fee has risen. Significantly."
I wanted to tell him to go to hell. Instead I looked him in the eye and said, "Good-bye, Mr. Walsh."
He hesitated a split second, then buttoned his jacket, pulled his shades from his pocket, and strode out.
After my shift, I went home--yes, the apartment was finally becoming home--and read the ritual research files, making notes and looking things up on the Internet until my eyes hurt. Would firing Gabriel mean I'd lose my free Internet access? Would he send a repo man to take back the laptop? Fifty-fifty on both, I figured. Rose seemed to like me, so she might not listen if Gabriel asked her to change her Internet password. Would he be petty enough to ask? Hard to say. Better to do what I could quickly.
Chapter Forty-four
I was up early the next morning. Stressed about firing Gabriel, if I was being honest with myself. I worked it off with a 6 a.m. jog. I was rounding the corner by the community center when I saw a new gar
goyle. It was on an ivy-covered stone post, and I wouldn't have noticed it at all if the breaking light hadn't hit the post at just the right angle, making the gargoyle's green stone eyes glitter.
"Clever," I murmured as I cleared away the ivy for a better look. "Another one for my list."
I started to smile, then stopped myself. Thinking of gargoyle lists only brought my mind back to a place I'd been trying to leave--Gabriel. I shook it off and started to run again, but I kept thinking about the gargoyles, and when I passed the bank, my gaze instinctively went to the place where I'd seen one the other night, with Veronica.
It wasn't there.
I walked over to the stonework. The door was framed with rosettes. The other night, though, one of those carvings had been a gargoyle face. And now? All I saw were rosettes.
I looked from several angles. Even ran my fingers across the one that I was sure had been the gargoyle. Nothing.
"A night gargoyle," I murmured.
I looked back down the road at the post by the community center. That "hidden" one made sense--you just didn't notice it if the sun didn't hit it right. But this...?
I ran my fingers over the rosette again, then gave my head a sharp shake and continued on.
I spent my shift thinking about ritual murder. It wasn't as common as Hollywood and the tabloids might lead one to believe. There's no human sacrificial tradition in Wicca, satanism, voodoo, or any of the faiths we associate with modern American occultism. According to the experts Gabriel had hired, if you find corpses with evidence of ritual sacrifice, you're probably dealing with fringe nut jobs.
There were no indications that Pamela and Todd Larsen were fringe nut jobs. She'd admitted to being a practicing Wiccan, but everything the police found in that chest was evidence of the benign, Earth-mother-worshipping form embraced by college students everywhere.
The experts Gabriel hired hadn't been able to identify most of the ritualistic elements in the murders. There were no pentacles drawn in blood. No black candles. No dead animals. In the end, both experts decided the Larsens had made up their own ceremony. One was convinced they were secret occultists who believed their self-made ritual would grant them some boon. The other thought they'd simply invented it to throw the police off the trail.
I liked theory two. Two sociopaths want to kill people and get away with it. One has some minor experience with occultism. They decide to add fake ritual aspects to their murders to mislead the authorities.
And yet I couldn't help thinking there was more to it. Maybe I was looking for patterns where none existed. I've often thought that's where my obsession with omens and superstitions comes from--trying to find order and meaning in a chaotic world. In trying to make sense of these ritual elements, maybe I was just falling into the same trap as the other investigators.
When my shift ended at three, I offered to come back to help Trudy again. Since the dinner rush in Cainsville starts at five, I'd eat an early meal there and work quietly at a corner table.
That was the plan, anyway. The reading and note-taking wasn't so easy when Ida and Walter stopped by for tea and wanted to talk about whatever I was working on so hard. I shut my folders quickly and said, "Just some research."
In my haste to scoop up the pages, one fell and Walter got to it before I could.