Rite of Passage, page 6
“Yes?”
“Where is the Shadow Archives located? The main one, I mean. No one ever talks about it with me.”
She scoffed. “Benny, I couldn’t tell you that even if I knew. Which I don’t. Information like that is reserved for the highest levels of the organization. Greg might now, but it wouldn’t surprise me if even he was in the dark.”
“Oh,” he said. His brows drew together as he considered that. “You know, boss, there are times when I have to wonder if the Watchers are really the good guys. If we weren’t taking dangerous Relics out of the hands of bad people, I’d be convinced we weren’t. I mean, who in their right mind calls something the Shadow Archives when they’re supposed to be the good guys.”
Alison laughed, amused by his ramblings that voiced thoughts she’d had herself many times in her early years among the Watchers. “I think it was meant more as a name to evoke the elusiveness of it. The secrecy that goes along with so few people knowing the location of the main Archives or the identity of the council members.”
“Yeah, I guess I can see that. It probably didn’t sound as quasi-sinister way back when it started, too.”
Considering that no one really knew when the Shadow Archives or the Watchers themselves first formed, that was a possible explanation. Alison was fairly certain it had been during what was now considered ‘Before Common Era’, in the days when the Roman Empire was still a Republic and Egypt was still ruled by the pharaohs.
She covered a yawn as she guided the car along the exit from the interstate. They were on the far side of Houston now, primed for a quick start the next morning. But first, they both needed rest. The brief fight in that vacant lot had taken a lot out of her. She only hoped her racing thoughts would allow her to sleep instead of lying awake in her bed for the remainder of the night.
Benny carried their luggage in from the car while she completed the check-in and got room keys. Due to their late booking, they had rooms on separate floors. That would normally be an inconvenience, but she didn’t think either of them was in the mood to stay up and discuss the job.
The elevator dinged as it arrived on her floor. “Breakfast at seven,” she told Benny when she took her shoulder bag from him.
“I can’t say I’ll be wide-eyed and bushy tailed, but I’ll be there.” Benny gave her a wan smile as the elevator doors closed.
Alison trudged down the hallway, wondering why hotels always had such wild carpeting. The kind of stuff no one in their right mind would ever put in their home. She found her room near the end of the hall and waved her key across the sensor.
She dropped her bag on a padded bench by the door and looked at the king-sized bed that seemed to fill the room. The white sheets and soft mattress were calling, and she was more than willing to give in. After kicking off her shoes and tossing her jacket over the back of a chair, she fell face-first onto the bed.
Chapter Seven
Benny wanted to stop for Cajun food as soon as they hit the outskirts of the New Orleans suburbs, but Alison made him wait. Instead, she steered them toward the police station in Kenner, where they were able to submit a request for the case files of an assault Dahlish’s sources had informed him about. By the time they received the requested copies more than an hour later, both of them were famished.
They found a small family-owned restaurant sitting beside one of the canals. It was late for lunch and there were few other patrons, so they were able to grab a secluded table on a covered patio overlooking the still water. Benny leaned on the wooden railing with a grin of pleasure and breathed deep of the humid Gulf air. “This is what I’m talking about, boss. It’s like I can hear the jazz already.”
She shook her head at his exuberance but joined him as they waited for a waitress to come take their order. After hours in the car and then sitting in the police station’s hard plastic chairs, she felt the need to stretch her legs. Hopefully, the remainder of the afternoon would give them plenty of opportunity for that.
Once iced tea and a basket of fried gator bites had been delivered to the table, they took their seats. Alison opened the folder with the copies of the case file notes and spread the few pages out where both of them could see. “Not much here,” she said, disappointed that the case seemed to have received little attention.
This was chronologically the first of the cases in the New Orleans area, occurring three weeks ago. An old woman living in a ramshackle house near the Mississippi River had been asleep in her recliner one evening when someone burst through her back door. According to the police reports, there was little left of the door but jagged shards and a shattered frame. The cops had put it down to a cheap door that was rotten from the damp air, but she wasn’t so sure.
The old woman claimed the home invader never spoke a word to her. The lower portion of the person’s face was covered by a mask, and she described them as average in build and height. When pressed, she said the person might have been a few inches taller than her own five and a half feet. It had been too dark in the house to see any details such as eye color or skin color through the gaps between clothing and mask or gloves. The invader tore through her home, tearing out drawers and ripping off cabinet doors as if searching for something.
When the old woman began to shout in anger, it drew attention from her neighbors. Alison snorted when she read that it took more than five minutes for a man who had been sitting in his front yard ten feet away to walk over and knock on the old woman’s door. He called out to ask if she needed help, and she screamed to tell him there was a burglar.
After that, the stress of the situation must have overwhelmed her. She told police the intruder had walked over and bent over her in the recliner, and the next clear memory was when the police broke open her front door with their guns drawn. Both officers noted they’d knocked and called out for ten seconds without response and had broken in afraid of finding grisly remains.
“I don’t get it,” Benny said, flipping over the last page as if hoping to find more words that he’d missed. “Sounds like a simple B&E, aside from the superman thing with the door. Why did your friend Dahlish think this is connected to Relics?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted, wondering the same thing. “He seemed convinced it was connected to at least one of the other two incidents, though.”
Benny shivered. “Yeah, those I’m not looking forward to investigating.”
She chuckled. “We go where the job takes us. After lunch, we’ll drive by and see if the old woman is home. Maybe she can tell us something that isn’t in the reports. I’m not thrilled by how little is here.”
“Old woman, poor part of town.” Benny shrugged, moving papers aside as the waitress arrived with their food. “They probably get a dozen like it every month, and only solve them when a burglar gets sloppy.”
Alison remained silent while the waitress set down their plates. She thought Benny was probably correct, and that the same thing almost certainly happened in any sizeable town across the country. Police got a bad rep these days, and some of them truly deserved it, but there were plenty of men and women doing the best they could with the resources available.
Benny made noises of contentment as he spooned up gumbo. The shrimp mixed in with the rice and sausage were large enough to truly be called jumbo, and he savored every one of them. She’d gone with a plate of crawfish that came with a large square of homemade cornbread. By the time they’d finished the meal, she felt glad he’d insisted on stopping at the small restaurant. Both of them leaned back from the table to pat their full bellies after their plates were clean.
“This is why I love our job,” Benny said wistfully. “We get to visit all kinds of interesting places and enjoy local cuisine. It’s almost as good as a vacation.”
“I’ll remind you of that the next time you request a week off,” she said with grin.
It was well into mid-afternoon by the time they found the address listed in the case file. It was clear that they’d entered a part of town filled with the forgotten and neglected. Scars from Katrina were still visible in some places, where homeowners didn’t have the money to fully repair the damage their property had suffered.
The house they parked in front of had a yard choked with knee-high weeds. So few flakes of paint remained on the wooden siding of the house that she would have assumed the place was vacant if she’d just been driving by to somewhere else. Other houses on the street were also in dilapidated condition but appeared to be better cared for than this one.
Benny waved to a middle-aged man sitting on a nearby porch who was eyeing them suspiciously while clutching a beer bottle. Three empties were clustered near his feet. “Neighbor from the report, boss?” he asked under his breath.
She nodded. “I’m starting to understand why it took him so long to respond to all the commotion.” By the time of the home invasion, she figured the man would be so drunk he’d be lucky to notice a bomb going off nearby. He’d probably been passed out on the porch, slowly wakened by the continual noise.
Alison knocked gingerly on the front door. The frame still showed scarring around the lock from when the police officers broke in, and the door itself had a couple of long cracks running down it. She doubted it would hold back a stiff wind, much less another burglar.
“I don’t know about you, boss, but this isn’t exactly the kind of neighborhood I’d be visiting if I wanted to break into homes.” Benny scanned the area with a skeptical look. “I’d be surprised if anyone on this street had more than a few bucks to steal.”
She’d been thinking the same thing. It made her more confident this incident was likely to be related to the string of Relic thefts, though. She reached out to knock on the door again.
“Just a damned minute!” a woman yelled from inside. “Some of us don’t move as fast as we used to, so hold your horses. Impatient little whelps.”
Benny grinned at her. “I like this lady already.”
They heard a single lock retract before the door was pulled open to reveal a woman with dark skin and snowy white hair. She was dressed in a faded yellow nightgown despite it being afternoon, with pink slippers that had more bare spots than fluff. “What do you want?” she asked bluntly.
“Are you Mrs. Thelma Dewey?” Alison asked.
“Yeah. So what?”
Benny chuckled, raising a hand to hide his wide grin. Alison shot him a look before turning back to the old woman. “Mrs. Dewey, my colleague and I would like to ask you a few questions about the home invasion that occurred here several weeks ago. Would you happen to have a few minutes to talk with us?”
The old woman stared at her flatly for a moment. “Ain’t got nothing to say that I haven’t already told the cops. Go bother them.” She started to close the door.
“We’ll pay you for your time,” Alison said quickly, reaching into a pocket to extract a twenty-dollar bill.
The door remained still for a moment, and then Mrs. Dewey pulled it wide open. She eyed the money for a moment before snatching it and slipping it inside her brassiere. “I suppose we’ve got a few minutes before Wheel of Fortune is on. Come in. I don’t like to stand this much.”
Alison stepped into the house, glancing around the dim interior. Cabinet interiors were exposed where doors had been ripped off and never replaced, and several drawers were stacked on top of counters. They were standing in a long living room that seemed to occupy the front of the house, but she could see through into the kitchen. The back door had never been replaced, and Alison was surprised at the damage still visible in the shattered frame. A simple sheet of plastic rippled in the wind, attached to the outside wall in some fashion.
“Ma’am, didn’t the city contact you about the assistance programs available to help repair the damage from the burglary?” Benny asked.
Mrs. Dewey waved a hand through the air with disgust as she fell into a worn recliner. “I ain’t got time to fill out a thousand useless pieces of paper just to have them tell me it’ll be six months before they can send someone out. My grandson will fix it when he has time.”
Alison shared a look with Benny, both of them highly dubious about the usefulness of a relative who allowed his elderly grandmother to be so unprotected for three full weeks. She took a seat on a couch covered in plastic that was so yellow it must have been in place for decades. It wasn’t very comfortable, but it put her close to the old woman, so that she could talk to her over the noise of the blaring television.
“According to the police report, the intruder never spoke to you. Is that right?”
The old woman nodded, never taking her eyes from the informercial playing on the TV.
“Were you able to get any sense of whether it might be a man or a woman?”
Mrs. Dewey shook her head.
Alison sighed, thinking the old woman clearly wasn’t interested in exploring the incident. She glanced over to where Benny was looking through the items inside one of the drawers that was sitting on top of an old wooden end table. He reached out to finger the metal rail along the side, and then bent to look into the opening where the drawer should have been.
She turned back to the old woman, trying again to glean some new information. “Do you know if the intruder might have been looking for something?”
Mrs. Dewey snorted a laugh. “If he wasn’t, then he sure did a lot of damned damage for no good reason.”
He? She wondered if that was a generalization, or if the old woman had subconsciously picked up on something that made her think the intruder was a man. “Was anything missing after that night?”
The old woman shrugged. “I got a bad hip. It ain’t worth it for me to go digging around to see if something got stolen. Look around you, child! I ain’t got much to miss if it’s gone.”
Alison winced at the bitterness in the woman’s voice. She looked to be in her eighties, had at least one grandson who evidently didn’t visit often, and appeared to have little of interest happening in her life.
“Here now! What are you doing over there?” Mrs. Dewey had finally dragged her attention away from the television in time to see Benny sliding the drawer back into the end table. He had to jimmy it from side to side, but it finally slid in smoothly.
“I can take a look at the others, if you’d like,” he said, standing up and giving her a smile.
“Whatever blows up your skirt,” the old woman said sourly, turning back to the informercial.
Alison gave him a nod of approval before he disappeared into the kitchen. He’d have a reason to snoop around now, and they’d both feel better if some of the damage could be repaired. “Mrs. Dewey? Do you happen to own any special items that might have been of interest to a burglar? Perhaps something that has always held special importance to your family.”
“What? Like an antique?” The old woman blew air through her lips. “Only antique in this house is me.”
Alison held in a groan of disappointment, wondering if the woman had always been this bitter and hard to deal with. She was starting to think this home invasion had nothing to do with Relics, after all. The person who broke in might have possessed one, or maybe the back door really had been so rotten it crumbled under a single kick. Looking around the dilapidated state of the living room, it was easier to believe than it had been while reading the report in the restaurant.
“I’ll tell you this, though.” Mrs. Dewey shifted in her recliner and leaned forward to glare at her visitor. “That asshole broke the glass on the old map my daddy put up over the bed when I was a girl. Must have fell off the wall when he broke through the door, or maybe when those nosy police did the same to my front door.”
Alison perked up. An old map sounded interesting. She’d seen a few that proved to be Relics of varying abilities. “Would you like me to clean up that mess for you before we go?”
“Might as well,” the old woman said. “It’ll give your young man more time to fix my drawers.”
She didn’t want to give the woman time to change her mind, so she slipped out of the living room quickly. Benny was bent over in the kitchen, rifling through an open cabinet. He looked up and shook his head to tell her he hadn’t found anything interesting.
Alison continued along a dark hallway to the only open door, which proved to be a bedroom barely large enough for the queen-sized bed sitting against the wall. A single nail was sticking out of the wall above the bed, and the large picture frame that had once hung there was propped up against the side of the mattress opposite where Mrs. Dewey obviously slept.
She pulled a small flashlight from her jacket, flicking it on and playing the beam across the floor. The carpet was so old and worn that it was no more than a thin layer of fabric covering the wood below. That meant there was nothing left for glass shards to hide in, and the light immediately picked out a few that hadn’t been cleaned up. Alison bent to grab them and drop them into a half-full trash can inside the door to a cramped bathroom nearby.
When she turned back to the bedroom, the flashlight played over the old map that had once been carefully encased behind the shattered glass. It was hanging loose now, only one corner still captured inside the wooden frame. Alison walked over and crouched to lift the paper that was yellowed with age. When she saw the faint lines traced across the paper, she knew immediately that she’d found the reason someone had broken into this ramshackle house in the poorest part of town.
Chapter Eight
Benny spread the fragile paper across his lap while Alison drove. “Are you sure, boss? This doesn’t look very special to me. Looks like one of those so-called antique maps people create and sell in tourist shops.”
They’d spent another ten minutes in Mrs. Dewey’s house, doing their best to repair some of the damage. Alison left a handful of bills inside one of the reseated drawers, in recompense for the map she smuggled out under her jacket. She knew the old woman didn’t have a clue how important it was or how it had put her life in danger.
