Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Alexandru
Ilinger at the far side of the foyer, the better to evaluate the notes of guilt and terror rolling off of Jerome.
Ms. Renfield pulls him in and shuts the door. “What happened, Jerome?”
“I’ve been paranoid, okay? Obviously, somebody was framing Dooley, but I heard that he couldn’t’ve done that last murder and, well, as you know, Milo and Razor Johnny were my enemies of sorts.
So I wondered, is somebody framing me? I downloaded one of those recovery programs—the kind that finds deleted files?
I wanted to make sure there was nothing on my computer.
” He tightens his grip on his laptop and lowers his voice.
“I found searches, Harriet. Deleted searches. Stuff like ‘Avoiding traffic cameras.’ ‘Crossbow bolt trajectory.’ ‘How to shadow a person without being noticed.’ They’d been buried in my deleted browser history to make it look like I searched for them and then tried to cover my tracks. ”
“Jerome—”
“I didn’t do those searches, Harriet. I’m telling you I didn’t. But they’re sitting right there in my deleted files, and if the police wanted to, they could find them, and it’ll look like I’m a murderer who tried to frame Dooley and then hide the evidence.”
Ms. Renfield adjusts her glasses, going into her thoughtful mode. “You’re thinking somebody planted that search history.”
“I’m not just thinking it! I know they did. Don’t you believe me?”
Ms. Renfield hesitates, unsure. For all of my complaints about her bias, it really is a credit to her that she is keeping her mind open.
Jerome, however, does not like it. “Harriet! This is me! We worked together for how many years on the school paper? You know me. And okay, yes, I helped get Dooley out of jail and didn’t tell you.
And I didn’t tell you about the book—that’s on me, too.
But you know I’m not a killer. I don’t have it in me.
Somebody’s framing me just like they framed Dooley. ”
“Okay, let me think.”
I can feel him wanting to protest, to badger her into saying he’s not the killer, but he seems to reconsider.
“No, I get it. You want to think about it and follow the data, that’s your thing, and I respect that.
But I feel like, there has to be some trail, right?
You know computers. You could take a look and see that it was planted.
” He holds out the silver laptop to her.
She takes it, genuinely unsure what to do. “I’m not sure that I have the capacity to examine this properly.”
“But InovaSpire would, right?”
She sucks in a breath. She doesn’t like this idea.
It’s here Jerome notices the curved stairway with its carved serpents coiling up the balustrade, their scales rendered in dark wood so detailed they seem to ripple in the dim light. “Are those... snakes? Biting people’s feet?”
“Don’t ask,” she says.
“Indeed they are,” I say, emerging from the shadows.
“The design depicts ‘Night of the Coils,’ a Karsovian folk tale where God finally abandons the earth and serpents rise to reclaim it, devouring mankind from the feet upward so that people might watch their own consumption.” I gesture toward the sitting room. “Shall we?”
Jerome stands rooted in his place.
“Yes, a truly charming tale,” Ms. Renfield says. “Let’s go to my office. I have thoughts.” She turns on her heel and leads the way back to her office.
I gesture for Jerome to proceed, and I follow. The torchlight throws shadows across the walls of the short hallways.
We follow her to her markedly brighter office. Ms. Renfield sets the laptop on her desk. She motions for Jerome to take the chair in the corner, but she herself does not sit. She plants her fists on her hips, regarding the machine like a foe.
I linger in the doorway, enjoying her in this mode: short of stature, but so oddly mighty.
She asks him for his password.
He gets up and comes around to her side of the desk and types it in. Fear and hope wash through him as he waits to see what she’ll do next.
It is imprudent to allow one’s primary suspect to deliver evidence to one’s own doorstep, but I must admit things have become more interesting.
“Where are the weird files?” she asks. “Can you show me without moving things around too much?”
He bends over and does a little typing. Again, he stands aside.
Ms. Renfield leans in and studies the screen. “I would give them maybe a B-plus on duplicating your search language.”
“What do you mean?”
Ms. Renfield points at something. “Look at your search history. You search noun-first. ‘Budget deficit school board 2024.’ ‘Crime statistics Silverton County quarterly.’ These supposedly imposter ones are modifier-first. ‘Untraceable anonymous payment methods cash transaction.’ ‘Covert residential monitoring surveillance equipment.’”
Jerome’s eyes widen. “Yeah! You’re right! If it was me, I’d say, surveillance equipment residential monitoring covert. So do you believe me?”
“Well, maybe you knew I would notice it.”
Jerome scrubs a hand through his hair. “Right. I get it.”
The flavor of Jerome’s emotions has shifted.
The guilt has thinned; perhaps it was always about Dooley, about having inspired those murders.
What remains is fear. The raw, animal kind.
He believes he is being hunted. But then, a hunter who has become the hunted would feel much the same. Ms. Renfield glances up at me. I shrug.
“Look,” Ms. Renfield says. “I’m going with your theory for now, okay? I’m going with the idea that somebody is framing you. Assuming we’re right, then that person believes the police will get access to this laptop at some point.”
“Do you think we should take an axe to it?”
“You think like quarry,” I say, disgusted.
“Excuse me?” Jerome gusts out.
Ms. Renfield shoots me a look. “All he means is, if somebody’s setting a trap, we have to turn the spotlight on that person. We have to play offense, not defense.”
“Hunt the hunter,” I add.
Ms. Renfield gazes at me, the gold in her eyes catching the light. “Hunt the stuffing out of them.”
I find myself smiling at her. “This is all so wonderfully interesting. Almost like a puzzle constructed by some unseen hand. A nesting doll of sorts. You open one to find another inside, and another, and another.”
“It’s not that interesting to me,” Jerome says.
Ms. Renfield turns to him. “The police are going to get a warrant for this laptop. That’s inevitable. But before they do, I can copy the hard drive.”
“Copy it?” Jerome straightens. “Like, make a backup?”
“More like a forensic image. Everything on the drive—deleted files, metadata, all of it. If someone hacked into your system to plant evidence, they left traces. The how and the where of the intrusion. Unfortunately, I don’t have the tools to analyze it. Not really.”
“But InovaSpire…” Jerome asks.
“Probably, but I don’t want to involve them in anything that might look like obstruction of justice. Anyway, I’ve got something better. Less local.” She pulls out her phone.
I watch her thumbs move quickly across the screen. A slight furrow appears between her brows. It truly is pleasurable to watch her work.
“My half-sister Irina lives in Vienna,” she says, not looking up. “She’s a forensic specialist who sometimes works with my other half-sister, who’s in Interpol.”
“I didn’t know you had half-sisters,” Jerome says.
“I do. And a half-brother in Vienna. Recent development.” Ms. Renfield catches my gaze. “Alexandru here knows them, don’t you, Alexandru?”
“I do indeed.”
“Alexandru hosted us when we were in Karsovia for our father’s funeral. Such hospitality as you’ve never seen.”
My cunning Renfield. “Renfields deserve nothing less.”
She twists her red lips in a half smile.
She’s alluding to the fact that I once planned to kill those siblings of hers. Who could blame me? But Ms. Renfield used her wits to save their worthless lives.
Irina’s existence is handy enough now, I suppose.
Ms. Renfield’s phone buzzes. She types some more. “Good. Irina says she can analyze it remotely if I send her a proper forensic image.” More typing. “She’s sending instructions. There’s a specific way to do it so that we capture everything, not just the visible files.”
“And she can find who did this?” Jerome asks.
“Let’s hope!”
The work goes quickly, and not twenty minutes later we’re standing at the front door.
Ms. Renfield sets a hand on Jerome’s arm. “What you need to do now is go home and sit tight.”
“I don’t know how I can possibly do that.”
“You can, and you will,” I say to him.
“The last thing you want to do is look guilty,” Ms. Renfield explains.
“It’s a little late for that! Somebody’s already doing it for me! And they’re doing a pretty good job of it.”
“But you have us on your side, don’t you?” Ms. Renfield glances at me and I give Jerome a tight smile. “And you have the truth on your side,” she adds. “Nobody wants to put away an innocent man. Nobody wants that; certainly not the police.”
“But I also was instrumental in getting a murderer released from jail. They can’t love that.”
It takes about three more rounds of tedious assurances to get the man out the door, laptop in hand. We watch him drive away.
“He is going to run,” I say.
Ms. Renfield looks up at me, shocked. “No way. We asked him to sit tight. He knows we’re on his side.”
“His mind is not clear.”
“Did he seem sincere to you when he was talking about his horror of finding those searches on his machine?”
“He would not be the first murderer to be horrified by his own actions or his own stupidity.”
“But you sensed that he was sincere in his horror. I think that’s what you’re saying.”
“I did. And I’m sensing that you still very much want him to be innocent. That is not a disposition of a good detective.”
“I can be rooting for somebody and still keep accurate score.”
I am in my library reading by the firelight the following morning, enjoying the sound of the rain pelting the slate roof, anticipating a great thunderstorm to come, when Gregor appears at the door.
“Overlord. Do you require anything?”
“No.”
He hovers, as is his tedious way.
From below comes the sound of movement—footsteps, the jingle of keys. Ms. Renfield.
“Go and see where she is off to.”
Gregor’s footsteps descend the curving staircase. “The overlord wishes to know where you are going.”
“You may tell the overlord that it’s none of his business.”
“He would request it, milady.”
“I would deny the request.”
As usual, I must do everything myself. I descend the stairs to find her donning her rain hat. Her defiance sounded convincing, but something beneath it feels wrong. I cannot name it. I simply know.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.” She does not turn. “To see an old friend.”
“You are lying.”
Now she turns, those gold-flecked eyes flashing with defiance. “I’m not lying. I’m just not elaborating.”
“You are distressed.”
“I think your Spidey senses need a tune-up, because everything’s fine.”
“It is the dark feeling that you get when we pass the ice cream shop.” I step closer. “What is the matter?”
For a moment I think she might tell me—I can feel the explanation gathering. But then something changes. “I can’t do this with you. It’s personal—nothing to do with the case, nothing to do with my work here. Or with you.”
“You are my Renfield; your distress has everything to do with me. You will tell me and you will tell me now.”
“Not happening.”
“I will not abide this situation!”
“Abide you will.” She pulls open the door.
“Ms. Renfield!”
“Not my name! Don’t wait up, overlord.” With that she goes, a tiny warlord in a sweater jacket, rushing through the rain to her car.
I stand in the doorway, watching her taillights disappear down the drive.
I slam the door and whirl around to face Gregor. “She would refuse my request for this information?”
“You did not request, you demanded.”
“As is my right. I am her overlord.”
“Indeed you are,” Gregor says insufferably.
It is infuriating.
“Is she not aware what I can do?” I turn, climbing back up the stairs to my library, though no serene reading will be taking place now; this is how vexed I am.
“If something bedevils Ms. Renfield, she is to inform me of that thing, and I will solve it—so that she may resume her service to me at her fullest capacities.”
I stride into the library, Gregor at my heels.
I point to his corner and he goes. I do not want to see his sad face nor hear his drivel. I throw myself down in my chair, unsure what to do, so extreme is my vexaciousness.
“What?” I demand, feeling the words crowd within Gregor.
“Perhaps it is something you cannot solve.”
“Such as what?”
“You cannot solve guilt.”
I ponder this. It is indeed guilt that I feel associated with the ice cream shop. Extreme guilt.
But how can it be?
“She is a paragon of virtue, toiling to save the worthless lives of peasants. So conscientious and charitable. If she feels guilty, it is because she dropped a paper clip or failed to compliment a villager’s shoes.”
“Perhaps she acts virtuous because of her guilt, overlord.”
I turned my gaze to where he stands, sallow eyes barely visible in the gloom. If anybody should know about guilt, it would be Gregor. “You have further thoughts. You will reveal them to me.”
“Perhaps she is afraid.”
“Ms. Renfield? Afraid of me? Why would she be afraid of me? I have never so much as thrown her one day in the dungeon.”
“Perhaps it is not you she is afraid of. Perhaps she is afraid of what she carries. Afraid to reveal it.”
This makes no sense.
How is it, of all the servants in the world I end up with these two? A trembling coward and the most obstinate Renfield in history.
I take out my book, opening to some page, I care not which. My eyes trace the familiar lines of Constantinople’s walls, but my thoughts drift back to Ms. Renfield. That dread. And yes, the guilt. I have tasted such feelings in others. Never has it nettled me so.
I look up, annoyed. “What else?”
“You should ask her nicely.”
“An overlord does not beg.”
“Perhaps you would go to her as something other than her overlord. Perhaps then she will yield.”
“Go to her as something other than her overlord? She is a Renfield. I am her overlord. It cannot and will not be other than that. Not ever.”
Gregor says nothing, but he vibrates with opinions.
I stand, causing the book to fall to the stone floor, a few of its ancient pages detaching from the binding. “Go! You will count the stones in the north wall. I believe you miscounted last time.”