Vicious Circle

Basquiat sighed, rolled her eyes, flashed Coldwood a pained look that said plainer than words “Are we really going to have to do this all by the goddamn book?” Coldwood met her stare, not giving an inch. Okay, I could see where this was going now—or part of it, anyway. Someone here had the jurisdictional blues. I played dumb, though: there’s nothing cops hate worse than a smart-mouthed civilian.

“Over here,” Basquiat said to me, with a peremptory gesture as though she were calling a dog to heel.

“Thanks for looking out for me, Gary,” I murmured to Coldwood, keeping all but the trace elements of sarcasm out of my voice.

“Hey, you don’t know what I did for you and what I didn’t,” Coldwood muttered back, looking angry. “I tried to call you earlier, but you were out all day and your mobile was busy. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Fix, but it’s meltdown out there. They had a fucking riot over in White City.”

“I heard.”

“The innocent have nothing to fear. Go ahead and surprise me.”

I went across to where Basquiat was standing, more or less in the center of the room—and of the plastic sheeting. She watched me come. She really was very attractive under the strictly professional hair and outfit; and she really didn’t like me at all. Glancing down, I realized that I was treading on dead people: or at least, on the numbered plastic tags that forensics teams still use as place markers for where people died. One. Two. Three. Someone had been busy here—and fairly indiscriminate.

As I drew level with her, she pointed down at her feet. Under the plastic, a circle about five feet in diameter had been drawn on the floor in thick, grainy white chalk. Within the circle was a smaller circle, and between the two, going all the way around the ring with letters very carefully spaced, were the words VERHIEL SERAGON IRDE SABAOTH REDOCTIN. The center of the circle was inscribed with a pentagram: the five-pointed star used in certain kinds of black magic because, supposedly, it merges the four elements of matter with the single defining reality of spirit. Makes nice jewelry for little Goth girls, too, but that’s just a happy coincidence. There were also elaborate curlicued marks in each segment of the circle between the five legs of the pentagram: they were based on Greek letters, but with a great many additional strokes.

What I noticed about this one, though, was that in spite of the care taken in drawing it, it had been pretty comprehensively messed up. The floorboards were chewed up into splinters in a long line that cut through one segment of the circle, and something brown had spilled at the center, which then flowed out almost to the opposite edge, effacing part of the pentagram on its way. There was another plastic marker here. It was red, and bore the number “1” in spotless white.

Someone didn’t close the circle.

“Saturday night,” Basquiat said, from right beside me. “Sometime after eight and before, say, two in the morning. A whole bunch of people came in here. We’ve got tire tracks on the forecourt outside and a whole bunch of footprints. We’re guessing maybe a couple of dozen people in all, but that’s still in the air.

“What we do know is that they didn’t just walk in off the street. Some of them had been living here for a while before that, out in the back.” She pointed off into the dark. “There are six sleeping bags there, a portable latrine, a lot of canned food, and a dozen or so black bags full of various kinds of domestic garbage. So let’s say we’ve got a core group doing caretaking duties here—keeping the place in order, watching out for any untoward attention. Then we’ve got a bigger group that just turns up on Saturday night for the party.”

She went down on one knee, sketched out the outline of the circle with one well-manicured hand. “And we can guess what kind of a party it was. This is a pseudo-Paracelsian magic circle, based on an original in the Archidoxis Magicae. Necromancy. Someone was doing black magic here, and”—her fingers hovered over the dark brown stain at the center of the circle—“it involved a sacrifice.”