Chicagoland Gail Martin (best novels to read for students TXT) 📖

around, like he might get in trouble for asking me to help. He didn’t seem to want Mr. Holmes to know who I was.”

My mind supplied darker reasons since Holmes had killed several children who became inconvenient, in addition to the many women he murdered. If Quinlan had been protecting Eddie, it was one of the hotel caretaker’s few admirable actions.

“And?”

Eddie squirmed. “He had cold eyes, even when he smiled. Like he could put on being nice, but he really wasn’t. My dad was like that, so I knew the type. I thought Mr. Quinlan seemed afraid of him. To be honest, kinda reminded me of the way my mum used to tell my dad anything he wanted to hear to keep him from getting mad.”

I didn’t doubt that Quinlan had gotten himself in way over his head with Holmes and did whatever he could to keep from becoming one of the many victims. That didn’t excuse turning a blind eye to the goings-on at the hotel.

“And Mr. Capone? What did he want to see when you took him inside?”

Eddie looked both ways as if to make sure he wouldn’t be overheard. “He kept asking if I’d ever seen odd markings or symbols around the place,” he replied, dropping his voice. “Or if I ever got sent to pick up items from witches. Whether I’d seen either of the men work magic. Weird stuff. I mean, who believes in that kind of thing?” The nervous laugh told me that Eddie did, even if he didn’t want to say so.

“What did you tell him?”

Eddie bit his lip. “Mostly the truth. That I hadn’t gone inside when Holmes lived there, and that I only got to explore later, when the place was pretty damaged. But even so, there were some weird things—weird even for here.”

Eddie jimmied a lock on a basement door while I kept lookout. As I waited, I called on Krukis’s power. Holmes might be dead and gone, but evil stains the places where it has been welcomed and fed. Ghosts were the least dangerous of the entities such dark power might draw to a site like this. I felt the ancient god’s magic change me and thanked him for his gift.

Eddie flipped on the lights as we went inside, and he led me down a worn set of wooden steps into the large basement. He didn’t seem concerned about the owner of the store above us finding out we were here, and I wondered if he had a kick-back arrangement on his fee that benefitted both of them. Or maybe the store manager just rented the space and didn’t give a damn about the basement.

“Don’t worry. Mr. Pasarella, the store guy, never comes down here,” Eddie said as if he had read my mind. He gestured toward the wide-open space. “Well? What do you think?”

Bare overhead bulbs didn’t fully light the cavernous cellar, leaving shadows that clung to the edges and corners. Odd stains marked the concrete floor, dark enough to have been blood. The furnace with its wide door large enough for a human body remained in place, cold and empty. A glass trough sat to one side, and I guessed it was the acid bath Holmes used to get rid of bodies.

“You ever find any of those symbols down here?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

Eddie looked nervous like he hadn’t been expecting me to want to actually poke around, just take a quick look and leave. My suspicions grew that he had glimpsed more horrors as a child than he let on, although playing dumb had probably saved his life.

“Yeah, a couple,” he said, probably figuring that if he made me happy, we could leave all the sooner. He led me to spots on each of the walls, not a surprise since marking the four quarters is common in magic. I recognized the symbols from the research we’d done as a variation of a binding sigil—not quite the same as for Capone’s vampire, but similar. I made note of the differences to look into later. A friend in Charleston knew all about this stuff, and he’d help me sort it out.

Other than carting off the bodies and tidying up the crime scene, it didn’t look like much had been done in the basement. No surprise—even if it wasn’t haunted. Tools and other evidence had been seized, but that left shelves full of bottles filled with odd powders and liquids and bins whose contents hadn’t disintegrated too far to be recognizable. I recognized them as ingredients for dark magic and figured if anyone else had made the connection, they also knew enough not to mess with a witch’s stash.

As I moved carefully around the room, I spotted other symbols carved into the walls that Eddie either hadn’t noticed or didn’t want to talk about. “You said you went through the upstairs after the fire, once Holmes was long gone. Were symbols there too?”

Eddie shivered and squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds before he answered me. I suspected that he’d found more than he’d bargained for exploring those places.

“Yeah. In the wallpaper pattern, in the borders, carved into the wood. All over the place. I think…I think they kept the souls from leaving because we heard voices and saw things.”

In the park, Eddie had been willing to put on a show for some drinking money. The pale, gaunt man in front of me wasn’t acting. He’d seen and experienced things that had shattered him to the core, making him Holmes’s final victim.

“What other questions did Capone ask?”

Eddie scrubbed a hand over his grizzled jaw, either trying to remember or not wanting to say. “He asked about who did the killing for Holmes, whether he did it himself or had someone who worked with him. And then he wanted to know about how Holmes got people to trust him—because he could be a charming bastard—that’s how he got close to those women. I said I didn’t know,