Fatal Error

  “Who’s Mister Osala?”

  “Why should I tell you anything about him?”

  “Why not? Is it a secret?”

  She shrugged. “I guess not. He was hiding me from Jerry. My mother hired him to investigate—”

  “Two of us?” Jack said. “Does it seem logical that she’d hire two investigators?”

  Jack didn’t think of himself as a PI, but in this case he guessed he’d served as one.

  “Totally not.” She rubbed her temples. “I don’t know . . . this is so not making sense. One of you has to be lying.”

  Jack pulled out his ace. He hoped it was enough.

  “Remember that letter you received from Doctor Vecca?”

  Her head snapped up. “How do you know about that?”

  “It wasn’t from her. I wrote it. I even delivered it to you personally—in a blond wig. Remember? It contained everything I’d learned about Jerry.”

  She stared at him, her eyes growing wider and wider. “Then you know . . . ?”

  He nodded.

  She looked up at Weezy. “You too?”

  Weezy nodded.

  Dawn buried her face in her hands. “Oh, God! I didn’t want anyone else to know! Ever!”

  Weezy put a hand on her shoulder. “No one blames you. You were the victim of a sick, sick man.”

  “And it’s over,” Jack said. “He’s gone for good—out of your life, out of everyone’s life.”

  “But I was so stupid!”

  “You were young,” Weezy said, squeezing her shoulder. “That was the problem.”

  Still young, Jack thought, leaning forward. “So who’s this Mister Osala?”

  “Jack,” Weezy said with a warning tone. What was with the look she was giving him?

  “What?”

  “She’s upset. Maybe later.”

  What was up with her? This was important.

  “Just this one thing, okay?” Jack sat next to her. “Tell me about this Osala, Dawn.”

  She took a deep breath. “Well, he’s very rich, lives in a duplex on Fifth Avenue overlooking the park. He said he’d made a promise to my mother to protect me and that’s what he did.”

  “Why aren’t you there now?”

  She looked away. “He kicked me out. He said with Jerry dead, I was in no danger, so his obligation was up. He found me this apartment and—”

  “He chose it for you?”

  “Totally. Even paid the first six months’ rent.”

  Jack couldn’t help a glance at Weezy.

  “What’s wrong?” Dawn said.

  “Weez, can you get me a pen and a piece of paper?”

  “Right here.”

  She plucked a Sharpie and a yellow legal pad from the table. Jack took them and drew a crude figure. He held it up for her.

  “Did you see anything like this around Mister Osala’s house?”

  She shook her head. “Never.”

  Damn.

  “But,” she added, “my obstetrician had something like that on his pocket watch.”

  Jack tensed. “And who set you up with the obstetrician?”

  “Mister Osala.”

  He choked back a whoop. There was the connection: The Order had had its sights on the baby all along. They’d placed Dawn under the wing of a well-heeled member until she delivered, then they dumped her and spirited the baby away.

  The question was, had they searched out Weezy just so they could install Dawn across the hall? Seemed so. But to what end?

  “What’s that symbol mean?” Dawn said.

  He didn’t want to start in on the history of the Septimus Order. Weezy could handle that beautifully, but it wasn’t where he wanted the conversation to go.

  “Just a fraternal order . . . like the Masons.”

  Yeah, I wish.

  “Enough of this,” Weezy said from the kitchen. “Let’s eat. I’m starving.”

  4

  Dawn sipped coffee and nibbled on half of a sesame bagel with nothing on it. Weezy did the same, but was more aggressive with the coffee, draining cup after cup. Jack knew from the time they’d been apartment mates that she had an astounding capacity for caffeine.

  Jack loaded his poppy-seed bagel with cream cheese and chomped.

  “How are you feeling?” Weezy said.

  They hadn’t planned out a good-cop, bad-cop thing, but she seemed to be falling into the more touchy-feely role.

  Dawn looked at her. “You never had a baby?”

  Weezy shook her head.

  “Well, then,” Dawn said, “I’m sore. Not totally sore like I was yesterday, but sore.”

  Jack tried to imagine giving birth. Gave up. He’d tried many times while Gia was pregnant but his mind couldn’t go there.

  He wanted to ask Dawn about her baby but held back. He sensed Weezy tacking in that direction.

  She tapped a finger against her temple. “How are you feeling up here?”

  Dawn frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Emotionally. You’ve been living in somebody’s house, now you’re on your own. You were pregnant, now you’re not. You just delivered a baby and . . .” Weezy shook her head. “That’s got to get to you.”

  Jack could see Dawn withdrawing, shutting down. Weezy must have sensed it too. She reached out and touched her arm.

  “I’m messing this up. What I’m trying to say is, if you’re ever feeling down or lonely or just want to talk, I’m here all by myself too. I hardly ever go out, and sometimes I get lonely, so any time you want to talk or just come over to sit and read or watch TV with someone else around, feel free.”

  Jack thought Weezy might be laying it on a little thick, acting all mother hennish, which was not Weezy. Then it dawned on him that she wasn’t playing good cop . . . this was genuine.

  Dawn’s voice was thick when she spoke. “Why do you care?”

  Jack wanted the answer too.

  Weezy looked flustered. “I . . . I’m not sure. You needed help yesterday, and you seem, I don’t know . . . lost. I’m just offering to help until you find your bearings.”

  “Lost . . . yeah, you’ve got that right. I was headed for college, everything was going my way, but I screwed up everything.” She looked like she might cry but got on top of it and turned to Jack. “What about you, Mister Thousand Questions? Why do you care?”

  So many reasons . . . most he couldn’t tell her.

  But he knew one, as true as any of the others, that would mean something to her.

  “Because I let your mother down.”

  Dawn blinked. “What? How?”

  “I took too long getting the job done. In my defense, I didn’t know a clock was ticking, and neither did she. She was gone before I could tell her I’d dug up something that would end your relationship with Jerry forever. She loved you fiercely, Dawn, and knew you’d be ruining your life with him.”

  “She had that so right. I just wish I’d seen it.”

  “She was ready to do anything to save you from him. Unfortunately she died not knowing she’d succeeded.”

  Dawn was staring at him. “So she didn’t know about . . . ?”

  Jack shook his head. “I was on my way to tell her. I figured it was news that needed to be delivered face-to-face, but I didn’t get to her in time.”

  “So she died not knowing?”

  He nodded.

  She closed her eyes and let her head fall back. “Thank God!”

  He glanced at Weezy and she gave him a small smile and an approving nod. Approving of what? Comforting her? Gaining her trust? Or both?

  He cocked his head toward Dawn: Your turn.

  “I’m sorry about your baby,” Weezy said. “I won’t pretend that I can imagine how that feels.”

  Dawn straightened and looked at her. “I’m not sure how it feels either. I totally didn’t want the baby—”

  “I can imagine why you wouldn’t,” Weezy said.

  “I even tried to abort it. But now that they tell me he’s dead . . .”
She sighed. “You know, it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t, you know, ask to be conceived. He had nothing to do with it. He’s totally an innocent bystander. But after he was born they told me he had neurological problems, ‘incompatible with life’ . . .”

  Remembering Veilleur’s request to find out about the birth defects, Jack said, “Weezy told me they didn’t let you see him?”

  “I got a peek.” She made a face. “He looked hairy . . . black hair all over . . . kind of like a monkey, you know?”

  Weezy said, “That could be lanugo. Some infants are born with a lot of body hair.”

  “I read about that while I was pregnant, but this seemed awfully thick. But that wasn’t the weirdest . . .” She shook her head.

  “What?” Weezy said.

  “I thought he had . . . you’re so not going to believe this.”

  “Try us,” Jack said.

  “Well, it looked . . . I only caught a glimpse . . . but it looked like he had . . . tentacles.”

  Jack felt queasy as he remembered how they’d been making Lovecraftian jokes about the Order’s schemes, but this . . .

  “You mean like an octopus?”

  “No, they didn’t have suckers or anything like that. They looked more like snakes . . . like slim little garter snakes.”

  “Instead of arms?”

  “No, he had arms too, although his fingers looked kind of clawish. Two arms with a tentacle coming from . . . they looked like they were coming from his armpits.”

  Something stirred and rustled in the back of Jack’s mind. Something long buried. He glanced at Weezy and saw she’d gone dead white.

  He was about to ask her if she was all right when Dawn spoke again. She was staring straight ahead, oblivious to both of them.

  “Maybe he’s better off dead—if he’s dead. I mean, they say he is, and I kind of wish I could believe them, but . . .”

  Jack felt like he’d just stuck his finger in a live socket.

  “Wait-wait-wait! You don’t believe he’s dead?”

  She sighed. “I know it sounds totally paranoid, but you probably already think I’m crazy because of the tentacles, so I might as well go for the gold, right? No, I don’t believe he’s dead.”

  “And you base this on . . . ?”

  She shrugged. “Mother’s intuition? Or maybe the way they wouldn’t let me see his body.”

  “What excuse did they give?”

  “Well, he—Doctor Landsman—told me that since I’d already signed the adoption papers, he wasn’t officially mine, and anyway, they’d already sent him to the morgue.”

  Jack glanced at Weezy. Some of her color was back but she didn’t look right. What was upsetting her? Had she made a connection to something she’d read in the Compendium?

  “Did you mention the tentacles?”

  Dawn nodded. “He said I must have been hallucinating from all the stress of the delivery. Well, yeah, I was stressed, but not to the point where I was totally seeing things.”

  “But why do you think this doctor would lie to you?”

  “Ready for more paranoia?”

  Jack had to smile. “Bring it on. I eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

  “Okay. Try this: Doctor Landsman always did the ultrasounds of the baby himself, never his tech, and he’d never let me see them. He’d show Mister Osala, but never me. I’m sure he knew about these deformities in advance, and so did Mister Osala. I’ve done some thinking. I think the adoption papers were fake. I think they’ve taken the baby themselves.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. To experiment on? To put in a sideshow? I don’t know. Call me paranoid if you want, but I just know they’re lying to me. They are so lying to me.”

  Jack debated whether or not to tell her about his call to the morgue. As the mother, didn’t she have a right to know?

  “I don’t think you’re paranoid, Dawn. In fact, I’m pretty damn sure you’re not.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “When Weezy told me how they wouldn’t let you see your baby’s body after he died, I had the same thought: No reason in the world they wouldn’t show you unless they couldn’t—because they had no body . . . because he wasn’t dead. Now, granted, I’ve got a suspicious mind that sometimes leads me astray, but more often than not, it’s on target.”

  Dawn straightened. “And this time?”

  “Well, you tell me: No death certificate was filed for a newborn with a Wednesday morning time of death.”

  “I knew it!” She balled a fist. “I’m not crazy!” She looked at Jack and then Weezy. “But where is he? Where’s my baby?”

  “If I had to guess,” Weezy said, “I’d say he’s in this Mister Osala’s house.”

  Dawn gasped. “No way! I was just—”

  “Kicked out,” Jack said, seeing the logic. “You had to go because he was expecting another guest.” He ripped the top sheet off the legal pad and prepared to take notes. “First off, how do you spell his name?”

  “O-s-a-l-a.”

  Jack printed that at the top of the sheet. Something about the name . . . but it wouldn’t come.

  “Okay, now tell me everything you know about Mister Osala and his place . . .”

  5

  “Jack,” Weezy said as he followed Dawn out the door, “I need to talk to you about something.”

  He watched Dawn disappear into her apartment, then stepped back into Weezy’s. The plan was for him to pay a visit to Osala’s place and see if he could get in and find the baby, or evidence that a baby was living there.

  “What’s up?”

  “Did Dawn’s description of her baby stir up any memories?”

  “Should it?”

  He did remember a faint reaction, but it had been overshadowed by Dawn’s belief that her baby was still alive.

  “Covered with dark hair . . . clawlike hands . . . and tentacles? Ring any bells?”

  “No.”

  “Back when we were teens . . . the basement of the Lodge . . . ?”

  And then it hit.

  “Oh, jeez!”

  . . . the feeling of something coiling around his neck . . . black-furred paws scraping along concrete . . . a snakelike thing—maybe a tentacle—waving in the air . . .

  No wonder she’d gone pale. He was probably looking a little pale himself right now.

  “You don’t think there’s any connection, do you? I mean, how can there be?”

  “Lately I’ve been catching references to q’qrs in the Compendium, so they’re up front in my mind. Srem doesn’t present a drawing of a q’qr—at least I haven’t found one yet. Her references are always oblique because, like so many things in the Compendium, she assumes the reader is already familiar with what she’s discussing. But that thing that chased us back in Johnson seems to fit what I’ve put together about q’qrs. And things that Dawn said about her baby fit too.”

  Jack was having trouble wrapping his mind around that one . . . or maybe his mind simply didn’t want to go there.

  “But q’qrs disappeared with the First Age, what, fifteen thousand years ago.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe some survived the cataclysm.”

  “But Dawn’s baby?”

  “Think about it: Q’qrs were created by the Otherness back in the First Age. Maybe ‘created’ isn’t the best word—genetically retrofitted or repurposed from human DNA is more like it. They became the source of the Taint, what we know as oDNA, which everyone carries to varying degrees. So, in a sense, they’ve never been away. They live on, right here in our genomes.”

  Lots of them lived on in Jack’s genes, and he didn’t like it. But he saw where Weezy was going.

  “I get it. According to Veilleur, Jonah Stevens’s plan was to produce a child—Dawn’s—so packed with oDNA that it would be able to replace the One. You’re thinking he wound up creating a q’qr instead.”

  “Not a real, one hundred percent q’qr, but something close.”

&
nbsp; “But what could the Order want with it?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe to use it as a mascot. Maybe they plan to supplant the One themselves.”

  He gave her a look. “What?”

  “I don’t believe that either. Just throwing things out. Whatever their reason, we should know it, don’t you think?”

  “Exactly. That’s why I’m going to pay a visit to Mister Osala.”

  Her expression turned worried. “You’ll be careful, please?”

  “I’m always careful.”

  For some reason he had a feeling he should be especially careful with this Osala guy.

  6

  The lobby of Osala’s building had an almost cathedral air about it. High-ceilinged but not that high. Maybe it was the wrought iron affixed to the entry door, or the dark wood and pointed arches within that gave it a gothic feel. Maybe it was a cathedral—consecrated to money and set in the ionospheric rent district.

  He noticed two elevators opposite the entrance.

  “Got a repair order for . . .” Jack squinted at the name scrawled on the work order . . . “the Osama elevator.”

  He carried a red steel toolbox and wore oil-smudged overalls.

  “It’s Osala,” the doorman said, giving him a suspicious look. “Repair order from who?”

  He had a small, thin frame and deep brown skin, with short gray hair and a matching beard. He wore a gray uniform with dark red piping and a brass name tag that read MACK. He looked sixtyish and like he’d been around the block a few times.

  Jack shrugged. “From whoever manages this place. I just go where they send me.”

  He handed over the work order and Mack studied it.

  “This says you’re to fix a noise.”

  “That it do.”

  “It ain’t making a noise. It works perfect.”

  Jack shrugged again. “Like I said: I don’t write up the work orders, I just go where I’m sent.”

  Dawn had told him everything she knew about the place. She’d described the Osala duplex in impressive detail but was vague about the rest of the building. One elderly doorman during the day—that would be Mack here—two elevators, one for the exclusive use of Osala’s penthouse. She said the building had been virtually deserted since the holidays, with most of the other tenants fleeing to warmer climes till spring. Even Osala had been “down south” a lot lately.