The Hermetic Detective (A Riga Hayworth Paranormal Mystery Book 7) Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Books by Kirsten Weiss

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  About the Author

  Copyright

  Kirsten Weiss

  The Hermetic Detective

  Book Seven in the Riga Hayworth Series

  CHAPTER ONE

  The clang of the alarm faded to white noise.

  Riga stood in an empty hallway. Long rows of lockers and red-painted classroom doors extended into the distance. A corridor branched ahead to the right. Above its twin metal doors a sign flickered red: PEN.

  She walked closer. The light flashed, strong then weak, and she saw that the O had gone completely dark.

  The halls reminded her of her old high school. She was supposed to be somewhere, but she couldn’t remember the room number. And there was someone…

  Her chest squeezed. The babies. Oh, God. She’d left them. Where were they? She pushed through the door, ran down one corridor and another, slamming through heavy doors. What kind of mother abandoned her children?

  “Sheesh,” a man said from behind her. “When you’re asleep, you don’t know you’re dreaming. When you’re awake, you don’t know you’re alive. You’ve gotta remember the details, doll face.”

  Skidding to a halt, she spun around, gaped. “Vinnie?”

  The ghost slouched against a locker. Dark-haired and dapper in his white sailor’s uniform, he grinned. “In the spirit.”

  “This is a dream.” She slumped, relieved. And the dream was a recurring one she should have recognized. Why did she always end up back in school, late for class, unable to find where she was supposed to be?

  “That’s what I said. You got wax in your ears?”

  Sleep. She’d finally gotten to sleep, and she was damn well going to enjoy it, even if that stupid alarm was clamoring in the distance. “Please tell me you’re not real, that you’re just a figment of my subconscious.” The ghost had a tendency to appear when trouble was brewing, and she had enough on her hands with a pair of five-month-olds.

  Vinnie’s eyebrows shot up. “Who said your subconscious ain’t real?”

  “If you’re going to get cryptic, I’m leaving.” She focused on her hands, slender and unlined, and imagined a dream beach. She looked up. Nope, still in school.

  “That’s life, doll, a snake biting its own tail.”

  Riga groaned. “You used to be more direct. Don’t tell me my guardian angel has turned into a mystic.”

  “Not your guardian, the big guy’s. You two’ve got cute rug rats, by the way.”

  “Are they—”

  “They’re sleeping like babies.” He smirked. “Now listen up, we don’t have much time. There’s big trouble coming—”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “I just told you, the big kind.”

  “If your Donovan’s guardian angel, why don’t you invade his dreams?”

  “Because A: he’s not sleeping right now, and B: he won’t let me, and C: I ain’t no angel.” He leered.

  “Really?” Riga digested that. How was her husband able to block the ghost? Donovan had never displayed any overtly magical powers. But there was something… A power fizzing just beneath his skin. “But why—?”

  Whipping off his sailor’s hat, he smacked his thigh. “Dames! They won’t stop flapping their jaws.” He shook his fist at the ceiling. “When’s this penance gonna be done? Don’t a guy deserve to rest in peace?”

  She folded her arms and discovered her dream self was wearing her new favorite outfit, a linen blazer over wide-legged, black linen pants. “Let’s get this over with. Tell me. How bad?”

  He rubbed his face. “Do you know how many people died at Pearl, Riga?”

  “Pearl Harbor?” Her arms loosened, dropped to her sides. Vinnie didn’t joke about Pearl. Over 2,500 people had died there, some his friends. And she couldn’t remember the last time he’d called her by her name. Had he ever? “What are you telling me?”

  “That it’s terrifying what a coordinated attack can do.”

  “And who’s coordinating?”

  “That’s the question.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t know the answer?” Riga asked, disbelieving.

  “No.” He paced between lockers. “But there’s rules.”

  “Then what’s the good of this warning?”

  His shoulders hunched. “I know, I know. Just don’t take nothing for granted. Don’t believe nothing and no one, got it?”

  That went without saying. Her husband, Donovan, was the only person she trusted completely. “But—”

  “Too late. Now wake up.”

  “Vinnie—”

  “WAKE UP.”

  She twitched in the soft lounge chair and blinked at the two cribs, the shelves of children’s books and stuffed animals, the slowly spinning mobile of stars and planets. One crib stood vacant, the twins preferring to share. Riga was desperate enough for sleep to let them have their way. She could see them now through the bars of their crib, their little faces peaceful. Her heart went gooey.

  Dream fading, she raked a hand through her auburn hair, checked her watch. Ten A.M. Her favorite outfit had been replaced. Soft, black knit pants, a button-up shirt in the same fabric, a slim belt around her waist. Comfort clothes. She tossed one end of a forest-green scarf over her shoulder. She might be a new mom, but she hadn’t thrown in the towel on fashion yet.

  A tail thumped on the carpet. Her Rhodesian Ridgeback, Oz, looked up at her, hopeful.

  Whipping the burp towel off her shoulder, she leaned over and scratched behind the massive dog’s ears.

  His tail thumped louder.

  The twins were safe, and she’d been dreaming about… What?

  She glanced to the door. The light above it blinked red.

  Muffling a curse, she stumbled from the lounge chair and grabbed her handgun off the end table. Her fear mixed with something she preferred not to identify.

  Excitement.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The dog lumbered to his feet.

  “Stay. Guard,” she told him. Gun aimed at the floor, she ran to the door, threw it open.

  A dark mass loomed over her, and she stumbled, nearly crashed into Ash, her family’s personal protection.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  He looked down at her and frowned, tall, dark, and deadly. “Intruder on the grounds. Stay—”

  She dashed down the hallway. Glock cradled in both hands, she raced down the stairs and into the wide foyer. Riga skidded to a halt beside a round, mahogany table and its heady bouquet of summer flowers.

  A gray mass shifted in the corner o
f her gaze. She looked left, through the living area of stone and wood-beamed walls, leather couches, oriental carpets. Past the piano, past tall windows overlooking Lake Tahoe, a silver-haired woman stood on the deck.

  A security guard guided her to a bench.

  This was the threat that had set off the silent alarms? Riga pursed her lips.

  Ash appeared beside her. “Hold up. You’ve got—”

  “Our intruder, do you think?” Pulling open a drawer in the foyer table, Riga slid the gun inside, shut it. She trotted down the three steps into the living area and skirted a wide, square coffee table, glanced at him.

  His expression hardened. “Wait here. I’ll check it out.” He brushed past her.

  Riga moved to follow, then stopped. She glanced behind her to the foyer and the stairs leading up to her children’s room. As much as she itched to charge, Ash was here for a reason, and he knew what he was doing. Dammit.

  Opening the sliding glass door, the bodyguard strode onto the deck. Muffled voices floated to her on a whiff of alpine air.

  Ash met her gaze and raised his hand, crooking his fingers. Come.

  She walked onto the deck.

  The woman smiled up from her perch on the edge of a wooden bench, built into a low stone wall. Her eyes were iceberg blue, piercing, and her skin had an unpleasant, pale tint.

  The uniformed guard glanced at Riga, did a double take. “I can’t understand how she got this far,” he said to Ash, apologizing.

  “Figure it out,” Ash said.

  Riga sat down on the bench beside the elderly woman. The lake before them glittered, the soft crush of waves loosening the knot between her shoulders. “Hello,” Riga said. “What brings you here?”

  “I was looking for you.” She cocked her head. The woman’s clothing — light green cardigan, floral-print blouse, knee-length pink skirt — was freshly pressed. But the sweater’s buttons had gotten jumbled, extra fabric bunching where a buttonhole had been skipped. “And I do believe you’ve misplaced something, dear.”

  “Misplaced…?” Riga conducted a frantic once over. Shoes, on. Shirt, buttoned. Knit pants, riding at her hips. Scarf… Her green scarf dangled oddly, heavy, and she pulled it forward. A diaper dangled from the end, tape stuck to the silk. On the plus side, the diaper was clean. Thank God.

  Ash smirked, shrugged. “I tried to tell ya.”

  “You didn’t try very hard.” Shooting him a look, she tugged the scarf free and dropped it and the diaper on the table. “Please, go on. You said it was me you wanted?”

  “Yes, the police referred me to you, you see. Are you Riga?”

  “Yes. You said the police sent you?”

  The woman nodded.

  Riga’s brow furrowed. She was friends with the local sheriff, and he’d recommended her for macabre cases before. But it had been a long time since she’d caught a case — not since she’d learned she was pregnant. She reached out with her senses, probing. There was no dark magic about the woman, but unease whispered along Riga’s spine.

  “Yes, I thought you were the lady I was looking for. I’m Mrs. Norton.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  Her eyes widened, impish. “I walked.”

  Riga frowned. Mrs. Norton had just strolled onto their heavily guarded property? Ash ran regular system tests, and the security was supposed to be close to impregnable. Perhaps there was magic in this woman after all.

  Ash growled low in his throat, and the other guard hurried from the deck, disappearing around the corner of the house of wood and stone.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your case, Mrs. Norton?” Riga asked.

  The woman’s hands clenched, the knuckles prominent through her wrinkled skin. “It’s rather difficult.”

  “Go on,” Riga said.

  “It’s about where I live—”

  Ash made a strangled sound.

  Oz stood in the open door. Between his teeth, the dog clutched Riga’s infant son, Jackson, by the back of his romper.

  The baby giggled, reaching for his mother, and the dog set him gently on the deck.

  Oz sat on his haunches, his brown eyes reproachful.

  “Jack!” Light headed, Riga ran and snatched him up. How had he gotten out of his crib? And if Jack was here…

  The woman had been a trap, a distraction. Riga should have known her sudden appearance was wrong. “Emma.” She’d left them. She never should have left the children. She had to get to her daughter.

  Reality shifted, like layers upon layers of clear, watery doors sliding apart. A cold claw hooked her solar plexus, and a riptide of fear pulled her into the nothingness of the in-between.

  The world spun, grayed, and she stood in the nursery, clutching her son to her chest.

  She hurried to the crib. Emma lay sleeping, her rosebud mouth suckling in a dream. The mobile wheeled above her.

  “Thank God,” Riga whispered, and her knees wobbled. She’d panicked for nothing. It hadn’t been a trap. The old woman was just an old woman. Not every odd incident was magic. And Riga had been laying low. There was no reason for anyone to strike at her, not with all her magical enemies dead and the “normal” ones in prison.

  But how the devil had Jack gotten out? She pressed her cheek to his, smelling of talcum powder and innocence.

  This was Jack’s third escape, and she’d be damned if she could understand how he did it. Could Oz have removed him from the crib? Perhaps, if Jack had been standing, Oz would have had the reach. But at five months, the twins were still working on sitting up and rolling over.

  As if summoned, the dog’s footpads sounded on the stairs, his collar jingling. He trotted into the room and sat at her feet, panting.

  “We’ll talk later,” she whispered to the dog. Taking a blanket off a low table, she bundled her son in her arms, grabbed the baby monitor, and returned to the deck.

  Mrs. Norton blinked at her. “Goodness, you move quickly! One moment you were here and the next, poof!”

  Ash pasted on a sickly smile. He’d seen Riga go “poof” before, and she knew it unsettled him. Since she had little control over her shifts through the in-between, she was uncertain how she felt about them, either. “Emma?” he asked.

  “Is where she should be.” Riga set the monitor on the picnic table and turned it on.

  “What a lovely young man,” Mrs. Norton said, and for a moment Riga was unsure if she were referring to Jack or Ash. “May I?”

  Obedient, Riga came to sit beside her.

  Jack squirmed in the blankets, kicking them free.

  Mrs. Norton laughed, stroking his dark hair. “He’s a rascal, isn’t he? It’s hard to believe innocence such as his can share the world with so much evil.”

  “Evil?”

  Mrs. Norton leaned toward her. “Do you believe in evil?”

  Riga skimmed her lips across her son’s downy head. The woman might as well have asked if Riga believed in avocados or alligators. It wasn’t a matter of belief, but of knowledge. “Evil exists.”

  The older woman leaned back, sighed, her shoulders slumping.

  “Are you all right?” Riga asked.

  She passed a skeletal hand over her face. “Merely tired, and I don’t have much time. I noticed the problem, you see, in my senior care facility.”

  “Your facility?”

  “I’m a resident. And I should tell you now that I’m in the dementia ward.”

  “I see,” Riga said carefully. That might explain the odd, not-quite-rightness about the older lady.

  One corner of the woman’s wrinkled lips turned up. “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

  “And today the wind blows southerly?” For a dementia patient, the woman seemed cogent, quick-witted enough to quote from Hamlet.

  “For now. But I’m not sure for how much longer, so I must speak quickly. People are dying in the facility.”

  Riga tried not to make a face, failed. “It must be dis
tressing, but the odds of a death in a senior—”

  Mrs. Norton waved her hand, dismissive. “I know, I know. One hundred percent mortality rate, yes? But these are murders, not natural deaths. Oh, they’re made to appear natural, or like accidents. A woman whose chart said she should only receive soft foods, because she can’t chew, chokes to death on a piece of Salisbury steak. A man who isn’t supposed to be up and about because he’s unsteady on his feet is found with his neck broken at the bottom of the stairwell. They seem accidental. But something is wrong.”

  “And the police told you to talk to me?” This was not her sort of case. She was a metaphysical detective, an investigator of first causes. Riga couldn’t imagine the police referring her to Mrs. Norton unless it was a joke. And Sheriff King wasn’t the sort to make jokes at the expense of an elderly woman in care.

  “Not the regular police, the astral police.”

  Ash smothered a disbelieving noise.

  But Riga stilled, thoughtful. Jack’s kicking ceased. “And how did you contact the astral police?” she asked.

  The woman ran a trembling hand through her hair. “I’m not entirely sure. Things get blurry. When they told me your name was Riga Hayworth, I feared they were a delusion. But they were quite insistent. Is that really your name?”

  “My parents had an awful sense of humor.”

  “You do look like Rita, the hair, the face. But the eyes are different. What a magnificent actress she was. A true screen goddess.”

  “What else did the police say?”

  She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and drew out a wrinkled dollar bill, extended it to Riga. “They told me I should give you this to secure your services.”

  Riga shifted Jack’s weight and pocketed the dollar. “I’ll drive you to your facility and see what I can find. But if I don’t see anything out of the ordinary, I’ll have to give you your dollar back.” She didn’t take cases from the mentally disturbed. It only fed their illness. But there was something about Mrs. Norton that she couldn’t dismiss. And her mention of the astral police…

  The wind tossed the pines, soughing, and in spite of the summer warmth, Riga shivered.

  “Fair enough.” Nodding, Mrs. Norton reached into her other pocket, withdrawing a folded piece of paper. She ran her thumb along its edges. “There’s more. I overheard two people talking. There are old vents, you see, and sometimes voices carry. Unfortunately, their voices were distorted, so I couldn’t recognize them. But I heard what they said, terrible things, talking about us as if we weren’t people, just… things. And there was a third man, groaning, begging, and then a crack, and he didn’t speak again. The next day they found the man on the stairs, the man with the broken neck.”