Sparks (12 page)

W
HEN
A
NYA'S PHONE RANG, SHE
first thought it was the alarm on the temperature monitor in the bathtub. She bolted upright in a panic, swearing and flailing in the comforter tangled around her elbows.

She leaned over, into the tub, and the happy duck stated that the temperature was eighty-seven degrees. Sparky lifted his head and blinked at her with irritation.

The phone continued to ring. Anya disengaged herself from the grip of the comforter and tripped across the hall to the kitchen phone.

"Kalinczyk," she muttered.

"Rise and shine," the voice boomed. It was Marsh.
Christ.
She glanced at the kitchen clock. It was still three hours before she needed to be at work.

"With all due respect, Captain... what the hell? It's four a.m."

"Meet me at the Detroit Institute of Arts when you get your sorry ass woken up."

The line went dead.

"Piss," Anya growled.

She hadn't figured out the logistics of morning ablutions without the benefit of a shower. After some trial and error, Anya managed to wash her hair in the kitchen sink with the vegetable sprayer and gave herself a sponge bath with her nice new washcloths from the mega baby superstore. She had to admit that the organic cotton plush cloths were nice. Very nice.

Shivering, she managed to get into her work clothes without her teeth chattering out of her head: black pants, charcoal-colored blouse, black jacket. She swiped on some lipstick and decided to let her hair air-dry with the windows down on the way over.

Brushing her teeth in the bathroom sink, she saw Sparky resting his head on the edge of the bathtub, watching her.

Deliberately, Anya took the salamander collar off and set it on the counter. Cold droplets from her hair snaked down her bare neck. She pulled a dry-erase Magic Marker out of her pocket and knelt by the tub.

"This," she told him, "is for your own good."

She drew a wobbly circle on the tile, around the shower surround, down across the floor. Sparky watched her draw, his gill-fronds pushed forward in concern. If a magick circle could keep a salamander out of her bed, one could surely keep a salamander in a bathtub. Even if it was lopsided and ran up over the wall. Anya left the last little bit of it open to reach in and give Sparky a hug.

"You're staying home today."

The salamander slipped out of her arms and trotted across the bathroom floor.

"Sparky!" She wasn't sure how she was going to catch him and put him back. Her muzzy-headed plan hadn't extended that far.

Sparky climbed up on the counter, took the salamander collar in his teeth, and padded back to the bathtub. He circled three times, kneading the sleeping bag with his feet. He set the collar down over the faucet spout.

"Okay," she said, not understanding. But if Sparky would feel closer to her having the collar in the circle, that was okay.

She closed the circle with a stroke of the marker. Sparky snuggled down in his nest.

"I'll be back tonight," she murmured.

As she locked the door to the house behind her, Anya absently rubbed her throat. She felt naked without the collar. Jumpy. She imagined, in the darkness, that shadows moved and seethed. Without the salamander as an alarm, she had difficulty quelling her imagination.

She slipped behind the wheel of the Dart, pulled the iPhone from her pocket.

"Call Sparky," she said to it.

The screen revealed a soothing red-and-orange image of the salamander in his nest. From the audio, she thought she detected a snore.

Taking a deep breath, Anya turned the key in the ignition.

He's gonna be all right,
she told herself.
He's gonna be all right.

But she only half believed it.

In the predawn hours of morning, the city was still half asleep. Streetlights hummed overhead, and cars had begun to crawl into the parking lots of twenty-four-hour coffee shops. The freeways were nearly clear, lights only beginning to shine in the bedrooms and kitchens of row houses screened back from the road by chain-link fences. The city seemed quiet, still. But Anya knew it was all an illusion: that children dreamed of their parents fighting about money, that mothers and fathers whispered about lost jobs and moving away. The line was already forming at the unemployment office, and more than one person stared into their cereal and wondered how much longer until the next auto plant would close.

She turned off on Woodward Avenue, tooled down the street to DIA. It seemed a grand illusion, light shining artfully upon the steps and broad plaza that stretched out to the street. A copy of Rodin's
The Thinker
perched in the front, but it was too dark to see if he was lost in contemplation or if he merely slept.

Anya was betting he was awake. A handful of police cars, a fire truck, and paramedics had pulled up to the curb. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the whine of an alarm that hadn't been shut off yet. Her bag of gear was heavy on her shoulder, causing her calves to burn as she made the seemingly interminable climb carrying the duffel.

She spied Marsh at the glass doors, talking to the paramedics in the glow of red and blue strobe light.

"Captain," she said. Marsh was always first at a scene. That was one of the immutable laws of the universe. "What's going on?"

Marsh jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, toward the lobby. "We've got a fire alarm pulled, and two missing guards. We think they're stuck twiddling their thumbs behind the barricade in the Special Exhibits area."

Anya glanced at the water trickling down the steps. "The insurance adjustor's gonna love these guys."

"Yeah. But unlike the crime lab, DIA has measures in place to protect the art. Steel doors and that kind of thing. Nobody seems to know exactly what it is they have in place, though, since museums get variances on that, and don't have to conform to fire codes."

"There's gotta be some way to know. Isn't that info on file somewhere?"

"I got a couple of clerks out of bed to look in long-term records storage for the info. It's a nice administrative clusterfuck."

Anya winced. Marsh rarely swore, and when he did, it was a sign that someone's ass was going to get handed to them on a plate. "Are the guards all right?"

"We're not sure."

Anya's brow wrinkled. "You don't know?"

"Remember the steel doors I mentioned? One of them slammed down, and we can't get through it yet. DPD is getting creative." Marsh rolled his eyes.

A loud crash echoed from inside the museum.

"Wonderful." Anya groaned. "Can't they just get the codes from the alarm company? Or get the info from somebody at DIA?"

"The DIA liaison is apparently out of the country--collecting new art in Fiji--and her assistant's not answering the phone. The alarm company isn't being terribly cooperative, since no one seems to know the right thing to say to them to convince them that we're not trying to pull down an art heist. They're supposed to be sending someone out."

Another crash rattled the glass in the doors.

"But this is more fun," Anya said.

"Yeah," Marsh agreed. "This is a lot more fun."

Anya dropped her duffel bag at her feet and set her coffee down beside it. "Can I go watch?"

"Knock yourself out, kiddo. But take notes--I'm sure the insurance company's gonna want the full report about how the security system was damaged."

Anya crouched before her duffel bag and rummaged around in it for her coveralls. No point in compromising the scene any more than it already had been. She zipped the suit up to her neck, donned her Nomex gloves--just in case anything else was still burning--and tucked her helmet under her right arm and her bag under the left as she pushed through the glass doors into the lobby of the museum.

Like many of Detroit's grand architectural landmarks, DIA had been built in the 1930s. Curved windows reached blackly up to the vaulted ceilings in the Great Hall. Suits of armor stood sentry behind glass cases on the inlaid floors, seeming to watch Anya as she strode through the lobby. A red strobe light cast a hellish glare on the glass, giving the appearance of fire moving in the blackness.

Anya followed the alarm sirens. Her intuition prickled: She would have expected the alarm systems to have activated a sprinkler system and for there to be standing water and puddles. But there was nothing here. Perhaps the whole fire-suppression system was malfunctioning, and that was not a good sign.

She walked through the Great Hall, turned right on the promenade, and stopped before the doors to an exhibit hall labeled
ANCIENT GREEK AND ROMAN ART
. A half-dozen police officers in SWAT gear were buzzing around it like wasps. Two breachers were making dents in the door with what looked like battering rams. One guy was busily playing with something that looked like Silly Putty. He waved the other two off and stuck the explosives to the door with a blinking electronic detonator.

Great. This was where the really expensive shit was stored. And these guys were going to start blowing shit up.

"Fire in the hole!" the Silly Putty guy shouted.

Anya slammed on her helmet and ran back down the promenade. She'd gotten no more than a half-dozen steps in when a blast rattled the glass overhead. She jumped back and shielded her face with her hands when a plate of skylight glass crashed down in front of her in a glittering hail. Slivers raked over her protective suit, and a piece caught her shin.

"Motherfucker," she swore, stepping back and rubbing her knee. That hurt.

She turned back to the Ancient Greek and Roman Art exhibit, hoping there would be something left of it. Dust and smoke filled the hall, and Anya dug in her bag for her respirator. The plastic explosives had made a very nice hole in the steel door, enough for SWAT to go swarming inside and yelling orders at one another. Someone managed to shut the audible alarm off, leaving a high-pitched ringing in her ears.

But something was wrong. SWAT was retreating from the exhibit hall, coughing and gagging. Through her respirator, Anya could smell something sickly sweet.

Shit.

There was a reason the museum didn't have a sprinkler system installed here. They'd been using halon gas to suppress the fire. The steel door had been installed to provide an airtight seal while the gas suffocated the fire... and likely the guards inside.

Anya took a deep breath. Her respirator would be of small help in filtering out the inert halon. She clambered through the hole in the door, picking her way over the curled steel and broken tile into the exhibit room. Immediately, she could tell that the insurance adjustor was going to be plenty pissed. Plexiglas-and-steel cases had slammed down over many of the pieces of art, but it looked as if a bust of a charioteer had toppled over and been crushed in the mouth of a steel safety curtain. Anya could make out a marble shoulder and an arm in the rubble.

But what stopped her in her tracks was that unmistakable smell, beneath the artificial sweetness of the halon.

Magick.

She turned to one of the massive leather-upholstered couches in the corner of the mess. A sprawl of feet stuck out from below it.

"Over here!" she yelled to the SWAT guys, but no one came. Anya rolled the couch off the bodies.

A young man in a guard uniform was hugging a fire extinguisher like a kid with a teddy bear. Beside him sprawled the prone form of another guard. Anya grabbed the guard with the fire extinguisher under the arms and dragged him out of the room, through the hole in the door, and into the hallway. Fresh air was beginning to penetrate the room, but not fast enough.

SWAT was shouting for paramedics. Anya took several gulps of air from the hallway and rushed back into the room to grasp the ankles of the second prone man. The entire front of his uniform was blackened and covered with acrid fire extinguisher foam, and his arms were wrapped around his gut. She hauled him out into the hallway just as more firefighters in respirators converged. The guards were whisked away at a dead run, taken to fresh air and the paramedics waiting by the curb. Anya followed, clomping in their wake.

Marsh grabbed her arm as she ripped the respirator off her face, sucked in deep breaths of fresh air. She coughed the sweetness of the halon and the bitterness of the magick out of her lungs. A respirator was of little use in an area with no oxygen. She felt light-headed and clammy with that limited exposure--and what of the guards, who'd been breathing it in for who knew how long?

"What the hell happened in there?" Marsh demanded.

Anya shook her head, croaked, "It was a fucking disaster. They had halon in that room. How long has it been since the alarm went off?" She watched the knot of people on the steps. The paramedics weren't working with a sense of furious urgency, and her heart sank.

"More than an hour," Marsh said. "We've been trying to get into that damn room for more than an hour." He passed his hand over his eyes. "We'd been expecting to find two wet guards in a locked room soaked by sprinklers. Not bodies."

When he spoke again, it was with restrained fury. "Nobody's supposed to use that in occupied buildings. There's supposed to be an alarm to warn people to leave the area before the room is sealed off."