The Necromancer: Part Seven

      "I believe 'good afternoon' would be more appropriate," she said automatically, then moved on straight to business. "I was wondering if I might have a word with you, Commissioner. If you're not too busy." The words were a formality; she had rarely seen anybody look less busy in her entire life.

      "Oh! I believe I could spare a moment," he replied. "In fact you may even sit down if you like. My secretary tells me that you have been looking for me all morning - it strikes me as only fair that your dedication should be rewarded."

      Emma took the offered seat, wondering how to begin. There were several ways of introducing the subject, each with its own particular advantages and disadvantages. "That is correct," she said, buying herself some time by answering his statement instead of bringing up her own point.

      "I am quite concerned for your health, Miss Ward - going to bed so late, and getting up so early! How excessively delightful that you are so devoted to your work."

      By all of which, she gathered, he meant that he was glad of the ten or eleven hours of sleep that he had probably enjoyed. He certainly did not looked tired, which was more than could be said of many of the detectives. He was dressed as impeccably as the day before; the only difference was that today his cravat was a pale lavender instead of red. On the other hand, now that she saw him up close, she couldn't help noticing that neither his appearance nor his tone of voice quite matched his rather chipper words. At the moment, in fact, he was staring somewhat oddly over her shoulder as if there were somebody standing just behind her.

      She was not here, however, to chat about her sleep habits, nor did she intend to give Lockwood a moment's thought more than was required. It was toxic path to start down - Nick's influence. "I was wondering if you might clear something up for me. On what grounds did you rule out Conrad Jones as a suspect?"

      His eyes flitted back to meet her own. "Why, to confess the truth, I did not think he had committed the crime."

      Did he mean to insult her intelligence, she wondered? She decided it would be best to remain silent and wait for a more satisfactory answer.

      "There were several points of consideration, but the principal question I asked myself was this: Why would a murderer wear a light colored coat, and then be so extraordinarily careless as to leave it behind at the scene of the crime? I will grant you that, had he killed Lawson on the spur of the moment, Jones might simply have failed to consider these things. But to meet with Lawson, decide to murder him, and later to return and make such ridiculous mistakes? I hardly think so. Then there is also the matter of timing. Why would the mysterious 7:00 visitor not have reported Lawson's death, unless he - or she - was in fact the murderer?"

      His logic was more sound than Emma had expected, though hardly as foolproof as he seemed to think. "Then how did the blood get on the coat?"

      He smiled very slightly. "These things happen. Perhaps the true killer simply wiped his hands on it when he reentered the office."

      That was a bit of a stretch, she thought, but altogether he had a point. There were plenty of ways that blood could have gotten on the coat despite Jones's not having committed the crime, and though each was improbable in its own way, so was the idea of him leaving his incriminating coat draped casually on a chair at the scene of the murder."You are convinced, then, that Jones is not the culprit."

      "Most utterly convinced, Miss Ward."

      "Very well. Thank you for your time, Commissioner." Emma rose to leave.

      "Oh! - before you go, perhaps you might do something for me." She sank back down into her chair, keeping her expression impassive despite her sudden suspicion. His request, however, was nothing alarming. "I have here a charming stack of papers - I wonder if you would be so kind as to go through them and give them your signature? I find them so very tedious that I can hardly bear to look at them..."

      "Thorough and accurate paperwork," Emma said coldly, "is the foundation of all good investigative work." Nevertheless she took the papers from him, somewhat relieved that he hadn't asked anything else of her. She couldn't help suspecting that one day in the not-so-distant future he was going to ask her to be complicit in something illegal; and on that day she was going to have a difficult decision to make.

     ***

     She found Nicholas waiting for her in her office, sitting at her desk eating crackers. "How funny," she told him dryly. "Here you are doing the same thing as the Commissioner, except that at least he has the grace to do it in his own office. Do you never have any work to do?"

      "Unlike your boss over there, I didn't sleep in until one o'clock and I have better things to do than look cut myself in the mirror."

      "I have never once seen Commissioner Lockwood look at a mirror, and you certainly don't appear to have anything better to do at the moment."

      "Oh, give me a break," he said dismissively. "I've been working all morning. But I wanted to talk to you."

      Emma stood in front of him with her arms crossed. "Get out of my chair." When he had done so, giving her a smirk that she didn't care for, she continued: "About what? I'm busy, Detective Chase, unlike some people I could name."

      "Well, Miss Ward, I wanted to ask you why we are now down a suspect - the only one we had."

      She sighed and decided that it would be best to fill him in on everything at once, since he was always incorrigibly curious. She related everything that had happened the precious night and that morning, up to and including the conversation she'd just had with Lockwood.

      When she was finished, Nicholas, who was given to abrupt shifts of mood, sat silently frowning for several moments. "I don't like it, Emma," he said at last.

      "Well, neither do I. This takes us back to square one, and I would have preferred a more thorough investigation into Conrad Jones. But there's nothing we can do about it."

      "No... that's not what I mean, exactly..."

      "Oh?" she said impatiently. Emma could never stand indistinct, wavering statements. "What do you mean, exactly?"

      Typically, he seemed too lost in thought to notice her annoyance, and he refused to be rushed. "Why doesn't Lockwood want anyone talking to Jones?"

      "I don't know. Nor do I care."

      "You should. The Necromancer has something up his sleeve."

      "I can't imagine why you call him that," said Emma, her coldness turning positively icy. "Of all the absurd, petty things..."

      "It's just a joke. You wouldn't understand." Nick waved a hand as if he meant to dismiss the issue. "Halston once said that the only way he could solve some of these murder cases was if he... Anyway, you're right, it's not relevant. What matters here is that I don't know what Lockwood is doing, and I intend to find out. What right does he have to come here with no experience, take over our department, block our investigations and give us no explanation at all? He's hiding something. I'd stake my life on it."

      "Then you would be an idiot. You should never stake your life on anything you are less than one hundred percent sure of. In any case, I haven't noticed anything remotely secretive about the High Commissioner. You're making all of this up in your imagination."

      "Oh really? Tell me, Emma, you're an observant, well-informed kind of person. What is the High Commissioner's first name?"

      She searched her memories for this information, and concluded somewhat to surprise that it was not there. "It starts with an H."

      "Yeah, didn't think so. Nobody else knows either. Funny thing, isn't it? So we don't know who he is, and we have no idea where he comes from, other than that he's probably from Meridell - but who knows, really? And you're not starting to smell something fishy here? Nothing unusually mysterious about your new boss?"

      "I don't know why you insist on constructing a mystery out of this. I would imagine he is exactly what he seems to be - a member of the Meridellian upper class."

      "I would love to know how a Meridellian nobleman wound up with that knife scar on his face," Nick replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "Or didn't you ever wonder about that? Do you have no curiosity at all?"

      Emma blinked, considering how she should answer. It had never, in fact, occurred to her to wonder about it. "How do you know it's a knife scar?" was the best she could come up with.

      "Please. I'm a Citadel detective. We have more crime per capita than the rest of Neopia put together, if you don't count Krawk Island... I know what it looks like when someone gets their face knifed."

      "It's still none of your concern. None of mine, either." She pushed up her glasses, fixing him with a serious look. "You need to leave this alone, Nicholas."

      He laughed bitterly. "Oh, no. I don't think so. I want Lockwood gone, and I think I've figured out how to make him squirm. It's simple, really. I just need to do some digging - I have a hunch he doesn't want us to know anything about him."

      Emma did not like the sound of this at all. "You should be careful, Nicholas. As you say, you have no idea who he is. He might very well be dangerous."

      "No. No, and you'll come to find that that is his little secret. Mr. Ice King Lockwood has no boiling point. He may threaten, and glare, and intimidate, but he'll never act on it."

      She stood up abruptly. "I won't listen to any more of this. It's becoming an obsession with you. You're angry that he got your job, and I can see you're going to go to any lengths to get your revenge. Well, Nicholas, don't drag me into it. I have actual work to be doing."

      Nick glared at her, and for a moment she was certain that he would storm out without another word. "You wait. I'll prove it." Then he stalked out of the room, closing the door rather harder than necessary on the way out.

      Emma was distinctly disturbed by their conversation. Nicholas might think he knew what he was doing - and that Lockwood would too lazy and too apathetic to retaliate. But recalling the interrogation of the night before, Emma wasn't so sure.

      Following Nick's departure, in any case, Emma decided that it was as good a time as any to get started on her superior's paperwork. It really was utterly routine; most of it required, at the most, a few lines of information about the investigation to be filled out. By and large it was simply a matter of scrawling a signature at the end. How he could be so lazy puzzled her almost as seriously as Lawson's mysterious murder. Still, it was not her place to have opinions about her superior's methods, and she certainly had no objection to doing it herself. It was quite satisfying to fill out so many forms, and with her customary efficiency, she was finished with the stack in under twelve minutes.

      She was just contemplating what to do next when the Usul secretary stuck her head in the door. "Miss Ward? Did they ever find you?"

      Emma looked at her for a moment, then concluded that she had no idea what the girl was talking about. "Who?" she inquired, pushing her glasses farther up her nose.

      "Oh, those men who were looking for you. They said they'd wait in here. It was only about ten minutes before you came back - I'm surprised they didn't wait that long."

      "Who were they, and what did they want?" Emma wondered why it was that she always seemed to have to ask the same questions over and over again.

      The Usul shrugged. "They didn't say, really. They looked important though. I think maybe they needed a document or something - when I checked in on them, I saw them looking through the stack of papers on your desk."

      "But what could they have been looking for?" she said slowly, to herself as much as to the Usul. The secretary might not have recognized their behavior as anything unusual, but Emma had a feeling that those two men hadn't been friendly government officials wanting to ask her for information. Who they really were, however, she could not begin to imagine.

To be continued...