Chapter #9Some Detective Work by: imaj   You pull your cell phone from your bag and hit the speed dial for Blackwell’s house. It rings three times before someone answers. “Professor,” you ask curtly.
“Yes and no,” comes a solemn voice over the phone. “Ah… Mistress Chelsea.” It’s a golem of course. Blackwell will already have switched places with Becca. He has a golemized mask of himself that he uses to keep the original of whoever he’s swapping in for out of circulation for a few days. You permitted him to control the golem himself – the golem limit problem again. Technically he could use the mask to betray you in a number of ways – putting it on you for example – but you’ve put a few safeguards in place to stop that happening.
“Lucky for me it’s you I need then,” you say winsomely. The golem can not mistake the acid undertones concealed in your voice.
“I’m more than happy to help Chelsea my dear,” says the golem just a little too quickly. It doesn’t need to obey you, but nor is it stupid enough to not realise the consequences of obstructing you.
“I need some things from the library,” you explain.
“Well you can just check them out,” interrupts the golem.
“Not books,” you reply angrily. The golem goes quiet instantly. “Someone managed to get into the stairwell of the Keyserling’s laboratory. The gwarcheidwad chased them off. Pull some strings for me and get the security camera footage and list of students in the building.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to do young lady,” begins the golem.
“Can it Professor,” you interrupt. “I know you can handle it for me. Get your fat ass over to the library now.”
“The, shall we say, other me would be better suited to handling your request. Alas I do not have access to the same resources as him…”
You sigh. “Listen Aubrey,” you snarl. “If I wanted to use occult means I’d fucking do it myself. If you can't intimidate a few lowly college menials without recourse to magic then you aren’t any use to me. Hop to it before I have to drag your original out of whatever hole he’s crawled into”
There is nothing but silence on the other end of the phone. You can mentally picture the golem spluttering impotently on the other end and then realising it has no choice but to follow your instructions. “Very well Chelsea,” comes an almost toneless voice.
“Thank you Professor,” you say sweetly, drawing on Chelsea’s ability to turn her mood on a dime. You find that one of your hands has snaked inside the waistband of your designer jeans without thinking about it. There’s something about utilising Chelsea’s persona in this kind of argument that always leaves you feeling a little hot and bothered. Sometimes you’re a little curious if it’s something present in her original personality or something that’s emerged since you took over.
*****
You smile your brightest smile as the security guard ushers you into his office. There’s a nervous air about him, like he’s fazed by the whole scenario. Doubtless that means the Blackwell golem has been at him, since the Professor is almost as good as Chelsea when it comes to bullying people into getting his own way. Almost.
The library security office is tiny, with barely enough room for two people. The Professor sits on a swivel chair and his weighty bulk takes up a lot of the space. There are a few monitor screens mounted on a wall in front of the chair – security camera feeds. All but a couple are off, and they are playing back footage from the third floor.
You try to close the door behind you but the guard grabs hold of it. “I can’t…” he starts.
“She’s my research assistant,” interrupts the Blackwell golem.
“But…” tries the guard again.
“Off you go now,” add the golem meaningfully. The guard looks as if he is about to protest one last time but you shut the door smartly in his face, smiling as you do.
The golem hands you a piece of paper. You look it over and see that it’s filled with names. “What’s this?”
“The list of student’s you asked for my girl,” replies the golem. “Every college student that comes into the library has to swipe their ID card to get in. It gets recorded of course, along with the time they enter. Everything gets recorded in this day and age.”
“There’s got to be at least fifty names on here,” you splutter.
“You’re lucky it’s a Sunday,” replies the golem a little too smugly for your liking. “And early on in term. Otherwise there would be half a dozen bits of paper.”
“You mean you are lucky,” you snort. “You can look up the student records right?” The golem nods. “Well you get to look them up and see if any of them match the security camera footage. Have you found anyone yet?”
“There’s no camera near the entrance to your laboratory. Apparently every time one got placed near there it never worked properly for some reason,” the golem replies with a wry smile. “However, judging by the time you called me, I think this is your man here,” it adds pointing to one of the screens. “I’ve got a better picture of him here.”
You look closely at the other screen the golem points to. It’s still far from a good piture, but you can make out the features of a young man. He has lank, dark hair and a long face. Even in the poor quality camera footage his dark eyes glitter with malice.
“At least you can rule out all the girls,” you say.
Despite your earlier comment, you settle down beside the golem and watch as it works its way through the names in the list. The Professor has access to the college’s student record database, and the golem uses the computer in the security office to bring it up. You and it examine the photo in each record, comparing them to the image on the security monitor. It’s more than a little frustrating – each picture on the database can be up to two or three years old and the picture from the security camera is very poor quality. In the end, you rely more on your sense of instinct to compare them than anything else.
Not that it does any good. After two fruitless hours you’ve checked every name on the list and not one of them looks sufficiently like the man on the camera picture. That would be bad enough, but spending the time in the close company of even just a copy of Blackwell has left you in a foul mood.
“Staff,” you ask abruptly.
“Just the security guard and the woman on the front desk,” replies the golem. “Obviously our man is neither.”
“Is there a way to get in without using a card?”
“Presumably,” replies the golem uselessly. “Oh, you can sign in if you lost your card I believe.”
“Don’t you think this would have been a good idea to tell me a couple of hours ago,” you snarl, your patience exhausted. The golem shrugs. “Just find out if anyone has signed in,” you sigh.
You catch a glimpse of the security guard waiting outside as the golem leaves the office. He looks in anxiously, but you scowl and close the door in his face. You sit in the chair and bury your head in your hands. This has been nothing but a huge waste of time. There’ll be a chance to take your frustrations out on someone later, you figure. You take another look at the face from the security camera picture. There’s something naggingly familiar about him, as if you should somehow recognise him from somewhere.
After a few minutes the Blackwell golem returns. “Just one person signed in without a card today.”
“So look him up,” you sigh. You vacate the seat. It’s not quite sticky, because any sweat the golem left there would vanish after a short while. Remove a part of a golem from the golem itself – and that includes things like hair, blood and other bodily fluids – and the part will simply fade away as it is cut off from the magic animating the golem. The chair definitely feels unpleasant though.
The golem taps away at the keyboard. “That’s odd,” it muses, almost to itself. “No record for them. Very odd. The woman at the front desk shouldn’t have let them in if they weren’t one of the students.”
You push the golem out the way and look at the name he’s typed into the computer. Shivers run down the back of your spine as you realise you recognise it. Instinct kicks in again and tells you that this is exactly who you’re looking for.
His name is William Shabbleman.
*****
You look round the laboratory one last time to see if there is anything else you want to remove right now. The Keyserling journals are worthless unless you know how to decode them. Most of the other books in the shelve might be valuable, but you’ve no idea which ones. You can hardly take all of them. No, the only thing worth securing somewhere else right now is the Libra. It’s secure in your bag, along with your notes. The question is where to take it: Blackwell’s House, or Sigma Delta?
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