Detective Parker—her first name was Tia, I learned—looked me and Rachel over skeptically. “I almost believe you,” she told Rachel. “Him? I’ve heard about this guy from the Chicago cops.”
“Yeah, he’s got a flaming rep with them.” Rachel kicked me under the table to keep me quiet. “But he’s telling the truth. We all saw it.”
Parker groaned. “Yeah. So this guy you saw—the bald-headed guy—stole the gargoyle that Harvey had in the shed? And sicced a live real gargoyle on you to make sure he could snatch it?”
I nodded uncomfortably. “That’s what happened. I didn’t have time for a video.”
“And Geoff Long? What about him?” She crossed her arms on the table and leaned forward.
We were in an interrogation room, the kind with a big sheet of one-way glass on one wall that looked like a mirror on our side.
I shrugged. “He killed Lawrence Raymond. Maybe he was trying to steal the other three gargoyles from him. I don’t know why.”
Parker frowned, looked from me to Rachel, then stood up. “Get out. Don’t come back until you’ve got a story that makes sense. One without killer gargoyles.”
Adrienne was waiting for us in the hall. She looked pale and tired. “Galen’s in the hospital. He’s trying to talk them out of rabies shots. There’s some kind of fever. Do gargoyles carry rabies?”
“I’ll look into that.” Tomorrow, maybe. Right now all I wanted to do was go home for dinner and a few beers.
But I couldn’t do that yet. “Where did you say the other gargoyles heads are?”
“Wisconsin. We’ve got a lake house. Mom says they’re all safe there. She checked.”
“Wait—your mother’s there right now?”
“Yeah, the cops said it was okay. She wanted to get away and—” Her face froze. “Oh shit.”
Yeah. The old man had gone after Harvey’s gargoyle. The other three might be next. “Call her. She should get out of there.” I looked at Rachel. “You want to Uber home or come to Wisconsin with me?”
She sighed. “You got more bullets for that thing?”
I packed my jacket pocket, hanging down heavily. “One more magazine.”
“We’ll need it the way you shoot.”
“Hey! I hit that thing twice!”
“Simmer down. You shoot just fine.” She looked down the hall. “Let me go to the bathroom first. So much for dinner.”
“I’ll text you the address,” Adrienne said, her phone to her ear. “Mom? Yeah, look, I think you should get out of there . . .”
The Raymonds’ lake house was in Lake Geneva, a Wisconsin resort town about 80 miles north of Chicago. We made the drive in a little over an hour and met up with Carla Raymond at a Burger King just outside. She’d taken her daughter’s advice to get out of the house, but she wasn’t happy about it.
She was seated in a booth with an empty coffee in front of her, and started shooting questions before we all sat down. “What am I doing here? What exactly is going on?” She paused to look at Rachel. “I’m sorry, you’re—?”
I introduced her Rachel, and they shook hands briefly before she turned back to Adrienne. “Is Galen all right?”
“He’s fine,” Adrienne said.
“Good.” She paused, as if catching her breath. “Then what’s going on? What did you mean about Larry’s gargoyles?”
A 20-something manager watched us from behind the counter, and I knew we’d have to order something or leave soon. I was ready to eat, despite my nerves, but I had a feeling Burger King wasn’t anyone else’s idea of an acceptable dinner under the circumstances.
Adrienne shook her head, trying to stay calm. “They’re—I think they can come to life. If you saw the thing that attacked Galen, you wouldn’t want to get anywhere near it. If that man is really after the gargoyles, I think we should head back home now and let him take them.”
Mrs. Raymond’s frown was fierce. “No. Not after—everything. I want to know what’s going on, and I want to see it myself.” She sighed and patted Adrienne’s hand. “Thank you for coming, Adri. You can go home if you want—”
“Hell, no.” She slid out of the booth. “I want to see this through. Right?”
“Right,” Rachel said, pushing me out of the booth.
I would have put it off a while, maybe had a Whopper and some fries while planning our strategy, but I knew Rachel wasn’t going to let me. I did buy a large coffee, hoping the manager would stop glaring at us. He didn’t.
Adrienne drove her Accord, and Carla Raymond climbed into a big Jeep, and Rachel and I followed in our Prius for several miles out of the city, away from the resorts and restaurants, until the road was lined with dark trees and our headlights were the only source of illumination guiding our way.
Mrs. Raymond turned, Adrienne followed, and we headed down a short gravel driveway until the Jeep stopped in front of a garage.
The house was almost as tall as the trees surrounding us, with a wide porch, high windows, and a rustic aura. A soft yellow bulb glowed next to the front door, and a few lamps glowed inside.
Mrs. Raymond started toward the porch steps. Rachel held out an arm. “Wait.”
Adrienne looked at her. “What?”
“She’s right.” Mrs. Raymond was staring at the windows. Shadows darted back and forth inside the house.
“What is it?” Adrienne peered. “We had raccoons that one time—”
“It’s not racoons,” Rachel said. “It’s—something bad.”
“She’s psychic,” I told them. “She knows what she’s talking about.”
Adrienne looked Rachel up and down, skeptical. Rachel cocked her head and smiled. “Truth.”
After a moment she nodded. “Whatever.” Mrs. Raymond was already heading for the garage. We followed.
Inside she was unlocking a tall steel cabinet next to a black BMW. She reached in, and a moment later she had a long shotgun in her hands.
“It’s my house,” she said, loading bullets into it. “Whatever’s in there, I’ll take care of them.”
I slowly took out my handgun. “Me too, if it gets to that.”
She looked at the Glock, smiled, and chambered a round with the traditional snick-snick sound I’d heard in a hundred movies. “Looks like we’re ready.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “I’m staying far back from you people.”
I put Donald back in my holster as Adrienne joined Rachel behind us.
Mrs. Raymond unlocked a door, and we crept inside quietly. We were in a mud room next to the kitchen, dark, but a lamp in the room beyond gave us enough light to avoid bumping into each other.
Mrs. Raymond kept the shotgun barrel low as she led us across the kitchen. Then we passed through a dining room, making our way around a long chestnut table with eight chairs, and made our way into the living room.
A tall lamp in the center of the room burned with a white-hot bulb, the lampshade missing. My eyes stung from the glare. I blinked, and when I got my vision back I saw Mrs. Raymond standing in front of a plush sofa.
Two of the gargoyle heads sat on it.
Adrienne gasped. “It’s like a horror movie.”
“Which ones are they?” I asked.
Mrs. Raymond bent down “John and—George, I think. I don’t really know them.” She peered into the eyes of one. “I think this is—”
Adrienne gasped again. Mrs. Raymond jerked up.
The old man was walking in from a hallway, carrying the last of the gargoyle heads. He wore a long black coat, with his hood pulled up over his bald head. His boots clunked heavily on the hardwood floor.
He stopped, stared at us, and groaned. Then he bent down to set the gargoyle head on the floor. “You people shouldn’t try to stop me.” The same foreign accent.
“What the hell’s going on?” Mrs. Raymond lifted the shotgun. She didn’t point it directly at him, and she kept her finger away from the trigger, but it was intimidation enough. “Did you kill Larry? Who are you? What are you doing in my house?”
“I am taking what’s mine.” He folded his arms across his chest. “These magnificent beasts belong in my house, not yours. My family!”
“Who are you?” I was next to Mrs. Raymond, my hand ready to reach for Donald under my arm, but I didn’t want to take it out just yet. Too many guns could raise tensions too high.
He sighed again. “My name is Klaus Geier. My ancestor sculpted these with their own hands, from old German clay that belongs to my home. I’m taking them back.”
“Wait, wait.” I went back through my memory. “These were sculpted by, wait—Sabina Mundt. In Bavaria, in the 14th century. That’s your ancestor? She disappeared. After her father was murdered.”
He smiled, as if impressed by my knowledge. “She moved and married. To Anton Geier. She never sculpted another gargoyle. But she never forgot.”
Geier. Guy. Guy-a. Geier. That’s what Long was saying. I wondered if I would ever have figured it out without Geier standing in front of me.
“We bought these legally,’ Mrs. Raymond said. “Larry was very careful about that—”
“They belong to my family!” Geier stomped a foot. “They’re coming home with me!”
“Did you kill my father?” Adrienne. Her voice was quiet. Sharp as a razor.
His eyes flared. “No. It was that idiot Long. I only told him to find out where they are, but he panicked. He only got part of what I wanted, names and places that didn’t mean anything, but when Raymond tried to fight him, he—yes, he killed him. The idiot. I had to find out who Galen was, where this place is—”
“Why did Long even work with you?” I asked. As long as Geier was in the mood to talk, I wanted to keep him monologuing as long as possible. It was better than facing the gargoyles again. “Did you have something on him?”
Geier smiled. “He bought a relic from an old church, bones from a saint. Totally illegal, from a friend of mine. He could have gone to jail. That made it easy to manipulate him, that and the images I showed him of my children.”
“Just so you could get your hands on these guys?” I looked at the three gargoyle heads. “Are you some kind of wizard, Klaus?”
He nodded, the hood slipping back for his bare scalp. “It’s from far back in my past. They hanged the mother of the woman who carved these for witchcraft and murder—”
“Sabina Mundt, yeah. So she didn’t just carve these heads—she implanted them with actual demons? That you can control?”
His smile darkened. “There’s a fifth gargoyle. One that I still have. He does my bidding, yes, as long as he’s close. But now I have these—my children.” He looked down at the heads on the couch. “Now they’re coming home with me.”
Mrs. Raymond raised her shotgun. “No, they’re not.” Her hands were steady.
Adrienne darted forward and put a hand on her shoulder. “Mom, don’t—”
“He was my husband!” Her finger trembled for the trigger.
Geier stared at her, glanced at me and Rachel, and then shook his head. He lifted a hand and said something in German. Or maybe Latin, I didn’t know. Rachel grabbed my arm.
Three gargoyles emerged from the hall behind him, snarling and drooling.
Geier shouted, pointing at us, and they charged forward.
Mrs. Raymond stumbled backward, staring at them, the shotgun drooping. Adrienne reached down for it, trying to protect her mother from the creatures surging at us.
I had the Glock in both hands, trying not to shake at the sight of the gargoyles’ claws. Geier backed away, still shouting at the creatures. I didn’t want to shoot him, so I stepped back, aimed at the closest one, and squeezed the trigger.
I hit its chest, and it staggered, growling. Then it started for me again, arms raised, claws stretching out for my face.
I fired again as Rachel shouted something, and then the shotgun boomed, rattling the room and pummeling my eardrums. I saw Adrienne, the shotgun in her arms, staring at another gargoyle doubling over, roaring in pain as blood gushed from its torso.
Our shooting didn’t scare gargoyle number three into slowing its attack. It scrambled over the sofa and clamped its claws into Adrienne’s arm, digging through her shirt, drawing blood as she yelped and fought to drag the shotgun back up.
I gritted my teeth and fired at the creature’s head, blowing a chunk of its skull off.
My stomach lurched, and I was glad I hadn’t gotten that burger I wanted earlier. I managed another shot that missed, and then Adrienne got to the shotgun’s trigger and blasted the thing’s leg.
The first one I’d shot came at me again, and I got it in the face, which made it stop for a moment, its body heaving as black blood dripped from its wounds onto the hardwood floor Then Rachel grabbed my arm and pointed.
“The heads!” I could barely hear her, half deaf from all the shooting, but she was jabbing her fingers at the sofa. “Get those!”
I saw Geier raise his arms, shaking his head wildly. “Nooo!” his lips said, the scream desperate. “No!”
My wrists trembled as I turned the Glock toward the sculptures. Biting my lip, I squeezed the trigger, and the first gargoyle head shattered.
The creature Adrienne had shot in the leg suddenly fell back, screeching, and toppled over on the floor.
Geier lunged forward, trying to snatch the heads from the sofa, but I fired again and destroyed the next one, and another gargoyle dropped. This one curled up on the floor, shaking violently, and suddenly vanished, leaving nothing but a blotch of blood on the floor and a shadow that faded in less than a second.
Mrs. Raymond had the shotgun again, but Geier was clutching the final gargoyle head. Instead of shooting at it, she turned the weapon around and slammed its butt into the gargoyle’s face, breaking off its nose and gouging its stone cheek.
Adrienne grabbed for the head, fighting Geier, and Mrs. Raymond leaned back, hefted the shotgun, and slammed the butt down on Geier’s skull. He shrieked and fell back, holding his bald head and cursing while the final gargoyle staggered toward the two women, hissing in rage.
Mrs. Raymond fumbled with the shotgun, her daughter helping her, and got it pointed at the creature as it lunged at her. The shotgun roared again, driving another bullet into the thing’s torso, and I aimed and fired my Glock at the sculpture. I shot it twice, breaking it into a dozen shards and a pile of gray dust.
The last gargoyle vanished. Geier lay on the floor, gasping and cursing. He pounded a heel. “My children! You killed them! They were mine!”
I looked at Rachel. “You okay?”
“Fine.” She patted my arm. “Good shooting.”
“Thanks for telling me what to shoot at.” I ejected the magazine—one shot left—reset the safety, and put Donald back into his holster. Then we turned to help Adrienne and her mother.
“I’m all right,” Mrs. Raymond said. “I’m all right. Adri, are you—are you—”
“I’m okay.” Adrienne ran her fingers through her hair. “Jesus, that was—crazy.”
On the floor, Klaus Geiger groaned and cursed in German.
Mrs. Raymond looked down as if she wanted to spit on him. Then she shoved a piece of broken gargoyle with her toe. “This couch is ruined. And those stains probably won’t come out.”
“Sorry about the mess,” I said. “And destroying your husband’s gargoyles.”
She rolled her eyes. “I never liked them anyway,” She looked down at Geier, slumped on the floor. “What do we tell the police?”
I looked at Adrienne. “Good thing we’ve got a lawyer handy.”
The cops found Geier’s car a few miles away, parked off the road, with Ringo and another head locked in the trunk. Geier was in the hospital, being treated for a concussion and other injuries, with a mental health watch thrown in for good measure after the paramedics heard him rambling and ranting about how we’d murdered his children.
At the local police station I was questioned by Detective Carson, a heavyset, skeptical cop who needed a shave and more of an open mind.
“Gargoyles.” He looked up from his notes. “Wasn’t that a movie?”
“I never saw it.”
“Then what’s this all about? What was so important about those statues?”
We’d had a few minutes in the house to get our stories straight. Since the killer gargoyles had vanished when we destroyed the sculptured ones, leaving nothing behind, we decided to leave them out. It went against my usual policy of telling the police everything, but it simplified the narrative.
“Geier thought they rightfully belonged to him.” They’d given me a cup of lukewarm coffee, and I took a swallow. “When we found him in the house, he got violent. Especially when we decided to put an end to it all by destroying the heads.”
He looked at something on his computer screen. “There were more than just those three shots fired.”
“It got a little crazy.” I shrugged.
“And he killed Geoffrey Long, too?”
“I saw him at the house.” I could say it with utter sincerity, because it was true. As far as it went. “I told Detective Parker in Skokie.”
“Yeah, I talked to Parker.” His eyes crinkled. “She thinks you’re too much of a smartass for your own good.”
“My girlfriend says the same thing.” Rachel wasn’t with me. I hadn’t seen her since we drove to the station, guided by a patrolman. “Is she okay? She really didn’t have anything to do with this, we were just going to go out to dinner afterward—”
“She’s fine.” Carson crossed his arms on the table between us. The familiar mirror sat behind him. I wondered who was watching.
I picked up the paper cup, then set it down empty. “Could I have some more coffee, please?”
Half an hour later they let me go. Rachel was waiting with Adrienne out in the hall.
“What took so long?” Rachel was annoyed. “Were you a smartass again? I’m hungry.”
“I was hungry hours ago.” I looked for a soda machine. “Is your mom okay?” I asked Adrienne.
“She’s waiting in town. We’re going back to Chicago.” She held out a bottle of water to me. “I just stuck around in case I had to help you get out. And keep Rachel company.”
“Thanks.” I took a long gulp of water. “Did they give you any trouble?”
“Not much. People know mom here, and they heard about dad. And there weren’t any actual gargoyle corpses to see, so right now it’s just a home invasion, and the facts are pretty obvious.”
“I hope so.” I looked at Carson’s door. “Maybe we should get out of here before he changes his mind, though.”
“You want to come with us and get food?” Adrienne asked us. Mostly Rachel. “It’s a long drive back to Chicago.”
“Sure,” Rachel said. I nodded.
Out in the car, Rachel asked me, “Do you think they really bought it?”
“I think they’d like the real story even less.” That would be a strong reason to let it go. “And if Geier starts raving about his children, they’ll assume he’s crazy and lock him up in a mental ward.”
“It’s not exactly that simple.” Rachel was studying psychology, after all. “But yeah. I just hope we’ve seen the last of them.”
Adrienne flashed the lights on her car. I waved and started up. Dinner was the more pressing issue now.
“I was thinking,” Rachel said. “While I was waiting for you . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Geier said he had another gargoyle head.” She grinned. “What do you think? Pete Best?”
The drummer Ringo replaced. “Maybe. Or maybe Stu Sutcliffe.” I know my Beatles history.
“Nah. Pete all the way.” She punched my arm.
I wondered where he was. Could Geier manipulate him, restrained in his bed in the mental ward? I hoped not.
But I kept an eye on the rearview mirror as we headed down the road.
# # #
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