The office bustles with the morning tune of ringing phones, shuffling papers, and the sing-song of chatter. I pour a cup of coffee from the community pot and head to my desk. Joe is already at his. Our desks face each other, large metal frames of drawers topped with heavy slabs of particleboard covered in a cheap, dark veneer.

  I rather like the office chairs they give us: wooden seats with two steel rails holding up a wooden backrest. They have a swivel with five wheels. They’re uncomfortable if you sit in them for too long, but they at least roll around and have a little give to them to help rest your back. I’d hate to be stuck in one all day, though.

  “Good morning, Joe.”

  “Good morning, Howard.” Joe slurps hot black coffee from his mug. “He wasn’t there, was he?”

  “Wolfgang?” I ask as I take a seat in my office chair. “No. Like you figured. The building secretary said she hadn’t seen him since Wednesday.”

  I take a sip from my own mug. The coffee is warm with a mild acidity. I taste notes of cocoa. Might pair well with a hot brownie or chocolate chip cookie. That’s when I realize: I forgot to grab breakfast this morning. I give my eyes a rub.

  “Tough nuts,” says Joe.

  “Yeah, tough nuts, I guess. Clara was right.” My stomach growls. “Right enough. He really is missing.”

  “At least we know a dead end is a dead end.”

  “It wasn’t a complete dead end.”

  “No?”

  “His door might have been unlocked. I might have gone inside to look around.” I take a sip of coffee, hoping to drive away my hunger, but knowing full well it won’t work.

  “If you had, what would you have found?”

  “You know, his desk is really nice. Or I imagine it would be, if I actually went into his office and saw it.”

  “Oh, cut the act. We both know how it goes.”

  “Really, though. That desk was a lot nicer than I expected. Shame it was so scuffed up. Maybe he got a good deal on it. Anyway, his ashtray was full. The whole room wreaked of cigarettes, but there definitely weren’t any fresh butts.”

  “You trust the secretary’s word then.”

  “I do.”

  “What else did you find?”

  “He left some papers out. Apparently, the last person to hire him was a Mrs. Laura Softson. She asked him to go find her husband. He’d gone off to a cabin in Eatonville. Those are the only details he wrote down, but obviously … he’s a private eye. His written records are only the tip of the iceberg. Probably just enough information to protect his license.”

  “If we weren’t so tangled up in this, I’d likely think it was nothing more than an affair.”

  “Yeah, same. What do you think now, though?”

  “Well, we have to ask if the man in yellow is Mr. Softson.”

  “I suppose we’ll want to see if we have any records on him.”

  “Aye. That’d be a good start.”

  “We can find Laura. Maybe she knows a thing or two.”

  “Right. We might see if there’s any connection between them. Maybe they’re all Unitarians or some such.”

  “Could be. I doubt it. I mean, it sounds like these New Faith Unitarians are a minor sect. I’ve never heard of them. I can’t imagine a broad from Seattle would drive all the way to Marisburg for Sunday service.”

  “Aye. Seems unlikely, but we’ll need to be certain. Maybe it’s not as simple as that.”

  “What’d your priest say about the grimoire?”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Well, we both agreed that it was pure evil, and if it were up to us, we’d consign it to the flame.”

  That’s just the response I’d expect from a couple of Catholics. So superstitious. I can’t help but crack a wry smile.

  “You think I’m joking,” says Joe. He raises an eyebrow.

  “No,” I say. “That’s the funny part; I know you’re not. You know I respect your zeal, though. I just don’t get.”

  “That book is filled with abominations and blasphemies, Marlowe. It’s beyond degenerate. No one should be reading it. It shouldn’t exist.”

  “Fair, but did you find any leads in there?”

  “All I got was a better idea of how depraved these boys were. I don’t know what evils they awoke. I didn’t have time to pry through the whole thing, but—” his face wrenches as if he’s just whiffed spoiled milk “—I don’t think I could stomach doing that anyway.”

  “Give it to me then.”

  “Might as well.”

  “That was easy.”

  “Your unbelief will at least protect you from taking any of it seriously. It was more dangerous for those boys who believed in an unseen world yet had no light to guide them. Just thinking about it churns my stomach.” He swallows more coffee and shakes his head.

  “There’s got to be something in there, even if it’s just enough to tell us what they were trying to do. I enjoy reading this stuff anyway.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “What? I need a good laugh now and then. And like you said, a little fiction is of no consequence to the well-formed mind.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Joking aside, yes, I think it’s all silly. But it’s also fascinating. I don’t know how any of you religious types take any of this stuff seriously. It’s a real mystery, and I always enjoy investigating it.”

  “It’s not religion,” says Joe with a frown and a furrowed brow. “It’s occultism. It’s a hellish mockery of religion.”

  “Fair enough. Maybe it is. I’ll see for myself.”

  “That you will. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Marlowe.”

  I didn’t tell him how I couldn’t sleep last night. My mind was stuck on the book. Something about it fascinated me more than any other collection of bound pages ever had. If I told him, his imagination would run wild with ideas of ghosts and ghouls or demons or some such. Better to keep my anticipation to myself.

  “What’s on the agenda today then?” I ask.

  “Well, I suppose we’ll need to put in a warrant to search Wolfgang’s office.”

  “Yeah, I guess we should do that. I feel bad about ‘breaking in.’ I only did because we were friends once.”

  “You’re really worried about his disappearance, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “It’s natural. I’d have done the same thing.”

  “Well, also, I was just following my gut. I’m still sure he’s a victim here. Jack, no matter how low he’d sunk, would never resort to selling drugs to teenagers or trying to abuse a young lady. He’s just not that kind of man.”

  “How thoroughly did you check his office?”

  “Not all that thoroughly. I felt uncomfortable in there. Felt like someone could walk in at any moment and call me out. I wouldn’t blame them. Besides, I figured the papers on his desk were enough of a lead. I got a name and an address.”

  “Well, not until we’ve got a warrant, you didn’t. He’s a private investigator. Those documents are supposed to be confidential.”

  “You’re right. We’d ruin our chance of bringing anything to court if we went and spoke to Mrs. Softson without a warrant for having searched Wolfgang’s office. I’ll go to the clerks and have them type up two missing persons reports and requests, one for Jack Wolfgang and one for Barry Jones, along with requests for information and a warrant. When do you think it’ll get approved?”

  “Tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “We really can’t wait that long.”

  “You’d best hurry then, boyo. Give them a report on what we’ve found while you’re at it, but … leave the book out of it.”

  “I put in the requests and the report. What’s next?”

  “We need to figure out what happened to those boys, we need to find Jack Wolfgang, and we need to identify the man in yellow.”

  “What do you think's going on here?”

  “Officially, drug trafficking. Unofficially, I have no idea, but I'm sure it's worse.”

  “Those discrepancies in the report the local P.D. gave us: you don’t think there’s a crooked cop out there, do you?”

  “I’m not ruling that out. If there is, I don’t think it’s worth asking questions. Not yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s an easy enough lie to cover what with the girl sitting in a Mental Hospital. That said, if they’re smart, they’ll just say they wrote what they inferred from what she told them.”

  “What if they’re stupid?”

  “Then we’ll scare them by asking questions. A scared crook is liable to cause all sorts of chaos. Better to come at this a bit more surgically.”

  “Besides the book, I think our best bet is to go visit that Unitarian church. I figured I’d go check it out this Sunday.”

  “This is the worst part of working a case. Waiting. Waiting for records. Waiting for forms. Waiting for paperwork.”

  “A real necessary evil, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Oh! We should go find this Barry Jones’s mother. If he’s really missing, we shouldn’t waste any more time before we talk to her.”

  “Of course! That’s what I was forgetting. That’s certainly our best lead at the moment.”

  “Well, grab a map, and we’ll try to figure out where we’re going then.”

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