Crime, Thrillers & Mystery / Universal Gargoyle Chapter 1 v2.0
PROLOGUE
Thursday 19 December 2002
Charles Landau hated being lied to. The fact that he lied regularly to nearly everyone he knew had no bearing on this. He hated being lied to, but he could accept that it happened. People had their reasons. What he truly hated was being lied to clumsily, by people who should have known better. And Peter was a clumsy liar, and a man who should have known much better. Peter, of all people: they’d known each other since graduate school, Charlie always first and Peter second, going on twenty-five years now. Did he really think Charlie was going to believe him?
He opened the bottom drawer of his desk. With a practiced flip of his hand, he reached into the second file from the rear and withdrew the vial. A tap onto the back of his wrist, a sniff, another, then the vial went back into its hiding place. Now the world was back in the right orbit. He swiveled around, put his feet on the railing and leaned back in his well-padded chair to let the drug flow through him while he gazed at the joggers in the park below.
At least Steph hadn’t been lying to him. She was a terrible liar and always had been, and the story she told him had been so absurd that he wrote it off as another one of her transparent efforts to exert some control over him. But an hour on the Internet and half a dozen phone calls had shown him there was something behind her accusations. And half an hour with Peter had proved it, at least enough that he was going to have go to the authorities. He didn’t relish having to turn Peter in, especially because everyone was going to think that he’d done it out of rivalry instead of righteousness. The whole thing was so awful that Charlie didn’t even relish knowing that he’d been right all along: dark energy was going to rip you apart if you went that far into the void. Plus, he was going to have to call goddamn Steph back and tell her she was right. She was gonna love that.
He was going to have to call the cops. But the last thing he needed was for a couple of patrol cops to try to make sense of the story. Hell, the story didn’t make any sense to him. Best to let this little buzz ride itself out, then see if he could make a few calls and find a detective who’d be willing to listen to the whole story. He locked up his desk and left the office. At the top of the walkway, he leaned over the balcony and looked down into the atrium. Elise was walking from the main door back into the gift shop, manic little duck stomping on her heels. He smiled and shook his head, then turned back around to walk down to the main floor.
He froze as he saw the figure that had materialized in front of him. Overcoat, white scarf, ski mask. “Peter?” he said. No, too tall.
“You’re a scorpion,” said the man. “Not even a wolf.” A flash of light, and the world spun and whirled.
Charlie had a flash of insight while the world spun about him. It was all about universal gravitation, and he could prove it. Then the lights went out.
CHAPTER ONE
“BANG! Just like that. For an instant, I thought it might have been a gunshot.” Elise was trying not to sob as she spoke. “So I ran over here to see what happened.”
Inspector Mustapha Alawi turned back to look down at Elise, whose pale gamine face was blotched with tears and mascara. “And that’s when you saw his head, Ms. Morgan?”
“Doctor Morgan.” She shook her head. “Never mind. Call me whatever you want. I thought it was the cart. There’s a cart with a Mac and a projector on it, for tour groups… for presentations. We always joked that it was going to roll down the ramp one day. But when I came running up, I almost tripped over it. The head, I mean. His head. Charlie’s head. Just staring up at me. I think I saw him blink one last time.”
Mustapha leaned over the railing from where they stood on the outer edge of the helical walkway to survey the great glass cube that formed the atrium of Atlanta’s City Observatory. The ramp on which he stood wound around the central column that contained the elevator shaft. It stopped just above, at a landing that led to the planetarium proper, before continuing up to the topmost level, where exhibits and photographs lined the way to the rooftop telescopes and the café overlooking Piedmont Park. The grey light of the end of a grim December day filtered through the atrium; there were too few giant silver snowflakes suspended from the ceiling for holiday cheer to overcome the gloom.
Elise sniffled, swallowed, controlled her tears. “He is a wonderful man. We’ve had two years together. He was the director of my committee at the university. And now… He’s never even going to get to see his child.” She looked down and rubbed her flat belly through her grey silk blouse, then looked up and saw the confusion on Mustapha’s face. “I just found out today. I took the test.” She fished in her purse and produced the white plastic stick of a home pregnancy test, holding it up so Mustapha could see the blue cross in the window. “He was so excited. Now he’ll never even know!” She dropped the stick, put her head in her hands and gave way to her grief, her body racking with sobs.
Mustapha handed her his handkerchief, then bent down to pick up the pregnancy test, sliding it gently into the breast pocket of her jacket. Poor thing: she was way out of her league, but who wasn’t when it came to this kind of trauma? The closest Elise probably came to murder was TV cop shows, which meant she knew as much about murder as Mustapha did about whatever it was she studied under the late Dr. Charles Landau, director of the City Observatory, author of half a dozen best-sellers on popular science and perennial fixture on public television.
He took her by the elbow and guided her down the ramp and around the curve. This took her out of sight of the crime scene techs kneeling in front of Landau’s head where it had come to rest against the posts of the railing. “I’m very sorry for your loss, Dr. Morgan, but I have to do my job, and that means asking some tough questions. Can you tell me what happened after you saw, uh, Dr. Landau’s head?”
Elise blew her nose into the handkerchief, then took several deep breaths before looking up at Mustapha, her eyes red, her delicate nose even redder, her face streaked with eyeliner, mascara and tears. “I screamed. And I kept screaming until the security guard came running up to see what happened. He called 911 while I went up and saw the body. The rest of the body. There was blood all over the doors to the planetarium.” She wrapped her pipe-cleaner arms around her narrow chest and shuddered. “So much blood.”
“And you didn’t get a glimpse of the person who did this?”
“Nothing. I just heard the noise, that’s all. I’m sure whoever did it ran through the doors and down inside the planetarium to the exit there. I would have heard his footsteps on the walkway if he’d gone up to the top level. I might have heard the door into the planetarium close right after the bang the head made. Charlie’s head. Oh, god.”
“It must have been very quiet in here, for that impact to make such a loud noise.” It was obvious to Mustapha that this poor woman had never heard an actual gunshot in her life.
“It was; the observatory is closed on Thursday afternoons. But sounds echo in here, especially anything on the walkway.” She stomped her foot, driving her heel into the surface of the walkway with every one of her ninety-five pounds. The sharp noise reverberated throughout the atrium. Most of the cops and crime scene techs standing nearby turned to look at her, startled by the volume and sharpness of the sound. “It’s sturdy enough, even though it doesn’t really sound like it is. Sometimes people look a little worried, but we’ve never had a problem.” She began to cry again. “Until today.”
Mustapha patted her on the shoulder while looking down below them on the curve of the walkway, where he could see his new partner, Detective Second Grade Diana Siddall, interviewing the security guard. Assistant Chief Purcell had asked him personally to look after Diana in her first weeks on Homicide.
Looking after someone else’s blonde daughter wasn’t the sort of assignment Mustapha relished after almost two years of working cases solo, but it wasn’t like he had much of a choice. And Siddall’s pedigree was hard to beat. Her father Malcolm had only recently retired from twenty years as the elected DA of Fulton County, which encompassed most of Atlanta and two big chunks of the endless suburb that surrounded the city. Diana had risen as quickly as possible through the ranks, was twice decorated and wounded once in the line of duty.
Two perfect clichés in one: a family of cops, and a dinosaur like him paired off with a sweet young thing. But old Malcolm was the real deal, and his daughter had a solid rep where it counted, among the real cops. And there was nothing to fear on the other front: Mustapha wouldn’t dare step out on Gisèle even if he wanted to, and Diana was too country-club white for him to find attractive, anyway.
He cleared his throat, sourly. Maybe he was getting old. He had no problem with women on the Job; he just had a hard time considering someone whose first words to him had been “Don’t you think this precinct house radiates negative energy?” as partner material. Of course it radiated negative energy—that was the goddamn point, wasn’t it? But at least the girl seemed to have the right attitude, with none of the usual sense of entitlement that came along with relatives in high places. Besides, if he had to have a partner, this beat having to put up with another sardonic middle-aged guy with prostate problems.
“Gangway, Stoph.” The cigarette-wracked voice of Dave Keller, chief of Crime Scene, jolted Mustapha out of his reverie. He turned back to look over the quietly sobbing Elise to see Keller holding a black plastic milk crate. Mustapha could see the head of Charles Landau in the box, wrapped in a transparent evidence bag. Landau’s features were frozen in a look of vacant surprise. Most of the victims Mustapha saw looked like that. It was just his own luck that he’d probably die in bed, knowing full well what was about to happen.
He put his arm around Elise’s shoulders and turned her away from where Keller was walking behind her with the head. Then he waved Diana over from where she was talking to the security guard. She walked up the ramp and stood at attention. “Yes, sir?”
“This here’s the widow, Dr. Morgan. Can you get her contact info and write up a statement?” Diana nodded. Mustapha looked back at Elise. “This is Detective Siddall. She’s going to get you to repeat what you just said to me, okay?” Elise nodded, her tiny features frozen into a mask of grief and bafflement.
Diana reached out and handed Elise her card, then patted her on the back of her hand. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re going to find who did this and bring them to justice.” Elise nodded again, her eyes focused on something very far away.
Mustapha stomped down the ramp, which made great thumping noises but held firm, and caught up with Keller halfway across the atrium. “Whaddaya got, Dave?”
Keller handed the box to his comely assistant, who smiled at Mustapha as she stepped around him to take Landau’s head to the morgue. He swept the paper cap off his own head and shook free his unfashionably long, mostly grey hair. “I think we can make a preliminary indication of cause of death,” he said dryly. “The bloodwork? That’s what they pay us OT for.”
“What’m I looking for?” asked Mustapha.
“A long, medium-thick, very sharp blade. Single-edged. Machete, samurai sword. One smooth stroke was all it took; I don’t think the perp even had to put that much force behind it.”
“Right, because he wasn’t expecting ninjas or anything.”
Keller shrugged. “Who does?”
“You got anything else?”
“What do you want, some kind of high-tech blood spatter analysis? The guy had to be about Landau’s height or taller, else he would have cut Landau’s head off at an angle. Unless Landau was leaning forward at the time, in which case that was all bullshit.”
“Thanks, Dave.”
“Always glad to help. Call me later. You win anything on the Hawks last night?”
“I’m a Muslim: we don’t gamble. I took the spread, and won.” Mustapha turned and walked back up the ramp, this time trying to be quiet about it. Diana had Elise talking now, but the new widow’s face was still frozen in shock. As he approached them, Mustapha could smell the faint odor of honeysuckle he had grown accustomed to from Diana in the three brief days of their partnership.
He held up his hand to forestall Diana’s next question. “Dr. Morgan, do you know of anyone who might have intended to harm Dr. Landau? Can you think of any reason why someone might want to kill him?”
She blew her nose again, this time with a great honk that echoed throughout the cavernous atrium. “He had… problems with people: professional rivalries, that sort of thing. Charlie was a wonderful man and a great scientist, but he was used to getting his own way.”
“And this caused him to feel that he was in danger?”
“No, not at all. I mean, he never said anything like that, or seemed very worried. But he had arguments with people. There’s the dark matter and dark energy thing, of course–“
“The what?”
“Oh, sorry. It’s a theory – well, a hypothesis, really – about how the universe is constructed. Do you want me to explain it to you?”
“If you have to.”
“Well, the universe is expanding; the galaxies have all been moving apart since the Big Bang. The question is whether the universe will continue to expand forever, or will gravity eventually slow the expansion and then draw the galaxies and clusters back to a central point? A lot of people really believe that the universe won’t keep expanding, but the trouble is that the amount of observable matter, stars, nebulae and so forth, isn’t nearly large enough to provide enough gravitational force to reverse the expansion.”
Now Elise was standing up straighter, more animated, in her comfort zone talking about science. “So some astronomers suggest that there’s an enormous amount of non-luminous matter, ‘dark matter,’ out there that we can’t see but that provides the missing mass. Clouds of frozen molecular dust, mostly.”
“Uh huh.” He watched Diana try to take notes.
“Then there’s dark energy, which is a whole different thing–“
“I’ll take your word for it. What’s this got to do with your husband?”
“Well, Charlie was sure dark matter and dark energy were out there, but they’re just about impossible to observe. So he published his book last year, Inertia Within, that used the ideas figuratively, talking about the human spirit, the capacity for evil, that sort of thing.”
“And this made people want to kill him.”
“I don’t think so! But some people were pretty upset. It wasn’t scientific, you see? It was just speculation about ethics, culture, that sort of thing. Some other astronomers didn’t like it. We get a lot of bad press because of astrology, and they thought it just wasn’t doing serious cosmology any good.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“Well, he’s had a long rivalry with Peter Geoffries, spelled the English way, with a G, who used to be a serious astronomer but now spends most of his time running a very silly self-help organization that uses a real jumble of astrological and astronomical metaphors. Dr. Geoffries wasn’t very fond of Charlie or Inertia Within, but kill Charlie? Cut off his head? I don’t think so.”
“We’ll check him out anyway. This may be a difficult question, but what about Dr. Landau’s personal life? Were there other women, other people he was seeing? Any former lovers making threatening phone calls, that sort of thing?”
“Oh, no; not at all.” A streak of naïve pride showed through her grief for an instant. “He and I… well, his ex-wife sometimes came by the office. She wasn’t happy with the divorce, but she got a lot of money out of it. I mean, Inertia Within was written mostly because she got everything he had. So I don’t think she was out to get him or anything. She and I didn’t get along so great, but she usually didn’t make a scene or anything. Her name’s Stephanie. They have a son, David. He just turned sixteen. He comes to stay with us a couple of nights a week. He’s a good kid, but he’s a sixteen-year-old boy, so he’s angry at just about everything.”
“I have a son who’s twenty; I know just what you mean.”
“They live in Buckhead, off West Paces Ferry. I don’t know the number.”
“We’ll take care of that. Anything else I should know about?”
“No… God, I can’t believe this! He was doing the holiday planetarium show all weekend; who’s going to take care of that?” All the momentary control she’d had over her emotions fled her, and she began to weep again.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Dr. Morgan,” said Mustapha, flipping his notebook shut and handing her his card. “If you think of anything else, or something else happens, please call me at this number. Use the telephone: I don’t do email.”
“But you can always reach me,” said Diana, “if you have information that you think will help us.” She embraced Elise, the two women sharing one of those instant female bonds that had always mystified Mustapha.
Diana then turned to him. “What’s next, sir?”
“Security tapes, if they’ve got’em.” He started to walk down the ramp.
Once he and Diana were out of earshot of the grieving widow, he turned back and looked his new partner in her big green eyes. “What do you think?”
“Not enough information to draw any conclusions, sir.”
“Good answer. Political answer. Now tell me what you really think.”
She paused, crinkled her nose, then shrugged. “It wasn’t the wife. She’s too distraught to be faking it.” Another pause. “Unless she’s a great actress… I really don’t know, sir. Not your garden variety homicide, is what I think.”
“One thing you want to keep in mind is that there are no garden variety homicides. Each one has its own story. But you’re right: looks like you picked a real interesting first day as a Homicide detective, kid.”
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The first two sentences are good, but the rest of the first paragraph a bit confusing, but overall a nice prologue, may actually serve as your query hook.
I stopped at page four, here’s why: If I had a dollar for every crime or thriller, etc that began with a crime scene or police interview, I’d be a rich guy. (Funerals are also popular, btw.)
The intro crime scene/police interview has become the obligatory “fruit cart” in the movie car chase scenes. (Give me an example of a movie car chase that doesn’t have one.)
They are just too convenient, too contrived a device to dump data on the reader up front and get them “up to speed” in a short amount of time. I think all those details that are conveniently being exposed ARE the story, thus they should be unfolded as part of it. The crime scene tool is so often relied upon, b/c we grew up seeing them as part of TV crime dramas, so everyone seems to think they are almost mandatory, but what is a required element in a one hour tv drama shouldn’t be necessary in a novel. (That’s what I love about Columbo, he starts with the crime, then the crime scene and interviews come later.)
I like the prologue setup with the guy doing the drugs and struggling with what to do, I think with a tad less introspection, that that would be an original beginning. I like a story that starts in the middle with a unique catchy setting .
It is well written however which is the good news. And you probably don’t want to hear this, b/c it will entail a fairly major rewrite, but I doubt that the ol’ intro crime scene schtick will grab a good agent anymore.
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The prologue is okay but missing something.
The head is certainly entertaining but the characters feel a little hollow right now. It needs some character like the nosey secretary or cleaning lady, an office slut, a deep sultry voice in a woman, a secret revealed through a reaction to the situation. Something in that area. Put some “flesh” on it.
I get a sort of Clarice Starling feel from the lady detective. It feels a little too clean cut unless you put in the necessary contrast of a “fleshy” character. From what I can see you have the bones of a tantalizing story. I like the ME’s attempt at(CSI’s)a Grishom-like deduction of the perp’s profile and admitting it might be bullshit. Funny.
Give us more on Mustapha, nice choice in name by the way. I am a bit of a space buff keeping up on current events in that area. I like your choice in controversial science.
I am interested in seeing more of your story. Good luck.
Parts of the prologue I felt would have worked better in the present tense i.e. “he froze as he saw the figure that had materialized” I felt would have more immediacy were it something along the lines of “he froze as the figure materialized” for example. Good use of italics. Your opening paragraphs have intrigue but this warns reader that something is looming on the horizon is deployed nicely.
Use of onomatopoeic words such as “BANG” for me are redundant ways to begin a chapter for me. They are almost to cartoon-like for a serious work of fiction and they can come across as a fruitless way to create an attention-grabbing opener. Your prose itself should be the hook and through one intriguing first sentence, you should have the reader’s attention.
Enjoyable story and characters overall, however in parts of the dialogue I was left feeling swizzled since would these people really talk in neatly explained scientific theories like this free from error or hesitation? That’s a matter of opinion, whether dialogue needs to reflect life or not. I can go either way in my own fiction.
Claire_D
Answer to Question One: Probably not. It doesn’t pull me in. It starts off with a discussion about lying, then changes to an action scene with a mysterious appearance, then spinning and whirling, flashes of lights and then the lights go out. And then something about universal gravitation. It’s disjointed. The first discussion doesn’t connect well to the action scene. I would suggest rewriting your prologue as a purely action oriented scene. Give the reader more. Leave the thoughts about lies for later, or make them briefer. Emphasize action and conflict to make for an exciting prologue.
Question Two: Maybe. The interaction between the Inspector, Elise and Diana is interesting. I became intrigued by the situation and ended it wanting to know more. But the writing issues are distracting and make it tough to keep reading. To be more specific, there is not a good transition from Prologue to Chapter 1. The Prologue ends with flashes and lights going out. Then Chapter 1 starts with a Bang and a severed head. Better pacing would have Chapter 1 giving the reader a chance to take a breath before hitting them with a bang and such a graphic image.
Weak sentences or phrases: “The whole thing was so awful …” and “Charlie had a flash of insight…” and “It was all about universal gravitation…”
“was going,” or “was gonna” used too often. Five times in rapid succession in paragraphs 3 and 4 alone. Quit counting it after that.
Awkward sentence that doesn’t flow well or fit the action scene: “He froze as he saw the figure that had materialized in front of him.”
I’d suggest instead: Suddenly a figure appeared. He froze. (or something along these lines)
You repeat words in close proximity too often. One example: (spun) “and the world spun and whirled. Charlie had a flash of insight while the world spun…”
Also, a flash of light and a flash of insight in adjacent sentences. Then you tell us twice that her face was smeared with mascara and tears.
And this sentence may be just a tad too long, like maybe WAY too long: “The closest Elise probably came to murder was TV cop shows, which meant she knew as much about murder as Mustapha did about whatever it was she studied under the late Dr. Charles Landau, director of the City Observatory, author of half a dozen best-sellers on popular science and perennial fixture on public television.”
“A streak of naïve pride showed through her grief for an instant.” This sentence is a judgement best avoided by a narrator.
You might say instead, “He picked up a glimpse of something in her look. Was it pride? He couldn’t be sure, but for just that instant, it wasn’t grief.”
I know I was pretty pessimistic in my number rankings, but I hope you can take it as constructive. You do have a talent for telling a story. It’s shocking and intriguing. The characters are interesting and different from each other. The relationship between the inspector and the rookie has lots of promise. As those characters develop and deepen, I can see good stuff happening.
My main critique is in the writing style I have already described. Work on the dialogue becoming more natural. Elise especially is hard to swallow. Meaning the way she speaks. If she’s meant to sound odd, then throw in the Inspector looking at her strangely and wondering why she would describe the recent beheading of her lover with: “BANG! Just like that. For an instant, I thought it might have been a gunshot So I ran over here to see what happened.” And so on.
I would encourage you to keep working on this. Clean up the style and work for a more natural flow.
Good flow, good pacing, good timing, good practice of introducing information in pieces and holding back rather than putting it all out there at once.
I imagine you might need to go through another rewrite or so to tighten it a little more.
Some are very trivial, and I may even be wrong. But, for example:
At the beginning, introduce Elsie/Dr. Morgan as Dr. Elsie Morgan to the reader. Then, when you go back and forth between Elsie and Dr. Morgan, there will be less confusion. It took me a few paragraphs before I was absolutely sure Elsie and Dr. Morgan were the same person.
As for this passage … The grey light of the end of a grim December day filtered through the atrium; there were too few giant silver snowflakes suspended from the ceiling for holiday cheer to overcome the gloom. Given the prologue is Thursday, and the shortness of the daylight hours in winter, I find it hard to believe that his body would be found in the afternoon on a Thursday (or maybe a Friday). Seems more likely the killer would come in late at night with the body discovered the next day in the morning.
This dialog seems a little unnatural. It’s given by a distraught woman, and it seems it would be difficult for her to do without pauses and sobs … especially with all the detail that’s in there, especially like “spelled the English way” and “very silly self-help” ... “Well, he’s had a long rivalry with Peter Geoffries, spelled the English way, with a G, who used to be a serious astronomer but now spends most of his time running a very silly self-help organization that uses a real jumble of astrological and astronomical metaphors. Dr. Geoffries wasn’t very fond of Charlie or Inertia Within, but kill Charlie? Cut off his head? I don’t think so.”
Now, I love science, but I don’t know about explaining to the reader about dark matter. Your options might be to either, go back and make it apparent that Dr. Morgan is such a nerd that she can block out life around her and really focus on a subject … not as easy for a woman to do as a man, even if they are scientists … or cut back her dialog and replace whatever is necessary with background information, narrator revelation, or even save it and let the reader wonder about dark matter, or give Elsie an assistant who can fill in some missing pieces while Elsie is regaining her composure, or make Mustapha a guy who knows everything.
Also, the following dialog could be reduced from:
“I don’t think so! But some people were pretty upset. It wasn’t scientific, you see? It was just speculation about ethics, culture, that sort of thing. Some other astronomers didn’t like it. We get a lot of bad press because of astrology, and they thought it just wasn’t doing serious cosmology any good.”
To:
“No!” she said. “Well, maybe. It wasn’t scientific. Many astronomers protested … thought it might undermine cosmology.”
These are just some examples, and again, I could be way off base. I’m just an amateur with fiction writing.
Overall, good flow, lots of interest, think you’ll find more opportunities to edit and tighten during the rewrites.
Hope this is useful.
First reaction: not into drug culture scenarios, so I wouldn’t read past the prologue. The writing, however, is fine.
Once I started reading the first chapter, I felt much better. Your prose and dialogue are easy to read and well crafted. I would, however, watch the length of the dialogue lines. A couple of times they get a bit long for natural dialogue.
Right when Elise starts talking about dark matter, I wanted the chapter to end, leaving the discussion for chapter 2. This would give the reader a natural transition to the next chapter.
Proofreading notes:
racking with sobs. (to rack is a transitive verb. Here, you are using it as an intransitive verb, as her body racks. Either racked with sobs or perhaps convulsing?)
The sentence that begins “The closest Elise . . .” is so packed with information. Is it possible to present this information in dialogue?”
women on the Job (why uppercase?)
I mean, Inertia Within (italics missing)
definately liked it good punctuation use, like how you used your words to create visuals.
I have to start off by saying I really like it. The first chapter had a great hook. That was what definitely made me read more and more. I love your writing style and I have nothing to give advice on. Love to read more.
-Bobby
it needs polosihing, but not much. after reading the prolouge i slightly wanted to continue to read. reading chap 1 definitly made we want to continue. as far as the polishing goes, it’s just little grammar things (ie: “Use the telephone: I don’t do email.” why the colon?), but i know how creative writers loathe editing so can’t blame you too much. i think the prolouge needs to focus on the fantasy in the story more than the reality. don’t be afraid to give a little more info about the adrk matter/energy and how it related to Charles in the prolouge; it should make the rest of the read more yearnful and enjoyable. i must say that i like how you are blending fanatsy and reality thus far. would love to read more.
This is indeed a very strange piece of writing. But I do like it. It flows well and the dialogue is interesting without being unrealistic. I look forward to reading more of your stuff. Well done. Cheers.
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