Sergeant Roscoe Burly nodded at the attendant at the desk as he walked inside. He hated hospitals, and he hated asylums more than that. He didn’t know why the doc had called him down to the place, but figured there was a reason.

“Thank you for coming down, Sergeant,” said Strangehold. He appeared at

the door leading deeper inside the building. “I have something to show you

after we talk.”

“The clothing store, the Note, and the other place all belong to Foot Enterprises,” said Burly. “I’m still trying to find the owner. The company owns a few other places in town.”

“The owner is probably Lisa Raye,” said Strangehold. He indicated they should use an office for their talk. He closed the door. He sat behind the desk, inspecting it as he thought about what he wanted to say. “She probably owns a piece of the printing company too. I don’t know if her supposed bosses know that.”

“How do you know this?,” asked Burly. He sat on the edge of the visitor’s chair. He pulled out his notebook.

“I confronted Miss Raye at her home,” said Strangehold. “I found paperwork

afterwards, but I don’t have the expertise to trace it like you, or an accountant would be able to do. Some of the papers were certifications of money flowing from the printing company to her pockets.”

“How do I justify checking into that?,” asked Burly.

“I don’t think you will be able to since Miss Raye has not given you probable cause to probe her finances,” said Strangehold.

“So what are doing here?,” asked Burly.

“I’m going to lay out what I know, and what I speculated happened,” said

Strangehold. “I don’t think you will be able to use it, but you should know what

I think happened.”

“Does this have something to do with that empty house your magic bird asked

me to go to yesterday?,” asked Burly.

“I’m getting to that,” said Strangehold. The magician leaned back in his chair. “This is going to take a bit so let’s start with the murder method.”

He held a hand over the desk. A blob of buttery light dropped from the palm of his hand. It became a miniature of what it had looked like ripping Allan Crenshaw apart in his apartment.

“This is a replica of the mask Lisa Raye used to kill Crenshaw,” said Strangehold. “You could never get a conviction as long as she didn’t use it in front of witnesses.”

“I’ll give you that,” said Burly. “I would look like a nutter.”

“She didn’t use it all the time when she needed to kill someone, just in a few special cases when she cared about the victim being tied back to her in some way,” said Strangehold. He made a gesture. The model jumped back in his hand with a slurping sound. “It’s effectively strange enough to make most policemen not try to chase down something that can rip a man apart in seconds.”

“So why did she kill Crenshaw?,” asked Burly.

“That goes with her second scheme,” said Strangehold. “She was farming ectoplasm for her personal use. Crenshaw helped her with it, by helping her perfect the song that she gave to other musicians to play in her club. Everyone listening to the song would give up part of themselves without realizing it. She had a collector set up under the club to catch the ectoplasm to be absorbed later. It was the same thing with the clothing store. An ectoplasm collector took life force from women trying on clothes for her to use later.”

“What was the first scheme?,” asked Burly.

“She was using the proceeds from her businesses to buy more businesses to buy more businesses,” said the doctor. “Anyone who got in the way got a visit from her special friend.”

“So if I look around, I should find a trail of ripped up by animal attack bodies?,” asked Burly.

“Probably,” said Strangehold. “So Miss Raye has two plans in motion.

“The first plan was to accumulate businesses with her mask as her enforcer. The people she threatened would never come forward to report a monster threatening them over property they owned. Only people like us would believe them.

“The second plan was to accumulate ectoplasm from others to keep making her mask more powerful. The more she could take, the bigger it would be. I have no idea if she could do anything more than those two spells, but their combination was bad enough.”

“Okay,” said Burly. “The house?”

“It’s Miss Raye’s house,” said Strangehold. “She inherited it from her parents. They are still in their bedroom whenever you want to collect the bodies.”

“Really?,” asked Burly. “Why?”

“She might have been trying to bring them back to life,” said the doctor. “She might have even been summoning them through her control of ectoplasm from wherever their spirit life had taken them.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“I think you’re pulling my leg,” said the detective. “How exactly could she summon them?”

“Summoning them might be too strong a word,” said Strangehold. “There are people out there who can really tap into the afterlives of the dead. Ectoplasmic mediums can usually only deal with memories of the dead. We take a memory and some ectoplasm and make a facsimile of the dead person. It may look and act like the dead person but it isn’t the real person.”

“She might have thought they were her dead parents?,” asked Burly.

“Possibly,” said the doctor. “What she was doing was playing roulette with the lives of the people she was farming. Any of them could have died from the ectoplasm being forced out of them because it’s part of their life force.”

“And we couldn’t prosecute her for that,” said Burly. He was well aware of what people would believe. He would have a better chance of suggesting Lisa Raye had poisoned a large group of people with some unknown substance than saying she was sucking people’s souls out of their bodies.

“You could if you could prove ectoplasm existed to the satisfaction of the court, and proved that Miss Raye knew how to harvest it, and was harvesting it in some way,” said Strangehold. “I could demonstrate my own talents as part of that effort. My inclination is that everything would be written off as some kind of trickery.”

“I can’t disagree with that,” said Burly. “The district attorney would laugh me out of the room, and ask for my badge.”

“Most of this I found out from a search that I shouldn’t have conducted,” said

Strangehold. “The prosecutors might have problems with any evidence presented, and then the strange nature of the evidence itself would not give us any favors.”

“So what does that leave us?,” asked Burly. “From where I’m sitting, she’s going to walk.”

“That’s the other reason I called you down here, Sergeant,” said Strangehold.

“All right,” said Burly. “What did you do?”

“I tracked Miss Raye down from the clothing store, we exchanged blows, and I was obliged to bring her here until her trial,” the doctor said. “Since we agreed there was no way for her to stand trial, I have signed her in under another name for treatment to help her need to not kill people.”

“She’s here?,” asked Burly.

“I placed her here,” said Strangehold. “When she recovers, she will be able to leave. But we won’t be able to prosecute her for her crimes unless you can dig up something in her financial chicanery.”

“I can ask some financial people to go over it, but I don’t know,” said Burly. “You said you tracked her down. What happened?”

“We engaged in a duel, and I defeated her,” said Strangehold. “Then I removed her ability to use her magic. She will have to resort to more mundane means from now on.”

“Can you really do that?,” asked Burly.

“This particular brand of magic, yes,” said Strangehold. “There are other teachings. If she finds one of those, she could go back into business killing and looting.”

“How long will she be in here?,” asked Burly.

“I don’t know,” said Strangehold. “It depends on how long it will take for her to

recover, and hide her true self. Some years maybe. It’s been a long time since I have done anything this horrible to another person. It is a fate worse than death in some circles.”

“I can see that I guess,” said Burly. “Like losing your legs.”

“Like being blinded and deafened,” Strangehold said. “But essentially yes, that is what I did.”

“All right,” said Burly. “This is a violation of several laws, and the Constitution. I don’t see any way around that.”

“Right now, Miss Raye is undergoing psychiatric evaluation for fitness to be released back into society,” said Strangehold. “Her businesses will keep depositing money into her accounts until they are closed, or she walks out of here and closes them. All of her magical dealings can’t be prosecuted, and as the loser of a magical duel, she should be dead, or worse. I am hoping to take the least harmful road for her, and society at large.”

“But you think she will still engage in criminal activity once she is released,” said Burly.

“She trained her magic to do what she wanted, not the other way around,” said Strangehold. “That means all the people she killed would still be dead, just not by the weird means she used.”

“I’ll close the case as a weird animal attack,” said Burly. “I would like it more if she was standing trial and we could prove all of this.”

“No one is going to believe this woman killed people with her mind,” said

Strangehold. “Even with powers out there such as the Mark, our society is not ready to accept that people will stay in the shadows and kill without trying to build up their ego by announcing things. If she had thrown on a costume and killed Crenshaw in broad daylight in front of witnesses, then we could make that case against her. This way we have nothing, and despite her initiating the duel, it will still be my word against hers in a court. That wouldn’t be enough.”

“And you would look bad saying a woman was a witch,” said Burly. “Nobody

believes that any more.”

“Exactly,” said Strangehold. “There are two problems with the way I did things, other than the legality.”

“Go ahead,” said Burly. “The illegality is bad enough.”

“Miss Raye had to have been taught by someone else,” said Strangehold. “That person might take an interest in Middleton after this. That could lead to unknown problems in the future.”

“So we might have some more monster activity in the future,” said Burly. “That’s great.”

“And it will be directed at me, or us, if you are thought to have anything to do with this,” said Strangehold. “So do your routine, and then cover up what you know as best you can.”

“What’s the other problem?,” said Burly.

“Miss Raye will remember me,” said Strangehold. “She might remember you. When she is released, she might decide to kill the both of us over what happened to her.”

“But she will be powerless,” said Burly. “She will be powerless, right?”

“She will be more than capable of buying weapons to try to kill us,” said Strangehold. “It will have to be something to watch for when she is released.”

“So what is the good that has come out of this extraordinarily bad situation?,” asked Burly.

“A threat has been removed,” said Strangehold. “No one will die accidentally due to our suspect’s callousness to other people’s lives. And if I hadn’t found her, the threat to our own lives would have escalated if we had got close to what she was doing.”

“So what am I doing here?,” said Burly.

“This is her file and new name,” said Strangehold. He handed over an envelope from a drawer in the desk he sat behind. “You might need that if you want some warning when she’s released.”

“So you can’t keep her in here forever?,” asked Burly. He made a note of the name in the file before sliding it back.

“Wrecking her schemes and making sure she can’t bring her parents back to life as soul sucking abominations will have to be the measure of success for this,” said Strangehold. “You might want to give the skeletons a proper burial under aliases when you can get the time.”

“I’ll get right on that,” said the sergeant.