Cullen rolled his eyes. “I’m talking about real doppelgängers, not fairy tales. Not that real ones are supposed to be real.”
“Is there a point you can back up to where you start making sense?”
“Son of a bitch,” Karonski breathed. “Son of a bitch. You’re talking about a double? An actual, physical double?”
Cullen’s eyebrows lifted. “Basically, yes.”
Karonski leaned forward. “I need to tell you about one of my open investigations. The one into the attack on Ruben.” He patted a closed folder. “It’s all in here, but I can sum it up. We know how the potion was administered. According to what Sherry’s group found, it was added to a pot of coffee. The problem is, Ruben says Ida brewed that pot. Ida says she didn’t. She washed out the pot like usual, then went back to her desk and didn’t go back in Ruben’s office until he had the heart attack. Whoever made the pot, it was brewed between five and five fifteen. Ruben had the heart attack at five forty. Three people had access to the pot between five and five forty—Ruben, Ida, and the director.”
Lily jerked back. “Ida? No. That’s not . . .” Ida Rheinhart had been Ruben’s secretary forever. Sure, she was kind of scary, but scary like Lily’s third-grade teacher. Lily, like the rest of her class, had been convinced Mrs. Brown was an alien. She had to be, since she was either telepathic or really did have eyes in the back of her head. Unlike some of the kids, however, Lily hadn’t thought Mrs. Brown was a kid-eating alien. No one had gone missing, after all.
Ida didn’t eat children, either. Or FBI agents who failed to file a report properly, however much it might seem that way at times. And if you pulled out her fingernails one at a time, she’d give you the Gorgon gaze, but she would not betray Ruben or the Bureau. “But it can’t be the director, either. Can it?”
“None of the above, if Seabourne here’s right.” Karonski’s eyes gleamed. “We’ve been looking for some kind of compulsion charm, which is several shades of unlikely, especially since Ida claims she doesn’t have any blank places in her memory. But compulsion is all we could make fit—until now.”
“Oh, yeah.” Cullen was almost purring. “I don’t feel quite so crazy now. I don’t suppose you found any puddles or wet places near Ruben’s office?”
Karonski frowned. “Nothing like that in the reports. I didn’t arrive on-scene until long after puddles would have dried up.”
“A wet spot.” Lily frowned. “Water, or something else? The carpet was damp near Bixton’s body.”
“Hot damn.” Cullen’s eyes glowed almost as brightly as his wiggly lines had—and a lot more blue. “Hot damn, it fits. It all fits.”
“Explain,” Rule said.
“Okay.” He brooded a moment, probably translating his jargon into something resembling English. “A doppelgänger is supposed to be a temporary magical construct that exactly duplicates a living person. Or a cat or a canary, for that matter, but most people are not interested in going to that much trouble to get a spare Tweety Bird. Problem is, doppelgängers are like the lead-into-gold bit early alchemists wore themselves out on. Or like cold fusion is for physicists these days. It seems like it ought to work, but no one can get it to. Every century or two there’ll be a flurry of rumors that someone’s cracked the problem, but those stories are like Elvis sightings—the true believers get excited, and everyone else rolls their eyes.
“So ‘doppelgänger’ crossed my mind when I heard about Ruben’s apparent double, but only in the way ‘alien abduction’ might pop into your head if you hear about mysterious lights in the sky on the same night someone disappeared on a lonely road. It fits the plot, but the plot’s screwy. Then I saw the runes on that dagger, and it didn’t seem quite so ridiculous.”
Lily drummed her fingers. “Are doppelgängers an elf thing?”
“Maybe. I should probably tell you about the guy who wrote the grimoire. Eberhardus Czypsser chased doppelgängers back in his day—it’s one reason he was discredited for a century or two and most copies of his book disappeared. But never mind that for now. He claimed to have successfully made a doppelgänger of a bumblebee.”
Rule’s eyebrows lifted. “A bumblebee?”
“You start small, especially if a spell takes an ungodly amount of power and you aren’t willing to use death magic.”
“Death magic.”
“Yeah, which is another way doppelgänger fits. If you could make one