Carter & Lovecraft Read Online Free Page A

Division of Licensing Services site, and applied for a license. It took a while for him to think of five people to put down as character witnesses, mainly because he would need their signatures and he wanted the thing finished and ready to go as soon as possible. He ended up spending a full day finding the ones he’d chosen and having them sign. It made him feel like a bail enforcement agent, another license the DOS-0075-f-l-a covered. He had checked the first box, though.
    APPLICATION AS (Check only ONE):
    X Private Investigator
    While Carter waited for the bureaucracy to sort that out for him, he downloaded another PDF, printed it out, and filled in as much as he could until he could find an office. He was going to need a business address; the home address he’d used on the private investigator’s license application looked halfhearted to him. He wanted a real business address this time, something real to enter into the PD 643-041 Handgun License Application. He filled it out with particular attention to section one of the “Letter of Necessity,” a detailed explanation as to why the applicant’s “employment requires the carrying of a concealed handgun.”

 
    Chapter 3
    FACTS CONCERNING THE LATE ALFRED HILL
    The office was three blocks away from Suydam’s house. At least Carter didn’t have to go past there when driving to and from his apartment.
    The Suydam house was sure to be demolished. The locals didn’t like having a “murder house” in their neighborhood, and a developer had already stepped forward, offering to demolish and clear the site. They’d made a very small attempt to pass this off as civic altruism, but nobody thought they wanted anything but the real estate, and the developer gave up the pretense quickly.
    The house had a cellar, and Carter was glad he hadn’t seen it. Suydam had carried out his experiments in altered perception there, and the bodies of the remaining boys were found under fresh concrete in a subcellar. Suydam himself had consumed industrial quantities of hallucinogens—LSD, Salvia divinorum , psilocybin, and, his personal favorite, DMT—and painstakingly noted his experiences. These he had tabulated in a complex system that was identified as being largely based on the Aarne-Thompson classification system for folklorists. These sets and subsets were, in turn, weighted by an apparently arbitrary system of significances rendered as numbers to two decimal places. The system was sketched out in detail, though without anything but the most abstruse explanation, in the notebooks discovered in Suydam’s bedroom. The system was mapped out more briefly on the left-hand side of the psycho wall.
    The rest of the wall defied analysis. Several hundred pictures were taken to form a detailed mosaic, and a CSU tech undertook to create a database of the wall in her own time. The case was, after all, closed.
    Carter was obliged to attend the inquiry into the shooting, and it was deemed justifiable, Suydam intent on being an asshole to the grave by provoking the police into shooting him. It got out that Hammond had shot himself, and one tabloid made a front cover story of it. By the next day somebody famous for being famous had suffered a wardrobe malfunction, and a random cop eating his gun was no way near as newsworthy as a celebrity nipple.
    *   *   *
    Now here Carter was, a gumshoe.
    He hadn’t been entirely sure what he was getting into, but it turned out that it was exactly what he had expected and nothing more. None of the additional work that he hoped would lift the job out of the mundane ever came along. Most of it was divorce work, some skip traces, background checks, and missing persons where the person obviously wanted to stay missing, but had left somebody behind who isn’t so cool with that notion. Very occasionally he had to attend court as a witness. Far too often he spent his entire day on the Internet, accessing assorted databases—tax, voter registration, DMV.