Murder by Magic (10 page)

“Mrs. Ex-Wife first,” I decided, and Raven agreed.

Dexter had apparently believed in doing right by his ex, or else she had a very good lawyer. Ex–Mrs. Dexter lived in a penthouse apartment that could just as well have been called a penthouse mansion, on top of the sort of building usually described first as “luxury.”

Then we met the ex-wife, who opened the door herself with the air of someone who’d just been interviewed by cops and was prepared for a return bout. Her appearance pretty much screamed top designer, and her beige suit probably cost the same as my whole year’s salary. I couldn’t completely envy her, though. She desperately wanted to be young, at least as much so as cosmetics could manage (no cosmetic magics, though, which surprised me, since a lot of folks use them these days), and was fiercely svelte and blonde, hair caught up on the latest artfully tousled style. I stopped myself just in time from self-consciously touching my own less elegant hair.

What Mrs. Ex-Wife didn’t look was grieving. Angry and weary, yes, and thoroughly sick of answering questions, but not grieving. “Your people were already here, ah . . .”

“Call us Raven and Coyote, ma’am. We’re not with the police, but with the MBI.”

I’ve seen many reactions to that announcement, ranging from anger to wary alarm. This one surprised me: the woman recoiled from our IDs in genuine horror, and I
felt
fear blaze up in her like a psychic wildfire. She was clearly only barely keeping from slamming the door in our faces. Raven and I exchanged quick glances: Mrs. Ex-Wife would never have had anything to do with the arcane.

Odd fear for someone who was married to the head of Dexter Arcane Industries. But then, money could overcome a lot of things. Including any scruples she might have had against taking her ex’s life? “Ma’am,” I prodded gently, “could we come in? We’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”

She would probably rather have told us,
Go to the devil,
and meant it. Instead, Mrs. Ex reluctantly invited us into a vast living room that was all either beige fabric or white marble and, like its owner, fairly screamed top designer.

Raven and I sat on matching chairs that had been designed more for style than for comfort. Mrs. Ex perched uneasily on a third. We asked her the usual opening questions, trivial stuff about maiden name, number and age of children, none of which were intended to do anything but relax her a little.

No go. So I went straight for the proverbial jugular. “Ma’am, please do accept our sincere condolences. But I have to notice that you’re not exactly in mourning.”

“Should I be?” she snapped.

“Well, uh, surely—”

“Raymond brought it on himself! Dealing in, well, in
that
!”

“Dexter Arcane Industries, you mean?” Raven asked.

“I warned him, but he wouldn’t listen to me. Raymond was so good, so kind in every other way.” She stopped, staring fiercely from Raven to me and back again. “I already told the police all this! Even after the divorce—it’s true, we didn’t have anything to do with each other after that, but Raymond never complained about the settlement, never stinted on child support.”

“Did he visit the children?”

“No! I wouldn’t risk it!”

“I . . . beg your pardon?”

“Oh—oh, I don’t mean he would have abused them. He never even showed much interest in them. Raymond was—you’ve heard that old line about being married to a job? It wasn’t quite that bad, not at first. But Raymond just would not listen to my warnings! He could have sold the company, gone into something safer, something more wholesome. But he never listened to me, not even when his love for that sinful business was costing us our marriage.”

“Ma’am, we know he was the owner and CEO of Dexter Arcane, but are you saying that he was also a practitioner?”

“God knows what he was into!”

That wasn’t exactly hard data. Carefully, Raven and I continued to question her. No, she’d never caught her husband attempting any spells. The only time he’d brought home any objects from the company, she’d tossed them out and had their home purified by a priest.

Clear enough. What we had here was a true antimagic bigot. If it weren’t for our MBI IDs, we’d probably already be out on the street. If Dexter had tried anything arcane, he would have had to work it on the sly, and so far there just wasn’t any evidence of that.

However, we weren’t quite finished. “Ma’am,” Raven said, “do you mind if we question your children?”

“They know nothing about this! They haven’t even seen their father for years.”

“I understand,” I said in my gentlest woman-to-woman voice. “But this must still be very difficult for them.”

“I haven’t told them how he died. But those cops, those stupid, stupid cops, let them know that he was murdered. At least I stopped them before they could throw in how he’d been—how he—how he died.”

She’d just gone up a notch in my opinion: concern for her kids.

“I’m sorry,” Raven said, and I knew he meant it. “We’ll try our best not to upset them. But we really do need to ask them a few questions.”

The kids turned out to be named Tiffany and Blaine. Tiffany was a slim little blonde doll, maybe five or six, very pretty and just a touch too cute in her pink ruffled blouse and neat jeans. Blaine was a lanky young blonde teen, maybe fourteen at the most, wearing the inevitable band-advertising T-shirt and artfully worn designer jeans. They sat side by side on the sofa, Tiffany’s feet, encased in pink sneakers, dangling, both kids looking as if they’d rather be anywhere else. Not that I blamed them.

They didn’t look particularly grief-stricken, just bewildered. Then again, judging from what their mother had told us, they hadn’t even seen their father for years. Maybe Tiffany didn’t even remember him.

Very clearly, no magic coming from Blaine. Children as young as little Tiffany are more difficult to read, since Power usually doesn’t focus itself until adolescence. All I got from her was purely mundane child: confusion over the loss of a man she didn’t know, uneasiness over the presence of two strangers her mother clearly didn’t like.

Very gently, Raven and I edged around the details of the kids’ father’s death, trying to learn, first from Blaine, if the man had, indeed, been attempting magic on his own. Blaine blustered as only a frightened teenage boy can do. “My father wasn’t a dirty, double-damned
sorcerer
!”

“Neither, I trust, are we,” Raven said somberly.

Mrs. Ex, to do her credit, didn’t comment.

What else we got from Blaine was that he didn’t care (a lie), he didn’t miss his father (a lie), and he didn’t like us (true). He was not a singularly complex kid, but to be fair to him, Blaine was also struggling with adolescence. Hormones were overriding pretty much everything else in his psyche.

When we asked Tiffany similar but more simply phrased questions, she shook her head, refusing to admit that her father could ever have done anything wrong. Our questions quickly showed that she had only a vague concept of “father,” namely as someone who didn’t want her, since he’d never come to see her, and a feeling, just below the surface, that something must be wrong with her because of that. Her fear and despair were rapidly growing so strong that when tears welled up in her eyes, they almost welled up in ours as well.

We’d gotten all the information we could from her. Excusing ourselves, we fled.

“I hate questioning kids,” Raven said, fighting himself back under control.

“So do I.” I ran a not-quite-steady hand through my hair. “They have no clues at all about not broadcasting their emotions.”

“That was one genuinely scared, unhappy little girl. Not that I blame her for any of that. Dexter sounds like a real sweetheart. Bet Tiffany winds up in therapy in a few years. And—”

“Raven, look at the time. Child psychology’s going to have to wait.”

We grabbed quick cups of coffee and sandwiches from the nearest coffee shop and hurried on to our next destination. From all we had been able to learn—and from all that our brief magical listing had let us see—Dexter Arcane Industries had had only one genuine rival: Mandala Inc.: Supplies for the Right-Hand Path. Expensive merchandise, mostly handmade, usually out of the range of MBI agents’ salaries, and guaranteed Darkness-free.

“Whatever we learn,” Raven said dryly, “it’ll be a pleasure to question an
adult
!”

Mandala Inc. was located in what is usually called a business park: gleaming white buildings surrounded by plenty of grass and trees. Squirrels raced across the cement paths, and sparrows chirped all around us.

“Where are the aerobics classes?” Raven muttered.

“Or the Druid wanna-bes. You’d never know this place manufactured magic equipment.”

Just then something flapped quickly by us—something that wasn’t a bird.

“
Almost
never know,” I amended.

The office of Mandala Inc.’s owner and CEO was a quietly elegant place, with plush moss-green carpet, a few pots of discreet greenery (the ivy sort that doesn’t shed), and gleaming wood and chrome furnishings. A wall-length window looked out over the tranquil business park and a decorative lake. Disconcertingly clean office, I thought. Not a paper out of place. A neat desk is a sign of a troubled mind and all that. Or else Mr. Sinclair simply delegated
everything.

Just then the door opened and a slight man in a neat navy-blue business suit hurried in. His face was absolutely ageless, narrow and rosy-cheeked, unmarred by any lines: really good cosmetic magic or else incredibly clean living. His longish hair was pure white, possibly prematurely so, and he had the clearest blue eyes I’ve seen in a human. “Forgive me, agents. I was just inspecting the latest lot of thuribles. As you surely already know, I am Amadeus Sinclair.”

We duly shook hands, and he took his seat behind that gleaming, too-clean desk. “Please,” Sinclair said, gesturing to two of the leather and chrome chairs, “be seated. Now, you wish to ask me some questions.”

Of course he knew who we were without needing to check our IDs: Sinclair fairly radiated magic. But his magic seemed so utterly untainted by anything nasty that it
felt
downright wholesome.

“I wonder what Mrs. Ex thought about
him,
” I murmured to Raven.

Of course Mr. Sinclair had already heard of his rival’s death; it wouldn’t have taken magic for that, not where business was concerned.

“I warned him, many times I warned him. Put up a warding, hire some arcane guards, do
something
. Working in such an industry without any talents of his own—”

“He wasn’t killed by magic,” Raven cut in.

That stopped Sinclair dead in his tracks. “No? But—no?”

“Does that surprise you?”

“Well, yes! I just never thought . . . It seems so, well, ignominious for poor Raymond to have been murdered by mundane means.”

Tearing off someone’s head didn’t strike me as mundane, but I wasn’t about to say that. Instead, I asked, “You’re not glad to see a rival removed?”

“Powers, no!” He leaned forward, and for the first time there was something sharp on his face, something that said
businessman.
“Look, I don’t deal with Darkness, but that doesn’t make me a saint. Dexter Arcane takes too many shortcuts, and their products undercut mine in manufacturing costs and distribution. If the whole company disappeared overnight, I wouldn’t exactly weep. But we’re speaking of a human life! How . . . how
did
he die?”

Raven told him, and I watched Sinclair shrink back in a shock that looked and
felt
genuine. “Good God, how horrible! Poor Eleanor. She’s had to put up with so much from him, and now this! And the children—terrible, terrible! Do they know? No? There’s a mercy. What spell could have caused—no, you said there was no magic involved. But—”

“I’m afraid we can’t disclose any more details.”

“Of course not, of course not.”

We let him dither on for a time. But all the while, like any good magician, he kept up a strong mental warding. We could only take him at his babbling words. And nothing in that babbling, for all our careful questions, revealed anything useful.

Except . . . “You and Mrs. Dexter are friends?”

“Social acquaintances. We saw each other at the same events, and only rarely spoke with each other, but I always knew she was unhappy.”

“Oh?”

Sinclair stared at us, taking a moment to interpret that monosyllabic question, and then burst into laughter. “Agents, please! First of all, she would never have had anything to do with a magician. And second, I’ve never had anything to do with women. No, my feeling toward Eleanor is pity, nothing more.”

Damn. We could both sense that he meant it. Another possibility squashed.

“We have nothing further to ask,” I said.

Raven added, “I assume that the police have already warned you not to leave town.”

“They think
I’m
a suspect, me! But of course I was his rival, of course they’d think—but
me
! How could they . . . ?”

We left him engrossed in a new round of babbling.

“That,” Raven said as we headed down the path, birds and squirrels doing their birdie and squirrelly activities all around us, “is either the most innocent man we’ve ever met or the finest actor.”

“He’s gay. That was true. He pities Mrs. Ex. That was true, too. And he really didn’t know how Dexter died.”

“That doesn’t mean Sinclair didn’t send an assassin: ‘Just do the job; don’t tell me how you do it.’”

I glanced at my partner. “Remind me never to get you really teed off at me.”

“Hah,” Raven began.

Then all hell broke loose, almost literally. Magic alarms blared out on all sides, nothing audible to the nonmagical but forceful enough to us to nearly stagger us.

“Sinclair!” we exclaimed as one, and raced back the way we’d just come. IDs out and yelling the mantra “MBI! Let us through!” we forced our way through the confused crowds of workers and grim-faced guards to Sinclair’s office. What had been the door to his office was now just so many splinters. Where were his wards? They should have slammed into existence the moment there was—