Murder by Magic (9 page)

“Leave her out of this.”

“You ruined me, you bastard. You both did. So you both pay.”

“How did we do that?”

“You were supposed to kill him!” Art yelled. “Kill him once and for all and get him out of my life!”

“We don’t do that kind of work.”

I could see old Art was building himself into a rage. “I had it all planned, damn you. He was supposed to break in, and you’d kill him. That would have been the end of it.”

“The best-laid plans and all that,” I said.

His eyes glazed over. He aimed the gun at me and pulled the trigger. The shot was explosive.

He stared in shock. I staggered a little; these new heavy-caliber weapons are annoying, but I was still standing, and I smiled at him.

Art pulled the trigger again. The bullet hit me in the upper right chest, tearing through my shirt. “You know,” I said to him, “I just bought this shirt.”

“My God,” he moaned. “What are you?”

“Arthur old boy,” I said as I brushed powder from my shirt and glass from my hair, “your inquiries about us were not as good as you thought they were.”

He’d made me angry, very angry, and there was nothing I could do about my fangs beginning to show.

His head was shaking back and forth, not believing. Whatever. I was used to it and didn’t really care anymore.

He kept pulling the trigger. One of the bullets hit me in the head, and that really pissed me off. While hardly fatal, the damn things
hurt.
I sent a fervent thanks that we had no neighbors on the top floor and that Emma had insisted on soundproofing the entire place a few years back.

“Fun’s over, Art,” I said as I moved toward him.

There was a growling sound from the darkness. Before I could reach him, a huge white creature shot out of the blackness. Covered with fur, moving with lupine grace.

Art screamed.

Once.

“What should we do?” Emma asked me the next morning.

“I’m open to ideas. This one won’t be easy to explain.”

“We’ve got the shattered window,” Emma said, a flick of her head indicating the stirring curtains. “He did have a weapon. He was trying to kill you.”

“Just his bad luck he tried on a night when the moon was full, I guess.”

She smiled at me. “Never try and kill a woman’s husband. We get cranky.”

I nodded. “And mortal women think they have problems every twenty-eight days.”

“I suppose we could clean this up ourselves.”

I nodded as I lit yet another cigarette. Emma frowned as the tip burst into flame when I glanced at it, but, as I said before, it was a trick I liked doing. Okay, so I still liked showing off for her a little bit. “We’re going to have to, I think. A quiet and clean disappearance is best, I think.”

“Agreed. I’ll go get dressed, and we can get this done. Will the sun bother you while we clean this up, darling?”

I shook my head. “Between the tinted windows and heavy curtains, I’m fine as long as it doesn’t hit me directly.”

She went into the living room, heading for the bedroom, her clothing in the bedroom closet. “Jonathan, I’ve been thinking,” she called out. “We need a pet. A bird or something. Perhaps a dog. Maybe another cat.”

“Darling, the last time we tried that, you
ate
the cat.”

“Picky, picky, picky . . .”

The Case of the Headless Corpse

Josepha Sherman

Josepha Sherman is a fantasy novelist, freelance editor, and folklorist whose latest titles include
Son of Darkness
(Roc Books),
The Captive Soul
(Warner Aspect),
Xena: All I Need to Know I Learned from the Warrior Princess, by Gabrielle, as Translated by Josepha Sherman
(Pocket Books), the folklore title
Merlin’s Kin
(August House), and, together with Susan Shwartz, several
Star Trek
novels, including
Vulcan’s Forge
and
Vulcan’s Heart.
She has also written for the educational market on everything from Bill Gates to the workings of the human ear. Recent titles include
Mythology for Storytellers
(M. E. Sharpe, 2003) and the
Star Trek Vulcan’s Soul
trilogy.

She is a fan of the New York Mets, horses, aviation, and space science. Visit her at
http://www.sff.net/people/Josepha.Sherman.

T
he body was male, strongly built, clad in an elegant midnight-blue robe, and without a doubt, dead.   Murdered. Very few suicides manage to tear off their own heads. The crime had made a mess of the expensive-looking Oriental carpet. And, I thought irrelevantly, they were never going to get the stains out of that nice oak floor.

My partner, Raven, was looking about the extravagantly large living room. “Where’s the head?”

The cops gave us both a wary glance. “We haven’t found it yet.”

I was doing my own scouting. With all this mess, you’d have expected bloody footprints, or at least a trail of—

Whoa. “Here it is,” I called. “Here, behind this sofa,” which was an expensive white leather affair. “Must have rolled.”

“Or been thrown,” Raven said, crouching to study the head.

My partner is a tall man, dark-haired, lean and good-looking in a rangy sort of way. I’m female, brown-haired, not exactly lean, and half his height. We’ve been partners long enough to be surprised by pretty much nothing.

The head was that of a man in perhaps his late fifties, blond hair fading to gray. The face was strong but with slightly sagging jowls, and looked vaguely annoyed by the whole affair. It was a face I recognized from the news: Randolph Dexter, head of Dexter Arcane Industries, a major supplier of magical goods to the trade, though not a magician himself. Divorced, if memory served, with offspring.

Yes. A quick glance at my handheld Wizard told me that there was indeed an ex–Mrs. Dexter, Eleanor, and that there were two of those offspring, a son and a daughter. None of them were magicians, either: in fact, there were no magic licenses on record for any of the family.

There was only one problem in getting accurate data and with us being here at all. Because of Dexter’s profession, the place was full of magical trophies: a silver chalice on the mantelpiece, a colorful, intricately woven mandala hanging on one wall, and so on. Handsome stuff. All of them together cast a psychic fog of magic, yet nothing had that unmistakable mental jolt that says “I’ve been used.” There was neither sign nor
feel
of any grimoires or other magic manuals, which are the only methods by which a nonmagician can even hope to cast a spell.

In other words, magic fog or no magic fog—well, my partner was already explaining it to the cops.

“He wasn’t killed by magic. It’s not our jurisdiction.”

Raven and I are agents for the MBI, the Magical Bureau of Investigation. We take on those cases of murder, espionage, and matters of national security involving the arcane arts.

(And no, Raven isn’t his real name any more than mine is Coyote: the MBI has a perverted sense of humor when it comes to giving its agents handles.)

No murder by magic. No trace of spells. Just to be on the safe side, I softly recited the reveal-spell charm that’s supposed to be foolproof. Granted, the magic haze was a nuisance, but . . . Nope, assuming the readings were accurate, no spells.

But something else was bothering me. I murmured to Raven, “Why aren’t there any footprints?”

He shrugged. “Clever killer?”

“Oh, come
on.
”

“Maybe he stood on a chair. Maybe he ran across the sofa.”

“And the head? If it had rolled, there’d be a blood trail on the carpet. If it had been thrown, there’d be blood on that nice white sofa.”

“Good point.”

There was also the small problem of who or what would be strong enough to rip a man’s head off his body.

“Raven,
there’s
the magic. Some sort of strength-enhancement spell—no, never mind,” I corrected myself before he could comment. “That would have shown up on our scans, too.”

With no magical evidence, we were forced to turn the case over to the cops. But later, as we returned to the small office we share in the MBI Building—which looks, deliberately, like any other bland gray governmental building, were other governmental buildings warded—I couldn’t get the murder out of my mind. “Raven . . .”

“Yes. It’s nagging me, too. We’re missing something.”

“But what?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“Yes. That’s exactly the problem. No clues.”

Just then a message sprite formed between us with the smallest
pop
of displaced air. Like all the sprites, it was a sexless, slight, green-skinned figure with wings that blurred as it hovered.

“Agents Raven, Coyote, boss man wishes seeing you
now
!”

With another small
pop
the message sprite was gone. Raven and I exchanged a resigned glance and headed off to Chief Wizard Merlin’s office.

Needless to say, Merlin isn’t our superior’s real name any more than Raven and Coyote are ours. He is a heavyset man of indeterminate age, the sort who looks like an ex-jock who was probably a fullback in college—but with eyes that hold a
lot
of cold, hard experience.

He acknowledged us with his usual curt nod. “New case. A woman claims that her poodle is being possessed by the ghost of her deceased husband.”

“You’re putting us on,” Raven said.

Merlin seemed to be enjoying this a little too much. He shook his head, face absolutely without expression. “Seems that the poodle has started talking to her.”

“Uh . . . of course. Chief, I understand that talking poodles might be an MBI matter, but we’d really like to keep working on the Dexter case.”

Merlin raised a bushy eyebrow. “You already filed that one as a nonarcane murder.”

“Well, yes,” Raven began, “but—”

“
Is
it?”

“It seems to be, but—”

“Seems?”

I took pity on my floundering partner. “We merely want to follow up on a few new leads. Be absolutely sure.”

Merlin’s quick wave of a hand brought a computer screen into view. Scrolling down the files, he commented, “Neither of you sensed any magic other than peripheral haze due to unused arcane objects. The reveal-spell charm revealed nothing. There is no evidence of any arcane talent in any member of the immediate Dexter family. What leads?”

“The family,” I said. “Dexter’s company. There might be something . . .” I stopped. That sounded lame, even to me.

At Merlin’s second wave, the screen and computer obediently vanished again, and he turned to fix us with a look as cold and hard as that of a basilisk. “I’m well aware that a murder investigation is more glamorous than a case of a dead husband giving stock tips to his widow through her poodle.”

“Stock tips?” I asked.

“Good ones?” Raven added.

“Excellent ones, to all accounts.”

“And she wants to get rid of
that
?”

“Apparently,” Merlin drawled, “the dog is big on insider trading.”

“But—”

“We can’t—”

Merlin silenced us by fixing us with a look that would have pierced a demon’s disguise. “Is this reluctance of yours due to magical intuition? Or are we merely playing hunches?”

There was an awkward pause. Then Raven said, “I really wish we could claim the former, but . . .”

“We just don’t know,” I finished.

Merlin sighed. “You two should have been named Bulldog and Terrier, you know that? Very well, you have”—he glanced at his watch—“exactly one minute to convince me why I should keep you on the Dexter case.”

Raven and I both knew that he meant it literally. Hastily, counting off the seconds in my mind, I summarized the lack of footprints, the lack of any blood trail. “Yes, I know it could have been the work of a really clever killer—”

“One with inhuman strength,” Raven cut in.

“Or, perhaps, a very efficient power tool,” Merlin said dryly. “The minute, agents, is up.” He held up a hand to stop us from interrupting. “As I say, you two should have been called Bulldog and Terrier for your sheer tenacity. Or is that simple stubbornness? Still, I have to agree that the case of the insider trading poodle can wait a day.”

“Thank you!”

“
Only
a day.”

“Chief—”

“A day. You two have exactly twenty-four hours in which to prove the use of magic with intent to kill in the Dexter case. After that . . .”

“Poodle,” I said.

“Precisely.”

A second trip to the murder scene netted us nothing but impatient cops. Of course they had already questioned the Dexter family and employees, but not being MBI, they hadn’t gotten more than surface answers. We had an advantage, needless to say: magic. One of the reasons Raven and I work so well as a team is that our magics are perfectly compatible. This means that our powers don’t fight each other, a problem that has happened to other, failed partnerships.

Unfortunately, though, since the murder hadn’t been caused by a spell, we couldn’t use our joined talents to simply track the spell backward and conjure up the killer’s name. But at least we could whittle down the list of “possible” suspects to “more likely” suspects.

Sure enough, a scroll materialized between us even as we finished reciting the last spell-syllable.

“That’s
it
?” I asked. “That’s all?”

“Not the most promising of lists, is it? Let’s see . . . Dexter’s ex-with-kids . . . one business rival . . .” Raven shook his head. “That’s it, all right: two adults, two kids. Nary a friend or even an acquaintance on the list.”

“Either everyone loved him except for his wife and/or rival, or he had no friends at all.”

“Want to bet me it was the latter?”

“No bet,” I said. “I
feel
that, too. Unfriendly fellow, the late Mr. Dexter. Ah, you know, the killer
could
have been some random lunatic. ‘Random’ wouldn’t show up on the list.”

“Oh, thank you
so
much.”

“Just a possibility.”

There is an annoying rule in the MBI that no agent may interrogate a witness or suspect alone. As it happens, there’s a perfectly good reason for it: a solo agent was once slain by a suspect who, much to his surprise, turned out to be mostly demon. But the rule was going to cut down on our precious time, since we couldn’t split up to make separate investigations.