Weird Detectives (38 page)

Escott’s Nash was still there, the keys and his Webley on the front seat. Mabel and Escott were indeed inside the trunk, to tell by the muffled shouts and thumping, but they could wait.

I got the car started, shifted gears, and shot out from under the porte cochère. Rain once more pounded the roof with brutal force, but the heavy fall and general darkness would obscure the vehicle from Agnes, hopefully throwing off her aim. I didn’t stop to look.

When I judged the distance to be far enough, I cut the motor, vanished, and bee-lined my invisible way back to the house. Wind buffeted me, and the rain was a startling unpleasantness. I usually get that kind of quivering discomfort when sieving through solid walls. When it stopped, I made the reasonable assumption I was under shelter.

With great caution, I took on just enough solidity to get my bearings. Clive’s flashy coupe was in front of me. I let myself float up into a dim corner to watch.

In the few moments since Riordan and I escaped, Agnes had been busy.

Wearing hat and gloves, she emerged from the back door, the leather case with the money in one hand, a travel suitcase in the other. She tossed them into the passenger side of Clive’s coupe and hopped in herself. She was laughing, a free and easy sound of pure delight and triumph.

I half expected a fateful bolt of lightning to strike just then, but nothing happened. The storm seemed to be letting up. Agnes revved the motor, shifted gears, and roared off into the rain.

Escott had past experience at being locked in car trunks, so he was more sanguine about it than our client. That, or maybe he’d enjoyed being stuffed into a small space with a healthy young woman on top of him. I’d kept a straight face when I’d let them out, though they were rather badly rumpled.

Mabel was livid and ready to strangle Riordan, but I explained he was long gone. I had a lot of explaining to do, but first had her give me the location of the fuse box so I could get the lights working. She was none too pleased at the state of the dining room, appalled and aghast at the sight of Clive and Taylor literally asleep on their feet, and furious with me on general principles. She visibly fumed as I eased each man flat on the floor. They were breathing okay, hearts pumping steadily, so they didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger.

“Some kind of curare?” Escott ventured, studying them with his own brand of cold-blooded curiosity. “If so, they might well be aware of everything we’re saying.”

I shrugged. “Just don’t touch the sherry. It might be a good idea to empty all the open bottles into the drain. Agnes could have left a booby trap behind.”

Mabel was ready to explode. “
What
happened?”

I sat down because I was damned tired. Before dawn, rain or no, I’d have to stop at the Stockyards and have a long drink. With the promise of fresh beef blood in my near future, I told them everything that happened, including Riordan’s badly timed interruption and the fight, leaving out the part about my injuries. I’d tell Escott later. He’d need to know just how violent his acquaintance had gotten.

“You let her go?” Mabel’s throaty voice rose. I held up a hand.

“She didn’t get away with anything.”

“Only with Hecate’s Eye and all that money. She’ll never come back.”

I took the pendant—the real one—from my pocket and held it out to her.

Mabel gaped, then reached for it, fingers shaking. “You switched them!”

“Said I would. It took long enough, what with Agnes fighting me every inch of the way.”

“You mustn’t touch it. My God, put it down before something horrible happens.”

I put it into her hand and told her how I’d played pickpocket during the tussle. Agnes must have thought I was some kind of masher since I’d had to keep my hands moving. No wonder she’d shot at me.

“She still got away with the payment—Taylor will set the police on her.”

“No, he won’t. He brought a case full of funny money to buy the gem. It’s as counterfeit as the pendant he got. Agnes had two fakes made. Maybe the jeweler cut her a deal for making two.”

That took them both a moment to digest. I used the pause to take the little box from Taylor’s coat pocket and spilled
his
fake pendant onto the table.

“But how did you know about the money?” Escott asked. “You couldn’t have gotten a close look at it.”

“It was the smell. Ever smell uncirculated cash straight from the bank? Nothing like that fresh ink, only this was just too fresh. It was strong enough that I picked up on it in the next room, but its importance didn’t click until Riordan showed up wanting to talk with Clive. When he hired Riordan to follow Mabel, he paid with counterfeit bills.”

“How did
he
get them?” she asked. “Oh—oh, it couldn’t be.”

“It could. He and Taylor are partners, working a long confidence game. Clive the gigolo marries an heiress with expectations. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s left a number of wives in his wake.”

“A bigamist?” Mabel stared at Clive as though he were an exotic zoo specimen.

“It’s likely. Marriage is a tool of the trade. I bet this time the deal wasn’t as sweet as he’d hoped. Agnes got the house, but it was worthless to him. A family heirloom like a rare diamond was much better. He probably put a few words in her ear about how unfair it was that you got it, unless it was her idea to start with. When the time was right, he called in Taylor to pose as a wealthy gem collector. The hard part for them was probably finding really good counterfeit cash. The printer should have let it dry longer.”

More gaping from Mabel; then she began to hoot with laughter. There was no love lost between her and her cousin. That Agnes had married a confidence man and possible bigamist bothered Mabel not at all. Tears ran down her face, and she had to blow her nose.

When she got her breath, I continued. “Neither of them knew that Agnes had her own angle, which was to drug them, switch the gems, and drive off with both brass rings. Clive would wake in the morning with no wife and no cash. Maybe Taylor would crash his car in the rain or not, but . . . ” I let it hang.

That sobered Mabel up. “I can’t believe she’d have gone that far.”

“She might have planned to delay him long enough for the mickey she slipped to put them out. Riordan interrupted when he tried to crack my skull open.”

“You’re sure you’re not hurt?”

“It’ll take more than a crazy Irishman with a stick to do that.” I turned to Escott. “You’re going to tell me more about him, right?”

He looked pained. “Not just now.”

“I suppose I’ll have to call the police,” said Mabel about the supine mannequins on the parlor floor.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve a friend who will want to meet these jokers.” My friend was a gang boss of no small influence who owed me a favor or three. Northside Gordy would be very interested in hearing Taylor and Clive’s life stories and why they were operating in his city without his permission, thus denying him his cut of their deal. If they were lucky, he might let them go with most of their body parts intact.

“Poor Agnes.” Mabel snickered. “When she starts spending that fake money . . . ”

“She could go to jail,” Escott completed for her.

“It’d serve her right, but I better let the police know that she stole a car.”

Mabel put Hecate’s Eye in its little box and went to the kitchen to make the call.

Escott and I looked at the gem, neither of us disposed to get closer.

A last bit of lightning from the fading storm played hob once more with the house lights. They flickered, leaving the one candle to take up the slack for an instant before brightening again.

“Did you see that?” I asked. “Tell me you saw that.”

“Trick of the light, old man, nothing more.” But Escott looked strangely pale. “It absolutely did
not
wink at us.”

P. N. Elrod
is best known for her Vampire Files series featuring wiseacre undead gumshoe, Jack Fleming. She’s the prize-winning editor of several successful anthology collections for St. Martin’s Griffin and is branching into steampunk with a new series for Tor Books. More info on her toothy titles may be found at vampwriter.com.

The Case:
The lower half of a woman’s body is found standing in a shed. There is no sign of the upper half, and no further clues.

The Investigator:
Detective Jessi Hardin, the only officer currently assigned to the new Denver PD Paranatural Unit (one of the first in the country). Her experience with the magical is minimal, but it is more than the other cops have.

DEFINING SHADOWS

Carrie Vaughn

The windowless outbuilding near the property’s back fence wasn’t big enough to be a garage or even a shed. Painted the same pale green as the house twenty feet away, the mere closet was a place for garden tools and snow shovels, one of a thousand just like it in a neighborhood north of downtown Denver. But among the rakes and pruning shears, this one had a body.

Half a body, rather.

Detective Jessi Hardin stood at the open door, regarding the macabre remains. The victim had been cut off at the waist, and the legs were propped up vertically, as if she’d been standing there when she’d been sliced in half and forgotten to fall down. Even stranger, there didn’t seem to be any blood. The gaping wound in the trunk—vertebrae and a few stray organs were visible in a hollow body cavity from which the intestines had been scooped out—seemed almost cauterized, scorched, the edges of the flesh burned and bubbled. The thing stank of rotting meat, and flies buzzed everywhere. She could imagine the swarm that must have poured out when the closet door was first opened. By the tailored trousers and black pumps still in place, Hardin guessed the victim was female. No identification had been found. They were still checking ownership of the house.

“Told you you’ve never seen anything like it,” Detective Patton said. He seemed downright giddy at stumping her.

Well, she had seen something like it, once. A transient had fallen asleep on some train tracks, and the train came by and cut the poor bastard in half. But he hadn’t been propped up in a closet later. No one had seen anything like
this
, and that was why Patton called her. She got the weird ones these days. Frankly, if it meant she wasn’t on call for cases where the body was an infant with a dozen broken bones, with deadbeat parents insisting they never laid a hand on the kid, she was fine with that.

“Those aren’t supported, are they?” she said. “They’re just standing upright.” She took a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of her suit jacket and pulled them on. Pressing on the body’s right hip, she gave a little push—the legs swayed, but didn’t fall over.

“That’s creepy,” Patton said, all humor gone. He’d turned a little green.

“We have a time of death?” Hardin said.

“We don’t have shit,” Patton answered. “A patrol officer found the body when a neighbor called in about the smell. It’s probably been here for days.”

A pair of CSI techs were crawling all over the lawn, snapping photos and placing numbered yellow markers where they found evidence around the shed. There weren’t many of the markers, unfortunately. The coroner would be here soon to haul away the body. Maybe the ME would be able to figure out who the victim was and how she ended up like this.

“Was there a padlock on the door?” Hardin said. “Did you have to cut it off to get inside?”

“No, it’s kind of weird,” Patton said. “It had already been cut off, we found it right next to the door.” He pointed to one of the evidence markers and the generic padlock lying next to it.

“So someone had to cut off the lock in order to stow the body in here?”

“Looks like it. We’re looking for the bolt cutters. Not to mention the top half of the body.”

“Any sign of it at all?” Hardin asked.

“None. It’s not in the house. We’ve got people checking dumpsters around the neighborhood.”

Hardin stepped away from the closet, caught her breath, and tried to set the scene for herself. She couldn’t assume right away that the victim lived in the house. But maybe she had. She was almost certain the murder had happened somewhere else, and the body moved to the utility closet later. The closet didn’t have enough room for someone to cut a body through the middle, did it? The murderer would have needed a saw. Maybe even a sword.

Unless it had been done by magic.

Her rational self shied away from that explanation. It was too easy. She had to remain skeptical or she’d start attributing everything to magic and miss the real evidence. This wasn’t necessarily magical, it was just odd and gruesome. She needed the ME to take a crack at the body. Once they figured out exactly what had killed the victim—and found the rest of the body—they’d be able to start looking for a murder weapon, a murder location, and a murderer.

The half a body looked slightly ridiculous laid out on a table at the morgue. The legs had been stripped, and a sheet laid over them. But that meant the whole body was under the sheet, leaving only the waist and wound visible. Half the stainless steel table remained empty and gleaming. The whole thing seemed way too clean. The morgue had a chill to it, and Hardin repressed a shiver.

“I don’t know what made the cut,” Alice Dominguez, the ME on the case, said. “Even with the burning and corrosion on the wound, I should find some evidence of slicing, cutting movements, or even metal shards. But there’s nothing. The wound is symmetrical and even. I’d have said it was done by a guillotine, but there aren’t any metal traces. Maybe it was a laser?” She shrugged, to signal that she was reaching.

“A laser—would that have cauterized the wound like that?” Hardin said.

“Maybe. Except that it wasn’t cauterized. Those aren’t heat burns.”

Now Hardin was really confused. “This isn’t helping me at all.”

“Sorry. It gets worse. You want to sit down?”

“No. What is it?”

“It looks like acid burns,” Dominguez said. “But the analysis says salt. Plain old table salt.”

“Salt can’t do that to an open wound, can it?”