Jagger (Steele Shadows Investigations)

by Amanda McKinney

  He ignored the jab. “Was the fourth scroll sold after it was stolen, like the others?”

  “Yep. For six figures.”

  “Six figures?”

  “Yep. It sold for the most of the group. All four scrolls sold for about four-hundred thousand total. The underground black market for stolen art is a world-wide, billion dollar industry. In case you didn’t know.”

  “I’m in the wrong industry.”

  “You’re on the right side of the law.” I sipped again. “The FBI has an entire unit of agents trained to recover high-value art, not to mention dozens of agencies in the private sector. Art investigators, they’re called. Thing is, stolen art moves quickly, which makes it tough to trace. The Cedonia Scrolls have been stolen and recovered three separate times over the last few decades, making them even more valuable in the black market.”

  “That, and the fact that they’re said to be cursed. What idiots would want to be cursed? Let alone kill a cop for one?”

  Colson obviously hadn’t spent the last seventy-two hours of his life researching the dark underworld of supernatural powers. The moment I began researching the infamous Cedonia Scrolls, two things surprised me. One was how little information there was on them, and two, was the massive cult that worshiped them.

  The legend went something like this: In 1968, a group of hikers found four scrolls locked in a chest, hidden deep in a cave just outside Berry Springs. The scrolls were constructed of leather sheets sewn together and wound on two wooden rollers. Using punched designs in the leather, each scroll depicted a different location around Berry Springs. Although there’s no record of the scrolls being professionally appraised, they’re assumed to be from the seventeenth century. According to the Wiccan websites I’d perused, the location on each scroll signifies a monumental ceremony held by the famous witch, Cedonia, where she raised demons from the earth.

  The hikers who found the scrolls died two weeks later, one from a rare virus, and the other, a tumble off a cliff. And so began the rumor that the scrolls were cursed and all those who touched them were doomed to face eternity in hell. I wish I could say I was surprised at the demand to own one of these scrolls, but the truth was, I knew far too well about the obsession to tempt fate. To own it, to control it. To be a part of something bigger than yourself, for better or worse.

  As decades went on, the gossip of the Cedonia Scrolls slowly faded away, until a year ago when whispers said the scrolls had been stolen from an art lover named Charles Nicholson, who was in hospice, now dead. Over the following weeks, three of the four popped up at various private art auctions, where each was stolen sometime in the night. An anonymous witness to one of the heists dubbed the thief the “Black Bandit,” a nod to the black suit, hat, and mask it wore. The story quickly became sensationalized, gossip colored with stories of witchcraft, curses and supernatural power.

  The fourth scroll was MIA until it turned up at a local art shop named Mystic Maven’s. According to the shop owner, Hazel De Ville, she’d purchased the scroll at a thrift store for two dollars, the infamous piece of art finding its way out of the black market and into the hands of someone who had no clue what they had. After bragging about her find to everyone in Donny’s Diner, Hazel locked the scroll in her art shop, where it was stolen that same night. During the robbery, the station received a call about a “suspicious person,” wearing head-to-toe black, lurking around the building. Lieutenant Jack Seagrave was the first one on the scene—where he was shot to death moments after the Black Bandit escaped with the fourth scroll.

  “It’s all connected, Colson. A cursed Wiccan scroll was stolen. Then, Seagrave gets shot while responding to the heist. Then, on the day of his funeral, a voodoo shrine is assembled ten yards away.”

  He slowly nodded, then asked, “Anything on the car?”

  Earlier that day, I received the surrounding street camera feeds from the scene and hit my first lead. My first in three days.

  Three fucking days.

  “Nothing worth anything.” I said. “I ran the description through the system. No blue, four-door sedan associated with any recent crimes. I reached out to a few of my counterparts across the state, see if it rang any bells for them.”

  “No luck?”

  “No luck.”

  Colson blew out a breath. “Could’ve been anyone, you know.”

  “Or, it could be Seagrave’s killer. A piece-of-shit car with no license plate was caught on camera outside the art shop, moments after Seagrave was shot six times. Why wouldn’t you think it was the shooter?”

  “But there were also two other vehicles that passed by within thirty minutes, right?”

  “Sandra Nickels, on her way home from the nightshift at the processing plant, and Carlos Muniz, on his way home from a gig at a bar in Eureka.”

  “You talked to them both already?”

  I grunted.

  “Verify Muniz’s story?”

  “With the bar and his roommate.”

  “Humph.” Colson chewed his lower lip.

  “The unmarked blue sedan is our guy. Just have to find him.”

  “I’m assuming you’ve been to Ron’s lot?”

  I nodded. “His, and two other used car lots in town. Still need to hit up the surrounding towns. There was one blue sedan sold to an old lady name Ingrid, two years ago. She still owns it today.”

  “You talk to her?”

  “Went to her house before the funeral.”

  “Of course you did. See any pentagrams on her front door?”

  “No.”

  Colson took a swig of his beer, then blew out a breath. “So we’re assuming the blue sedan belongs to the Black Bandit…”

  “And that the Black Bandit killed Seagrave.”

  A moment slid between us as we contemplated that assumption.

  “What about the dumpster diving?” I asked. “Anything turn up?”

  “No murder weapon.”

  Searching the surrounding trashcans and dumpsters for the gun used to kill Seagrave had been a stretch, too. The Black Bandit wasn’t that stupid. Obviously.

  “We’ll have the dolls and candles you bagged up from the Voodoo Tree scanned for prints. If the Bandit was the one who built the shrine, maybe we’ll get a hit. Maybe that’ll give us a legit lead. I’ll start the paperwork first thing tomorrow morning.”

  I scoffed.

  “Takes time. You know that.”

  “We don’t have goddamn time, Colson. We’re already three damn days into this.”

  He didn’t respond because he knew just as much as I did that after the first forty-eight hours of a homicide, every hour that passed made it less likely the culprit would be caught.

  “Have any other of the Cedonia Scroll heists been associated with homicides?” He asked.

  “No.”

  “So, the Black Bandit stole the scroll, got busted by Seagrave on his way out, put a round of bullets in Seagrave’s chest, then disappeared in a blue four-door sedan?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time a B&E ended in a homicide.”

  “We’ve got no murder weapon, no prints, not a single piece of trace evidence. Only a random car and a blurred side-shot of the Black Bandit.”

  “And this.”

  I pulled out my phone and hit play on the video I’d watched a hundred times since that morning.

  5

  Darby

  I waited until Colson’s flashlight had faded into the distance to resume my search of the woods around the Voodoo Tree. I assumed he was on his way to track down Jagg, and I only hoped he’d tell him I was still searching the scene. Two points for the new kid.

  I kept my flashlight up and my head on a swivel. Never could be too careful when it came to witchcraft. Being born and raised in Berry Springs, I knew that all too well.

  The town was made up of three types of people. Your traditional cowboys—the majority of the population—who’s idea of dressing down was wearing their leather cowboy boots instead of their ostrich o
nes, their wool cowboy hats instead of their felts. Acknowledging anyone by anything other than sir or ma’am was unacceptable, and very likely to get you a swift slap in the jaw. Southern women were serious about their discipline. I still can’t look at a wooden spoon without a shudder. The folks that inhabited Berry Springs were the real deal. True southern cowboys and cowgirls, the kind that rode horses and shit. I rode a horse once on a class field trip. Fell face first into a mound of horse dung, fracturing my shoulder and busting out my two front teeth. I was called Dingleberry Darby until the day I graduated high school. I was also laughed out of anything that involved any kind of athleticism whatsoever.

  Kicked ass at Dungeons and Dragons though.

  Anyway, a smaller part of Berry Springs was made up of hippies, as the rednecks so lovingly called them. They were nature lovers who’d migrated to the town for its hiking trails, campsites, creeks, caves, and some of the best rivers for kayaking.

  Thirdly, there was a small group of misfits—as they’d been labeled—who practiced Wiccan, claiming half the land as their own, their annual protests always falling on deaf ears. I remember first hearing about the Berry Springs witches on the playground at school, then, my grandpa would tell me the stories at bedtime after he’d fall off the wagon. Many moons ago, he always started out, a small group of witches escaped the Salem Witch Trials and fled to the mountains of Berry Springs. They lived deep in the shadows of the caves and cursed anyone who crossed their paths. Normally, that’s where the story would end, but on nights that he overindulged, he’d tell me the most tantalizing part of the tale, leaving me with visions of twitching noses and my hand between my legs. Aside from the curses, the witches used their beauty to seduce the men of the villages with one goal in mind—to avenge their dead sisters by reproducing and re-populating the world with more witches. The Berry Springs rednecks hated the story and tried, unsuccessfully, to bury it for decades. Bad blood for our small town, they’d say.

  As I stared up the Voodoo Tree, I was afraid the age-old feud was about to fire up again.

  Starting with Detective Max Jagger of the state police.

  It took me a minute to figure out, but suddenly everything clicked into place. From the detective’s sudden obsession to prevent forest fires, to the reason he was wandering the woods with whiskey in his back pocket in the middle of the night—not that the latter was abnormal. The detective’s superhuman ability to consume alcohol while remaining coherent was also legendary in Berry Springs.

  Under normal circumstances, Detective Max Jagger, known as Jagg, would have probably taken a piss on the shrine and sauntered away, but not this one. Why? Because Jagg believed this one had something to do with Police Lieutenant Jack Seagrave’s murder, three days earlier.

  I’d stood behind Jagg at the funeral where he’d positioned himself just far enough away from the crowd to let everyone know he didn’t care to be addressed. As was Jagg, in every social setting he crossed. It was just him and I, in the background, although I assume he didn’t notice I was there. Not many people noticed I was anywhere. Pretty much the opposite of Jagg. Everyone took notice of that guy, no matter where he was, what he was doing, or who he was insulting.

  He stood like a statue during the benediction, behind dark Ray-Bans and a faded grey suit. While everyone else hovered under shade trees, Jagg stood in the blazing sun, as if welcoming the punishment of the heat.

  Tears were shed, prayers whispered, none of which by Jagg. And while everyone exchanged hugs and kisses after the casket was lowered, the detective still didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Nothing. The funeral goers passed him by, a few wary glances by the men, a few lingering ones from the women.

  I didn’t receive a single glance, men or women.

  As was my life.

  I was always that kid that no one noticed. Always hiding in the shadows, ducking behind other kids, praying that the teacher wouldn’t call on me in class. The curse of being shy. I learned quickly that shy meant nerdy, meant no one wanted to hang out with you. And then the whole Dingleberry Darby thing kind of sealed the deal.

  Confidence was something I never had. Ever. I doubted every decision I made, every move I made, every breath I took. I floated through life on fear, nothing else. I graduated high school with nothing—no friends, no money, no job, no idea what I wanted to be. Then, I heard that BSPD was hiring. I’d almost pissed myself when I hit the submit button, adding my name to the list of badasses who surely applied for the job. I passed each test by the hair of my chin—three to be exact—and was floored when I received the offer. To this day, I don’t know how or why I’d been chosen over someone else. Anyone else. Regardless, with a bottle of Pepto in the glovebox and Saint Christopher hanging from the rearview mirror, I’d shown up to my new job pretending to be ready to tackle whatever they could throw at me. I threw up twice that first week.

  Jack Seagrave’s murder was the biggest thing to happen since I’d started.

  I hadn’t worked the scene but heard about it. Everybody had. The Lieutenant had been shot six times in the chest in an alley downtown and left to rot in a puddle of his own blood. I heard Jagg lost it at the scene. Not crying, but going completely ape shit. A prequel of what was to come, no doubt about that.

  Lieutenant Seagrave had spent over a decade in the Navy, like Jagg, before deciding to walk away from the military after knocking up his new bride during one of his leaves. Definitely unlike Jagg. Seagrave had accepted a job as a beat cop at BSPD and worked his way up to Lieutenant where he remained before someone shot him to death.

  The man was two months from retirement.

  The connection between Jagg and Seagrave was cloudy at best, as was most of Jagg’s life, but I got the impression the two men had been close.

  Jagg was the type of detective to go to the ends of the earth to solve a case. Add in a personal connection and the devil himself couldn’t stop the man.

  Forget about witches, Jagg was a true legend in Berry Springs. Someone talked about, whispered about. Wondered about, fantasized about. Hell, Tanya, our receptionist/dispatcher couldn’t even form a full sentence around the guy. I couldn’t imagine having that kind of power over the opposite sex. Jagg was said to have plenty of lovers, but was always single, if you catch my drift. Women dropped to their knees for him, and if I’m being honest, this phenomena was a bit of a mystery to me. Sure, the guy was the walking stereotype of a bad boy biker, covered in tattoos with dark eyes, and a six-foot-four frame that I’m not ashamed to admit that I’d kill for. But the guy seemed to live every day in a constant state of pissed. He was an asshole. Cynical. Assume the worst, there was no best. The guy never smiled, but maybe women liked that. I sure as hell wouldn’t know considering my last sexual experience had been with a jar of jelly and a banana peel. Two birds with one stone. Delicious.

  They said Jagg was so good at his job because he didn’t believe a word out of anyone’s mouth. Didn’t take a thing at face value. While most people believed a stranger would do good given the opportunity, Jagger believed that person would cut off your balls and wrap your dick around your throat given the opportunity—something I heard he’d done, by the way. Innocent until proven guilty? No, not in Jagg’s delusional world. Guilty until proven innocent, every time.

  I’ll never forget my first experience with the detective. It was my first week at BSPD. I’d been given the graveyard shift and was somewhere between watching a tutorial about evidence collection and contemplating how to remedy my boredom woody when Jagg burst through the door to the bullpen, singlehandedly dragging a man twice his size who had a bloodied lip, two swollen eyes, and a swastika on his neck. I recognized him instantly. The infamous Pistol Pete, one of the most notorious gang members in the tri-state area. Pete was loosely connected to several homicides but the cops couldn’t link enough evidence to ever arrest the man—until Max Jagger took the case. Rumor was the detective spent days, weeks, stalking the gangster. I mean, literally stalking the guy. From his car, a drone, the w
oods surrounding the gangster’s house. Rumor was Jagg spent thirty-one hours perched in a ninety-foot hickory tree in Pete’s backyard with nothing but his camera, his gun, a pack of beef jerky and a flask, before capturing the moment Pistol Pete tried to sell a handful a jewelry he’d stolen from an old woman who’d been beaten to death during a home invasion. Those pictures had been enough to get a warrant to search Pete’s home and, within six hours, Jagg had arrested a man who later confessed to killing six people over three states. Confessed, because, rumor was, Jagger had threatened Pete with photos of him on his hands and knees accepting an unconventional kind of payment from a fellow gang member. Decades in federal prison, a pile of dead bodies and evidence to match had nothing on Pete’s sexual orientation, apparently. Jagg had found the man’s weakness and exploited it, saving years of trials, thousands of tax payers’ dollars, and perhaps most importantly, providing closure to the victim’s families.

  After getting the confession, Jagg breezed out of the station with a cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of files in the other, like it had been just another day at the office. While most cops would be gloating and celebrating, Jagger went back to his house, wherever that was. Not many people knew where Jagg hung his shoulder holster. I imagined a cave, or a dungeon of sorts.

  A day didn’t go by that I didn’t see Jagg either in the station or working a case somewhere in town. He was the definition of a workaholic. People said he didn’t sleep, rarely ate. The man put everything he had into his cases, cutting through red tape, legally and illegally, to get things done. He was a dog with a bone when it came to solving a case, hence the nickname Dog.

  Stories of his days as a ruthless, merciless Navy SEAL proceeded him, as well as the number of bodies he’d left in his wake. It was still debated why he’d left the military. Some said it was because he was dishonorably discharged after kicking his CO’s ass. Some say he just simply walked out one day because there were no more terrorists to kill. Others even suggested he’d turned, hated the very country he’d spent decades defending. No one really knew. He’d just shown up in Berry Springs three years ago and applied to be a beat cop. I heard that when he accepted his job at BSPD, crime in our small town immediately went down by seventeen percent. Six months into the job, that number dropped to twenty-seven percent. Two years after that, Jagg accepted a position with the state police, as a detective. His territory covered multiple counties around Berry Springs and had the same effect on surrounding crime rates. Detective Max Jagger was a feared man.