Murder By Misdirection

by Debra Snow

  “I…uh—” was all Pro could manage. She had not heard her mother lay down the law like this since she was a teenager.

  “And look, maybe you have issues with your father. Lord knows I do. But he’s your father, and you should be out there trying to prove that he didn’t do it. If you ever loved him you should at least be doing that.”

  “I…uh—” was all Pro said again.

  “He gave you one simple task: to go through those emails. Did you do it? No! You are too busy having the Prophecy Adele Martin Thompson pity party.”

  Pro looked drunkenly at her mother. She believed it was the first time her mother ever used all of her names at one time.

  Elisha went to her glass of wine and downed it.

  “So,” Elisha demanded as she put down the empty wine glass, “you gonna help or what?”

  “All right,” Pro grumbled. “But can I do it in the morning? I’m pretty worn out right now.”

  “Go to bed, and we’ll sort through these emails then. I’ll help you.”

  Pro got to her feet a bit clumsily, with the decision that maybe she’d had enough wine. “I’ve never seen you so mad before.”

  “That’s because your father has pissed me off and so have you! Now get to bed. You have work to do tomorrow!”

  15. Phantom Vanish

  The next morning, Pro dragged herself from the spare bedroom to the kitchen and turned on the machine that would prepare her coffee. Once the light changed color to announce the water was hot, she put a plastic cup of something called “House Blend” in the convenient chamber and started it to brew.

  As the machine hissed and gurgled, it occurred to her that something was different. She peeked out into the dining room/living room area and found the number of blossoms had been seriously reduced from the previous evening.

  The potted palm was in a corner, but the flowers were merely covering a few side tables, and the floors were unobstructed by any decorative plants. As she contemplated this, the front door opened and her mother came in.

  “Where did all the forestry go?”

  “The flowers? Oh, I consolidated what I liked and tossed the rest. I was just dumping a trash bag down the chute. Leave it to Max to go for a grand gesture that was not very practical.”

  “You liked it yesterday.”

  “I did. I liked the idea that Max wasn’t playing games for once. Of course, with him breaking out of jail and following you, it appears I was wrong. I can only guess that he just can’t seem to help it; he has to be the smartest person in the room.”

  Pro nodded and got her coffee, hoping the caffeine would help relieve her pounding headache. She took a sip and sighed.

  Her mother crossed her arms. “Good thing I stopped you at the first bottle of wine. You were going for the second when I yelled at you.”

  “You haven’t yelled like that in years,” Pro said and shook her head. “Since this whole thing started, you’ve yelled at me and threatened to spank me.”

  This got a smile from her mother. “You had your bad times. After Max left, you acted out, and I thought I was going to have a real problem with you. But then I met Joe, and once he moved in, you straightened right out.”

  Pro took another sip. “He had a great technique. If I misbehaved, he would look at me with those puppy-dog eyes of his and say he was disappointed.”

  “Oh yes, I remember.”

  “That was enough for me. I did everything I could to make sure he wasn’t disappointed.”

  Her mother moved past her into the kitchen and began to brew a cup of coffee for herself. “I worried about that sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “When you decided to go to the police academy, I was always concerned that you did it just for Joe. I was afraid that it really wasn’t your calling, but you were so focused on Joe being proud of you, that you did it anyway.”

  Pro smiled. “You never said anything.”

  “I didn’t want to influence your decision either way. I just worried, as mothers do.”

  “It was the right choice for me. I like being a cop, and I especially like being a detective. I make a difference.”

  “And you always wanted to do that.”

  “Besides, my first job choice, fairy princess, was already taken.”

  Elisha chuckled. “That’s right. I remember you walking around in that dress every day. We had to pull you out of it to wash it.”

  “So I guess cop is my second choice.”

  Elisha picked up her mug and sampled the brew. “Besides, fairy princesses don’t get days off. Now, are we gonna go through those emails or what?”

  “Might as well get started. I am officially off today, so now would be the time.”

  Pro reached into her attaché and extracted the box with Max’s things and the returned printouts. She put it on the table and opened the lid.

  “Are those Max’s credit cards and his phone?” Elisha asked.

  “Yes, he left them with Sam Lovell for safe keeping. That’s why he didn’t have a wallet or anything on him when he was arrested the second time.”

  “Because he knew he was going to escape and wanted them somewhere safe?”

  “Best as I can tell,” Pro surmised. “Now here, look through those. I have copies that are already translated.”

  Pro pulled out the copies she had made the previous morning and separated them into two piles: ones she had converted and noted the real message and ones she did not.

  “I was doing it by date, so let’s go through.”

  “Way ahead of you, honey,” Elisha said and began to go from one pile to the other.

  “Since I have only one set of codes, you check those, and I’ll translate a new one.”

  Elisha nodded, looking from one paper to the other. “The ones from Max are organized by date as well.”

  “That doesn’t hurt,” Pro said and pulled out the page where she had written the Houdini and alphanumeric codes.

  The pair of them were going through the pages when Elisha noticed something odd. “Wait, if these are organized by date, I have one that is out of order.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you translated the one before it, and the one dated after it, but not this one.” Elisha handed the sheet of paper to Pro.

  Pro looked at it. “That is odd. There should be a list of emails by subject line and dates with those papers.”

  “Here it is,” Elisha said, as she extracted several stapled pages.

  Pro grabbed the list she reprinted on Sunday and put the two pages side by side.

  “Yeah, the list I printed up on Saturday has that email registered. But look, on the printout from Sunday, it’s gone! In fact, it states that no emails were sent on that date at all.”

  Elisha frowned. “How is that possible?”

  Pro shook the pages in her hands. “This case keeps getting stranger and stranger. Give me that email, and let me see what it says.”

  Elisha handed the one page over, and Pro started to write numbers above the words on the page. She then checked the other code sheet and began to write out the message.

  “What does it say?” her mother asked impatiently.

  “I’m working on it,” Pro snapped, her head down close to the page as she wrote away. She leaned back and took a good look at the page. “Looks like it says, ‘Prototype is close. Need input. See at MS.’”

  “Oh, now everything is clear.” Elisha grimaced.

  “I’m trying to think how it disappeared off the list.”

  “A trick of your father’s?”

  “I doubt it. He can do wonders with a deck of cards or a levitation, but not with computers. I can only imagine that someone hacked the police server, because we downloaded all the files from Al Floss’s computer, including the emails.”

  “So someone with very good computer skills, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Pro said absently, going over the last few days in her head. “Malcolm Shaut!”

  “What?<
br />
  “He was one of the people who attempted to buy the plans. He writes software and made a lot of money at it.” She snapped her fingers. “Plus, his initials are MS.”

  “How could he have a prototype?”

  “He told Tom and me that he has a workshop in his basement. Omigod! He could be btg@magic.us!”

  “But why hack NYPD and erase just that one email?”

  “If he erased all of them, we’d notice it right away. He just erased the one that had his initials!” Pro stood up. “I’ve got to get dressed. Malcolm Shaut could be our killer, and I bet that’s where Max will be. That’s what his text meant about me looking at the emails.”

  “Do you think so?” Elisha wondered.

  Pro was on the move. “I’m jumping in the shower. Call Tom, let him know what we found.”

  ∞∞∞

  In record time, Pro was clean, dressed, and on the move. She was grateful her hair didn’t require a lot of work. Pro knew that her mother’s longer locks could take hours to manipulate into shape, due to the tight kink of it.

  She grabbed a necessary second cup of coffee on her way to the subway. She headed downtown on the Number 1 local to get off at the 50th Street Station. Once above ground she called Chu as she walked from Broadway toward Ninth Avenue.

  “Chu,” his voice came over the phone.

  “It’s Pro. Are you heading for Shaut’s place?”

  There was a heavy sigh over the phone. “I am walking there now. But I thought we had decided it would be best to withdraw from this case.”

  “Did you talk to the LT?”

  “It’s been a crazy morning. I haven’t seen him yet.”

  “Good! Because I think we can close this case right now.”

  “I am only doing this because you’re my partner,” Chu protested.

  “That’s good enough for me,” Pro said and hung up. She passed Ninth Avenue and strode up the block toward the brownstone. Her hand slipped into her jacket to touch her sidearm and reassure herself that it was there.

  She reached the correct address and looked up the concrete stairs that rose up before her. Like the rest of Shaut’s building, they looked freshly painted and clean.

  Pro stood waiting for her partner, who couldn’t be very far away. Her eyes went to the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the front of the building and was about waist-high. Behind it there was a door on street level. Pro decided that it must have been the basement, as one had to ascend the stairs to reach the first floor.

  From her angle, she noticed that the door wasn’t quite closed. It couldn’t really be seen from out front or on the street, but from her angle it was noticeable.

  She glanced down the block to see Chu as he approached. He was wearing a brown blazer with khaki pants. She waited until he drew near.

  “Are we going up and ringing the bell?” asked Chu. “Or are we just going to stand outside and wait?”

  Pro put her extended index finger to her lips and Chu quieted immediately. She pointed at the basement door, and Chu went up a couple of steps to view it. He returned and whispered, “You noticed the door was open?”

  “He might have an intruder,” Pro murmured. “One that has no problem with locks.”

  “Should we let Shaut know?” Chu asked quietly.

  “Let’s see if anyone is in there. We have probable cause to suspect there is a burglar.”

  “Or Shaut forgot to close the door.”

  They moved as a unit up to the iron fence. Pro lifted the latch soundlessly, and the pair moved through it. She carefully closed it, and they advanced to frame each side of the door. Chu was on the side that opened, so he cautiously grabbed the knob, gave it a very gentle pull, and it opened a crack.

  Both detectives pulled their service weapons and pointed them up at the sky. Chu gave a nod, yanked the door open, and as he went low, Pro went high, and they both shouted “NYPD” as they burst into the room.

  It was indeed a workshop with machines around the room. Pro recognized a lathe and table saw, and she also saw large work benches to set up projects.

  Directly in front of the two officers were two large glass prisms on slowly rotating platforms. And Max Martin, aka Max Marvell, stood between them with his hands raised in surrender.

  “Ah!” Max smiled. “You found the same clue I did!”

  “Don’t move!” Chu said, his weapon still pointed at the magician.

  “Of course not!” Max replied. “This is what I was talking about! You see, Shaut was stealing my trick and he killed the others to stop them from getting it. You need to arrest him.”

  “Arrest him?” Chu said and glanced over at his partner with a look that suggested Max had lost his mind.

  Pro lowered her weapon and returned it to her holster, and then extracted her handcuffs from a pocket. “Look, Max, he got a couple of crystal thingamajigs on some platforms; that proves nothing. We’ll press him about the murders, but right now we need to arrest you!”

  “Me?” Max said. “But this proves he’s the killer. He was building Prism!”

  “Max, put your hands behind your back,” Pro said as she approached her father. “Once we have you locked up, we will talk to Shaut.”

  She pulled Max’s hands behind him and fastened the cuffs.

  “You don’t understand,” Max whined as the metal was slid around his wrists.

  “Actually, we do, Mister Martin,” Chu said as he holstered his weapon. “You are an escaped fugitive and a flight risk.”

  Pro moved back to Chu to speak in quiet tones. “One of us should stay here and keep an eye on the place, to make sure Shaut doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “You take Max to the precinct. He’ll be more cooperative with you.”

  They both turned to face Max, who stood only a few feet away from them. He was in front of an antiquated cabinet about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth. There was a curtain in place of a door, and it was opened so you could see inside. The interior had alternating stripes of purple and light red that went up vertically from the bottom of the box.

  “So you don’t believe he got the plans for Prism? Then I’ll prove it.” Max stepped on a nearby foot pedal.

  The two oblong prisms began to spin.

  “Max, that’s not going to help,” Pro yelled, but both she and Tom took a step back.

  There was a strange “whirring” noise and a high-pitched screech pulsated through the room, which made Pro and Chu cover their ears.

  With one simple gesture, Max threw the open handcuffs to Pro’s feet and held his arms aloft…

  And was gone.

  The effect was so startling that both Pro and Chu, their hands still over their ears, blinked in astonishment.

  Pro quickly traced the foot pedal cord that Max had stepped on. It went to a small box with a blinking light. She went around the rapidly rotating prisms and followed the wire to a metal box with lights. It looked like some kind of pre-made utility box one would use for a home electronics project.

  Still, she located a small red toggle switch, and with a flick of her hand, turned the unit off. The blinking light went out, and the high-pitched whine ceased.

  The spinning crystals began to slow, and Chu moved into the place Max had stood. “Where did he go?”

  Suddenly, the door was pulled open forcibly, and there stood Malcolm Shaut. He was breathing hard, as he obviously had just ran out of the house, down the stairs, and to the door.

  “What are you doing here?” he panted as sweat rolled down the side of his face.

  16. Cabinet Escape

  Uniformed officers were out front of the brownstone, and several forensic investigators were checking the scene carefully.

  Upstairs on the first floor, Pro and Chu sat across from Malcolm Shaut as he looked from detective to detective.

  “So you are btg@magic.us,” Pro accused.

  “I have no idea what you are talking about!”

  “We cracked your use of the Houdini code. Honestly, do
you think we’re stupid?”

  Shaut looked desperately at Chu. “Has she lost her mind?”

  “And then you hacked the NYPD servers and erased the message.” Pro pulled a folded paper from her pocket and slapped it down onto the desk. “Here! Read it yourself!”

  “I’m a software developer, not a hacker, and I haven’t hacked anyone!” Shaut carefully picked up the creased sheet and opened it. He looked at it for a moment, then tentatively put it down and glared at Pro. “I didn’t write this or send it.”

  “Oh, I see,” Pro demanded angrily. “So why did you neglect to let us know you had a working prototype of Prism?”

  Chu cleared his throat. “It does seem odd, Mister Shaut, that you were trying to get plans for the trick while you have a working version in your basement.”

  “Look, I’m telling you, I didn’t write that email, and I don’t even have an email account like that. As far as what I have in the basement, that was me tinkering away. Floss gave me a rough idea of the size of the prisms used in the effect and the spinning platforms, so I had those made. I also figured out the control box with my assistant. We hooked up the electronics to make the platforms rotate. But, I couldn’t get the trick to work.”

  “We just saw it work,” Pro said while gesticulating wildly. “It made Max disappear!”

  “All I can think is that he got it functioning somehow. You said you found him there. Do you have any idea how long he’d been there? I only came down because of the noises I heard. I recognized that high-pitched whine from the previous tests we had done.”

  “So where did Mister Martin go?” Chu demanded.

  “I have no idea. From what I was told by Floss, it doesn’t really make anyone disappear; it somehow bends light around a center point.”

  “What?” Chu said, as he stood up to lean across the desk. “How is that even possible?”

  Shaut stood up as well and leaned on the desk so his face was inches from Chu’s. “That’s why I wanted to buy it.”

  “So I will repeat myself,” Chu said, not moving an inch. “Where did Max go?”