by Dan Stout
We watched her work for hours, in snapshots one second apart. We could only get a glimpse of the mural, but I knew how far she’d gotten on it, the delicate lines and colors on the wall of the crime scene. I wondered if she had more plans for it, or if it was only a test piece for a larger project, a rough draft waiting for inspiration to strike. I rubbed my hands, wincing as my palm ground against the stubs of my missing fingers. Jane stepped back, teetering precariously on the end of the dumpster and surveying her work.
“Who are you?” I whispered, chewing my lip. “Who would hurt you like that?”
Her head turned, and Jane stared into the camera, eyes narrowing. The next second she held up a hand, shielding her eyes from the streetlight as she peered out at us. Then she was grinning wide and flashing an obscene sign. She’d spotted the camera and laughed at it.
Then she was back to work, no cares at all for who was recording her. I smiled, cheering her on. Damn right, Jane.
After another half hour or so, she turned as if talking to someone in the alley, then jumped down, and out of sight. A painful period of inactivity followed. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t prevent my mind from imagining the violent scene occurring unrecorded in the alley below.
Jax pushed back into his seat, causing metal chair legs to squeak in protest as they dragged across vinyl flooring. “Maybe Dungan was right,” he said. “There’s nothing useful on there.”
“Wait.” I leaned forward, squinting at the screen. “What’s that?” In the dark shadows of the fire escape a figure had appeared, lurking and watching. Though mostly obscured, I could make out the figure of a man in a nice shirt and slacks, fabric too thin to be one of Frazier’s sneakers. The outline of mandibles made it clear it was a Mollenkampi watching whatever was playing out in the alley.
“Looks familiar, but I don’t know who that is. Do you?” I asked. Ajax shook his head.
The figure on the fire escape recoiled and pulled even deeper into the shadows. I guessed that Jane’s death had turned to a mutilation.
Another long sequence of still shots, long enough for the watcher to remain, unobserved, as Jane’s killer abandoned her body. Then the figure on the fire escape came forward, stepping onto the counter-weighted stairs, descending step by step, his every feature captured by Frazier’s camera.
I turned to Ajax. He shrugged. Whoever it was, my partner didn’t recognize him any more than I did.
But we had a witness, and we had an image. Better yet, it wasn’t an unrecognizable blur. The mysterious watcher was an adult male Mollenkampi. He was gangly, taller than most, with dark brown, almost black head plate speckled with bright blue speckles.
“He look familiar to you?” I asked. “I kind of think I’ve seen him before.”
“Not really,” said Jax. “But that expression tells me something about his character.”
Nodding, I looked back at the figure, lingering at the bottom of the screen as he pushed the dumpster back into place. With the casual way he’d waited for Jane’s killer to finish before waltzing past her still-warm body, it was a good bet that he wasn’t a stranger to violence. Or the criminal justice system.
I rubbed my hands together in mock excitement.
“Let’s break out the mug shots.”
* * *
It was another few hours of combing through photos before we found a match. On an open book, surrounded by half-empty carry-out containers, we found a match for the face we’d freeze-framed on the TV.
The man on the fire escape was a thug named Anson. He’d come to the city five years earlier, and had known connections to the CaCuri organization. We sat at our cluttered meeting room table and attempted to force the various pieces of the puzzle to fit.
“He’s tied to the CaCuris.” I pointed at the figure on the screen. “But Dungan said he thought the Harlq boss Anders was behind our dismembered friend in the wash.” I swung my finger toward my partner. “And you think it looks nothing like a Harlq killing.”
“Exactly,” said Jax. “And the pathologist reported St. Beisht had been killed elsewhere. Which means Anson chose to put the corpse someplace it’d be found.”
“Found but scrubbed in bleach.” I scratched the salt and pepper stubble coming in on my neck. “This Anson guy wanted the world to know St. Beisht was dead, but still give himself some cover.”
“The way he hung out on the fire escape,” said Jax. “I don’t think he was planning on running into the scene with Jane. That indicates the killings aren’t related.”
I grunted an agreement, still trying to remember where I recognized Anson’s face from. “And we didn’t pick him up entering the building, so he likely came in the front door.” The mention of the alley triggered a memory of Dungan thumbing through his accordion files, showing us the faces and snapshots of gangsters.
“St. Beisht’s bodyguard,” I said. “That’s where I’ve seen this guy before.”
Jax hummed, uncertain.
“What would happen,” I said, “to a mobster bodyguard whose charge gets knocked off?”
My partner rolled his shoulders. “Nothing good.”
“So Anson needs to disappear,” I said.
“But first he wants his bosses to know that St. Beisht is dead?” Jax sighed, a musical tinkle through dagger-like teeth. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Does it need to make sense?” I asked. “We find him and get the details of Jane Doe’s murder. I don’t care why he was there.”
“So where is he, and how do we make him talk? I don’t think either of us wants Dungan to know we’re onto this.”
“No.” I leaned forward, peering at the video machine. “Whatever he’s up to, it’s only going to complicate things for us.”
I hit Rewind, and watched time spool backward, watched Jane come back into view, smile and insult the camera, and begin stripping her artwork off of the alley wall. One by one the portraits disappeared, until she worked on the image of a pair of twins. I hit Pause, freezing the moment in time.
“This Anson character has a record,” I said. “Let’s find out if his parole officer knows how to find him.”
“Okay.”
“He’s a witness to Jane’s murder. And he’s likely the guy who stashed St. Beisht in the laundry.”
He watched me, fingers drumming on the chipped surface of the conference room table, waiting to see where I was headed.
I nodded slowly, easing into the ask. “I know you don’t like talking about the Harlqs . . .”
Jax didn’t raise his head. “It’s where the case led.” He sighed, a whistling mournful tune that I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt. Then he stood and headed for the door, never once meeting my eye. “I’ll make some calls. No guarantees.”
“Without Dungan knowing?”
His eyes widened. “That’d be tricky. OCU will have surveillance on the Harlqs day and night.”
“It’d save us a lot of headaches,” I said. “We don’t need Dungan running this up the chain of command.”
He made an irritated, trilling noise with both mouths. “I’ll try.”
“Okay, but—”
“I’ll make the calls, Carter.” He said it louder, with no room for argument. His eyes moved back to the TV, where we’d watched Jane’s last moments, and he breathed out some of the tension. “If I can make it happen, it’ll happen.”
“Alright,” I said. “That’s all I can ask.”
But I wasn’t sure it was all we’d need. Not if we were going to fight through the levels of bureaucracy and corruption that infested Titanshade from the temperate warmth of the city’s core to the snow-dusted Borderlands at the ice plains’ edge. From Bryyh’s well-intentioned reassignment to Dungan’s questionable motives, I figured it was only a matter of time before we burned every bridge we’d ever crossed.
21
THE NEXT
DAY, JAX AND I drove to Coffin Corners to find ourselves a Harlq.
We rumbled along in silence, neither of us wanting to talk about what we were getting ourselves into or the possible motives behind Dungan’s game. Jax was behind the wheel. We’d spent most of the morning making calls from various pay phones. I’d been trying to track down Anson’s parole officer, while Jax had been negotiating a meeting with the local Harlq leader. It was important to find a location Dungan and his OCU buddies weren’t likely to have wired. There was still the chance we’d be seen, but there was absolutely no reason to have the conversation preserved on audiotape.
Coffin Corners was a fashionable neighborhood, named after the odd architecture of the building that dominated its busy five-points intersection. In truth, the building was simply a tapered hexagon, and likely wouldn’t have been perceived as coffin-shaped anywhere with a less grim view of the world. Then again, we cremated our dead or left them on the north face of the Mount to be picked apart by Sky Shepherds, so maybe Titanshaders simply didn’t know what a coffin was supposed to look like.
Jax pulled up near a no-parking sign and killed the engine. “This is the place. Our contact should be inside.” He set the roof cap siren on the dash to avoid a ticket, and opened his door.
“Hold on,” I said. “First we gotta have the talk.”
He leaned back, letting the door almost shut. “I had the talk when I was younger. And, frankly, I don’t think you even know where Mollenkampi babies come from.”
“You didn’t want to get involved with the Harlqs,” I said. “And I know that’s it’s been tough for you to set up this interview.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I know I said you didn’t have to tell me why, as long as it didn’t impact an investigation.”
He tipped his head to one side. “Yeah . . . I don’t think that’s actually what you said.”
“But here we are.” I crossed my arms. “And now I need to know.”
“It’s just that you make yourself sound a lot more sympathetic than the way I remember that conversation going.”
“Kid,” I said, louder than I needed to. “You gotta tell me.” I held his gaze, waiting him out. After a moment he sighed, adjusted the rearview mirror to keep a visual on the restaurant, and started talking.
“I told you the Harlq Syndicate struggles in smaller towns?”
I nodded. I remembered our breakfast at Gretta’s just fine.
“It’s because the outsiders stand out more. Small towns sometimes take care of these things themselves.” He rubbed his eyes, as if banishing visions of old memories.
“Meaning what? Vigilantes?” I hoped I sounded sympathetic as he continued.
“The Harlq bosses in Kohinoor were killed by shopkeepers and crossing guards who got their courage up with whiskey.” Jax sighed. “And you know what? I didn’t like it, but I could’ve slept at night,” he stared at the mirror, watching the restaurant past a never-ending parade of shoppers and street hustlers, “if it had stopped there.”
“It never does.”
“I suppose they felt like heroes. Like they were on the side of justice. When they ran out of gangsters, they took out people who helped the Harlqs. Then people who they thought would’ve helped the Harlqs eventually. By the end, it was just people settling old grudges.”
“You had to stop them,” I said.
He nodded.
“So it worked,” I said. “The Harlqs were out of town. The vigilantes were stopped. Happy ending?”
I asked it out of a sense of obligation. Because of course I knew the answer. The only happy endings are in storybooks.
“We arrested the ringleaders, the ones most out of control. Things calmed down,” he said, “and we all patted ourselves on the back. I put in for Detective, on the heels of helping to clean up the mess.”
The first time I’d met Ajax he’d told me he’d made detective only a couple weeks earlier.
“You left town right after that,” I said. “Came to Titanshade. Why?”
“You ever read a paragraph in a poorly written textbook? You get through the whole thing and realize you didn’t process any of it.” He glanced at me. “Look who I’m asking.” Jax chuckled, but it was an empty sound, and he let his mandibles droop. “I should’ve known what was coming.” He gripped the steering wheel, arms braced as if heading for impact. “Remember when I said that Harlq recruits are shipped off to other cities, a combination of foot soldiers and hostages?”
“Yeah.”
“Families started getting packets in the mail.” He drew a ragged, jangling breath. “Photos of their kids and cousins, who’d gone off to join the Harlq organization. Executed in front of their peers.”
He turned in his seat and looked me in the eye.
“Now you know why I don’t like the Harlqs.”
He didn’t slam the door as he got out of the car, but he didn’t close it gently, either.
* * *
The Crown Block was a nice sit-down restaurant. The kind of place with a friendly host and hostess to show you to your seat. And when we told them we were meeting friends, they simply smiled and took our word for it. We were only a few tables in before we were intercepted by a young Gillmyn who I assumed was Jax’s contact.
On the short side for his Family, the Gillmyn wore flared tan slacks and a blue satin shirt with looping red-and-orange patterns embroidered on either breast.
“Come with me,” he said. “We’re already running late.” He immediately walked toward the back of the restaurant, and we fell in alongside him. We tromped through the main eating area, past all the normal-looking families and couples enjoying lunch. He acknowledged my presence, but spoke to my partner. “You’re Ajax, right?” he asked.
Jax nodded.
“Man, it’s really great to meet you. I’m Weston, but everybody calls me West. I’m from Norgaerev, and I can’t tell you how much—”
“I know,” Jax cut him off. “You told me earlier, on the phone.”
“Yeah, okay.” He grinned, almost toppling a service tray as a server emerged from the kitchen. “I’m really indebted to Miss Ruena. She’s how I got this position with Echo Unchained.”
“Echo Unchained?” I said. Neither Jax nor West responded to my question.
“She’s been a huge influence on me, you know? She’s like the lead in this book she gave me, The Ringmaster’s Secret. She’s just got so many layers going on.”
“Betrayal,” Jax said. “It’s called The Ringmaster’s Secret Betrayal.”
“Right! You totally get it. Anyway,” the kid barely took a breath between sentences, “she’s been huge for me, and I’m happy to help out any way I can.” He led us toward a pair of Mollenkampi flanking an open archway leading to a private dining area. We maintained our pace, but now flipped out our badges. I tucked mine into my breast pocket. The two thugs exchanged a glance and shifted their feet, ready for a confrontation.
West raised his hands. “It’s cool, guys. They’re with me!”
Jax stepped past him and addressed the guards. “We’re expected.”
One of them leaned into the room and, eyes still on us, called out something in Kampi. I didn’t hear the response, but the muscle men faded back, and we entered the darkened room.
The private space was sized for large family gatherings or corporate lunches. This day only a single table was occupied. A Mollenkampi man sat before a lavish meal spread out on a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. He was flanked by another pair of guards, a Mollenkampi and a Gillmyn who looked older than the pair at the door. West circled the edge of the room to stand next to them. The man at the table was who we’d come to see—Anders, the Harlq boss who Dungan claimed wanted St. Beisht dead.
Anders had watery eyes that passed over us briefly before he muttered, “Let them be,” to his companions. Then, louder, t
o us: “What can I do for you, gentlemen?”
The Harlq boss wore a casual shirt, unbuttoned to mid-chest, and a dark blue sport coat with thick shoulder pads and buttons the same bright gold as the band of his wristwatch, which itself was decorated with precious stones. His biting mouth clenched slowly as he waited for our response, and there was the glint of gem studs set in his jagged teeth as well. Not a man afraid of appearing overly showy.
“Just a few questions,” I said as Jax and I took seats at the table, angling ourselves so that both the bodyguards behind Anders and at the door were in sight. “Does the name Anson mean anything to you?”
Considering Jax’s feelings about the Harlqs, I figured it’d be best if I did the talking. Anders seemed to have other plans.
He answered my question with a curt, “No,” while staring at Ajax, as if deciding what to do with him.
I tried again. “He never did any work for you?”
Anders kept his eyes on Jax. “You gonna say something, or does your keeper do the talking for you?” He indicated me with a jab of his fork.
I pulled out Anson’s mug shot and placed it in the middle of the table. “This may jog your memory.”
He shook his head, still talking to Jax. “You don’t got your family temper, do you, kid?”
Ajax didn’t answer, and Anders spoke to the Gillmyn who stood two paces away.
“Lou, this is Two-Tongue Ruena’s nephew. You know her?”
The guard shook his head, still silent but peering at Jax with curiosity. For my part, I stared straight ahead, doing my best to not let surprise show in my face or body language.
“Eh, you know of her, I bet.” Anders looked back at Jax. “But what I’m wondering is if she knows you’re here. I’m also wondering if she knows you used her name to get in to see me.”
Near Anders’s guards, West uncrossed his arms, head swiveling as he looked from his boss to Jax, who finally broke his silence.