“Ordinarily?” Dulcie repeated.
I turned from the less-than-impressive view outside my window and faced her, finding her beauty unparalleled. She was sitting with one leg crossed high over the other, and her hair cascaded down one of her shoulders. Her expression was serious, but curious at the same time, and the way she was slightly bent forward allowed me to see her swollen cleavage above her bra through the gap of her uniform blouse. “You have no idea how incredibly sexy you are,” I said, my voice coming out blistery and deep.
She looked like she was about to say something snide, no doubt, when she simply bit her lower lip and swallowed hard instead. We just stared at each other for a few seconds as I made my way toward her, watching her chest rise and fall with her increased breathing. When I reached her, I knelt down, and still staring at her, trailed my index finger down the incredibly soft skin of her temple to her cheek and her jaw. I was suddenly overcome with the need to lean into her and inhale her intoxicating scent.
“Ordinarily…,” she prodded in a soft voice, reminding me of our conversation.
I allowed my finger to drop from her jaw, down her neck before reaching her collarbone and tracing it to the junction of her sternum. “Ordinarily, I would agree,” I whispered as I leaned into her ear and kissed her neck. “But in this instance, it’s an impossibility.”
“Why is Stone Angel not worth a second look?” she responded in a breathy voice.
“Because,” I continued, trailing kisses down her neck to her chest as I unfastened the top two buttons of her blouse and pushed each side open, making room for my face. As I leaned in and kissed the swells of her breasts, I felt drunk on the aroma of her skin. It was a fragrance that belonged uniquely to her. “Because even though Stone is in prison, he’s also in a coma.”
“A coma?” Dulcie repeated, the shock evident in her open mouth and her wide eyes.
“He has been for years, and as such, I don’t consider him much of a threat,” I finished as I unfastened the next three buttons on her shirt and buried my face in her cleavage.
“Knight,” she started in a worried tone while attempting to push my head away, “we can’t do this in your office.”
I glanced up at her and smiled. “Why not?”
“Because someone might see us!” she exclaimed as she tried again to push me away. Looking up at the door, which was open wide, I stood up, closed it, and locked it before returning my attention to the beautiful woman sitting in my office whose face was flushed pink.
“Now no one is going to see us,” I said, glancing over at the windows, which were already covered with tightly closed shades.
“Still,” she started as she shook her head, “it isn’t exactly professional.”
“Nothing to worry about, Dulcie. It’s just you and me,” I finished as I leaned down. Gripping her chin, I lifted her face upward so I could kiss her. She started to say something, but the words died on her lips as soon as I caressed them with my tongue. I felt her loop her arms over my head as I ran my fingers through her soft, beautiful hair. “God, you make me crazy,” I whispered.
She laughed, and I pulled away from her just so I could see her smile. “I can absolutely say the same thing about you,” she teased before kissing me encouragingly again.
“Do you know how hard it is to concentrate around here with you sporting these curves?” I continued as I ran my hand down her breasts, following the contour of her waist, and finally ending with my palm cupping her taut backside.
“How long have I worked here now?”
“Long enough to impede my work progress,” I grumbled as I freed her blouse from her pants and worked my hands up her back, stopping briefly to massage her shoulders before I unhooked her bra. I pulled it free and felt myself grow instantly erect as soon as my gaze settled on her gorgeous, full breasts.
The shrill ring of the phone made me nearly jump out of my skin. Dulcie laughed at my reaction as I shook my head and tried to calm my thumping heart. “For F’s sake,” I started as I turned to the office phone, which continued to ring. “Who the hell is calling me at this hour?”
Dulcie just shook her head as she sighed and motioned to the phone, urging me to “answer the damned thing, already!”
“Knightley Vander,” I said in a none-too-friendly tone after picking up the handset.
There was heavy breathing for a second or two. “‘On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me, eleven snipers sniping,’” a deep, robotic voice rang out.
“Who the fuck is this?” I answered, narrowing my eyes.
The sound of the dial tone followed. I shook my head, and it felt like slow motion as I replaced the handset back onto the cradle. I didn’t say anything for a while, but replayed the message over in my head.
“Who was it?” Dulcie asked as she put her bra back on. Apparently, she’d sensed that any previous sexual thoughts were instantly ejected from my head as soon as I received the call.
“I don’t know,” I said as I shook my head and took a deep breath.
“Okay, sooo what did he or she say?”
“I think it was a ‘he,’ but I’m not one hundred percent sure. Whoever it was, he was using a voice changer, so he sounded like a robot or a monster or something,” I said, feeling my eyebrows drawing together in confusion and frustration.
“What did he say?” Dulcie repeated.
I shrugged. “He repeated a line from ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas.’” I finally brought my attention to her face. “‘On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me, eleven snipers sniping.’” I took a deep breath. “That was it. Then he hung up.”
She nodded and was quiet as she fastened the last button of her blouse before tucking it back into her pants. “Do you think it was a message from the attacker?”
“Who knows?” I said, throwing my arms into the air as if to say I had no answers. “Whether it was the sniper or only an imposter, who the hell knows?” Whatever it was, though, I couldn’t deny that the call had agitated me, making me a little nervous. Nervous because I didn’t like being on the uninformed side, and whenever I got abstract leads like this one, they really didn’t leave me with much other than frustration.
“Eleven snipers sniping,” she continued as she narrowed her eyes and appeared thoughtful, even contemplative. “Whoever it was would have to be pretty comfortable with the details of the case, especially the cards that we keep finding on every victim. And last I checked, the press hadn’t made too much of it.”
I nodded. “You’re right.” I glanced at my desk calendar and swore. “The eleventh is tomorrow.”
“All of the Christmas cards have been out of order, Knight,” Dulcie protested. “Eleven snipers sniping could have nothing to do with December eleventh.”
“Maybe but maybe not,” I argued. “It could be that our sniper is trying to throw us off his scent by making it appear like nothing is organized.”
Dulcie took a big, showy breath. “Okay, do you want me to increase patrols here and in Estuary and Haven?” she asked, referring to the surrounding communities of Splendor.
“Yes, increase patrols and make sure every regulator and junior regulator is working. I want everyone on the lookout.”
I pulled a pad of paper out from the top drawer of my desk and jotted down the date, the time of the call, and the ominous words. Then I reached for the desk phone and, turning it on, wrote down the phone number that appeared as the most recent call on the caller ID. I faced my computer and clicked the icon on my desktop that enabled me to search the phone number, and I entered it. It took a few seconds for the program to return the information. “It was a call made from a pay phone,” I said.
“Which pay phone?” Dulcie asked.
I was quiet for a second as I searched the entry for the location. “It’s the pay phone right outside this building,” I answered, my voice sounding hollow. “Son of a bitch.”
I stood up and started pacing the room as I clasped my ha
nds behind my neck and breathed heavily. Then I reached for my jacket, which was hanging over the chair back, as I started for the door. “I’m gonna go check it out, see if our surveillance cameras caught anything. The guy obviously has balls of steel to call me on my office phone from the goddamned pay phone across the street!”
“I’m coming with you,” Dulcie announced as she stood up.
It didn’t take us long to make our way downstairs and exit the building. When we emerged outside, a cold wind blew through the trees, rattling the naked branches like a skeleton dancing. I spotted the pay phone immediately. It stood across Main Street and on the corner of Predue Street. Not surprisingly, it was empty. I whipped my cell phone from my pocket and speed-dialed the forensics unit.
“It’s Vander,” I said after Mannie, one of the forensics team members, answered. “I need the pay phone across from Headquarters dusted for prints…now.”
“You got it,” Mannie said as I hung up and slipped the phone back into my pocket.
I turned to face Dulcie. “Let’s make the rounds and see how many of these businesses have surveillance cameras that might have picked something up.” She simply nodded and started down one side of the street, while I started down the other, hoping and praying that we’d uncover something.
Three hours later, we had surveillance footage from two of our own cameras and two from buildings across the street that overlooked the pay phone. One of our cameras was set up to record goings-on at the rear of Headquarters, which was also a good two hundred feet from the pay phone, so I wasn’t exactly surprised when it didn’t reveal anything interesting. The other camera was set up to shoot video directly across the street, with the pay phone smack-dab in the middle of its viewfinder. That was the one I was hopeful about.
I loaded the video onto my computer and fast-forwarded through the frames until I reached the stills from the top of the hour, which was roughly thirty minutes prior to my receiving the worrying phone call at 8:29 P.M. Given that it was dark outside when the cameras were recording, I had only the light from the streetlamps to go on, which didn’t exactly make it easy to decipher much. Scrolling through the frozen frames, I paused once I thought I made out the figure of a man, completely dressed in black. He appeared to be wearing a hoodie and walking down Main Street with his chin held down, as if up to no good. Red, green, and silver flashes of light surrounded him as the light from the streetlamps reflected against the Christmas ornaments and tinsel hanging among the greenery that decorated the windows and door of one of the stores on Main Street.
“Hello, Mr. I-Could-Be-The-Sniper,” I said as I leaned forward, peering at the man and hoping we’d found our assailant. Dulcie hovered over my shoulder as I clicked “play” on the footage. The man ambled down the street and walked right past the pay phone, as if not even noticing it, before continuing on his merry way.
“Hmm,” Dulcie said as I fell back into my chair and sighed, shaking my head.
“He definitely looked the part, didn’t he?” I asked. She just nodded with a slight laugh. She fell silent as soon as a stocky woman appeared on-screen, dressed in a rockabilly sort of fashion with a short-waisted red blouse and a high-waisted pair of jeans that ended just above her ankles. She had on black Mary Jane flats, and her bright red hair was pulled up underneath a black-and-white-checked handkerchief. Dark black catlike sunglasses and short black gloves completed her look. She held her head up high and clasped a multicolored clutch in one hand, and a matching change purse in the other.
She didn’t waste any time in entering the phone booth. Then she propped her clutch against the window and fished through her change purse until she produced some quarters, which she immediately dropped into the coin slot. She lifted the handset and stood there for a few more seconds, waiting while the phone rang. After saying a few words, she hung up and stepped out of the booth, immediately heading north up the street.
“She couldn’t have been the caller,” I said, shaking my head in frustration. “She wasn’t using a voice changer.”
“She wasn’t a woman,” Dulcie replied. Her eyes scrutinized the image of the woman as she disappeared around the corner. “Rewind the footage,” she ordered, leaning closer to the monitor and pointing her index finger at the screen. “There,” she said. I paused the reel at the section where the “woman” first entered the phone booth. “How tall is a phone booth?” she asked, facing me with raised brows as I realized where she was going with this.
I shrugged. “I don’t know, seven feet?” I really didn’t know, so I hopped online and Googled “phone booth dimensions.” Clicking on the Wikipedia entry, I reaffirmed my hunch. “Eighty inches tall.”
“Okay, so just under seven feet,” she continued. I pulled up the surveillance footage again, and we both focused on the woman. “She nearly hit her head when she walked through the opening,” Dulcie finished.
I sighed. “True, but aren’t there tall women out there?”
She glanced at me and frowned. “Women who are as tall as you are?” Then she laughed without humor. “Not likely.”
“Good point, but it’s not enough.”
“Look at her feet,” Dulcie continued. “That shoe has to be at least a men’s eleven—it’s frickin’ huge!” She took another breath. “And if you still don’t believe me, take a look at that enormous Adam’s apple.”
I enlarged the image on-screen, which made it incredibly blurry, but I couldn’t deny that if she were a woman, she had major body issues, because Dulcie was right. Between her immense height, her Sasquatch-like feet, and an Adam’s apple that looked like she was choking on a chicken bone, she might as well have been the subject for “Dude Looks Like a Lady” by Aerosmith. “Okay, so she, er, he’s in drag, so what?” I retorted.
“So since he’s obviously concerned about concealing his identity, wouldn’t he also be concerned about concealing his voice?” Dulcie paused for a second or two, but I didn’t respond. “The answer is yes,” she continued. “And you know how easy it is to find a witch to magic your vocal cords into whatever voice you heard on the phone. That’s like the easiest trick in the book.”
“It’s easier just to purchase a voice changer,” I argued.
Dulcie frowned. “Right, but a voice changer is also way more obvious—it’s clunky and big enough that anyone on the street would have been able to see what he was doing.” She took a breath. “This guy was going for stealth, remember?”
I just smiled at her. “Nice work, Nancy Drew.” I glanced back at the footage and nodded as I came to the conclusion that I agreed with Dulcie—it looked like there was a very good chance that this was our caller. I decided to load the footage from the other two surveillance cameras we’d apprehended, hoping the other angles might offer us information that we couldn’t see with the current footage.
The first camera didn’t really offer us much more than we’d already seen on the Headquarters’ surveillance footage, but the second camera did. The camera belonged to Fashionista, a women’s clothing store located on the corner of Main and Predue Streets. The camera had been set up in such a way that the pay phone was just out of range, but Predue Street wasn’t. In accordance, Dulcie and I were able to make out the image of the she-male as he vacated the phone booth and walked up Predue Street, only to disappear into a white Toyota Corolla that was, of course, missing its plates. Well, it wasn’t so much missing its plates as the plates were simply bewitched, so any onlookers couldn’t make out the letters and numbers.
“Can you zoom in on the license plate?” Dulcie asked.
“It’s pointless,” I answered, although I did as she requested. “The plates have been magically tampered with.”
“Even so, I might be able to tell if Sam could crack the magical code,” Dulcie responded. Sam was our resident witch at the ANC and also Dulcie’s best friend. She was an incredibly gifted witch whose abilities we relied on frequently. Dulcie peered over my shoulder and studied the blurry license plate, which even now was reve
aling numbers and letters disappearing and appearing at will. A few letters moved from left to right, like a scrolling ticker tape on a billboard, just like the one denoting smoking deaths this year. The other numbers and letters just faded in, blinking a few times before fading back out again. Trying to focus on the license plate was a difficult task, to say the least—which was the point of bewitching the thing in the first place.
“So?”
Dulcie shrugged. “It’s definitely magic after the fact—I mean, the car has plates, but whoever they hired to bewitch it, did so in such a way that the numbers and letters only readjust or fade in and out when someone’s trying to read them, either on camera or in person.”
“Seems like a pretty good magical stunt to me,” I said, not embarrassed to admit I was no expert when it came to the parameters of the magical world. Dulcie wasn’t either, but she had managed to pick up some tidbits from her friendship with Sam over the years.
Dulcie shook her head as she smiled. “Elementary, my dear Knightley, elementary.”
I chuckled and stifled the desire to kiss her even though it was a difficult task, considering how much I loved it when she was playful. “So what’s next?” I asked, leaning back into my chair and smiling up at her, while enjoying my view.
“Lemme call Sam and see if she can meet us here.”
“Good luck with that. I doubt she’s going to be happy about being called into work on her day off.”
Dulcie cocked her head to the side and then grinned. “She’ll understand. Besides, this isn’t her first rodeo—she’s been working at the ANC for years, which means she’s spent many a weekend right here.”
“Roger that,” I said as Dulcie reached for my desk phone and dialed Sam’s number. I turned back to my computer, figuring I should rewatch the surveillance footage to see if anything else jumped out at me. As I rewound the reel to the point when the she-male first appeared on the street, I tried to hone my attention to the footage. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I could see Dulcie laughing into the handset of my office phone as she wound the cord around her index finger and talked to Sam.
Eleven Snipers Sniping (A Short Story) (12 Days of Christmas series Book 11) Page 3