That struck me as unusual. Bob McClatchy worked in an environment that was chock-full of people who were already sworn to protect him. He’d only have hired out if he felt his life as seriously threatened.
Maybe Destry’s mind breaking spell had made him more paranoid. More full of himself.
Or...maybe there was a legitimate threat?
I looked back up at the open window. Esteban and Vega should’ve just about reached that floor by now, unless they’d had to take the stairs. A stray gust of wind blew the curtains to one side.
A chill ran down my arms as I caught the glimpse of something just inside. A long, narrow black shape.
At that second, before I could even think to shout, flame erupted from the end of that shape.
From high overhead came the dreadful bratatatat of machine gun fire.
Chapter Thirteen
Getting shot at does tend to sharpen your instincts for self-preservation. As soon as I heard the first fusillade, I dove for the cover of the nearby sports coupe, flattening myself against the rear bumper before I realized that I wasn’t the one being shot at this time.
Sounds of shattering glass yanked my attention back towards LAPD headquarters. Most all of the windows belonging to the pair of SUVs parked at the curb had been shattered by sprays of flying bullets. And the barrage kept coming.
One of the uniformed patrolmen at the front of the group took a bullet as he dove for cover. He rolled down the steps to land in a heap on the sidewalk. Lucas Sims went down next, the tall man clutching at his chest as he crumpled to the ground.
The reporter from the Times froze. Bullets whizzed around McClatchy as he grabbed the woman by the shoulder and pulled her back towards the entryway. Lieutenant Ollivar actually managed to draw his gun before he caught a bullet in the arm, the impact spinning the big man around like a top before he went down as well.
The two guys I’d pegged as private security stepped forward and drew their own weapons, but instead of looking for a target, they seized McClatchy and the reporter by shoulder and arm. They manhandled the two back inside the front door and under cover as quickly as possible.
Despite the overwhelming roar of high velocity rounds, the station erupted like an anthill someone had kicked over. Uniformed patrolmen poured out of the side entryways, and a pair of cruisers screeched up out of the garage, disgorging another four officers. I’d never seen a response from the LAPD that was as fast and aggressive.
Suddenly, everything went dead quiet. I got to my knees, peeking over the coupe’s bloodstained spoiler. No more gunfire came from the fifth floor window. The two SUVs still sat sadly at the curb, pockmarked with so many bullet holes they looked like giant black sponges.
I still kept as low as I could. The police that ringed LAPD headquarters all had their weapons out, and were charged up, ready to return fire. Nobody in their right mind would draw attention to themselves right now if they could help it.
Sounds finally began to filter back onto the street. One of the wounded men let out a series of pain-filled moans. Sirens wailed in the background. Somewhere, a car alarm blatted without a reply. Radio chatter echoed off the sides of the concrete buildings as the police made sense of what had happened.
A squad car pulled up cautiously on my side of the street, making way for the first of three ambulances. Luckily, the closest hospital was only a half-dozen blocks away, and it had a trauma ward. Two uniformed policemen spotted me as they got out. Their eyes went wide as they stood protectively behind their open car doors and drew their guns.
My mouth went bone dry. Everyone was still acting on adrenaline; rational judgement was muted for the moment. I cautiously raised my hands. To be fair, I was wearing a strange jumpsuit costume, gloves, and baseball cap from an especially unpopular team. Oh, and I was kneeling next to a fresh, blood-drenched corpse.
To my relief, Esteban’s voice came through loud and clear over the squad car’s radio. “Clarke, Jackson, stand down. You’re drawing weapons on our OME support.”
With notable reluctance, the two officers lowered their weapons. One reached into the car and toggled the switch on the dashboard. “Sergeant Jackson here. Copy that, Detective Esteban.”
“Confirmed. I’ve secured the shooter’s position. I’m sending Detective Vega down. Don’t draw on her, either.”
Jackson confirmed that as well. His companion waved the next two ambulances past and over to the LAPD steps. The first paramedic crew was already out of their bus and treating the downed patrolman. I brought my hands back down and did my best to slow my heart rate. Detective Vega emerged from the building and waved me over.
“My gloves are contaminated,” I said. “Give me a minute.”
She nodded, and spoke while I pulled off the dirty gloves and stuffed them in a biohazard bag from my case. “Sorry. Forgot you were handling the body. This whole thing’s messed up. Detective Esteban wants you to follow me upstairs. He’s hoping you can find something in the shooter’s nest that’ll explain all of this.”
I looked up sharply as I snapped my case closed. Esteban had said ‘I’ve secured the shooter’s position’, instead of something like ‘I have the shooter under arrest’. That told me loads about what I might find – or not find – at the scene.
Vega showed me inside the brownstone’s front entryway. It opened up into a decrepit foyer lit by weak fluorescent bulbs and decorated in 70’s era wood paneling. The chamber held more than a whiff of stale varnish and old mildew. Not surprisingly, I noted that half of the nameplates on the tenant mailboxes were blank.
“Obviously, whoever runs this place is an absentee landlord,” Isabel said, as if sensing my thoughts. “And they’re absent a lot.”
We walked past a glorified freight elevator with a hastily stenciled ‘Out of Order’ sign taped over the buttons. Vega and I took the five flights of stairs, which meant that I ended up seriously gasping for air by the time I got to the top. I decided that I seriously needed to renew my gym membership. Crime scene analysis could be exacting and difficult, but it didn’t lend itself to hardcore cardio workouts.
I covered my nose as we made our way down the fifth floor hallway. It wasn’t the smell that bothered me. Entire ribbons of gray paint had peeled off the long-neglected walls, and I wanted to limit my exposure to lead in the resulting dust particles. We came to a door that hung askew on a single hinge. The other hinge had been broken, and the doorknob dangled from the smashed-in frame.
Esteban looked up and waved me in from where he knelt off to the side. I stepped into welcome sunlight after the gloom of the hallway. The increased illumination didn’t make the place any more attractive. The room was a fifteen-by-fifteen foot square that carried the same varnish and mildew smell. The furnishings were limited to a couple stacks of old newspapers and handfuls of freshly spent brass casings. Instead of peeling paint, someone had tacked up gray striped wallpaper. The stripes, and the lack of furniture, made the place feel more than a little like a prison cell.
Ratty blue curtains hung at the sides of a large, open window. A rifle tripod sprawled like a crushed spider in front of that same window. The top of the stand cradled an evil looking, snub-nosed gun. I gave Esteban a curious glance. The look on his face was a mixture of puzzlement, anger, and frustration.
“Vega and I had just started up the stairs when we heard the gunfire,” he explained. “Once we got up here, I had to break the door down to get in. I kicked the weapon’s stand over, but that was an afterthought. The shooting stopped as soon as we entered.”
Now I understood the look of frustration. “No shooter?”
“Afraid so.”
I set my case down. “I should be able to find prints on the weapon’s trigger, at least.”
“The door was locked from the inside,” Esteban said suddenly. “There’s no other exits I see in here other than the window, and that had a couple dozen eyeballs on it within a few seconds of the shooting.”
I nodded. I’d been one of tho
se watching, as a matter of fact.
“Right. Nobody exited that way.”
“I sent Vega down the hall to the emergency roof exit,” Esteban said. “Nothing there either, not a trace.”
“Nobody could have gotten out of here!” Vega fumed. “That gun was firing right up to the very second we broke that door down. Qué chingados! There simply wasn’t any time to get out of the room!”
“Settle down,” Esteban said, though not unkindly. “We didn’t check the adjoining rooms. If we’re missing a hidden way into one of those places, I’ll bet you can spot it there.”
Vega frowned at his suggestion, but she left anyway to check it out.
“That’s a crap idea and she knows it,” Esteban muttered. “But you need to know. This is a MAC-10 machine pistol that someone rigged up to fire in full auto mode. It’s been well taken care of – so much so that every surface has been polished to a black shine. And I’m not seeing so much as a thumb print or a glove mark on it.”
I stared at him. “What are you thinking?”
“That kind of disappearing act...it’s almost magical, don’t you think?”
My stomach turned into a cold lead weight as I considered what Esteban had just said. And the fact that he could very well be right.
“You think we have someone else crossing over? The way Magnus was doing when he shot at me?”
“We’ve got to consider the possibility.”
“Damn it!” I cursed. “Everyone in Andeluvia’s already jumpy at the prospect of this ‘Old War’. Me too, as a matter of fact. Now, there could be a shooter from that world running wild in ours?”
“Not running wild,” Esteban corrected me. “This was very deliberate. And isn’t it more than a little coincidental that Deputy Chief Robert McClatchy happened to wander into the field of fire?”
“You think that someone’s targeting Bob?” I gasped. “The dream I had, the one with Destry. Could he have contracted with someone, maybe set this up?”
“I don’t know, because you’re the expert on pooka between us. Can a dream horse hire a contract killer? Can they set up and teleport out of a locked room? And for that matter of fact, can a pooka toss a gang enforcer out the window right before they play the assassination card?”
“Dear God,” I said. “This makes no sense! Pookas don’t hire hit men, or tote around machine pistols. They use magic, it’s all they know!”
Esteban froze. His eyes went wide, staring over my shoulder. It was the exact same look that people have on their faces when the monster is behind their friend, ready to pounce. I turned around, expecting the worst.
Detective Isabel Vega stood in the ruined doorframe, her arms held tight across her chest.
“Well, this is getting interesting,” she said, as she looked suspiciously at both of us. Her eyes settled on Esteban’s face. “I’m hearing talk of ‘dream horses’ and ‘magic’. That’s certainly not what we usually discuss when investigating a shooting. So, partner, how about you start telling me what the hell is going on?”
Chapter Fourteen
Esteban went instantly poker-faced when it became clear that Vega had heard at least part of our conversation. His eyes flicked over to me but his partner took a couple of steps forward, placing herself directly between us. She made a flat, authoritative gesture with her hand.
“No, don’t look to Dayna on this one,” she said sternly. “I asked you, Detective Esteban, and I want to hear the answer from you.”
He cleared his throat. “If I tell you the truth, you’re only going to say that I’m crazy.”
“Try me.”
“Okay,” he said, with a theatrical exhale. “Several months ago, Dayna was transported away to a magical land, a land where the king had been murdered. She was brought in as a forensic investigator, in order to solve the case. Ever since then, she’s been making friends with magical creatures, some of whom have shown up here and caused problems. We were just discussing whether one of them, a big black horse called a ‘pooka’ could be involved.”
Vega leaned in close to him, her face a textbook illustration of a scowl.
“Pura mierda,” she spat. “Crazy? I don’t think so. Whatever little code word game you and Dayna have going, if it gets in the way of our work, then I’ll get myself transferred. Save us both the trouble.”
She turned and stalked out.
“That went well,” Esteban said wryly.
“You do have to give her points for being direct,” I admitted. “If I were in her shoes, I might feel the same way. I think I just got lucky that Shelly accepted the idea as easily as she did.”
“Didn’t she have a nervous breakdown first?”
“True, that probably softened things up a bit. And she had a talking owl to spell it out for her.” I considered for a moment. “Look, I’ll do a sweep of the room, and then take the gun in for extensive fingerprint analysis. Maybe I can build a case that the weapon was fired using transparent fishing line or something. If Isabel decides to make a fuss, I’ll tell them that I said, ‘Whoever did this made it look like magic’.”
“She’s not going to make a fuss; I’m sure of that. But unless she sees a griffin, or one of your other friends, in the flesh she’s not going to trust me like before.”
“I’m sorry, Alanzo. I didn’t mean to stick a wedge between you and your partner.”
He gave me a look. “Don’t be. I’d rather have Vega mad at me than have her meet some of the creatures you work with. Shelly and McClatchy haven’t exactly benefited from the experience.”
“Touché.” I glanced at the tripod again. “When you get downstairs, see if you can call in an Ordinance Technician. There’s got to be one of them in that crowd out there.”
“You don’t want someone from the OME to handle this?”
“The OTs on your staff just got a shipment of storage cases lined with Kevlar. Big ones. They should have a case that can fit around the entire assembly up here. I’ll fill out the transfer slip to have it shipped to our ballistics lab.”
“I’m make sure you get what you need.” With that, he left in Vega’s wake.
I sighed heavily, rubbing my temples to stave off the headache that threatened to blossom there. Then I opened my case, got out a new set of gloves, and began a careful sweep of the room from top to bottom. I didn’t find anything for a while except for handfuls of nine-millimeter brass casings. Then, I found a couple of black hairs. Even to the naked eye, the edges weren’t jagged or flat, meaning that these had been naturally shed, not cut off with scissors or a razor. Encouraged, I kept tagging and bagging everything I found, putting my trust in my training.
The cornerstone of every crime-scene investigator’s faith was Doctor Edmund Locard's principle: Every contact leaves a trace. Simply by walking through a room, a person lost skin cells, shed hair or eyelashes, or dropped fibers from their clothing. Everyone left traces, from the objects they touched, to the tool marks left behind, to the glass they broke...
I stopped in my visual sweep as I spotted a tiny red flake lying on the floor by one of the overturned tripod’s feet. I snagged it with a pair of tweezers and popped it into one of my sample bags. Then I held it up to the light.
I thought at first that the red flake was a leaf that had blown in, or perhaps a stray carpet fiber. But this quarter-inch bit of whatever-it-was proved stiff and translucent. If it was a flake of glass, then it didn’t come from this room. In fact, none of the surfaces in the room were anything close to the paprika-colored shard.
Nothing from my experience in Los Angeles jogged my mind as to what the substance might be. Neither did anything from Andeluvia, for that matter. I hurriedly tucked it away, like something I had to be ashamed of, as soon as the Ordinance Tech arrived. After the slip-up with Detective Vega, my reflex was to err on the side of caution for a while.
* * *
It took more than twenty minutes to extricate the OME van from the half block between Second and Third Streets. I had to get
Detective Esteban to verbally approve my getting the van back in the first place – some idiot wanted to impound every single vehicle on the block as ‘evidence’. Then, I had to proceed at a damnably slow stop-and-go pace between the dozens of people who’d managed to congregate in the traffic-free zone.
Patrolmen, seeking out assignments on the most interesting case of the day. Traffic officers, who wanted to completely control their twenty feet of road. Television journalists from every news agency in Southern California, either setting up to do background reports, or accosting any civilian emerging onto the street to get an ‘eyewitness’ interview. And on top of that, the OME had sent a second van into the chaos to bag and tag the corpse I’d examined.
With the disruption caused to the downtown traffic patterns, it took close to another half-hour just to get back to the OME building. So, I decided to put healthy eating on the back burner as soon as I lugged my sample case in through security. I found a corner break room past where the sign for the forensics department still carried the faint ‘Labs ‘n Slabs’ graffiti.
Once there, I force-fed the vending machine cash until it spat out a six-pack of miniature frosted doughnuts and a cup of coffee. The latter had a decent flavor, but the chocolate on the pastries tasted like mud-colored candle wax. I managed to melt it off my tongue with the application of a second cup of extra-hot coffee.
Fed, if you could call it that, I brought in my sample bags and set them on the shift table. Luckily, this time it was actually staffed. I’d been using the lab’s services to supplement my own examinations ever since I’d moved to one-third time. I needed the help. Otherwise, the paper piles in my office would build to the point they would collapse my desk.
A petite young woman named Lee Myun-Hee sat at the desk that doubled as an impromptu service counter. Her fingers were ablaze at the keyboard as she entered in data. She looked up and smiled faintly as she recognized me.
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