Wicked Ways: Death at the DuMond (A Cozy Witch Mystery Book 1)

by Ava Collins

  “No cops. I promise.” I said. “I just need to know the identity of the killer. I’ll build the case from there.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t a cop?” Slim said, his eyes narrowing.

  “I’m not. I swear,” I said. “But my friend is going to take the fall if I can’t find the real killer.”

  Big slim sighed. He pondered this for a few moments. “Tell you what I’m gonna do. You give me your number. I’ll give it to my supplier. Maybe you get a call? Maybe you don’t?”

  My eyes lit up with glee. “Thank you. I really appreciate that.”

  “But if any cops come sticking their noses around here… You’re a dead girl,” Slim said.

  I gulped with fear and nodded. I gave slim my contact information and started to leave. One of the paintings stacked against the wall caught my eye. “Do you, by any chance, know Otto Von Hirsch?”

  Slim’s eyes widened.

  CHAPTER 18

  BANCROFT POUTED FOR the entire ride back to the DuMond. Porter and I had a wonderful conversation. We talked about everything under the sun. Life, love, hopes, and dreams. Bancroft frequently huffed and rolled his eyes.

  I don’t meet a lot of people that I can just talk to. Really talk to. People who have something interesting to say. People who actually listen to what you have to say. Banksy is the only other person I have that with. Well, telepathically with Newport, but that’s different. And Newport isn’t a person. Unless, of course, Newport is a shifter and has been hiding that fact. Anyway, I think Porter and I clicked.

  “If you could look into a crystal ball and see one part of your future, which part would you want to see?” Porter asked.

  “Hmm. That’s a good one,” I said. It took a minute for me to respond. I’ve always felt like life comes down to moments. Ninety percent of life seems to be filler. But the remaining ten percent seems to be what shapes your destiny. It’s the choices you make in this ten percent that defines you.

  “I know it sounds morbid,” I said. “But if I could know anything, I’d like to know how, and when, I will die.”

  “Ooh, that is a little dark.” Porter said. “Wouldn’t you be afraid that would change how you would live your life?”

  “That’s exactly the point. I think that would help me make the most of my time. If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I’d sure try to have a hell of a lot of fun tonight. If I knew I was going to die in ninety years, I wouldn’t worry as much, and I’d eat a lot more cheeseburgers.”

  “Fair enough.” Porter smiled. It was a brilliant smile.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “You know what? You’ve changed my answer.”

  “Really,” I said, curious.

  “I’d want to know when my wife will die.”

  “You’re married?” I blurted out, suddenly terrified.

  Porter chuckled. “No, no. I’m just saying. When I do get married, I’d want to know how much time I have with my wife. So I can make the most of every day.”

  I must have looked like a deer caught in headlights. I melted into the seat. Porter seemed so sweet. Bancroft gagged and pretended to barf.

  “Stop it,” I said, reprimanding Bancroft.

  “What?” Porter said.

  “Oh, not you. You can keep talking,” I said, doe-eyed.

  “I get the impression that your friend doesn’t like me,” Porter said.

  “Oh, no. He’s just… dealing with… ghost issues, at the moment.” My eyes narrowed at Bancroft. He sighed and folded his arms for the rest of the drive. He looked like a sad child, scolded for misbehaving.

  An ambulance was parked in front of the DuMond, bathing it in flickering red and white light. My eyes widened, and my heart sank. It’s never a good thing when an ambulance pays a visit.

  Porter drove up to the front of the building and put the car in park. “Do you want me to stick around?” he asked.

  “No!” Bancroft shouted.

  I could tell Banksy was at his limit. “No, it’s okay. You’ve done so much for us already.”

  Porter handed me his card. “You call me if you need anything. You can call me for no reason at all.” He smiled.

  I took his card and smiled back at him. “Thank you. For everything.”

  Banksy and I slid out of the cab and dashed inside. Several of the residents were huddled in the lobby.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “It’s Isabella,” Elliott said.

  “Is she okay?” I asked.

  Elliott shook his head.

  I raced to the stairwell and spiraled upward. My quads were burning by the time I reached the top of the stairs. I burst through the steel fire door into the hallway. Isabella’s door was open, and EMTs were hovering over her trying to revive her.

  One of the EMTs was doing CPR. He administered chest compressions with blazing speed. The other EMT hooked up the AED (automated external defibrillator). She placed a contact pad just below Isabella’s shoulder and another on the opposite side on her rib cage.

  Once the AED was hooked up, the unit took over. An automated voice issued commands and analyzed the situation. The AED instructed everyone to stand clear. A shock was advised.

  The machine hummed as it charged and instructed the EMT to administer the shock. She pressed the button, jolting Isabella’s body. The other EMT resumed chest compressions. The EMTs repeated this process several times. It was clear that Isabella wasn’t coming back. I burst into tears.

  The EMTs would later tell me that Isabella died of cardiac arrest. Isabella was young and healthy. She was in good shape. Though it wasn’t impossible, cardiac arrest seemed an unlikely cause of death for someone like Isabella. She died in the same way as Mr. DuMond. My mind instantly flashed to the cupcakes.

  Uniformed officers arrived shortly after she passed. They took control of the scene and searched the apartment. But they didn’t seem concerned at all. I was hovering in the doorway when one of the officers yelled at me. “Ma’am, I’m going to need you to step back and clear the doorway.”

  “Has anyone notified Detective Gibbs?” I asked.

  “Ma’am, this person died of natural causes,” the officer said.

  I looked at him in shock. “Natural causes? She was 25 years old.” I inched my way into Isabella’s apartment.

  “In our examination of the situation, we found nothing that would indicate a homicide,” the officer said. “Now, I’m going to need you to clear the area.”

  I huffed and gritted my teeth. “Well, if you’re not going to call Detective Gibbs, I am.”

  “The medical examiner will be here soon. If there’s any evidence of foul play, I’m sure it will be discovered during the autopsy.” He sighed. “If you don’t clear the area, I’m going to arrest you for interfering with an investigation.”

  “Oh, so now it’s an investigation?”

  The officer snapped his handcuffs from his duty belt.

  “I’m going,” I said, backing out of the apartment. Bancroft stayed to nose around. I headed back to my apartment and called Detective Gibbs. My call went straight to voicemail.

  It was almost 4am. I was exhausted, but my mind was racing and there was no way I could sleep. Even though I had an 8am class in the morning.

  Mom was asleep on the couch, with her fingers still on the keys of her laptop. Newport was curled up with her, watching TV. I staggered into my bedroom and went to my nightstand. I pulled open the top drawer. This was where I kept my journal, and other personal belongings, that I didn’t want anybody rummaging through. The cupcakes that Isabella had given me were still in the drawer in a Ziplock bag, right where I had left them. I put them there earlier to keep them safe and out of the way.

  I took a sharpie and wrote on the Ziplock bag: do not eat—poison. Then I put the cupcakes back in the drawer.

  CHAPTER 19

  DETECTIVE GIBBS RETURNED my call late the next afternoon while I was working. I had been trudging through the day like a zomb
ie, with no sleep. We had a pop quiz in my 8am English Literature class. I hadn’t read any of the assigned texts. My grades this semester were taking a sharp nosedive.

  I was messing up orders at Bill’s Burgers. Fries turned into onion rings. Cheeseburgers turned into chicken sandwiches. Nobody was getting what they ordered, and everyone was pissed at me. My tips wouldn’t be enough to buy a cup of coffee. I had two tables walk the tab because I dozed off and took too long to bring the check. And those skipped tabs were coming out of my pocket. My boss wanted to see me after the shift, and I was sure I was going to get fired.

  “I got your message,” Gibbs said. “I’m thinking you might want to consider another line of work.”

  “I agree with you. Waiting tables sucks,” I said.

  “No. I mean, I don’t think you’d make a good detective.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “My officers said that you showed up at the scene, harassing them.”

  “I wasn’t harassing anyone,” I said, calmly. “I was, perhaps, a little insistent that they be thorough.”

  “I heard that you were crying hysterically, demeaning my officers intelligence. Demanding the incident be classified as a homicide.”

  “That is absolutely not the case,” I said. “I was not hysterical. I was merely upset because my friend was dead. I think she has been murdered. And I think your officers have a combined IQ that is still within double digits.”

  Gibbs sighed. “Part of good police work is good teamwork. You don’t seem to work well with others.”

  “Use your phone on your time,” my manager yelled.

  I covered the mouth piece. “Emergency call. Gotta take it.”

  My manager pointed to a four top that just got sat in my section. “Emergency table. Gotta take their order.”

  I darted toward the new table. “So, what did the medical examiner find?”

  “She wasn’t murdered.”

  “What did the toxicology report show?”

  “Trace amounts of Amiodarone HCL.”

  “See, she was poisoned,” I said.

  “Someone got food poisoning here?” a customer asked.

  “No, no. I’m talking about someone who was murdered,” I said.

  “She wasn’t murdered,” Gibbs said.

  “Let’s go,” another customer mumbled. The group got up and left. My manager’s eyes burned into me from across the restaurant.

  “She had a heart arrhythmia. She was on medication for it. Isabella went into ventricle fibrillation, which led to acute cardiac arrest,” said Gibbs. “No homicide.”

  My manager was still glaring at me. He pretended to slit his throat with his finger. I was in big trouble. Then he pointed to his office. He wasn’t going to wait until after my shift to fire me.

  As if the day wasn’t bad enough, somebody had stolen my bike during my shift. I had to walk home after being downsized from the prestigious position of burger wench.

  I staggered back to the DuMond, fretting the entire way about my financial situation. It’s not like I was raking in the dough at Bill’s Burgers, but I was making enough to buy groceries. Now I didn’t even have that. And Mom’s medical bills weren’t getting any smaller.

  The city blocks blurred into one another as I stumbled along in a daze. The sky was gray and growing darker. A storm was rolling in, and I just hoped I’d get home before it rained. It’s hard to say for how long the two men were following me. I first became aware of them when I was about halfway home. Big, thick men. Dark sunglasses. Looked like bouncers at a club. The kind of guys who spend too much time in the gym.

  One had short dark hair. The other had long blonde hair, pulled back into a ponytail. Both of them had fake tans, and looked a little greasy. They kept their distance, several paces back. But I imagined that they smelled of cheap cologne.

  I picked up my pace. They picked up theirs. I was playing cat and mouse all over again. At the next intersection I crossed the street to see if they would follow. Sure enough, they did.

  The downtown street was filled with people shuffling about. I weaved my way through the chaotic crowd. The meatheads were still trailing behind me.

  A black Cadillac SUV passed by me on the street. It was the third time that I had seen it. The last three digits of the license plate read JCX. I had committed that to memory when I got suspicious on its last pass. This was concerning.

  I didn’t to know who these people were, or what they wanted with me. But I wasn’t about to find out. I watched the Cadillac turn right at the next corner, then stop. To more meatheads piled out from the back. They marched toward me. I was cornered.

  The only thing I could do was to dash out into the street—into the traffic. Car horns blared. Tires squealed. I ran and dodged. A taxi skidded toward me. The shrill tone tore at my eardrums. I leapt into the air, onto the hood. If I hadn’t, someone would be peeling my face from the grill.

  The smell of burned rubber filled my nostrils. The hood was scalding from the heat of the engine. I rolled across to the other side, then hit the ground running. The meatheads dashed into the traffic, chasing after me. They weren’t far behind.

  Drivers shouted obscenities at me. I sprinted as fast as I could. These guys were all muscle. They weren’t distance runners. They didn’t do cardio. I figured if they didn’t catch me within the first couple hundred yards, they weren’t going to.

  I slipped and snaked through the crowd. The meatheads were gaining on me, bowling over pedestrians. I blurred past a newsstand and pulled over a magazine rack. It toppled to the ground. The meatheads hurdled it without slowing down.

  My lungs burned and my legs turned to mush. These guys were faster than I anticipated. My heart pounded. I was dripping sweat. I wasn’t so sure about my theory of only having to out run them for a few hundred yards. I couldn’t make it much farther. With no sleep the night before, my body was passed the point of exhaustion.

  I wanted to look back, but I knew it would be a bad idea. That little bit of diverted energy would slow me down. I kept sprinting as fast as I could. But then I had to do it. I looked back over my shoulder.

  One of the meatheads was so close, he reached out his arm to grab me.

  CHAPTER 20

  BIG, THICK HANDS swiped at my collar. The dark haired man was almost on top of me. An old lady on the sidewalk stuck out her cane, tripping the six foot five slab of muscle. His face smacked the concrete. I’m sure he broke a tooth. His lips were drizzled with blood.

  The blonde-haired idiot behind him tripped over the dark-haired man’s body. Grunts and groans filled the air. The two meatheads behind them added to the mound of muscle on the concrete. It was like a massive pileup on a freeway.

  A city bus at the corner was starting to pull away. I dashed toward it and leapt through the doors just before they swung shut. The bus pulled away from the curb. I looked out the window at the meatheads picking themselves up off the ground. They brushed themselves off. The dark-haired man wiped away the blood from his mouth with his sleeve. His eyes blazed into me.

  I waved and smiled.

  He shouted something, but I couldn’t hear.

  “The fare, ma’am,” the bus driver said.

  “Excuse me?” I asked, standing on the steps, holding on to the chrome railing.

  “Everybody’s got to pay the fare,” the driver said.

  I dug into my pockets, but I didn’t have any money. After paying for the two skipped tabs, I was broke.

  The driver pulled to the curb at the next block. The air brakes hissed. The doors creaked open. “No fare, no ride,” the driver said.

  “But, this is an emergency.”

  “Then have your emergency somewhere else. Now get off my bus.”

  Through the bus’s warbled window tint, I could see the meatheads trying to cross the street a block over.

  I flew down the steps to the sidewalk. At least I had a block head start this time. I ran hard, but my legs were rubber. I plunged down the subwa
y steps and hopped the turnstile. I dashed onto the platform, peeling through a mass of people, then squeezed onto the train. The doors closed as I saw the meatheads sprint onto the platform. I waved at them again.

  A transit cop tapped me on the shoulder. He smiled and said, “You’re under arrest, young lady.” Then he slapped the cuffs on me. The cold, hard metal ratcheted around my wrists.

  “But I didn’t do anything.”

  “Theft of service,” he said. “You jumped a turnstile. Violation of Penal Code section 165.15, a Class A misdemeanor. Punishable by up to one year in prison.”

  I swallowed hard. “You’re not serious?”

  “As a heart attack, ma’am.”

  “So, you’re taking me to jail?”

  “You’ll be taken back to the precinct, fingerprinted, and held in custody. If this is your first offense, you’ll be given a Desk Appearance Ticket. If this isn’t you’re first offense, you’ll be taken down to central booking with the rest of the lowlifes.” He grinned.

  I got the distinct feeling he enjoyed this whole process.

  The precinct was grimy. Busy with cops coming and going. Telephones ringing, keyboards clacking, prisoners shouting. I sat in a four by eight foot holding cell for hours. Once white walls were now dingy and peeling, revealing a yellowish-green underneath. If this was supposed to be nice, I’d hate to see central booking.

  It was freezing in the cell, and I shivered constantly. The small space and sensory deprivation were getting to me. If you weren’t crazy when they put you in here, you would be by the time you left. The cell had the faint scent of bleach that tried to mask the stronger scent of vomit and urine. The cell door looked like a giant cheese grater. Through the holes in the crosshatched pattern I could see into the hallway. An officers creed was painted on the wall titled: Core Values.

  The creed was a commitment to duty and honor, respect and dignity, right and wrong, and fairness to all. The department had recently come under fire for prison abuses. According to an article in the New Gotham Times, several officers were indicted for beating inmates and making false arrests. We had discussed the incident in my Ethics in Criminal Justice class.