by Dana Donovan
“Ah, yeah, good one.”
He seemed to think I was kidding, and went on to tell me that Fisher and the vic worked together, but that she left ahead of him. He said the man cried several times while giving his statement, but I wasn’t buying it. I told him to invite Mister Fisher back to the justice center in the morning and I’d get the real story out of him.
“What do you mean the real story?” Dom asked.
I shook my head at his naivety. “Forget it. Is he the one who pulled the fire alarm?”
“No, he claims he was just stepping out of the elevator when it went off.”
“Then who pulled it?”
“Don’t know. We’re dusting for prints now.”
“Where did he say he was he coming from?”
Dominic gave a nod up over his shoulder. “The office building across the street. There’s a covered pedestrian walk on the second level connecting the two buildings.”
“So, these two were working late?”
“That’s what he says.”
“All right then, guess it’s not a botched robbery after all.”
“No?”
“Uh-uh, I’m thinking it’s a lover’s quarrel now; a man and woman working late together, having an affair, she wants it to stop, he doesn’t, so he kills her. You see it all the time.”
Dominic held the evidence bag up and shook it. “Maybe. We’ll check for his prints, of course, but I don’t think he did it.”
“Oh? Why do you say that?”
“Gut instinct. He seems genuinely horrified by the whole thing. Besides, why would he pull the fire alarm?”
“Crime of passion,” I said. “He killed her in the heat of an argument, realized what a terrible mistake he made and so he pulled the alarm to summons help.”
“But he’s got a cell phone. Why not use it?”
“He didn’t think of it.”
“All right then.” Dominic pointed at the chain-link fence stretched between the concrete columns. “Why would he run all the way around the fence to the back side of the garage to pull the alarm there when he could have pulled another box right next to the elevator?”
Okay, it made sense what he said; I admit. He thinks a lot like Tony. I guess that’s why we make such a good team together. “All right, so are you telling me you think someone else killed her and that the killer ran all the way around the fence to pull the alarm?”
He shrugged at that thought. “Don’t know. I’m just going with my gut, Carlos; always listen to the gut.”
“Geez, you know you’re even beginning to sound like Tony now.”
“Yeah?” He smiled at that. “Thanks.”
I laughed. “That’s not necessarily a complement. Trust me.” I checked my watch and saw that we had been there nearly an hour already. “Speaking of Tony, has anyone called him?”
Dominic checked his watch. “I left a message on his cell. He should have gotten it by now. Want me to call him again?”
It had been a year and a half since I started working with Dominic. When we first teamed up, I have to admit I didn’t feel as confident working homicide cases with him as I did with Tony Marcella. But the kid has proven his worth, and in some cases, invaluable. The key difference is that with Tony, I always felt like I was playing second fiddle. With Dominic, I’m always the head enchilada. Call it ego; I guess every good cop has one, but damn it, I like it. I looked at Dominic and shook my head. “No, don’t. If I know Tony, he and Lilith are probably all tangled up in a witch’s knot under the sheets. He’ll call back when he comes up for air.”
Tony Marcella:
I suspected the moment Lilith walked through the door that something was up. She seemed tense and fidgety. When I asked her what’s wrong, she shut me down with just a stare. I figured it best to give her some room and let her wind down, but the longer she was home, the more nervous she became. I saw her walk to the window to look outside no less than six times, and check the lock on the door seven. At one point she went over to the bookcase to refer to the dictionary. For what, I don’t know. I finally took her by the hand and sat her down on the sofa.
“Lilith, please tell me what the hell is going on. Why are you acting so peculiar?”
“Tony, I….” Her breathing grew quick; her hands trembled, and I saw in her eyes something I once thought impossible in Lilith: fear. The notion of anything unnerving her unnerved me.
“Lilith, tell me.”
“I screwed up, Tony. Screwed up big time.”
“Wha…what did you do?”
“I froze. I played my cards like some cool-shit chick, and when it came time to act, I froze.” Her eyes had been wandering—darting around the room as she spoke. But then she suddenly zeroed in on mine and pulled me in with the same stare that only moments earlier shut me down like a train wreck.
“She’s dead,” she said flatly.
My mind went blank. I couldn’t imagine who she meant: the girl downstairs with the balloons the other day, her mother, the woman at the Cyber Café who told Lilith to piss off because Lilith asked her to take her noisy phone conversation outside. Although I thought the score of that one was settled after the woman’s cell phone mysteriously exploded in her ear.
I asked Lilith at the time if she had anything to do with that, but she just smiled and said, “With what?”
I squeezed her hand tighter and shook off the hold that her stare had me under. “Lilith, you have to focus. Look at you. You’re scaring me. Now how about you take a deep breath and tell me everything from the beginning. Does this have anything to do with that phone call you got earlier tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me his name.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to kill me! That’s what he wanted.”
“What! Why?”
“I don’t know. That’s just it.” She pulled free of my hands, stood up and began pacing the floor, wringing her fingers one at a time in nervous secession and counting her steps quietly up and down and back again. I could see her gathering her thoughts, shuffling and reorganizing the events of the last few hours in her head. “He told me he had the gate key,” she said, stopping and pointing at me just long enough to establish that fact before renewing her stride.
“What’s a gate key?”
She pulled a medallion from her back pocket, the pocket that wasn’t just a flap covering her bare ass. “This is a gate key.” She tossed it to me. “That one was given to me by my mother. It’s been passed down through the women in my family for generations.”
I examined the relic, bouncing it in my hand to guesstimate its weight and worth. “Nice. What’s it open?”
She reached down and snatched it from me. “Nothing. It’s not that kind of key.”
“Then what does it do?”
“The markings on it are used in various ways to decipher the riddles of the grimoire. Without it, the book is essentially useless, except for a couple of chants and a few basic spells that every witch already knows anyway.”
“I get it. So it’s called a gate key because it sort of opens the gates of witchcraft to whoever has the key to use it.”
“Bingo. Give that man a cigar.”
“All right, so, if you had this gate key, what key was he talking about?”
“He was talking about my aunt’s key.”
“The Bishop woman.”
“Yes. You see Ursula Bishop had no children of her own. Therefore I’m certain that she would have had her key on her person when they hanged and subsequently buried her. But when I went down to pick up her bones today, they told me they had found no key.”
“Maybe they didn’t. A key like that would have been worth a lot of money to someone back then. It’s possible someone took it from her, either before or after they hanged her.”
“No. You don’t understand. That key is sacred to a witch. There is no way Ursula would have gone to her grave without it.”
“No. It’s more likely it was in her person when they buried her.” Lilith looked down at the front of her jeans and passed her hand discreetly over her private area.
“Oohh, I see.”
“People back then didn’t know the first thing about witches. Everything they thought they knew came from the church and from the wild imaginations of the accusers who sent them to the gallows. No. Ursula had her gate key when they buried her. I’m certain of that. If this man says he has it, he has it.”
I got up from the couch and found myself unconsciously checking the window and the door lock. “Okay, what then? What happened after this man phoned you and you left here?”
“We were to meet at the parking garage downtown. I got there first and waited for him in the shadows behind a fence.”
“And?”
“Just about the time I spotted him, the elevator door opened up and a woman stepped out. Everything happened so fast after that. The man walked up to the woman. He called her Lilith.”
“Thought she was you.”
“Yes.”
“What then?”
“Then he killed her. Stabbed her with a goddamn sword.”
“A sword?”
“All right, maybe not a sword, but a really big knife.”
I started for the phone. “I have to call Carlos.”
“He knows by now, I’m sure. I pulled the fire alarm before I left.”
I stopped and looked over my shoulder at her. I wanted to tell her good job, but the words wouldn’t come. I guess because deep down I was disappointed in her, though I really don’t know why. She couldn’t have known what would happen out there, and she probably couldn’t have done anything to stop it; but then maybe that’s why: because of the probably.
Carlos answered his cell on the third ring. “Tony, where’ve you been? Dominic tried to call you. We got a homicide down here at—”
“Carlos, I know. Lilith told me all about it.”
“Lilith? How’s sh—”
“She was there. Look, it’s a long story. When are you going back to the office?”
“We can head back now if you like. Things are secure here.”
“Great. Do me a favor first.”
“What’s that?”
“Have Spinelli take some photos for me.”
“No need. We have a department photographer here already.”
“Carols, indulge me, will you?”
“All right, fine. We’ll snap a few and head on out.”
“Thanks. I’ll see you there.”
Dominic Spinelli:
After Carlos hung up with Tony, he asked me to take some pictures with my own camera. When I told him I had already done that, he just shook his head and smiled.
“Have I mentioned how you remind me more of Tony every day?” he asked.
I smiled back proudly. “Yes, you have.”
His face fell into a scowl. “Well stop it.”
Before leaving the garage, we met with the guy who manages and maintains the facility: a Mister Melvin King, a nice guy with an easy-going disposition, but a bit of a nervous feller if you ask me. He seemed genuinely disturbed by the event that took place at his facility—said he prides himself on its record of low crime and no vandalism.
“Oh, sure we’ve had a couple of auto break-ins when people were stupid enough to leave shopping packages out in the open on the seats, but…” he shook his head, “nothing like this.”
“We understand,” I said. “Mister King, Detective Rodriquez and I would like to have copies of your security videos from tonight, and we’d also like to see the time registers from your ticket voucher machines.”
“Already have them for you here,” he said, pointing at a neatly packed manila envelope by his office door.”
“Wow, that was quick,” said Carlos.
“It’s all digital now, Detective. I think you’ll find the quality of the video exceptional. I hope you find something helpful.”
“We do, too,” I said. “Thank you.” I looked to Carlos. “Anything else?”
He gave me a look as if to say, would Tony need anything else? And then it came to him. “Yes. Mister King, are there any cameras on the outside of the building?”
Melvin frowned briefly before brightening up as though surprised by the idea. “There is,” he said. “I completely forgot. There’s one mounted out over the garage door facing down the one-way street. It’s on a video loop separate from the others. We installed it last year after a gate crasher bailed out without paying for a two-week stay on level one. Our cameras inside can’t see everything, but that one sees all the cars leaving, since it’s the only way out.”
That made Carlos happy. “May we have the video from that one as well?”
Melvin King obliged, and soon we were on our way back to the Justice Center to meet up with Tony and Lilith, and boy I can’t tell you how excited I was to hear all about that. Just knowing Lilith was somehow involved made me suspect something witchy was at play here. I never imagined, however, that the entire case would revolve completely around her. It made me realize something strange, something I really hadn’t considered before: that Lilith had, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, been involved in virtually every homicide recorded in New Castle over the past several years. Coincidence? I wondered.
Tony Marcella:
Lilith and I were already waiting at the Justice Center when Carlos and Spinelli arrived. They escorted us upstairs to a private conference room where AV equipment had already been set up so that we might review the pictures and security videos they brought back. But first Lilith and I had to bring the two up to date on Lilith’s involvement in the case.
I let her tell them about Ursula Bishop and about the bones the city dug up outside the cemetery. Then she went in to the part about the mysterious caller wanting to meet to discuss Ursula’s gate key. I think that part intrigued Spinelli most of all. Carlos had Lilith slow things down some when she got to the graphic part concerning the murder. She was, after all, talking a mile a minute. If he didn’t ask her to slow down, I would have. Of course then she would have picked on me for being a control freak.
“That’s when I let out a gasp,” she said. “I know he heard me. He turned and looked my way.”
“So, whereas before he obviously didn’t know what you looked like,” said Spinelli, “now he does.”
“Damn straight he does,” she answered. “And it’s a good thing. I want him to know exactly who the hell it is that did it when I vaporize his ass.”
“You can do that?”
She leaned across the table at a dropped jawed Spinelli, and in a hushed, sexy tone said, “Honey, you’d be surprised what I can do.”
He eased back in his chair, his silly smile and his stare not fading for an instant. I waved my hand in front of his face and snapped my fingers. He straightened up and joined the rest of us.
“All right, Lilith, what happened after that,” Carlos asked. “After you saw him kill that woman, what did you do next?”
She jerked her shoulder in a half shrug gesture. “I pulled the fire alarm and left. I came home and told Tony and he called you and well, here we are.”
“So you got a good look at the guy?”
“No.”
“Why not? You said he looked right at you.”
“He did, but from the shadows.”
“So you couldn’t see him?”
“I told you, no.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” said Spinelli. “If this guy doesn’t know you, then why did he want to kill you?”
“Are you kidding?” I said, meaning it as a joke, of course. “Do you even know this woman?”
Carlos and Spinelli scooted their chairs back and away from the table, their reflexes, I must say, more keenly acute than my judgment. But Lilith held her fire, presumably out of respect for the office of the Justice Center, but I’d like to th
ink it was for love.
“Maybe the parking vouchers and video will help us,” Spinelli returned.
“The videos maybe,” said Lilith, “but I doubt the vouchers will. He didn’t park in the garage.”
“You sure of that?”
“Certain. I saw him run out past the ticket gate.”
Carlos looked to Spinelli and gave him the nod. “Start with the video from the camera closest to where the murder happened. Let’s see if we can pick out a face.”
Spinelli tinkered at the computer for only a minute before isolating the images from what turned out to be camera number four. In it we saw the stranger tucked neatly within the shadow of a concrete support column.
“I’m behind the one across the way there by the fence,” Lilith said. “You might see me from camera two.”
Spinelli tapped a couple of keys, clicked the mouse a few times and presto; we were watching a split screen with Lilith behind a column on the left and the killer behind a column on the right. It was from the right side we saw the elevator door open and the woman step out.
“Here,” said Lilith. “Right here is when he does it. Keep your eyes on him now.”
Of course she needn’t have told us. By then we were all crowded closely around the monitor. We saw only the killer’s back as he approached the woman, removed the knife from beneath his coat and plunge it in her belly. As he withdrew the blade and stepped back, Lilith let out an audible gasp, much like she had after witnessing the killing first hand.
Hearing her, the killer turned his head sharply toward Lilith, but faded into the shadows, preventing us from seeing his face. Seconds later he turned and ran for the gate; the camera unable to get anything at all worthwhile. A quick check of the other camera angles proved no better and we were left with nothing more than a vague description of our suspect.
“That’s about it,” Spinelli said. “It doesn’t tell us much.”
“No it doesn’t.” I said, and I eased back in my chair, folding my arms at my chest. “But it tells us something. What?”
Spinelli thought a moment. “It tells us he’s right-handed. It’s the hand he used the knife in.”