PM09 - Supernatural Born Killers

by Casey Daniels

  “Nobody knows more about protection than Quinn.” I winced even as the words made their way out of my mouth. “That is—”

  “Nice meeting you,” Quinn said even though he obviously didn’t mean it, and since he turned and stalked away, it provided us the perfect opportunity to retreat, too. My arms still firmly through those of my parents, I dragged them across the ballroom and to the door.

  Outside, my mother grinned at me. “You didn’t tell me you knew the Blackburnes.”

  “I don’t.” I couldn’t be any clearer. “I only know one Blackburne. Milo.”

  “And he likes you.” Mom stood on tiptoe so she could crane her neck and look back at the ballroom door. It was closed, so I don’t know what she thought she’d see. “You’re dating?”

  “Mom.” I would have groaned whether Quinn was nearby or not, so it’s not like I was trying to hide anything from him. “He’s a cemetery patron,” I explained. “He gave us a whole lot of money just a couple days ago.”

  “That explains why Ella is cutting you some slack about going in to the office.” My dad knew a thing or two about the value of friends in high places, or at least in the power of making sure those who could blow the whistle on you were happy. Katherine McClure, his old office manager, had gone to prison for a couple years, too, for helping him cook the books and keeping her mouth shut about it. Katherine wasn’t as loyal and she was greedy; a couple thousand extra in her paycheck every month assured her silence.

  “What the hell was that all about?” I guess I didn’t have to worry what Quinn thought of my mother’s blatant admiration of the Blackburne fortune. He wasn’t about to start mincing words just to keep her happy. “You’re standing there chatting with the guy who knows the guys who—” Quinn realized his anger had gotten the better of him, and he bit off the rest of what he was going to say.

  My parents realized that whatever that something he was going to say was, they wanted to hear it, and closed in on him.

  I had no choice but to screech to get their attention.

  “Are we sure we want to stand here and discuss this?” I was looking at Quinn when I said this because I figured I could count on him to be at least moderately rational. “It’s bad enough Blackburne saw us together.”

  “Why?” my mother asked.

  “What does this have to do with our case?” my father butted in.

  “And how is any of it going to help us locate Jack’s body and find out what’s really going on?” Quinn groaned.

  His seemed the only question worth answering.

  And that would have been great if I had answers.

  Which I didn’t.

  I didn’t have any patience left, either, especially when Mom and Dad walked away and Mom called out a cheery, “Our place tonight for dinner. Seven o’clock. We’ll talk more about our investigation then.”

  “So…” I was in the kitchen helping Mom with the salad, but when she slid a look toward the door and the great room beyond where we could hear my dad and Quinn talking over the glasses of Crown Royal Dad had poured when we walked in, I knew what she was getting at.

  Exactly why my response was, “So…what?”

  Mom clicked her tongue. “You know what I’m talking about. Quinn. What’s going on between you two?”

  “Nothing I want to talk about.”

  “Or nothing you want to talk about with your mother?”

  I wasn’t in the mood for subtle distinctions so I grabbed a cherry tomato and popped it in my mouth.

  Mom gave her homemade Italian salad dressing one last stir. “He’s as dreamy as can be, but he’s a cop, after all. He can’t possibly be as rich as Milo Blackburne.”

  I finished chewing and swallowed. “And that matters, why?”

  “Oh, I’m just saying.” Mom splashed dressing onto the salad and tossed to her little heart’s content. “Wouldn’t that be quite the coup?”

  The quivering feeling in the pit of my stomach told me I knew what she was talking about, but if nothing else, I had been raised to be polite to my elders. I didn’t want to hear the answer, but I asked the question, anyway. “Wouldn’t what be a coup?”

  Mom brightened. “You and Milo Blackburne. That would make our old friends sit up and take notice.”

  “Mother!” It was all I could take. There were four salad plates out on the counter and I went and retrieved them and marched across the kitchen with them clutched in my arms. “I’m not going to sell myself to Milo Blackburne just so you—”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. You know that, honey.” The pout that went along with the statement almost made me believe her. “I’m just saying that if it just happens to work out…if you just so happen to fall in love with Milo Blackburne…and if he just so happened to fall in love with you…and if there was a marriage in your future—”

  “No.” I shoved the swinging door between the kitchen and the great room with my butt. “No and no again.”

  “You’re not disagreeing with your mother?” The question was stern but the look in my dad’s eyes was anything but. Dad put down his glass and grabbed the salad plates from my hand, putting them near the four wineglasses and four place settings of silverware already set on the table. “You wouldn’t want to upset Mom.”

  “I would if she wants me to marry Milo Blackburne.” I’d already sat down and I flapped open the lilac-colored linen napkin set next to my plate. “No,” I said again, glancing to where my mother was sitting on my right. “I’m not going to marry Milo Blackburne.”

  She had the good sense to be embarrassed to be discussing this in front of Quinn. Or at least the good sense to look like she was embarrassed. “That’s not exactly what I said,” she mumbled for his benefit.

  “Is, too,” I mumbled right back.

  “Never did.” She smiled and passed him the salad.

  Quinn is a smart guy. He knew there was nothing to be gained from getting between two Martin women in mid-spat. He took his salad, passed the bowl to my dad, and said the single word, “Jack.”

  The ploy worked. Mom was so excited, the salad fell off her fork and an olive bounced across the table and landed in front of my plate. “Oh, we’re going to talk about the investigation!”

  Dad had spent too many years eating prison cafeteria food on a hard-and-fast schedule. He gobbled down half his bowl of salad before he spoke. “So where are we?” he asked Quinn.

  “Nowhere if you don’t all stay away from Blackburne.” I wasn’t sure if this comment from Quinn was for my benefit or for my mother’s, but just in case, I took offense, anyway.

  My shoulders shot back. “He showed up at the hotel.”

  “And after what happened at his house the other night,” Quinn began.

  Mom sat up like a shot. “His house? You were there?” It didn’t take more than a second before the excitement faded in her eyes and was replaced by worry. “What happened?”

  I filled them in as briefly as I could, about the two goons who’d shown up at Blackburne’s door, about the creepy, secret room.

  All the color drained from my mother’s face. “You mean…Milo Blackburne…he might be…not on the up-and-up?”

  I couldn’t help myself; I pictured the wedding invitation and laughed:

  Gilbert and Barbara Martin

  Request the honor of your presence

  at the wedding of their daughter

  Penelope Anne

  and Mr. Milo Blackburne,

  Bad guy

  Oh, what would the old friends think then?

  To my mother’s credit, I don’t think she was thinking about the marriage plans that never would be when her eyes filled with tears.

  “Oh, honey, you might have been—”

  “I wasn’t. I’m fine. But when Blackburne showed up at the hotel today—”

  “We almost blew it.” My dad groaned and slumped back in his chair. “We told him we were investigating.”

  “It’s a good reason for you both to steer clear.” Quinn looked
back and forth at both my parents. “I’ve shown Pepper photos, but she can’t pick out pictures of the two guys who stopped at Blackburne’s that night. That might mean they’re from out of town. Or they don’t have arrest records. Obviously, that’s not helping us much. Still, we’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on. If only we knew the details.”

  “We know somebody’s going to try and steal something at the comic book convention,” I said for my parents’ benefit. “And whatever it is, somebody thinks it’s valuable enough to kill for. Vincent…” I didn’t want to say too much, so I looked at Quinn, and when he didn’t stop me, I went right ahead. “Vincent talked about morgues and such. But apparently, even though he sounded crazy, he knew something. Somebody wanted to keep him quiet.”

  “Wow,” Mom said on the end of a sigh.

  “So what do we do?” Dad asked. He’d always been a man of action. So much so, that he answered his own question. “Seems to me, what we said the other day has some merit. It might help figure out what’s going on if we can find the ghost’s body.”

  “Agreed.” This from Quinn. “The question is how.”

  We chewed and thought, thought and chewed, and I was just about to admit I was coming up as empty as my salad bowl suddenly was when I felt something cold and wet on the back of my neck.

  Drip, drip, drip.

  I glanced over my shoulder and up only to find Jack hovering near the ceiling.

  “Well, it’s about time,” I said.

  “For more salad?” my mother asked.

  My dad is smart; he realized that wasn’t what I was talking about. Then again, I was looking up at the ceiling.

  “We need to find your body,” I said, watching as Jack floated down and settled on the floor. “We figure it’s the only way to figure out what happened to you. And how it all ties in with Dingo and Vincent and the comic book convention and that other person who’s going to die if we don’t do something fast. It is tied in, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “What’s he saying, honey?” Mom asked, looking where I was looking and obviously not seeing anything but the quickly growing puddle on the floor. She got up and went to the kitchen for paper towels.

  “Can you tell us where to look?” I asked Jack.

  He nodded.

  “Your body’s in water, right?” This went without saying so I wasn’t surprised when Jack nodded again.

  “There’s a lot of water in Cleveland,” Quinn grumbled.

  Jack looked at him as if to say no duh. I did not report this.

  “So what we need to figure out,” I said to Jack because everyone else was just as clueless as I was so there didn’t seem to be any point in addressing them, “is where in the water.”

  Jack shambled over to the table.

  Back from the kitchen, my mother clutched the paper towels to her chest and shook her head at the trail of water on her great room floor, but when she bent to get to work, I stopped her from cleaning it up by reminding her there was no use even trying until Jack was gone.

  Mom dropped back in her chair and Jack poked his chin at our salads.

  “You’re in a bowl.” I knew this wasn’t right, but he didn’t have to look at me like I had two heads. The dead have a lot of nerve.

  Jack poked some more.

  “Glasses,” I told my fellow investigators. “You’re in glass? Like in a tub or an aquarium or—”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Not a bowl. Not glass.” I glanced around the table. “Wine? Your body’s at a winery.”

  “Or in a vat of wine.” Mom was breathless at the horror of it all.

  Jack shook his head.

  By now, we were all looking around the table, grasping at straws.

  “Butter,” Quinn said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Salt and pepper,” my dad chimed in. His head snapped up and he looked at the empty space beside me where only I knew for sure Jack was. “How about the salt mines under Lake Erie?”

  Jack shook his head.

  I massaged my temples with the tips of my fingers. “Italian dressing,” I mumbled.

  “Then he’d be pickled, not drowned,” Quinn said.

  Behind the duct tape, I could tell Jack wasn’t amused.

  More poking from our ghostly companion.

  “The Crown Royal the guys are drinking?” I asked Jack.

  This time, he nodded.

  “There’s a Crown filtration plant,” Quinn piped in. “It’s part of the city water system.”

  Jack said no.

  “There’s a royal…” My mother made a face. “Well, there’s nothing royal I can think of. Not in Cleveland.”

  “So what is it?” I wailed. “Crown Royal is a drink. It’s a beverage. It’s—”

  “Whiskey,” my dad said at the same time Jack nodded.

  Quinn slammed a fist on the table and stood. “That’s got to be it,” he said. “I know where Jack’s body is. In the water off Whiskey Island.”

  As much as it pains me, allow me to provide a little history lesson here.

  Whiskey Island isn’t actually an island and except during boating season when the marina is hopping, the restaurant is open, and the tiny park is chock-full of sand volleyball players, there isn’t much in the way of whiskey around, either. In fact, Whiskey Island is a triangular spit of land just west of downtown Cleveland with Lake Erie on two sides of it and the Cuyahoga River on another. Back in the day (and I mean really way back), the area was settled by Irish immigrants who built a rough-and-tumble shanty community. According to local legend, the Island got its name either because there was a distillery there or because those immigrants built so many saloons.

  Smart people that they were, the Irish got tired of the diseases than ran rampant in the swampy area so close to so much water. They moved on, and Whiskey Island turned industrial. These days (even with the marina and the park), there’s still a gritty edge to the place.

  Of course, the fact that is was late afternoon and raining to boot didn’t do much for the ambiance, either.

  “This is crazy,” I grumbled, casting a sidelong glance at Quinn, who was standing on my left. Over his shoulder and beyond the marina, I could see a giant lake freighter being unloaded at a dock. To my right and across the park was a salt mine and beyond that, I could barely see the outlines of downtown skyscrapers, shrouded in low-lying clouds. Behind us, there were railroad tracks and when a train rolled by, the rumble shook me to the bone. In fact, the only peaceful part of the scene was the narrow strip of beach directly in front of us and the lake beyond where the rain plunked slowly and steadily against the gray water.

  The lake where Jack Haggarty’s body had apparently been dumped.

  I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my leopard-print trench coat. “Don’t you guys have some special team of somebodies who look for bodies in places like this?”

  “Of course we do.” A stiff breeze blew in off the lake and even tucked snuggly in his L.L.Bean Storm Chaser jacket, Quinn shivered. “But I don’t want to call them yet. Not until we know if we’re really onto something. If I do—”

  “Somebody higher up is going to tell you to back off and mind your own business.” I figured I’d say it so he didn’t have to. “So…” I glanced around at the nothingness. Quinn had planned this little foray into the urban wilderness just as evening was falling and though I protested (because that’s about when the rain decided to start falling, too), I knew what he was thinking. The fewer people around, the less likely it was for someone to question why we were poking around at the water’s edge.

  Of course the fewer people there were around, the more desolate the place felt, too.

  Inside my raincoat, a cold tingle crawled up my back.

  “Told you to dress for the weather.” Quinn threw out this comment as if it actually might have helped at this point.

  I aimed a smile in his direction at the same time I plucked at the leopard-print fabric. “I a
m dressed for the weather. Raincoat, see?”

  “And the shoes?”

  I glanced down at the ankle boots that seemed a perfectly good option before we left my apartment. Bad timing, since that was the same moment the three-inch heels sank a little farther into the mushy ground.

  “Come on.” Quinn grabbed my arm and dragged me back to his car. He opened the trunk, pulled open a box, and brought out a pair of rubber rain boots. Yellow rubber rain boots.

  I looked at the offering as if it were a snake ready to rear up and strike. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “I knew you’d pull something like this. That’s why I stopped at the army/navy store on my way over to your place.”

  This was supposed to make me feel better?

  I took a step back, distancing myself from the boots as well as the thought of the army/navy store. Any army/navy store.

  It would have been an effective maneuver if I didn’t squish right into a puddle.

  To his credit, Quinn almost controlled an I-told-you-so smile. “You want those pretty shoes of yours to get all wet and muddy?”

  He knew me too well.

  A minute later, we were walking back to the beach. Well, Quinn was walking in his waterproof boots. I was clumping in the rubber rain boots. And happy to have them (not that I was going to admit it) when we stepped onto the beach and I promptly sank into the wet sand.

  I looked to my left, then my right. “The Island isn’t very big, but Quinn, where do we even start looking?”

  His gaze was glued to the waters of Lake Erie. And here’s the thing people who’ve never seen it don’t know. Like the other four Great Lakes, Erie is plenty big. Like hundreds of miles long and way too wide to see Canada on the other side. In fact, looking north the only thing we could see (besides all that liquid) was the stone break wall and a lighthouse, far out in the water. Over on our right on a finger of land that grew out from the main part of the Island was a white building that reminded me of the lighthouse except that it had more style. Tall, round tower, sleek lines. Very Art Deco and if the absence of lights meant anything, very deserted, too.