Death in the Hallows (Hank Mossberg, Private Ogre Book 2)

by Jamie Sedgwick

  “You owe me all right,” I said.

  She nodded at the cops, and they took Kerry out of the room. “Will you release the others into my custody?” she said.

  I sighed.

  “Please, Hank?”

  I glanced at Butch and saw him frowning in the shadows. “We were friends once, Gen,” I said.

  “We’re still friends,” she said. “What I’m asking you right now… I’m not asking as a cop. I’m asking as your friend.”

  And that’s why he sent you, I thought cynically. “They’re down the hall. Malone has a broken wrist. You might want to get him some medical treatment… in a few days.”

  After the prisoners were gone, Butch and I sat staring at each other across my desk. I noticed the smell of smoke rising from my clothes and I looked at the soot on Butch’s face and the crutches leaning up against his chair, and I started laughing. I couldn’t help it.

  “What’s gotten into you?” he said.

  “I was just thinking what a pair we make. In the last twenty-four hours we’ve been arrested, shot, almost set on fire… somehow we got through all of it and we still haven’t accomplished a damned thing.”

  He tilted his head, considering. “You’ve got a point. We still don’t know who killed Flick, and my situation hasn’t changed, either. What’re we gonna do now?”

  I scratched the back of my head, staring at him. “We still don’t know who killed Flick. That was all I wanted. I didn’t even care about the swords. Nya is fighting to keep her home and raise her children alone now, and I’ve got nothing. I’ve got to find the killer.”

  “Too bad we didn’t have more time with the mayor.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you believe him? That it wasn’t any of them?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It was hard not to believe his story.”

  “He gets paid to tell lies,” Butch said. “It’s his job.”

  “I know.”

  I’d been watching Butch and I knew what was going through his head. As important as solving Flick’s murder was to me, it didn’t mean that much to him. Not compared with what was going on in his personal life. He wanted his wife back. He may have been sitting there with me physically, but mentally he was already checked into a hotel in the Caribbean, enjoying his honeymoon. I suddenly felt guilty. I picked up the phone and dialed Annie’s cell phone number.

  “Hank, is that you? Where have you been?” she said.

  “It’s me,” I said. “I need a favor.”

  “Hank, I’ve been trying to call you for two days!”

  “I know. My cell phone went dead. Annie, I need-”

  “You didn’t call me for two days because your cell phone was dead? What’s the matter with you, Hank?”

  “I’m sorry Annie, it’s just that-”

  “Don’t even bother apologizing. It’s way too late for that. What are you thinking, avoiding me for two days? Are you cheating on me?”

  “No!” I said, sitting upright. I glanced uncomfortably at Butch. “No Annie, I’m not cheating on you! Some things just came up…”

  “Something always comes up with you Hank Mossberg. I’m really starting to wonder about you.”

  “Annie, I was working. You know how my job is. Sometimes I can’t just stop and go looking for a phone.”

  “Yeah, whatever. You better have a darn good story when you take me out to dinner.”

  “Dinner?”

  “Yeah. And I don’t mean that steak and onion gentleman thing you call a sandwich. I want something good, something French that I can’t pronounce. Something that costs the GDP of a small middle-eastern country, and doesn’t even include dessert.”

  “All right, all right,” I said. “Whatever you want. But you’ve got to do me a favor first.”

  The line went quiet for a few seconds and I could almost hear her counting to ten in her head. “Annie?”

  “What is it,” she snarled.

  “I need the guest list from Butch’s wedding. Could you email it to me?”

  “Oh, so you still haven’t figured out what happened to Talia? What exactly have you been doing all this time?”

  “I thought we already went through that.”

  “We’re going to go through that and a whole lot more over dinner,” she said. The line went dead and I heard the dial tone buzzing in my ear.

  “That didn’t sound good,” Butch observed as I set the phone back in its cradle.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, with more conviction than I felt.

  He stared at me. “So, I guess we’re still at square one with Talia,” he said cautiously. I could tell from the tone in his voice that he was hoping I’d cracked the case. He was hoping that I’d been thinking it through all this time, and I’d had a breakthrough.

  “We’re gonna figure this out,” I said. “Tonight. What happened with what’s-his-name… you know, the ex-boyfriend? What was his story?”

  “Kensey? I never got to talk to him,” Butch said glumly.

  “What do you mean you didn’t talk to him? I thought that was how you got thrown in jail.”

  “Well, first they wouldn’t let me talk to him, so I went in anyway. I found him at his desk and asked what he did to Talia. He called me a lunatic. I punched him. Next thing I know, I’m in jail. He denied everything of course, but we didn’t get much time to talk.”

  “I see. Well I guess he’s still on the list then,” I said. “Unless you think he’s innocent.”

  “I dunno. He did seem surprised to see me there.” Butch started chuckling as he thought about it.

  “I bet he was,” I said.

  A few minutes later, the wedding list popped up in my email. I printed it out so Butch and I could work on it together. I handed it to Butch as I rose from my desk and started for the hallway.

  “Where you goin’?” he said.

  “We’re going to have a talk with Kensey. We’ll go over that guest list on the way.”

  Butch almost smiled.

  It took about forty minutes to get to the undercity police department. On the way, Butch used his cell phone to dig up information about the wedding guests. What we got wasn’t much. Our limited access to the police network did show that several of the guests had criminal records. The problem was that they were all petty crimes, and they were all so distantly related to Butch that he barely knew any of them. None of them were related to Talia. Her family had no criminal records at all that we could find.

  That end of the investigation didn’t look promising. I hoped we could coax something out of Kensey without getting ourselves tossed back in jail. Before we entered the station I reminded Butch to keep his cool. “Let me do the talking,” I said. “The last thing we need is to spend another night in jail… or worse yet, have to break out again.”

  Butch promised to behave. We went inside and I asked the rookie at the front desk if we could speak to Detective Gen. He called her desk and said, “It’ll be a minute. She’s in the middle of an interrogation.”

  Butch and I exchanged a frustrated glance. She was probably questioning the mayor at that very moment. We settled into the lobby chairs and waited. Fifteen minutes later, Gen came out to meet us.

  “I figured you two would be around,” she said. “Come to my office.”

  She led us past the front desk and through the cluttered office space beyond, to a small office at the back of the room. There was barely room for the three of us in there at once. “I suppose you want to know what we’ve pried out of the mayor,” she said.

  “That’d be nice,” I said, “considering we broke the case and busted him for you.”

  “Be nice,” she said. “We can still be friends, can’t we boys?”

  “Sure,” I said, clicking my teeth. As much as I hated thinking that way, it’s good to have a friend on the inside and I was probably going to need her help often, especially now that Butch was retiring.

  “I have something to show you,” Gen said. “I think you’ll
find it interesting. We got an anonymous video this evening. Nobody knows where it came from. This movie just showed up in all of our email boxes at once.”

  “All of your email boxes?” I said.

  “Yeah. The entire department. And there’s no I.P. route, no return address. It just appeared like magic.”

  She turned her computer screen so we could see it, and played the video. It was time stamped the day of O’Rourke’s death. It showed Malone walking in through the front door of Curly’s bar. A few minutes later, he left.

  “Interesting,” I said. “That puts Malone at Curly’s right about the time O’Rourke was killed, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Gen said. “I don’t suppose you two know anything about that do you?”

  “Not at all,” I lied. Thanks, Tas. I owe you one.

  “Well, this is the way it’s going down. We have Malone dead to rights. Moira is confessing everything, including how Malone killed O’Rourke to keep him quiet. The chief wants to make an example of him. It won’t be pretty.”

  I smiled at that thought.

  “But,” she continued, “we don’t have much on the mayor. All of our evidence is circumstantial, and even with your testimony it’ll be hard to give him more than a slap on the wrist. After all, he didn’t do anything except sell forged weapons and we can’t even track that directly to him. All the money came from Malone, in the form of campaign contributions.”

  “What about Flick?” I said. “Which one of them killed Flick? Was it Malone?”

  “I don’t know. Malone and the mayor both claim they have alibis for that night. We’re checking up on them. At this point, I’m sure Malone will confess to O’Rourke’s murder. He’ll go for a deal, try to avoid extraction.”

  Butch and I both cringed at that word. The fae don’t have the death penalty. They have a process called extraction that removes the life force of a fae creature and sends it into an alternate dimension, the place where fairy life originated. The human equivalent would be sort of like forced reincarnation. If it was possible to take a human’s soul, rip it out of the body, turn it into a ghost and make it haunt a mossy meadow in another dimension, that would be extraction.

  “So you’ve got nothing on Flick’s murder?” I said.

  She shook her head. “I wish I did. So far the only connection we have is that sword, which is still stuck in the rock. The mayor says it was never stolen, he said he let Flick borrow it, if that’s worth anything to you.”

  “He gave it to Flick as part of a bribe,” I said. “At least, that’s what he told me.”

  She considered that. “All right. I’ll see if I can get a little more out of him.” She checked her watch. “I’ve got to get back to work. I can’t let up on these creeps until I have their confessions.”

  I rose to leave but Butch cleared his throat. “Oh, right,” I murmured. I’d almost forgotten the reason we went there in the first place. “We’re trying to get in touch with one of your detectives, a guy named Kensey.”

  She narrowed her eyebrows. “Oh, right… Butch’s fiancé. Well, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree on that one. I doubt Kensey is your guy.”

  “All the same, if we could just talk to him?” I said.

  “Fine with me. He’s off duty right now but I’ll write his address down for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Of course.” She jotted the address down. “One more thing. I presume you’ll still be working on Flick’s murder?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Good. Keep me updated. Oh, and if you get a chance, swing by in the morning and give us an official statement.”

  I smiled as we left. That was the best treatment I’d gotten from the police force in years. Maybe ever. Things seemed to be looking up. Then again, even if Gen was my ally, I still had the chief to worry about.

  Kensey’s place was in the undercity. In fact, it was in the same neighborhood where Flick’s widow lived. I was tempted to stop by and check on her, but I chose to leave her with her grief for the time being. It would have been different if I had some news, but I didn’t want to disturb her and then have to admit that I had nothing on Flick’s killer. I silently promised myself that I wouldn’t give up on the case, no matter what happened.

  When the cab driver pulled up in front of Kensey’s house, I told him to wait for us. It took a minute to extract myself from the tiny back seat and then Butch and I walked up to the front door. We heard voices inside, and we knocked. A few seconds later, Kensey appeared before us. He noticed me first.

  “Steward?” he said. “What are you doing here?” Then he glanced over and saw Butch. “You! Wait a minute… there’s a warrant out for you two!”

  “It’s been revoked,” I said quickly. “We just wanted to ask you a couple questions.”

  A young female wood elf appeared behind him. She was carrying a baby in her arms. “Who is it, Kensey? Are they police? What’s this about?”

  “Nothing, honey. Go put the baby to bed. I’ll be right there.”

  I watched her a moment and then glanced over at Butch. I could tell we were both thinking the same thing: what were the odds that Kensey was still stalking Talia, if he’d gotten married and had a kid? Not likely. “I’m sorry for taking your time,” I said. “We’ll be on our way.”

  He frowned as we stepped off the porch. I could feel his eyes burning holes in my back as we walked back to the cab. Then the door closed and he vanished inside with his family. I crawled back into the back seat and Butch climbed into the front. “Well, that was a bust,” he said hopelessly.

  “Not entirely,” I said. “He may not be our guy, but that’s one less suspect on the list.”

  Butch held up the list of wedding guests and I stared at it. Suddenly I felt very tired.

  Chapter 10

  Butch and I returned to the jailhouse and spent the next two hours crawling through the guest list one more time, using every resource at our disposal to identify potential culprits. We ended up calling Tas for another favor, trying to do some background research on one of Talia’s distant cousins. Tas was less than cheerful about having his evening interrupted again, but he ran the search as a special favor, and reminded me twice that I “owed him one.”

  Ultimately, every lead came to naught. Out of the list of nearly two hundred guests, not one made a decent suspect, save for Dwana. When all was said and done, we just kept coming back to her. And as of yet, she had not confessed to anything.

  “It has only been one day,” I reminded Butch. “If we give her more time-”

  “But what if it’s not her?” he said, his eyes pleading with me to do something. “What if the real culprit is covering his tracks right now? Then we’ll never find him!”

  “Who else could it be?” I said. “Talia didn’t have enemies. We’ve researched every guest on the list twice and we’ve done background searches on half the undercity.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” he said miserably. “Nobody else had a motive, and most of ‘em couldn’t have pulled it off. Judging by the crazy in her eyes, Dwana is our best bet. But I still don’t like waiting. I can’t stand thinking about Talia like that, just laying there, barely even alive.” He was sitting across the desk from me, and I stared at him for a moment.

  “I understand what you’re feeling,” I said. “Problem is, this is a sensitive situation. We can’t just accuse your sister-in-law of putting the curse on Talia. Imagine what that could do to your relationship with your new family.”

  “Aye, and we’re already off to a rocky start,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, stroking his beard. He looked worn, exhausted. “What else can we do? We can’t just sit here and wait, can we? It could take weeks. Even months.”

  “Not that long,” said a female voice. Our heads both swerved around to look at Dwana as she stepped into the room. She was wearing high-heeled shoes and a short, slinky dress that was nearly transparent. Her hair was done up like it was a special occasion.
Elegant curls fell down around her cheekbones, framing her face, and dark blue makeup highlighted her eyes. The scent of her perfume filled the room.

  I shot Butch a glance. Elven women are attractive by nature. They have naturally plump lips and curvaceous bodies so they don’t usually bother going the whole nine yards. Dwana had, and it was spectacular. I don’t know whose jaw hit the floor first, Butch’s or mine. She didn’t even look like the same girl I’d met at the wedding. At the time, I could understand why Dwana had always felt outshined by Talia’s vibrant presence. Looking at her now, it didn’t seem she had much to complain about.

  “What wrong boys?” she said with a slight smile. “You never heard a girl’s confession before?”

  I sat up straight, making an effort to pull myself together. I glanced at Butch and saw him staring at her, bewilderment in his eyes. “Are you admitting that you put the curse on your sister?” I said.

  “I am,” she said with a pouty look, sticking out her lower lip. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, we uh…” Butch stammered. “What?”

  She walked across the room, shaking her hips in an exaggerated motion. She settled on the edge of my desk, turning her watery gaze on Butch, and batted her eyelashes at him. “I feel so terrible,” she said, reaching out to touch his face.

  I couldn’t tell if he was about to jump out of his chair and strangle her, or start drooling all over himself. Either way, it wasn’t pretty.

  “You put the curse on Talia?” I asked again.

  Again, she said, “Yes.”

  I ran a hand through my hair, glancing back and forth between the two of them. “So what are you going to do to me?” she said.

  Butch looked more or less catatonic. I stood up. “You’re coming with us,” I said, grabbing my coat and hat. “We’ve got a little trip to make.”

  I didn’t tell Dwana where we were going right away, because I didn’t want to give her the chance to back out. Butch didn’t know either, but it didn’t take him long to figure it out. We took the undercity tram to the Canal District on the west end of town, and then rented a flatboat to work our way through the canals. By then, the cat was pretty much out of the bag.