Cold Hard Steele (Daggers & Steele Book 2)

by Alex P. Berg

  “It’s Phillips, sir. And I’m well.”

  I tried to play it cool. “Phillips. Yeah, yeah, right. I remember. So why do they have you on nanny patrol here? Something dangerous up at the crime scene?”

  “Not exactly, sir,” he said. “It’s just an…interesting scene, I guess. You’ll have to see it for yourself. Detectives Steele and Quinto are already up there.”

  Given a slack leash, my mind took off like a greyhound, coming up with ludicrous ideas for what could’ve occurred at the murder scene. I couldn’t help it. My and Shay’s last two cases were cut-and-dried stab and runs, orchestrated by idiot savants of the criminal kind who happened to be lacking in the savant part of things. I needed something interesting to focus my restless mind on.

  “Is everything all right, sir?”

  I deglazed my eyes. “Oh…yeah Phelps. I’m fine. What room was it again?”

  “Two twelve, sir. And it’s Phillips.”

  I gave him a nod and headed in. A couple of middle-class human families milled about in the building’s lobby, pursing their lips and talking in hushed tones as I took the stairs. Who could blame them? This wasn’t the sort of neighborhood where people got axed frequently. By the looks of things, it wasn’t the sort of neighborhood where anything interesting happened ever. That wasn’t a bad thing, at least not for families with kids. Boring and safe beats exciting and dead any day in my book.

  I stomped my way up the stairs and found the apartment in question. A flatfoot at the door let me through into the pad’s living room. As I took in my environs, I suddenly understood the nervous commotion downstairs.

  The place was trashed. Not tossed, as a place would be if some ne’er-do-well had been searching for something, but utterly, completely, hopelessly wrecked. A thick oaken dining table in the middle of the room lay in pieces on the floor, as if a muscle-bound thug had delivered a flying pile driver to its midsection. Next to it, a green corduroy couch heaved its last breaths, huge gashes in the fabric displaying its innards to the world. Clumps of fluffy white cotton puffed from the tears like popcorn spilling from a hot kettle. Both windows in the space were smashed, and bits of glass, cotton, and variegated scraps of cloth littered the floorboards.

  At the sides of the room, tall bookshelves full of hardbacks, paperbacks, and serials had been knocked to the ground, spilling their contents across the floor in a tide of cardboard and paper. I walked over to the pile and selected a couple random paperbacks. Sam Simon and the Trolltown Beatdown by Marcellus Pinkerton read one. The other was titled The Beast with Twelve Arms by Collette Plumlee. Both were frivolous pulp novels, and both sounded awesome.

  I started to thumb through the Sam Simon book when Quinto’s big bass voice made me jump.

  “Daggers! There you are,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”

  I stood and turned. Folton Quinto was a good guy and a better cop but not someone you’d want to mess with unless your lifelong dream was to understand how muddled fruit at the bottom of a cocktail felt like. He was about six foot seven, with skin that resembled an elephant’s in both color and composition, and his mismatched buckteeth gave his smile a malicious quality, no matter how good his intentions were. He’d spent his time in goon squads on both sides of the law, but after a youth full of indiscretions, he’d eventually joined the force. Good thing, too. Our precinct’s health insurance premiums could’ve skyrocketed after a single untoward encounter with the guy.

  “Ahh, Quinto,” I said. “You’re looking fit and trim today. You been working out?”

  He stuffed his skillet-sized hands into his pockets. “Depends. Does throwing punks through walls count?”

  “I’m going to go with yes.”

  “Then sure,” he said. “I’ve been working up a sweat three, four times a week or so.”

  “Ouch.” I puckered. “Does our fair city even have that many thugs in need of pummeling?”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Quinto. “Though some repeat offenders get the old one-two on a regular basis. You’d think they’d learn after a couple smackdowns, but they keep on getting into trouble. I blame our crumbling school systems.”

  “What do you expect?” I said. “Teachers are one of the few public servants paid even worse than we are.”

  Quinto nodded. “Perhaps. So, are you going to answer my question? What took you so long? You wake up drunk again?”

  I frowned. “Why is that everyone’s first assumption today?”

  “It’s like playing the stocks,” said Quinto. “Past performance doesn’t necessarily predict future results, but at least it gives you something to go on.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “But no. I was out with Nicole.”

  Quinto raised a questioning eyebrow.

  I shook my head. “Just spending some time with the kid.”

  “Ahh.”

  Quinto didn’t pry any further. He possessed enough wisdom not to delve into that morass of tangled emotions and bitter feelings. I’m not sure if his good sense came from simple propriety or from the fact that he’d never been in a serious relationship himself and had no idea what the hell to say. Either way worked for me.

  “So,” he said. “What’s in your pocket?”

  “Maybe I’m just happy to see you.” I grinned.

  “Seriously, Daggers.”

  I pulled a white paper bag from my right coat pocket and opened it. “I got kolaches from Tolek’s. Apricot, blueberry, and honey. Want one? Not the apricot, of course. That one’s mine.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Quinto. “It’s almost lunchtime.”

  A warm voice came from the far side of the room. “Oh, Quinto. You should know better than that. Daggers never kids when it comes to kolaches.”

  4

  My partner, Detective Shay Steele, sauntered into the room, a playful smile splayed across her thin lips. Her dark chocolate-colored hair hung over her shoulder in a loose, knotted ponytail, and hints of subtle curves peeked out from underneath the bodice of her burgundy pantsuit. Her azure eyes twinkled with a quiet mirth, and her sharp nose was tilted ever so slightly toward the ceiling. I could tell I was in for some sass.

  “Let’s see, Daggers,” said Steele as she walked up. “I know for a fact you only eat kolaches for breakfast, so given that you have them on hand, you must not have eaten your first meal of the day. Given how cranky you become without food, I have to assume you recently woke up. The question is why. Can I assume—”

  I put a hand up. “I wasn’t drunk. And I’m not hungover.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that,” said Shay. “I was going to speculate that perhaps you overslept and didn’t have time to grab a bite before you met up with your ex-wife and son.”

  I nearly bit my tongue in surprise. “That’s not far from the truth. But how’d you know what I was up to this morning?”

  “Are you sure you’re not drunk, Daggers?” asked Quinto. “She can see into the past, remember?”

  Steele didn’t miss a beat. “Nothing so complex as that, Quinto. He told me.”

  I eyed her suspiciously.

  “Yesterday,” she said. “After work?”

  The fisherman in my brain finally felt a bite. “That’s right! I knew I told someone. Captain thought I was crazy.”

  “You say that in the past tense,” said Quinto. “I think the present tense is more appropriate.”

  “For your information,” I said, “I’ve looked up the definition of crazy in the dictionary, and in my owned esteemed opinion, I don’t even come close to qualifying.”

  “Did you look up the definition of amnesia, as well?” asked Quinto.

  “Just for that, I’m rescinding my peace offering,” I said. “No kolaches for you.”

  “Now look at what you’ve done, Quinto,” said Shay. “You’ve gone and made him moody. You know I have to hang out with him all day, don’t you?”

  Quinto’s shrug implied he didn’t, but his crooked smile said he did. I plucked the apricot
kolache from the bag and tore a chunk from it with my teeth. I chewed slowly, moaning with delight before sucking my fingers with overexaggerated vigor.

  “No hard feelings,” I said. “You’ll just have to endure the succulent scent of these fried delicacies on an empty stomach, my friend.” I held the bag out to Shay. “Want one?”

  She shrugged. “Ehh, why not?”

  My partner plucked the honey kolache out of its paper perch with delicate fingers and took a bite. On our first lunch together, she’d ordered a meatless salad of wilted vegetables. I’d feared the worst, but apparently she’d been afraid to make the wrong first impression. Since then, the gal had proven to be a champion eater. Where she put the food, I’m still not sure—maybe elven stomachs work differently than human ones—so I reacted with only mild surprise when she accepted my offering of artery-clogging vittles.

  I tucked the white sack back into my coat pocket. “You’ve been working on your intestinal fortitude, I see.”

  “What? This?” said Steele around a mouthful of sugary bliss. “It’s just a doughnut.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Given all this carnage, the body’s got to be a mess, and you’re still eating. I’m impressed.”

  “Actually, about that,” said Quinto with a raised finger. “It’s not exactly what you’d expect.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “C’mon,” said Shay. “We’ll show you.”

  My partner led our procession over to the bedroom, which held more evidence of the same sorts of carnage that infested the living space. Smashed furniture, a torn sofa chair, scrapes and gouges in the floorboards, and a mattress that looked like it’d been used as the playing surface in an epic game of five finger fillet. Unfortunately for the guy face up on the mattress, it looked like he might’ve taken part in the game as well.

  I almost choked on my kolache. “Argh… It’s worse than I thought.”

  “What? How so?” said Shay.

  Given the nature of the stiff’s apartment, I’d expected a rather horrific body—one covered in cuts, scrapes, and bruises—but the corpse on the mattress was surprisingly clean. His skin was unblemished, without any blood spatters to speak of. His physique was also far less imposing than I’d expected. The destruction throughout the apartment looked to have been caused by a hulking bruiser, but the guy on the bed was several inches shorter than my partner and rather doughy around the midsection.

  In the middle of his chest, immediately over his heart on the left side, a thin, ornately-crafted stiletto protruded from his skin. A lone trail of blood snaked down his chest and onto the mattress underneath. It was the only wound I could spot upon first glance, but that didn’t prevent there from being one rather horrific aspect of the body.

  “The guy’s naked,” I said.

  “So?” said Shay. “If I recall correctly, there was a naked person involved in your last case with Griggs.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But there was a crucial difference between that naked body and this one.”

  “Being?” Shay prodded.

  “The nature of the bits between the legs.” I waved at the dude’s junk. “Nobody wants to see that while they’re eating.”

  “Doesn’t bother me any,” said Shay as she polished off the last of her honey doughnut and licked her fingers.

  “His nakedness isn’t even close to the most interesting thing about him,” said Quinto as he circled the room. “Tell Daggers what you saw in your vision, Detective Steele.”

  Whenever Detective Steele arrived at a crime scene, she enacted an elaborate performance in which her eyes glazed over, her hands floated out to her sides, and her fingers tickled the air—the physical ramifications of suffering one of her out-of-body, reputedly psychic episodes. Afterwards, she’d reveal what clues she’d seen etched in the fabric of time.

  Shay smiled demurely. “I saw our dearly departed friend over here getting stabbed…”

  I stuck out my lips and nodded in mock seriousness. “Really? Wow. We should tell the Captain. You’re in line for a raise with that kind of insight.”

  “…with an icicle,” she finished.

  I frowned. My partner’s visions weren’t intended to be strict recreations of the past. Instead, she provided representative images of what might’ve happened. But in this case, I was having a hard time figuring out what in the world she was getting at.

  “I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

  “Go on,” said Quinto. “Touch the dagger.”

  “The one protruding from the stiff’s chest?” I asked.

  Quinto nodded. I looked to Steele. She nodded, too.

  I felt as if I were taking part in some silly children’s game, except there was no chance of getting surreptitiously kissed at the end of it all.

  I shrugged. “All right. I’ll bite.”

  I reached a hand out and pressed my fingers to the exposed portion of the blade.

  5

  The dagger was cold as ice. I pulled my fingers back into a fist.

  “It’s cold,” I said astutely. “Why is it cold?”

  “That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out,” said Quinto.

  “Maybe somebody stored this thing in an ice chest,” I mused.

  Shay shook her head. “That was my first intuition, too. But it’s a reasonably warm day. Put a knife in a bucket of ice, even a solid steel stiletto like that one there, and it’ll only stay cool for maybe ten, fifteen minutes tops, at room temperature. This sucker was cold when we first got here, which was close to an hour ago, and it’s still chilly.”

  I stuffed the last of my fried apricot pastry into my mouth and thought as I chewed. A murder weapon that was as cold as ice and remained that way, despite the best efforts of mother nature? “Dare I say perhaps we’re dealing with the ‘M’ word here?”

  Steele knew exactly what I was referring to. In our first case together, we’d been confronted with a tuxedo-clad dead guy with a gaping hole burned clean through his chest. I’d been convinced he’d been murdered by magical means, but my partner had insisted otherwise. In the end, our coroner Cairny had proven Shay correct. Like a putz, I’d been forced to apologize to my new partner, and on the first day on the job no less.

  In retrospect, I probably should’ve trusted Shay’s judgment. She’d studied for years at H. G. Morton’s, one of the most prestigious magical training institutions in the city. That alone made her our precinct’s premier authority on all things magical, both nefarious and otherwise.

  Shay shrugged. “Honestly, Daggers, I’m not sure. Elemental manipulation is pretty basic stuff, but even if someone did use magic to cool that stiletto, it should’ve warmed up by now.”

  “Maybe the dagger’s enchanted,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” said Steele. “Despite what you might’ve heard through old wives’ tales, enchantments are myths. Magical abilities are innate, meaning they exist only in the self. They can’t be transferred to inanimate objects. My instructors at H. G. Morton’s were very clear on that.”

  “Maybe they lied,” I said. “Maybe your instructors had secrets that were too dark and dangerous to share with their students.”

  Quinto snorted. “It’s a little early for conspiracy theories, don’t you think Daggers?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said with a wag of my finger. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have spurned my kolaches.”

  Quinto muttered something. I caught the lines ‘didn’t actually spurn’ and ‘wouldn’t mind one’ before my partner drowned him out.

  “All I can tell you is what I’ve been taught,” said Steele. “I don’t think enchantments are real.”

  I leaned in to take a closer look at the frigid dagger. It was a fine piece of craftsmanship. Floral, silver filigrees graced the stiletto’s hilt, and the arabesque designs continued on the steel of the blade. The frou-frou elements didn’t make the dagger any less deadly—or illegal—but they certainly added an element of flair. Tiny ice crystals stuck to the blade at its
intersection with the cross guard, and a strange, shimmery wetness seemed to coat the steel when viewed from the right angle. My partner must’ve noticed those last two elements, as well.

  I straightened and took a final glance around the room. “Alright, let’s recap. We’ve got a dead guy by the name of…do we know his name?”

  Quinto shook his head.

  “Ok. So we’ve got a yet-to-be-identified dead guy. He’s naked, and he has a mysteriously cold—and very ornate—dagger sticking out of his chest. His place is completely trashed, as if a barroom brawl erupted in his living room, but he looks like he just returned from a full service body cleanse at a high-priced day spa. Am I missing anything so far?”

  “For what it’s worth, we don’t think it was a robbery,” said Steele. “We found some cash and miscellaneous valuables in the remains of his nightstand.”

  “Yeah, I figured as much,” I said. “Thieves are often dolts, but they tend to be efficient. Stripping a guy down to his birthday suit and stabbing him with an icy, possibly magical, blade doesn’t strike me as being a terribly good use of resources. I think we can safely surmise something wacky’s in the works here.

  “Moving on—given the state of this apartment, I’m assuming whatever took place here made a lot of noise.”

  Quinto nodded. “One of the tenants heard the commotion and called for the police early this morning.”

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s start by canvassing the tenement. Quinto, take the apartment across the hall, and work your way down from there. Detective Steele and I will take this side of the hall. Let’s figure out who this guy is first and then see what we can come up with on him.”

  “You got it,” said Quinto. He hoofed his way out of the bedroom. Shay moved to follow him, but I motioned for her to hold back until Quinto was out of earshot.

  “So tell me,” I said. “The icicle bit. You noticed the frost on the cross guard of the blade?”

  “That was the most obvious clue, yes,” she said. “I also noticed a little bluing of the skin tissue around the puncture wound. And there was the single stream of blood flowing from the incision. As fluids get cold, their viscosity increases, and they flow more slowly. Blood’s no different. All together, the evidence was conclusive.”