“And why am I just now hearing about it?” David looked stern.
Bradford sighed sympathetically. “For what it’s worth, I argued with my superiors to bring you in the loop on what's probably happening in your jurisdiction. I was overridden. That’s why when I first came to Gless Inlet, I was installed as Druida Stone’s assistant at the Mason."
“Did you find any evidence that Druida herself might have been connected to the Strands trade?” I asked, remembering the dossier that I had read at Maude's, and still wondering how a mid-level clerk wound up bringing down the biggest Strand's cartel the Coven Isles had ever seen.
“If she was, I certainly never saw it,” Bradford admitted. “Still, I was always puzzled by how she was so intent on getting rid of various key magical texts, all but throwing them in the trash like they were Mainland New Age tracts. I justified my vocalizing objections to this practice as technically not violating my cover.”
“But it still got you fired from the library and probably in Dutch with your bosses.”
“That’s the polite way to put it, Ms. Jenkins,” Bradford admitted. “The only reason I wasn’t yanked off the assignment completely was because I came up with the idea of the Scroll of Thoth and the lending program.”
“But that still brought you unwelcome attention, judging by the number of frequent but unsubstantiated complaints I’ve gotten from the mayor’s office,” David pointed out. “So, how did you—“
“It took some doing, David…all right if I call you David?”
At David’s nod, Bradford continued, “Talisman started pressing me for results and quickly. But they were still adamant that I should keep you in the dark on what His Honor or I was up to.”
“Which is why you’d like for us to keep quiet about what we know about you now,” I deduced.
“Very much so,” Bradford said with a weary nod. “However, after last night, I think it’s past time I brought the local authorities up to speed.”
“If anyone asks later, Bradford, I’ll just say that whatever you tell us here came from a confidential informant,” David said, giving Bradford a comradely squeeze of the shoulder. “Let Talisman draw its own conclusions.”
Bradford waved his hand as David said it, as if he was beyond caring now.
“It’s almost a shame that Druida is dead right now,” I muttered.
“Hattie,” David said, using his warning tone on me.
“Okay, it is a shame regardless,” I added. “But if she were still alive, I’d put her at the top of the suspect list for this kidnapping.”
“As many disagreements as I had with the woman, I couldn’t agree less, Ms. Jenkins,” Bradford said.
“Oh, just make it Hattie before you tell me why I’m off-base,” I said with an offhand wave of my own.
“Well, I was taken out by a professional extraction team. I have a hard time believing that Druida would have had the resources to pull that off.”
David said nothing, just dangled the Heimdall Security pendant in the air before us. Bradford was totally unfazed by the sight of the necklace. “Did you happen to find that in the alley?”
“Actually, I did, first thing this morning,” I said, my words tumbling out a little too fast to be credible. No way I was fooling David.
But Bradford covered for me by saying, “I thought I grabbed something on my way out. Good to know that I wasn’t hallucinating that part.”
“Would Heimdall have had access to Crow Isle?” I asked.
“The only people I know who have that kind of access would be the mayor’s office,” Bradford said. “The key to the doorway was supposed to return to Talisman a week ago. But some kind of bureaucratic screw-up kept that from happening.”
“Maybe not as much of a screw-up as it looks at first glance,” David said, standing up. “You going to be okay?”
“Docs said that my injuries were pretty visual, but nothing life-threatening. I should be out in a few days.”
“I’m going to see if I can catch your kidnapper as a get-well present,” David said with a predatory grin.
Bradford chuckled, “Good hunting,” he said and extended his hand.
I felt the heat of the Obliviscatur charm go off for the sixth time behind me.
“Are you trying to make the whole island into amnesiacs?” I asked Eclipse tartly, looking over my shoulder at my mind-wiping kitty on the thatch of the broom.
“Well, forgive me for being the one who's aware that your bird glamor only works at an altitude much higher than the one we’re currently flying at,” Eclipse snapped back. “If you know how to create one that works at rooftop level, be my guest.”
I couldn’t really get too mad at him for that. I was so used to the bird glamor covering my broom when flying that I hadn't given much thought to altitude needs. If the price of staying on the right side of the law was a few patchy memories, so be it. Eclipse knew how to work the charm well enough to make sure no more than a minute was lost to anyone doing the “Look up in the sky!” routine.
I felt my cell phone go off in my pocket, prompting me to hit the switch on my Mainland Bluetooth connection. The wind around me suddenly died down as a sound barrier enchantment blocked out the ambient noise in front of me.
“Hey, David,” I said. “Any luck at the mayor’s office?”
“Just went over it and the staff with a fine tooth comb,” David said ruefully. “Nobody apparently knows anything. But, we did find the Crow Isle key charm here.”
“Any way to tell if it’s been used recently?”
“We’ll let Maude worry about that,” David said, shifting gears. “Any sign of Fog’s car?”
“Not yet,” I admitted. “I’ve gone from one end of Glessie to the other for an—“
That was the moment I spotted His Honor’s personal ride. Even if Glessie had so few cars that actually seeing one was on par with a sighting of Bigfoot on the Mainland, there was no way anyone could have missed the gunmetal silver Cadillac nosing out of the alley ahead of me. There were no pedestrians or cyclists on the road the car was now traveling, which may have been why the driver felt it was safe to gun the engine.
“Hattie?” David asked at the other end of the line.
“Got him,” I said. “Heading up the north end of Pickman just above Ward Street.”
“Crap,” David said. “Even with brooms, we’d never get there in time to catch up.”
That statement made me think of the Reforma spell. Would it be possible that…
“Get ready to blank out a lot of people, Eclipse,” I said, tilting the broom handle down to get closer to street level.
“Way ahead of you,” Eclipse replied, his little head darting in all directions to capture any curious lookers-up.
As I felt three more bursts of the Obliviscatur charm go off, I focused my will at all four tires on the Cadillac. Suddenly the tires lost all of their air in one big rush, making them go as flat as pancakes. That part of Pickman was nothing but a dirt track on a good day, but thanks to recent rains, it was basically a mud pit. The Caddy revved its engine in vain as it tried to spin its way out of the rut, throwing up mud everywhere.
The sound dampener charm doesn’t block out all noise. “Hattie, why am I hearing an engine working overtime in the background?”
“Let’s just say that if you can get here on brooms, you’ll have no trouble catching up with His Honor,” I said, a satisfied smile on my face as I tilted my broom up. “I’ll keep an eye on things to make sure nobody attempts a getaway on foot.”
Within five minutes, David’s team had everybody from the car in custody.
Fog all but jumped as David threw down some photos in front of him in the interrogation room. After the vitriol that man had poured on me yesterday, it was a treat to watch him squirm from where I stood, on the other side of the one-way glass.
“Seems to me you had an unhealthy obsession with the late Ms. Stone, Your Honor,” David said, tapping the photos with his pointer. “Candi
d shots through the window after Druida showers?"
David touched the picture his accusation pointed to. But, he didn't stop there. "Pics of her leaving Woga class, oh, and, plenty of close-up's here, showing all the best contours under that stretchy lycra she wore."
David casually pushed a few of the damning images across the table to Fog. Marty could only mouth wordlessly, while his face flushed a violent shade of crimson.
"Let's not forget the video footage of Druida's early morning jogging routine in Spirit Tree Park!" He shouted that last, making the Mayor jump for real this time. "So, this is where our tax Lunes go? How all of our hard earned money is being spent?"
“Listen…Chief Trew,” Fog said, panic running through his voice like a live electrical current. “I-I know how this looks. I really, really do. But I swear, I had nothing to do with her murder…at all! Why would I want her dead, for Bran’s sake? I was in love with her.” The Mayor's strident voice broke a little with those last few words. David didn't let up.
“Still doesn’t answer the question of why you were attempting to run when we caught up with you,” he said, leaning into the mayor. “But then, thanks to the informant that tipped us off, we had enough probable cause to search your house to tell us why.”
“That is illegal!” Fog sputtered. “You had no right to—“
“Take it up with whatever judge you happen to get for your trial,” David spat back. “Everyone is still going to know that you have been in contact with known Strands dealers since your term started.”
“So what if I was?” Fog asked. “That still doesn’t prove that I ever did anything ille—“
The words died in his mouth as David held up a small purple journal that he pulled from his back pocket. “Next time you want to hide something, do it somewhere less obvious than under the floorboards of your bed. Points for putting it in code but my cryptographers tell me that they’ve worked on harder Sudoku puzzles. The last entry in it shows a payoff for the kidnapping of one ‘B. O.’…which, by wild coincidence, just happens to be the monogram of the recently kidnapped Bradford Obonyo.”
Fog all but melted at this point, looking down at the table as though it contained his doom. Given that David slapped the book on top of the photos, maybe it did.
“Why did you have him taken?” David asked.
Fog looked up at David, looked down at the book. He seemed to be weighing the options between another evasion and telling the truth. He finally said, “Because I thought he was the one who killed Druida.”
“Give me a break,” David snarled as he pushed himself off the table. “Yesterday, you were saying that Hattie Jenkins was the one who did that.”
“She was too!” Fog snapped, some of the fire coming back in his face and voice. “They both were! They both hated Druida for…”
Fog lost his voice again. Clearing his throat, he said, “I knew that between those cats of hers and your…personal relationship with Jenkins, I’d never be able to touch her. But who cares about another darkie who didn’t have the sense to—“
This time, David cut him off with a backhanded slap to Fog’s cheek.
“Police brutality!” Fog yelled. I could not believe what I just saw. I've never in my life seen David strike a person. But, I believe if I had been in there with Fog, I might have done the same at that senselessly racist remark.
“Nope. Just giving a Class-A jerk what he so richly deserves,” David countered, getting within an inch of Fog’s face. “By Brigid, you stupid little man, did you think that someone wouldn't find out the truth about you eventually? So what was the plan?"
Fog’s eyes gleamed with unbridled hate as he sneered, “Break Obonyo…every man’s got his limit, right? The people I hired would work on him. Not on Glessie, you understand. I wanted to keep trouble away from our beloved town; Bran knows we've had enough of it lately. I still had the key to Crow Isle, so I knew my operatives could do a good job without any interruption. I knew they could get Obonyo to confess to anything I wanted him to.”
“Including your involvement in the Strands trade,” David said.
“No…no!” Fog snapped. “Why would I even bring that up?! I wanted him to confess to what he was actually guilty of; Druida’s murder. If you did your job instead of letting your girlfriend—“
“The next words out of your mouth are going to determine how many more charges I throw on top of the ones I’ve already got you booked on,” David said. “Choose carefully.”
A shiver of admiration tumbled through my body. Go ahead punk, make my day.
I admit, I giggled at David bringing this unbelievably sleazy, racist politician to heel. Even when we were kids, David had always had a protective streak. I was sure that days like the one we found ourselves in now were the times when he felt like his work actually mattered.
Raquel Berry walked into my side of the interrogation glass. One look at my face and she froze in her tracks.
“Cat got your tongue?” I raised an eyebrow at her and nodded toward the interrogation room. "His Honor here cracked. You missed a good show."
Berry took that as a sign that it was safe to approach and cautiously handed me a sheet of paper. “I’ll be giving this to David in a moment. But I thought you might want to see this for yourself.”
It had two lines of script running parallel to each other. The top line was what I presumed was the code that David had just mentioned while interrogating Fog; a very simplistic mixture of Futhark and Ogham. The translation told me that it was a line in a ledger, citing a sum of 5000 Suns for the kidnapping of B.O. It also bore five names complete with initials.
“All of these were Heimdall operatives?” I asked, tracing my finger across them.
“‘Were’ being the correct term,” Berry said with a hair flip that seemed to be an expression of her own annoyance, rather than it being an attempt to annoy me. “Heimdall doesn’t need this sort of bad press or reputation. I’ve been talking to our legal department, which has offered unconditional cooperation with David’s people regarding prosecuting these rogue operatives to the limit of the law.”
It was a persuasive speech, but I still asked, “Why all this trouble for someone with an alternate book lending program?”
“Oh, don’t be coy, Jenkins,” Berry snapped with a pout. “It doesn’t become you.”
“Neither does being insulted; you may remember?” I asked, letting her know her brand of smarm was creeping its way to my personal city limits.
“Well, I personally find it an insult that I am the last to know that Bradford Obonyo was actually an undercover cop,” Berry said. “These are the sort of people I am supposed to be good at spotting and I never once…”
Berry cut herself off with an irritated sigh and another flip of her hair. But that statement did go a long way towards explaining why Heimdall was being unusually cooperative in this particular case.
“So David told you?” I asked.
“Obviously,” Berry snapped. “If you’re worried that I’ll tell anyone about this, remember what I said yesterday about NDAs.”
While we had been talking, Fog and David had departed the question room. David walked into our side of the glass and looked apprehensive to see both Berry and me occupying the same space.
“Relax,” I assured him.
Handing Berry back the paper, she gave it to David, who said, “And these are all your people?”
“I’m afraid so, David,” Berry said. “As I was telling Jenkins, we’re going to pull out all the stops on making sure they are legally punished for this little freelance job.”
“I appreciate it,” David said, looking at her with a genuine smile.
To quell the stormy thoughts I felt bubbling at the back of my brain, I asked, “Is there any chance that we could tie him to Druida’s murder, despite all his bluster?”
“If only,” David said, sorting through the photos in his hand. Once he found the right one, he handed it to me.
It was a clear survei
llance photo of Fog meeting with Asanath Coleman, a known Strands trafficker, at the base of Myrdwen Cliffs on Glessie’s west coast. I took a closer look at the backdrop to the image. A low rock wall, scattered with seemingly random runes. There was something about the rune in the top left corner of the wall that looked different from the others.
But before I could follow up on the thought, Berry said, “I take it this comes from our injured-in-the-line-of-duty comrade Mr. Obonyo?”
“Good guess,” David said. “This kind of surveillance was just part of his building a case against the mayor. Check the timestamp.”
My heart sank when I saw it. The date and time were a rough match for the time of death Maude had noted in her autopsy report on Druida.
Making one last try, I asked, “Couldn’t he have hired someone to do the job?”
“If he did, it’s not in the ledger,” David said. “I’ve got a forensic accountant tracing back every transaction that came out of His Honor’s slush fund. But nothing he’s put together so far has any connection to the murder.”
Tartarus!
Chapter Sixteen
I was almost two blocks from my destination when I heard a familiar voice admonish me, “And where do you think you’re going, young Seraphim?”
I snapped my head around toward an alley on my left, irritated by the interruption. I stepped closer to the source of that voice, to find Onyx perched on top of a trash can, flicking his tail back and forth in measured arcs.
“Why are you out here without a leash?” I asked.
“Why are you going to the library instead of the shop?” he countered.
“Going to see if Reg can help me with some research on Crow Isle,” I replied.
Onyx harrumphed. “He’s an Unawakened, Hattie. There’s a limit to how much he can help you there.”
“Anything at this point would help,” I insisted, determined to outsmart my smartypants cat. “I don’t care if Fog hasn’t been connected with Druida’s murder. He had people working for him on Crow Isle, so maybe—“
The Witch of Bohemia: A Paranormal Cozy Mystery (Hattie Jenkins & The Infiniti Chronicles Book 3) Page 15