“Don’t get testy with me, Rachel. Just leave the crime solving to us.”
“We’ve been hired to prove Mary’s innocence, and that’s what we’re going to do. We’ll keep you informed of any developments that affect your investigation or lack of investigation.” And with that, Rachel hung up.
“That pompous asshole,” Rachel muttered. “He’s not doing anything to solve this case. We’re doing all the work and he comes off with this superior attitude like he’s the only investigator in town that can solve a murder.”
“I don’t know what you see in him,” I commented.
“Well if I don’t get an apology, I won’t be seeing much of him anytime soon.”
Avery had taken Rachel out on a few dates since our first case together, and I really don’t know what she sees in him. I do have to admit that he’s a straight-shooter and an honest cop. He’s average looking and average height, but maybe above average intelligence When I explained to him about scientific magic, after I had given him a demonstration, he understood what I was saying and asked intelligent questions. But I don’t think he has much of a life outside the police force.
“Do we have to keep Avery informed?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s to our advantage. When we find the real killer, we’ll need Jack to make the arrest. It’s best to bring him along with us, evidence-wise, so that handing him the real killer won’t be such a surprise.”
“You seem pretty confident that we’ll find the real killer.”
“I think we’re making good progress. If anybody can do it, I think we can, don’t you?”
“Absolutely. I have great confidence in your investigative ability and in my ability to follow your lead. What do we do now that Mr. Tsong isn’t our primary suspect?”
“Wei Liu is now our primary suspect. We focus on him.” Rachel had finished most of her beer, and she stood up from the table. “I’m going down to my place and relax for a while.”
“Are you available for dinner?”
“I think I’m just going to take some alone time tonight. I’ll call if there are any developments, otherwise I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“OK. You get some rest and we’ll pick up the case tomorrow.” I walked Rachel to the door and then returned to the kitchen to clean up after our snack.
Rachel had been gone for no more than fifteen minutes, when my Spell Bell began to chime. The first thing I did was to grab the Snoozer. The second thing I did was to lay the Spell Bell on its side behind the couch in the living room to silence it and keep it out of sight. Then I hid in the bathroom that was between the kitchen and the living room. With the bathroom light out and the door cracked, I could see most of what was happening in those two rooms.
After a couple of minutes during which nothing had happened, I pulled out my phone and called Rachel. Her Spell Bell should have warned her as well. There was no answer. I went to the living room and retrieved my Spell Bell, keeping my hand on it to muffle the chiming. I could feel the clapper hitting the bell, so magic was still nearby or had recently gone, but where? I set the Spell Bell back on its side behind the couch, and left my apartment.
I went downstairs and stood outside Rachel’s front door. The two downstairs apartments had two exits each—the front door opened into the living room/den, and the back door opened into the bedroom to provide a second fire exit. I couldn’t hear her Spell Bell chiming. I knocked twice on her door, but got no response. Gathering my courage, I took my keys out of my pocket and inserted my master key into her lock. All landlords have keys to their tenants’ apartments in case of an emergency, and this was definitely an emergency. Holding my Snoozer at the ready, I slowly and quietly opened the door and looked inside.
There was no one in the front room, so I stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind me. I walked down the short hallway, peeking into the bathroom which was empty. I slowly opened the door to her bedroom and peeked in. The bedroom was also empty. I checked the closet, and no one was there, either. Abandoning caution, I called out Rachel’s name, but got no response.
I looked under the bed and saw Rachel’s Spell Bell lying on its side. I pulled it out, set it on the night stand, and it was silent. The magic had left the building.
Chapter 21
I left Rachel’s apartment, and went out onto the front porch. Rachel’s car was parked in her parking spot. I went back to Rachel’s apartment and started looking for clues. Her purse was on a small table near the front door. The only time she left the Goose without her purse was when she went running. I checked her bedroom closet, which was well organized because it was the only closet she had. All her shoes were in a hanging organizer with a pocket for each shoe. There were two pair of running shoes and no empty pockets. This wasn’t looking good.
Rachel’s apartment was fairly neat. The bed wasn’t made, but the place was clean and orderly. There was no sign of a struggle. I actually hadn’t been in Rachel’s apartment for over a year when I had to replace the microwave, so I didn’t know where she habitually kept things. I didn’t want to go snooping around, but this was a special circumstance. I looked in the drawer of her bedside table and saw her pistol and stun gun. Rachel was unarmed. I didn’t see her Mojo, so she probably had her amulet of protection.
Now it was time to put on my thinking cap. Somehow magic had come and gone from the Goose. Nothing had showed up in my apartment, but I hadn’t checked the basement. I went downstairs to the basement, turned on the lights, and looked around. I had a magic circle drawn in chalk on the floor near one corner. I used this circle for testing the Spell of Translocation. If a magician had cast a Spell of Translocation using a magic circle too large to fit inside one of the apartments, they might pop up in here. I didn’t see any sign that anyone had been here recently, but that didn’t mean that a careful person couldn’t have come and gone.
I went back to Rachel’s apartment and searched through her purse. I had searched through her purse once before, with her permission, and most of the stuff was stuff I had seen before. There was, however, Wei Liu’s business card in the bottom of the purse. Could this be a homing beacon? Had Rachel been captured by the Chinese magician?
I had used a business card as a homing beacon myself, but I had always signed the back to make it unique before I tore it in half. I used one half of the card to translocate to the location of the other half. Wei Liu’s card was completely intact. How could this be a homing beacon? There was no choice but to test it.
I took the business card, left Rachel’s apartment, locking the door behind me, and went up to my own apartment. I changed into my translocation gear and a light overshirt to hide my Snoozer in its shoulder sheath. I put the things that I would need into a small backpack, and I unfolded a SmartCar magic circle onto the living room floor. I set up the symbol cards for translocation and placed Wei Liu’s card on the wooden pivot point in the center of the circle.
It was now or never. If I let too much time elapse, Rachel’s captors could move her away from the homing beacon at my destination, wherever that was. This was a dangerous and desperate plan I was executing. Maybe if I had more time, I could come up with something more intelligent, but Rachel was missing, and I had to do something.
There was no guarantee that the business card was actually a homing beacon. If it wasn’t, then casting the spell would do nothing. If it was a homing beacon, then I was going to pop up without warning in a strange place. I took a deep breath, held my Snoozer in my right hand, and moved the final symbol cards into their correct positions to cast the spell. The air around me started to shimmer. The spell was working! There was a flash of light, and I was in a familiar room.
Chapter 22
There were people in the room! I touched my thumb to the Snoozer’s trigger and waved the wand all around me in a 360-degree circle like a crazed terrorist with a machine gun. Everyone fell to the floor in Snoozer-induced comas. The air around me stopped shimmering, and I looked around. My heart was pounding, and I was
breathing rapidly. I picked up one of the symbol cards to break the Spell of Translocation. I had exactly twelve minutes before the Snoozer’s spell would wear off and everyone would wake up. I got my breathing under control and took stock of the situation. Yes, I was back in Wei Liu’s office. The same room Rachel and I had been in less than three hours earlier. Rachel was slumped in one of the armchairs. A Chinese man was on the floor near the couch, and there was a pair of feet sticking out from behind the wooden screen to the right of the desk.
The Chinese man on the floor in front of the couch was young, mid twenties I would guess. He was wearing loose, nondescript clothing that looked like it would be good for translocation. I went over to Rachel and sat her upright in the armchair. Her hands were tied behind her with a silk cloth. I checked her pulse, and it was slow and steady, a good sign.
Next I went behind the wooden screen to examine the second body. It was a man with pale skin and white hair. He had white eyebrows and eye lashes and spooky eyes. The man was Chinese, but he was an albino. This must be Ernie’s ghost. It was hard to tell his age, but I was guessing that he was at least as old as I. Which one of these guys was Wei Liu? Who was the other guy?
The albino was wearing matching white trousers and tunic made of silk. The tunic had subtle embroidery. His short leather boots were also white and very supple. Judging from the quality of the clothing, the albino was Wei Liu.
My priority was to rescue Rachel before the two magicians woke up, but I decided to take a minute to look for more clues. I went over to the desk, and this time the top right drawer was unlocked. I opened it and the first thing I saw was another Snoozer wand. Thank goodness the wand was out of Liu’s reach, or he would have been immune to my Snoozer’s spell. I didn’t know if Rachel would approve, but I took the wand and put it in my shoulder sheath.
The drawer also contained a piece of jade that was obviously the piece that was broken off of the bi. I decided to leave it in the drawer. There was a notebook, a pencil, a ring of keys and a steel box in the drawer. I set the steel box on the desk and opened it—it wasn’t locked. Inside was a leather folder about nine inches tall by eight inches wide. I picked up the folder and opened it to reveal several pages of business cards, each in an individual clear plastic pocket like pages of photographs in an album. All the cards appeared to be identical Wei Liu business cards, but each one had Chinese words written under it. I flipped to the last page and there was one empty pocket with writing underneath it. Could this have held a homing beacon to Rachel’s apartment? I returned the folder to box, put the box back in the drawer and closed it. Time was running out, but there was one more thing I wanted to do.
I went behind the screen to the wet bar and took two smooth glasses out of the cabinet. I carefully wiped the outside of each glass with my handkerchief. I picked up one of the glasses, with my fingers inside the glass, and wrapped Wei Liu’s right hand around the outside. I took a sharpie out of my pocket and wrote a “W” on the bottom of the glass. I picked up the second glass and went over to the second man and wrapped his fingers around the outside of the glass. I wrote an “X” on the bottom of the second glass, and I put both glasses on the rug inside the magic circle woven into it.
I picked up Rachel and laid her inside the magic circle. I replaced the business card on the pivot point with half of a torn picture postcard which was the homing beacon for my apartment. With my own Snoozer in one hand, I replaced the final symbol card in the circle to invoke the Spell of Translocation, and shimmer, flash, shimmer. We were back in my apartment.
The first thing I did was to put Wei Liu’s business card in the steel box along with the half page I tore out of his book of cocktail recipes. The next thing I did was to pick up my Spell Bell and put it back on an end table. Next, I unbound Rachel’s hands and laid her comfortably on my couch. Then I carefully wrapped each of the two glasses in paper towels and put them in a paper bag in the kitchen.
Rachel was starting to wake up. She opened her eyes and sat upright on the couch.
“Professor! You rescued me—again!”
“That seems to be my primary function in this partnership. Are you alright?”
“I feel like I’ve been zapped with a Snoozer.”
“That you have—I zapped everyone in Wei Liu’s office when I translocated in to rescue you.”
“How did you find me?”
“Before we get to that, tell me what happened to you after you left my apartment about an hour ago.”
“OK. Well, I had only been in my apartment for a few minutes when my Spell Bell started chiming. I didn’t know if it was caused by you translocating or doing some magic, or if some other magic was coming in from somewhere else. I put the Spell Bell under my bed to shut it up so I could think. Always in the past, whenever someone translocates to the Goose, they pop up in your apartment, so I was just about to go upstairs when these two guys materialized in my living room.
“My gun was in the bedroom, and I didn’t have any way to defend myself. The white-haired guy pointed a wand at me, and the dark-haired guy shouted, ‘Stay right there.’ I stood still, and the dark-haired guy came over, grabbed me and pulled me into his circle. The automatic ‘snap back’ feature of the Spell of Translocation teleported the three of us back to Wei Liu’s office.”
“Yes, the Spell of Translocation can carry up to three people,” I commented.
“Back in Liu’s office, the dark-haired guy tied my hands behind my back and sat me in a chair. The white-haired guy spoke to him in Chinese and he asked me who I was.”
“That white-haired guy is an albino Chinese man,” I said. “I suspect that he is Wei Liu.”
“I think you’re right. He was obviously the boss, but I don’t think he could speak English. The dark-haired guy, let’s just call him Chan, did all the talking. I told him my name is Rachel, and he asked me what I was doing in this office early this morning. I had to tell them something, so I said that I was investigating the illegal importing of art from China to the United States, and I had reason to believe that three pieces of jade came from here. Chan spoke for a minute with Liu, and then told me that they were investigating the same thing.
“Chan asked me how I managed to materialize in that room, and I said that I used one of the pieces of jade, a broken bi, as a homing beacon. He asked if I worked for the United States government, and I said ‘No, I was working with the local police.’ He asked where I came from, but I wouldn’t tell him.
“Then he asked how I knew about the three jade artifacts, and I said that the man who imported them was murdered by his wife and the police confiscated the artifacts. I suspected that they were stolen from someone in China, and I was investigating the theft. Chan asked lots of other questions, but I didn’t give him anything else useful. I asked him who they were, but I didn’t get an answer. That’s the last thing I remember.”
“I must have zapped you with the Snoozer about two minutes later which explains your amnesia,” I said. “My story is that I, too, heard my Spell Bell chiming, but I was surprised when a couple of minutes later, no one had showed up in my apartment. I called your phone, but got no answer, so I went down to your apartment. You weren’t there but your purse and car were at the Goose, so I guessed that you had been kidnapped.”
“How did you get into my apartment?”
“I used my landlord key and let myself in.”
“I didn’t know you had a key to my apartment.”
“It’s in the lease, but I haven’t used it since I replaced your microwave.”
“I guess, it’s a good thing you had it.”
“It sure was. I had to assume that you had been translocated somewhere, but where? And what was used for a homing beacon? We had just been in Liu’s office, and you had taken one of his business cards, so I looked in your purse and found the card.”
“How could the card have been a homing beacon? It wasn’t torn in half?”
“I found an album in Liu’s desk drawer that con
tained lots of seemingly identical business cards with individual labels written in Chinese. Even though all the cards looked identical, I think that Liu had some process or spell that magically bound together pairs of business cards for use as homing beacons. If that’s the case, every person he gave a business card to would be a potential target for translocation. It’s really quite ingenious. He obviously keeps track of every card, so he knew that one was missing from the card tray on his desk. For a homing beacon, he and Chan must have used the card in the album that was paired to the card you took.”
“Where’s that business card now?”
“I put it in the steel box where I also put the torn page from Liu’s book of cocktail recipes.”
“OK, so you translocated to Liu’s office. Then what happened?”
“As soon as I materialized, I saw that there were people in the room, so I waved my Snoozer around like a crazy man and put everyone, including you, to sleep. I checked to make sure you were OK and just sleeping, and I searched Liu’s desk for clues.”
“And that’s when you found the album of business cards?”
“Yes, and that’s not all I found.”
“What else did you find, Professor?”
“I found this,” I said as I pulled the Snoozer out of the sheath under my overshirt.
“Isn’t that your Snoozer?”
“No, my Snoozer is there on the coffee table. This is Liu’s Snoozer.”
“You stole Liu’s Snoozer?”
“Well, yes, I admit it was a judgment call, but I did take his Snoozer. Was that a mistake?”
“I don’t know if it was a mistake, but it was a crime.”
“Is it a crime to disarm a Chinese spy and kidnapper and possibly a murderer?”
“He wasn’t a spy if he was in his own country. We were the spies. We were breaking and entering. We were in China without visas or passports.”
“When you put it that way, it does sound a little questionable,” I admitted.
Crimes of Magic: The Yard Sale Wand Page 15