Charms and Death and Explosions

by Honor Raconteur

  Yes, she’d mentioned this before. “He has a business partner? Or an employee?”

  “None of the neighboring business owners were sure about it,” McSparrin explained to me. “They just knew the man handled the finances and they saw him coming in and out of the building at interesting hours. In fact, the business ran interesting hours. They were only open in the afternoons from two until five, three days a week.”

  I blinked at that, turning my head to give her a baffled look. “And they stayed in business?”

  “Did better than that,” McSparrin denied with an expression that suggested it was only the tip of the iceberg. “The car? Was paid for in cash three months ago. They said the victim was always bringing by a new girlfriend, eating out at the best restaurants, and wearing the latest fashions.”

  That did not add up to a good overall picture. “I’m afraid I see. He was churning out charms by quantity instead of quality, cutting corners and costs, and living off the profits.”

  “You see why I really want to find the business partner,” Jamie intoned dryly. “Right now it’s a very ugly picture. I give it fifty-fifty odds that it was a jealous girlfriend who got to him. Or paid someone to get to him, I should say. How many female powder monkeys are there?”

  “About as many policewomen, perhaps less,” I answered dryly. “It’s not a profession most women choose to pursue.”

  “Hmm.” She digested this with a noncommittal hum and made the necessary turn onto the main road. We were perhaps five minutes away from the crime scene now. “Alright, you said that the business was too dangerous for us to go into. What are you expecting it to be like?”

  Something of this nature was not easy to explain, but for her sake and McSparrin’s, I tried to put it into layman’s terms. “In order for charms to be accepted into a store, they go through a cursory inspection. Usually a lens of some sort is used to see if the charms radiate magic. They unfortunately cannot tell the average person if a charm is of good quality or not, hence the deplorable state of the market, but they can at least tell if the charms are nothing more than ink and paper. To that end, fraudulent people like our victim have the habit of using bespelled ink, or spelled paper, in order to manufacture enough of a magical signature to pass these inspections. But they’re often careless with the storage and use of the items. Spilled ink on the floor is ignored, torn paper not disposed of properly, etc. It leaves a mess of magical energy strewn about.”

  Jamie’s eyes cut sharply to mine and I knew she heard what I did not say. Her magical core was in a constant state of flux, and while coming into contact with other magic was not harmful, per se, being around agitated magical energy would do her no good. Such knowledge of her state was confined to a handful of people—I being one of them—and I protected her as much as possible by keeping that information close to my chest.

  “I see,” she finally said. “That does sound nasty.”

  “I’d rather not step through that kind of mess,” McSparrin seconded firmly. “Doctor, I assume you can tell at a glance how bad it is?”

  “I can, yes, which was why I requested that you not enter the building without me. If I deem it safe enough, you can of course come inside and investigate. Otherwise I’ll have to cleanse the place first. It won’t be safe for a non-practitioner to enter otherwise.”

  Jamie pulled to a stop in front of the building, clear from the crime scene rope still cordoning off the small area of the parking lot and sidewalk outside of the two-story brick building, and turned off the engine. “Then we’ll wait here while you take a gander.”

  “Very well.” I climbed out and headed for the business’s front door, a truly ugly shade of chartreuse with a bell hanging over the top of it to announce visitors. The red brick front of the building, at least, had not been impacted by the blast unduly. The windows were cracked, the painted gold letters on the panes now less than pristine as it read: Charm-A-Way: Your source for good health. I couldn’t stop a snort at the slogan, as I found it ironic in the extreme. Testing the brass handle, I found the door unlocked—interesting—and pushed it open without trying to step across the threshold. Best to get a good look at the situation first.

  Even with my bare eyes, I could see that the front room, at least, was kept in an orderly fashion. The tile was clean, the front counter dividing the foyer from the back room polished to a dull gleam, and nothing about the narrow space hinted at trouble. Stepping through, I maneuvered around the long counter and toward the back of the space, finding two offices and a file room. Nothing in any of them indicated magic at all. Conversely, that made me frown. If he hadn’t been using this back area to manufacture his charms, then where? He must have a printing press in the building somewhere.

  Opening doors at random, I found one leading to a staircase downwards and took it. As I descended, a vile odor assaulted my nose and I stopped dead halfway down. There was a light on somewhere, enough to dimly illuminate the space, but the angle of the wall prevented me from seeing anything more than a sliver of grey floor at the base of the stairs. What was that horrendous odor? It smelled of something dead and decaying, mixed in with the oil of a machine, the metal tang of spilled blood—oh, stonking deities.

  I think I knew where that missing partner/employee might be.

  Hastily, I reversed directions and ascended the stairs, as I had no means of protection on myself except my wand, and Jamie would have my head if I walked into a potentially dangerous situation by myself. I doubted the murderer was still here if the body was already in such a state of decay that I could smell it, but still. No need to be stupid.

  I stumbled to a stop at the edge of the door, meeting both women’s eyes, and they looked tense and alarmed at my abrupt reappearance. Either that, or my wild expression told them that something was dreadfully awry. “I think the missing employee is in the basement, and I do not believe he’s still living.”

  Jamie was out of the car before I could complete the sentence, already removing her gun from its holster. “You see him?”

  “No, smelled him halfway down the stairs. The odor is…distinctive. I thought better of investigating it by myself.”

  “Good. I’d hate to have to beat sense into you.” She patted my arm as she went through, her own way of saying she was glad for my common sense, then paused as McSparrin scrambled to join us.

  I led the way toward the back of the building, explaining quickly as I moved, “There is a set of stairs in the back. There’s no sign of anything magical on this floor. I assume the printing press and other materials are in the basement. Do allow me to go first, as I still have not verified the basement area safe for exploration.”

  “We will,” McSparrin promised faithfully, her gun also in hand.

  Certain individuals in this city would find it emasculating to have two women armed and ready to defend their unprotected backs. I found it vastly reassuring. Both of these women were better marksmen than I, and it was their task more than mine to take down armed criminals. My focus was to protect them from the elements of magic they could not see. I left the rest up to them.

  Descending the stairs again, I breathed through my mouth, and gave McSparrin a sympathetic glance as she gagged. “Vile, isn’t it? You’ll never mistake this smell for anything other than a rotting corpse. Breathe through your mouth and try not to think of food. It helps.”

  “Sorta, at least,” Jamie muttered, eyes peeled as we descended. She kept her gun trained down, ready to lift and aim at a moment’s notice.

  We reached the bottom and I carefully put my head around the corner. There was no hint of anything living moving about. The basement was well lit, suggesting that the men actually spent most of their working hours down here. Narrow windows lined the walls on all sides, spaced out evenly, providing something in the way of lighting. The main illumination came from the bare bulbs dangling from the ceiling. There were six printing presses, huge creations of iron staged along the area, with reams and reams of paper, bottles of ink, and
two tables of printed charms along the front area. They’d been hard at work before the disaster, apparently.

  “Henri,” Jamie stepped around me to stand at my side, in full view of the room. “Any magic?”

  “Quite a bit, but contained, fortunately. Don’t approach the shelves or the table, and it should be fine. They weren’t stupid enough to ignore spills, at least.” Although I didn’t have any higher praise to offer than that. Which was a sad state of affairs.

  “Penny, you take right,” Jamie instructed with a jerk of her chin. “Let’s locate the source of that smell.”

  “That’s about as exciting as chasing down the smell of a dead rat,” McSparrin muttered to herself but obeyed immediately.

  “I’d rather it be a rat,” Jamie retorted, then sighed. I noted she carefully breathed through her mouth and I felt a certain sympathy for her. As vile as the stench was, Jamie’s heightened senses would be doubly assaulted. “I hate dead people. They hold no answers.”

  “Unfortunately true.” Since no one could approach the printing presses but myself, I went that direction, wand ready with a stasis spell. It was the best defense I had, as it would keep my attacker down if attacked. I didn’t expect trouble down here, however. The area was too open, with too few hiding places. We would have seen him already if there was someone still here.

  “Ah. Found him.”

  I hurried through the rest of my sweep of the back area, following Jamie’s voice toward the front. She stood near the charm tables—although keeping her distance and a hand over her nose—staring downwards with the oddest look upon her face. McSparrin, standing at her side, looked just as baffled.

  Coming around the other direction, I immediately saw why. The man was in his forties, perhaps older, hair thinning on top, his clothes shabby and on the edge of ruin with all of the ink staining his cuffs and splattering his white shirt. I couldn’t see anything of his expression, as the body was on its knees and slumped in on itself. Someone had tied his hands behind his back, then his wrists to his ankles, keeping the body taut and strangely upright.

  “Bullet to the back of the head, looks like,” Jamie informed me, words muffled, “although we’ll wait for the coroner’s report to make sure. Penny, take the car and go fetch Doctor Weber, please.”

  With a nod, McSparrin scrambled up the stairs, gratefully, I think. At least, I would be grateful for any reason to escape the stench.

  I studied the man, my perplexity growing. “Why go through the very elaborate prep work necessary to turn the car into a bomb, killing one of them, then execute the other like this?”

  “Does seem strange, doesn’t it? If they had a gun, why not use it on both men? It would have been far simpler.” Jamie holstered her gun and scratched her chin, staring at our second victim thoughtfully. “Assuming that’s what happened. We might be looking at this wrong. Garner could have killed the assistant, and then his accomplice, whoever that was, killed Garner later.”

  “I grant you the possibility, although at this moment I don’t see the motive.”

  “I don’t see the motive behind any of this yet. Either way, we’re not looking at a single murderer. Drake said before it would take two men, two specialties, in order to pull the car bomb off. I think he’s right. We’re not dealing with a single murderer. This smacks of being a group of people. Just how many people did these two idiots piss off?”

  “That is indeed the question. My second is more practical. Must we stay down here while waiting for Weber to arrive? I’d like to find my appetite again before dinner.”

  Laughing, Jamie winked at me. “Come on, then. Let’s wait topside.”

  I followed at her heels, each step offering cleaner air to inhale, which my nose appreciated. We gained the main floor and didn’t stop until reaching the offices. Inclining my head toward one, I suggested, “We could put the time to use. I, for one, would like to know what other stores carried their wares.”

  “And finances are usually very telling,” Jamie agreed with a thoughtful look toward the filing room. “Let’s divide and conquer. My reading skills are up to this, I think.”

  Numbers were easiest for her to read, after all. We divided to either side, me toward the main office and the massive desk that conquered most of the room. The mahogany surface didn’t contain much paperwork, but I had the feeling that the desk was mostly for show. This was a place to impress women, not to actually run a business. Jamie might well have better luck in the file room than I did here.

  I went through several drawers, but other than finding a stash of liquor, a half-devoured box of hard candy, and a few potentially useful love letters stashed in the back of one drawer, I found nothing of interest. I did keep the letters, then wandered into the file room to search there.

  Jamie already had two drawers out, and three piles on the sole table in the room. As I entered, she glanced up from the ledger in her hands and informed me, “I think our dead man downstairs is named Peter Timms. He’s listed as an employee in the books.”

  “Well, that clarifies that, at least.” I pointed to the piles. “What are these?”

  Pointing to each, Jamie rattled off, “Invoices, tax forms, bills.”

  I picked up the first folder on the invoice pile, noted the date was this month, and rifled through them. To my utter lack of surprise, he had more than one vendor for his wares, which meant the warrant in my pocket would need to be revised. Still, it seemed he only dealt with roughly thirty stores, a modest amount in a city of this size. Unless…now that was odd.

  “What’s the funny look for?” Jamie inquired.

  “All of the stores he uses are on this side of the city,” I answered slowly, conferring with the mental map in my head.

  She put the ledger down for a moment, cocking her hips to half-sit on the table’s surface. “Really? You’re sure.”

  “Yes, I’m quite familiar with all of them. Some of them are modestly reputable, others not known for their quality.”

  Shaking her head, she marveled, “You’re better than a Wikipedia page when it comes to Kingston.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” When she waved this off, I put her statement under its usual heading of, Earthling, Strange Statement of, and continued. “I find this odd. There are multiple market places in Kingston, and the east end would be the perfect place to cater to, considering the state of his charms. And yet he doesn’t have a single store over there that he distributes to?”

  Narrowing her eyes, she stared down at the open ledger in her hands. “You know, when you put it that way….”

  “Odd, is it not? What are you seeing in the ledger?”

  “The same thirty stores, over and over again. He apparently delivered charms to them once a week, usually an order of fifty at a time. There’s a lot of abbreviations and short hand going on—I assume because they had more than one type of charm they offered, and their own way of referring to it.”

  “Yes, quite. I saw three different types just from the briefcase. More than a dozen types were on the tables downstairs.” This did not make sense to me. Why only thirty stores? Why only on this semi-respectable side of the city when the east side would be a better way to offload his merchandise?

  “I’ve got a bad hunch,” Jamie murmured. Standing, she put the ledger aside and went to the far right filing cabinet, the one nearly hidden in the corner, then sank onto her haunches. Pulling out the bottom drawer, she drew a leather-bound ledger out and flipped through it. It took her precisely one page before she grunted in satisfaction. “Knew it.”

  “Do enlighten me,” I drawled in invitation, leaning my back against the table’s edge.

  Standing, she waved the ledger in illustration. “This has a different business name on it. Different stores. I will bet you dollars to donuts that these idiots are charlatans. Con-artists. They go into an area, saturate it with bad charms, and when it gets too hot for them, they pull out. Declare bankruptcy, change their names, change their distributors, and go right back at it.”r />
  I let out a soundless whistle. That was entirely possible. I’d seen multiple businesses pull the same strategy, especially bad construction businesses. Unfortunately, the law could not prosecute an individual for certain crimes, per se. Not if the business as a whole was deemed responsible. It was a loophole that the more clever criminals used often to their advantage. I kept waiting for the law to change, to wise up to this tactic and plug the hole. It had not happened yet.

  “If you’re correct—and I’ll lay odds you are—then it should be easy enough to prove the matter. Especially since they were stupid enough to keep their files from the last business.”

  Jamie nodded in dark amusement. “I think they did it just to keep track of who they’d already burned. Either way, it was stupid. Cocky. Well, Henri, this is a bit of a pickle. It looks more and more like the bad charms are tied into the motive. But if they’ve done this multiple times, it leaves us with a rather wide suspect pool. There’s got to be several hundred mechanics and powder monkeys in this city alone.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, the thought already exhausting me. “This won’t be easy, to narrow the field. I think I already know the answer, but do fingerprints survive explosions?”

  “Actually, they do,” she surprised me by saying.

  I blinked at her. “I’m astonished. Do they really?”

  “I should qualify that,” Jamie cautioned. “Fingerprints made with blood, dirt, or grease can survive fires. A contained explosion like the car bomb wouldn’t necessarily wipe away fingerprints.”

  It truly fascinated me, the knowledge contained in her head. I never tired of asking her questions because of it. “Interesting. I’m doubly glad that I and Drake wore gloves, then.”

  “Yes, so am I. I’ll get on fingerprint recovery when we get back to the car. For now, though…” she regarded all the files with a sort of resigned good humor, “I suppose we’ll have to arrange this being carted back to the office. Do you think we can requisition Penny and Gerring?”

  “I believe so.” At least, I hoped so. Captain Gregson was of the opinion that Jamie’s techniques produced good results. He encouraged her to train the newer members of the force, those who were still amiable to learning, and I’d seen him rearrange schedules to allow our junior members the time to study under her. Phrased correctly, we’d no doubt be able to keep McSparrin and Gerring with us for at least a week. “We’ll ask upon our return.”