Dragon with a Deadly Weapon

by Michael Angel

  My brow furrowed. “Okay, I think I follow you. How can we be too ‘close’?”

  “Because everything went down on the twelfth floor of this building.”

  Esteban nodded towards a polished brass display board that hung on the wall next to a row of elevators. I took a couple of steps towards the board and realized that it was a building directory. The bottom floor held an art gallery and an insurance agency. Further up the building, small law offices and brokerage firms predominated.

  But the entire top floor, the twelfth, had been allocated to a single firm.

  Crossbow Consulting.

  The chill I’d felt out by the fountain came back with a vengeance.

  My voice came out as a whisper. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Esteban indicated one of the side corridors with a nod of his head. “Come on, we’re using the service elevator.”

  The walls and flooring got a lot less plush as we wended our way to the rear of the grand foyer. Marble was replaced by tile, and then by tired-looking checkered linoleum. At the end of the passageway, a dull gray door retracted to reveal a crowded double-sized elevator.

  Two uniformed LAPD patrolmen emerged, followed by a quartet of gowned OME personnel pushing or pulling a pair of gurneys. Each gurney carried a filled body bag. We stood aside as they squeezed by. We got into the elevator and Esteban hit the button for the top floor. The door closed, and with a little ‘ding’, up we went.

  We stepped out into a scene right out of a war movie.

  Specifically, we stepped out into the scene in the movie that takes place right after the battle’s been won or lost and the dust has just settled. Only instead of the dramatic hush that hung over the scene, there were plenty of loud sounds to go around.

  A half-dozen cops were busy working the scene, along with more OME personnel who were collecting evidence in sample bags. Lieutenant Ollivar stood off to one side, arguing with one of the building’s security guards and a utility worker from the local power company.

  Based on the signage, the main entryway for Crossbow Consulting had been to our left. ‘Had Been’ were the operative words. The remnants of a massive security door lay to one side, a slab of steel more than a foot thick. The door hadn’t been pried open. Instead, it looked like a tin can that someone had set on fire and tossed under the wheels of a big rig.

  Beyond the destroyed entryway I saw the layout of a typical office, complete with a reception desk and a network of half-rise cubicles. A couple details jumped out at me, even at a distance. Bullet holes pockmarked the walls. Shrapnel had pitted and torn several of the cubicle panels, leaving them gaping and ragged.

  Blood stains turned the floor into a modern-day Pollock print.

  Ollivar left the two men he’d been conversing with and moved to join us. He was a heavyset man with a face etched into a piggish, narrow-eyed scowl. I couldn’t say that I liked him. I could only say he’d changed his mind about me as McClatchy had spiraled into madness. In the end, he’d come out swinging for me.

  “Lieutenant, what the heck happened here?” I asked.

  “Detective Esteban and I were hoping you could help us with that,” he said bluntly. “Shortly after five this morning, we got an emergency call from building security. They said someone had set off a bomb on the top floor. The initial explosion was followed by the sound of gunfire. By the time we got here, whatever happened was already over and done with.”

  “How many bodies do we have?” I asked.

  “Four. All employees of Crossbow Consulting. But here’s where it starts to get chueco. We’ve got witnesses, a half-dozen of them. All employees of Crossbow. And all are telling us the same story: that their surveillance system went active and into security lockdown.

  “The door was blasted open a few seconds later. A man wearing jeans and a gray hoodie walks right through what’s left of the doorway, like he’s just there for an appointment. He pulls out a pistol but doesn’t start spraying the place with bullets. He ignores everyone else and takes out only four people in the office.”

  Esteban’s brow creased. “It sounds like someone was pulling a hit. Why those four? What do they have in common?”

  “Each was an adult male between twenty and thirty years of age, and they arrived at the office twenty-four hours ago from the overseas branches of Crossbow. We hadn’t seen or heard of them before. Remember, we’d already done a search and seizure of this office.”

  “I remember hearing about that,” I put in. “You guys sent in SWAT, but no one was armed. The employees here handled paperwork and filing, and not much else.”

  “Well, these four handled the nastier side of things, like the people who showed up outside your house,” Ollivar said. Esteban’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t show any other sign of emotion. I knew better. Vega’s death still played on his mind. “Each of these guys were on INTERPOL’s ‘naughty’ lists, and we’ve got no idea how they got into the country. And the kicker is that we found exotic weaponry on each of their corpses. Custom jobs, each designed to hold silencers and extra ammunition.”

  “Okay, so our masked man takes out these bad hombres,” Esteban said. “Then what happened? Did someone nail him? Did he leave? And if so, how did he get past building security? There’s a guard post by the elevator bank, they’d be waiting for him.”

  “That’s just it.” Ollivar pulled a cloth handkerchief from a pocket and dabbed the sweat from his forehead. “The witnesses are consistent in what they’re telling us. After killing the four gunmen, our suspect walked into the office’s back meeting room. He never came out. But he’s gone, just plain gone.

  “We’ve searched the place from top to bottom with officers, OME personnel, even trained dogs from the K-9 unit. There’s no hidden vents, sub-floors, or hidden passageways. And it’s a sheer twelve-story drop from the windows.”

  “There aren’t any clues at all?” I asked, though I knew in my gut what Ollivar was going to say next.

  “Not a one. As far as we can tell, our suspect walked into the room and simply vanished into thin air.”

  Vanished into thin air, I thought. Vanished, like whoever set up the shooting of Police Chief Sims. Vanished like Archer and Harrison. Vanished like the stone dragon, Sirrahon.

  Great.

  Just my rotten luck.

  Chapter Three

  “Wait a minute,” Esteban objected. “Do we have anything else to go on besides ‘guy in jeans and a gray hoodie’?”

  “Our suspect is around six feet tall,” Ollivar responded. “No one made out his face under the hood, but his hands were white, so he’s definitely Caucasian.”

  “What about the security cameras? Did they catch anything?”

  I braced myself, but I knew what the answer would be.

  “The building’s security cameras on the ground floor and in the parking lot don’t show our suspect pulling up in a car. They don’t show him entering the building, either. Of course, it’s possible that he came on foot and avoided the cameras down there.”

  “What about on this floor? There’s only an elevator lobby, and then the entryway to Crossbow. You can’t avoid a camera up here.”

  The Lieutenant’s face took on a reddish tinge, as if he had to force himself to continue. “The systems up here all came up blank. Literally. They failed sixty seconds before the door to Crossbow’s suite exploded.”

  Esteban stopped and just gaped at him.

  “If that’s not chueco enough for you, I’ve got more,” Ollivar continued. “Our witnesses were consistent on one more thing: that our suspect ‘murmured’ the entire time during the attack. His lips moved, though no one could hear what he was saying over the gunfire.”

  That sent the hairs on the back of my neck prickling up. I traded a startled glance with Esteban. It didn’t go unnoticed by the Lieutenant. Despite how brutishly dull Ollivar looked, he was a lot sharper than I gave him credit for.

  “That’s the same kind of look I saw you two give each ot
her, back when we were looking into that museum theft,” he gritted. “The time when I found that gigantic feather. Chrissie, you need to know something. The reason I asked for you and Esteban to show up here when I’ve already got enough people on scene.”

  Ollivar casually looked around, making sure that nobody was paying attention to us. His voice dropped as he spoke again.

  “Detective Vega came to speak with me the day before she ended up in that shootout at your house. She believed that you and Detective Esteban shared some kind of ‘secret’ knowledge.”

  I didn’t like where this was going. Before she’d seen Grimshaw and Queen Nagura at the end, Isabel Vega had thought that Esteban was part of a criminal conspiracy. That he spoke in ‘code’ to pass information along to me. The last thing I wanted was for a shadowy rumor to follow him for the rest of his career at the LAPD.

  “Lieutenant,” I said carefully, “if Isabel thought we were doing something outside the law, she was badly mistaken. Internal Affairs ran a check on me, they came up empty–”

  “I’m not talking about that kind of thing, and you know it,” Ollivar said sharply. “And I doubt that IA is finished with you, at least in the long term. But I think you two know what I’m talking about, and I don’t need to say it. You never ‘solved’ that theft at the museum, but it’s never happened again. That’s enough for me. Whatever you find in Crossbow’s office, if you can’t solve it through the LAPD’s channels, take care of it in your own way. Aggaraste la onda?”

  Esteban put his hand protectively on my shoulder as he answered. “Yeah, we get it. And I’m sure that Dayna and I will take care of this. One way or another.”

  Ollivar let out a grunt and shuffled off to confer with another group of officers. I realized that I’d been holding my breath. I let it out with a sigh. Esteban rubbed his chin.

  “Just when I think I’ve seen everything…” he murmured. “What do you think, Dayna?”

  “I think there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to Lieutenant Ollivar,” I replied. “And the same goes for this crime scene. Come on, let’s take a look.”

  The first item on my to-check list was the blasted door’s remains. I went up to where the foot-thick steel had been scorched and folded back upon itself. I worked my jaw back and forth as I studied it. There was a lot going on here, and all of it wrong.

  “What do you think?” I asked Esteban.

  “I think it’s one-hundred-percent off kilter, that’s what. Look at how it’s bent the wrong way. It’s as if the blast came from inside the office, not from the elevator lobby. A shaped charge could do that, but I doubt that’s what we’re seeing here.”

  I leaned in and brought my nose within an inch of the scorch mark. I inhaled, and my nostrils filled with the scent of charcoal and matches. The smell etched itself on my tongue and made it curl up in disgust.

  “Sulfur and charcoal,” I said quietly. “That’s what I smelled at the Wainwright house. And on that first body we found, the one at that construction site.”

  “The one with the gold medallion that gave you a one-way ticket,” Esteban agreed, his voice also kept low. “Those two ingredients aren’t found in modern high-tech explosives, either. I’m betting that the OME’s explosives lab’s going to have a fun time figuring out what blew this door open.”

  Shaking my head, I stepped back into the office, almost colliding with yet another gurney topped by a filled body bag. One of the OME techs pushing it was Lee Myun-Hee. Her eyes brightened as she recognized me.

  “Good to see you, Dayna,” she said, in her reed-thin voice. “I thought you’d be the ‘advisor’ the LAPD was sending over.”

  “Just so you know, I won’t be critiquing your findings,” I said quickly. “I think the brass mainly wants a second set of eyes on things. Since this case is so odd.”

  “Tell me about it. This is the last body. If there’s anything you want to see, now’s the time, or you’ll have to wait till we’ve put him in the chiller.”

  I thought about it for a second as Esteban stepped past us to take in the room. Blood spatters, bullet holes, and chalk outlines pockmarked or stained the walls and floors. Chunks of metal and stone lay scattered about, making the floor resemble a badly kept gravel pit.

  I went up to the gurney, grasped the bag’s zipper, and tugged it down.

  “I want to check the man’s bullet wounds,” I explained, as I exposed the body.

  The smell of blood and spilt bowels greeted me as I did so, scoring a few notches on my personal Stinkiness Scale. The man was well-built and wore an expensive gray suit. I couldn’t tell if he had been good looking, as his head had been blasted into a horrific shape by the impact of a bullet high up on one cheekbone.

  A barely-there sheen of coppery sparkle ringed the fatal wound.

  “Let me know if you see that metallic glint on any of the other bodies,” I said, as I traced the area with my finger.

  “That’s really odd looking,” Lee said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it around a gunshot wound. Any idea what caused it?”

  I zipped the bag up again before setting my case down to open it. I pulled out the sample bag with the bullet and handed it over to Myun-Hee. She looked at it in surprise.

  “I found this in the fountain outside,” I explained. “Definitely a bullet from this gunfight. See the weird metallic flakes? I’m thinking that’s custom-made ammo.”

  “If that’s custom work, I’ll find out what it’s for,” Myun-Hee vowed. “Just let me get this back to the labs.”

  I stepped to one side to let her through. I joined Esteban, who stood a few feet away from the battered reception desk, hands on his hips. He looked over my shoulder and made sure that no one else was in the room before speaking.

  “The patterns of this little gunfight are clear as day to me,” he stated. “And I’m starting to think something’s very wrong here. Just like with that door.”

  Myun-Hee’s team had already done a lot of the work, so the shootout patterns were easy to follow. They’d placed markers indicating where the four bodies had fallen and tape lines for possible bullet trajectories.

  Based on how those trajectory lines radiated out from a central point, it was clear how the shooter had moved. He’d walked in through the entryway, taken a few steps to one side, and then stopped where Esteban now stood.

  A total of eleven shots had been fired. Three had gone harmlessly through the windows at the far side of the room. That had sent the glass chunks tumbling to the ground, resulting in one bullet landing in the outdoor fountain.

  Two splatters of reddish-brown gore matched up to each marker that indicated where a body had been found. In each case, one of the splatters had sprayed significantly farther, or with a wider ‘fan’. That said something even more sinister to my mind.

  “Maybe this was a hit,” I said grimly, as I pointed the pattern out to Esteban. “Each of the four men took a hit from the shooter. But the second round of four bullets show signs of a higher kinetic impact. That means they were fired from a shorter range.”

  “Our shooter plugged each victim with one shot and took them down.” Esteban stepped forward a couple of steps. He raised his arms and clasped his hands as if around a gun to pantomime the action. “Then he stepped forward and tapped them a second time, one-two-three-four. To make sure they stayed down.”

  “Brutal. And efficient.”

  “Too damned efficient. You’ve missed the biggest detail of them all, and that’s because you’re focused on what’s in front of you, not on what’s behind.”

  I turned and looked at the wall behind us. Aside from the blasted entry door, which lay off to one side, it was completely unmarked. Not a single bullet hole marred its surface.

  “The men killed here were trained mercenaries,” Esteban gritted. “Just like the ones that gunned down Vega. And this one guy manages to get the jump on all four of them? He takes them down, even has time to do a double-tap, and he does it so fast tha
t they can’t get a single shot off in return? How in God’s name do you do that?”

  A metallic gleam caught my eye as he spoke. I nudged a piece of rubble out of the way with my toe, then bent down to pick up the object. It was the casing from a nine-millimeter bullet.

  Once again, my mind flashed back to the crime scene at the Wainwright house. My fingers trembled with more than caffeine-fueled jitters as I turned the casing over in my hand. I peered carefully at the object’s base.

  The flowing shape of a flowery seashell glinted back at me. The same one that had been on Hollyhock’s medallion. The same one I’d found on the cartridge casing used by Karl Nystrom’s custom-built firearm, the Demon. The same sign that Galen had identified as a Wizard’s Mark.

  “How do you beat four veteran mercenaries to the draw?” I asked, as I held up the answer. “I think it helps if you’re a wizard from Andeluvia.”

  Chapter Four

  I think it helps if you’re a wizard from Andeluvia.

  My words hung in the air. Esteban paused for a moment before turning to me.

  “That has to be what’s going on, doesn’t it?” he said. “The way the door’s bent open. The ability to arrive someplace unseen. The ability to block camera reception and then vanish into thin air.”

  “I don’t see any other explanation that makes sense,” I admitted. “If I had to guess, our wizard got the drop on the four mercenaries by invoking a spell. Probably to slow his adversaries down.”

  Alanzo quirked an eyebrow at me. “Think it’s anyone you know?”

  “The only two people who can cast magic at that level are Harrison and Archer.” I answered. “I think we better go check that back conference room.”