by K. J. Emrick
“How could I know this woman was going to be here? How could I even know who she was? She was a crook, and I’m a cop!”
“We’ll get to that,” Addie promised. “Yes you’re a police officer, but you’re still a person. People from every profession make the same mistakes, whether we like to admit or not.”
She was thinking specifically about witches who used dark magic to get what they want, like Belladonna Nightshade. Women like her gave witches everywhere a bad name.
“I’ve heard your evidence,” Alex snapped at them. “It all points to the French guy, or the huge musclebound guy. It doesn’t point at me.”
“Well,” Addie said with a sharp smile. “Let’s see how it applies to you, shall we?”
“I’d rather not,” Alex grumbled.
“Tough,” Lucian told him. “Stick with us. This is going to be a story worthy of a best seller badge.”
Alex folded his arms over his chest. “Sorry, I don’t read much.”
“Maybe you should. If you did, you might have planned this out better.”
Lucian raised a fist, and for a minute Alex looked worried.
Then Lucian ticked off one finger.
“First, you followed Sheila here. You were late coming to the ceremony, Alex. We saw you come in late. That’s because you were following Sheila. You knew she was coming here, but you needed to be sure she got here, so you followed her here.”
Alex was shaking his head. “You saw me, all right. You saw me come into the dining room and sit down. That’s what you saw.”
“Oh, you made sure we saw that,” Lucian said. “You sat down to dinner specifically so everyone would see you. Then you slipped out to the restroom like so many other people were doing. I noticed, when we were taking statements, I asked you to bring people to and from the restroom and you never once asked where they were. You already knew.”
“Then,” Addie continued the explanation, “all you had to do was wait for your chance. That chance came when Sheila got taken into the security office by Roderick. When it was just the two of them in there, you slipped in, and knocked Roderick unconscious, and killed Sheila.”
“That’s crazy,” Alex sputtered. “You just said the security office was locked! These locks use number pads for extra security. What, did I somehow divine the combination by magic?”
Addie couldn’t help the little smile that curled her lip when he mentioned ‘magic.’ If he only knew. “At first,” she said, “that stumped me too. I thought the only person who could get through one of those locks was someone who knew the code. That was part of what brought us to Marcelle and Roderick. But then I watched Lucian bypass the lock on Marcelle’s office with a little trick he learned at the police academy. A police officer would know how to get around those locks. That means you knew how to do it, too.”
He clamped his mouth shut. There was nothing he could say to deny that fact.
Lucian let the silence hang for only a few moments. “So, Alex, you snuck into the security office. You got the drop on Roderick and knocked him unconscious. No reason to kill him, because he never saw you. Besides, there’s still dozens of people in the building. You couldn’t risk taking too long with your plan. You killed Sheila by stabbing her in the back and got out of there to change your clothes and stash the weapon you hit Roderick with.”
“Ridiculous,” Alex muttered.
“No. You got blood on you when you killed her, but you thought of that beforehand. You had a fresh shirt and your weapons hidden in the museum. I’m guessing you did that earlier today, or yesterday, even. Maybe longer. Ever since you learned Sheila was coming here tonight, you’ve been planning this. Once you killed her, you got rid of your bloody clothes in the trash, and the weapon somewhere no one would ever see it. At least, that was what you hoped.”
Addie saw the shadow cross over Alex’s eyes. He knew he was being trapped, one piece at a time, just like she and Lucian had found the clues. “What we couldn’t figure out at the time,” she said, “was why you would leave the knife behind, but ditch the other weapon. That was confusing, I have to admit, until we realized you left the knife to make a statement. Sheila was a backstabber. You and she were partners. You made money together. Then, she met Marcelle.”
Behind her, Marcelle sat up straighter. “What does that have to do with anything? She met me, that did not make her not a thief!”
“Actually,” Addie said gently to him, “it did. She loved you, Marcelle. She stopped stealing money when she met you. She wanted out. She told her partner she was quitting.”
He stared back at her blankly, saying nothing at all. Then he waved a hand for her to continue, as if she was waiting on his say so.
“There was something else we realized,” she said, turning back to Alex. “It was when we found the weapon you used to knock Roderick unconscious. You could afford to leave the knife. It’s just a knife. You had to hide this. It would have pointed right to you if you hadn’t…”
With a flourish of one hand, she produced the weapon out of thin air to show him. A little bit of magic for dramatic effect never hurt anyone.
The metal bar from the suit of armor lay in the palm of her hand. It had three segments, each a little smaller than the last. It had a handle on the bottom end and a hard ball at the top section. It was designed to collapse down for easy carrying, and then expand again with a flick of the wrist.
A police baton.
“These things have serial numbers on them,” Lucian pointed out. “Our department keeps track of those numbers when they get issued to our officers. Imagine how surprised I was when I checked the number against our records and found it belonged to you. Of course, that was just one more clue pointing us in your direction. Although, I have to say that putting it in the armor was genius. Even if we’d swept the museum with metal detectors looking for this, the armor would have disguised it. I guess you thought it was going to be easier to say you lost your baton and get a new one, than have someone find blood on it someday down the line, right?”
Addie cupped her hand and crossed her arms, and the baton disappeared again. Alex would think it was just sleight of hand on her part. That was fine with her. It saved a lot of uncomfortable questions.
He didn’t so much as clap, so she explained what the baton meant for him. “The fact that you used your baton is more proof that this was premeditated. Nobody comes to an awards ceremony armed. Not with a collapsible baton. Not with a knife. You had them both, because you knew you were going to kill someone. You didn’t know you were going to have to club a security guard, but you knew you might have to defend yourself against someone. No matter who got in your way, you were going to kill Sheila.”
“Ridiculous,” he said again, his voice barely above a whisper.
“There’s no reason to deny it anymore,” she pointed out to him. “It’s your baton. You couldn’t use your gun. That kind of noise would have brought everyone down on you. That would’ve been game over. This way… well, you almost got away with it.”
“But how could I know she would be here!” Alex blurted out, almost pleading with them to believe him. “How could I know? Was I just following random people around and buying tickets to ceremonies in case they showed up? Ah, see? Your little theory falls apart right there. How could I have known?”
Addie never lost her smile. “You’re the only one who could have known, Alex. Roderick certainly didn’t. He’s a security guard here. He’s not important enough to see the guest lists. No offense, Roderick.”
“None taken,” the big man said with a shrug.
“Marcelle, on the other hand,” Addie said, “was doing a lot of research on Sheila so he could track down people she might have conned. He wanted that insurance in case he needed leverage against her, but he wasn’t keeping tabs on where she might be at any given moment. He was as surprised as anyone that she was here tonight. The only person who would have known where Sheila was going to be, was her partner. Her accomplice. That person,
Alex, was you.”
Alex waved his hand through the air dismissively. “So you keep saying. You still haven’t said how I knew.”
The look Lucian gave him was full of scorn. “You said it yourself, Alex. You’re a police officer. You know how to keep someone under surveillance. That’s something else us cops do well. Like arresting people who think they can commit murder and get away with it.”
“Which we will prove conclusively,” Addie promised him, “once we get a warrant to check your financial records. With the serial number on the baton, and Roderick’s DNA on the end of it, getting that warrant will be easy. Want to save us the trouble and confess now?”
Alex met that offer with a sneer. “Maybe you want to let me go, and I won’t tell the chief you’re accusing one of your own of a crime. You really want to go toe to toe with me, Lucian? You forget, the chief likes me. He doesn’t like you. Too many weird things happening around you. So. Who you think he’s gonna believe, me or you?”
Inwardly, Addie cringed. The ‘weird things’ Alex was talking about were all the things Lucian had encountered since knowing her. She had brought him into a world of witches and magic, murder and mystery, and apparently it had created a certain reputation for him at his job. Did he regret knowing her, she wondered?
He turned to her and gave her a wink. Whatever they faced together, no matter how weird, he enjoyed being with her. He loved her, and that meant the world to her.
“I think,” he said to Alex, “that the chief will believe the facts. That’s what I think. The bloody shirt, your police baton, and when we get your financial information that will just be the icing on the cake. So. You can confess, or we can just skip that and go right to the arrest portion of our night.”
Addie laughed softly at that. Her man had such a way with words.
It turned out that Alex… not so much.
“Fine!” he yelled at both of them. “You got me. Is that what you wanted to hear? Sheila Davenport and I were partners in a scheme that was making us a continuous stream of money, as long as she kept working at it. She approached the guys, cozied up to them and got them in bed with her, and then she gave them that sad sob story about her kid needing money until they gave her anything she asked for. I came in afterward to threaten the guys to keep quiet. Don’t talk, I’d tell them, or I’ll go public with your affair. Don’t talk, or I’ll make sure the police find cocaine in your house. Don’t talk, or you might find the brakes on your car don’t work one day real soon. You don’t have to have a ton of muscles on your body to scare people. Know what? It worked. For over two years we’ve been doing this con job and it worked every time.”
He leaned over to look past Lucian, pointing directly at Marcelle. “Until she met him.”
Marcelle pointed to himself, looking more confused than ever. “Moi? Addie said the same thing to me, but I do not understand. I know Sheila was a bad person. It is why I stopped seeing her but now you say she stopped stealing from people when she met… me? Pourquoi?”
“She loved you, that’s why. Although what she saw in an uptight foreigner like you is beyond me.” Alex shook his head at the very thought of it. “She had me, and that should have been enough. Or, she could have had me if she hadn’t fallen head over heels for you. You were just supposed to be another mark, another paycheck, but then she came to me and said she wasn’t going to steal from you. She wasn’t going to steal from anyone, not again, not ever. She was in love, and she didn’t want to hurt you. What kind of bull is that?”
Marcelle wiped a hand over his brow. “Mon Dieu. She never… I never suspected… But of course, if I had known that she was giving up that life of crime I would have… I do not know. Is that crazy? I do not know what I would have done. Now, I suppose, I never will know.”
“See?” Addie said. “I told you. Love comes in lots of different forms.”
“Well. This would have been different, bien sur.”
Addie smiled at him, and he smiled back. She thought that maybe someday he would be able to come to terms with what happened here today, and with what might have been between him and Sheila Davenport.
“Oh, how touching,” Alex mocked. “Sheila was a thief. She was never going to be anything else. She was just being stupid. I pleaded with her to keep up the game. I demanded that she find another man to con if she didn’t want to do you, but she wouldn’t do it. The thing was, she knew I had more to lose than she did. She threatened to expose me if I didn’t back off and let her try to win back her favorite Frenchman.”
Addie had figured as much. “You couldn’t risk that she would tell on you, is that it?”
“You got it. Gee Lucian, maybe you were right about your girlfriend. She’s smart enough to be in the room with us real cops after all. You’re right, Addie. It didn’t matter that she said she would never tell as long as I left her alone. I know women. If she got angry enough, or if she felt threatened, or if she was having a bad hair day then she would get it into her head to tell everyone about me. That was something I could not let happen. I had to silence her for my own good.”
“Well, sure,” Lucian said sarcastically. “Her life against your freedom. Kind of a no-brainer. I can see how you had to kill her, so you wouldn’t go to jail. You felt like she’d stabbed you in the back, so you stabbed her in the back as revenge.”
“Don’t mock me, Lucian. I’m too smart for that. Sheila had to die, so I could keep on being me. That’s all there is to it.”
“You’re going to jail,” Lucian promised him. “And that’s all there is to that. You’re not going to be anything to you after this except a guy in an orange jumpsuit making license plates for the state.”
“Nope. Not gonna happen.”
Without them noticing, he had been inching his hand down toward the doorknob, and now he threw the door open and twisted around, about to dash into the hallway and make a break for the door.
A broad shouldered, heavyset man stood there, blocking his way out. He was in a cheap brown suit and tie, with a badge case folded over the breast pocket. Addie had only seen the chief of the Birch Hollow Police Department a few times before, but there was no mistaking that pinched face and those washed out eyes.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” Chief Harris told Alex. “Except to jail, like Lucian said.”
“Perfect timing, Chief,” Lucian told him.
“Yes, well. I think former Officer Alex Candor overestimated how much I like him.”
Alex finally realized that he was caught, and all of his plans had been for nothing. It was over. Slumping against the doorframe, he hung his head.
In the next moment, he was laughing. It started out soft and slow, and then got louder, until his chest was shaking with the sound of it. Tears followed the laughter. Addie had the feeling that something inside of him had snapped. He didn’t know what to feel.
She leaned her head down on Lucian’s shoulder. This one was going to be tough on him. Whenever a police officer turned bad, it was a black eye for all police officers everywhere. Funny, how people never thought that way about teachers or garbage men or professional baseball players, but just one cop doing bad things painted all of them with the same brush.
“I love you,” she whispered to him.
“I know,” he replied. “Some days, that’s what gets me through.”
Behind them, almost forgotten, Marcelle and Roderick shifted in their chairs. Roderick cleared his throat. “Well. That was kind of exciting. Guess it’s back to work as usual tomorrow.”
“For me, oui,” Marcelle told him. “For you, non! After what you said about me being a shifty little man, you are fired. You will get your severance pay and you will clear out your things from this office. For you, this story is done as well.”
The big man slumped in his chair. “Oh. Well. That kind of sucks.”
CHAPTER 10
“Have I ever told you,” Addie whispered into Lucian’s ear, “how very much I like your apartment?”
“Yo
u like my couch,” he whispered back, pulling her deeper into his embrace. “That’s what you like.”
“Well, it’s a very comfortable couch.”
She giggled like a teenager as his hands found some very sensitive spots along her back, and as his lips tickled against the side of her neck. She had already taken out her braid, and her red hair fell loosely around her shoulders and across his face. It was one of those moments she wished could just go on forever.
They had been sitting here, on his couch, with most of the lights off for the better part of an hour. Dinner had been forgotten on the kitchen table in the next room. They were busy touching, and kissing, and letting each other know that everything was better, now that the mystery in the museum was solved and they were alone together.
Addie thought that would have made a great title for a book. Mystery in the Museum. There had been several times that she had considered writing a novel, or at least trying to. She had plenty of interesting stories in her life to draw inspiration from. A paranormal mystery might be just the thing to try her hand at.
Well, she thought to herself, then I wish you luck with that, Addie Kilorian.
Of course, doing that was just a fantasy of hers. She would never be able to dedicate enough time to writing a book. Between running her diner, and protecting the town of Shadow Lake, and loving this man right here, there just wasn’t enough hours in the day to just be herself.
That was all right. She liked her life the way it was. She’d leave the writing to the professional authors. At least for now.
So, the mystery at the museum had been solved, and the killer had been led away in handcuffs. Every officer there at the scene had glared at Alex Candor on his way out. It was a rather somber ending for what was supposed to have been a night to celebrate some of the good people from their community. Most of the guests filed out without saying a word when they heard the news that everything was over, and they could go home.