by Dan Willis
“This time we’re going to go to each one in person,” Alex explained. “We’ll swing by Colton’s house and pick up a picture of him, then see if anyone at the stores remembers talking to him.”
“What good will that do?” Tony demanded, his voice rising.
“It might tell us where else your nephew might have gone, Mr. Casetti,” Alex said. “All we have right now are the receipts, but he might have gone to other places and simply not bought anything.”
“That sounds like a hell of a long shot,” Tony growled.
“I know it looks bad,” Alex said. “But I’m not giving up. Right now the only thing we know for sure is that Sal was hit by a truck. He might have been targeted or it might have been an accident.”
“And what, the truck driver just picked up Sal’s body and threw it in the river?”
“Or Sal was hit on a bridge and fell in the water,” Alex said. “Whatever happened, we just don’t have enough information.”
Tony held Alex’s gaze for a long moment without speaking.
“You wanted me for this,” Alex said, “because I’m good at what I do, Mr. Casetti. Your nephew’s trail isn’t cold, not yet.”
Lucky Tony snorted, then waved toward the door.
“Well if that’s the case, then get out of here and find my nephew.”
Alex stood and headed for the door, taking care not to run, or even hurry.
“And Lockerby,” the mob boss called after him. “I’m losing my patience. You need to make some progress this time. Understand?”
Alex nodded. He understood perfectly well the threat underlying the mobster’s words and he had no doubt that Tony would be as good as his word on that account.
Alex rubbed his eyes as he stepped out of Carrol Brothers Grocery. He and Connie had been to half the shops on Colton’s list so far and none of them had shed any light on the alchemist’s activities. Several of the shop-keeps or their clerks had remembered Colton. As Alex had guessed, he wasn’t just grocery shopping, he was looking for steady suppliers of the items on his list. Unfortunately no one remembered anything unusual about their conversations or where Colton might have gone next.
“I need a drink,” Connie said, coming up to stand next to Alex on the sidewalk. “Is it always like this?”
“More often than I’d like,” Alex said.
“Where to next?”
Alex consulted his watch before answering.
“It’s after five and we’ve hit all the grocers. All that’s left are the alchemical suppliers and the haberdasher, but they’ll be closed by the time we got there.” Alex dropped his watch back into his vest pocket and sighed. “I need to take another reading for the Lightning Lord before I go.” Since Andrew wanted him to take readings with the power box, Alex had put it in the truck of Connie’s car and checked it at all the places they stopped. “Pick me up at the hotel at nine and we’ll hit the rest of them.”
“The boss isn’t going to like that,” Connie said, opening the trunk for Alex. “He’s getting pretty worried about Colton.”
“Me too,” Alex said. He leaned over and hefted the weighty metal box out onto the sidewalk. “I can’t see any reason for him to disappear.”
“What if you were right about Sal?” Connie said. “What if he was hit while crossing a bridge, and what if Colton was with him?”
“That would mean he’s at the bottom of the Potomac,” Alex said, pulling out his flip notebook and pencil. “If that’s the case, there’s nothing we can do, so let’s not worry about that yet. We still have four shops to visit, so maybe we’ll get some answer there.”
Connie didn’t look hopeful, and Alex felt how the mobster looked.
“You want me to drop you off at your hotel?” Connie said as Alex wrote down the readings on the power tester.
“No,” Alex said. “I’ll catch a cab.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, then climbed in his car and drove away.
After he was gone, Alex stepped around the corner of Carrol Brother’s Grocery and chalked a door on the brickwork. He opened his vault just long enough to deposit the heavy power meter inside, then shut it and walked down to a five and dime to use their phone. He still had an hour before he had to meet Sorsha and Detective Norton, but he wanted to check up on Lyle Gundersen to see if he’d found the loom cards in storage.
“Alex!” Gundersen cried when the phone connected. “Where have you been, I’ve been trying to reach you?”
“I have other things I’m working on, Mr. Gundersen,” Alex said, a bit short-tempered after the day he’d had. “Did you find the extra cards?”
“Yes,” he said, still agitated. “They were in a warehouse in Silver Spring.”
“Great, I can meet you there, just give me the address.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Mr. Lockerby,” Lyle moaned. “The warehouse was broken into an hour ago.”
Alex felt a sudden headache blooming and he grabbed his forehead in a vain effort to suppress it.
“Don’t tell me,” he said.
“The cards were the only things taken,” Lyle continued.
“I told you not to tell me,” Alex sighed.
17
Paths
It turned out that Silver Spring, where the burgled warehouse was located, wasn’t even in D.C. It was a rural area north of the city in Maryland. Alex’s cab deposited him in front of a run-down building at the far end of a small industrial park. It stood two stories high with a steeply sloped roof and a peeling paint job that had to be a decade old.
Alex stopped at the curb to light a cigarette, letting his eyes wander over the building. The warehouse had two large carriage doors in front along a raised platform where trucks could back in to unload. A standard-sized door for the office stood on the right edge of the building with a long bank of windows running down the right side.
In the time it took Alex to put away his lighter, he’d spotted at least four ways to get into the warehouse without being detected or leaving a trace.
Secure it was not.
Despite the fact that there had been a burglary, Alex saw no sign of a police presence.
“Hello?” Alex called, pushing the office door open. Beyond the door was a table with a telephone and a blotter, three filing cabinets, and a table with a hot plate and a dirty skillet. A door at the back of the room stood ajar and Alex assumed it led from the office into the warehouse proper.
“Alex?” Lyle Gundersen’s voice came through the back door. “We’re in here.”
Opening the door, Alex found the warehouse very much as he expected it to be, one enormous room filled with dusty shelves. Boxes, crates, and paper-wrapped objects littered the place, clogging the shelves and, in many cases, spilling out over the floor. The shelves each had paper cards on their ends with a letter designating each aisle, but beyond that Alex saw no further form of organization.
How do they find anything in this fire hazard?
Walking along the rows, Alex came to the one designated ‘E’ and found Lyle and a man in work overalls standing about a third of the way along the aisle. A large crate stuck out into the aisle from the shelves, and Gundersen had placed an open, hard-shelled container on top of it.
“Thank goodness you’re here, Alex,” Lyle gushed. “I just don’t understand any of this.”
“Is this where you kept the cards?” Alex asked, indicating the hard-shelled case as he walked up.
“Yes,” Lyle said. “I had Mr. Grady here,” he indicated the man in overalls, “locate them as per your instructions. I had no idea someone would try to take them. This just doesn’t make any sense.”
On that point, Alex agreed.
“Were you here when the theft occurred?” Alex asked Grady.
“D’know,” the man slurred. He was of average height and lean, with a pock-marked face, a bald head, and a lackadaisical expression on his face. Alex got the impression he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. “I found the box of car
ds like Mr. Gundersen said. I left them right here before I went to lunch and when I came back, they was gone.”
Alex resisted the urge to roll his eyes.
“Is there anyone else on duty here?” he asked.
“Mr. Grady is our day clerk,” Lyle said, cutting in quickly. “If the museum needs anything from storage, he locates it so it can be moved. He also files anything the museum sends here for storage.”
“Is there a night guard?” Alex pressed.
“Nah,” Grady said with a dismissive wave. “This is the stuff that ain’t worth nuthin’.”
“What Mr. Grady means,” Lyle explained, “is that this facility is for storing things that, while historically valuable, don’t have much…”
“Material value,” Alex finished.
So this is the museum’s junk drawer, he thought. Great.
Alex looked at the open case. It looked like a fancy hat box, but it was square in shape. And it was filthy.
“Did anybody move this after the theft was discovered?” he asked.
Both Lyle and Grady shook their heads, so Alex leaned over the open case and examined it. There were clean stripes in the dust along the top and front of the case and Alex could clearly see where Grady had put his thumbs on the front when he opened the lid.
“You opened this to check the contents,” Alex said, looking at Mr. Grady. “Did you leave it open when you went to lunch?”
“I think so.”
Alex chewed his lip. With the case open, the thief wouldn’t have left any fingerprints on the outside. Still, there were several tracks in the dust that coated the inside of the box, so maybe he’d have better luck there.
“See anything?” Lyle asked.
“Not yet,” Alex said, setting down his kit. “But let’s take a closer look, shall we?”
He took out his new oculus and went over the case with silverlight. There were several fingerprints on the outside of the case, but those would belong to Grady. Inside there were a few stay marks that could be the oils from the thief’s hands, but they were too faint and smeared to be of any use.
“Anybody here,” a familiar voice called from up front.
Alex looked at Lyle, who shrugged.
“I also called the police,” he explained, then called out to the men in front.
A moment later Lieutenant MacReady made his way down the aisle with two uniformed officers in tow.
“Sorry I took so long, Mr. Gundersen,” MacReady said. “This is Maryland, so I had to get special permission from the State Police to be here.” He smiled at Lyle, then turned to Alex.
“Lockerby,” he said with a nod. “Find anything?”
Alex was forced to admit that he hadn’t.
“I looked into your theory that our wolf-handling thief came from a circus,” he said, pulling out a flip notebook and paging through it. “Turns out there is a circus in town, so I went over there and guess what? They have large predators and a dog act.”
“Scottish terriers?” Alex guessed, reading the Lieutenant’s expression.
“Poodles,” MacReady said. “They’ve got some big cats, a few lions and a tiger, but no large canines.”
Alex sighed and put his lamp on the floor. Silverlight hadn’t revealed anything, but he might try ghostlight just to be thorough.
“At least our thief didn’t kill anybody this time,” MacReady continued. “Probably left his dog in his other pants.”
Alex started to chuckle, but stopped as he reached for his ghostlight burner. Picking up the multi-lamp, he swept it over the floor around the crate.
“No,” Alex said. “Our thief brought his wolf with him here too. Mr. Grady was lucky to be out when they visited.”
MacReady’s face screwed up into a confused expression until Alex passed him the oculus.
“Right here,” Alex said, indicating the floor. He couldn’t see it without the oculus, but he knew what the lieutenant was seeing. All around the crate were large paw prints.
“I don’t get it,” MacReady said, passing Alex back the oculus. “How does a man come and go in broad daylight with a wild dog and nobody notices him?”
“Maybe he’s the dog,” Grady said, scratching his ear.
“What?” Alex and the lieutenant said together.
“You know,” Grady explained. “Like that movie where the feller turned into a wolf when he drank liquor.”
“You’re suggesting our thief is a wolf man,” Alex said, not believing he’d heard correctly. “Like in the movies.”
“Wouldn’t that make him even easier to spot?” MacReady said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “People are bound to notice a guy walking around with fur and fangs.”
Grady just shrugged as if the lieutenant’s statement had been a genuine question.
“Dunno,” he said. “But it sure would explain why you can’t find the wolf.”
So would a ghost wolf, Alex thought, and it’s about as likely. Out loud, he said, “I’m sure we’re keeping you from your work, Mr. Grady. Thank you for your assistance.”
Grady might have been slow on the uptake, but he knew a dismissal when he heard it.
“I got to go fill out the forms to report this to the museum,” he said, then excused himself and headed back in the direction of the office.
“I’m sorry to say it,” MacReady said once Mr. Grady was gone, “but so far, the wolf man thief is the best lead we’ve got.”
“Not quite,” Alex said. “When I asked Mr. Gundersen to locate these spare cards, I suspected that what our thief was after was the pattern the cards produced. This theft all but confirms that.”
“I don’t see how that helps us,” MacReady said.
Alex explained about the insurance pictures and how he’d turned them over to a friend in the textile industry, though he left out the part about that friend being in Manhattan.
“So we’ll know what the pattern is in a couple of weeks,” Alex concluded.
“That might help,” MacReady admitted, “but the thief has all the cards now, won’t he just skip town?”
“We may still have a chance to catch him,” Alex said, then he turned to Lyle. “How many people know that I asked you to find the extra cards?”
Lyle looked confused for a moment, then shook his head.
“Just the people in the room when you asked,” he said. “You, me, my insurance man, Edwards, and…”
“And Miss Pritchard,” Alex finished.
Lyle’s eyes went wide, and he stammered in outrage.
“You can’t mean to suggest that an upstanding young woman like Zelda Pritchard had anything to do with this unseemly business.”
“Think about it,” Alex said. “Edwards had the insurance pictures the whole time. If he wanted the pattern, he wouldn’t have had to steal anything, he could use the pictures to make reproductions of the cards, then put the pictures back where he got them. Then there’s you,” Alex went on. “If you wanted the cards, you could have simply removed them from the exhibit for cleaning and kept them as long as you wanted.”
“What about you?” Lyle demanded, a bit half-heartedly.
“I have the photos,” Alex explained. “If I was after the pattern, I wouldn’t have bothered stealing the cards from here. It wouldn’t be worth the risk.”
“You’ve convinced me,” MacReady spoke up. “Who is this Pritchard woman?”
“For the record, I’m sure she’s not involved in any of this,” Lyle insisted. “I had to make a dozen phone calls trying to find where the cards were stored. Anyone could know about them in time to arrange this theft.”
“I still want to speak to the young lady,” MacReady said. “If she has an alibi, I can rule her out.”
Lyle hemmed and hawed for a bit longer but eventually broke down and told the lieutenant wheat he wanted to know about Zelda. While he did that, Alex switched his multi-lamp to ghostlight and swept the scene again. When he was finished, it was half past five and he had to hurry if he didn’t want to
be late to meet Sorsha. Excusing himself, he packed up his kit and headed to the office to call for a cab.
The Senate Office Building was a twenty-minute cab ride from the burgled warehouse, so Alex had time to stew over his cases. The theft of some worthless cards from the national museum seemed so random and silly. It felt like a badly thought-out prank, and yet a man had been killed over it. Alex was convinced that something big was tied up in the case, but he just couldn’t imagine what the card’s pattern could be that would be worth the effort of stealing them. And yet someone had.
After a quarter-hour reviewing the Smithsonian theft, Alex’s thoughts turned to the disappearance of Colton Pierce. He’d worked missing person cases before, and he knew that the more days went by without a ransom demand or some word from the missing person themselves, the more likely it was that they were dead. When he went over the facts, Alex had a sinking feeling in his gut. If someone had grabbed Colton for ransom, then Lucky Tony would have heard something by now.
But he hadn’t.
There were only two possible explanations for that. One, whoever had Colton didn’t know he was Tony Casetti’s nephew. Lucky Tony said that the relationship was a secret after all. Then again, if they didn’t know, why grab a college professor with no relatives to pay a ransom? That didn’t make sense.
The other option was equally bleak: Colton had been killed. Maybe Connie was right and the professor had been killed by the truck that hit Sal, or maybe he saw Sal get hit and knocked into the river, and Colton had gone in after him and drowned. Whatever the situation, though, it meant that Colton wasn’t coming back.
That wasn’t good news. Lucky Tony had been easy and affable on the golf course, but the longer Colton’s fate remained unresolved, the angrier he got. Alex had no doubt if that trend continued, the mobster would start making real threats. There were flash runes, shield runes, and even escape runes to help Alex, if it came to that, but Lucky Tony wasn’t just some street tough. A man like him could hire an army to go after Alex, or put a bomb in a package and have it delivered to his office, or to the brownstone. Mobsters tended not to care very much about collateral damage, and there were plenty of people in Alex’s life that could get hurt if he didn’t locate Colton Pierce.