Capital Murder (Arcane Casebook Book 7)

by Dan Willis

  22

  The Freeway and the Dead

  Alex returned to his suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel shortly after four o’clock. He’d spent the bulk of the afternoon visiting the last few shops for which Colton Pierce had receipts, and taking power readings for Andrew. Each was an alchemist or alchemy supply shop full of bottled potions, jars of powdered ingredients, brewing and lab equipment, and pamphlets and periodicals on everything from home remedies to advanced alchemy. What they didn’t have, however, was any new information on Colton. All of them remembered him, but none could shed any light on his mysterious disappearance.

  At least the power tester showed a strong connection to Empire Tower back in Manhattan, he thought. Andrew will be happy.

  Shutting the door behind him, Alex tossed his hat on the writing desk. He wanted nothing more than to sit on the excessively comfortable couch by the window and just stare at the scenery. Unfortunately, he had to be at the morgue to meet Lisa Baker in less than an hour. Hopefully her review of the coroner’s autopsy would shed some light on the bodyguard’s death and, by extension, the disappearance of Colton Pierce.

  With a sigh, Alex took out his rune book and removed a vault rune, sticking it inside the chalk outline he’d simply left on the hotel suite wall. He paused to light a cigarette, then used it to ignite the flash paper and reveal his vault. Fishing the key out of his pocket, he slotted it into the hole in the center of the steel door and turned it smartly. There was a twenty-year-old single malt Scotch in his liquor cabinet and a comfortable reading chair in his library where he could sit and wait for Sherry.

  He almost sighed with anticipation as he pulled the heavy door open, and the urge made him chuckle. There had been many years when the best Alex could do was dime-store bourbon and the hard chair behind his old desk.

  “I must be getting soft,” he said.

  When he got the door open, however, he found that both his chair and his Scotch were occupied.

  “Sherry?” he said as he entered.

  His secretary looked up from his reading chair. She had the lamp on the side table on and there was a book in her lap.

  “Hi’ya, boss,” she said, setting down the tumbler of Scotch from which she’d been drinking. “I didn’t intend to make myself at home, but I accidentally closed that door you left open.” She looked a bit sheepish and went on. “I went in to make sure I was in the right place, then when I came back for my bag, I shut it behind me without thinking.”

  Alex chuckled.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “Tell me what you found and then I’ll open the one back to my office. I assume you finished up in Springfield.”

  Sherry picked up the tumbler then drained it and stood, handing Alex the glass and the book.

  “A Christmas Carol,” Alex read off the spine. “Very seasonal.”

  “It’s one of my favorites,” she admitted as she made her way to the drafting table where Alex wrote his runes. She scooped up a folder that had been left on top, and returned while Alex put the book back in its place on the shelf.

  “Here you go,” she said, handing it over.

  Alex took the folder and flipped through it. Inside were several pages of Sherry’s neat, tightly packed handwriting.

  “Care to summarize?” he said, motioning for her to sit in his chair.

  She smiled and sat, crossing her legs while Alex pulled up the padded ottoman he kept by the chair.

  “There are two possible routes for the new freeway,” she said, taking the folder back from Alex. Pulling out two different papers, she passed then over. “This is the northern route, and this is the southern.”

  Alex looked down the pages. Each of them contained a list of counties where the route would travel, a long list of numbers with names next to them, and some references to newspaper stories with notes.

  “So, what am I looking at?” he asked.

  “Nothing special,” Sherry admitted. “As you can imagine, the local papers were full of stories about each route.”

  “Is there a favorite?” Alex asked. “Maybe something Senator Young disagreed with?”

  Sherry shook her head.

  “You’d think so, but no. The stories in the papers were pretty evenly split in their preference.”

  “Was anyone objecting to the project as a whole?”

  “A few, but mostly everyone is excited to have the road.”

  Alex sighed.

  “I guess a major scandal of some kind would make this too easy,” he said. “What about the people who own the land?”

  Sherry grinned and leaned forward to indicate a name on the paper with the northern route.

  “It took a while, but I finally found Harriet Wilson.”

  Alex waited, but Sherry just sat there with a wide grin on her face, waiting for him to ask.

  “And who is Harriet Wilson?”

  “She owns a large part of a long valley where the proposed road will be built,” Sherry explained. “There’s pretty much no way to build the road around her land.”

  “So if the road goes through the northern route, she’s guaranteed to have her land bought out by the government.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said with a nod. “What’s better is that right now, most of this land is worthless. It’s too steep to make residential buildings cost effective and it’s too far off the beaten track for commercial development.”

  “So Harriet stands to reap a major windfall when the government pays her fair market value for her land.”

  Sherry nodded and tapped her nose.

  “Is she connected to Senator Young somehow?” Alex asked. “Maybe through his wife’s side of the family?”

  Sherry shook her head, but her smile didn’t falter.

  “Harriet Wilson is the sister-in-law of a woman named Leslie Marcello.”

  She paused again, grin never slipping.

  “And?” Alex finally answered, giving her an unamused glare.

  “Leslie Marcello is the maternal grandmother of one Michael Harris,” Sherry finished with an ear-to-ear grin.

  Alex cast his mind back over the case but came up short. Was there a Michael Harris associated with the Senator? What about Tiffany? He was sure she’d mentioned someone named Harris.

  “Duke,” he exclaimed when his mind finally made the connection. “Michael ‘Duke’ Harris, Senator Young’s aide.”

  “Got it in one, boss,” Sherry said. “As far as I can tell, Duke Harris is Harriet Wilson’s only living relative. If Senator Young picks the northern route, he stands to inherit about a quarter of a million dollars when Harriet dies. She’ll be eighty next April, in case you were wondering.”

  Alex whistled.

  “It sounds like a quarter-million reasons to want the northern route,” he said. As the possibilities of Duke’s involvement in his boss’s death started to play through Alex’s mind, he suddenly realized what Sherry had said.

  “What did you mean if Senator Young picks the northern route? Isn’t that picked by some committee or other?”

  Sherry looked at him, confused for a moment.

  “I read in one of the papers that the route would be chosen by the state Senators,” she explained. “Apparently the other Senator has a brother in the construction business, so he recused himself to avoid charges of nepotism.”

  “So Senator Young had total control over what route will be chosen,” Alex said. “That’s the connection.”

  “I couldn’t find any connection to the new guy, though,” Sherry said, consulting her notes. “Senator Unger.”

  “There wouldn’t have to be,” Alex said. “Duke will just hand him papers that he claims are Senator Young’s notes, and Unger will go along. He won’t want to make waves on his first day. Great job, Sherry.”

  She grinned and picked up the empty tumbler from the side table.

  “I’ll take some more of this as a thank you,” she said.

  Ten minutes later, Alex made his way back to his hotel suite, having let Sherry out i
nto his office. She’d broken the murder of Senator Young wide open, so he’d sent her home with the rest of his twenty-year-old Scotch. A small price to pay for such excellent legwork.

  Checking his watch, he still had a few minutes before he needed to meet Connie and head over to the morgue. He felt better than he had when he’d arrived, despite not getting any real rest, so he decided he’d have a drink and then head down to the lobby. When he exited his vault, however, he realized he was, in fact, late.

  “There you are,” Connie said. The mobster was sitting on the overstuffed chair next to the desk. “I thought I’d wait here, seeing as you had company.”

  Alex felt his jaw tighten. His vault was his sanctum, the repository of his secrets. The idea that anything about it might become public knowledge, or worse, come to the attention of Lucky Toni Casetti made him furious.

  “How did you get in here?” he asked, mastering his anger.

  “Nice to see you, too,” Connie chuckled, then he nodded at the open vault door. “Wasn’t that your secretary? The one from New York? That’s some doorway you’ve got there.”

  Damn it.

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” Alex growled. “Let’s just say there are perks to working with a sorcerer.”

  “Barton did that?” Connie said, his eyebrows raising.

  “Yes,” Alex bluffed. “And he doesn’t want people talking about it.”

  Connie gave Alex a speculative look, but even the right-hand man of a mob boss knew better than to muck about in the affairs of a sorcerer. It wasn’t a sure thing that Connie would keep his mouth shut about what he’d seen, but it was all Alex could do.

  “You ready to go?” he asked, standing.

  Alex turned and shut his vault, then got his hat from the desk.

  “Yes.”

  Alex and Connie waited in the car until the day staff were gone and the desk sergeant had locked the front entrance. They gave it another five minutes, then went around to the back where Alex tapped on the rear door.

  “Hurry,” Lisa said as she pushed the door open. “Someone will be along to check this door any minute.”

  She shut the door behind them and led the way along the hall to an operating theater at the end of a short hallway. A body, presumably Sal’s, lay on a wheeled gurney in the center of the room under a white sheet.

  “I took a look at Mr. Gerano before you got here,” she said. “Dr. Reynolds’ report documents the injuries pretty conclusively. What is it you want me to look for?”

  “Anything that isn’t in the report,” Alex said.

  Lisa gave him an askance look, then sighed.

  “You should settle in,” she said, rolling up her sleeves. “This could take some time.”

  Alex stood where he could watch while Connie sat on a bare metal chair next to an instrument cabinet. Lisa took the sheet away, revealing the dead man. It wasn’t a new sight for Alex by any means, but even so, he wasn’t really experienced enough to be used to it. He’d seen broken and bloody corpses, but they were somehow better than the naked man on the gurney. Alex could look at the victims at crimes scenes as objects, things that were broken and twisted, devoid of life. With the exception of the long Y-shaped incision across Sal’s chest, however, the man could just be sleeping.

  It gave him the creeps. One minute you were alive, the next you were dead, but you looked the same.

  Lisa pulled a wheeled tray of instruments over next to the gurney, then selected a small knife and turned to the body. With a deftness born of practice, she cut through the catgut Dr. Reynolds had used to sew up the incision.

  Alex held on to his stomach as Lisa peeled back the folds of skin, exposing the man’s guts. Without any hesitation, she reached in and pulled out the center of the rib cage.

  “Breathe, Alex,” Lisa said, giving him an amused look. “He’s dead; it doesn’t hurt.”

  “Right.”

  Now that he considered it, Alex could see that the ribs had been cut cleanly by a bone saw. Reynolds would have had to cut them to perform the first autopsy.

  “There’s a lot of damage in here,” Lisa said, as she leaned close to the open cavity. “But it doesn’t look like Dr. Reynolds took out the organs.”

  “Is that unusual?” Alex asked.

  Lisa considered her response, then shrugged.

  “No. With this much damage, it’s safe to assume that the trauma is what killed him.”

  “What do you think?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” she said with a grin. “You want me to be thorough, so I’ll take a closer look.”

  From there, Alex watched as Lisa removed Sal’s major organs, laying each one carefully on a nearby counter. When she was done, she moved her tray to the counter and began examining each of them in turn. More than once Alex had to look away and take a few deep breaths before he could continue. He found the whole thing macabre and fascinating at the same time.

  “Well, I know what killed Mr. Gerano,” Lisa said at last. “He drowned.”

  “I thought you said he was hit by a truck,” Connie said from his chair.

  “And I stand by that,” Lisa said. “But that’s not what killed him.”

  “So you were right,” Connie said to Alex. “He was hit and fell off a bridge.”

  “That makes sense,” Lisa said. “With these injuries, there’s no way Mr. Gerano could swim.”

  For his part, Alex just nodded, while he stared at the hollowed-out shell of Sal.

  “What?” Connie asked, suspicion crawling across his face.

  “Lisa,” Alex said, turning to her. “Thank you for your help. Give me a few days to arrange things with Dr. Bell and then give him a call.”

  “We already talked,” she admitted. “He’s pretty sure he can get me on with one of the hospitals in Manhattan as a resident.”

  Alex congratulated her, then looked at Connie and nodded toward the door.

  “We’ll show ourselves out,” he said.

  Together Alex and Connie headed out into the hall.

  “You know something,” the mobster said as they walked. It wasn’t a question but a statement of fact.

  Alex was reminded just how observant Connie was. He worried again what Lucky Tony’s man had really seen in his vault.

  “Did Colton own a car?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Connie demanded.

  “Did he?”

  “Yeah. Why is that important?”

  “Because I came down from New York in an airship,” Alex said. “The D.C. Aerodrome is just over the river on the Virginia side.”

  “So?”

  “So if Colton took an airship, he probably parked his car at the Aerodrome.”

  “That doesn’t explain why Sal would be walking over the bridge,” Connie pointed out.

  “Unless Colton ditched Sal,” Alex said.

  Connie gave Alex a sideways look, and his eyebrows dropped down over his eyes.

  “I’m pretty sure I don’t like where you’re going with this,” he growled.

  “You’re going to like it a lot less,” Alex cautioned. “What if Colton was on the run from his uncle?”

  “That’s ridiculous, and you know that. He came to Tony about his discovery. He wanted to go into business, not the other way around.”

  “Maybe he got cold feet,” Alex said. “Maybe he learned something he didn’t know, something that spooked him.”

  “So you’re saying that Colton gave Sal the slip and took an airship out of town?”

  “It explains the suitcase and the cash,” Alex said.

  “And then Sal tracked him to the Aerodrome but got hit crossing the bridge?”

  “No,” Alex said. “Well, not exactly. Put yourself in Colton’s shoes. You want to get away from your rich and powerful uncle. The only way you’re going to have a chance is to get a big head start, so what do you do?”

  Connie stopped and grabbed Alex’s shoulder, spinning him to face to face.


  “You think Colton ran Sal down with his car.”

  “That’s exactly what I think,” Alex said. “Colton had to get away clean and he couldn’t do that if Sal knew when and how he left town. Your boss is a very smart man, so it would be child’s play for him to figure it out.”

  Connie held his gaze for a long moment, looking for any holes in that argument.

  “I still don’t buy it,” he said at last.

  “It’s just a theory,” Alex said. “It fits the facts, but that doesn’t make it true. Tomorrow we’ll go over to the ticket office and find out what airships departed on the day Colton disappeared. With any luck, we’ll be able to learn something new.”

  “You’d better hope so,” Connie growled. “Because I’m not going to be the one to tell the boss your theory.”

  23

  The Opening

  Alex rode the elevator up to the top floor of the Willard hotel. He was dressed in his black tuxedo and his shoes were polished. As the operator slowed the car, Alex patted his pockets one last time: rune book, cigarettes, lighter, chalk, wallet.

  Check.

  When he’d first gotten his P.I. license, Iggy had accompanied him on his cases. Back then, Alex would show up at a client’s home or to a crime scene having forgotten his rune book or his crime scene kit. Iggy spent weeks drilling him, every time Alex left the brownstone, to check that he was properly equipped. And the routine of patting down his pockets was born. It didn’t help with the crime scene kit, but that was why Iggy taught Alex the old safe rune in the first place.

  “Top floor, sir,” the elevator operator said, pulling the grate back to allow access to the hall. “Room five-oh-two is to the left.”

  Alex thanked the man as he stepped out. The hallway was sumptuous, with elegant carpeting, crystal light fixtures, and polished wood tables holding paper tissues and touch-tip lighters. Despite the atmosphere of genteel elegance, Alex’s eyes darted back and forth quickly, and he even checked behind him. His plan of getting Zelda to out herself during their date now seemed ill thought out. If Zelda were really the front man for the burglars, all they would have to do was grab Alex when he picked her up.