Hidden Voices (Arcane Casebook Book 9), page 1
CONTENTS
1. Organ Music
2. Foreign Affairs
3. Affairs of State
4. The Search
5. Dornbirn
6. The Red Herring
7. Vanishing Act
8. The Show
9. Family
10. The Raid
11. The Grind
12. Family Matters
13. Death in the Family
14. The Guest
15. Limits
16. Federal Director
17. Dead Ends
18. Motive & Expertise
19. The Strad
20. Der Übermensch
21. Death’s Door
22. The Job
23. Strings
24. The Fire Escape
25. Finding
26. Details
27. Never Judge a Book
28. Solutions
29. By Any Other Name
30. Problem Solving
Acknowledgments
Also by Dan Willis
About the Author
Digital Edition – 2022
This version copyright © 2022 by Dan Willis.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
Edited by Stephanie Osborn
Supplemental Edits by Barbara Davis
Cover by Mihaela Voicu
Published by
Runeblade Entertainment
Spanish Fork, Utah.
1
ORGAN MUSIC
The report of Alex’s heels echoed through the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as he made his way up the main aisle toward the lectern. An acrid smoky tang permeated the air, and his footsteps stirred up the fine layer of ash that coated every surface. The church was a small building tucked into the middle of an Upper East Side block and had been there since before the Civil War. Like many buildings of the time, it consisted of one long hall with a vaulted ceiling, and living quarters for the Reverend out back.
A raised dais occupied the far end of the hall, backed by a choir loft and a pipe organ, while the rest of the hall held wooden pews that usually stood in two neat rows facing the front with a central aisle between.
That was on a normal day.
As Alex looked around, he realized this was not a normal day for the little church. Most of the pews were charred and burned by a fire that had broken out in the building two days ago. What hadn’t been consumed by the fire had been damaged by the water used by the fire brigade. Everywhere Alex looked, he could see damage of one kind or another. Even the floorboards of the dais and the wooden façade that covered the organ pipes were saturated and warping. Alex wondered if they’d have to replace the wooden frame and the cross-bracing that held the pipes in place.
Alex made a face as he surveyed the damage. He’d spoken to the fire investigator, who’d told him there was no evidence about how the fire actually started. Looking around, Alex knew that there wouldn’t be any. The vigorous and quick response of the firemen would have washed it all away.
Fortunately, Alex wasn’t here to figure out where the fire came from. His job was much harder.
"It’s about time," the impatient voice of Lieutenant Callum Scott greeted him. The lieutenant was a broad-shouldered man with a bald head, and a thick handlebar mustache. He was also a colossal bigot and a jackass. When someone in the department had been trying to block Danny Pak from becoming a lieutenant, Captain Callahan discovered it was Scott.
If it were up to Alex, he wouldn’t have crossed the street to piss on Scott if the man had been on fire. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Scott was the current superior of Detective Robert Arnold, newly promoted to homicide. Alex liked Arnold, despite his habit of relating elements of his cases to the folksy sayings of his wife. He was a solid investigator who paid attention to detail and had good instincts.
It was Detective Arnold who had brought Alex in on this case. It was Arnold’s first case as a homicide detective and, in Alex’s opinion, Lieutenant Scott expected the man to fail.
Maybe he has something against red-headed people too, Alex thought as he climbed the steps up to the dais. Five men waited for him over by one of the large windows that occupied the walls and let daylight into the building. Alex recognized Lieutenant Scott and the red-haired Detective Arnold. Beyond them were a uniformed policeman, a dapper man in a well-made suit, and a thin, muscular man in a work shirt and overalls. Alex had never met the first two, but he knew the man in the overalls from the pictures in the case file.
According to the file, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Margret Haig had been murdered in the spot where the men were standing. She had worked as a treasurer for the church and she had just broken an engagement to Troy Crane, the man in the overalls. That was ten years ago and the case had gone unsolved.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, Lieutenant," Alex said, putting on an affable smile. "It took me longer than I thought over at the evidence storage facility."
Scott didn’t look impressed by Alex or his apology, but he seemed to be resisting the urge to grind his teeth.
"Well?" he prompted when Alex didn’t elaborate further. "Are you going to tell me why you dragged us over here or not? Your partner here," he jerked a thumb at Detective Arnold, "has been quite mum on the subject."
"Sorry," Alex said, putting his hands in his pockets as if he were waiting for a bus. "I was just checking on something for Detective Arnold."
Scott’s gaze turned to the shorter man.
"Get on with it, Detective," he growled.
"I want it clearly understood," the man in the suit said, "that if you’re wasting my client’s time, I’ll file a grievance with the court."
"Shut up, Stilwell," Scott growled again, turning his piercing gaze on the attorney.
"Did you read the case file, Lieutenant?" Arnold asked in his quiet voice.
"I glanced at it," Scott admitted, "but I remember this case. When Miss Haig was shot, her ex-fiancé was the only one in the chapel." Scott nodded at the man in the overalls. "It had to be him."
"‘Cept uou never found a gun," Troy spat, "did you?"
"Just to make sure we’re all clear," Arnold said, "when Miss Haig was shot, she was hit by two bullets right in her chest." He tapped the area over his heart. "According to the coroner’s report, she died instantly."
Alex just stood back and watched. He and Detective Arnold had gone over this presentation for an hour that morning and he was doing very well.
"At the time of the shooting," the red-haired man went on, "Mr. Crane was the only other person present, and he’s quite correct that an extensive search of the church and the grounds did not find a gun."
"Maybe the cops just missed it," Alex suggested, drawing a dirty look from the uniform.
"You know, I thought of that," Arnold said, opening the brown folder he was carrying under his arm. "But you see these pictures," he held out a stack of photographs to Lieutenant Scott despite it being Alex who asked the question. "If you look at these, you can see that the church was being renovated at the time of the shooting. They had to take everything out, the choir loft, the lectern, and the railings, so they could install the pipe organ."
Arnold gestured at the massive wooden frame filled with the metal pipes that made up the instrument.
Scott squinted at the pictures and nodded, then handed them to Stilwell. Alex, of course, had already seen them and they showed just what Detective Arnold had described. The chapel was bare, the wooden floor of the dais was half torn out, meaning that if Troy Crane had stashed a weapon there, even the most inattentive beat cop would have found it.
"Maybe Troy here threw his gun out the window," Alex suggested as the lawyer went through the photographs.
Troy bared his teeth at Alex but, before he could say anything, his lawyer piped up.
"I don’t think that would have helped," he said, holding up a photograph. It showed the outside of the building below the window. During the renovation, that window had been removed to allow the big pipes for the organ to be passed through. Rather than risk the destruction of the flower beds beyond, they’d been dug up and replanted elsewhere, leaving only hard, bare dirt. "There’s nowhere to hide a gun here."
"Maybe he buried it," Alex suggested, barely keeping a wide smile off his face.
"You know, I thought that too," Detective Arnold said. "I thought Troy must have jumped down into the hole in the floor and buried the gun under the foundation."
Stilwell looked like he wanted to object, but Detective Arnold went on without waiting for him.
"But that wouldn’t work because Troy didn’t have enough time to bury anything." Arnold held up his hand and ticked off one finger. "According to the report, the man who ran the church, Reverend Morgan Yates, was just out back when he heard the shot and ran inside, where he saw Mr. Crane standing over Miss Haig’s body. He told the detective on scene that from the time he heard the shot until he arrived inside wasn’t more than twenty seconds."
"You’re making my client look awfully innocent," Stilwell said with a satisfied smile.
/> "Maybe he had an accomplice outside," Alex said, right on cue.
"I thought about that, too," Arnold said. "Someone he threw the gun to who then carried it away."
"That doesn’t work either," Scott said with a sour expression. "There was a beat cop across the street who heard the shooting. He ran to the church and got here right after the Reverend, but he could see the side of the building the whole time."
"Very good, Lieutenant," Arnold said. "So there was no accomplice and no place for Mr. Crane to hide a gun."
"So why are we here?" Stilwell pressed.
"Yes, Detective," Scott said, stressing the title. "What about that?"
"Well, sir," Detective Arnold went on. "Something just kept bothering me. When Mr. Crane was questioned, he suggested that the bullets that killed Margret Haig must have come from outside, through the window."
"Well, there wasn’t any glass in the window at the time," Alex pointed out.
"That’s true, but if the shots came from outside the church, how come only Reverend Yates and the patrolman heard them? I mean, if they came through the window, they would have to have been fired from the street or from the building next door. Either way, the policeman would have noticed. He wouldn’t have run to the church, he’d have gone toward the sound of the gunshots."
Lieutenant Scott, whose expression had been getting more and more sour with every bit of evidence, suddenly smiled.
"Yeah," he said, turning to Troy and his lawyer. "What about that? The shots had to have come from the church, and Margret Haig didn’t kill herself."
Stilwell cleared his throat and put a restraining hand on his client.
"I admit those are puzzling details, but I don’t think a grand jury is going to take a chance on it, especially without a murder weapon."
The lawyer had a point, and Lieutenant Scott’s face soured again. Before he could demand explanations, Arnold went on.
"I have to admit, I was stumped about that one," he said. "That’s why I brought in Mr. Lockerby." He nodded in Alex’s direction, and all eyes turned to him. "I wanted him to see if maybe there was some magical way to shoot Miss Haig."
"Well?" Scott said, his voice sliding into a frustrated growl.
Alex had no desire to acquiesce to the man’s impatience, but he did want to help Detective Arnold, so he launched into his part of the story.
"As far as I know, there isn’t any magical way to fire a bullet. Well, maybe a sorcerer could do it," he admitted, "but why would they? They have easier ways to kill someone. It got me thinking, though, what if there were other ways to fire bullets that didn’t involve a gun?"
"That’s ridiculous," Scott and Stilwell said at the same time.
"Is it?" Alex asked, not bothering to contain his grin anymore. "I have a couple of friends in the Army and I had them look into the service record of Mr. Crane."
"I wasn’t in the Army," Troy protested.
"Not Mr. Troy Crane," Alex explained. "Mr. Jeremy Crane, your father, and you’ll never guess what we found."
Troy clamped his mouth shut with a sullen look, and Alex only smiled wider.
"So what did you find, damn it?" Scott shouted, his patience clearly gone.
"According to the Army," Alex said, "Sergeant Jeremy Crane served with distinction in France, where he and his unit were cut off from their force and had to hide out behind enemy lines for almost three months. In that time, they killed six German officers and over two dozen soldiers, all without being caught."
Scott whistled and nodded approvingly.
"That’s a very impressive record," he said.
"So impressive that Jeremy Crane received a medal for his heroism. It was noted in his file that he was the one who enabled his men to be so effective by creating something called an improvised firearm."
"A…what, now?" Scott asked.
"It’s a kind of gun," Detective Arnold said, picking up the story. "They’re usually made out of wood, with a bit of pipe inside to give it strength. You drive a bit of metal, like a nail, through the back to act as a hammer, then you shove it against someone’s torso and hit the back end with your palm. The nail is driven into the primer and the bullets go off."
"That doesn’t sound very safe," Scott said. "It’d probably blow up in your hand."
"A lot of them did," Alex supplied. "They’re single use guns. Even if they didn’t blow up on the first shot, you’d never get a second one out of them."
"But Miss Haig was shot twice," Stilwell added, helpfully.
"You can make them double-barreled," Alex said. "That’s what Sergeant Crane did in France to make sure those German soldiers died on the first shot."
"I see where you’re going with this," Lieutenant Scott said, turning to Arnold, "but if Troy here used one of these improvised guns, the police on the scene would have found it." He held up the picture of the empty chapel. "Remember, there wasn’t anything here."
"How many signatures are on a dollar bill?" Alex asked.
"What?" the lieutenant demanded.
Alex repeated the question.
"How should I know?" Scott replied.
"Come on, Lieutenant," Alex said, putting on his serious face. "I dare say you handle a dollar at least once a day. How many signatures?"
"I don’t know," he admitted. "So what?"
"So, it’s hard to notice something you’re not looking for," Alex said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, dark piece of wood. "Hang on to this for me," he said, handing it to the lieutenant.
With that, he turned to Detective Arnold.
"Why don’t you do the honors?" he asked.
The shorter man nodded and headed toward the exposed pipe organ.
"Imagine you’re Troy, here," Alex said to Lieutenant Scott. "You’ve just used a single-use wooden gun to murder the woman who rebuffed your offer of marriage. The sound is echoing off the stone walls of the chapel. You’re sure someone’s heard. What do you do?"
Scott looked confused for a moment, then a slow smile spread across his face and he turned to the pipe organ just as Detective Arnold emerged from the wooden frame. In his hand, he held a short piece of wood that looked just like the main cross braces that tied the frame together.
"I found this around the side of one of the big pipes," Arnold explained. "It was a bit too long, so it was wedged in at an angle."
As he approached, Alex could see two round openings in the end of the rectangular object.
The detective handed the find to Scott, who turned it over in his hands. After a moment to satisfy himself, he turned to Stilwell and Crane.
"Well?" he growled at the lawyer. "How is your client going to explain this?"
"You have no proof that ever belonged to my client," Stilwell said with an absolutely straight face.
Alex was impressed at his performance. The man had to know his client was licked, but he persisted anyway. He decided not to play any poker with the lawyer.
"We’ve got two slugs we dug out of Margret Haig," Lieutenant Scott declared.
"And if I understand how that firearm works," Stilwell interjected, "there won’t be any marks on the bullets to compare. It’s a smooth bore weapon."
The bald lieutenant stopped with his mouth open as he realized that Stilwell was right.
