Assault in the Wizard Degree, page 18
Harrison still wore a business suit the color of freshly flayed sharkskin. He still had the same taut build, lanky face, and cropped-to-near bald skull. The only improvement I could make out was the fact that he didn’t have a crowbar balanced on his hand this time.
There was something about the man that set my nerves on edge. No, that wasn’t quite correct. Someone as obnoxious as Lord Behnaz or Robert McClatchy could get on my nerves without much effort. I had to be honest with myself.
I was scared of Damon Riaga Harrison.
Sure, I’d talked a good game. I’d even screamed at him that ‘it wasn’t over!’ the last time we’d crossed paths. But he’d been walking away, and I’d been closer to my gun. A lot closer, in fact. Right now, he was technically sitting on top of it.
There was no doubt that something about him scared me to the bone. The speed and strength, sure. But it was his casual way with violence that gave me nightmares. I had no doubt that, if he’d had been given orders to do more than inconvenience me, he’d have smashed me into more pieces than my car’s windshield.
Right now, I could see him reasonably well, while he couldn’t see me. But the man obviously was expecting me to show up. That wasn’t a big leap, actually. The OME didn’t have a cafeteria on-site, so most people either drove someplace for lunch, or walked to one of the nearby convenience stores or food trucks for something quick.
I squinted as best I could through the glass. Yes, he was looking expectantly towards the building’s exit doors. I muttered a curse under my breath and turned around, groping in my pocket for my phone before realizing that I’d have to go back in through the security checkpoint.
There really wasn’t a line, but I felt every second tick by as I handed over my phone and keys to go back through the metal detector. A quick flash of my badge and I was through. I grabbed my stuff and quickly stepped out of earshot of the security people. I dialed the phone awkwardly in one hand while trying to stuff my keys back into place with the other.
The phone picked up after only two rings. “Esteban here.”
“Alanzo, it’s Dayna,” I said quickly. “I might have a…situation.”
He must have heard the flustered tone in my voice. “Dayna, where are you? Vega’s just turning the corner to park at HQ.”
“Just inside the back entrance of the OME. Damon Harrison from Crossbow Consulting is sitting on my car. It’s probably nothing…but if you could swing by the OME lot–”
“On it,” he said. I heard him rattle off an order to Vega, then the screech of tires. “Stay away from him, we’ll be there in less than a minute.”
A surge of relief flooded my veins as he hung up and I put the phone away. I peeked out into the lobby again. In the process, I got a strange look from the bored-looking security guard watching the exit flow, but I ignored it.
Damon Harrison had vanished.
Dammit.
Of course, right then Esteban and Vega pulled up into the loading zone in an unmarked police cruiser. The car had barely even come to a stop before Esteban got out of the passenger side, scanning the lot for any sign of Harrison. Vega simply looked annoyed as she put the car in park and got out on her own.
I ran for the door, making my way through the pedestrian traffic until Alanzo spotted me. He grabbed my arm protectively as I came up to him. His eyes shone with concern.
“Dayna, are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “Harrison didn’t even see me. But he vanished, just after I made the call to you. I didn’t see where he went.”
“That’s less than a minute. He’s still somewhere in the area.”
“You want us to maybe do a sweep on foot for this man of mystery?” Vega asked sardonically. “I suppose I could call in SWAT if you want.”
Esteban turned to face her. “We don’t need to get into this right now, partner.”
“If we’re still chasing wild geese, might as well do it in style.” She flicked a spare glance in my direction. “Hey, Dayna.”
“Hey, yourself,” I said faintly. My cheeks burned as emotions swirled inside of me. Gratitude for Alanzo’s quick response. Embarrassment over Harrison’s vanishing act. And guilt, for injecting rancor between Esteban and Vega. It had been like this since she’d overheard us talking about magic. About Andeluvia, as well.
Esteban leaned over to me and spoke quietly in my ear. “It’s your call. Tell me what you want me to do.”
Vega shook her head and walked off a few steps. I took the opening she’d given us and spoke in the same tone to Esteban. His body went iron-tense as he listened to what I had to say.
“Remember that day my car got wrecked? You asked me if I’d ‘made a wrong turn at the riot’.” He nodded, so I went on. “That was Damon Harrison. He was waiting for me in the parking garage. McClatchy had him smash up my car with a crowbar right in front of me. That was meant as a warning.”
“That sonofabitch–”
“Just hold on!” I insisted. “I didn’t tell you…because confronting him physically is a no-win proposition. He’d kill you if you threatened him. Or your career would be over the moment you shot him. That’s partly why I wanted Cohen digging up information on his employer. And it’s why I’m worried right now.”
Esteban’s eyes had gone hard as coal. “Tell me.”
“Cohen called me earlier today. He said that he’d found something. We were going to meet at my house. Then Harrison shows up, less than two hours later. It could be coincidence.”
“And probably isn’t.”
“All I know is that I’ve got a feeling. Like something terrible is about to drop out of the sky on us.” I let out a breath and added, “I’d like you and Vega to escort me home. Just to make sure that everything’s on the up-and-up.”
He nodded, understanding. “Right. Get going, I’ll explain the situation to my partner.”
I headed over to my car. That strange sense of foreboding came back even more strongly, almost smothering in its intensity. Behind me, I heard snippets of a loud, angry conversation between the two detectives.
Esteban must have smoothed things over enough in the end. When I finally got into my car and backed out of my parking spot, he and Vega were ready to follow. In fact, all the way through the freeway lanes and street traffic, Esteban’s partner kept their car right on my rear bumper.
I pulled up to my house and parked in the driveway. Vega pulled over, letting Esteban out so he only had to do a quick jog up the desiccated remnants of my front lawn. He joined me as I got out and flipped through my keychain for the key to the front door.
He eyed the splotches of fresh paint that dotted the doorway and house’s side trim. “Still redecorating?”
“I’ve been so darned busy,” I admitted, as I located the key. We went up the walk as I added, “I only just got around to hiring someone to paint over the recent fire damage. Most of the work had to be done inside.”
“So I see,” he chuckled, as I unlocked the front door. He motioned for me to step back, which I did. He opened the door, peeked inside, and let out a breath. “It looks clear.”
“Thank God for small things,” I said, as we went in.
Esteban looked around at the recent patchwork to the ceiling and the ongoing replacement of my wood living-room floor. The faintest tinge of smoke still hung in the air. He peeked into my bedroom and guest room, giving me a ‘thumbs-up’. I went into the kitchen and looked at the back door. The little button on the knob’s faceplate was popped ‘out’, meaning that the door had been left unlocked.
“Wait a minute,” I said faintly, as Esteban joined me. “I’m not one-hundred percent certain that I locked this door. But I’m pretty sure I had.”
“If you were going to be in Andeluvia for a few days, I can guarantee that you’d have locked it,” Esteban said grimly. “But I didn’t see anything out of place in the rest of the house. What about in here?”
“No, there’s nothing–”
I froze as I turned towards the kitchen table. The same table where Shelly, Thea, and I had eaten dinner. The same one where I’d plotted strategy with Galen, Liam, and Shaw.
A ceramic cake stand with an opaque green glass cover sat on the table.
My mind raced. I didn’t own anything like it. And while it looked innocent enough, there was a little piece of paper that someone had placed on the table. One corner had been tucked under the edge of the cake stand. Maybe as a kindly afterthought to make sure that the sheet wasn’t blown away by a stray draft.
A message had been burned into the paper with the dark black ink of a laser printer with a brand-new cartridge. Two lines, perfectly centered. It even came with a clever sing-song rhyme that did nothing but stoke my sense of dread.
IF YOU KEEP LOOKING AT ME
YOU WON’T LIKE WHAT YOU SEE
Almost against my will, I reached out and grabbed the little green knob at the top of the cake stand’s cover. It felt cold and slick against my fingers. I lifted it away in one smooth motion, staring at the stand as if it were a coiled snake.
I yelped.
I dropped the cover. It shattered on the kitchen floor in a shower of lime-colored shrapnel. My shoes crunched over the pieces as I fell back a step, gasping. There was a weepy, strangled cry. It took me a moment to realize it had come from my lips.
I’d seen awful things before in my line of work. And recently, I’d seen people killed right in front of me. Felt a friend’s blood splash on my skin. Yet this horror smashed through all my defenses. It had walked right into my house – my home – shattering my sense of safety and burrowing into my memory.
Cohen’s mottled tortoiseshell glasses lay on the flat silver circle of the stand.
So did his blue-green eyeballs.
Nothing else.
Chapter Thirty-Two
For the second time in as many months, emergency vehicles filled my street.
Instead of fire trucks, a quartet of police cruisers had converged upon the scene, along with the OME van. Only this time it wasn’t parked in my garage. While the responding officers wrapped the entrances to my house in yellow crime-scene tape, one of the new recruits under Shelly Richardson’s group had gone inside. To dust for prints and collect the evidence without finding any other nasty surprises, I hoped.
I looked around and watched the looks of shock that registered on my neighbor’s faces. They kept well away from the cordon of vehicles surrounding my home, but they stared and pointed. One woman ducked the questioning from a local reporter who’d just pulled up in their news van.
Yeah, at this rate I was a shoo-in for the least popular person on the block.
I sat on the curb, leaning forward to rest my elbows on my knees. I felt more exhausted and frustrated than ever. Esteban and I had spent three hours answering questions from the LAPD. I’d stayed stone-faced, keeping an icy grip on my emotions.
And yet…overriding everything else was a strange, howling feeling that everything was going wrong. That everything I tried was futile, useless. I’d done the best I could to fight the powers of the dark in Andeluvia. I’d done the best I could to hold onto my job in Los Angeles while helping people and keeping my head down.
But no matter what I did, things just kept coming. They kept getting worse. McClatchy now ran the LAPD. Shelly had been imprisoned and threatened with torture. My car had been wrecked. And now I had an even more awful question that I had to face.
Had I sent Maxwell Cohen to his death?
I couldn’t escape the fact that I was partially responsible. I just couldn’t. It had been my choice to contact him. My choice to put him on that case.
But it was his choice to accept it, my mind stubbornly countered. That annoyed me, as I had already ordered the balloons and confetti for my pity party, but my brain stubbornly overrode me. Stop it! Cohen wasn’t some innocent you flung to the lions. He was an old hand at detective work. He knew the risks. And whoever killed him knew why you hired him.
I sat up at that. That had to be right. Whoever had murdered Max had admitted as much in their little note when they wrote, ‘If you keep looking at me’.
Cohen had been looking at Crossbow Consulting. The outfit that Archer had slipped like a cuckoo into the nest when McClatchy was at his most paranoid. The same outfit that had terrorized me by smashing up my car. The same one that had killed Assistant Chief Lucas Sims in cold blood on the steps of the LAPD.
Something inside me snapped.
I calmly walked to my car and got in. The engine coughed to life as I shifted out of park. Esteban looked over from where he continued to speak with a pair of officers. He must have caught a glimpse of my face.
“Dayna!” he cried. “Wait! You can’t leave a crime–”
His voice disappeared in the roar of my engine as I gunned the motor and took off into traffic. How I avoided an accident, I had no idea. My mind was fixated on one goal only, and by the time I got to my destination, I’d already decided not to bother with the LAPD’s parking garage. Instead, I left my car parked illegally in the loading zone and marched up the steps. The same steps where Lucas Sims had bled to death.
The police chief’s hatchet-faced administrative assistant saw me coming, but she barely had time to get around her desk, shouting that I needed an appointment before I blazed past. I straight-armed the door into the chief’s office and marched on in, leaving her in my wake.
McClatchy looked up from his desk, eyes narrowing in piggish annoyance as he watched me approach. Archer stood next to him. A third, heavyset man sat in a chair before the two. To my surprise, I recognized Lieutenant Luis Ollivar as he turned in his seat. His left arm was in a sling.
“Well, isn’t this just what I needed to brighten up my day,” McClatchy snorted. “You make a wrong turn looking for the morgue?”
“I’m not here to see you, Bob,” I snapped. He blinked in surprise, and I took that opening to point at Archer. “You son of a bitch. You know what you did. This isn’t over. Not with you, not with Harrison!”
I got the satisfaction of seeing Archer react for a split second before his friendly, all-smiles poker face came out. “What are you saying, Dayna? If you have a formal complaint–”
“Not until I have evidence,” I shot back. “But if there’s anything, so much as a scrap of DNA, I’m going to nail your hide to the wall, Archer!”
“Have you gone insane, Chrissie?” McClatchy demanded. “What the hell are you talking about?”
I managed to pry my glare off Archer long enough to answer him. “This is about Maxwell Cohen.”
“Maxwell who?”
“Maxwell Cohen. He retired from Missing Persons last month.”
He snorted. “And that’s supposed to mean something to me?”
Ollivar’s face darkened at those words. “He’s been with the LAPD for more than twenty years, Bob. Isn’t that supposed to mean something to you?”
“I can’t remember every damned name in our ranks,” he shot back. “And even if I could, why the hell would I be concerned with some retired detective from Missing Persons?”
“Cohen was my first commanding officer,” Ollivar said quietly. “What happened to him?”
“He’s been murdered,” I said to the Lieutenant. “Someone just broke into my house. They left Max’s glasses on my kitchen table. Along with his eyes.”
“Jesus…” he whispered.
There was more commotion from outside. Esteban pushed his way through the door and made his way, breathless, to my side. He held his hand up bidding everyone to wait.
“Excuse me, Chief,” he wheezed. “You’ll have to pardon Dayna’s outburst. She’s been under a lot of pressure lately, that’s all. And I was with her when she found the remains at the crime scene. It was very disturbing.”
“You were there with her? At her house?” McClatchy said, with a raised eyebrow. “How very interesting.”
God damn this man. He had the uncanny ability to zero in on any potential weak spot of mine. But at least Esteban had enough sense to deflect the inquiry.
“Chrissie and I have worked on many cases together,” he said, doing his best to recast things in an official light. “She called me and Detective Vega and explained that she had reason to believe she had been watched or followed by persons unknown this afternoon.”
Unknown, I thought, as my gaze settled back on Archer. Fat chance.
“Detective Isabel Vega and I were coming off shift, so we offered to follow Chrissie back to her residence. Vega felt that we would be able to pick up anyone tailing the subject.”
“And why would anyone be that interested in a part-time OME agent?” McClatchy sniffed.
“Perhaps the same ones that shot at her last summer,” Esteban said lamely. “The shooter from that incident was never apprehended, were they?”
McClatchy shot a look at Ollivar. The beefy man shook his head in the negative.
I took a breath. Anger still coursed through me, but that howling haze of rage and despair had lifted a bit. I leaned forward and spoke, a deep, urgent tone in my voice.
“I’m telling you the truth, Bob,” I said. “You better get rid of your ‘security’ people. Because in the end, they’re going to cost you dearly.”
“Are you giving the orders around here now?” McClatchy growled back. “I could have you turned out of your office so fast your head would spin.”
Now it was my turn to snort. “We played that round already, when I tried to quit. You won it, remember? Now, let’s see how much you like what you’ve won.”
McClatchy sat still as a stone in his chair. Only the whiteness of his knuckles where he gripped the edge of his desk betrayed how badly I was getting under his skin.
“You can’t fire me because of your sick little obsession,” I went on. “And because if I leave, then you’ve got no more control over what I do.”
“Get out, Chrissie,” he gritted. “Before I have you thrown out.”
I straightened up and gave one final, hard look around. Ollivar sat back in his chair as if in shock. Archer remained where he stood, his mouth a grim line. Two more officers in blue appeared in the doorway. Esteban took my arm and waved them off.
