Cold Hard Steele (Daggers & Steele Book 2) Read online

  “So seeing as you were reading all night,” said Shay. “Wait—you weren’t reading the entire night, were you?”

  I sighed. My chatty half-elf partner clearly had no intention of letting me keep my nose plugged into the novel. I grudgingly closed it and set it down on the hardwood.

  “No,” I said. “I did sleep, just not particularly well. My brain was too stimulated.”

  “Ok, just making sure,” said Shay. “So, seeing as you were reading most of the night, did you manage to dislodge anything useful up there in your squishy parts?”

  I narrowed my eyes and set them firmly upon Steele.

  “What?” she asked. “What nerve did I touch upon this time?”

  “I’m trying to decide whether or not I should tell you,” I said. “I probably shouldn’t. You’ll laugh at me.”

  “Me?” Shay pressed a hand to her chest. “I’d never do that.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Ok, that’s a lie,” said Shay. “But if you really came up with a theory that could help solve our case, you know I’ll consider it thoroughly. I’d be upset if you didn’t share it.”

  I pursed my lips. “Very well. I’ll give it a shot.” I took a deep breath. “So in the Rex Winters book, Rex is investigating the death of the mayor, right? Because he found the body while out yachting. Except he loses the body, and when he gets back to town, he finds the mayor is alive and well. But he’s certain he saw the mayor’s dead body before. So—”

  “Daggers, I thought you were going to share insights about our murders, not relate the plot of your late-night reading.”

  “I’m getting there,” I said. “Pay attention. Rex shares his concerns with his chief of police, but the guy doesn’t believe him, because the mayor is looking hale and hearty. And that’s when the murders start—of prominent figures around town. Except they happen at night. Rex finds out about them by proxy, and by the time he can report them, they mysteriously get cleaned up. Nobody believes Rex regarding what he’s found, but that’s not the important part. The interesting thing—and this is what you won’t believe—is how the murders are perpetrated.”

  Steele gave me one of those dubious looks only women are adept at. “You don’t honestly expect me to believe people in your novel are getting murdered by having icy daggers plunged into their hearts, do you?”

  “Well, no, not exactly,” I said. “But there are key similarities. Some people are clothed, some aren’t. There’s minimal blood. Possible drugs. It’s as if our murderer heard about the book’s plot through a friend of a friend and then started enacting the murders himself.”

  Shay pressed a palm to her forehead. “Come on, Daggers, really? I thought you were going to decompress by reading, but instead you’ve turned into a sleep-deprived, conspiracy theory-spouting mess! I can’t believe I’m going to encourage you to imbibe more alcohol, but I think you would’ve been better off spending the evening with Cairny and I last night. We had a few drinks, had some fun, but look at me now. I’m refreshed and ready to attack the case. You, on the other hand—”

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Uh-oh, what?” said Shay.

  During her spiel, a runner had come in from the street and poked his head into the Captain’s office, but the bulldog was nowhere to be seen. I had a bad feeling about the kid’s presence so early in the morning.

  “Hey sport,” I said. “Captain’s not in yet. If you’ve got a message for him, you can leave it with me. I’m in charge while he’s gone.”

  Shay rolled her eyes, but my statement wasn’t a total lie. I had seniority.

  “Um, alright,” said the kid as he stepped over. “I just got word. There’s been a murder near the Pearl. And the circumstances are a little, um…odd, I guess. Supposedly someone got stabbed—”

  “With a cold dagger?” I finished.

  The kid nodded. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “Call it a hunch.”

  I extracted an address from the runner and told him to wait out in front. Then I turned to my partner. “You ready to go?”

  She nodded.

  In a moment of serendipity, Rodgers and Quinto strolled into the precinct as we were readying to leave. I told them to grab their things and accompany us to the scene of the crime. Quinto expressed some hesitation, but he agreed once I described to him the shit storm likely to descend upon us the instant the Captain arrived and found out there’d been yet another icy-bladed stabbing. Two murders of a similar fashion could be written off as a coincidence, but three translated into an all-hands-on-deck public relations crisis. We needed to solve the murders, and fast.

  28

  The apartment complex lucky enough to win the ritualistic murder-of-the-day sweepstakes was easily the nicest of the three places we’d visited. Located a half-dozen blocks outside the edge of the ritzy Pearl district, the building stood five stories tall and featured rose-colored rendered cement walls that popped in the early morning sunshine. Arched windows on the upper levels gave the structure a bit of exotic flair.

  I’d expected to find my good buddy, Phillips, standing guard outside the entrance to the complex, but either it was too early for him to be on duty or we were the first cops to arrive at the scene of the crime. I don’t think I’d ever experienced that before. Then again, I’d never been at work by eight in the morning, either.

  We pushed into the building and were assaulted by swaths of pushy, middle-aged professionals all clambering for answers to questions I hadn’t even formulated yet. “What happened? What was that racket? Is everyone ok?” They milled about in their pajamas, newspapers and small dogs held under their arms, demanding I, as a representative of our city’s majestic justice system, cater to their immediate needs.

  As I so often am, I was glad to have brought Quinto along for the ride. I unleashed him on the crowd, letting him sow seeds of reason and obedience into the mob. I figured the unruly masses would listen to him. His scowl had a way of giving even the most indignant people pause.

  With Shay and Rodgers in tow, I worked my way to the address the runner had given me, an apartment located at the end of the hall on the second floor. The door was ajar, and so I pulled my trusty nightstick, Daisy, from my coat pocket and clenched her in my right fist.

  The door squeaked as I pushed it open. As I absorbed the living room, I experienced a flashback to two days prior. The place was a complete mess—if possible, it was in even worse shape than Terry’s pad. Tables and chairs were smashed to splinters, huge gouges scarred the tops and sides of an otherwise lovely sofa set, torn drapes lay discarded in a heap, and a few gaping holes peered at me from the walls. Chunks of broken dishes and pottery, slivers of glass from smashed windows, and strips of torn cloth—as if someone had taken a machete to a rack of formal wear—littered the floor, as did something else.

  A dead body. Victim number three.

  It was a woman this time, and—surprise, surprise—she was as naked as the day her mother popped her out. Stretched out as she was on the floor, I’d guess she measured about five and a half feet tall, and though she was a bit on the pudgy side, she was far from unattractive. Her pale skin, blue eyes, and shoulder-length red hair combined to give her a sense of scholarly elegance. As with Terry’s body, no cuts or bruises marred her skin, despite the heinous condition of the apartment—except, of course, for the obvious laceration I was expecting.

  A foot-and-a-half long piece of steel protruded from her left breast. As with our previous victims, only a thin trail of blood seeped from the wound. Delicate scrollwork graced the dagger’s hilt, and ice crystals budded from the base of the blade. I noticed white wisps of vapor twisting and floating around the blade and over the incision in the woman’s chest.

  I turned from my inspection of the victim. “Well, it looks like—”

  Shay stood with her arms out to the sides, fingers tickling the air as her eyes glossed over and rolled toward the back of her head. Rodgers stood behind her fidgeting, probably eager to
search the place but unwilling to interfere with Steele’s psychic experience.

  I put him out of his misery by putting him to work. “Rodgers, why don’t you go assist Quinto with the neighbors while Steele and I search the premises? I want to know everything there is to know about this woman—who she was, what she did for a living, who she knew, and what people heard and saw last night and early this morning. And try to be quick about it. The body’s still fresh. I can practically smell the blood trail fading as we speak.”

  Rodgers nodded and shuffled out the door. After a moment, Shay relaxed and deglazed her eyes.

  “We’re going to have to tell them eventually,” I said. “It doesn’t seem right to lie to them, even if we’re doing it implicitly.”

  Shay sighed. “I know. I feel the same way. But let’s wait until a more opportune moment, ok? We’ve got enough on our plate as it is.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Notice anything interesting while you were engaging in your séance?”

  “Probably the same things you saw, for the most part. You notice the injection mark on her left arm?”

  I hadn’t, but I hadn’t looked that closely, either. Sure enough, a small, circular mark graced the primary artery on the inside of her left elbow crease.

  “Figures,” I said. “Cairny must’ve been right about that blood thickener stuff. Again we have a direct shot to the heart with only minimal bleeding.”

  I searched around in the chaos for a scrap of cloth that suited my needs, eventually finding a swatch of flannel about the size of a potholder. I wrapped it gingerly around the hilt of the murder weapon and extracted it from the dead woman’s chest. I could feel the chill seeping through the fabric. With my other hand, I grasped the end of the hilt and twisted. The top came off, revealing a thin metal flask hidden inside the stiletto.

  “Well, in a sense this is good,” I said as I replaced the cap. “Our situation here’s almost identical to Terry’s murder, from the state of the apartment to the victim’s nudity to the frigid murder weapon. Only real difference I see is the location of the body. And the sex of the victim, of course.”

  “Something you’re loving, I’m sure,” said Steele.

  “I admit I prefer the nude female anatomy to that of the male,” I said. “But when you say it, you make it sound so dirty—like I’ve got a weird fetish for dead bodies.”

  My partner sniffed. “We should cover her up.”

  “With what?” I asked. “You planning on sewing an impromptu quilt out of all these strips of cloth?”

  Shay ignored me and wandered over toward the broken windows. “Unfortunately, there’s another similarity between this place and Terrence’s that won’t work in our favor. This place is a second story unit, too. Hopefully, Rodgers and Quinto will extract something useful from the neighbors, but let’s say I’m not terribly confident that anyone will have spotted our cloaked mystery man on his way out.”

  I set the stiletto down next to our latest victim. The chill had started to make my fingers feel creaky and stiff. “We’ll just have to hope for the best in that regard. You never know. Even the smartest of criminals make mistakes, and mistakes can lead to clues. Speaking of which, let’s split up and search this place. Maybe we’ll find something the killer left behind in the scuffle, or some connection between this lady and our first two victims.”

  29

  “Find anything?” It was a big apartment. I was in the study, and Steele had escaped to the bedroom.

  With a grunt I yanked open a desk drawer that was putting up a fight, mostly because the desk looked like it’d been beaten with a ten-pound hammer and then sat on by an overweight giant. Whoever had trashed the place had done a stand-up job.

  Steele’s voice came back faint, echoing off several walls from a couple rooms away. “Not really, though these pieces of cloth are interesting. Did you notice their edges?”

  “What about them?” I called.

  “Well, they’re clearly bits of clothing,” she said. “But they’ve all been torn, not cut. You can tell by the thread pattern at the tears. The trashed apartment I can understand, but why bother tearing up all this woman’s clothing? What sort of grudge did the murderer harbor anyway? Normally when you find torn clothes at a crime scene it’s evidence of a sexual assault. But I don’t see any bruising in the obvious places on the victim for that to be the case. These clothes look like they’ve been through a shredder. Who does that?”

  I shrugged before realizing Shay couldn’t see me, so I added an additional loud “Not sure.”

  I reached into the savaged desk drawer and drew out a bright yellow folder. I flipped through the contents, which included a few vague letters referencing services of an indistinct nature, a ledger that included hours worked, but didn’t specify what work was being completed, and a dog-eared take-out menu for an authentic dark elven cuisine place nearby called Can O’ Pea’s. It made me smile.

  At least I was able to glean from the letters that our victim’s name was Cynthia Gladwell. I just wished the pieces of correspondence were more concrete. Most were letters of thanks, stating that Cynthia had ‘really outdone herself’ and that she’d done a ‘fantastic job.’

  Steele’s voice worked its way around the corner again. “You know what else I don’t get?”

  “What?” I said, as I replaced the folder and grabbed a three-ring binder labeled ‘WIP.’

  “Well,” she said, “both Terrence and our current victim—”

  “Cynthia,” I called.

  “What?”

  “Cynthia,” I said again. “I found her name on a letter in the desk.” I opened the binder and started to read.

  “Oh,” came Steele’s voice. “Well, both Terrence and Cynthia were found naked at the crime scenes. I think we can safely assume both of them were clothed at the time our mystery caller arrived to kill them. That means their clothes were removed, either before or after death.”

  My eyes widened as I flipped over to the next page.

  “Given the pieces of cloth in the apartments,” said Steele, “I’d assume their clothes were torn from their bodies, but neither body exhibited any bruising to support that theory. That said, the clothes are clearly torn. So that means our victims either voluntarily disrobed or the killer undressed them after killing them, and then afterwards he tore their clothes into shreds. That doesn’t make any sense. Why would someone do that? And why would they do it to Terrence and this woman, Cynthia, but not Octavio? And don’t tell me it’s because Octavio was so creepy looking no one would want to see him naked.”

  “Dear gods,” I said softly as I continued to read.

  “What was that?” Steele called.

  “Come in here,” I said, my heart racing. “Right now. You’ve got to see this.”

  The sound of Steele’s pounding feet preceded her arrival by seconds. “What did you find? A murder note? An affidavit? What?”

  I handed her the binder.

  “Read this,” I said.

  She started to scan her eyes across the page. “Um…what is this, Daggers?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I said, jabbing at the page with my finger. “This first page is a jumbled mess, but among the scribbles and notes you can see all the major plot points and settings. On page four, there’s a detailed character biography. And if you flip to the seventh page, it starts for good. See?”

  I flipped to the sheet in question. Shay read the title. “Rex Winters in Double Blind Danger?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  Shay shook her head and blinked. “What? Is this some sort of joke? Because it’s not funny.”

  “I wish it were, but unfortunately, I don’t have the sorts of resources necessary to pull off a prank of this magnitude. No, Steele, this is the real deal. Our victim, one Cynthia Gladwell, has an original, handwritten draft—I’d hazard it’s the original handwritten draft—of Rex Winters in Double Blind Danger in her desk.”

  My partner’s dainty eyebrows bunched up and d
own like caterpillars on the move. “I…but… How? Why?”

  “Remember when we talked yesterday afternoon, and I floated the idea that perhaps Terry and Creepy were involved in an unscrupulous activity?” I asked. “Perhaps a theft? And you poo-pooed my theory because neither of them would’ve had anything of value to steal from their employers? Well? We’ve just found something of value.”

  “Wait,” said Steele, finally recovering her ability for speech. “Are you saying you think the connection between Terrence, Octavio, and now Miss Gladwell…is that they worked together to steal the most recent Rex Winters novel?”

  “It’s really more of a manuscript in its current format,” I said as I retrieved the notebook. “But yes. Why not?”

  “Well for one thing,” said Steele, “the author of these books doesn’t work at either the book bindery or the publishing company. How would Terry’s or Octavio’s positions help them pull this off?”

  I waved my hand dismissively and paced around the room. “Oh, they were clearly there to gather information or obtain access to business contacts. Something like that. Besides, we don’t know what role Cynthia played in this yet. Clearly someone had to be working an inside angle with the author, Frank Gregg. I’ll bet it was this Gladwell woman. The question is, how did they intend to profit from this? Stealing the manuscript wouldn’t have been good enough. They couldn’t sell it to the publisher, bypassing Frank Gregg entirely. Even with guys on the inside, the bean counters at Chapman Books would’ve noticed that. So what then? Blackmail?”

  My eyes snapped open and I clenched my fingers into a tight fist. “Oh no! Not that. Anything but that.”

  “What are you muttering about?” asked Shay.

  I turned toward Steele. “Our murderer. I don’t want it to be so—I wish it weren’t—but it must be. It’s none other than Frank Gregg!”

  “What? Are you mental?” Shay’s eyebrows furrowed and her mouth hung open.

  “Think about it,” I said. “These guys were holding his novel hostage. He’s the one with motive. And besides, remember how I told you the murders in the book eerily mirrored the ones we’d found so far? Someone with knowledge of the book has to be behind these killings. Who better than the head writer himself?”