Crucible Steele (Daggers & Steele Book 5) Read online

  “Not hot. Haute,” I said.

  Cairny looked to Steele for guidance, who in turn looked to me. “You mean high-class? If so, it’s pronounced ‘oht.’”

  “Really?” I asked.

  Everyone nodded—even Rodgers with his mouth full of scone, though there’s no way he could’ve known what the word meant, much less how it was spoken.

  “If it’s pronounced ‘oat,’ then why in the world does it start with an ‘h?’” I said. “See, this is the problem with my reading habit. I’ve seen that word in print, and so I thought myself an expert, but apparently I’ve been saying it wrong this whole time.”

  Steele lifted her eyebrow. “What books are you reading that deal in high fashion?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but a big, rumbling voice reminiscent of a bass drum responded for me. “Oh, Daggers might talk a good game about liking mysteries and thrillers, but I suspect he dabbles in his fair share of historical romances, too.”

  Quinto stepped from behind the lumber pile, flashing his mismatched buckteeth in a smile as he joined Cairny. He dwarfed his coroner girlfriend by about ten inches and at least two hundred pounds, and in the wan morning sunlight, his skin shimmered with an unhealthy gray pallor—a byproduct of his alleged part-troll heritage. Whereas Cairny radiated an awkward charm, Quinto’s wide frame and battered, buzz cut-topped melon produced a more terrifying response—at least until you got to know the snuggly teddy bear beneath.

  “Hey, even historical romances are better than whatever you read,” I said. “What gets you off? Actuarial tables?”

  “Hey, now,” said Rodgers as he swallowed. “Quinto knows how to have fun. He’s neglected to take work home with him, what? Two whole days this week?”

  The big guy stuffed his hands in his pockets and frowned. “I get caught up in cases. So sue me.”

  Cairny shot her beau a warm smile. “Well, I like that he’s so committed. Besides, he sets his work aside when other things draw his attention.”

  Quinto’s frown disappeared. He chuckled and gave Cairny a hungry glance. “Indeed.”

  I grimaced and sent a finger to loosen my collar—except I wasn’t wearing one. One of the few perks of detective work was the lax dress code, which I took full advantage of with a varied collection of dark cotton shirts and an ancient leather jacket I’d worn down to the bone. Virtually everyone at the precinct had urged me to retire the thing, going so far as to claim it was attracting vultures, but I still felt it had a few good years left in it.

  “How about I make you two a deal?” I said. “Keep the smoochie smoochie and mooneyes to a minimum, and I’ll feed you breakfast.” I held up my white paper bag as evidence.

  Quinto eyed the offering. “Seems like a raw deal, as I can’t imagine you intended all those scones for Rodgers alone.”

  “Is that a challenge?” said Rodgers. “Because I think I could plow through at least three more of those. Or I could if someone had brought me coffee.”

  “You’re still going on about that?” I asked.

  Shay eyed the three of us boys and shook her head before turning to Cairny. “So we heard there was a body?”

  Cairny blinked and focused, as mention of the dead always caused her to do. “That’s right. Follow me.”

  I handed the bag of baked goods to Quinto and followed Cairny, who led us around the edge of the lumber pile past Poundstone and Gorman, who tipped their caps to us. Beyond them, in a patch of dirt next to an enormous coil of rope, lay a man much as I’d imagined following Rodgers’ description: wide and muscular despite his age, which was probably north of sixty given the network of weathered creases in his face and the almost complete victory of gray over his flattop.

  “So this is the deceased, huh?” I knelt down next to the body to take a closer look. The man wore a heavy woolen coat and greenish brown trousers, but I didn’t spot any blood on his clothing.

  Quinto chuckled and bit into a scone. “Somebody give this guy a raise.”

  “Please,” I said as I shot Quinto a disdainful glance. “I meant that as an invitation for what you’ve gleaned, not your baked good-impeded wit.”

  The dry interior of the scone prevented Quinto from interjecting a timely response, though he contorted his face and held up some fingers.

  Cairny eyed her beau with ill-restrained mirth. “Well, I can tell you what I know. He died sometime between ten and twelve last night. And he was strangled—by garrote no less. As you can see from his face, he didn’t suffer any bruising or scratching during his murder. I took a peek under his clothes, and I didn’t see any evidence of contusions there either. All of that, combined with the fact that he’s in a location I imagine most people wouldn’t visit between ten and midnight, indicates to me he was engaging in illicit activity. Perhaps a clandestine meeting? The garrote in particular makes me think this could be a mob hit.”

  I shifted my gaze to the stiff’s neck and found the source of Cairny’s diagnosis. Under the man’s day old scruff, a thin discolored line stretched from above his Adam’s apple to either side of his jaw.

  Steele knelt down across from me and started to check the man’s pockets. “What can you add, Quinto?”

  The big guy had recovered enough saliva to respond. “Not a whole lot, unfortunately. I talked to the dock hand who found him, and he claimed he’d never seen the guy before in his life. According to him, this place clears out at sundown and doesn’t perk back up until dawn, so there’s no reason for the man to have been here in the middle of the night. I corroborated that story with a number of other workers, and they told me the same thing. I checked his pockets, too, and didn’t find a red cent. Whoever killed him cleaned him out.”

  Shay’s eyebrows perked at that last bit. “You sure about that?”

  “Well…I thought so,” said Quinto. “Why? Did I miss something?”

  “Not in his pockets, but…” Shay trailed her fingers down the man’s arm, which lay at his side. She picked up his hand and repositioned it over his stomach.

  I noticed something bulky and worn on the man’s third finger. “Is that a class ring?”

  Shay nodded. “New Welwic University. Class of twenty-nine, it looks like. Could be a lead.”

  My partner and I shifted our eyes to the Rodgers/Quinto/Cairny triumvirate, who all glanced at each other with blank looks—but to be fair, that was Cairny’s default.

  “Don’t blame me,” said Rodgers. “I already told you I barely got a look at him before Quinto and Cairny booted me.”

  “So what’s your excuse?” I asked the other two as I stood.

  “It’s…not really in my job description,” said Cairny, although to be fair, she looked mortified.

  Not as much as Quinto, however. His face fell. “Rather than try and talk myself out of this, I’m going to relegate myself to whatever mundane task you think should be next on the to-do list.”

  I glanced at Steele and mouthed under my breath, “Romp. Told you so.”

  She silenced me with a glance. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Quinto. Everyone misses clues now and then.”

  The wind picked up, and I shivered. “Which doesn’t mean you’re not being relegated to grunt duty. Someone needs to search for the murder weapon, however futile an effort that might be, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to canvass the local homeless population. Someone might’ve seen our victim entering or exiting the shipyard last night. If they did, chances are they spotted the killer, too.”

  Quinto gave his partner an apologetic look. “Sorry, bud. Looks like it’s up to us to brave the cold for a bit longer.”

  “What? Me?” said Rodgers. “What about Cairny?”

  “I’m not his partner,” she said. “And I need to start my analysis of the victim. Besides—I don’t like the cold, either.” A smile accompanied that last part.

  Rodgers harrumphed. “All I have to say is that somebody better buy me coffee. And soon.”

  “What abo
ut you two?” Quinto nodded in Shay’s and my direction.

  My half-elf compatriot removed the deceased’s ring and stood. “We’ll accompany Cairny back to the precinct with the body. They it’s off to see where this little baby—” She flashed the class ring. “—can lead us.”

  3

  True to our word, we stuck with Cairny until we’d delivered our dead mystery man to the morgue, but like a true gentleman, I let Gorman and Poundstone do most of the heavy lifting. Of course, even after the delivery of the stiff, we couldn’t quite take off toward the university like racehorses. For one thing, the consumption of my tall morning coffee necessitated a quick trip to the facilities, but more importantly—and that’s a word my bladder would’ve argued against—we needed to add another piece to our arsenal before heading out.

  From the subterranean morgue, Shay and I headed upstairs to the precinct’s second floor where we found our friendly neighborhood sketch artist, Boatreng Davis. Boatreng had a little bit of a hair problem, in that he didn’t really have any left, but I’d found him to be an agreeable enough chap after he and I squashed our beef, one that had basically consisted of me being a huge jerk and him not particularly liking it. After a wink and a smile on Shay’s part, he hustled down to the realm of the dead and returned fifteen minutes later with a sketch of our dead strong-armed grandpa.

  With that in hand, we once again braved the cold en route to one of the city’s two flagship institutions of higher learning, the aptly named New Welwic University or NWU. While the University of New Welwic, or UNW, specialized in math, science, and engineering, NWU was better known for its fine and liberal arts programs, not to mention its law school, which had produced more of my interrogation room adversaries than even the meanest streets of the Erming.

  Our rickshaw dropped us off in front of the university’s main building, a sprawling four story limestone structure whose construction had been footed by wealthy donors. A bell tower sprouted from the center of the stone, rising several stories above the building proper before ending in a conical end cap painted in the university’s distinctive purple and maize. Huge oak trees lined the sides of a grassy promenade leading up to the building, their boughs bare due to winter’s chill. Though the space was largely deserted, I imagined students clogged it in the summer months, sunning themselves and tossing leather balls and smoking dried herbal mixtures of dubious legality.

  Steele spotted me staring at the bell tower’s bicolored tip as I stood at the foot of the mall. “You ever been to the NWU campus, Daggers?”

  “Once or twice,” I said. “For research purposes. You?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said with a shrug. “Morton’s was a wonderful school, and far better for paranormal studies than NWU, but with that said, most of the students were what you’d consider total drips. NWU was where the parties were.”

  I lifted a dubious eyebrow as we set out toward the building. “You came here to party?”

  My partner gave me a sly smile. “You don’t think I’m fun?”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  “Oh, but perhaps I should,” she said. “There are too many worthless ones that come out of there without my input.”

  I snorted. “My point is you’re so…responsible. I can’t quite picture you getting sloshed and defacing a treasured university monument or running around with nothing but a paper cone on your head.” Which was a lie, to be honest. I could picture Steele in such revealing attire, and I did so more often than I cared to admit—which was never.

  Steele pulled on the door handle to the main’s interior. “I was never involved in anything quite so self-indulgent—or illegal. Although there was that one time sophomore year…”

  I stopped dead in my tracks. “Oh, come on. You can’t throw out a teaser like that and not finish the story.”

  “Maybe I’m pulling your leg,” she said.

  “Are you?”

  Steele rolled her eyes and smirked before hopping through her own open door. I followed her, knowing she’d string me along with that particular piece of information for hours, but I couldn’t blame her. I’d do the same thing if I were in her shoes. The only reason I hadn’t was due to a lack of wild parties in my past and my complete and utter certainty Shay had no interest whatsoever in my drunken exploits.

  We arrived at the door to the NWU admissions and records office. This time I led the way, pushing through into a room featuring copious amounts of wooden paneling and a line of service kiosks that reminded me of a bank’s. A rope strung between brass posts snaked back and forth for three passes, but lucky for us, the queue to speak to a person was momentarily empty. I crossed to the only station currently occupied and approached the teller, a middle-aged woman with a bob cut and glazed eyes.

  “Admissions, or records?” she asked in a bored monotone.

  “Records,” I said, “though I suppose I should be flattered you think I might be here for admissions.”

  The woman behind the counter blinked slowly, and her lips didn’t move upward one iota. If anything, they crept down.

  I think Steele caught onto the woman’s job-induced malaise faster than I did. She pulled out her badge and presented it. “We’re not prospective students. We’re with the police department. We were hoping you might be able to help us identify an alum.”

  The teller afforded Steele the same unbridled joy that she had me. “Name?”

  “We actually don’t have a name,” I said.

  “You don’t have a name?” she said.

  “No name,” I confirmed.

  That seemed to throw a wrench into the woman’s gears. She looked at us blankly, unsure of how to proceed.

  I could’ve elaborated, but I was starting to become interested in how this might play out. Part of me thought she might be a soulless automaton controlled from within by snickering homunculi as a grand ruse perpetrated against clueless college kids.

  Steele unwittingly ruined my experiment by pulling out our stiff’s ring and the sketch Boatreng had produced. “We’re trying to identify the man in this drawing. We think he’s an NWU alum because of his ring. I’m not sure what sorts of data you collect on students, or what you might still have from back then, but perhaps we could see the files on the class from twenty-nine?”

  “You want to see the files from the class from twenty-nine?”

  I narrowed my eyes and peered at the woman. Her eyes, though dull, didn’t appear to be constructed of glass, and she moved too well to be made of anything but flesh and blood. Nonetheless…

  “Are you familiar with the myna bird?” I asked.

  “A what?” said the woman.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  The woman blinked and shook her head, then broke out of character. “Looking at the files won’t help you if you don’t have a name. But…can I see that ring?”

  “Sure.” Steele handed it over.

  The woman held the ring close to her face and narrowed her eyes.

  “I already checked for a serial number,” I said as she peered at it. “No dice, though. It does have a hallmark, which could help us track down the silversmith who made the thing, but I don’t see how that would be of any help.”

  “It wouldn’t,” said the woman without shifting her eyes from the ring. “And I can tell you who fabricated it right off the bat. Rundell, Smith, and Sons. They’ve supplied NWU’s class rings for over a century.”

  “So, if you don’t mind my asking,” said Steele, “what are you looking for?”

  “The rings aren’t all identical,” said the woman. “The silversmiths have dozens of different dies they use to personalize the rings for different university organizations. Fraternities and sororities, honor societies, clubs, athletic programs. You name it. If this ring had one or more of those symbols on it, that would narrow your search quite a bit. And sure enough—”

  She held the ring back out, her index finger pointing to a small oblong ball hidden
between a rendition of the university’s bell tower and an official seal.

  “Is that a scrummage ball?” asked Steele.

  “Scrummage?” I asked.

  “It is,” said the woman, “and how in the world do you not know what scrummage is? Did you go to UNW or something?”

  “I gather that’s amusing because you think of those guys as nerds,” I said, “but for your information, I’m the exact opposite. I didn’t go to college at all.”

  “Well, that explains it,” said the teller.

  I frowned. “I think I liked you better when you just repeated everything that trickled into your ears.”

  The woman grunted. “Go talk to the scrummage coach. He might be able to help you. I certainly can’t. Next!”

  I glanced behind us, but there still wasn’t anyone else in line. “Um…we’re the only ones—”

  “NEXT!”

  Steele tilted her head toward the door. “Come on, Daggers. I know how to get to the athletic campus.”

  4

  Shay led me across half the campus, past ivy-covered libraries and dreary dormitories, before eventually stopping at a nondescript brick building featuring a small bronze sign that read ‘Champion’s Hall.’

  “I think this is the place,” said Shay. “As far as I know the scrummage coaches’ offices are located here, as it’s close to the stadium. Whether or not they’re in at the moment is a different story.”

  We headed inside, through halls lined with trophy cases that gave credibility to the building’s name. Inside the glass-fronted cases were large bronze cups with ornately crafted handles, plaques bearing names and dates, as well as numerous pieces of vintage athletic equipment. Leather balls of varying shapes and sizes, rackets, hoops, bats, skates, and sticks, most of them looking as if they’d been handed down through generations. Commissioned artwork hung in what little wall space wasn’t covered by display cabinets, most of it depicting coaches and players of days long past, or so I gathered from the plaques affixed to the bottoms.