Daggers & Steele 1 - Red Hot Steele Read online

  I gave her a blank stare. “What do I say to what?”

  “Just apologize, won’t you? That’s all I ask.”

  One of the runners from out front burst in and ran to the Captain’s office. As I considered Shay’s request, I saw the runner bend over and whisper something into the Captain’s ear. I took a calculated risk.

  I gave Shay a cheesy smile. “I’ll file your request with management, sweetheart.”

  Before Miss Steele could verbally explode all over me again, the Captain stuck his head out of his office and bellowed at the two of us.

  “Daggers! Steele! We’ve got a body in a service corridor of a fancy hotel. The Lawrence. It’s on the corner of 3rd and West. Go check it out. Take Rodgers and Quinto with you. This one sounds fun.”

  Before elf girl could regroup, I hopped out of my chair and grabbed my coat. As warm as it was, it was the best way to keep prying eyes off Daisy, and I couldn’t very well leave her. She might get lonely.

  “What luck, partner! First day on the job and already you’re on a case. Just try not to soil your smallclothes when you see the stiff, ok?”

  Shay gave me an evil glare, but she couldn’t prevent a bit of color from creeping into her cheeks. I couldn’t tell if it was from anger or if my jibe hit too close to home. I suspected the latter.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said around clenched teeth.

  “Of course you will,” I said. “You’ll be with me. Rodgers! Quinto! C’mon, let’s hoof it.”

  10

  The Lawrence Hotel wasn’t too far from the precinct, maybe a half-hour’s walk. It was situated on the waterfront of the Earl Fulcinet Ferdinand River, more commonly known as ‘the Earl.’ I never paid much attention in history class, but if my memory serves me correctly it was named after some stuffy aristocrat whose primary achievement in life involved paying a cartographer to slap his name on a river discovered by the poor saps from which he extorted taxes. Seems a fitting tribute that everyone referred to the river by his title only and not his name.

  The Lawrence made its home on the west side of the river—the good side, same side as the precinct—though the hotel lay in a much swankier district than the workplace of us gumshoes. People referred to the neighborhood as the Pearl district, or ‘the Pearl’ for short, due to the fact that the banks of the Earl used to be teeming with pearl-bearing mussels before overzealous fishermen nearly wiped them out.

  The main draw of the Pearl was Magister Hall, the most renowned theater in the city. The place hosted two shows a day—a matinee and a nightcap—three hundred and sixty-five days a year. With over two thousand seats, a sell-out crowd all but guaranteed at every show, and ticket prices that would make a public servant like myself weep, the place generated more revenue than most small municipalities. But Magister Hall wasn’t the only place in the Pearl making the tax collectors smile. Travelers came from far and wide to experience the Hall’s shows, and they had to rest their heads somewhere—somewhere like the Lawrence Hotel.

  I picked the Lawrence out of a lineup of other swanky hotels as soon as it popped into view. I’m not entirely sure what gave it away. It might’ve been the massive columns running up and down all eight stories of the building’s façade. Perhaps it was the elaborately painted red and gold embellishments that peeked out from within the lobby and screamed of glitz and glamour. Or perhaps it was the giant sign outside that read ‘The Lawrence Hotel.’

  I’m nothing if not observant.

  Rodgers had been chatting young Miss Steele’s ear off the entire trek over from the precinct. Even now he prattled on about some old case he and Quinto had gotten mixed up in.

  “So anyway,” he said, “the next body we found was barely recognizable. It was so mangled it looked like rabid dogs had gotten at it. It was nasty. You know how organ meat looks when—”

  “Give it a rest, Rodgers,” I said. “She’s green enough without you messing with her hue. Besides, we’re almost there.”

  Though I joked about her queasiness, she looked far more relaxed than when we’d left the precinct. During the walk, she’d initially ignored me. As her rage subsided, I noticed her peering my way on more than one occasion. The brain between my legs tried to convince me the glances were born from lustful desire, but the brain between my ears saw things differently. Her glances had been deliberate. Calculating. I could practically hear the gears churning inside her head. A scheme was underway, and I’d have to wait to find out what it was.

  A doorman wearing a red and gold frock coat and with a ring of sweat around his cap opened the door for us as we approached. Once inside, I flashed my badge to a hotel clerk working the front desk. She hustled off and returned with a tall, bespectacled maître d’ in tow. His dark hair was highly styled with thick mousse, and he wore a dark suit and tie. He dabbed at his forehead with a white kerchief, the fabric damp with sweat.

  “Detectives. Thank you for coming,” he said in a strained voice. “My goodness, when the morning crew arrived and found that man dead I nearly fainted, and in such a manner as well, and who would’ve guessed that after such an event as last night’s, why in all my years I’ve never seen such a thing, and to think it happened here at the Lawrence, no sir, we certainly can’t have that sort of thing, and—”

  The maître d’ must’ve moonlighted as an auctioneer. I had to interrupt him before the body at our crime scene crumbled into dust. “Hold on there, pal. Why don’t you take a deep breath and tell me what you know. And keep in mind most of us prefer sentences over stream-of-consciousness word vomit.”

  The maître d’ stiffened and pulled back, but he got the message.

  “Very well,” he said. “Last night we held a charity event in the grand ballroom. A benefit for children of wounded war veterans. Often these events last long into the night, sometimes until three or four. As such, we leave the cleanup until the following morning. It’s not fair to the workers to expect them to stay that late, you see. Anyway, one of my duties here at the Lawrence is to oversee that all daily functions are performed according to schedule. So you can imagine my dismay when the cleaning crew came to me this morning and informed me there was man lying dead in one of the service corridors of our hotel. The workers were visibly distraught, and I don’t blame them. Why, when I saw it…” The man shuddered and lost a little color. “Well, perhaps you should see it for yourselves.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Lead the way.”

  As the maître d’ turned, I gave my new partner a friendly elbow in the shoulder. “You hear that? Sounds like a good one. You didn’t eat too much for breakfast, did you?”

  Shay gave me one of those calculating looks again and followed it with a smirk. “Are you kidding? You wouldn’t share your kolaches with me, remember? I guess you’ll just have to settle for dry heaves.”

  Wait, what? Had the raw little rookie just tried to out quip me? Was that part of her recently hatched plan?

  I hitched up my trousers. Nobody out quips Jake Daggers. Nobody.

  11

  The maître d’ ushered us through the grand ballroom, onto a raised stage at the back, and into a corridor full of ropes and pulleys and other mechanisms for controlling curtains and lighting. A traffic jam of dining carts lined the hall, each crammed with dirty plates, half-filled glasses of sparkling wine, and leftover slices of sheet cake. Amid this backdrop, we found our formerly-breathing leading man.

  He lay face up on the floor in the middle of the corridor. His smooth skin and high cheekbones brought to mind the she-elf standing next to me, but a darker hue colored his face than that of young Miss Shay’s. I hazarded a guess that the stiff was the not-so-proud owner of dark elf blood.

  Dark elves had been getting a bad rap for centuries. Most of the other races viewed their dark skin as a brand of immorality, but the simple fact was dark elf civilizations had arisen in jungles. Their greenish-brown skin camouflaged them in thick underbrush.

  Of course, the average joe didn’t let something as
simple as genetics stop him from hurling insults at them. People labeled dark elves as charlatans, thieves, and nexuses of vile diseases that afflicted a man in his nether regions. As with all stereotypes though, some actually had legs. Partly because of workplace discrimination and partly because of their natural, sultry good looks, many dark elves fell into the sex trade where they tended to pick up all sorts of nasty ailments.

  Based upon his attire, our dead friend had risen quite a bit higher than his natural station in life. A black tuxedo with a white cummerbund and necktie hugged his frame. His close-cropped ebony hair flowed up and over to the side, giving him a rather dashing, debonair look. He’d probably made ladies swoon in droves. You know, before he acquired the massive, gaping hole in his chest.

  Rodgers whistled. Quinto grunted. The maître d’ swallowed hard, excused himself, and backed away. I took a few steps toward the dead guy to get a closer look.

  I’m no spring chicken. I’d seen dead guys with holes in them before. Spears, swords—heck, even pickaxes could do the trick. But the hole in this particular dead guy was unique. For one, the hole was big, maybe the size of one of Quinto’s fists. More interestingly though, the hole didn’t cut through him. It’d burned through him, and not just the fleshy parts. Skin, muscle, bone. All gone. Vaporized.

  I peered straight through his chest cavity to a blackened scorch mark on the floor beneath him. Not only had whatever killed him been powerful, it’d been violent. Tiny charred holes pockmarked his suit, as if a massive shower of sparks had exploded upon him in an orgy of fire. Only one thing came to mind that could cause damage like that.

  I turned to Rodgers and Quinto. “Now I see why the Captain had you guys come along. Unless I’m mistaken, boys, I think we’ve got us someone who’s been murdered…by magic.”

  Quinto snorted. “Well, I’ll go ahead and check the—”

  He paused as he noticed the same thing I did—my new partner acting extremely odd. While I’d been looking forward to seeing how long it would take her to add her intestinal fluids to the crime scene, the show I observed was of an entirely different variety.

  Shay stretched her arms out to the sides, as if petitioning for silence, and extended her fingers into the air. Her digits flicked, grasping at a nonexistent breeze. Her eyes glossed over and began to flit back and forth like those of a woman caught in the throes of deep sleep.

  I stretched my wit and tried to shed some light on the situation. “Hey, uh…are you ok?”

  Shay spoke oddly, as if her voice traveled through water. “The tapestry…it beckons.”

  Tapestry? Oh, right. She meant she was communing with the dead or having visions of yesteryear imparted to her by the ancients or something as equally ludicrous.

  She continued to wave her fingers and tilt her head about at weird angles. I walked around behind her so I could observe her and the stiff simultaneously. As strange as Shay’s hand gestures and head movements were, the truly unnerving part about my new partner’s physical state was her eyes. They cut through me as if I were made of glass.

  Me? Invisible to the female eye? With my charm and good looks? I soothed my ego with the notion that she wasn’t ignoring me but rather seeing into the past. A past in which my smiling mug didn’t exist.

  After a few long moments, the storm passed from Shay’s clouded eyes. Her arms floated back to her sides, and her gaze refocused into the material world.

  “Well?” I asked.

  Quinto and Rodgers, quiet as mice during the ordeal, leaned forward, eager to hear what Miss Steele had gleaned from the spirit realm.

  “It wasn’t magic,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “How this man died. It wasn’t by magic.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Shay raised an eyebrow at me and tilted her head to one side. “Really, Detective Daggers? Do I have to explain this again? Did you have kolaches stuffed in your ears back at the precinct when I explained how this works?”

  Rodgers sniggered. Quinto cracked a small smile and shook his head.

  Back when I was married, my wife had come by and spent some time at the precinct once. She came away shocked—mortified, really—at how Quinto, Rodgers, and I could make light of something as serious as murder. She never understood.

  We had to.

  The alternative was to let the awful truth that the world was full of heartless, murdering bastards fully seep in, and that wasn’t a healthy thing for the mind to dwell upon. No, the best guys in the business all had a sense of humor—which, I realized, boded well for Shay.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t bode well for me. Rodgers and Quinto often peppered me with lighthearted ribbing, but they rarely got the best of me. The skinny half-elf, on the other hand, had done it in less than an hour.

  “I remember your discourse on paranatural hoo-donkery quite clearly,” I retorted. “There’s a tapestry. You pick at it, like a supernatural booger, and then the crusty bits dry up and fall off.”

  That line earned a snigger from Rodgers, but not Quinto. At least I’d earned one half of the pair back.

  “That’s not exactly how I related it,” Shay said with a hint of disgust.

  “Whatever. So who killed the guy? And if the killer didn’t off him with magic, then how?”

  Shay shook her head in a condescending manner. “It doesn’t work like that, Detective Daggers. Threads, remember? I only see threads. And as it turns out, the tapestry here is complex. The only thread I was able to pull free involved the murder itself, and there’s no scent of magic on the thread at all.”

  “You can smell magic?”

  “Look, it wasn’t magic. Trust me. I may not be a weaver, but I know what the threads mean.”

  I shot her my best quizzical look, but Shay didn’t elaborate.

  I harrumphed and stuck my hands in my coat pockets. “Well, I guess we’ll have to figure this murder out the old-fashioned way.”

  While part of me was dismayed that my fresh-faced new partner’s supernatural talents didn’t include plucking murderers from thin air, another part of me was glad to retain talents of use to the city. Homelessness didn’t particularly suit my lifestyle.

  I kneeled and checked the dead guy’s pockets.

  “Well, I think we can rule out a mugging,” I said. “Not much chance of that happening here in the hotel. Besides, he’s still got his cash on him.”

  He did. Quite a bit, in fact. Not to mention a deftly engraved gold pocket watch attached to one of his belt loops by a fine chain. Unfortunately, what the guy didn’t carry was any sort of documents, bills, or paperwork that identified him.

  That wasn’t particularly surprising. Several years ago, the city had levied a rule mandating all city residents obtain a government-issued identification card, but the cards were mainly for tax collection purposes. Few people carried them around. Sometimes I wished the lawmakers would force everyone to carry the cards at all times, but I doubt it would make my job much easier. Most of the city’s poor would ignore the law, and criminals would be smart enough to get fake cards.

  I straightened and beckoned to my pals.

  “Quinto, why don’t you help me cordon off this crime scene? And Rodgers, can you track down that maître d’? See if he can find a doorman or a clerk or someone who can help identify this stiff.”

  As Rodgers shuffled off, I gave my new partner a sly grin.

  “What are you smirking at?” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “I was thinking. Now that I’ve seen your talent, so to speak, it’s time to see if you have any real ability, by which I mean—”

  “Deductive reasoning?”

  My face must’ve betrayed my surprise. Already the young whelp was finishing my sentences? It took Griggs years to do that.

  Shay leaned in close over the dead body. “You’re wondering how I knew you were going to say that, aren’t you? Is it my ‘talent,’ as you called it? Or did I use my deductive ability? I’ll let you deduce that on
e by yourself.”

  Shay inspected the body. I grumbled. I may have underestimated how much moxie the fresh-faced pup had, and I hadn’t yet figured out whether or not I liked it.

  12

  I poked the dead guy in his flabby bits until Rodgers found his way back to the scene of the crime. With him, he brought an elderly woman in a black cocktail dress. As soon as she drew within eyeshot of the dead guy, she wilted. Rodgers helped steady her. She cast a look in the dark elf’s direction and exchanged a few hushed words with Rodgers before retreating back up the corridor. There, she leaned against a doorframe to help still her chattering knees.

  I could understand. I’d been there before. My adolescence had been far from a dream. I’d seen bodies, and not at funerals where people milled about, drank punch, and ate lousy cake, either. I’d seen bodies on the streets. People who’d set foot in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  But it was a different story when the dead person at your feet was someone you knew. Someone you had a connection with. Someone you cared for deeply. Someone like, say, your own mother.

  It happened when I was thirteen. The police officers in charge of the case told us it was a mugging gone wrong. Perhaps my mother had fought back—she’d always been scrappy—or perhaps she’d recognized one of her assailants. Either way, it didn’t matter. The detectives in charge never discovered anything that resembled a motive in the case, nor did they ever track down the murderers.

  And that made me furious.

  It was that lack of closure, and the agony associated with it, that drove me into police work. I swore I’d never let another little boy suffer the same pain I had. It wasn’t until years later, after a decade spent working the beat, that I realized the pain hadn’t come from my lack of closure. It’d come from my loss, and nothing could ever change that. But try to explain that to a kid armed only with a stack of detective novels and a towering pile of his own grief and insecurities.