Liquid Steele (Daggers & Steele Book 9) Read online

  “Would you have made a different call?” said Steele. “We don’t have a lot of other leads to go on right now. Aragosto is to the west and within the range from which we might expect a body to wash up. And if you’re surprised Captain Knox is willing to shuttle us out there and back, you’ll be really shocked to hear she’s already authorized us to spend the night in the event our investigation requires it.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Way,” said Shay. “Between this and the raises, I think it’s time we accept she’s better at securing funds for our department than Captain Armstrong was.”

  “Well, I think it’s rather optimistic of her to think anything will come of that lead,” I said. “But given what time it is and how long it’ll take us to get there, I guess I can see where she’s coming from. Thinking ahead. Apparently, it’s qualities like that which get you promoted to Captain.”

  “Don’t even start,” said Shay. “We’ve been down that road before, and it wasn’t worth it.”

  “Fair enough. You ready to go?”

  “Let me grab some tea for the road, then sure.”

  That wasn’t a bad idea. Quinto and I followed Shay to the break room to stock up for the trip.

  9

  I should’ve brought a book. The ride to Aragosto really did take two hours, and not because we picked a sickly rickshaw driver with gray hair and a concerning cough. Rather, we secured the services of agile young guys, one for Shay and myself and another for Quinto, both of whom after hearing where we intended to go demanded payment in advance.

  Still, despite the length of the journey, it wasn’t an unpleasant one. Other than my luxury poker cruise with Shay a few months back, years had passed since I’d left our metropolis. Though the first half of our excursion carried us through congested neighborhoods and loud, garishly-decorated markets, they were sites I was only vaguely familiar with, which made them ideal for sightseeing and people watching. Half-breeds and full breeds of every shape, size, and color filled the streets, conversing in a dozen different accents and insulting each other in twice as many foreign tongues. It seemed to me any other city would have a hard time matching the cultural and racial diversity of New Welwic, but I was an uncultured slob who rarely traveled, so what did I know?

  Eventually, the multi-story apartment buildings and crops of groceries and eateries gave way to a strip of urban sprawl that surrounded New Welwic, a slapdash collection of wooden shacks and lean-tos constructed by folks eager to gain entry to the city but without the means to live there full time. The military occasionally swept through the areas, culling the worst parts and torching the structures that posed an imminent threat to human life, but like an infestation of black mold, the hastily constructed tenements always grew back.

  On the bright side, compared to the bulk of New Welwic, the sprawl was a mere scab on its surface. Soon enough we were through that, too, and into the countryside, enjoying the floral, sweet scent of the blossoming irises and bleeding hearts, feeling the cool ocean breeze on our faces, and gawking at the preponderance of trees, ones with bark and leaves and everything. Shay and I exchanged pleasantries about the greenery and glimpses of wildlife, each of us picking at the wall of ice we’d built overnight but unwilling to address the mammoth in the rickshaw.

  Eventually, new structures appeared. A farmhouse here, a general supply shop there, then a collection of homes. Before we knew it, our driver had careened around a bend and was hauling us into a quaint seaside town. Two-story cottages with steeply-pitched roofs, jutting chimneys, and two-toned façades lined the gravel road, conceding their plots to three-story inns and bed and breakfasts as we neared the shore. Neatly-manicured crepe myrtles with pink blossoms sprouted from brick rings built into the sidewalk at regular intervals. Planters hung from lantern posts, spilling tendrils of pinks and purples toward the street. In the direction of the gusting ocean breeze stretched a sprawling boardwalk, filled with shops and eateries, carnival games and sideshows.

  Our driver skidded to a halt, the crunching of rickshaw wheels over gravel reduced to a lingering crackle. “Here we are. Downtown Aragosto.”

  I hopped out and held a hand for Steele to help her down. As she reached solid ground, I instinctively reached for my pocket before remembering I’d already paid the driver.

  “Not much of a downtown, really,” I said.

  The driver shrugged his thin shoulders, still gripping the handlebar in front of him with his wiry arms. “It’s what passes for one around here.”

  Despite demanding payment upfront, the driver hadn’t asked an exorbitant price, at least not for the amount of work involved. I almost felt like I was shortchanging him, and I was notoriously stingy when it came to tipping. Maybe my empathy resulted from the man’s physique. The poor guy looked like he could use a good meal or twelve. Then again, he wasn’t even breathing hard. Perhaps adherence to a strict diet was his secret to success.

  “You, ah…sure I covered the charge?” I asked.

  The driver nodded. “I should be able to secure a return passenger. Lots of tourists from the city around here this time of year.”

  That explained it. I’d assumed I was covering his time out and back, meaning I’d overpaid by at least fifty percent. My miserly tipping instincts kicked back in. “Well, if you don’t find any takers soon, circle the wagon back around. I doubt we’ll be here long.”

  Gravel crunched behind us. Quinto’s rickshaw arrived, through his driver didn’t seem to be the pinnacle of physical fitness ours was. The poor sap gasped and wheezed and nodded as Quinto thanked him.

  “Nice town,” said the big guy as he joined us.

  “You ever been here?” asked Steele.

  Quinto shook his head. “Can’t say I have, though now that I see it, I think maybe I should’ve. Perhaps I’ll bring Cairny out at some point. You?”

  Steele shook her head. “I think I passed it by a long time ago on a trip to see relatives, but that doesn’t count.”

  “If we’re lucky, we’ll have time to see some of the sights before we head back for the evening,” I said. “First things first, though, let’s find the local station.”

  “Heading straight for the police?” said Steele. “From what you told our driver, you made it seem as if we weren’t going to find anything here.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” I said. “This isn’t our jurisdiction. If we start poking around without permission, the local fuzz might get persnickety. Besides, in a town this size, they’ll probably know if one of their own went missing a week or two back.”

  Shay and Quinto nodded, and we set out in search of a local to point us in the right direction. It wasn’t hard. The first gentleman we chanced across, a septuagenarian by the name of Howard William Wadlow, provided a simple roadmap for us to follow, as well as gave us a completely unprompted and unwanted account of Aragosto’s history as a fishing port. Upon finally ripping ourselves free from his company, we ventured into the heart of the suburban sprawl, fighting past four or five blocks of curio shops and homes that would’ve had to have been made out of cardboard and shoe polish to have been affordable in New Welwic.

  Not wanting to feel left out, the police station was as quaint and compact as the surrounding structures: only a single story tall, taking up a quarter of the footprint of the 5th Street Precinct and painted in a thoroughly non-threatening baby blue. If not for the sign above the front door, I might’ve mistaken it for a day care.

  I yanked on the front door and let myself in, Shay and Quinto following behind me. To my right, I spotted a pair of offices with open doors. In front of us was an open area, much like our pit but without the ancient stink of coffee and desperation and with only four desks instead of a few dozen.

  A pair of uniformed officers stood in the middle, chatting as we arrived, one a husky dark-skinned woman with short, side-swept hair and the other a balding dwarf with close cropped auburn hair up top and a ruddy brown bush of beard below. They both peered our way a
s we entered.

  The woman approached us, hooking her thumbs into her belt loops as she shot us a smile both genuine and guarded. “Hi there. Sergeant Samantha Mines, Aragosto Police. Can I help you?”

  Her smile might’ve been cautious, but her stance wasn’t. She stood tall and proud, even with big old Quinto looming behind me.

  “Nice to meet you, Mines,” I said. “I’m Detective Jake Daggers. This is my partner, Detective Shay Steele, and our associate, Detective Folton Quinto. We’re from New Welwic’s 5th Street Precinct.”

  “New Welwic,” said Mines, nodding. “I figured you were law. You had that air about you as you walked in, like you owned the place.”

  “Force of habit,” said Quinto.

  “Don’t worry. I get it,” said Mines. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”

  “Probably nothing,” I said. “A case we’re looking into. I don’t suppose someone’s gone missing from your town recently? Lost at sea, perhaps? From a Nicchi Fishing and Crabbing?”

  “As a matter of fact, someone has.” The dwarf had approached, taking a stand next to the Sergeant. He didn’t shoot us a smile, and his stance indicated he could do without us entirely.

  Mines shot a thumb at the height-challenged cop. “This is Officer Bronmuth Silverbrook. And yeah, someone did go missing. Johnny Nicchi, owner and operator of Nicchi Fishing and Crabbing. About a week and a half ago. Did he pop up in New Welwic? The whole town’s been worried sick.”

  I gestured toward the quartet of desks in the center of the station. “Perhaps we should have a seat. I have some bad news.”

  10

  Rather than settle in the makeshift pit, we ended up in one of the offices, which turned out to be a conference room. I cradled a mug of coffee in my hands, having long extinguished the cup I’d grabbed from the precinct before leaving. Mines and Silverbrook had secured their own cups, though Steele and Quinto went thirsty. Apparently, the Aragosto PD didn’t have a line in their budget for tea. Either that or none of the officers in the city’s employ drank any.

  Mines leaned back in her chair, having absorbed our story of Fishy’s discovery, retold in painstaking, gory detail.

  She took a sip of her coffee and stared at us with wide eyes. “Wow. You’re sure it was murder then?”

  “We’d let you talk to our coroner if she’d come along,” said Steele. “But unless the man tripped and fell on a trident while at sea, then in his death throes got his feet tangled in a rope attached to an anchor, the lot of which followed him to the bottom of the ocean as he fell overboard, then yeah, he was murdered.”

  Mines set her coffee down, shaking her head. “Sorry. This is coming as a shock. I’d talked to him a few weeks ago. Didn’t know him that well, but I knew him. In a town this size, you get to know almost everyone, at least their faces. When he went missing, some people thought the worst. Not that he’d been murdered, of course. Just that he’d met his makers another way. But plenty of us held out hope he’d run off, disappeared into the night. Set sail for bluer seas or something.”

  I gestured with my mug. “So Johnny was…what? A fisherman?”

  “More of a crabber, really,” said Mines. “But guys in the industry do both around here. Depends on the season, and the weather to a degree. Lots of blue crabs in the shallows this time of year. Snow crabs in the winter. More fishing in the summer and fall.”

  “Obviously, you knew he’d gone missing,” said Shay. “You said it happened at night?”

  “As far as we know,” said Mines. “At least that’s when he went missing. I think it was…ten days ago, was it?”

  She looked to Silverbrook. The dwarf nodded as he took a gulp of his joe.

  “Ten days, then,” said Mines. “He wasn’t reported missing until a couple days after that. Let’s call it a week ago. Silverbrook did the legwork on his case, but he didn’t pull up much of anything. His wife, Bianca, said Johnny never mentioned what he was up to when he went out that night. Didn’t even tell her he was leaving. Said she figured he’d gone out to work, but…I guess not, right?”

  “Apparently,” I said. “Johnny have any kids?”

  Mines shook her head. “Just the wife.”

  “And how old was he?”

  Mines looked to Silverbrook for help. The dwarf looked like he’d rather be wrestling a grizzly bear than stuck rehashing an old case with us and his boss. “Uh…I’m not sure. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven, maybe. Why does it matter?”

  “Curiosity,” I said. “The body wasn’t in the sort of condition where we could make an educated guess.”

  Steele soldiered onward. “What time did Nicchi leave his home the night he went missing?”

  Bronmuth waffled. “Well…I’d have to check the files, but I want to say around eight. At least according to Bianca.”

  “And in accordance with the wife’s testimony, you worked off the assumption Johnny went to work. Presumably he took his own ship, or one of his?”

  “Just the one,” said Mines. “His was a small operation. He worked it alone, for the time being anyway.”

  Steele nodded. “Alright. So is that normal behavior? Going out to fish in the middle of the night, either for him or for fishermen in general?”

  Mines shrugged. “For him, I can’t say. But lots of crabbers around here work through the night. Pull thirty to thirty-five hour shifts sometimes. It’s a tough living. Some men die, to be honest, but for the guys who are good at it, know where to lay their traps, it can be lucrative. The Abano brothers have built quite an empire at it. Others pay their bills with plenty left on the side.”

  “Were there storms the night he went missing?” I asked.

  “None,” said Mines. “Which is why it was odd he went missing. If there’d been high winds or lightning, I think we all would’ve assumed he’d found his way to the bottom of the ocean.”

  “So he took his boat out that night?” asked Quinto.

  “That’s what we’d assumed,” said Mines. “His ship was missing the following morning. Silverbrook talked to the folks on the docks, the ones who’d also been working that night.”

  Mines looked to Bronmuth for help again. The dwarf’s sunny disposition hadn’t changed.

  “Yeah,” he said, shifting in his chair. “Uh…I forget the exact testimonies, but one of the guys mentioned the ship was still docked around ten. Someone else mentioned it was out of its slip when he got back around…I want to say four?”

  “And no pieces of his ship washed ashore?” asked Quinto.

  “Not in town,” said Mines. “Though I can’t vouch for anything outside our beaten path. None of the other fishermen have reported seeing any, that’s for sure.”

  “Which implies his boat was stolen,” I said.

  “Or scuttled,” said Quinto.

  I shrugged. “Depends on the motive for murder. If our killer was driven by coin, then you can be sure the boat is still in one piece. If Nicchi was murdered for another reason, then maybe you’re right and the killer valued the destruction of evidence over the boat itself. Still, based on the quality of knots tied to Nicchi’s ankles, I’m guessing we weren’t dealing with professionals. Thieves seems like a more likely bet.”

  “In that vein,” said Steele. “Was Johnny in debt, perhaps over the boat?”

  Mines blinked. “Well…I’m not sure. We haven’t put much effort into investigating his disappearance. Like I said, we had no reason to think he hadn’t simply sailed away. To be honest, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that he was murdered, and with a trident of all things. You’re sure about that?”

  “It’s an educated guess,” I said. “Speaking of which, you’ve mentioned your town’s fishermen and crabbers. Any spear fishermen among the bunch?”

  “None that I know of,” said Mines. “They wouldn’t be able to make a living that way. Everything here is net, line, or cage caught.”

  “Is there anyone who even sells tridents?” I asked.

  Mines looked to
Silverbrook. He grunted.

  Mines shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

  We all sat at the table, nursing our drinks and our thoughts alike.

  Bronmuth finally took the opportunity to assert himself. He placed his coffee on the table, stood, and took a step forward. “Well, officers, we certainly appreciate you coming all the way out to Aragosto to let us know about Johnny. It’s a tough thing to hear, but we’ll do right by him. We won’t rest until we’ve tracked down his killer. Unless there’s something else you need before you go…?” He gestured toward the door.

  Mines shot her associate a confused glance. “Bronmuth, what are you doing?”

  The dwarf frowned. “Uh…thanking the detectives for their help?”

  “Really? Because it sounds like you’re trying to shoo them off.”

  “They’ve told us what they know. We need to get to work, don’t we?”

  “We do. All of us,” said Mines.

  Bronmuth’s frown deepened. “Sam, this is our town. We know the folks here. We’ve got this.”

  Mines shifted her weight in her chair, cocking her head. “Have you forgotten Gentry retired three years ago?”

  “No, I thought he was still working the beat in his free time,” said Bronmuth, his face darkening. “Come on. We don’t need Gentry, or anyone else for that matter.”

  “Is…everything alright?” asked Steele.

  Mines pulled her gaze free of Silverbrook’s. “We’re a small town, detectives. We survive off fishing, crabbing, and tourism. I don’t know if you noticed our boardwalk on the way in? Tons of folks from New Welwic drop by to visit, to play the carnival games, watch Doc Fowler’s ridiculous horse show, and stay in our inns. Thankfully, our problems usually don’t grow much bigger than our size. We get bar fights and disagreements among the fishermen, sometimes they come to blows, sometimes a tourist even gets involved, but by and large, Aragosto is a safe place to live. There hasn’t been a murder here in six years, and even that was a run of the mill mugging gone south. The detective who investigated that case, Gentry, retired a few years ago. When it comes to homicide experience, we have none.”