Bones of a Witch (5 page)

“On the contrary….” He reached under his coat
and removed a slender instrument from beneath it, long and shiny
and definitely not a gate key. “I’m afraid, Ms. Adams, the mistake
was yours for coming out here tonight.” and without warning, he
plowed the instrument into the woman’s stomach with a powerful,
twisting thrust.

Her face contorted grotesquely. Her jaw
unhinged, but no sound escaped. She fell into her assailant’s arms
and he drove the blade in deeper, dipping his shoulder low until
all her weight rested upon it and the knife. He pulled the blade
out and stepped back. The woman fell first to her knees and then on
her face, hitting the cold concrete slab with a sickening
thud.

I gasped in utter shock. The killer turned with
a snap to look at me and then sprang back into the shadows just as
I stepped out. I knew he could see me then, and if I were not so
emotionally wounded I might have thought of some witchery to stop
him in his tracks. I called to him to come to me now, come see what
a big man he is when the fury of a witch is released. And had he
known of my compromised state of mind he might have taken me up on
the offer. Instead, he retreated, fading back like a receding wave,
swallowed by the blackness from which he came.

I turned and hurried for the door, pulling the
fire alarm on my way out and wiping my prints off the box before
exiting. By the time I ran back to my car, the fire trucks were
already rumbling down Edgewater, two blocks north of the garage.
Not that their speed would make any difference; I knew that. But
the sooner they processed the crime scene, the sooner they could
restore the poor woman’s dignity by getting her body up off the
pavement. And maybe then I could concentrate on getting the bastard
that killed her.

Carlos Rodriquez:

Sergeant Duffy and his men had already secured
the parking garage’s entrances and exits by the time Dominic
Spinelli and I came up on the crime scene. We found that the
paramedics had turned the body over upon their arrival, but
otherwise left everything as they found it. Paul Gates, the county
coroner, arrived about five minutes behind us. We waited for him to
do his prelim and call it before taking over with our people. It
looked straightforward to me, though: an apparent robbery gone
horribly wrong.

I put Dominic in charge of evidence gathering.
He split the team into three groups of two, each taking one of the
garage’s three levels. It wasn’t long before he came back with a
smile and a terrific find.

“Check it out,” he said, holding up a large
plastic evidence bag with a bloodstained knife inside. “I think we
found the murder weapon.”

I took the bag. “Gee, Dominic, you
think?”

His smile faded. “Well, yeah, I mean you can’t
say for sure without testing. You know what Tony says, things
aren’t al—”

“Always what they seem, I know, but come on.
What are the chances this is not the murder weapon?” I held the bag
up to the light. “It’s no ordinary knife, I’ll give you that,” I
said, and Dominic agreed. The blade looked about eight-inches long,
fluted and serrated with a stainless steel mark of 924. It had a
finger-formed hilt carved from ivory and capped with a gold-plated
pommel the shape of a wolf’s head. I handed the bag back over to
Dominic. “Ever see anything like this before?”

He shook his head no before folding the plastic
evidence bag into a larger brown paper sack. “I haven’t,” he said,
“but I have to think the killer didn’t mean to drop it. That’s
ivory and gold with a pure stainless steel blade. Can you imagine
how much it’s worth?”

“A handsome cent, I imagine.” I looked around
the garage and spotted a number of security cameras mounted on top
of some of the concrete support columns. “What about them? Maybe
they saw something.”

“We’ll know soon,” said Dominic. “The property
manager’s on his way. We’ve asked him to get us the video from the
cameras, as well as transactions records from the ticket vouchers
of all the cars that have come and gone from here this
evening.”

“All right; nice work.” I slapped him on the
back and ruffled his hair up some. He hates when I do that. “That’s
exactly what I would have done.”

“Of course,” he said, though I thought I
detected a hint of sarcasm in his tone.

Except for my car and the black and whites, I
spotted only two other vehicles on the level. One I presumed
belonged to the victim. I pointed to both. “You check those out
yet?”

Dominic looked over at them briefly. “Yeah, the
red one’s hers.” He nodded at our vic. “The BMW belongs to her
boss, Gerald Fisher. He’s the one who found her.” He glanced up
past my shoulder toward a man dressed in a business suit, leaning
against the fender of a black and white and drinking hot coffee
from a paper cup. “That’s him over there.”

I turned and gave the man a look.
“Him?”

“Yeah.”

“The guy with the coffee?”

“That’s right.”

“W…where’d he get the coffee?”

Dominic shrugged. “I don’t know. Guess one of
the uniforms got it for him.”

“And he didn’t get me one?”

“You?”

“Well, us I mean.”

“Ah, yeah, good one.”

He seemed to think I was kidding, and went on
to tell me that Fisher and the vic worked together, but that she
left ahead of him. He said the man cried several times while giving
his statement, but I wasn’t buying it. I told him to invite Mister
Fisher back to the justice center in the morning and I’d get the
real story out of him.

“What do you mean the real story?” Dom
asked.

I shook my head at his naivety. “Forget it. Is
he the one who pulled the fire alarm?”

“No, he claims he was just stepping out of the
elevator when it went off.”

“Then who pulled it?”

“Don’t know. We’re dusting for prints
now.”

“Hmm, where did he say he was he coming
from?”

Dominic gave a nod up over his shoulder. “The
office building across the street. There’s a covered pedestrian
walk on the second level connecting the two buildings.”

“So, these two were working late?”

“That’s what he says.”

“All right then, guess it’s not a botched
robbery after all.”

“No?”

“Uh-uh, I’m thinking maybe it’s a lover’s
quarrel now; a man and woman working late together, having an
affair, she wants it to stop, he doesn’t, so he kills her. You see
it all the time.”

Dominic held the evidence bag up and shook it.
“Maybe. We’ll check for his prints, of course, but I don’t think he
did it.”

“Oh? Why do you say that?”

“Gut instinct. He seems genuinely horrified by
the whole thing. Besides, why would he pull the fire
alarm?”

“Crime of passion,” I said. “He killed her in
the heat of an argument, realized what a terrible mistake he made
and so he pulled the alarm to summons help.”

“But he’s got a cell phone. Why not use
it?”

“He didn’t think of it.”

“All right then.” Dominic pointed at the
chain-link fence stretched between the concrete columns. “Why would
he run all the way around the fence to the back side of the garage
to pull the alarm there when he could have pulled another box right
next to the elevator?”

Okay, it made sense what he said; I must admit.
He thinks a lot like Tony. I guess that’s why we make such a good
team together. “All right, so are you telling me you think someone
else killed her and that the killer ran all the way around the
fence to pull the alarm?”

He shrugged at that thought. “Don’t know. I’m
just going with my gut, Carlos; always listen to the
gut.”

“Geez, you know you’re even beginning to sound
like Tony now.”

“Yeah?” He smiled at that. “Thanks.”

I laughed. “That’s not necessarily a
complement. Trust me.” I checked my watch and saw that we had been
there nearly an hour already. “Speaking of Tony, has anyone called
him?”

Dominic checked his watch. “I left a message on
his cell. He should have gotten it by now. Want me to call him
again?”

It had been a year and a half since I started
working with Dominic. When we first teamed up I have to admit I
didn’t feel as confident working homicide cases with him as I did
with Tony Marcella. But the kid has proven his worth, and in some
cases, invaluable. The key difference is that with Tony I always
felt like I was playing second fiddle. With Dominic, I’m always the
head enchilada. Call it ego; I guess every good cop has one, but
damn it, I like it. I looked at Dominic and shook my head easy.
“No, don’t call him again. If I know Tony, he and Lilith are
probably all tangled up in a witch’s knot under the sheets like a
couple of young love nuts. He’ll call back when he comes up for
air.”

Tony Marcella:

I suspected the moment Lilith walked through
the door that something was up. She seemed tense, and fidgety. When
I asked her what’s wrong she shut me down with just a stare. I
figured it best to give her some room and let her wind down, but
the longer she was home, the more nervous she became. I saw her
walk to the window to look outside no less than six times, and
check the lock on the door seven. At one point she went over to the
bookcase to refer to the dictionary, for what I don’t know. I
finally took her by the hand and sat her down on the
sofa.

“Lilith, I beg you, please tell me what the
hell is going on. Why are you acting so peculiar?”

“Tony, I….” Her breathing grew quick; her hands
trembled, and I saw in her eyes something I once thought impossible
in Lilith: fear. The notion of anything unnerving her unnerved
me.

“Lilith, tell me.”

“I fucked up, Tony. Fucked up big
time.”

“Wha…what did you do?”

“I froze. I played my fuck’n` cards like some
cool-shit chick, and when it came time to act I froze.” Her eyes
had been wandering—no, darting around the room as she spoke. But
then she suddenly zeroed in on mine and pulled me in with the same
stare that only moments earlier shut me down like a train wreck.
“She’s dead,” she said flatly.

My mind went blank. I couldn’t imagine who she
meant: the girl downstairs with the balloons the other day, her
mother, the woman at the Cyber Café who told Lilith to piss off
because Lilith asked her to take her noisy phone conversation
outside. Although I thought the score of that one was settled after
the woman’s cell phone mysteriously exploded in her ear. I asked
Lilith at the time if she had anything to do with that, but she
just smiled and said, “With what?”

I squeezed her hand tighter and shook off the
hold that her stare had me under. “Lilith, you have to focus. Look
at you. You’re scaring me. Now how `bout you take a deep breath and
tell me everything from the beginning. Does this have anything to
do with that phone call you got earlier tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me his
name.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to fucking kill me! That’s what he
wanted.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. That’s just it.” She pulled free
of my hands, stood up and began pacing the floor, wringing her
fingers one at a time in nervous secession, and counting her steps
quietly up and down and back again. I could see her gathering her
thoughts, shuffling and reorganizing in her head the events of the
last few hours. “He told me he had the gate key,” she said,
stopping and pointing at me just long enough to establish that fact
before renewing her stride.

“What’s a gate key?”

She pulled a medallion from her back pocket,
the pocket that wasn’t just a flap covering her bare ass. “This is
a gate key.” She tossed it to me. “That one was given to me by my
mother. It’s been passed down through the women in my family for
generations.”

I examined the relic, bouncing it in my hand to
guesstimate its weight and worth. “Nice. What’s it
open?”

She reached down and snatched it from me.
“Nothing. It’s not that kind of key.”

“Then what does it do?”

“The markings on it are used in various ways to
decipher the riddles of the grimoire. Without it, the book is
essentially useless, except for a couple of chants and a few basic
spells that every witch already knows anyway.”

“I get it. So it’s called a gate key because it
sort of opens the gates of witchcraft to whoever has the key to use
it.”

“Bingo. Give that man a cigar.”

“All right, so, if you had this gate key, what
key was he talking about?”

“He was talking about my aunt’s
key.”

“The Bishop woman.”

“Yes. You see Ursula Bishop had no children of
her own. Therefore, I’m certain that she would have had her key on
her person when they hanged and subsequently buried her. But when I
went down to pick up her bones today, they told me they had found
no key.”