Steele Life (Daggers & Steele Book 8)

by Alex P. Berg

  “Thanks,” I said. “Honestly, I’m excited about where these electrification efforts will lead. Not that I think having lightning bolts travelling across thin wires all over the city sounds safe, mind you, but the applications? They seem endless.”

  Shay continued to stare at the workers as she paid the bill. “Think Sherman is still looking for more investors?”

  “Probably. He was the last time I interacted with him. He might not be offering as much stock in his company per crown as I received, but I’d wager it’s still a good buy. Why? Thinking about putting your own bonus to use?”

  “Maybe. I’m young. I can afford to lose it if things go south.”

  She returned her coin purse to her jacket pocket, pursed her lips, and gave the work crews one last glance before looking my way. “Anyway. Something to think about for later. You ready?”

  I nodded. We both stood and hoofed it toward the precinct.

  2

  I pulled on one of the precinct’s double doors and held it open for Shay. As I followed her in, the station’s familiar aroma greeted me, a mixture of lemon-scented cleaner, body odor, stale air, and cut-rate coffee. A patrol officer manned the welcome desk, while behind him stretched an expanse of antique desks, chairs, coat racks, and flimsy dividers that us career purveyors of justice lovingly referred to as the pit. In the winter, the space became a dank, dark, depressing hovel, deserving of its moniker, but with spring upon us, streaming rays of sunshine had elevated the pit from gloomy to merely dim. I wagered I could remove my jacket without developing a crop of goosebumps along my forearms. Not that I would. Even with my newfound physique, I preferred to keep my jacket firmly in place. Something about the thick black leather made me feel like a badass, and I enjoyed the cool, hard press of my nightstick’s steel against my chest, poking out as it did from its interior pocket.

  Shay and I headed toward our work stations, but in order to arrive at them we had to pass by several more, including those of our close-knit detective pals Rodgers and Quinto.

  Quinto was the easier of the pair to spot, mostly due to his size. The guy claimed to be six foot seven, although I think he rounded up from his true height of six foot six and three-quarters. He weighed somewhere between three hundred and three hundred and fifty pounds, depending on how many dozen eggs, roast goats, and gallons of tea he’d consumed over the past twenty-four hours, and despite the fact that the only real exercise I ever saw him engage in was walking and throwing belligerent punks through walls, the majority of his weight seemed to be of the good kind. His grayish skin, potentially a sign of partial troll heritage, didn’t do anything to soften his outward appearance. Neither did his rather aggressive buzz cut or smile filled with square buckteeth—none of which was an accurate representation of the man beneath the thick, menacing skin. In actuality, Quinto’s was a gentle soul, or at least it was on a per pound basis. Not that any of that came through this morning. The scowl that stretched across his face could scare birds away from a corn field.

  His partner, Detective Rodgers, didn’t look so hot either. His normally perfectly-coiffed blond hair lay squashed across the top of his head as if crushed under the weight of an invisible cap. His blue eyes lacked their usual sparkle. Bags under his eyes marred his usual boyish good looks, and his perfect white smile had gone missing.

  Both men hunched over their desks, piles of paperwork and files strewn before them. At first I thought the culprit behind their dour nature might be an early start and a lack of caffeine, but mugs littered both desks, as did spent tea bags in Quinto’s case.

  Shay noticed the same clues I did. She called out as we walked up. “Early morning?”

  The pair of detectives looked up from their work and glared at her, which I found surprising. I received evil glares with relative frequency, but for them to shoot such malignant looks Shay’s way meant the situation was more dire than I’d predicted.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” grumbled Quinto, his voice deep and tired.

  He was right. We didn’t, mostly because we’d both been out of the office yesterday, enjoying our day off. Somehow I suspected pointing that fact out wouldn’t help either of our coworker’s moods.

  “Don’t tell me you guys were here all night?” I said. “What the heck did you get sucked into?”

  “A case,” muttered Rodgers. “What else?”

  I’d already figured that out, but again, sarcasm seemed a poor conversational strategy at the moment. “And what happened exactly? To keep you here all night, I mean.”

  Quinto grumbled and waved at Rodgers, knowing his partner enjoyed the sound of his own voice more than he did.

  “So yesterday morning, a runner pops by,” said Rodgers, stifling a yawn. “Sends us on the trail of a new murder. Once we get there, we find it’s a standard case. A woman’s been beaten to death. Neighbors heard an argument the night prior between her and her live-in boyfriend. Sounded heated, and they heard thumps, maybe things being thrown. The boyfriend’s long gone when we arrive, though someone had hastily packed clothes out of their closet. It looks like he’s on the run, so we do what we always do in those situations. We track down the guy’s closest family and friends, see if he went to one of them for help. Sure enough, by midafternoon, we find him, this handsome debonair elf character, except his face is all scratched up from his altercation with his girlfriend and his knuckles are bruised and bloody from going to town on her.”

  “So what’s the problem?” I asked. “Sounds like an open and shut case. I mean, you caught the guy, right?”

  “With ease,” said Rodgers. “He didn’t run, and we took him into custody without incident. He didn’t say much, mind you, but we figured that would change given enough time to stew. So we brought him back here and placed him in one of the interrogation rooms. The dingy one down in the basement. Left him there by his lonesome for about an hour. Except when we travelled back down to grill him, we found ourselves in a bit of a predicament.”

  “Being?” asked Steele.

  “The guy was gone.” Quinto gnashed his teeth as he finished speaking, making it clear he was still angry about the ordeal.

  I blinked. “But wasn’t he restrained?”

  Rodgers nodded. “Yup.”

  “And there was a detail at the door?” asked Steele.

  “Sure was,” rumbled Quinto.

  “Turns out the guy was a stage magician,” said Rodgers. “His friends and neighbors had referred to him as a performer, so we had no idea, but that’s how he must’ve escaped. Picked the locks on his shackles and snuck out somehow. You can imagine how the captain reacted when we found out he’d gone missing. What had promised to be a nice, leisurely interrogation before we headed home for the evening suddenly turned into a full on manhunt, and again, given the guy was our charge, you can imagine the captain wasn’t inclined to let us sneak away to our beds as the whole thing stretched into the wee hours of the morning.”

  Shay whistled, something I only wished I could do. “So were you able to recapture him?”

  Rodgers yawned again and nodded. “Given that he didn’t have much of anything on hand, except apparently a hidden lock pick, we figured he’d need cash and supplies if he was going on the lam. We checked back at his apartment, and sure enough, he’d dropped by, but he’d already left by the time we arrived. Long story short, we stopped him at the docks trying to board a ship headed oversees at about five-thirty this morning. After that, we brought him back here—again—and locked him up—again—but this time after a thorough strip search and after leaving a pair of officers to keep eyes on him at all times. We finished up half an hour ago.”

  I scratched the back of my neck and tried to adopt a sympathetic look. “Jeez. Well, I don’t envy you one bit, but you failed to address the most pressing question on my mind.”

  “Which is?” asked Quinto.

  “What the hell are you still doing here?” I asked. “You wrapped the case a half-hour ago.
I would’ve been a blur heading out the front door two seconds later. Either that or I’d have turned into a pile of snores at my desk before making it out.”

  “You forget. The guy escaped from the interrogation room without a trace.” Rodgers tapped a stack of documents in front of him, which I’d suspected were forms or old case files but on closer examination appeared to be blueprints.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “The problem isn’t that our prisoner escaped his shackles,” said Quinto. “It’s that he escaped the interrogation room while an officer of the law stood outside his door. He’s a stage magician, yes, but unless the guy has real magical powers of which we’re not aware, then how the hell did he sneak out without anyone noticing?”

  “The captain wants us to investigate,” said Rodgers. “Thinks there might be a secret passage somewhere in that room, which isn’t as crazy as it sounds. This is an old building.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Steele. “I get the need for an investigation, but can’t this wait? You two are running on fumes. There’s no way the captain thinks keeping you here in this state is productive.”

  Quinto shrugged. “I don’t know. She was up a good chunk of the night with us. I think she napped for a few hours in her office, but it didn’t do much to alleviate her mood. Speaking of which…”

  The big guy trailed off, and I heard the squeak of a hinge behind me. Given the topic of conversation and the direction of the noise, I had a pretty good idea who I’d find there when I turned.

  “Detective Daggers. Detective Steele. Good to see you in this morning.”

  Captain Beverley Knox stood tall in the door frame leading to her office, the bright morning sun streaming in through the windows at her back. She only stood about five feet three inches, but her aura might as well have been of someone twice her stature. Perhaps it was the hard creases in her face, gathered over her fifty-odd years, the last thirty or forty of which had been in situations that were siphons for stress. Perhaps it was her cool grey eyes that seemed as if they’d seen everything there was to see in this world and wouldn’t be surprised to see any of it again, merely disappointed to. It might’ve even been her hair, a faded copper in color now flecked with gray which she kept in a short pixie cut with the bangs swept across her forehead. Whoever had started the rumor of redheads as fiery and passionate had never met Captain Knox, as a calmer, more calculating person had never existed. Still, I suspected she harbored a burning fire within her. She’d never have succeeded in our profession without it, but she kept it surrounded with rocks and firmly choked at all times.

  She might’ve also been a bit of a mind reader, but only in the sense Shay was. She gave my two detective pals a nod. “Detectives Rodgers, Quinto. You look on the verge of collapsing. Head home. Get some rest. We’ll tackle the mystery of our disappearing magician tomorrow.”

  Rodgers and Quinto didn’t need to be told twice. They snagged their coats and scampered for the door as fast as their leaden legs would carry them.

  “As for the two of you,” said Knox as our friends disappeared. “Join me in my office. We have a case to discuss.”

  3

  We settled into the chairs in front of Captain Knox’s desk while she stepped over to the windows, staring at the passersby who travelled along 5th Street. If Quinto was right about her having caught only a few hours of rest in her chair overnight, she certainly didn’t show it. She stood there, solid as a rock, displaying not a hint of discomfort. Maybe she didn’t feel any. From what I’d seen of her over the last couple months, I gathered she didn’t sleep much. Or eat much. Or be fazed by anything less than a hurricane, crackling with lightning and whipping fist-sized balls of hail at her face with hundred mile per hour winds.

  Shay’s stint as commander-in-chief of the precinct had lasted longer than any of us had expected, almost two whole weeks, but thankfully it hadn’t stretched longer than that. At the end of the fortnight, my partner had been thoroughly exhausted, and I along with her. Not that Steele hadn’t learned greatly and exhibited all the skills the rest of us knew she possessed and that our previous Captain had seen in her: intelligence, a keen eye, a knack for negotiation, an ability to distribute time and effort among cases based on their need, and a faultless work ethic. But just because she was able to do the work didn’t mean she particularly enjoyed it, and despite my previous fantasies about becoming captain myself one day, neither did I. As her partner, now both inside and outside the precinct, I’d done everything I could to help her, locked arms with her step for step, fought the bureaucratic red tape, and juggled a dozen different responsibilities seemingly in an endless loop.

  At the end of it all, I’d been as exhausted as Shay, wondering how our previous Captain, Abe Armstrong, had managed the task for so many years and wondering what exactly I’d seen in the position all along. From afar, the captaincy had seemed glamorous, a position of power that didn’t require walking ten miles a day through the cold, snowy streets of New Welwic or taking truncheon blows to the skull delivered by four hundred pound ogres with names like Tiny or Smalls. But once embroiled in the position, brought close enough to it where I could feel its stale breath on my face, I saw it for what it was: a wearisome, soul-sucking endeavor that explained why Abe ultimately looked about fifteen years older than he really was.

  Of course, part of the reason I no longer yearned after the position was that I’d changed, transformed from a bitter, jaded workaholic to someone with better things to do in his free time than sit alone at a bar swilling whiskey and poring through mystery novels by the dozen. I had a body to look after, a son to raise, and most importantly, a squeeze in need of my quality time—which, as Shay and I had both discovered, did not include hours spent together arguing with petty police functionaries over budget minutia or whether or not department protocols were up to current citywide regulations.

  Either way, Shay and I had both been relieved when the chief of police had finally assigned our precinct a new, permanent replacement for captain, the aforementioned Beverley Knox. Whether her sex was incidental or related to Shay’s stint as interim captain I’d probably never know, but regardless, I wasn’t sure the chief of police could’ve picked a better replacement for our old commander. Captain Knox had thus far proven herself to have an exceptional temperament for the position. She was thoughtful, precise, and meticulous, with high expectations but not unreasonable ones. She was tough but fair, nobody’s friend but no one’s enemy. And as if there had been any doubt, her resume had been impeccable. She’d spent over thirty years on the force, working her way up through burglary, fraud, and homicide and proving herself in the same male-dominated environment Shay had encountered, except probably an even more hostile one given her earlier entry into the profession. Within a week, she’d had every last officer and detective in the station clicking their heels upon her command, myself included, and while my friendship with old Captain Armstrong could never be replaced, I already found myself harboring more respect for Captain Knox than I ever did for Abe.

  Captain Knox continued to stand at the window, staring at the street. She didn’t seem the type to daydream. Perhaps she’d fallen asleep on her feet. I’d done that a time or two myself.

  I cleared my throat. “So, Captain…you wanted to speak to us? Perhaps about that magician’s disappearance from the interrogation room?”

  Knox turned from the window, shaking her head. “No. I feel confident Detectives Quinto and Rodgers can get to the bottom of that particular mystery when they return. Besides, now that the magician in question has been returned to custody, there isn’t a time crunch on its resolution. We simply won’t place anyone in the room until we’re confident with our security measures.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Poking around the chilled bricks in the basement looking for ancient secret passageways didn’t strike me as a particularly fun endeavor.

  “So, then,” asked Steele. “Has there been another murder
you need us to investigate?”

  “Not precisely,” said Knox, settling into her chair. “A missing persons case.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “Tracking down runaways? That’s a little out of our comfort zone.”

  Knox eyed me coolly but disapprovingly, like a stern father might’ve after his child’s harmless misdeeds. “I’m aware of that, Detective Daggers.”

  Shay proved quicker on the uptake than me. “I assume you’d like us to investigate a missing persons case in which you have a suspicion of foul play.”

  Knox gave a curt nod. “Precisely. Are you familiar with the Vanderfellers, Detectives?”

  “Vanderfellers… Vanderfellers…” I snapped my fingers a few times, hoping the motion would grease the gears in my brain. “They were a family of wealthy New Welwic aristocrats, am I right?”

  “Still are, if I’m not mistaken,” said Shay, “although I don’t think they’re as famous now as they were in their heyday. I believe they built their fortune on real estate?”

  “Correct,” said Captain Knox. “Frederick Claypoole Vanderfeller rose to prominence not quite a century ago, constructing dozens of high rises and apartment buildings around the city. Most of them are innocuous enough, but he was responsible for a few famous ones. The Bell Theater downtown? That’s a Vanderfeller construction. Later on he branched out into lumber, minerals, and freight. Built quite an empire. At the time of his passing forty years ago, he was the wealthiest man in New Welwic.”

  “Something about the way you phrased that makes me think the wealth didn’t last,” I said.

  Knox shrugged. “From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, or so they say.”

  I scrunched my brow. “Pardon?”