Forgery of the Phoenix

by Michael Angel

  “Phoenix?” He thought for a moment. “Magical bird made of fire, reincarnates itself from its ashes, that phoenix?”

  “That’s the one.”

  He gave me a wry look. “I don’t suppose that you’d change your mind about it if I said the obvious: that it’s probably really, really dangerous to go.”

  “I have to go, Alanzo. There’s a possibility that I could learn something that will benefit everyone in that world. To find out more about what’s coming their way.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “Easier to show than tell,” I said. He followed me out of the kitchen and back into the living room, where I switched on the light and went over to my rolltop desk. “Albess Thea pretty much confirmed what High Elder Belladonna prophesied about all the evidence showing that a conflict from earlier in Andeluvian history is starting up again.”

  “Three thousand years is a long time for a grudge match to flare up again,” Esteban pointed out, as I took the desk key from its hiding place in the shelf above the desk. I unlocked the desk’s rollup section and slid it up in one smooth motion.

  “It may be for humans,” I said, as I opened one of the middle drawers and drew out a large, heavy tome. The book smelled faintly of star anise, and the surface had a pebbled texture that reminded me of freshly harvested snakeskin. “But since going to Andeluvia, I’ve learned that there are creatures who live on a completely different time scale.”

  “Different time scale...” Esteban murmured, as he started to catch on. “The phoenix. They’re one of those types of creatures, aren’t they?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. And here’s what sealed the deal for me.”

  I laid the Codex of the Bellum Draconus out on the desk and opened it to a random page. Then I pulled Korr’s summons from a second drawer, unfolded it, and lay both out side by side. Esteban hardly had to look twice.

  “That’s the same material,” he observed. “Only one is stiffer than the other, like someone’s dipped it in glaze or varnish.”

  “Just what I thought. Apparently this material hasn’t been made in Andeluvia for several centuries. And if it’s that rare, maybe it’ll produce a lead I can follow.”

  Esteban stood back and thought about that for a minute. While he did so, I got out a pair of sample bags I’d stored in one of the desk’s smaller drawers. I tagged and bagged two small page corners that had flaked off, one from the summons, the other from the Codex itself.

  “I still worry about you,” Esteban said, and his voice sounded resigned. “But if this was one of my own investigations, then it would be foolish not to follow up something like this. It’s the kind of detail that can blow a case wide open. I just wish there was something I could do to support or back you up on this.”

  “If there is, I won’t hesitate to ask,” I said, as I put the documents away and locked the desk up securely. I leaned into him, and his arms came up, folding me into his warmth. “I know you’ll be there for me.”

  “You’d have to fight me off with a griffin to keep me away.”

  “Shaw’s okay with you, actually. When I told him we were seeing each other, he said ‘Thy choice is a good one. He and the others you choose for breeding shall surely provide you with many fine chicks’.”

  Now both of his eyebrows shot up as he pulled back to arm’s length. “Chicks? Others for breeding?”

  I laughed at that. “Relax. I’m not looking to start a family just yet. As for the ‘others’, that’s just a griffin kink. They go in for group sex, and the more the merrier.”

  “You do seem to learn a lot of interesting things about that world.”

  “Well, knowledge is power.”

  Esteban glanced over my shoulder, where I had a clock on the wall. “Then maybe you know that we’ve talked our way past six in the morning. If you had any more ideas for bed...”

  “Yeah,” I said regretfully. “We’d be cutting it close. And I’m not in the mood for a ‘quickie’.”

  “I don’t do quickies,” Esteban said, as he drew me in again. We kissed, his tongue slipped through to dance around mine, and all of my mental faculties above the waist threatened to shut down. “But consider that a promise for next time.”

  “Tease,” I shot back. “I wish I could spend the rest of the morning with you.”

  “That makes two of us. At least you can think fondly about me when you’re visiting the phoenix.”

  “I’m stuck at work same as you for the next couple of days, so it’s not like I’m going to have them on the mind instead of you.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You might be at work, but not the same as me. I’m pulling a rough set of duty shifts until the city council makes up its damned mind.”

  “They’re still deadlocked over choosing the next police chief?”

  “As ever. I know you’d prefer Lucas Sims over Bob McClatchy.”

  I snorted. “I’d prefer a cold virus over Bob McClatchy.”

  “A lot of Sims’ supporters agree with you. But the man only transferred in from Vegas a year ago. He hasn’t had time to generate a following outside the City Council.”

  “He did well enough to get appointed an Assistant Chief.”

  “A bunch of folks like Ollivar still support McClatchy, though. And just about everyone wearing a uniform would rather they just flip a coin and get it over with by this point. In fact–”

  A set of buzzing tones came from my bedroom. Esteban let me go and went to retrieve his phone, which he’d left on the nightstand next to my bed. I replaced the desk key and was on my way to the kitchen when my own phone went off. I plucked the device from its charger and looked at the screen message.

  I was the backup on call person for this morning. Glancing at the address of the callout I noted it was located at the intersection of Main and Second Avenue. That put it only a block from LAPD headquarters. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled as I read the police code associated with the incident.

  Esteban came out of the bedroom in a rush, struggling to zip up his pants. He spotted where I’d thrown his shirt on the couch late last night and went to slip it on. His voice sounded concerned, but full of regret.

  “I’m sorry, Dayna,” he said. “It’s an emergency. Something big just went down on Second Avenue.”

  Wordlessly, I held up the screen of my phone so that he could read the same message on my phone. The same location, with the same action code. 187.

  Homicide.

  It looked like we would be sharing the morning together.

  Just not the way either of us had intended.

  Chapter Twelve

  Parking in downtown Los Angeles could be a special torture all its own. In fact, if you found an open spot, typically one or more special conditions applied.

  Number One: It’s a handicapped spot.

  Number Two: The spot’s the size of a kid’s toy wagon or a baby stroller.

  Number Three: It has labyrinthine parking rules like ‘No parking M-F 11am to 11pm, and all day Saturday and Sunday.”

  Number Four: It’s been earmarked for some kind of special vehicle that uses electricity, liquid natural gas, compressed plutonium, or used cooking oil.

  In a nutshell, today was one of the days I was grateful that the LAPD had the authority to block off street spaces with cones and yellow tape.

  Someone had blocked off the entire section of Main between Second and Third Avenue. Then, they’d simply re-routed traffic to adjoining avenues. So, while I’d had to fight my way through the early commute jams, I felt more than a little relief when my van was waved through the tape barrier.

  I parked off to the side of the allotted investigation zone. Esteban had left a couple of minutes ahead of me, and I spotted him as he walked towards a second perimeter of crime-scene tape further down the block. I shut off the engine and got out to throw open the OME vehicle’s rear doors. Since I’d be looking at a suspected homicide, I needed to suit up. I pulled out a light blue jumpsuit that one of Fitzwilliam�
��s pages wouldn’t have objected to wearing. Then I took my usual seat on the rear bumper to get my gear on.

  In between zipping up my suit and pulling on my Stompy Boots, I looked around. Los Angeles has a bewildering variety of landscapes. Scrub and forest up by the Griffith Park Observatory and the Hollywood Hills. Rolling, manicured greens out by Elysian Park and Crystal Springs. Waves of suburban row houses, liberally punctuated with mansions, in Bel Air and Beverly Glen.

  This time, the crime scene lay close to the intersection of two concrete canyons that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Chicago or New York. Most of the buildings in downtown L.A. have mirror-bright concrete and glass facings, similar to the LAPD headquarters down the way. Though mostly zoned for commercial and public use, there were a couple refurbished brownstone-type buildings, complete with fire escapes, down at the corner.

  I pulled on my Angels baseball cap, grabbed my crime scene case, and moved at a brisk walk towards the far end of the block. The morning sun cast weak shadows, but even in winter, the stretches of concrete and asphalt in the heart of downtown could turn into an oven by noon. So in a way, the early morning nature of the find was a blessing.

  Esteban squatted just outside the second perimeter of crime scene tape, chatting briskly with his assigned partner, Detective Isabel Vega. Vega had pulled her coffee-colored locks into an even more severe bun than the one I normally saw her wearing. While the style hid her hair away, it emphasized her sharp cheekbones, black, wire frame glasses, and no-nonsense expression.

  As I drew closer, she acknowledged me with a brusque nod. Esteban remained where he was, peering at a splash of blood decorating the rear spoiler of a sports coupe. He looked up, motioning me to come closer.

  “I’m no Hector Reyes when it comes to blood spatter patterns,” he admitted, “But this looks odd. Not sure how you get this shape when the body is over there.”

  The blood droplet that lay across a horizontal section of the car’s spoiler was an oblong smear. A sharp ‘tail’ pointed almost accusingly towards the body, which lay eight feet behind the car, face down and crumpled up on the asphalt, only inches from the nearest curb.

  I frowned. “Let’s take a look, then.”

  I cracked my case open to pull on a set of gloves. Vega followed a step or two behind us as we ducked under the tape. I knelt by the body as Esteban’s junior partner filled us in on details.

  “A local property manager called in a ‘jumper’ about forty-five minutes ago,” Isabel explained. “That got upgraded to a suspected homicide as soon as someone got a better look at the body.”

  That was understandable, given the amount of blood involved. The closeness and slope of the curb actually helped me out a bit. The fluids had drained off in a single direction instead of creating a clotting pool of liquid.

  The body belonged to an adult male. He lay facedown in the street, arms and legs outstretched as if thrashing or swimming. A copper-colored swath of skin showed on the back of the neck between his thick, black hairline and the collar of a leather jacket. Said jacket had pulled or shifted up from the waist. The handle of a huge handgun jutted up from the exposed waistband of a scruffy set of denim jeans.

  “Esteban,” I asked, “can you grab me a large sample bag?”

  He nodded and went to my case. I noted in passing that the body had indeed been only very recently deceased. I scented no decay. The odors around the corpse consisted of the iron-rich scent of blood and the nasty reek of spilled acids and bile from ruptured internal organs. Not roses and violets, to be sure, but it barely rated a two on the Chrissie Scale of Stinkiness (patent pending.)

  Once Esteban had handed me the sample bag, I gingerly reached forward and grasped the firearm. As soon as I pulled, I noted a detail that confirmed the cause of death – a fall from a high place. It was a subtle, tactile detail one only got from experience handling fresh corpses. Full body impact trauma at speed pulverizes flesh and shatters bone. The feeling of mushy resistance under the clothes as I freed the gun told me that the underlying flesh lay slack and effectively pulped.

  I didn’t recognize the make of the weapon right away, but it was noticeably heavier than my 9mm semi. I let out a low whistle of surprise as I brought it out. The weapon gleamed bright gold in the morning light.

  “That thing’s a regular hand cannon,” Esteban observed. “Desert Eagle.”

  “Is that gold plating?” I asked, frowning.

  Isabel cleared her throat. “Actually, that’s a very rare gold finish called ‘Tiger Stripe’. That means our friend here is a Hispanic gang enforcer. It’s a way to make the enforcer look more like part of an elite club.”

  “Hispanic gang member?” I leaned forward a little. Sure enough, there was a five-pointed star tattooed in black on the web between the thumb and index finger on the right hand. I couldn’t quite make out the adjoining marker, so I asked. “You’re the expert, any idea what the mark next to the star is? Maybe a lizard claw?”

  She sat down next to me and peered at the mark. “Close. It’s a spur, the kind you find on a bantam rooster’s legs. It identifies this guy as part of El Gallito. The, ah, ‘tough cocks’.”

  “Kind of outside their zone,” Esteban remarked. “But not by much. And I doubt that a Gallitos enforcer would just wake up, have coffee, and decide to commit suicide.”

  “I agree,” I said. “But why in the world would anyone commit a homicide within shouting distance of LAPD headquarters? Is this supposed to be some kind of message?”

  “You’d be surprised how often it happens. But if this was supposed to be a message, I can think of more direct ways to send it. More likely that this fellow pissed off one of the Gallitos’ rivals.”

  “I suppose.”

  But something nagged me about this body’s location. I pursed my lips as I surveyed the body a second time. One detail immediately drew my attention, and probably would have been the first thing I noticed had it not been for the protruding handle of the Desert Eagle.

  The corpse’s right ankle was bent ninety degrees inward, so that the sole of man’s right shoe could easily touch the inside of the left leg’s shin. A nasty injury if he’d survived.

  I took a closer look. The pants leg at the juncture of the break had a distinctly flat, two-inch wide mark. Something like an iron bar had impacted the man’s leg with some serious force – enough to break the tough tendons and bone around the ankle. Or perhaps, the leg was the item that impacted the bar...

  Abruptly, I stood up and craned my neck to look around at the nearby buildings.

  “If you’re looking for the jumping-off point, we already checked it out,” Vega said, as she pointed upwards. “The windows of the building here are all barred, so he had to step off the seventh-story roof. We didn’t find anything up there, either.”

  But the building we stood in front of was a blank faced, commercial five-story. Off to the left, just beyond where the sports coupe had parked, stood a six-story residential brownstone with old-style fire escapes.

  My brain did one of its trademark clicks right then.

  “You didn’t find anything up above, because that’s not where the body came from,” I stated briskly as I looked up and to the left. “Our guy jumped, or was pushed, from the upper floors of that residential building.”

  “How do you figure that, Dayna?” Esteban asked.

  “That ankle wound is a glancing impact. Say he’s falling from up above. His ankle smashes on the edge of one of the metal guardrails on the fire escape. That could catapult the entire body to the right.” I gestured, trying to shape the fall in my mind. I ended up pointing at the smear of blood on the coupe’s spoiler. “That explains this odd splash mark. It’s a stretched oval showing movement. The elongated ‘tail’ shows the direction of the fall, as well as the ultimate impact point.”

  “Okay, that sounds plausible.” Vega and Esteban turned their attention to the building I’d pointed out. The top four stories each had a fire escape. “And since you
’d need a running jump to clear the outermost rails, I’m thinking that homicide is looking pretty close to certain.”

  Vega adjusted her glasses. “You thinking he went down from the roof?”

  “That, or the fifth floor. There’s no sign of broken glass on the sidewalk. The fifth floor is the only one that has a wide open window.”

  I followed Esteban’s gaze and looked more carefully. Tattered blue curtains hung in the open window, swaying ever so slightly in the breeze. If the person in question had been thrown from that point, the question became: Why?

  I turned to look back out from the building. There was a view of sorts, but nothing especially interesting about it. But something had begun nagging me, tugging at the back of my mind, a worry, like a little kid demanding attention.

  “This might be a stretch,” I said hesitantly, “but say that our ‘gang enforcer’ was forcibly evicted from that building. What good is that particular piece of real estate?”

  Esteban switched his gaze from the window and faced out in the direction I’d been looking. His voice took on a chill tone. “They’ve got a damned good view of the LAPD’s front steps. I’m going upstairs to check this out.”

  “I’ll back you up,” Vega agreed, as she got up. The two Homicide detectives went over to the building’s front entryway and disappeared inside.

  I was about to get back to my observation of the body when movement caught my eye. A large group of people had come out of LAPD headquarters and were making their way down the broad front steps. A pair of black SUVs marked as city vehicles sat parked at the curb below.

  The group was led by a pair of uniformed patrolmen. Next came a tall man wearing a light tan jacket and a woman in a pink dress. I squinted and saw that it was Assistant Chief Lucas Sims talking to a female reporter from the Los Angeles Times.

  I grimaced as I recognized Robert McClatchy’s beefy, gray suited form, followed by Lieutenant Ollivar’s even beefier bulk. At the rear of the group, sticking closely to McClatchy, were two men wearing matching dark suits and glasses. Definitely private security, of the same kind I’d seen hired to protect the sapphire exhibit at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum.