by Maher Tegan
"Des!" he exclaimed, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. "What are you doing up here this early? I thought you were startin’ your vacation last night."
I slid the top box off his pile and tossed it into the dumpster. "Yeah, I know. I was, but Amber and Dax stopped by my house last night. Apparently, Dax’s brother has been arrested for murderin’ that guy yesterday."
Bob tossed the rest of the boxes into the dumpster and brushed his hands off. "Let me guess—they say he's innocent, and you plan to prove it."
"Yes, and yes," I said, following him back around the corner of the tiki toward the patio. I headed straight to the coffee maker and made myself a coconut mocha coffee. "What else am I supposed to do? They say Blake thinks he has him dead to rights, but they swear he didn't do it."
He rolled his eyes and shook his head. "You don't say? The suspect’s brother swears he's innocent? That's certainly new in the history of murders." He washed out the sinks and filled them with soap and sanitizer while I finished making my coffee.
I went around the bar and pulled out the fruit, the cutting board, and the knife, slid them onto the bar, then walked back around and pulled myself up onto a stool in front of them. "Ha ha. The brother isn't just anybody. He's Dax. You know I have to help if I can.” I sliced an orange in half as he shot me a wry look.
"No need to get snarky," he replied as he stacked beer glasses in the freezer. "You just have to realize how it looks. I understand that Dax is one of the most grounded people I've ever met. I'd even go so far as to say that if he thought his brother did it, he wouldn't have come to you. However, I also know that family is inherently biased. Nobody wants to believe somebody they know and love has it in ‘em to kill someone."
He moved around the bar and shooed me away, then took my seat in front of the fruit. "As far as I'm concerned, you're still on vacation. That means you're not doing any work around here, and you're gonna find out who killed that dude as fast as you can. Then as soon as you do, you’re hightailin’ it outta here. And don't think for a minute your vacation starts a second before you step foot off this property. You're not gonna blow your personal time solving resort problems."
Tempest, who'd been quiet since we’d gotten there, snatched an orange wedge, and waved it at me. "He's right. You're not robbin’ me of time with my sisters just so you can help somebody else, even if it is Dax and Amber. As far as I'm concerned, you have until this afternoon when Mila's neighbor gets back to solve this thing."
I rolled my eyes. "That's fresh. You know as well as I do it probably won't happen that fast." Secretly, though, I was right there with her. Nothing would make me happier than to lock it down and bail by nightfall.
I plucked my cup of coffee from the bar and motioned to her. "Then without further ado, let's get this show on the road.”
Chapter 7
I knew Blake wasn't going to be happy about my decision, but I figured it was better to face him right off the bat. I can't say I was looking forward to it, though, so rather than teleport as far as Margo, which was as close as I could go, I decided to walk and gather my thoughts. Tempest, on the other hand, told me I was on my own and disappeared with a flick of her whiskers. Even though it was barely nine in the morning, it was already wicked hot. My blouse was sticking to the small of my back, and my hair was already damp around my collar.
"Good morning, Destiny!" Margo said, her stone face curving into a smile. "So, what are your plans for the first day of your vacation?"
I sighed and gave her a half smile. "Well, if it ever gets here, Mila and I are going up to see my cousin for a little bit."
Margo drew her brows down. "What do you mean, if it ever gets here?"
"I mean that even though my vacation’s supposed to start today, I had to postpone it. Amber and Dax came to see me last night, and it's Dax’s brother that's been accused of the murder."
Understanding crossed her face. "Ah, now I see. But why did you agree to help them? Why not just go to Blake and tell him he's got the wrong person?"
"That's why I'm here right now," I said, putting my hand over my eyes like a visor to keep the sun out when I looked up at her. "I know Dax and Amber swear he's innocent, but I can't believe Blake is ready to lock him up and throw away the key unless he has solid fool-proof evidence. I figured I'd go up and talk to him and see what he has. That is, if he'll actually share it with me."
"Then you better get to it," she said, pulling in a deep breath and releasing it. "I overheard them last night saying that he was going before the Witches Counsel today."
A thought occurred to me. "Wait, did they bring him past here last night when they arrested him?"
She nodded. "As a matter fact, they did. And if you're asking what I think you’re asking, I didn't sense anything other than fear from him. Maybe a little bit of anger, but that definitely wasn't the prevailing emotion."
I thought about that for a second. Since it had been several hours since the murder, it was possible Jackson could have no longer been feeling murderous. After all, once you kill somebody, you probably wouldn't feel bloodlust anymore, at least not if it was a one-and-done thing. That didn't mean, though, that maybe he hadn’t passed by Margo when he was feeling that way.
"Did Jackson come by you at any point day before yesterday?" I asked.
She furrowed her brow and a little bit of sand trickled down from her. "As a matter fact, he did. I spoke with him a few times. Since he's a regular, we know each other, and I rather like him. He spends time with me when he's taking a break from the tables. He's a good conversationalist, and since he's very old as well, we swap stories of how things used to be."
Hope fluttered in my chest. "Please tell me you talked to him shortly after he got in a fight with Marty."
She tilted her head a little bit. "I'm sorry, who's Marty?"
"Oh,” I said, waving an impatient hand. “I'm sorry. Marty’s the guy who got killed. In case you didn't know, Jackson got in a fight with him day before yesterday in the casino. Apparently, Marty was running short on cash and was sore because Jackson kept beating him."
Understanding crossed her features. "Oh. Yeah, a lot of people have that reaction to him. He does have the best luck, and it's hard for some people to believe he has that without cheating. He did mention it had happened again, but it didn't seem to matter much to him. He's laid back and takes that kind of thing in stride. Not much rattles him, and I don't think I've ever seen him mad, unless he’s talking about landwalkers tossing garbage off boats. That's a real sore point for him because his pet sea turtle Freddie got caught in those plastic rings that they use to put soda cans together. He almost died, and that’s turning into a common occurrence."
I couldn't really hold a grudge there because that was an irritation to me too. I never understood why people couldn't just throw their stuff in a garbage can instead of flinging it over the boat.
I chewed my lip for a second, thinking. "You didn't get any sense of ill will from him that day?"
She shook her head. "No, actually, he was in quite a good mood. Not a drip of ill will. In fact, if you gave me a list of fifty people we both know and asked me to put them in order of who I think would be prone to kill somebody, he'd be pretty close to the bottom of the list. He’s seriously an old school peace-and-love kinda guy."
"Thanks, Margo," I said feeling a little bit better about sticking my nose into the investigation. Now I was ready to get inside and out of the heat. "You've been a lot of help."
"Good luck, Destiny. For what it's worth, I don't think he did it."
I realized I'd forgotten the most important question of all. Or at least the second most important question. I turned back to her. "Has there been anybody else go through here that seemed that angry?"
She shook her head. "No, but I wish there had been. That would make things so much easier, wouldn't it?"
I sighed. "It sure would, but things are rarely that easy, are they?"
Once inside the main resort, I was surprised t
o find Tempest waiting by the bank of elevators for me. She was pacing and glancing toward the door, and once she saw me, she scowled. "Where on earth have you been? There's no way it took you that long just to walk from the tiki to here."
"Unruffle your tail feathers," I said returning her scowl. "I stopped to talk to Margo, and I actually learned a couple of things." I stabbed the button to call the elevator, then rubbed the goosebumps the AC had raised on my damp arms.
She butted my leg with her head. "Well? Are you going to tell me? Or do I have to guess?"
The elevator doors slid open, and I stepped aside to let a family of vampires off. Once inside, I poked the button that would take us to Blake's office. "In a nutshell, she knows Jackson and doesn't think he could ever murder anybody. Apparently, he's a lover not a fighter, but she didn't have anybody else pass by her that felt off either."
"Well," she said as the door slid shut. "That does make me feel better. Even aside from her magic, Margo is an excellent judge of character. If she says she doesn't think he did it, then I tend to believe her. Not that I don't believe Amber and Dax, but you know."
"Yeah, me too."
Before we could discuss it further, the door slid open, and Blake himself stood there facing us.
He pulled in a deep breath and released it when he saw us. "Let me guess. Somebody blabbed and told you about the murder, and you're here to help me solve it. Apparently, you didn't hear the part about how I've already got the guy who did it."
"Actually, I heard you have the wrong guy," I replied, crossing my arms and arching a brow at him. "But I also know that you wouldn't have arrested him if you didn't have solid evidence. So, tell me what you’ve got, and if you convince me you have the right guy, I’ll consider just walking right back out that door and going on my vacation right now."
He rubbed the back of his neck in a way that let me know he was getting irritated. "How about the fact that I have a witness that saw him get on the boat with Marty yesterday morning?"
My heart sank. I’d asked for solid evidence, and an eyewitness definitely fit that bill. I wasn't sure if even I was going to be able to figure this one out in time.
“How dependable is the witness?” I asked. If it was just somebody who’d started his morning with a couple bloody Marys for breakfast, I could knock some holes in that in a heartbeat.
"Dependable enough that I have no choice but to believe it," he said, his jaw clenching. He reached out and jabbed the button for the first floor.
I leaned my hip against the brass rail that ran the circumference of the wall and studied him. I had a feeling he was backed in a corner but had no idea how. Blake was very much his own man. "What do you mean, you have no choice but to believe it? You always have an option. Besides, that's a non-answer and a weird way to put it. Do you think he did it or don't you?"
His gaze slid to me, and he glanced up at the camera in the upper corner of the elevator. He flicked his wrist, and a little prickle of magic trickled through the elevator. At the same time, the box lurched and came to a stop. I wasn't sure what was going on, but he obviously didn’t want people to monitor what he had to say.
He turned to me, his expression dead serious. Urgency rolled off of him. "I'm not sure who blabbed to you, but I'm glad they did. I was just on my way to your place, and I was dreading being the one to put your vacation on hold. What I mean when I say I have no choice is that the Keller family donates a lot of money to various Council activities, and it was the widow’s brother who supposedly witnessed Jackson in the boat with Marty."
"But you don't believe him?" Tempest asked, hopping up on my shoulder.
He shook his head. "Something’s off. I don't know what, but the guy was just a little bit too smooth with his story."
"Off how?" I asked.
Blake raked a hand through his hair, and from the way it was standing up, that hadn’t been the first time he’d done it today. "I don't know, just … off. While he was telling me the story, he looked me straight in the eye, and his gaze never wavered. Usually when people are reliving a string of events, their gaze shifts as they think about it."
I rolled my eyes. "Not that I don't want what you're saying to be true, but that's a pretty thin reason not to believe the guy. What aren't you telling me?"
He sighed then shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Little lines creased his eyes, and if I hadn’t known better, I'd have sworn he looked a little guilty. "Let's just say that there was a substantial donation to the resort this morning. The founders are delighted, and they’re lapping up the Council’s narrative.”
"Even if that means convicting an innocent man?” I shook my head, unable to believe the utter lack of humanity those people often showed.
He drew his brow's down in frustration. "You know as well as I do that half of our board are creatures who don't really care about the goings-on of the day-to-day world. Most of the relationships are transactional, but that's what bugs me. Unlike them, I want to know why the donation was made, and I want to know who made it."
"Wait,” Tempest said, shifting toward him. Her claws dug into my shoulder a little bit as she did, and I winced. "You don't even know who made the donation? You have to know where every single penny donated to the resort comes from, even when it’s anonymous."
Blake ran a hand over his face. "You’re right. This is the first time I haven’t had access to that information, and I don’t like it. That's a discussion I’m gonna be having with the founders eventually because right now, the board is all over me. For now, though, we need to find out who really killed Marty Keller and put this to bed. They can't make me convict an innocent man if I have the real killer dead to rights. That's why I was coming to you."
His brown eyes went soft. "I'm really sorry Des. I swore to myself I wasn't going to let you get dragged into this, but I can only do so much in my official capacity. I don't know who's gagging me, but you can bet your bottom dollar I’m gonna find out, and when I do, somebody's gonna pay. That's not how I work. Nobody's going to force me into doing anything that I don't want to do."
I let that roll around in my brain for a minute trying to look at it from different angles. I agreed wholeheartedly that he needed to find out who was trying to game the system, but I also knew that he needed to stay on the inside if we were going to be able to control the narrative. "Don't apologize. You're not making me do anything I wasn't already planning on doing anyway, so let's just get past that. What else can you tell me about the murder? And was there anything on the security cameras that backs up Jackson's claim that Marty gave him that ring in exchange for the money owed him?"
It occurred to me that I wasn't even sure how the guy’d died, and I didn't even know how long he'd been on the resort. The latter I could find out for myself, but the former was, for once, a mystery because only Blake’s security team had likely had contact with the body.
“There's not much to say about the murder itself. He was underwater, so there's no chance of getting any fingerprints or anything like that, but I can tell you that he was strangled. As far as security footage showing Jackson getting the ring from Marty, there's nothing." His gaze shifted to the floor. "I can't prove it, but I think our security feeds were tampered with."
"What?" I snapped my head toward him. "That's not possible. That system was designed by the top minds in the entire magical world. It's tamperproof."
Tempest huffed a breath out through her nose. "There's no such thing as something that’s tamperproof, Destiny. You know as well as I do that there's a way around everything no matter how powerful the magic if you know what you’re doing."
I sighed, knowing she was right but angry that somebody had corrupted the Enchanted Coast. This place wasn't just my work, it was my home, and many of our guests were also my friends. Our security wasn't just one of our biggest selling points, it was a source of pride. People here were safe, whether we were talking about their physical bodies, their money and personal belongings, or their privacy; w
e took great pride in the fact that our guests were here for an experience where they could just relax and have fun without worrying about anything. Anger swept through me. Even on a normal day, there was nothing I liked better than knocking somebody off their high horse. Now they'd messed with my home and the people I cared about, and I was going to make sure they regretted that to their dying breath.
Chapter 7
A second after Blake turned the camera back on and restarted the elevator, the floor-indicator stopped on the first floor. "You're gonna have to go about this a little differently than you usually do," he said. "If I’m gonna be able to stay on the inside, I can't help you. I can’t arrange for you to talk to anybody, and I can't be seen giving you any more information. Not that I have any more to hand over anyway."
His jaw flexed, and I knew this was burning his bacon. If there was anybody who took more pride in our resort than I did, it was Blake. He’d been with it from the beginning, and just like for me, it was way more than a job to him. "There's not really anything else I can tell you that you can't find in the hotel records anyway," he said. "The Council shut me down hard as soon as Xavier — that's Sandra's brother — came forward and said he saw Jackson get in the boat with Marty.”
"What do you mean, they shut you down?" Tempest asked, maintaining her position on my shoulder as we stepped out into the expanse of the grand foyer.
Blake scratched the stubble on his chin and shook his head in frustration. "I mean that within fifteen minutes of the donation hitting, Xavier came forward, told me what he saw, and then the Council called me five minutes later. There was zero delay between any of the events, so I have no doubt they were related. I don't know why they’re trying to shut this down, but I can guarantee you Xavier is part of it."
This was one of the ugliest parts of the supernatural world. Most of the controlling governments and higher organizations were run by people who'd lost their touch with humanity. Everything came down to dollars and cents and power. People on the individual level didn't exist unless they had their checkbook out. Fortunately, that antipathy had an advantage: they didn't bother to butt into the daily goings-on of most of our lives. As long as things stayed at the status quo on their end, they didn't care what the rest of us did.
