Hot Trick (A Detective Shelley Caldwell Novel)

by Patricia Rosemoor

  More on that later. Whether Mom liked it or not, we had a major heart-to-heart coming.

  But right now, I was content to believe Casey Brogan had visions of murders that hadn’t yet occurred. And that I was meant to stop them.

  “The moment you have your next viewing,” I told Brogan, “I want you to concentrate, to force more details.” Before he could object, I added, “And I not only want to know about it, until we get to the heart of the threat, I want you to stick with me. Like glue.”

  “And my incentive would be…”

  “Money. That’s what you’re all about, right?”

  “And a little respect.”

  “I’ll try not to make any more rash judgments about banshees,” I promised. “I’m open to whatever you have to tell me.”

  “Well, you’ve had a change of heart, I see.”

  “You’ve been…convincing. And my mother remembered you.” A half truth. She’d remembered the name.

  “Did she now? How is Rena?”

  My pulse jagged even as I told myself he could have easily researched Mom’s first name.

  “She’s worried about me. That I might be like my father.”

  Silence. I clenched my jaw.

  “That you are. The reason I decided to approach you.”

  That still didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. Instinct told me he wouldn’t spill about Dad. At least not yet.

  “You haven’t seen anything else you haven’t told me about, right?”

  “You would be knowing everything I do, Detective.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then we have an understanding.”

  “I’ll raise a pint to that.”

  “A pint…okay…but keep a sober head about you. I don’t want you missing your next communication from the spirit world because you’ve passed out.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be finding you the moment I know anything.”

  “In the meantime, go over your last two visions and see if we didn’t miss anything.”

  But it seemed we hadn’t. No matter how much I probed, I didn’t get anything new. Satisfied for the moment, I let Brogan off the hook.

  And put out an APB on Tanya Janicek and Edmund Fox.

  Chapter Forty-One

  “If Benita Rivera is hiding anything, I couldn’t get it out of her,” Norelli told me, swilling a cup of coffee in one hand and waving a donut in the other. “I talked to her before going to see the Widow Forrest.” Sprinkles of powdered sugar coated his lapels, but he didn’t seem to notice. “She seems genuinely troubled by the murders. Went on and on about how killers can walk free and trash other people’s lives. Destroy their families. If anything, she was angry.”

  “And you bought it?” I asked.

  Norelli took a bite out of his donut, spraying sugar everywhere. “Every word. She said if there was anything she could do to help catch the murderer, she would be our go-to girl.”

  Somehow I couldn’t see Benita Rivera putting it in quite those words, but I figured Norelli was spinning it in a way that made him comfortable. He didn’t know how to deal with an honest emotion other than to turn it into a joke.

  “So she didn’t try to implicate Hernandez, right?”

  “I asked if she’d heard anything to the effect. She denied it, said she couldn’t see why he would punish the very people who let him walk.”

  “No one let him walk,” I said. “Rafferty sure doesn’t want him on the street. Or Forrest.” Or me. “The jury should have nailed him with what we gave them. They simply couldn’t come to a consensus. Although how anyone could have had any doubts about that bastard’s innocence…”

  Which made me wonder again if undue influence on one or more of the jurors had been to blame. I would probably never know. The thought of Hernandez walking the streets sickened me, but I’d done what I could to nail him. I had to accept that sometimes my best just wasn’t enough. A hard lesson, one I didn’t particularly want to learn.

  “So we’re back to someone turning Sebastian’s good deeds on him to frame him,” Norelli said.

  “Edmund Fox was in the audience at the library.”

  “He’s on Sebastian’s fan list?”

  “Hardly. I spent hours searching the internet and came up with an interesting find.” I handed him the photo I’d printed out.

  “Interesting how?”

  “Take a good look at the woman.”

  Norelli frowned. “Isn’t that Sebastian’s publicity broad?”

  The word broad made my jaw clench, but I nodded. “I put out an APB on them both. Maybe if we haul them in for questioning, we can get the goods to prevent another murder.”

  Another murder—my greatest fear. Hopefully, finding the duo would stop number three from happening.

  “Another murder?” Norelli muttered, shaking his head. “You hear from your snitch?”

  “He hasn’t made any more predictions. Yet.”

  “But you expect him to?”

  “The skin at the back of my neck is talking to me.”

  “What’s it saying?”

  “Asking,” I said. “Who’s next?”

  Yeah, that was the problem. I didn’t think the murderer was done.

  Before we could get into it further, one of the uniforms interrupted us. “Hey, Caldwell, we got Edmund Fox stewing in interrogation.”

  “What about Tanya Janicek?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “She wasn’t home. A neighbor out walking her dog said she saw Janicek leave the building and get into a taxi at dawn. She was hauling a suitcase.”

  “So she’s flown,” Norelli muttered.

  “At least we got Fox,” I reminded him. “Let’s see what he has to say for himself.”

  But Fox blabbed the same old story, wailed about his innocence, threatened to get a lawyer and sue the CPD for harassment.

  “Why were you at Sebastian’s escape last night?” I asked.

  “Curiosity.”

  “How did you know where to go?”

  “The internet. Word spreads fast.”

  I tried visualizing a computer in that seedy hotel room and couldn’t. “So you pulled out your computer just to see if you could get information on Sebastian?”

  “I was at the library, actually. I used their computer.”

  “Which one?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Your alibi, man, get with it.”

  “Caldwell, give the man a break. You’re making him nervous. He’s only here for questioning.”

  Norelli playing good cop? Would wonders never cease?

  “I have another question,” I said, pulling out the photo and sticking it under Fox’s nose. “Why didn’t you tell us about you and Tanya Janicek.”

  Fox’s expression darkened. “That lying bitch! Is that why I’m here? She implicated me?”

  “Why would she?”

  “Because I broke it off with her when she got too controlling. She told me she would get even with me if it was the last thing she ever did.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Two years ago. She went straight from me to Sebastian. The next I knew, he was after me. Now she’s at it again!”

  “You’re saying Sebastian Cole and Tanya Janicek are—or were—an item?”

  “You’ve seen what she looks like. What do you think?”

  I thought the situation was getting pretty deep here. I kept that opinion to myself, but when Norelli and I left Edmund Fox in the interrogation room, he was the first one to spit it out.

  “If Janicek got revenge on Fox for dumping her, why not on Cole?”

  “I was wondering the same thing,” I admitted.

  The fact that Tanya had gone missing in light of that information certainly put a new spin on her.

  Was Tanya a mortal woman? Or did she have special powers as well? Or learned powers like Silke’s?

  We spent the rest of the day tracking down Alan Forrest’s family members, neighbors and friends that Norelli hadn’t alr
eady contacted. Wanting to make some connection between the victim and Sebastian or the victim and Tanya, we came away disappointed. Everyone wanted to help but no one had anything solid to go on.

  And all the while, I stewed, wondering how much real magic was involved—if not Sebastian’s, then Tanya’s. It would make sense that a sorceress would gravitate toward a real magician, right?

  I needed to know more about magic. A crash course in what was possible and what wasn’t. I thought to do a little reading. Chaos Magic awaited me at home. After I did my homework, I could talk to Silke…or Jake. It was time I let him in on the supernatural details.

  “I’m going to take a couple of hours of down time,” I told Norelli when he parked in front of the Area office. “Shoulder’s bothering me again. I need some ice and my cats need food. Then I’m going to do some research at home. Call me if you get anything.”

  “You’ll be the first to know.”

  That he didn’t make a big deal of my going home made me uneasy. Did he want to be rid of me? Or maybe I was being a little paranoid.

  I really was tired. And my shoulder had stiffened. I needed to regenerate.

  Sarge and Cadet were waiting for me at the door. They glared at me accusingly, eyes round as if they were looking at a stranger.

  “Hey, my sweethearts, Mom’s sorry she hasn’t been here.” I stooped and swiped a hand over each of their backs. Cadet gave Sarge a dirty look, reached over and nipped him so that he fell back. “Hey, come on. I can make it up to you with some tuna…”

  They beat me to the kitchen.

  I threw a frozen dinner in the microwave and me into the shower. A half hour later, I was clean, dressed, fed and happily entertaining two cats on the bed as I opened Chaos Magic.

  Normally, I would approach a book like this tongue-in-cheek. But tonight, I found nothing funny about my reading material. This situation was not for amateurs.

  One of the keys to magic is the ability to enter altered states, I read, accomplished through either an inhibitory state—meditation, yoga, sensory deprivation—or an excitatory state—chanting, dance, sexual arousal.

  Well, I’d had a taste of the last, though I still didn’t know Sebastian’s true purpose for invading my dreams.

  I kept reading. It seemed chaos magic was no holds barred. A practitioner could use whatever worked for him or her from different systems of magic. The text compared a chaos magician to a method actor who circumvents reality and suspends disbelief.

  The magician uses setting, costumes, props, words and emotional memory. Any powerful experience can be used to tap into the emotional memory—sex, pain, confusion…

  If that didn’t describe Sebastian’s M.O., I didn’t know what did.

  I went on to read about spells. Types. How to cast them. I’d seen Silke cast one first hand during the cult killer case. I can’t say I believed everything I read, but the whole concept got to me, partly because of the weird phenomenon that had been happening, partly because of the feats Silke told me were possible, partly because my own father had gone chasing creatures that went bump in the night.

  How much did Mom really know? Had she been like me, skeptical but determined to do the research? Or had she simply turned off that part of her psyche?

  I wished I could. If I don’t know about it, it can’t exist.

  I closed my eyes and my mind to the text I’d been reading, and let myself drift until the urge to sleep became overpowering.

  “There you are. I thought you would never come.”

  Blinking, I stare at Sebastian who stands before me, wind blowing his long hair so that it flares out around his head like wings…reminding me of the library owls.

  “I didn’t come, you did. How do you control my dreams? What magic do you use?”

  “The power of attraction.”

  “I’m not attracted to you.”

  “Liar,” he says, reaching out for my throat.

  There’s an intensity about him that scares me. A fire burns behind his eyes. I’ve never seen him like this. Angry? With me, because I won’t succumb?

  “Why don’t you admit what you want?” he asks, his hand traveling down my neck to my breastbone. “Your heartbeat is speeding up at my touch. Your body knows what it wants.” He continues the pathway down inside my clothing to the juncture of my thighs. “See how wet you are for me.” He dips in a finger and pulls the juices across my clit.

  I almost come for him right then.

  “No,” I whisper, helpless to push him away. “This can’t happen.”

  “Then stop me. But you won’t. You need what I can give you.”

  His words are harsh, tinged with anger rather than seduction.

  “I need Jake,” I tell him, pushing my thighs together to keep him out. “I only want Jake. Not you. Never you.”

  His face twists and his eyes burn and suddenly he vanishes.

  Anxious meowing woke me. Sarge pressed his face against mine and I could sense Cadet whipping around behind him. Both were complaining. Loudly. I came to, choking on smoke. The bedroom was filled with it. The fire alarm screamed an obnoxious warning.

  I stumbled out of bed and into the main room to see flames licking the walls. My stomach turned over and my chest hurt. It looked like the fire had started in the kitchen. Had the microwave gone bad?

  Still groggy, I tried opening the door to the hall to get to the building’s fire alarm and extinguisher, but it was stuck. Not locked. Stuck.

  Why wouldn’t it open?

  Coughing, I made my way across the room and went for the windows. Also stuck.

  Nothing would open.

  What the hell?

  My hands shook as I picked up the phone to call 911. No dial tone. My cell proved to be equally useless. I couldn’t get a signal.

  My heart began to pound harder.

  I hadn’t caused the fire, not even accidentally.

  Panicked, I tried the door again, but it wouldn’t budge. Was it really stuck or was some kind of magic involved? Fetching a throw rug to beat down the flames in the kitchen, I sent an SOS to Silke, but she didn’t answer.

  The fire seemed to grow hotter. I fell back and told myself not to panic, to try to get outside help.

  Silke, where are you?

  Silence.

  Mom had said my being psychic wasn’t a twin thing, that it was a Caldwell thing. I’d never truly tested it until Sebastian had tried to get into my mind, and I thought I could reach him. But what if he’d arranged my demise? What if rejecting him yet again in my dream had set him off?

  What were my options?

  I could die or I could take a chance.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated harder and deeper than ever before and sent an SOS into the universe, hoping if Silke didn’t pick it up, someone else would. Even Sebastian. I was certain he could find a way to overcome the spell keeping the door and windows locked.

  The smoke got to me and I started coughing so hard I almost couldn’t hear the pounding. I opened my eyes to see Jake through the window on the rear fire stairs.

  “I can’t get out,” I shouted, knowing he would be able to hear me. “Some kind of spell on the exits.”

  He appeared frantic, but pound and kick at the glass as he would, it didn’t so much as crack.

  Not when magic was involved.

  Then I saw Jake’s realization turn to fury. His eyes burned and his stance reminded me of the night we’d destroyed the vampires at Heart of Darkness. He shifted between the two windows. The next thing I knew, his fist came through the wall, brick, plaster and all turning to rubbish against his strength.

  “I’ll get you out of there,” he yelled.

  Or maybe I heard him telepathically.

  He punched again and again, each time his vampire power making the hole a bit bigger, letting in breathable air. Then he attacked the window, and it shattered. The hole in the wall must have broken the spell. I picked up a heavy paperweight and hurled it at the other window, which blasted
apart in a rain of glass. Jake took off his jacket to cover an arm and cleared the sharp shards away, making a safe exit for me.

  I glanced over my shoulder to see flames dance through the inside wall toward the bedroom.

  “Sarge,” I yelled. “Cadet! Kitties, come.” I whistled for them but they didn’t come to me. “Oh, my God, I have to get them out of here.”

  As I turned to do so, Jake grabbed my arm and tugged me toward him. “Come on, let’s get you out of there.”

  “Not without my cats!”

  His hand circled my arm firmly, and though I fought him, Jake pulled me through the window opening onto the back walkway. I slapped at him, shrieked the cats’ names.

  “I can’t leave them!”

  “I’ll get them.”

  “No, you can’t go in there!”

  Too late. Jake leapt inside to face a vampire’s worst nightmare—fire. At least it was Jake’s worst nightmare. Although her demise had been caused by the sun, his mother had burned to death. I couldn’t even conceive of Jake taking this chance…

  For me.

  Apparently one of my neighbors had noted the fire. The sound of a fire truck and an ambulance filled my ears as they raced toward us. The smoke drifted over me, making me cough. Inside the apartment, it encircled Jake and swallowed him whole.

  “C’mon, Jake, hurry.”

  He seemed to take forever. I could still hear the fire truck and the ambulance and a bunch of excited voices coming from the front of the building. Still no Jake.

  Sarge and Cadet were my cats. What was I doing standing here helpless when they needed me?

  Jake needed me.

  And I needed him.

  I was about to go back inside to make sure Jake wasn’t in trouble, when the smoke in the living area shifted and a blanketed figure stepped through it into a clear spot. Stopping on the other side of the window opening, Jake tossed the blanket aside and I saw what looked like a pillow in his hands. Rather, a wriggling pillowcase.

  “Who?” I asked hopefully.