by Leslie Caine
“Did Ang recommend your buying this sword?” Sullivan asked.
“Of course. He’s the one who helped me purchase it.”
Sullivan gave me a slight nod, which meant: You take it from here. The coward! I cleared my throat. “The thing is, Shannon, even though it’s metal and Asian, it’s also a weapon. Which you want to bring into your primary place for sitting and relaxing. That’s as far from feng shui principles as you can possibly get.”
“But Ang suggested it! He acquired the sword!”
“I realize that…but I can’t tell you how strongly I disagree with him on this matter, Shannon.”
“Then work this out with him later!” She grabbed both my arms firmly, looked me square in the eyes, and pleaded, “You have to make this metal element work for me, Erin! Right now! Otherwise, the consequences are going to be dire. Things are already falling apart. Michael’s been having an affair with that slut of a designer who works at you-know-who’s. Ang warned that I’m going to get deathly ill if I continue to spend ten hours a day in this house.”
That feng shui quack was frightening her with his dire predictions into doing what he wanted. I should have seen this coming. “Okay. Obviously suspending it from the ceiling won’t be safe. And we can’t just have it mounted on any kind of a pedestal.”
“Not a stone one, for sure. Earth elements will diminish its power. And it goes without saying that wood can’t be used.”
“My first thought is we’ll build a wide, shallow enclosure…glass and hammered copper. We’ll make it into a low table and put pillows around it to anchor the piece so it won’t be stranded by itself or look like a display at a museum.”
“I suppose that could work. Especially if you use white pillows. That will increase the strength of my number-two white star.” She sighed with relief and explained to Sullivan, “Ang told me that’s my strongest protective star.”
Sullivan started to say something but stopped himself. He merely nodded. He raked his fingers through his hair in a gesture of frustration; Shannon didn’t know him well enough to recognize it as such. He retrieved his measuring tape from his pocket and quickly jotted down the dimensions. With a warm smile, he told her, “We’ll draw something up for you as soon as possible.”
“Great. In the meantime, this can stay just as is, where it belongs.” She knelt and moved the long sword in its sheath slightly, so that it was directly on top of a speck on the rug. “This dot marks the exact center of the room. And that’s precisely where I want it. So if—” A tinny version of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony began to play, and Shannon said, “That’s my cell phone.”
“We’ll let ourselves out,” I said.
“Thanks,” she replied, and then said “Hello?” into her phone.
We left, Sullivan saying to me, “Ang Chung must be stopped. Someway, somehow, we’ve got to get him under control.”
I unlocked the rental car. “No kidding. I wonder if there’s some kind of a governing board for—”
“Erin?”
I turned.
Shannon was leaning out the door. “Can you come here for just a minute?”
I nodded and murmured to Sullivan, “Watch. Now she’ll insist we suspend the sword over the sofa with fishing line so it’s hanging there invisibly.”
She was saying her good-byes over the phone as I came back inside. “That was Ang calling. He thinks he can do an emergency karma sweep of the home.”
“A karma sweep?” I repeated.
“It’ll be most effective if we can clean the karma of the frequent visitors to my home at the same time. Ang’s cleared his schedule for the remainder of the afternoon, so I just need you two to wait here till he arrives. He thinks it’ll be ten or fifteen minutes, tops. Or you can come back anytime before five.”
This was too much to take, and I said, “Shannon, we have a really busy schedule this afternoon, and frankly—”
Making placating gestures at me, she interrupted, “I know you think this is silly, but it’s my treat, Erin. You’ll each have a cleansed personal karma out of the deal, and it’ll only take five minutes. Please?”
I weighed my options. All of our remaining appointments were in South Crestview. We could reschedule the first one, but driving there and back would waste forty minutes, minimum. Sullivan and I needed to confer about what we could do about Ang Chung’s inane suggestions before our entire remodel was destroyed. “Fine, Shannon. We’ll swing by again in twenty minutes or so.”
“Oh, thank you!” Shannon hugged me. “My luck is finally going to change. I can sense it!” She sighed. “I am so relieved!”
There was a small coffee shop nearby and Sullivan and I headed straight for it. We both ordered decaf lattes and discussed strategies for handling Ang. We decided to contact the Better Business Bureau to see if we could talk to former clients of his. Some thirty minutes later, we were still batting around ideas as we pulled back into Shannon’s driveway.
Sullivan stared at the house. “The door’s wide open.”
I did a double take. “Oh, God.”
Shannon would never have intentionally left her front door that way. We tore out of the van and raced up the porch steps. At the doorway, Sullivan stopped in his tracks and turned to face me.
“Call nine-one-one,” he said, gesturing for me to go back. “I’ll handle this.”
He hadn’t blocked my view in time. “Oh, God. Poor Shannon!” I grabbed Sullivan’s arm to steady myself.
Shannon was sprawled, lifeless, in a pool of blood. The samurai sword that she’d been so proud to acquire was impaled in her chest.
chapter 17
Steve called 911 on his cell. I turned away and staggered to a corner of the porch where Shannon’s body was out of my line of sight. I took slow, deep breaths and hoped to avoid repeating my fainting episode.
Ang Chung should have already been here by now. Was this his doing? While suspicions were festering in my brain, I spotted Ang’s Toyota Celica on the road, speeding toward the house. I headed toward the driveway to keep him away from the crime scene.
He parked and emerged from his car hastily. “Afternoon, Miss Gilbert. I apologize for being late. I was meditating, which is critical when preparing for a karma sweep. I lost track of the time.”
I studied his dark eyes, trying to assess his guilt. He did seem more agitated than usual. “Did you happen to be with anyone while you were meditating?”
“No. I drove out to a peaceful hilltop nobody else seems to know about. That’s where the dragon vein is strongest. Why?”
“You might need an alibi.”
He paled. “What for?” He glanced at the house, then turned in the direction of the faint sound of sirens in the distance. “What’s happening?”
“Somebody’s murdered Shannon.”
His jaw went slack. He stared at me, truly shocked, but was that from my news or emotional remnants from his brutal crime? “My God. Shannon’s…dead?”
“The murder weapon was that fake samurai sword you conned her into buying.”
He narrowed his eyes. “I don’t care for what you’re implying, Miss Gilbert. It sounds a lot like slander.”
“It isn’t slander when it’s the truth, Mr. Chung. Shannon’s murder is going to ensure that the police investigate your shady financial dealings with her.”
“You don’t want to make enemies with me,” he snarled.
As the sirens in the background reminded me, he was correct; he was a prime suspect, and I’d just foolishly tipped my hand. I did my best to feign contrition. “No, I don’t. I’m sorry. It’s the shock talking. It was just so upsetting…suddenly finding Shannon’s body like this.”
He gave me a slight bow, but his laser glare made it clear he was furious. “Understandable. Perhaps you should find a quiet place for meditation at your earliest opportunity.”
Two squad cars arrived a few moments later. Sullivan joined us on the walkway, saying into his cell phone, “Yeah. They’re here now.”
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To my immense relief, my friend Linda Delgardio emerged from the first vehicle. She gave me a sympathetic smile, but strode to the doorway and glanced inside. “Has anyone checked to see if there are any more victims?”
“I did,” Sullivan said. “While I was on the phone with nine-one-one. The house is empty.”
“Do either of you know the whereabouts of her husband?”
“No, we don’t,” I answered. “Shannon and Michael had a fight yesterday. And they’d been living at a hotel.”
“Because of the fire?”
“Yes.”
The same balding officer who’d investigated my brother’s death took charge. Linda spoke to him quietly, then she strode toward me. The senior officer ordered Mansfield, Linda’s partner, to take Sullivan’s statement, and his own partner to take Ang’s. Meanwhile Linda ushered me into her squad car.
“What a disaster all this is,” she said under her breath.
“No kidding. At least now Detective O’Reilly can’t insist that this death was an accident.”
She pursed her lips. Linda never criticized her fellow officers to me. “Let’s start with how you and Mr. Sullivan discovered the body, and work backward, okay?” She opened her notepad. “Why did you come here today?”
“Ang Chung, that Italian-looking guy over there, was supposed to do a karma sweep on the house…and on Sullivan and me.”
“A karma sweep?”
“That’s what major feng shui devotees like Shannon do. As a last resort, to purify a structure with really bad karma.”
“So Ang Chung was going to be performing the…purification procedure?”
“Yes. I’ve never heard of a feng shui expert doing a ‘karma sweep’ on the occupants of the household, let alone on houseguests. But even before Steve Sullivan and I started working closely with Ang, we’ve both been of the opinion that the guy’s a quack.”
“So why were you going along with this?”
“To keep our client happy.”
“I see.”
“We happened to be here an hour ago, right when Ang called Shannon and said that he’d be here to do the sweep. We left for half an hour, came back, and found Shannon dead. Ang should have beaten us here by ten or fifteen minutes, but there was no sign of him. He drove up five minutes later, supposedly for the first time that day.”
“But you’re thinking he might have come here between your two visits and killed her?”
“Right. I don’t trust that guy for a—” I broke off as a beige sedan pulled up beside us. It was O’Reilly. “Damn it! Don’t you have any other detectives?”
“Sure, but he’s in charge of an active investigation at this residence.”
I watched him march toward us. “So Shannon’s stabbing is his case by default.”
He yanked open Linda’s door. “Del. Go see if you can give Meyer a hand. I’ll talk to Miss Gilbert myself.”
Linda gave my hand a quick squeeze, then got out of the car. O’Reilly slid behind the wheel in her place and slammed the door shut. It felt as though he had instantly sucked all the air from the car. “So, Miss Gilbert. You’re at it again.”
“Look, Detective O’Reilly, I would rather be in a hospital, being treated for malaria right now! Instead I returned to my client’s home half an hour after our first appointment and found her brutally murdered! I’ve done nothing wrong!”
“Didn’t say you had. Just noting that you’ve got uncannily lousy luck when it comes to your clients’ life expectancy. Good thing I’m single. I’d never let my spouse hire you to pick out our curtains.”
“Imagine my disappointment,” I fired back. Given half the chance, I’d recommend that he put heavy, velvet curtains in his kitchen, which would soak up the cooking odors and make him miserable.
“So you said you came out to this residence more than once today?”
“That’s right. I explained all that to Linda just two seconds ago.”
He narrowed his eyes. “We’re going to go through your whole story again. Humor me.”
With little choice in the matter, I took a calming breath of the now stale air, then obliged. He held up his hand when I said that Shannon had been trying “to intensify the feng shui elements in her living space.” He asked, “So you’re saying that entailed putting a machete in the family room?”
I spread my arms, though the gesture was hampered by our cramped quarters. “That’s what Shannon said she wanted. She told me it was Ang Chung’s advice.”
“Why? Was that legit feng sway?”
“Feng shui. I wouldn’t say that anything Ang advises his clients to do is necessarily ‘legit.’ The sword has a particularly strong metal element…especially because, according to Ang, at least, it was an ancient item from the Orient, where feng shui originated. But I’ve never heard of a consultant recommending a lethal weapon like this.”
“I’ll need to talk to him again,” he muttered, making a notation in his pad.
“Good. I think he killed my brother, too.”
He held my gaze. “Got to admit, with your brother’s tox screens having been clean and now this, you might’ve been right about his cause of death.”
“I am right. And I might be right about who did it.”
O’Reilly took the extra frustrating step of driving Sullivan and me to the police station and taking our full statements again there. By the time an officer finally drove us back to fetch my car, the sun had set. Our afternoon’s schedule had, of course, been decimated, and as we headed to our office, I told Sullivan, “There’s no way I’ll be able to jump right back into my job tomorrow morning. Audrey’s undoubtedly going to keep me up half the night, talking about Shannon’s death.”
“Why don’t you take tomorrow off?” he said grudgingly. “I’ll handle your appointments.”
That was my cue to decline his offer and soldier on, but I really did need a brief hiatus. “Great. Thanks. So I’ll see you first thing Monday, then.”
The next morning, while Audrey went to work taping another show in Denver, I lounged around in my dusty-rose microfiber bathrobe and wallowed in guilt. Sullivan had gone through every bit as much trauma as I had yesterday. Even so, I couldn’t face chatting with clients and reps, so I did nothing to remedy the situation.
By mid-morning, it hit me that, although I wasn’t up for doing my work, I was up for sleuthing. The search for my brother’s killer had been made both more urgent and more specific by Shannon’s death; the culprit was clearly someone with a motive to kill them both. Sullivan could have been right all along: I’d been avoiding considering Pate as the prime suspect. Maybe Pate’s ruthless determination to buy Shannon’s property was at the heart of all this. That possibility made me determined to do some research at a place where I’d never gone before: a BaseMart store.
For months now, Pate and the other owners of the store chain had been trying to strong-arm Crestview officials into offering major financial incentives in exchange for all the sales-tax revenue. With Audrey’s and Shannon’s help, however, the city politicians had been made aware that the company routinely relocated their stores into the county as soon as those subsidies ended, long before the towns broke even from sales-tax revenue. The nearest BaseMart was therefore twenty miles away, just outside the borderline of that store’s patsy-played city.
My mind was in such a whirl that I was caught by surprise when BaseMart loomed on the horizon. The parking lot was huge—and depressingly crowded. “No Big Boxes” had been aptly named. The store was an enormous boxy-looking structure, as though the architect’s mandate was Cheap and Ugly. I crossed the lot. The nippy air combined with smoky gray sky had the feel of an imminent snowstorm. The glass front doors were plastered with yellow, orange, and red ads about their “low, low, LOW prices.” I mused about bickering with a sales-clerk that sure, these prices are low, maybe even low, low, but definitely not low, low, LOW.
I didn’t bother to grab a cart, and had to say “No, thanks” when the senior citi
zen in the BaseMart purple vest tried to foist one on me. I wove my way through the aisles at random. As I’d expected, the store itself was a massive warehouse with row after row of stuff, every kind of merchandise, from applesauce to photocopiers. The ceiling was unadorned girders and fluorescent light fixtures which cast an ugly yellow glow on everything. I just hoped the roof would hold in the event of a big snowstorm.
Out of the same kind of perverse curiosity that made me stare at car accidents, I eventually located the furniture department. Their icky merchandise would fall apart within a year of regular usage.
I stopped dead at the sight of a workstation. It was identical in concept to Taylor’s prototype! I took a closer look. The materials were cheap stand-ins for what Taylor had used. The store had a stack of five boxes behind the sample workstation, which was on top of a high shelf. The strategic placement must have been to prevent customers from actually sitting on its built-in chair or adjusting the settings, which could cause it to collapse. Instead, the customer would have to buy the kit and assemble it at home—where it would no doubt promptly collapse.
I examined the nearest box to find out the name of the company that had produced the workstation kit. The only name listed was “Pied Piper,” the name on many of their products, obviously BaseMart’s own brand name. Pate’s last name was Hamlin. Could this be his in-joke, naming his brands after the Pied Piper of Hamelin of folklore?
My thoughts flashed back to Emily describing how someone had soured Taylor on the viability of his invention, just before he went into the spiral that landed him back in jail. I tore out of the store.
Was Pate such a bastard that he had deliberately deflated my brother’s dreams and expectations? Only to profit from the idea himself?
I parked on the opposite side of the street from Shannon’s house and ignored the commotion there; her home had been cordoned off and, some sixteen hours after the crime, still hosted at least a half dozen police vehicles. I pounded on Pate’s door, too angry to press the doorbell. I instantly tensed when Tracy Osgood, Pate’s supposedly estranged wife, opened the door. “You’re here again,” I cried. “What’s going on?”
