by Sharon Pape
“May you never suffer anything this awful in your life,” Merlin piled on. We were all looking at Boyd with teary eyes.
“Okay, all right. It’s against regulations, but you can have a few minutes.”
“God will bless you for your kindness,” Tilly said as he walked out. “Please close the door so our sorrow won’t be on display.” The moment the door closed, Tilly sat down beside Flint and took his hand in hers. I dropped to my knees on the other side of the bed, so if Boyd peeked in, he’d think I was praying. Merlin took the one chair in the room and did his best to appear devastated.
I looked at Flint, trying to visualize him as the Biker Dude. Without his leathers and spiked hair, it wasn’t easy. Where were his tattoos? His arms lay atop the blanket devoid of ink. So the tattoos were no more real than the Biker Dude persona.
Tilly was so still I couldn’t tell if she was busy reading his brain or having trouble navigating it in his current condition. By my watch, ten minutes had passed before Boyd knocked once and opened the door. We presented the perfect tableau of a family in grief. He stayed in the doorway as if reluctant to intrude. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, “but I have to ask you to leave now.”
I rose slowly, my knees aching from the hard floor. In an effort to give Tilly every additional second he could, Merlin struggled to get up from the chair. I went to help him. It took three long attempts before I succeeded in getting him upright. Having run out of ways to stall, I walked around the bed and touched my aunt’s shoulder. She let go of Flint’s hand, but as she got to her feet, she started to sway as if she might faint. Her effort to read him had clearly taken a lot out of her. I grabbed her around the waist to steady her.
“Officer,” I called, “if you could give me a hand?” Boyd rushed over to us and took hold of her arm, until she murmured that she was okay. He ushered us into the hall, where we all thanked him as profusely as our grief permitted.
“If you want to visit him again, ma’am” he said to Tilly, “you’ll need permission from Detective Duggan. We’re not trying to make things difficult for you, but you have to keep in mind that your son is under arrest for a number of serious crimes.” Tilly assured him she understood. Merlin and I bobbed our heads to make it unanimous. I stayed near Boyd for an extra minute. Under the pretense of looking for my keys in my purse, I quickly wove the memory-blocking spell.
Be gone all thoughts you have of us,
As if they never were.
Forget our names and faces.
To you we never were.
I called Travis from the lobby and two minutes later we were on the road back to Watkins Glen. I was dying to ask my aunt what she’d learned, but first Travis deserved an account of our time in the hospital, which I supplied, with additional commentary from Tilly and Merlin.
“All right, Tilly,” Travis said when we were done, “the spotlight is all yours.”
“Well, he was a difficult read, at least partly because there was trauma and swelling from the bullet. It was like trying to drive from point A to point B with road blocks everywhere. When I finally reached a place with healthy brain tissue, it was like looking for a tiny needle in a giant haystack with the clock ticking.”
“Consarnit, woman!” Merlin thundered. “I could expire by the time you get to the meat of the thing!”
“I’m getting there, old man. If I didn’t take the time to properly explain the landscape of Flint’s head, it would be easy to misinterpret what I found. Your impatience has only delayed the process.” I was trying to tamp down my own frustration at that point, but I knew that interrupting Tilly was rarely a good idea. To pick up the train of her narrative, she’d been known to go back to the beginning, so I kept my mouth zippered.
“Now where was I,” she muttered, making me stifle a groan. “Ah yes, I came across references to Sam Crawford often enough that they must have had more interactions than let’s say, a neighbor or casual acquaintance. What troubled me was the odd mix of emotions Flint had about him.”
“Like what?” Travis asked.
“I can’t name specific ones, it’s more of a general feeling I got. He gave me the creeps.” I was beginning to think our trip to the hospital didn’t net us anything of value. Tilly had done the best she could, given the twisted wreckage of his brain.
“What about Bradley Epps, Everett Royce, or Austin Stubbs?” I asked, holding out hope for something concrete.
“Epps, yes. He did seem more benign to Flint, but no one is completely dark or light. Oh, I did see Austin Stubbs,” she added, snapping me back to attention.
“And?”
“Nothing much, I’m sorry to say. He didn’t appear to have a big impact on Flint. I did feel darkness, but I think that was intrinsic to Stubbs.”
“What about Lena?” I asked. The question was idle curiosity more than fact seeking.
“Well, of course,” Tilly said. “I found her everywhere, as one would expect given their relationship. But his feelings about her were not as warm and glowing as they are for most couples about to wed. Of course that can be from the stress of planning a wedding.”
“Or from being involved in illegal activities,” I added dryly.
Travis dropped the three of us at my car, and I drove back to New Camel. Tilly had taken the day off, so after I deposited her and Merlin at her house, I stopped home to take Sashki with me to the shop. He groused a bit, but once I closed the door behind us, he seemed willing enough for a change of venue. There were times I was sure he came with me for no other reason than to rub his status in the faces of the other cats.
It was a short workday that began at one-fifteen. Only a few customers straggled in. I could easily have been closed all day with negligible loss of revenue. But a shop with hours posted on its door stood to lose a lot of customer loyalty if it wasn’t open when it was supposed to be. Disappoint people often enough and they stop coming.
That night I didn’t sleep well. I dreamed that Tilly and I were lost in Flint’s mind, being chased by malignant emotions. Sashkatu must have sensed my distress. He wrapped himself around my head like a big, furry bandage. It must have helped, because when the alarm woke me at seven, it was from a sweet dream of my childhood.
Chapter 51
I was turning off the security system at my shop the next morning when Travis called. “The police found Lena and arrested Bradley Epps,” he said. I felt like I’d been picked up by a tornado and set down in a stranger place than Kansas. A dazed “Wait—what?” was all I could manage.
“They tracked her down to her uncle’s farm in Burdett.” She might have fared better in Alaska, I thought, still reeling.
“Did they arrest Epps after they found her or before?” I asked, reasoning and logic seeping back into my brain.
“After. They brought her in for questioning, and then arrested him.”
“In other words, she gave him up and took our advice to negotiate a deal with the police.”
“Sure sounds like it,” he said.
Epps had the right motive, the perfect motive. We should have taken the next logical step and confronted him about it. Why had we waited? Because you need more evidence than it makes sense or it feels right, when you accuse someone of murder. “Are you okay?” I asked Travis. “I know how badly you wanted to catch Ryan’s killer yourself.”
“Not so fast.” He didn’t sound as disappointed as I expected.
“I don’t follow.”
“I was thinking about Tilly’s reading of Flint and I don’t think we should dismiss it just because it doesn’t jibe with the way we’ve looked at this case up until now. Duggan may think he has the killer, but what if he doesn’t?”
“I’m listening.”
“You saw how afraid Lena was when she came to us. I don’t think it was all an act. I think she’d gotten herself caught up in something that scared the hell out of her. W
ho had the best shot of talking her into doing something she wasn’t comfortable with?”
“The man she loved and was about to marry?”
“I bet Flint roped her into lending him the bike and helping him get into your house and who knows what else. He probably played up the money angle. Getting married comes with a lot of bills.”
“But Epps doesn’t have the money to pay him and Lena for extracurricular activities,” I said. “Crawford is the one with the money to hire a killer. But there’s still the issue of motive with him.”
“The same motive we attributed to Epps.”
“A guilty conscience? What about his practice and lifestyle?” I couldn’t find a way around that mountain.
“True, he stands to lose everything, including his freedom, if he’s caught. But the thing I finally realized is that Crawford is an arrogant man who believes he’s untouchable. Failure is not in his vocabulary.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, “if you’re right, why did Lena give the police Epps? Duggan is bound to see through the lie sooner than later.”
“She probably wasn’t looking further than the next five minutes. Flint is as good as dead. She’s on her own; she has to be half crazy at this point. If I’m right, she was too scared to give them Crawford. He has the money to exact retribution. But she needed leverage, something she could use to negotiate a deal with the cops. Maybe she thought they’d release her and she’d have enough time to find a better place to hide before they realized she was lying.”
“Or it really could be Epps,” I said. “Maybe the deaths of those innocent people was the last straw for him. All he needed was someone willing to help out for free.”
“A pretty tall order,” Travis said dryly.
“Maybe not as tall as you think. Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute. After Everett Royce’s wife is killed, he goes to see Epps. Maybe he threatens to kill him for incompetency. Epps calms him down, says he has a better idea. They join forces. Epps supplies the expertise on how to avoid leaving forensic evidence. Royce does the deeds.”
“I can maybe see Royce doing it to avenge his wife’s death,” Travis said, “but what about the others who were killed?”
“Okay, maybe Epps and Royce, his boy wonder, get away with the first one and it’s cathartic for them—a kind of high. They’re caped crusaders like their boyhood heroes. Well, maybe not caped.”
“As scenarios go, it’s not a terrible one. At least it’s not any more far-fetched than believing Crawford suddenly grew a conscience and decided to give up all the trappings of his—Wait, listen to this—Flint’s dead, possibly murdered.”
Chapter 52
Flint’s death weighed on my mind all day. I couldn’t help wondering if our visit to him was the reason he’d been killed. But who would have leaked it? Officer Boyd was the only one who knew we were there, and the spell I’d used should have erased his memory of us. Maybe it was just a coincidence and Flint was eliminated because there was a chance, albeit a slim one, that he might wake up and start naming names. He’d gone from being useful to the killer, to being a messy detail, a liability to be dealt with once and for all.
When I spoke to Travis again that evening, he told me a man dressed like a doctor, down to the proper ID tag, was allowed into Flint’s room by the officer on duty. He was in there for only a few minutes, during which time he must have introduced a lethal drug into Flint’s IV line. When the nurse came to check on him thirty minutes later, he was dead. The ME’s report was pending. My takeaway from this news was that the killer was erasing risk wherever it cropped up, leaving nothing to chance. I was worried that Travis, Tilly, Merlin, and I could be next on his list. Enough people who worked at the hospital had seen us walking around. Even if no one knew why we’d gone to see Flint, our being there was enough to raise the wrong eyebrows.
“I’m afraid you may be right,” Travis said, after listening to my concerns. “It was bound to happen if we got close enough. I want you to lock up. Don’t answer the door for anyone.” I made him promise to do the same. But knowing that the wards were in place gave me some much-needed peace of mind. I called Tilly to make sure she buttoned up her house too, but she didn’t answer. She’d probably taken Merlin out for dinner. If he nagged enough, she often gave in and took him to The Soda Jerk or the Caboose. When I dialed her cell phone, it went straight to voice mail. My aunt always had her phone with her, but didn’t always remember to turn it on—a problem with people of a certain age who’d lived without the convenience for the better part of their lives. I told myself she’d find my message when she got home.
I fed Sashki and his tribe. Watching them tuck into their dinners, I envied them their worry-free existence. They had a servant to prepare their food, clean their litter boxes, and make sure they had fresh linens upon which to lay their furry heads. I made a chicken salad sandwich and tea and took my dinner into the living room to distract myself with a TV game show. By seven-thirty the TV was no longer cutting it. I was really worried about Tilly and a certain wizard from long, long ago.
Not five minutes later the doorbell rang. When I looked through the peephole, I found my aunt and Merlin on my doorstep. If I’d given it any thought, I would have realized something wasn’t right. Tilly had her own key and preferred to let herself in. She never rang the bell. She claimed she shouldn’t need to as a member of the family. In my defense, I was so relieved to see her there that I suffered a momentary lapse in judgment. A big ol’ double-wide momentary lapse as it turned out. When I opened the door, Tilly and Merlin were grim-faced. Before I could ask them what was wrong, Mason stepped out of the shadows with a gun pointed at Tilly’s head. He jammed it against her temple, making her flinch for my benefit.
“Where are your manners?” he asked with a smile that chilled me. “Aren’t you going to invite us in?” I stepped back from the doorway, my brain unable to communicate with my mouth. Merlin came in first, followed by Tilly and Mason, who looked like an odd pair of conjoined twins with the gun connecting them. The trick was going to be separating them. “We’ll wait in the living room,” Mason said. I had no idea what we were waiting for, but Tilly was my most immediate concern.
“Are you okay, Aunt Tilly?” I whispered to her.
“You do realize I can hear you,” Mason said derisively. “You may as well speak up.” He didn’t wait for me to take the lead. He found his way into the living room and pulled Tilly down beside him on the couch, the gun still at her head. Sashkatu, who’d been on his perch there, climbed down Tilly and headed off, presumably to finish his nap in quieter quarters. Merlin and I were directed to the wing chairs facing the couch. I definitely preferred bodyguard Mason to killer-for-hire Mason, not that he was taking a poll.
“Might there be ice cream?” Merlin inquired.
“Shut up!” Mason said. “This isn’t a party.”
“It’s not necessary to have a party in order to enjoy ice cream,” he responded sullenly.
“I told you to shut the hell up or you can change places with Tilly here.” Mason picked up the phone on the end table and tossed it to me. “Dial your boyfriend’s number, then toss it back to me.” Mason wasn’t stupid, he knew that as long as he had a gun to my aunt’s head, I wasn’t going to try anything funny. “I’m waiting,” Mason said tersely.
I tapped in Travis’s number, and tossed it back as he’d instructed. If I’d been more certain of my accuracy, I would have thrown it back with a wallop of telekinetic energy and knocked him out. But I could just as easily have injured my aunt. Although I could only hear Mason’s side of the conversation, it was enough for me to catch the gist of things. Simply put, we were his hostages and our lives would be forfeit if Travis didn’t arrive within the hour, alone and unarmed. If anyone called the police, the clock stopped and the coroner could pick up our bodies.
I wanted to shout to Travis not to come, that he would just make the body
count higher, but I didn’t think our captor was bluffing about pulling the trigger. While we all might be dead soon enough, for the present we were alive and every additional second was a second in which one of us could come up with a brilliant solution to our predicament.
When the doorbell rang again, it was far too soon for it to be Travis, unless he also harbored the building blocks of magick in his DNA. I prayed for it to be the police, but it wasn’t likely they were aware of our distress. In any case, they would never have rung the bell. Tilly and I exchanged anxious glances as Mason propelled her off the couch to answer it. I couldn’t immediately see the newcomer, because he was blocked by the open door, but I heard Mason say, “It’s about time.”
“It couldn’t be helped,” the newcomer said, “there was a three-car pileup on 414.” Something about his voice seemed familiar. I had the answer in seconds, when Mason, Tilly, and Everett Royce came into the living room. What the heck was Royce doing with Mason? Mason worked for Crawford, and I’d seen Royce huddled at dinner with Epps. Were they all part of some bad guy cartel?
Mason and my aunt took the couch again, leaving enough room for Royce on her other side. Tilly had gone from pale to ashen. I asked Mason if I could change places with her and was told to shut up. “All your problems will be over soon enough,” he snapped.
Merlin had been remarkably quiet for some time. I had the feeling he was up to something and could only hope it involved saving us and not asking for ice cream as his last meal. Now that Mason had an accomplice, he was free to use the bathroom and raid my pantry for Oreos. As a captor, Royce wasn’t as exacting as his partner. He kept his gun in the general vicinity of my aunt’s head without pressing it into her skull. I watched Travis’s hour count down on the grandmother clock on the wall.
The doorbell finally rang again, I wanted it to be Travis, but only if he had a plan to rescue us. I didn’t want him to die with us. Since Royce was on guard duty with his own gun, Mason had his in hand when he went to open the door. Travis walked in and suddenly all hell broke loose.
