The Camelot Gambit

by A. J. Scudiere

  They headed through a lobby where people greeted the animals before they greeted Maggie most of the time.

  "Hey, Atinlay!" one of the men crouched down and rubbed the spotted pink pig's head, much to the piggy's delight. Lady Macbeth stood patiently and waited her turn. All of this occurred while Maggie set Eleri up with a badge.

  The badge was for Eleri Miller. She'd pulled out a driver's license to match the name and showed it to the guard at the building. It still felt weird. Weird enough that she almost signed in by writing Eames across the line. I suck at being undercover. It had been so long since she'd been trained or even worked this way.

  Her acting/signature must have been good enough, because she was allowed to follow Maggie on a tour of the place. Eleri used the opportunity for the part she was good at: talking casually while they walked, extracting information without her target knowing it.

  Though she hated thinking of Maggie as a “target,” that’s exactly what she was. Eleri didn’t know yet that Maggie wasn’t their killer. However, she would have put money on it that her new friend wasn’t. The upside of all this was that Curie was a small town. Maggie had been here almost since the day Bennett had cut the ribbon and let the first moving trucks come in. So it was plausible that Maggie knew a lot of what was going on.

  The trick of subtle interrogation was, Eleri had learned, not to bring up the subject. Or if you did, it had to be so artful that it slid neatly into the conversation, which meant she had to be on her toes and wait until the setup came around.

  Luckily, in the meantime, pot farming was fantastically interesting. Maggie had seventeen different varieties growing in different rows. She explained how she was testing whether she could crosspollinate them, create new varieties with higher or lower content of THC. She was operating in conjunction with a small, Japanese pharmaceutical company that was doing a corresponding study on their own soil.

  While Maggie was being asked a question by one of the techs working the plants, she handed Eleri a basket. Clearly, Eleri was not her first visitor, because she’d been neatly packed up and sent to pick apples, pears, and more while Maggie talked business. While Eleri wanted to listen in, it would be too obvious, and she was faced with a fall harvest that was far too bountiful for even the workers here to begin to eat all of it.

  Maggie said they bagged a lot of the extra produce and hung the bags out in front of the building where people could pick up what they wanted. Eleri now had a heavy bag of incredibly fresh fruit. She'd been on the tour for almost an hour when Maggie's phone rang.

  "Hello. Yes. No." Maggie held up a finger indicating Eleri should wait, and then said, "Can you give me a minute? This is my friend, Johanna."

  Eleri, desperately trying not to let her reaction show, felt her back stiffen. Could it be Johanna Schmidt? As she listened in, she hoped so. Westerfield had found them an empty house, but he’d also tried to position both them and Wade in places that would yield the most information. Maybe he’d hit a jackpot.

  When Maggie hung up, she looked disturbed.

  Eleri took the opening. “Are you okay?”

  “Her husband died last week and there’s no cause of death. But …” Maggie took a gulp, then turned her attention from the middle space directly onto Eleri. “You’re a type of human physiologist, right?”

  Eleri nodded, wondering what was coming next.

  It was a jackpot.

  “Well, maybe you can help, because Johanna thinks her husband was murdered.”

  9

  As Eleri came back down the stairs and into the main room of the house, she found Donovan sitting at the table. He'd not been at the CDC very long, and she had to believe that was because there wasn't anything more to find on Marat Rychenkov's body. Still, both of them had held out hope and had signed the order to hang onto the body for a while longer the first time. Even Eleri wanted to believe they’d just get an impulse and find the magic test. It had not happened, though Donovan had been unable to resist looking just one more time.

  As he glanced up, he told her, "I gave up. I signed the order."

  "For?"

  "To let Marat Rychenkov’s body be released to his wife. I expect him to be cremated, given what Johanna Schmitt stated in her requests. So everything will disappear. We've gotten all the evidence we can off of him … or at least I hope we have. I honestly can't make any reasonable argument that we're going to find more if we keep him longer. His wife already has to be suspicious."

  "Yeah, about that," Eleri said, leaning on the back of a chair "She is."

  "She is? And you found this out how?”

  “By doing my job,” Eleri said. Noticing his frown, she commented, "What? Remember, it’s a good thing.”

  It meant Eleri was doing her job and doing it well. Donovan supposedly had an actual job, but Eleri was in town “visiting” and “looking for work.” Her role allowed her a slightly greater level of freedom than he and Wade had, but also more pressure to ferret out information.

  She'd been heading out every day trying to make friends and find what she could. She was going to feel people out. She'd been here just a few days and already managed a little of it. “It means Westerfield put us in the right house. He used what little evidence there was and he used it well. I’m in the right spot. I’m making the right friends.”

  “Good,” Donovan grumbled, “because I’m striking out, and it’s frustrating as hell.”

  Eleri wanted to remind him that he wasn’t failing, but she’d been there, too. She always felt like nothing was working until it came together and they hit that critical mass necessary to see the connections. She was opening her mouth to say so, but Donovan beat her to it. "So, what do you mean Johanna Schmitt is suspicious?"

  "Well, I was out this morning," Eleri told him, "with Maggie and Lady Macbeth from next door."

  "The dog?"

  "Yes, and Maggie’s miniature pig."

  "She has a pig?"

  "She has a pig. Named Atinlay." She pronounced the odd name the way Maggie had, with the stress on the “At.”

  Donovan threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, man …” He gulped the words out between guffaws. “I have had such a shitty morning. But that is gold! We are up to our eyeballs in an unsolvable murder and now the wife is suspicious of it …” he gulped for more air, “But Maggie has a pig named Atinlay!”

  "What's so funny?" Eleri asked. "I don't get it."

  "What do you mean you don't get it?"

  "So, Maggie said the pig was named Atinlay and I looked at her weird, and she said, ‘You'll get it later’."

  "Oh, you don’t get it." Donovan was still laughing, even as the expression crossed his face, understanding why she was not bellowing her laughter along with him. “Maggie has an ig-pay. Named Atin-lay."

  "Ig-pay Atin-lay," Eleri sighed in near pain. "Oh my god. Her pig is named Atinlay. I can't even with this place."

  "I can't either, but apparently all of our ‘can't even’ing isn’t helping, because there's still a murder to solve. And this person is probably way too smart to be caught."

  "Well," Eleri said, trying to come to terms with that, "not every case gets closed."

  “Good God. I don't want it to be this one."

  "You and me both."

  "So tell me how this all works," he said, once he was done wiping the tears from his eyes over the name of Maggie’s pig.

  "Apparently, Maggie and Johanna are friends. Maggie had a project a couple of years ago, and she'd asked Johanna to do some programming and engineering for her. I got her to talk about Marat—about why Johanna might think someone would do that. She said Johanna talked about Marat doing some robotics work to try and make a sniffer or design a harvester for the marijuana. That kind of thing. So Maggie knew Marat, too, and she and Johanna are at least friends.”

  “I think you're right.” Donovan leaned back in his chair, his expression serious again. “I think a lot of people in this town are friendly enough that we can see some links.
Which hopefully will work in our favor.”

  “So far, so good. Anyway, Johanna calls her and says she thinks her husband was murdered. And Maggie passes this on to me, because I heard her side of the phone conversation, and because I have a human physiology background. She thought I might have ideas that the ME didn’t." Eleri sighed. Boy, had Maggie hit the nail on the head without knowing it.

  Donovan was sitting up straight. Eleri finally stepped away from the back of the chair, pulled it out, and sat down into it so they could have a serious, face-to-face conversation. "Tell me why Johanna thinks this," he said.

  "First off, the body has been kept too long for a standard death. She’s smart enough to have figured out that the seven days that he has been on hold—and no one will give her a satisfactory reason why—is suspicious. She is well aware that he's far too young to have died of natural causes or old age. And she kept requesting a cause of death, but the medical examiner won't give her one. In fact, it was listed in the examination as ‘incomplete’ until two days ago. Johanna finally got the report sent to her and saw the ME had ultimately listed the cause of death as ‘none’."

  "Shit," Donovan said. Eleri knew he’d seen that listing on the original paperwork, but neither of them had known the medical examiner was going to eventually sign off on it and hand it back to Mrs. Schmitt that way.

  "Fuck," he muttered, his hands coming back up to his face.

  "I know. Honestly, an ME can get away with handing that to most people. But I suspect these people are going through each other's ashes and find the pacemaker or the bone chip or the filling, and say, 'This isn't my spouse.'"

  Donovan nodded in agreement. The residents of Curie were smart and curious, and Eleri was coming to the conclusion that they were going to keep the case from ever getting closed.

  Just then, they heard a loud crash from outside the house. Both of them jumped reflexively and rushed to the front window. The square nature of the house and orthogonal lines of the neighborhood made it virtually impossible to see what was going on next door without actually going out the front. They had barely glanced out the window before realizing they couldn’t see anything. Both of them bolted toward the front door.

  Eleri and Donovan ended up standing on the front steps of Donovan’s porch and watching as LeDonRic James clanked his way up the front walkway, still in his full suit of medieval armor. The noise might have been lessened had another person not been clanking along behind him, also in full metal regalia. The two were arguing, hands waving as best they could while covered in curved metal. Their voices rang tinny through the helmets, even though the face guards were flipped up.

  Three young women trailed along behind, though two were on their phones and all three seemed uninterested in the argument in front of them.

  Donovan and Eleri waved and listened in.

  LeDonRic turned to the shorter knight and declared, "I had the sword made to order. The details are correct."

  The second, shorter knight replied quickly, "No, they're not. The scrollwork that you requested on the handle did not originate until at least one hundred and fifty years after the era that the suit is from."

  "Suits of this general design existed for over five hundred years. They were around long enough to overlap the distinct style of scrollwork that I chose," LeDonRic replied.

  In fascination, Eleri watched one of the nerdiest arguments she'd ever witnessed, though she had to admit she’d been part of a good number of nerdy arguments herself over the years. However, she was not a history geek, and while she was just barely keeping up, she couldn’t contribute.

  "The era of that armor design ends well before the scrollwork era begins. I'm telling you, you don't have historical accuracy."

  "And you do?" LeDonRic replied. Eleri began to catch on that the person arguing with him was probably a teenager.

  "I'm not aiming for historical accuracy," LeDonRic’s companion said. "I was aiming for fun. You're the one who claimed you were historically accurate when you're not."

  It was then the two of them turned slowly and paid attention to their inattentive audience. The girls had at least laughed along and were now occasionally interjecting information. Two of them had their phones up close to their faces and seemed to be looking up the information to support different sides of the argument.

  "I can't find scrollwork from that era," one said.

  "I'm looking up the hilts of swords. I thought that might be a better search." They weren’t as uninterested as they had appeared at first glance.

  With a sigh, LeDonRic noticed Eleri and Donovan watching his little gaggle of kids having their tiff. He turned to the two of them and offered a smile. "Allow me to make introductions."

  Eleri smiled, but had a question first. "It's barely three o’clock. Aren't these guys supposed to be in school?"

  "School's out early on Wednesday afternoons," one of the young women happily informed her. She had long, dark, curly hair and, on closer inspection, looked a lot like LeDonRic. Eleri was suddenly wondering if he had a daughter. It would explain the kids following him home.

  "It's Club Day," one of the other girls said. She had long blond curls and was tall and thin, willowy even. She was going to grow into that, Eleri thought, unable to ignore the shape of the girl's cheekbones and the long length of her femurs. That kind of assessment just went with the territory of being a forensic scientist. Not a wolf, was the next thought that passed through her head.

  The boy pulled off his helmet with a few more clanks, and LeDonRic continued with introductions. "This is Emersyn and Madisyn," he said, pointing over the heads of the two young women who were as dark skinned as him. Wide smiles abounded as they waved.

  "We're his nieces," said the one who'd just been introduced as Emersyn, as though she needed to explain these things. She looked younger than Madisyn. "It's Emersyn with a Y. Madisyn with a Y, too," she said. And Eleri wondered why the clarification was necessary.

  "These two are their friends, the twins." LeDonRic waved his hands over the heads of the two children who did not look genetically related to him, although Eleri was personally aware that color could be deceiving in that regard.

  She raised an eyebrow wondering if "the twins" was enough of an introduction, but LeDonRic grinned and named them as he pointed. "This is Joule and Cage."

  It was Emersyn who piped up again, "Joule is J-O-U-L-E."

  Eleri nodded. "Good to know." She turned back toward the blond girl. "Like a unit of energy?"

  "Uh-huh. My parents are physicists," she said. "And my brother is a complete nerd."

  Cage elbowed her in the ribs in response. But with the full metal gear on, it gave her a little more of a shove than he might have intended. She made a face behind his back which went fully unnoticed, because in his gear, he was unable to turn around and see it, not quickly enough anyway.

  It was Cage who turned to the newcomers, smiled, and asked if either of them had any knowledge of the scrollwork on the hilts of swords from various historical eras. When both Eleri and Donovan shook their heads no, he thanked them and proceeded to clank his way inside the house behind LeDonRic. The teens waved and followed their leader inside.

  Eleri and Donovan headed back into their own place with stunned looks on their faces. “Well,” Eleri said, “I thought this place was nerdy, but I stand corrected. That was well beyond nerdy. Those were the high school kids.” She caught the expression on Donovan’s face and asked, “What?”

  “I wonder if they beat up the jocks?” he asked. She wanted to laugh, though he seemed to have asked it in all seriousness.

  She pulled out her chair and plopped down. Despite the interruption, she still had information to share with him. “I was telling you that Johanna Schmitt suspects her husband was murdered. But—before we were interrupted—I was getting ready to tell you that she also seemed to think someone had been in her home … and that they’d been looking for something.”

  10

  Donovan spent the n
ext morning on the computer, waiting for Wade to call him back. Wade’s mobility as an investigator was hampered by his cover as a high school physics teacher. Though he was some level of adjunct and only taught the first period of each morning, he also wound up with papers to grade, the occasional teacher meeting to attend, and a variety of general to-do lists that came with the position.

  Donovan lamented that Westerfield had seen fit to give them real jobs. He'd told his boss about it during the call the day before. In response, Westerfield had pointed out, "You don't have a real job. You have a very small portion of what appears to be a real job. I couldn't have three of you going into town and not having employment at all. You've met the people. Are they as bad as I suspect?"

  "Worse," Donovan said, though he wouldn’t have called it bad. "They were having an argument over historical eras and accuracies regarding the hilt of a sword yesterday. And," he'd reported, "they already seemed to have figured out that there was a murder. We're not able to keep that under wraps."

  "Was that on you?" Westerfield asked, straightforward, and Donovan was grateful to be able to answer with a clear, "No."

  Westerfield had asked only a few more questions before letting them go. But, probably as planned, the questions were lingering in Donovan’s brain even now.

  His phone rang, and he was glad to see only the letter “W” appear in bold across his screen. It was the way he'd listed Wade. He’d removed the name and picture he had used before, in hopes that if anybody found the phone, they wouldn't know that he was communicating with someone else in town. He would have to remember to put the settings back when the assignment was done.

  "Hey. Everything okay? Have you figured out anything?" Donovan, for all he had learned, still had no connections and he had his fingers crossed that Wade did.

  "Man, this case is for shit," Wade sighed out the words, dashing his colleague’s hopes. Though they'd talked a few times since Donovan arrived in town, they still hadn’t been able to put together much in the way of evidence or even pertinent information.