Kiss the Witch

by Dana E. Donovan

  So sure, I thought about it. I can say that and know I love Lilith. I only wish sometimes she were more like Ursula on the inside and less like her on the outside. At least then I might not wonder.

  “You know, Carlos,” I said, after what may have seemed like minutes. “I’m not comfortable with where this is going. Look, I love Lilith, and I admit that our relationship is complicated, but that does not mean that I covet thy neighbor’s wife, or in this case, his fiancée.”

  “I bet Dominic would love to hear you say that.”

  “I’ll say that to him, if he asks me like a man.”

  “He won’t do that. He respects you too much.”

  “If he respects me, then why is he worried about me sleeping with Ursula? He knows he can trust me.”

  “Maybe it is not you he mistrusts.”

  “You mean Ursula?”

  “I mean Lilith.”

  “What?”

  “Sure. You know how she’s always getting Ursula to try new things. She is the shepherd and Ursula is her lamb.”

  “No, what you’re saying is that she is a pimp and Ursula is her bitch.”

  “Tony.”

  “Don’t Tony me. You give Ursula no credit at all for being her own woman. Not to mention you give me no credit either. Do you think I would sleep with Ursula behind Spinelli’s back just to––to what? Break her in?”

  “I don’t think that. Dominic does.”

  “Well then set him straight, why don’t you?”

  “Okay, I will. I’ll tell him you think about having sex with Ursula, but that it’s not Lilith’s idea.”

  “What?”

  “I said I will––”

  “I know what you said. Why would you tell him that after what I just told you?”

  “You just told me a minute ago that you think about having sex with Ursula.”

  “No, you asked me if I ever thought about having sex with Ursula, and I said I did. I don’t think about it. I only thought about it.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “No. It is completely different. Look, haven’t you ever thought about having sex with Ursula?”

  “Sure. I thought about it many times. I mean come on. Have you seen her? She’s gorgeous.”

  “All right then. Why don’t you tell Spinelli that? Tell him how you want to have sex with his fiancée.”

  “I’m not going to tell him that.”

  “That’s right, and neither will you tell him what I said. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, this conversation never happened. You hear?”

  He gathered the lines on his forehead and narrowed his sights to a distant point on the road ahead. As we made our approach down Howard Snow’s street, he said, “Dominic and Ursula haven’t done it yet?”

  I pointed to a parking spot outside the cordoned off fire zone half a block from the house. “This will work,” I said. “And no, they have not done it yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because Ursula is not that kind of girl.”

  “Ha.” He threw the car into park and shut the motor off. “Or Dominic’s not that kind of guy.”

  “Maybe. I know he’s nervous about it.”

  “`Bout his wedding night?”

  “Yup.”

  “You think we should get him a hooker, you know so he can practice?”

  “Carlos….”

  “I’ll pay.”

  “Absolutely not. Besides, that’s illegal.”

  “What if she doesn’t charge us?”

  “Oh? You have some frequent flyer miles you need to cash in?”

  He smiled at that. I’m not sure why, but I knew I didn’t want to know.

  We exited the vehicle and made our way to a group of firefighters standing by a red sedan with NCFD markings stenciled on the door. I recognized Larry Scorch (real name, I know) standing among them. Larry is New Castle’s Fire Marshal now, but I knew him when he was still green, a coyote up from the Carolinas, skinny as a matchstick and unpredictable as wildfire. He and the old Tony Marcella were good friends, back when I was still in uniform. Larry would come by the precinct in the old fire truck and pick me up for a ride out to Fenway to take in a Sox game. It was a good racket while it lasted, which was not long. It ended the day Sally’s Nail Salon burned to the ground because new Castle’s only fire truck was dispatched elsewhere and unable to respond to the call. Our respective departments busted us both down a pay grade.

  A year after the salon fire, Larry married Sally. That settled him down some. They had a couple of kids and she opened a new salon, which still stands today. The last time I talked to Larry was at my retirement–slash–going away party. He told me to call sometime. I promised I would, like I promised everyone I would.

  I never did.

  “Larry.” said Carlos, his hand outstretched as we approached. The loose huddle of men broke, leaving Larry open to receive us.

  “Rodriquez,” he said. They shook. “Long time no see. What’s up?”

  “Not a lot. Hey, do you know Tony’s kid? He’s a detective like his dad. Tony?” he presented me with a sweep of his hand. “Larry Scorch.”

  “Marcella’s boy, huh?”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

  “I don’t believe it.” He grasped my hand and squeezed it tightly. “Tony’s kid.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He shook his head, displaying a skepticism I have come to know well in reacquainting with old acquaintances. “I didn’t know Tony had a kid.”

  “Don’t think Tony knew, either,” said Carlos, and the two laughed. “But here he is.”

  “Yes, here he is,” said Larry. I saw a familiar smile inch across his face. “You know, you do look like your old man.”

  He peered into my eyes the way Lilith does sometimes when she knows I am lying. I get that often now when introduced to someone I already know well. That is, someone the old Tony knows well. People like Officer Brittany Olson, now Corporal, who took one look at me upon my initial return and saw right through me, made me think Lilith and Ursula were not the only witches in my life. And Jack Cruz, New Castle’s medical examiner. He did it, too. I actually got the chills when Jack looked into my eyes. With a simple blink, he saw down into my soul and then gave a nod and a wink for me to carry on, as if never missing a beat. I remember he told me to have Tony senior call him. I told him I would, but we both knew that would never happen.

  And now here was Larry Scorch doing the same thing, digging deep into my soul, peeling back the façade of an old man hiding behind a young man’s eyes. He said to Carlos. “Yes sir, he does look just like Tony did forty years ago.”

  “It’s uncanny,” Carlos remarked. “I tell him that all the time. I say, Tony, you look exactly like your old man. Don’t I say that, Tony?”

  I smiled politely, wanting so badly to move things along. “You do,” I said, and I pressed my finger to my watch. “But you know we have to hurry. We have that thing to do.”

  “Thing?”

  “Yes.” I stitched my lips tightly and drew a bead down on him that should have hurt him.

  “Of course. Yes. We have that thing back at the ahm….” He looked at Larry and gestured over his shoulder. “Back at the office.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “So, if you don’t mind, can you tell us what happened here?”

  Larry backed away a measured step, taking a deep breath and pulling on his suspenders to hike up his pants. He gave a nod toward the smoldering rubble that was once Snow’s house. “It’s early,” he said, “but preliminary reports suggest a gas main rupture.” He sampled the air with a sniff like a bloodhound catching scent of something on the wind. “Smell it?”

  I didn’t smell it.

  “I smell it,” said Carlos.

  He didn’t smell it, either.

  “Anyone hurt?” I asked. “The home owner?”

  Larry turned to the crowd of onlookers gathered on the safe side of the yellow perimeter ta
pe strung across the street. He pointed out a young woman in a tan sweat suit and running shoes. “That one there. The hot jogger with the tits. She told us she saw the owner about an hour ago come out to get his paper.”

  “He went back in, did he?”

  “He did.”

  “And he hasn’t come out again?”

  “Not in one piece.”

  I pointed at the vehicle in the driveway. The windows were shattered from the explosion, but it sat far enough from the house to have survived the worst of the blast. “It that his car?”

  “According to your boys, it is.”

  I said to Carlos, “Let’s tow it in.”

  “You got it, Tony.”

  “Larry,” I said, “Will you–” He interrupted me with a disapproving glare. “I mean Chief Scorch; will you keep us apprised of further developments? That is, if you find a victim inside or anything suspicious?”

  He gave Carlos a classic sour puss. “He’s just like his old man, isn’t he?”

  Carlos feathered a shrug to make it look ambiguous. “He is,” he said. “I think they partnered him with me because no one else would have him.”

  “What?” I fell back and gave them both an eye-full of eat me. “Who partnered with whom?”

  Larry reached out and gave Carlos a good-old-boy pat on the shoulder. “Look, I got to go, but listen. Keep your eye on this one.” He nodded conspicuously at me. “It’s not too late to turn him around.”

  “I’m on it,” said Carlos.

  And like that, Larry Scorch was gone, not even so much as a goodbye to me. I remembered then what an ass he was when we were both still just a couple of punks rookies with a fire truck and a gun. Two more pitiful examples of over-compensating the phallic effect, I could not imagine.

  Back in the car, I asked Carlos to call Spinelli and have him meet us at the Perc for lunch. I felt like I owed Spinelli that much after getting him upset about the upcoming cleansing ritual thing. Besides, I think we do our best work when we all sit down together and discuss things openly.

  At the Perc, I waited until we placed our orders and the beverages came before putting my thoughts out there.

  “This is looking like much more than a simple case of robbery,” I said. “What do you two think?”

  Spinelli said, “I agree. It smacks of corporate espionage, conspiracy and cover-up.”

  “Not to mention murder,” said Carlos. “I don’t know about you, but with Howard Snow getting blown up this morning, that makes six dead people from one company in three weeks. I don’t believe that’s a coincidence.”

  “All right then, so let us pull together the big picture. Three people from Biocrynetix Laboratories die in bizarre accidents in the three weeks leading up to the break-in and robbery of a carefully guarded facility, in which the item stolen is so secretive, the CEO doesn’t want the crime reported to the press.”

  “Right.” Spinelli said, stacking three sugar packets on the tablecloth to one side of his drink, and another three behind it. “Then the second three employees die in equally bizarre accidents right after the robbery. If I have to go by gut instincts alone, I would say that all six were somehow involved in the robbery.”

  “How do you figure?”

  He pointed to the first three sugar packets. “These three all worked outside the research labs at what I call logistical vantage points.” He peeled the first packet from the pile. “This one, we’ll call Jake Gerardi, the guy that drowned in his swimming pool, he worked security. He could have made gate keys for anyone, shared pass codes and issued ID badges to any number of perpetrators. Once he did all that, he was no longer needed.”

  “Wow,” said Carlos. “How did you know that?”

  Spinelli came back a bit wounded for the question. “What do you mean? Do you think I just sit around waiting for you to call me when you two are out in the field? I do things–lots of things.”

  “I know you do.” I said. “Carlos knows, too. Don’t you, Carlos?”

  “Sure, I know you don’t just sit around. You do stuff. I was just saying.”

  “Go on, Dominic. What else you got.”

  I watch his face wrinkle in an unflattering way, perhaps not wanting to let it go at that. I suspected he was still uneasy about my thing with Lilith and Ursula, and if I thought I could take him along with me, I would. But that would mean I would also have to take Carlos, and that was just not going to happen.

  Dominic removed the second of the front three sugar packs and placed it to the side.

  “Melvin Brookfield, the poor slob that broke his neck on the escalator; he was a paper pusher. With his access to certain records, invoices, status reports, etcetera, he could not only put a dollar value to the project’s worth, but also anticipate the final run up to the first production. With that knowledge, he could initiate a strike before any real volume of the product was produced, alleviating the need to carry it off with the rest of the secrets.”

  Carlos and I exchanged tantalizing glances. The scenario Spinelli laid out seemed impeccably placed. “So you’re saying these first three were used like, what, reconnaissance for the actual heist?”

  “In a way, yes. Expendable though they were.”

  “And McSweeney? What was her unfortunate raison d'être?”

  “Other than her need for greed? Miss McSweeney’s only asset to the robbers may have been what made her a liability to them, as well. She was J.P. Ferguson’s secretary. She could not only advised the robbers when Ferguson was out of town on business, but also make sure that those business flights got booked on times and days of the robber’s choosing.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said, as I pulled Ferguson’s plane tickets from my pocket to show the two. “Ferguson was just saying this morning how unusual it was for his secretary to book him on a red eye.”

  Spinelli said, “Can I see that?” I gave it to him. He studied it briefly before slipping it into his pocket. “You know, maybe it’s no coincidence she wanted him out of town last night.”

  “Hmm, maybe. So, let us assume this conspiracy theory is a go for the moment. You have expendable pre-robbery participants: Gerardi, Brookfield and McSweeney. Tell me about the other three.”

  “The brains behind the whole thing,” said Spinelli. “First, you have Williams, the executive program coordinator. He is on top of everything below Ferguson. He knows when the big things are happening, when testing takes place, the results of those tests, perhaps more importantly the failures of those tests. He’s the man to go to when the operation hits T-minus now and go.”

  “I thought that was Brookfield’s job,” said Carlos. “He was the one reading all the reports and could initiate the plan.”

  “Yes, but he was just one cog in the wheel.”

  “Seems like a useless cog if you already have Williams.”

  “Let’s hear him out,” I said. “Go on, Dominic.”

  He fingered the sugar packet representing Williams and pushed it aside. “Keep in mind, there is plenty of room for interpretation. It’s possible that any one or all of these people were not in on the heist, but murdered for what they knew or found out.”

  “That’s right. That’s why I want to hear the rest of your theory. So please.”

  Carlos took the pack of sugar representing Williams and placed it on the edge of the table. Without waiting for us to ask what he was doing, he pushed it off the edge, onto the floor. I looked at him curiously. “Why did you do that?”

  Without smiling, he said, “That was Williams going over the balcony.” He looked down at the packet on the floor. “Probably messier than that.”

  I slapped his arm just as he was about to take a sip of his iced tea, causing him to spill some on his lap. “As messy as that, maybe?”

  “Hey guys. Food’s up,” said Dominic.

  We set the conversation aside and allowed our server to place our orders on the table. I had the tuna melt, Spinelli the Philly with cheese and the rest went to Carlos: a cheeseburge
r with curly fries, garden salad, bowl of French onion soup and a basket of chicken fingers. I mention this so that you will know why Carlos had nothing more to contribute to the conversation, except of course for the inevitable pass the ketchup please.

  After settling in with our first bites, I asked Dominic to continue laying out his theory. He picked up where he left off by knocking aside the next packet of sugar from the stack representing Delaney.

  “Here we have Rick Delaney. Delaney was operations and logistics manager. Now, if you ask me, I think this is the guy that arranged for the actual break-in. As operation and logistics manager, he was in perfect position to allow an unauthorized entry into the building. He had the security codes, computer passwords, gate passes…everything you need to get in and out of the building without anyone seeing him.”

  “That’s good,” I said, and I watched Carlos scoop up the sugar packet that was Delaney and empty it into his tea. That left one packet remaining. I pointed to it. “Tell me about Snow.”

  “Ah, yes. Howard Snow. Senior research supervisor. I suppose if you were looking for someone who could negotiate terms for the clandestine transfer of a super-secret commodity to a rival company, you could not do better than Howard Snow.”

  “Then why kill him?”

  “Snow? Think about it. Even after the bad guys get the secrets and physical product in hand, Snow still has the information in his head to reanimate the project. It would be like stealing the atom bomb secrets from the Manhattan project after the first bomb was already produced. If you still have Oppenheimer, you still have the bomb.”

  “You think it’s a case of kill the messenger?”

  “It’s possible, but I have to tell you. If this is a case of simple corporate espionage, someone sure went to a lot of trouble to cover his tracks.”

  “It’s not so simple then, is it?”

  “Not hardly, which still makes me think there is a lot more to this case than meets the eye.”

  I pointed at the sugar packs. “If these people were all murdered, and their murders made to look like accidents, then we’re working with professionals here.”