Magicide

by Carolyn V. Hamilton

  A hideous nausea threatened to erupt from her stomach, and she fought it with what fatigued control she had left. All she wanted to do was to go home to a hot, cleansing shower. She could wash her body, but she could never wash the images from her mind.

  They made their way through throngs of people still milling around on the other side of the yellow tape as if they themselves were magnetically chained to the roller coaster disaster.

  Pizzarelli regarded them through narrowed eyes. “Wasn’t it Houdini who said that people don’t want to see other people die, but they love to be there when it happens?”

  CHAPTER 10

  Tuesday, August 9, 1:00 a.m.

  One leg of Artie Lundgren’s slacks was torn, and blood seeping from the cut above his left eyebrow hampered his vision. He moved his lumbering body in a daze. Around him buzzed the animated voices of police, paramedics, coroner assistants, technicians, event support staff. Their words assaulted his ears like a harsh foreign language; he couldn’t understand anything being said.

  He counted four twisted, blood-spattered bodies on the ground. He couldn’t look at their faces; one of them might be Becky. He hardly heard the moans of technicians and assistants who, like himself, had been injured by flying debris from the destroyed roller coaster car.

  Feeling uncontrollably dizzy, Artie sat down hard on the pavilion pavement. Eighty pounds over what he’d weighed in high school, he still didn’t make a soft landing. Sharp pain exploded in his right hip.

  The combination of oppressive heat and bright lights and the horror of the accident sickened him. A new wave of nausea threatened to erupt. He held one hand to the side of his head, as if the weight of it was too much to bear. With the back of his other hand he wiped congealing blood from his left eye.

  “Wow, man.”

  Artie raised his head, recognized the production engineer who managed the truck of technical equipment for the laser beam and other apparatus for the magic effect. Dressed in jeans and a black Maxwell Tour 2006 tee shirt, the young man hovered above him, a stupefied expression on his face.

  “Hi, Frick,” he murmured.

  The production engineer averted his eyes. His hands hung at his side like he didn’t know what to do with them, and he shifted from one foot to the other. “I thought you were one of the committee.” His voice was so soft Artie wondered if he imagined the words rather than heard them.

  Artie thought of the rest of the committee, the other five people besides himself chosen to ride in the roller coaster car for the escape: John, Ramon—the out-of-work bartender—Billy Ray, Si, Ethan—the youngest of them. SAG extras paid $75 a day for the duration of timing rehearsal and event. They’d ridden in the same seats in the car for four days during the time testing. There’d been a lot of downtime, sitting in the car waiting for each run to begin, and he’d gotten to like each of them.

  Now their faces floated in front of him, their eyes accusing him of an unspeakable act.

  “Well...yeah, I was.” Artie knew they both had the same thoughts: Why are you sitting here, alive? Why aren’t you dead, like the others? “At the last minute, I had a terrible attack of food poisoning. Couldn’t move from the toilet.” His voice faltered. “I-I put Becky on so we wouldn’t lose the money.”

  “Jeez, Artie, your wife...I’m sorry.”

  “Is everybody...?”

  “Yeah… they’re dead, man.” Frick put a hand on Artie’s shoulder. “Hey man, you’re bleeding. Let me get you to a med truck.”

  “I’m okay. I can take care of it. Lemme sit here for a few minutes.” Artie needed to get up and find Becky, but he couldn’t make his fat body move. He felt paralyzed by her image, the sound of her voice assuring him he’d be all right if he stayed in the bathroom.

  “You sure? You got some serious cuts there.”

  “Not serious. I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay, man.” Frick walked away, shaking his head.

  Artie covered his head with his arms so that no one would see him cry.

  CHAPTER 11

  Tuesday, August 9, 8:30 a.m.

  On Tuesday morning Cheri was halfway to the South Central Command when she remembered that over the weekend the location had been moved. Every year Las Vegas grew so fast that Metro services and personnel were strained to keep up with an ever-expanding population. A central police station like there’d been in the forties and fifties didn’t exist today; departments were scattered all over the city and county in separate buildings.

  She twisted her police-issue Ford Explorer SUV into a u-turn on Frank Sinatra Drive and drove all the way back to Russell to cross over the freeway. Where had she read that it takes seventeen times to ingrain a new habit into your head? She’d blame this directional driving error on that instead of family distraction.

  She’d been thinking about Tom’s situation at school. She never saw him do homework and she couldn’t get any information out of him about how his classes were going. He never brought friends home—never even mentioned friends—and he’d taken to wearing all black. Black! Since when was black a color of choice in the desert?

  She’d called the school counselor and made an appointment to bring him in to meet on Friday morning. Her son’s problem had to be his growing obsession with magic. Last year he’d been joined at the hip with his computer.

  That hadn’t worried her too much because, like the internet porn unit advised, she kept the computer in the living room where she could monitor—when she was home—what he did online.

  Now she suspected he thought a high school diploma wasn’t a prerequisite for a career as a magician. She suspected he was in for a rude awakening.

  By the time she parked the Explorer in the shade behind the new building, it was exactly nine a.m. She liked the new location for the detective offices, a sleek one-story building of Arizona sandstone blocks surrounded by desert landscaping that included a few mesquite trees among the barrel cactuses and pampas grass. Now, if she could just remember to drive straight there without going halfway to the old office first…

  From the passenger seat she grabbed her duty bag containing extra cuffs, report forms, bottled water and two apples and entered the building.

  “Yo, Raymer.” Athenia Soldana stood just inside the door, a thick file in her arms. As the department’s other female detective, she completed the—accidental, for sure—gender balance of two men and two women homicide detective sergeants who worked under Detective Lieutenant Satch Washington. Cheri didn’t count the young man who was their Investigative Specialist.

  “Morning. Que pasa?”

  Soldana crunched her shoulders, making her look even shorter than usual. “That Maxwell thing last night must’ve been a horror.”

  “Not a pretty sight,” Cheri agreed. She nodded at the fat file the other detective held. “How’s Jimmy Doe?”

  “Not good. Boy’s been dead now since early July. The autopsy report showed his blood was bright cherry red, and toxicology confirmed the presence of cyanide as well as Rohypnol.”

  “The date rape drug. Easy to get roofies on the street.”

  Soldana nodded. “The Rohypnol would give him temporary amnesia, relax him, impair his motor skills. Then it would be easy when the killer got him to the kill spot to give him a Jonestown.”

  “Kool-Aid and cyanide. Fast-acting.”

  “The cyanide killed him before his heart was removed.”

  “His heart? Good God.” Cheri wondered if the various natures of crime would ever cease to startle her. “Was the boy sexually assaulted?”

  “Nope. All the trauma was in the chest area.” Soldana rolled her head from side to side to loosen knots in her shoulders. “With most underage kidnap victims dead within three hours after they’re taken—no witness left to identify the kidnapper—we’re at a dead end. No tire prints, no shoe prints, no fingerprints, no other DNA, nobody to interview, nada.”

  She tilted her head in the direction of the briefing room. “Lieutenant’s in there with the P
izza.”

  Cheri knew Athenia was disturbed about not being able to solve this case of the boy’s body found in the desert. No matter how professional you were in this business, some cases got to you. Athenia could also be obsessive-compulsive. She’d once stalked a suspect with an air-tight alibi until the man had become so mad he’d screamed the clue that broke the case.

  “You’ll hang in there, girl,” she said. “You’ll find the killer.” She left Athenia standing in the hall and entered the briefing room.

  Cheri liked the head of homicide, Detective Lieutenant Satch Washington. Sure, he was rough around the edges, but in a way that worked just fine in his chosen career.

  Washington, with his freckled, desert-sunned skin had put in thirty-plus years on the force. You had to respect a cop who’d survived the merger that made the Clark County Sheriff’s Department and the Las Vegas Police Department into one big—if not always happy—family: Metro.

  Washington was the cop’s cop. He kept his hair buzz-short and his body in top shape with regular workouts at the gym and the firing range. Retirement wasn’t in his vocabulary.

  As soon as she stepped inside—before she’d even said good morning—she sensed a problem. Her boss, shirt sleeves rolled up, looked like he’d eaten a sour donut. He threw some papers on the table and ran a hand through his hair. He let out a low groan. “Not this morning…”

  Beads of sweat glistened on Pizzarelli’s bald spot. “I’m not ready for this, either.”

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, her face warmer than usual.

  “We’ll make this brief,” Washington said, “so we can all get out of here. What you got on the Maxwell murder?”

  Pizzarelli muttered to her, “Air conditioning’s out on this end of the building.”

  She saw both men suffering from the rising heat in the room. Outside, the August sun promised a scorcher.

  “So far, we’ve got five key people to interview,” she said. “We spoke to Maxwell’s personal coordinator and his technical advisor last night. There’s an ex-wife, a son and a girlfriend, all magicians. No parents. They’re deceased.”

  “There’s a protégé, too,” Washington said. “A young magician named Dayan Franklyn. Add him to your list.” He wrote the name on a piece of paper and handed it to her. She looked at the name and tapped it into her palm pilot. “If you can find anything in that new-fangled contraption.”

  “Works for me.” She closed it and stood up.

  “Yeah, well, take the paper anyway.” Washington pushed it in her direction and she dutifully picked it up. He ran the back of his hand across the side of his sweating face. “Go. Timing is everything.”

  They left the room and Cheri said to her partner, “The other day Tommy told me something about Regine, the girlfriend.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She’s had some kind of extensive surgery, more than just cosmetic, he thinks. He read about it in an underground newspaper on magic.”

  As they passed the police reception desk they were hailed by a weary voice. “You’ve got someone waiting to see you,” the receptionist said, shifting her heavy body, her face red from the heat. She squinted at a clipboard. “Name’s Artie Lundgren.” She nodded toward interview room two. “He’s in there.”

  When they entered the interview room, Pizzarelli didn’t bother to close the door behind him. Everyone who could leave his post had deserted the building, and they needed all the air circulation they could get.

  The heavy-set man sitting at the table looked up. Dark circles supported blood-shot eyes, and limp, mouse-colored hair hung forward in front of his ears. His Madras-plaid shirt looked like he’d slept in it for days.

  “I’m Detective Raymer. This is Detective Pizzarelli. What can we do for you?”

  “I can’t sleep. I‘ve come to turn myself in.”

  “Why can’t you sleep, Mr. Lundgren?”

  “It’s all my fault.” He clutched his hands together with such force that his knuckles turned white. “If I hadn’t gotten sick, Becky would still be alive...and Maxwell.” His voice became a whisper. “I’m responsible for all those deaths.”

  Pizzarelli took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his perspiring forehead and asked, “Why? Start at the beginning and tell us what happened?”

  Lundgren spoke, his voice hoarse. “I’m a trombone player, a member of the musicians’ union. Between gigs, I’m a SAG extra. Got hired to be one of the committee in the roller coaster car. I got a pass for Becky—my wife—to be backstage for Maxwell’s performance. When I got sick I couldn’t get out of the bathroom. In the beginning they were really clear about the weight thing.”

  He paused and took a ragged breath and dropped his chin to his chest. “That’s why it was important we always sit in the same seat. But Becky said she couldn’t see how it would make that much difference. She said nobody would notice if she went in my place. They never called us by name, you know, only by number.”

  “So you’re saying the difference in the weight caused the accident?” Pizzarelli asked.

  Lundgren convulsed into shoulder-shaking sobs. Cheri pushed a tissue box across the table. He took a handful and blew his nose, a hoarse, choking sound.

  “How’s that work?”

  Lundgren swallowed hard. With his hands he crushed the tissue into a tight, wet ball. “The difference between her weight and mine—with her in the car the weight was lighter, making the car go faster on the track. So it threw off the timing for when it would get to Maxwell’s position.”

  He took another tissue from the box and blew his nose again. “It’s boring, waiting backstage for a performance,” he moaned. “If only I hadn’t eaten the hamburger...”

  “A hamburger?” With one hand Cheri swiped sweat from under her chin. The room felt like the proverbial oven. God, how long would it take them to fix the air-conditioning in this building?

  “We weren’t supposed to eat before the rehearsals. They told us not to eat anything for four hours before the performance—that was after eight o’clock. But I was kinda jammed that day, y’ know? I hadda skip dinner and I was really starving. Then this guy comes around with a tray of burgers and says it’s been okayed, that we could each have one. Nobody else was hungry—I was the only one.”

  Lundgren balled up his second tissue and laid it on the table next to the first one. “It wasn’t a very good hamburger. I only ate half of it and threw the other half away.”

  “What time was it when the guy came with the hamburgers?” Pizzarelli asked, wiping the back of his neck with his handkerchief.

  “About eleven-fifteen, I think. I got this new watch. Becky gave it to me for my birthday”—he touched the face of the watch on his wrist and his voice choked—“It’s so nice, so sweet of her. I was looking at it pretty often.”

  “And you think the hamburger made you sick?” Cheri asked.

  Lundgren nodded. “Food poisoning, I’m sure of it. Lots of food handlers never wash their hands, y’ know, even though the signs say they have to. I was lucky the bathroom was close by.”

  “Did this hamburger guy wear a uniform for a catering company?” Pizzarelli asked. “Had you seen him before? Did you know him?”

  Lundgren let out such a heavy sigh that his body deflated. “No. I don’t remember. Maybe...a white jacket.”

  “What did he look like? Black, White, Latin? Glasses? Mustache? Anything particular about him?” Cheri asked.

  “Tall like you. White. No glasses or mustache. Come to think of it, he had on a white hat, so I couldn’t tell you what color his hair was. God, I just want to sleep. Are you going to arrest me now?”

  Pizzarelli shook his head. “Mr. Lundgren, we don’t think you did anything illegal. You can go home. We’ll call you if we have more questions.” He held out a business card. “Would you call us if you think of anything else about the man who gave you the hamburger?”

  Lundgren shrugged and took the card. In the heat of the room Cheri smelled his distress
. “Mr. Lundgren, do you have a family doctor?” He nodded and reached for another tissue. “Why don’t you go home and call him, tell him what you told us. Maybe he can suggest something to help you sleep.”

  Like a man who weighed three hundred pounds, Lundgren groaned as he pulled himself out of the chair. Cheri’s lungs felt constricted in the heavy air as she escorted Artie Lundgren out of the building.

  In the break room she poured cold water into a styrofoam cup, and carried it back to the office. Pizzarelli sat at his desk crunching on a carrot and rolling his new swivel chair in testing circular movements.

  “Well, well, well.” He leaned back and patted the arms.

  “Thought we were blowing this place till they fix the air-conditioning,” she said. She took a swallow of the water and saw Pizzarelli smile. “What? What’re you thinking? About Lundgren?”

  “Not Lundgren.” He pointed a pen at the telephone on his desk. “And not what I’m thinking, it’s what just happened.”

  Cheri opened her mouth and made an impatient gesture with her hand. “Yeah?”

  “There’s a DVD.” He appeared to pause for effect.

  The heat contracted her throat and she felt suddenly dehydrated. She really needed to drink more water, less coffee. “Oh? Blockbuster or home-grown?” She took another sip of the water, but it didn’t help her general heat-bloated feeling.

  “We got a call. Anonymous. Caller says this thing shows Maxwell involved in some magic hanky-panky.”

  Cheri’s left eyebrow raised. “Hanky-panky? His words or yours?”

  “Well, you know...” Pizzarelli made twirling motions in the air with his hand.

  “Yours.” She smiled and stared into the Styrofoam cup. “Think I need coffee,” she murmured. She looked around for a wastebasket, but wastebaskets hadn’t been delivered yet, either, so she set the empty cup on the desk. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here. You can tell me about it in an air-conditioned car.”