That was why his hand shook so badly as he lifted his Swiss army knife to cut through it.
Lassiter didn’t want to break the seal. He was the one who ordered it slapped on the door to the showroom at the Fortress of Magic, and he was the one who vowed to track down and incarcerate anyone who even thought about tampering with it. Because as much as he wanted access to the magician’s machinery inside, he knew a judge had sent down an order prohibiting anyone from examining it. And even though Lassiter had strong reason to believe the judge was motivated by his own personal issues and not by the rational pursuit of justice, the detective could not use that suspicion as an excuse to ignore the order. To do so would be to invite anarchy.
Instead, Lassiter put all his years of experience to work for him. If he couldn’t study the scene, he’d find another way to solve the crime.
Only there wasn’t another way.
It had been thirty-six hours since Lassiter had finished interviewing the last of the magicians, and as he stared at the black print on the electric green seal, his head was still pounding from the experience. It wasn’t the fact that none of them knew how the green giant had disappeared that bothered him. He expected that. It wasn’t even that none of them would admit knowing anything about the dead man. It was possible that they really had never met him, or that if they had, they weren’t used to seeing him floating dead in a tank of water, and the new circumstances made recognition impossible.
What was making his head continue to throb was the way that each of the self-styled magicians insisted that P’tol P’kah was a talentless hack who wasn’t capable of shuffling a deck of cards, and whose disappearance was the most obvious kind of trickery. And yet every time he asked one of them to give him a clue how the missing man had accomplished his disappearance, they all suddenly swore an oath of allegiance to something they called the Magician’s Code. Apparently that was a sacred oath that forbade them to reveal the secrets of a fellow prestidigitator’s tricks.
Right.
Carlton Lassiter hadn’t become head detective of the Santa Barbara Police Department because he was stupid or gullible. He had clawed his way to that position by virtue of his superior intellect and keen instincts, along with a city budget crisis that resulted in a hiring freeze shortly after his employment, eliminating many potential competitors. He knew when he was being lied to, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.
The magicians were all lying about this “code.” There was one simple reason they wouldn’t tell Lassiter how the green guy had achieved his escape: They didn’t have a clue. It didn’t take a detective as good as him to hear the jealousy in their voices when they described their rival as a fraud and a hack. If any one of them had a hint how the Martian Magician had pulled off his stunt, it would have been all over the Internet before Lassiter had a chance to ask his first question.
If the secret behind the miraculous disappearance was the greatest mystery Lassiter had to deal with, his headache probably would have subsided to a dull throb. But right now everything about this case was conspiring to constrict the blood vessels in his scalp. Even questions that should have been easy were turning out to be unanswerable.
To start with, there was the dead guy’s identity. Lassiter had personally supervised Detective O’Hara as she ran his fingerprints last night. He would swear in court that she had done everything right. But the system had been silent ever since. He sent the prints through every database he had ever used, and it kept coming up blank. Apparently the victim had never been arrested, which while frustrating, wasn’t necessarily surprising. But as far as the computer systems could discover, he’d never applied for a passport, requested a driver’s license, or opened a bank account anywhere in the country. He put the dead man’s image through a facial recognition program and didn’t come up with a single match.
Lassiter was a strong enough detective that he had long since learned how to fall back on his own skills when the computers failed, as they so often did. He studied every piece of the dead man’s clothing, searching for any clues to his identity. But there were no personal possessions in any of the pockets, and the clothes themselves were all national brands in stock sizes. They could have come from any store in any city in any state.
Lassiter had hoped the hat would provide a significant lead. After all, you don’t see that many people wearing bowlers in the United States. But the reason for that turned out to be not that no one bought them, but that they rarely took them out of their closet. The hat in question, technically a wool felt derby with a sixteen-ligne grosgrain band and grosgrain-bound brim edges, could have been manufactured by any of a dozen companies and purchased on any of a hundred Web sites, not to mention uncounted retail establishments, and purchased by any of tens of thousands of customers. If its late owner hadn’t removed the label, they might have been able to narrow down its provenance, but without the tag, it was hopeless.
The body didn’t offer any more clues to its identity. Its former occupant was a forty-year-old white male, five foot six inches tall, 195 pounds. He was in good health, and there were no drugs or alcohol in his system. Cause of death was drowning. Analysis of the contents of his lungs confirmed that it was the same water that filled the tank, matched to a sample that had soaked into Lassiter’s slacks when he had knelt by the corpse.
And that was making Lassiter’s head hurt, too, because he couldn’t figure out how the death had happened. This guy was young and relatively fit. He wasn’t drunk or drugged. So how did he end up drowning in a water-filled telephone booth? How did he get in there, and why couldn’t he get out? And how did he drown so quickly?
Lassiter knew there was only one cure for his headache. He needed to see that tank. If he could only figure out how it worked, he was certain the rest of the answers would fall into place. Unfortunately, it was in a locked room in his least favorite place on Earth, sequestered behind crime scene tape and protected by a court order.
He’d spent most of the morning on the phone, searching for a judge willing to overturn the order forbidding him to examine the tank. Many of them sounded sympathetic at first, but when they heard it was Albert Moore they were being asked to reverse, they backed off. Apparently Moore had a reputation as a street fighter, and few were willing to risk his anger. A couple of jurists didn’t seem to mind that challenge, but when Lassiter mentioned that it was Benny Fleck who’d requested the sanction, they all suddenly found new reasons to refuse his request.
Lassiter had learned many valuable lessons during his years on the force. He had studied the Reid Technique to master the three components of interrogation. He had taught himself how to maneuver his way through an uncooperative bureaucracy. He had even figured out how to get the mechanics at the SBPD to make sure the air conditioner in his unmarked sedan would keep working through the worst of the Santa Barbara summer. But the most important thing he’d learned was that if a murder isn’t solved within the first forty-eight hours, the odds of the case ever being closed plummeted to almost nothing.
The man in the tank had been dead for thirty-six of those forty-eight hours and Lassiter was no closer to finding his killer. The clock was ticking and its hands were dripping blood.
When Lassiter left the station in his unmarked sedan—the air conditioner blowing a stream of cool into his face—he told himself he was just going for a drive to clear his head. When he pulled up in the parking lot down the hill from the Fortress of Magic, he pretended there were some rooms he might not have checked out thoroughly the night of the drowning.
But now that he was standing outside the closed showroom, the blade trembling over the paper seal, there was no way he could hide from what he had really intended all along. He was going to violate the principles that had driven him his entire life. He was going to flout that court order, slash through the seal, and find out what trick the missing magician had used to make his escape.
Lassiter pressed the tip of the blade into the crack between door and jamb, just above the top edg
e of the seal. One swift move and it would be done—the same motion as shaking someone’s hand, that was all. And if the hand he was shaking belonged to chaos, anarchy, and the destruction of the rule of law, he was willing to do it as long as that would keep a killer from walking free.
Lassiter’s mind sent an order through his neural pathways down to his arm. Time to move. If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly, he quoted to himself. Lassiter couldn’t remember where that phrase came from, but he was pretty sure that whoever said it had some unpleasant job to complete and felt much better when he’d gotten it all over with. His mind repeated its order. But his unconscious seemed to be blocking it. His hand trembled, but no more. Irritated at himself, the detective placed his other hand on top of the one holding the knife and pressed down.
The knife hand pressed back up.
This was unacceptable. Lassiter had made the decision to break the commandments he lived by for the greater good. How dare one of his body parts rebel like this? Did his hand really believe it was better than the rest of him? He pressed down harder on the knife hand. The paper at the top of the seal began to crinkle down. Another second and it would be done.
“Carlton, stop!”
Lassiter cursed under his breath. It was bad enough his arm was trying to reverse his decision. Now his conscience was speaking to him like Jiminy Cricket. Well, he’d spent his entire life following the orders of his extremely controlling conscience, and this time it could get out of his way—even if it did speak in a melodious, oddly familiar female voice.
“Yo, Lassie, give it up!”
Lassiter froze. He was willing to accept the concept that his conscience would actually speak to him in words. But there was no way his own personal conscience, a resident of his own personal brain, would ever speak in that voice. He turned to see that Detective Juliet O’Hara had come up behind him, and she was followed by Shawn and Gus. For some reason Gus was carrying a dinged-up scuba tank.
“You have to leave this area, Detective,” Lassiter said with all the sternness he could muster. “For the sake of your career, you must not be a part of this.”
“That’s very generous, Carlton—”
“Generous?” Lassiter interrupted. “I am about to violate every precept to which we swore loyalty when we donned the proud blue of the Santa Barbara Police Department. When this case is over, I will have to turn myself over to Internal Affairs. They will strip me of my badge, my gun, and my honor, and I will spend the rest of my unhappy life working as a security guard at malls and multiplexes.”
“That could be pretty sweet,” Shawn said. “Just think, if we bought a ticket to one movie, you could let us sneak in to all the others.”
“Only on weekdays, though,” Gus said. “We don’t want to get you in trouble if there are sell-outs.”
Lassiter was so used to Shawn’s and Gus’ callous disregard for anyone but themselves that their obvious pleasure at the tragic consequences of his noble self-sacrifice didn’t surprise him. But he was shocked to his core when he noticed his partner stifling a smile.
“Is this funny to you?” Lassiter said. “I am one knife stroke away from ending my career to further justice.”
“It’s okay, Carlton,” O’Hara said. “We’ve come to help you.”
“You can’t. This is my task alone. Like the poor Hob-bit carrying that ring through Mordor to the Crack of Doom, I must bear my burden and do—”
Shawn reached past Lassiter, and the detective saw a quick glint of metal. Shawn stepped back. Lassiter looked at the door. To his horror, there was a deep slash all the way through the seal.
“Oops,” Shawn said.
“If you think that’s going to make any difference, it won’t,” Lassiter said. “If I use this act of vandalism to further my investigation, I am still guilty. In fact, unless I arrest these two and see them prosecuted for their crime, I’m as guilty as they are.”
As he said the words, Lassiter had to admit he felt a slight temptation to do just that—to say to hell with the murder and use this defacement of the entire judicial system to put these two delinquents in jail once and for all. But he knew that just as he was willing to sacrifice his own career to catch a killer, he’d have to be willing to sacrifice this pleasure.
“No one’s guilty of anything, Carlton,” O’Hara said soothingly.
“There was a court order—”
“Which we have followed to the letter,” O’Hara said.
“And not just any letter,” Shawn added. “This letter.”
Shawn turned to Gus, who reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a much-folded piece of paper, and slapped it into Shawn’s outstretched hand like an OR nurse handing the surgeon a scalpel. Shawn unfolded the paper and held it up for Lassiter to see.
“The letter states that we have been employed by Benny Fleck to find his missing client,” Shawn said. “That makes us his duly authorized agents.”
“And the court order written by the Honorable Albert Moore of the California Superior Court for Santa Barbara County prohibits you from examining the device without the express permission of P’tol P’kah or his duly authorized agents,” Gus said.
“And we’re even better than that, because we’re duly authorized agents of a duly authorized agent,” Shawn said. “That makes us dually duly authorized. You don’t get more authorized than that. Or more duly.”
Lassiter stared at them suspiciously, then turned to O’Hara. “Is this true?”
“All the papers seem to be in order,” O’Hara said. “And we witnessed Fleck hiring these two ourselves.”
She was right. They did. It all seemed to make sense. Even if there was a court challenge later, Lassiter knew he’d be on firm ground. He could see justice done without sentencing himself to a life of inhaling popcorn fumes. It was everything he’d hoped for.
“So let’s go,” Shawn said. “That tank isn’t going to investigate itself.”
Shawn reached past Lassiter and pushed the door open. Lassiter took one step toward the threshold, then stopped. This was too good to be true.
“Wait one minute,” Lassiter said. “Why are you doing this? What’s the catch?”
“Don’t be so suspicious, Lassie,” Shawn said. “All we want is a little interagency cooperation. And Jules said it was okay.”
“We’re pooling our resources,” O’Hara said quickly before Lassiter could object. “They needed a little help with their investigation; we needed a little help with ours. So we made a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
Gus lifted the scuba tank and tossed it to Lassiter, who staggered back as he caught it. “You need our authorization. We need your lab to analyze the contents of this tank.”
“What is it?” Lassiter said suspiciously.
“If we knew, we wouldn’t need to have it analyzed,” Shawn said.
“But we think it’s Martian air,” Gus said. “Or not. Either way, it would be really useful to know.”
Lassiter thought it through carefully. On the one hand, he hated the idea of donating precious police resources to these two frauds. On the other hand, if he agreed, he’d have a good chance to solve a murder, find a missing person, and salvage his career.
“On one condition,” Lassiter said after due consideration.
“What’s that?” Shawn said.
Lassiter heaved the scuba tank back at Gus, who managed to snatch it out of the air before it crashed on the floor. “You carry it.”
Lassiter didn’t wait for a response. He turned and marched into the showroom.
The tank was just as they had left it. The lid stood open, and there were small pools of water on the ground where the body had lain. The enormous boots still sat under the weight of the column of water.
Lassiter moved slowly toward the tank. Deep down he wanted to run to it like a child after a departing ice cream truck, but his training told him to use the approach to assess the situation carefully.
&nb
sp; Shawn and Gus clearly had no such training. They blasted past him, and Gus was pushing the airplane stairs back against the side of the tank before Lassiter was halfway across the room.
“This is an official police investigation,” Lassiter commanded. “Stand back from the tank.”
“Or at least you make sure you share everything you find with us,” O’Hara said. Lassiter glared at her. She shrugged. “They got us in here, Carlton. It’s their investigation, too.”
Lassiter sighed. He hated having anyone else interfere in his work, but he knew she was right. There was nothing he could do to stop them. But at least he could keep them from despoiling his crime scene before he could see exactly what they were doing. He quickened his pace to a half run and got to the tank just as Shawn was beginning to climb the stairs.
“What are you planning to do?” Lassiter said as O’Hara caught up with him.
“I figured I’d jump in the water, dissolve into a zillion tiny pieces, and see where I end up reintegrating,” Shawn said. “Then I’ll come back and tell you where I went.”
“Do you know how to do that?” O’Hara asked.
“How hard can it be?” Shawn reached the top of the stairs and stuck a toe of his running shoe into the water. “I just need one favor.”
“What’s that?” Lassiter said.
“If any of my molecules don’t reintegrate with me, I need you to fish them out so I can stick them back on later.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Gus hissed up at him.
“Do I ever?”
Shawn reached down and touched the water with his hand, then shivered. It hadn’t gotten any warmer in the hours since the Martian vanished. He stood up and was about to step in when the doors to the showroom crashed open.
“Step away from that tank!”
The speaker was a tall woman in a dark suit. Even from across the room, she exuded authority. She carried her black purse as if it contained a small arsenal, and her posture suggested she wouldn’t hesitate to use it.
“It’s okay,” Gus said. “We’re duly authorized agents of Benny Fleck, and we’ve authorized these two fine police detectives to be here.”
Psych: Mind Over Magic Page 11
