Shots in the Dark

by Allyson K. Abbott

  “No beard or mustache disguise today?” I said.

  “I didn’t have time to put them on. I wrapped the scarf around my face instead. Besides, they itch and make it hard to do this.” I felt his breath warm on my ear, then his lips soft on my neck.

  I stopped what I was doing, closed my eyes, and leaned back against him, relishing the sensations, both real and synesthetic.

  “We ought to do this more often, Mack,” he whispered against my neck.

  “Wish we could.” I abandoned the rice, pivoted on my good foot, threw my arms over his shoulders, and gave him the kiss I’d wanted to give him earlier.

  By the time we heard Mal returning with the burner phone, both of our faces were flushed. So was most of my body. Reluctantly, I released my hold on Duncan, grabbed my crutches from where they were propped up against the kitchen counter, and headed for the dining room. “The coffee is ready,” I said over my shoulder. “Help yourself.”

  I met Mal in the dining room, and he showed me the basics of using the phone. Duncan joined us after a couple of minutes, and both he and Mal entered the number for the burner phone into their own phones. As they were doing so, I thought about who might have been calling when I dropped the phone in the toilet. Had it been Melanie Smithson? I wondered if I should try to call her again, to give her a different cell number, but then I thought that might make her suspicious. Besides, I no longer had her number. I’d tossed the cocktail napkin Clay had written it on, burying it deep in the bar trash so no one else could find it. I knew Cora could get it for me again, and made a mental note to ask her later. Besides, if Melanie was trying to hide from someone, chances were she had ditched the cell I’d called her on earlier and replaced it with a new burner phone.

  Once we had the swapping of phone numbers done, we turned our attention to the envelope. It sat on the dining-room table, looking innocuous, but I could feel the weight of it bearing down on me, nonetheless. What ill-conceived surprises did the letter writer have in store for me now?

  We went through the usual routine of donning gloves and fetching a clean piece of white paper to place on the table. Then Duncan picked up the tiny envelope and studied it.

  “It’s been colored black with something,” he said.

  “Felt marker?” Mal suggested.

  “That’s where you were wrong,” I told him. “That’s the same black ink that was used to write the letters. I can tell from the way it smells.”

  Mal gave me a grudging nod.

  “Think that means anything?” Duncan asked.

  “That it came from the letter writer,” I said. “Other than that . . .” I shrugged.

  He slid the point of the letter opener under one edge of the flap and then sliced the envelope open. He squeezed the edges of it together and peered inside. Then he tipped it over above the paper.

  A tiny silver key fell out. Duncan once again looked inside the envelope, this time reaching in with two fingers. He pulled out a small piece of folded paper, and holding it over the paper on the table, he unfolded it.

  Like two of the letters before it, this one contained no cryptic words, no prophetic warnings. All that was written on it, in tiny calligraphic letters, was a date and a time: December 26, 4:00 p.m.

  Duncan held it up for me. “Anything about it jump out at you?”

  I examined the individual letters carefully. They were consistent in color, and the ink used to create them smelled the same as the other inks had, but there was an underlying additional smell, too. I shifted my focus to the paper. At first glance it appeared to be the same ubiquitous white printer paper used for all the other letters, but then I sensed something different: the texture and the color had both been altered slightly.

  “The paper is off,” I said. “I think it might have been sprayed with or soaked in something, like that previous letter we got.” I wiggled my fingers in a “give it to me” gesture, and Duncan handed it over. I held it up closer to my face and breathed in through my nose. I heard the deep bass notes of a cello and recognized the smell instantly. “It’s beer,” I said. “I can’t tell you what brand of beer, but I’m certain this paper had beer on it at one time.”

  I handed the paper back to Duncan and picked up the key. “Look,” I said, showing them the side of the key that had been down on the table. The two men stared at the key, then at me with questioning looks. “You don’t see it?” I said.

  The two of them looked again.

  Finally, Duncan said, “I’m not sure what you’re seeing, Mack.”

  I rubbed my gloved hand over the broad, round end of the key, the part one would hold. There was a hole at the end of it, but in the middle of that roundness there was something else, a slight rise in the surface. “There’s something on here,” I said, setting the key down and pointing. “Something clear.”

  Duncan bent down until he was eye level with the key. “Wow,” he said. “I’ll have to take your word for it. I don’t see it.”

  Mal picked the key up and brought it close to his face, turning it first one way, then the other in the light overhead. “I can see a faint shine,” he said. He put the key back on the table and looked at me. “Any idea what it is?”

  “I think it’s nail polish,” I said. “Clear nail polish, like you’d use for a top coat. I recognize the faint smell of it and a sound like rustling taffeta.”

  “Interesting,” Duncan said. “So does the polish itself mean something, or is there some sort of design drawn on the key?”

  “It might be both,” I said. The nail polish made me think of our idea that the letter writer might be a woman, and that prompted the thought that had been niggling at the back of my mind since last night. “There’s something else I need to tell you guys. I was talking to Tad last evening, and he happened to mention as he was leaving that he had to go shopping for some perfume for his wife, Suzanne. Want to guess what kind she wears?”

  “Opium,” they said in unison.

  I nodded. “I didn’t put too much stock in it at first, because there must be hundreds of women who wear that perfume. But it’s been nagging at me. And Tad told me Suzanne has been giving him a lot of grief about all the time he spends here at the bar with the Capone Club. She seems to feel that his association with the group could cast both him and her in a negative light. You don’t suppose she would go so far as to kill people to stop him, do you?”

  I waited, breath held, expecting them both to dismiss the idea immediately. But neither of them did.

  “She certainly has the money to do something like that,” Duncan said, frowning. “And I’ve heard rumors about her, that she’s a ruthless, cunning businesswoman who has no compunctions about leaving figurative bodies in her wake. It may not be a big leap from that to the literal version.”

  Mal said, “We should look into her connections to the university.”

  I nodded and took out my cell to call Cora and tell her to start investigating that line of thought, but then I remembered that I didn’t have her number. “Can one of you call Cora and ask her to come up here? I don’t know her number, and I’d like to get her to start looking into Suzanne Collier a little deeper.”

  “I got it,” Duncan said, taking out his phone. “I’ll try to do a little digging myself when I get back to the station, see what I can find without raising any alarms.”

  Mal and I stood by, listening as Duncan placed the call and asked Cora to come up to the apartment with her laptop.

  When he was done, Mal went down to the bottom of the stairs to let Cora in. I picked up the key again and studied the shiny area.

  “I think there is something drawn on here with the nail polish. It doesn’t cover the whole surface.” I looked over at Duncan. “You don’t still have that fingerprint powder with you, do you?”

  Duncan’s eyes grew wide. “That’s bloody brilliant!” he said. “And no, I don’t. But we can make some right here.”

  “Make some?” Now it was my turn to look puzzled.

  “Al
l I need is a pencil and a makeup brush. Have you got those? In fact, if you have some facial powder or powdered eye shadow, we can use that instead of the pencil.”

  I went into the bathroom and brought out my makeup bag, which contained what little I used: some mascara, some facial powder, and a tube of lipstick. “Will this do?” I said, handing Duncan the powder and the brush I used to apply it.

  “It will.” He took both items, then set the brush down. Then he opened the powder compact and scraped along its surface with his thumbnail until he had accumulated a small pile of fine powder in the center. After picking up the brush, he dipped it in the powder and then held it over the key. He didn’t touch the brush to the key; instead, he spun the brush between his fingers, letting the powder drift down.

  As I watched, we heard a commotion from the bottom of the stairs, and a moment later a breathless Cora arrived, with Mal on her heels. Though I could tell Cora was practically bursting with curiosity, when she saw what Duncan was doing, she set her laptop on the table and watched him without saying a word.

  Once the surface of the key was covered with the powder, Duncan picked the key up, tapped it a few times, and then carefully brushed over the surface. Then he eyed the end result.

  “That looks like a pound sign,” he said, pointing to a tiny figure on the left. “And this on the right . . .” He tilted the key in the light, studying the revealed figure. “It looks like the number one.” He handed the key off to me, and I saw what he saw: a pound sign followed by the numeral one. I handed the key to Mal, who examined it, with Cora peering over his shoulder.

  “What does it mean?” I asked. “Number one?”

  “It could be a hashtag,” Cora said. “People use it online, on Twitter,” she explained.

  Mal handed the key back to Duncan, who took out his phone and snapped several pictures of it, playing with different lays of the overhead light to see which angle showed it best.

  Cora went on with her explanation. “Folks who use Twitter use the hashtags to highlight keywords or trending topics. It makes it easier for other people to find all the tweets on any given topic.”

  “Twitter and tweets?” I said, shaking my head. “What is the world coming to?”

  “It’s the wave of the future,” Cora said.

  “So do we have to go on Twitter and search for this hashtag with a one after it?” I asked.

  Cora frowned. “I don’t know. It seems a bit too generic, too vague, though I suppose it can’t hurt to try.”

  “Okay. Then how do we do it?” Mal asked.

  “It just so happens, I have a Twitter account,” Cora said.

  “Of course you do,” I said with a smile.

  Cora took a seat, opened her laptop, and started tapping away at the keys. “By the way,” she said as she typed, “I ordered a bottle of Opium through my Amazon Prime account. It should be here tomorrow.”

  “And that leads right into the main reason we called you up here,” I said. We then filled Cora in on the Opium connection to Suzanne Collier, Tad’s comments, and what we wanted her to do. She became so enthralled by our story that she momentarily forgot what she was doing on the computer.

  “I can tell you of one connection I know about without doing any searching,” she said when we were done. She looked excited. “The Collier family is a huge sponsor of Boerner Botanical Gardens. I know because it’s a spot I visit often whenever I need to escape somewhere and meditate. It came up in a discussion once, and Tad mentioned that Suzanne is very involved with the place. I imagine it would be easy for her to get her hands on an aster or a willow leaf given that.”

  We all exchanged looks, but no one said anything. I thought we were all letting the idea of Suzanne being the letter writer ferment in our minds. And that got me to wondering about Tad. Was he involved somehow, too? Or was he an innocent bystander in it all?

  I didn’t know about the others, but I was starting to feel like I couldn’t trust anyone anymore.

  Chapter 33

  “Okay,” Cora said, returning to tapping her keys. “I’ll do some more digging as soon as we get done investigating this hashtag thing.”

  Mal was already standing over Cora’s shoulder, staring down at her screen. Duncan and I moved around the table to do the same.

  “I don’t know,” Cora said after a moment, looking grimly at her screen. “A hashtag with just the number one after it is going to bring up all kinds of crap. It’s too simple, too common. And Twitter doesn’t like searches for hashtags that have only numbers in them.” She pointed at her screen. “This is exactly what I feared,” she said. “There are thousands of things that come up when you search for a hashtag and the number one. It could take days to wade through all of this.”

  “What about if you type out the number one as a word instead of using the numeral?” Mal asked.

  Cora did so, but the results were equally voluminous and, to my eye, confusing.

  “Is there a way you can look for things having to do with keys or with beer?” I asked. “Maybe that will help narrow it down.”

  “Beer?” Cora asked, sounding confused.

  I explained to her that the paper that was inside the small envelope with the key had been treated with beer.

  “I can try,” Cora said with a sideways grudging nod. “But don’t get your hopes up. I think I’m going to need something a little more unique and specific to narrow down the search.”

  “Do what you can,” Duncan said.

  Cora didn’t look hopeful.

  Duncan went into my kitchen, grabbed some Baggies, and packaged up the evidence. As I watched him drop the key in a Baggie, I bit my lip.

  “Are you sure you should take that?” I asked. “What if I have some kind of brainstorm and need that key to try to open something?”

  “Like what? A key this small can’t be for a lock on anything much bigger than a diary or a box like the one you found at the cemetery. If you find something like that, you should be able to break it open in an emergency. And if need be, I can get the key back to you at any time.”

  I caved, but I wasn’t happy about it. My gut was telling me to hang on to that key.

  “I have to go,” Duncan said, “but I’ll call you later to let you know what time I’ll be back.”

  “Don’t forget to call the new phone.”

  “New phone?” Cora asked.

  “Yeah. Mine got wet,” I told her.

  “Put it in rice,” she said.

  “Already did.”

  “Give it twenty-four hours, and if that doesn’t fix it, let my guys take a run at it. And give me the number of your temporary phone in the meantime.”

  I gave Cora the new number, and she entered it into her phone. Then I asked her to give me Melanie Smithson’s number again. A few key taps later, she had it, and I entered it into the burner cell. I dialed the number right away, but my hopes sagged when I got a message informing me the number was no longer in service.

  “It looks like she ditched the phone,” I told the others when I was done.

  “You’ll just have to wait and see if she calls back on your landline,” Mal said.

  Cora said, “I’ll see if I can find another transaction for a new phone for her, but it might take a day or two for the charge to show up on her card, assuming she uses it again. In the meantime, I’ll play with this stuff on Twitter for a while and see if anything comes up that looks like it might pertain. But don’t hold your breath.”

  We all pulled off our gloves and Mal collected them, tossing them into the kitchen trash. Duncan put his coat and hat back on, pulling the hat down low over his forehead. Then he wrapped the scarf around his lower face. The sight of him, with just his eyes and nose showing, reminded me of the drawing Carter had done based on Harrington’s description. Something niggled at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

  Mal, Cora, and I followed him downstairs, and once we determined the coast was clear, he exited out the alley doo
r. Cora headed upstairs to the Capone Club room, where she would likely be bent over that laptop for the rest of the day. Mal and I went into my office, where I turned the alarm back on.

  “What’s next on your agenda?” he asked.

  I looked at the stack of drawings on my desk with all the lower faces that Carter had drawn the night before. “I want to run these by Teddy to see if he recognizes anyone.” I shuffled through the sheets of paper until I got to the original drawing Carter had done. I stared at it, and that same niggling sensation came back to me, but then a knock came on my office door, and whatever thought had been trying to surface went back into hiding.

  Mal opened the door to Debra. “Sorry to bother you, Mack,” she said, stepping over the threshold. “But Pete is sick. He just ran into the bathroom and upchucked. He needs to go home. Plus, that new waitress, Linda, just called in to say she can’t work today, because her mother is in the hospital. And we’re slammed out here.”

  “I’ll be right out.”

  With that, Debra returned to the bar.

  I looked at Mal and shrugged. “I guess my agenda for today has changed.”

  “I’d help out if I could,” he said, “but I don’t know anything about bartending or waiting tables.”

  “Thanks. We’ll manage. Why don’t you take some time for yourself?”

  “I think I will,” he said. “I’ve got some shopping I need to do. I’ll check back in with you later.”

  We left the office, and I went behind the bar, where a pale, shaky-looking Pete was struggling to mix some drinks. “I got this,” I said to him, taking the glass he had in his hand. “You go home.”

  “Thanks, Mack. Sorry.”

  I waved away his apology. “Not a problem. Go home and get better.”

  Mal waved good-bye and headed out. Pete followed closely on his heels. Teddy was helping Debra wait on tables, and when he came up to the bar, I told him to keep at it. I could manage behind the bar fine on my own, even with my crutches.

  For the next several hours, we stayed crazy busy. Billy came in at five and joined me to help. I was woefully inadequate when it came to carrying a drink tray with my crutches, so I kept making drinks and had Teddy continue to wait on tables. Duncan called around five thirty to say he was going to be held up at work, thanks to a gang shooting, and he didn’t know when, or even if, he’d be able to come by. Normally, I would have been disappointed, but given that I was also being held up at work, I told him it was fine. He said he would call later if he could come by at all, but that it would likely be very late if he did.