by Lisa Emme
“If you could check again? It would be a shame to remove such a beautiful tree unnecessarily.”
With a look that said he highly doubted there would be any change, the inspector measured the distance between the elm and the electrical box. And then with a frown, he measured it again.
“That can’t be right,” he said, shaking his head.
“Is there a problem?” I asked, trying hard to appear innocent.
“Well,” he replied, his bushy moustache twitching. “It seems there is a mistake in the original measurements.”
***
“And then he goes back to his truck and it is covered, I mean absolutely covered, with bird crap.” Tess laughed and slapped her leg. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Barbie laughed and shook her head. “It’s never dull around here, that’s for sure. But why do I keep missing out on all the good stuff?" She pulled a cloth from her apron and gave the table in front of her a wipe, picking up Tess’s now empty coffee mug. It was mid-afternoon, several hours after the inspector drove off wondering why his truck was targeted by every bird in the neighbourhood, and Tess and I were hanging out in our booth at the shop.
The bell above the door clanged and Barbie, still shaking her head at Tess’s recounting of the inspector’s visit, went to serve the newly arrived customers.
I glanced across the table at Tess. “So, how’s the new place?"
Tess had spent the better part of the morning checking out her condo now that Tiffy had moved all her stuff out of the firehall.
“It’s great. Tiffy did a fantastic job. Everything is exactly where I would put it. She even got the placement of the clothes I’d left on my bedroom floor down right.” Tess’s face screwed up, cycling through a mix of emotions. “It’s not the same as living with you though.”
Feeling no sympathy and still slightly abandoned, I snorted. “It was your idea, remember.” And then, deciding I’d been hard enough on her, I added, “At least you have a roommate. You’re not completely alone.”
Tess furtively peered around the room. “Ah, where is Tiffy, anyway?”
“She asked for the day off,” I replied, still feeling shocked over the whole thing. Tiffy had never taken a day off in all the time I had known her.
“Really?" Tess’s eyes widened in surprise. “I wonder what she’s doing?”
“She wasn’t home when you were over there?”
“Nope. And she left her bedroom door open so I would’ve seen her.” She stopped and a wide smiled cracked her face. “Unless of course, she was wearing pink.”
“Huh?”
“Omigod! You have got to see her room.” She put her fingers to her forehead and then opened her eyes wide while miming her mind was blown. “It looks like someone barfed up Princess Barbie in there. Everything is floofy and pink, and she has a frilly canopy bed.”
“Good for her,” I replied. “I guess she’s figuring out what she likes.”
Tess gave an exaggerated shiver. “I hope she’s still figuring.”
“Avengers Assemble!”
“Avengers Assemble!”
“What the heck?" I put my hand to my back pocket where my phone vibrated. Tess did the same, pulling hers out with a happy squeal.
We looked at our phones, staring at identical text messages.
“Bryce!” I said, shaking my head. “He’s been messing around with my notifications on my phone again.”
Tess, ignoring me, was smiling and typing a reply on her phone. It beeped and she glanced at the message. “C’mon! Bryce has something on the case.” She grabbed my arm, all but hauling me out of the booth.
“Alright, alright,” I said. “Let’s go see what the hacker genius has been up to.”
Chapter Eleven
“Show us what you’ve got, Bryce.” The words were out of Tess’s mouth the moment she stepped through the door. She hurried across the room eagerly.
“I’d call it a jackpot!” came Bryce’s robotic voiced answer. The room was suddenly filled with the sounds of a slot machine ringing and the wide screen monitor he had upgraded for himself flashed a picture of his small robot minion jumping up and down throwing confetti.
I joined Tess over at the desk. “Let’s not get too hasty with the celebration,” I said. “Unless you have a picture of the thief wearing a sign saying ‘I’m the cat burglar’, we haven’t solved it yet.”
“Don’t be such a Debbie Downer, Harry. You haven’t seen what I’ve found.”
“Fire away, Bryce.” I pulled up a chair and prepared to be astounded.
“So, as you know there have been a dozen thefts attributed to our feline thief. Unfortunately, the majority have been in high-rise apartments above the tenth floor and while there is plenty of surveillance on the inside of the buildings, it’s hard to find any on the outside at that height. The majority of video I was able to find is all from street level, with two exceptions.”
“That makes sense,” Tess said, nodding her head. “We know none of the interior cameras picked up the thief or the police would have got the guy already, so what did you find that they missed?”
“Nanny cams, every pervert’s best friend.”
“What? How did the police miss those?”
“Probably because the owners of the cams either didn’t know they were there, in one case, or didn’t want the police to know what she was up to in the other. But I’ll get to that in a minute. First, take a look at this.”
The monitor blinked and a street level surveillance video began to play. It was a view of the main entrance of the Wellington Arms, a ritzy downtown condo. Nothing seemed amiss, as far as I could tell. People were walking to and fro in front of the building, the doorman occasionally tipping his hat in greeting. A black town car pulled up and the doorman hustled to open the door to assist an elderly well-heeled woman out.
“It doesn’t look like anything to me,” I complained, growing bored.
“Be patient, grasshopper.”
The screen changed and another video of another building came on. It played out similarly to the first, although there was no doorman at this building. After a minute, yet another video came on. I still didn’t see anything that stood out but then Tess drew in a sharp breath.
“Wait a minute…go back, go back.” She gestured excitedly at the screen. “Did you see that?”
“See what?" I stared at the screen confused.
The video stopped and then jumped backwards a few seconds before beginning to play again.
“There!” Tess pointed to the screen.
In the background, a non-descript figure in a grey hoodie stood at the mouth of the alley beside the building. Bryce split the image three ways, playing all three videos at the same time.
“There he is again!” Tess jumped to her feet, excitement radiating from her body.
“Our mystery visitor can be found on surveillance from seven of the twelve robberies.”
“Really? So why didn’t the police catch it?" It seemed rather far fetched.
“Because they don’t have the brains, or should I say bytes, like I do,” Bryce bragged. “Nor can they write their own algorithms to search through hundreds of hours of feed in mere minutes. This feed is from ten days before the robbery. All of the feeds I’ve shown you are from at least a week before the locations were robbed. But that’s not the best part. Watch this.”
A new video appeared on the screen. This time it was an angle facing out across the street from the front of the Wellington Arms where there were several shops and a small convenience store. It didn’t take long (now that we knew what we were looking for) to spot the hooded figure, standing in the stoop of a brick building. There was dark blur and then the figure fell back into the shadow of the doorway out of sight.
“What the hell was that?” I asked in surprise.
“I’ll slow it down.”
The feed started again, this time in slo-mo. The dark object appeared with a jilted flapping motion. Th
e grey figure reached up with his arm blocking the object, which hurtled itself at the man. Even with the slow motion, it happened too fast to really see before they both disappeared from sight.
“Was that a bird?” Tess asked, eyes fixed on the screen. “Play it again.”
“I’ll do you one better. Remember the nanny cams? Well, this next clip is from a few minutes before the video we just watched. It was filmed in number 1805 in the Wellington Arms. The location of the fifth robbery. It seems that a Miss Hunny Deliite, yes that’s her name – her stage name – is making herself a little insurance policy to hold over her Sugar Daddy.”
“Who’s the Sugar Daddy?" Tess’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Councilman Geoff Barker.”
“Isn’t he like eighty years old? How old is Hunny?" Tess gagged and made a face.
“She’s twenty-five to his seventy-two. Pretty spry for an old guy. I had to go through hours of video to find this, and believe me, if I had eyeballs they would have rotted and fallen out by now. Some things shouldn’t be recorded for posterity and an old geezer’s posterior flapping on top of his–”
“Okay, okay, we get the picture,” I interrupted. “Just roll the video, or whatever. And this better not be a sex tape.”
The screen blacked out for a minute and then came back to life. The scene was the interior of a contemporarily decorated bedroom. The camera must have been a wide-angle lens because it took in a good portion of the room, from the king-sized bed to the bank of windows and sliding door leading out to a terrace. A slender, half-naked blonde walked by, brushing her hair. She stopped, adjusted the camera, and then smiled straight at it, before heading across the room to the left side of the bed. Tossing her brush on the duvet, she reached above the bedside table and swung a picture away from the wall, revealing a concealed safe.
“Zoom in! Zoom in!” Tess shouted excitedly.
I frowned at her. “I doubt if you’ll be able to read the combination from there, Tess.”
“No, not the safe. Look!” She pointed to a dark shadow in the window.
The image zoomed as Bryce did as directed, and the dark blob took shape, morphing into a large black bird.
“It’s a crow,” I said, disappointed. What was the big deal about a crow?
“I think it’s a raven,” Tess replied. “See his beak, how it’s thicker than a crow’s?”
“I still don’t get what the big deal is.”
Tess ignored me, waving me off, eyes fixed on the screen. With a sigh, I returned my attention to the monitor. The raven cocked his head, focussing intently on something inside the room. Bryce zoomed out the picture so we could see the entire room again. The blonde punched several numbers into the keypad on the safe and then yanked open the door. She reached in and brought out several black trays.
“Woo-weee.” Tess whistled. “Look at all the rocks.”
She was right. The trays positively sparkled with diamonds and other colourful gems: Rings; necklaces; earrings; bracelets. One thing for sure, Hunny’s Sugar Daddy was generous with the sugar.
Hunny selected several items from the trays, holding them up and admiring herself in the mirror, oblivious to the big black bird watching her keenly. When she turned back to put the remaining items in the safe, the bird took off, launching itself in the air.
The video ended and I shook my head, turning to Tess. “You don’t really believe that the cat burglar is a crow, I mean raven.”
“I have found the hooded figure and the raven together in six of the seven instances where the hoodie man shows up in the video. All taken before the robberies, almost as if they were casing the joints.”
“Okay,” I said, playing devil’s advocate. “Let’s say they are behind the thefts, that the raven spots the safe, gets the combination, somehow communicates it to the thief, who then scales the outside of the building and climbs in to rob the place. We still don’t know who this person is and we can’t see her face.”
“You said her,” Tess replied.
“Slip of the tongue, I meant him.”
“No, I think you’re right. The hooded figure is too slim to be a man. I think it’s a woman.”
“So, we’re looking for catwoman? Oh boy.”
Chapter Twelve
Our sleuthing session ended a short time later. Reviewing the rest of the videos with the hooded figure didn’t bring us any closer to identifying his (or her) identity and Tess had to leave to go teach a class at the gym. I, on the other hand, had to get ready to go to the opening of Dreams, probably the last place on Earth I wanted to go. Tess would have swapped places with me in an instant, but even if she had been invited to the invitation-only evening (not that she’d let the lack of an invite stop her), she, and all the other werewolves in Eleanor’s pack, had been forbidden to go to the new club until the continuing daemon presence was deemed safe.
After a long soak in the tub, I wrapped myself in my favourite fluffy robe and began assembling my outfit for the night, laying it out on the bed. I had chosen a black cocktail length dress from the latest arrivals to my penthouse closet and brought it home the week before. Tess almost had a cow when she read the tag and realized it was an Elie Saab, but I’d given up trying to get Salvador to scale back his excessive spending on clothes for me. Besides, it was a fun little number with a faux sweetheart neckline and semi-sheer full-length tulle sleeves embroidered with stars. Who cared if it cost a small fortune? Salvador could obviously afford it. My one effort at restraint would be to re-use the black Valentino pointed pumps I had worn the month before.
As I applied the bare minimum of make-up and fiddled with my hair trying to decide whether to slick it back or wear it up, I couldn’t help but keep glancing around waiting for Gran to make an appearance. Criticizing how I dressed was one of her favourite pastimes since slipping the old earthly coil, but she’d been absent for weeks now and I was beginning to wonder if I would ever see her again. Something had shifted when Seth pried open the portal to the Underworld, making it harder for her to manifest at times, and then Seth and his minions had started stealing souls to feed their craving for energy, adding to my worry that something had happened to her.
Finally, dressed and ready to go (with Gran a no-show), I paced the living room, staring at my cellphone. I was debating whether to call Nash or not. We hadn’t left things on the best of terms at the end of our date, but it felt weird to be going out without him, especially if I was supposed to be acting as Jonah’s “date”.
With a sigh, I punched Nash’s name on the phone and dialed him, waiting impatiently as the phone rang...once…twice…three times. Great, he was probably screening his calls, the chicken.
“Hey,” I said, after the beep. “It’s me…Harry. I’m just calling because it’s the opening of Dreams and I have to go, you know because of Salvador…I thought I’d let you know in case…” I let out a loud sigh. “I really don’t know why I called. What are we doing?" I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “Anyway, there’s some friend of Salvador’s in town, some guy named Jonah, so I guess I’m going to be his plus-one at this shindig. Not that it’s a date or anything…I think the guy is kind of sketchy, but I thought you should know in case there’s pictures in the paper tomorrow. The press is getting crazy lately…So I guess that’s all I had to say. Bye.”
Gah! I sounded like a teenager unsure if my boyfriend and I had broken up or not. Only Nash was more than my boyfriend, I was his mate and honestly, his absence this last month had left me feeling kind of hollow.
I was debating whether to strap on my katana – the new spell Max helped me with made sure it was invisible to everyone until I drew it – or leave it at home, when there was a rap on the door. Surprised that Henry didn’t text to let me know he was waiting outside, I opened it to discover Jonah on my step.
“Good evening, Harry. I hope I’m not too early? We didn’t get a chance to discuss a time to meet.” Jonah performed a slight bow, a smile on his face.
“And might I add, you look particularly lovely this evening.”
I stuck out my chin and gave him a once over, peering down my nose at him. He was dressed in a slim-fitting, sapphire blue suit with notched lapels, a light blue shirt, and skinny tie that matched the suit. It fitted him to a tee, accentuating his broad shoulders and narrow waist. He was smokin’ hot.
“You’re passable,” I replied, eyeing the box he was holding. It looked familiar.
Jonah smirked at my comment and noticing my interest in the bakery box in his hand, he held it up. “I was going to bring flowers, but since you own a flower shop, I thought perhaps these would be better.”
Narrowing my eyes at him, I took the Dorfman’s box and lifted the lid. “BMGs! Someone has done their homework.” I turned on my heel and headed towards the kitchen. I don’t care who bought them, I wasn’t going to pass up a Bacon Maple Glazed donut from Dorfman’s.
I set the box on the counter and helped myself to one, taking a big, delicious bite. After a moment of gooey bliss, I turned, realizing that Jonah was still standing on my doorstep.
He shrugged, indicating the threshold with a gesture of his hand. Well, I guess that answers that question. He’s definitely a vampire, even if he doesn’t register on my radar as one.
I took another bite of my donut, chewing slowly, and then sighed dramatically. “I guess you can come in. You did bring me donuts after all.”
Jonah stepped in, closing the door behind him. He glanced around the apartment, walking up to the fireman’s pole in the middle of the room to look up to the floor above.
“Quite the conversation piece. Do you ever use it?”
“Only when I’m late for breakfast,” I replied, helping myself to another donut.
Jonah chuckled and crossed the room, leaning over the box. He shook his head and looked at me skeptically. “Donuts with bacon?" He wrinkled up his nose.
“You’re right, you shouldn’t try one.” I slid the box away, closing the lid. “More for me that way.”
