Capital Murder (Arcane Casebook Book 7)

by Dan Willis

  “There you go,” he said as he shut the door and it melted away. “Good as new.”

  “Mind if I look in your bag?” Connie said in a tone that indicated that he didn’t care if Alex minded or not.

  Alex did mind, but he pasted on a smile and handed the bag over for a brief inspection.

  “That’s a hell of a thing,” Connie said, nodding at the wall as he handed Alex’s bag back.

  “It comes in handy,” Alex admitted. “Now I want to take a quick look at the rest of the house, then we’ll see if we can find Colton.”

  Alex led the way into the back part of the main floor, where he found a kitchen and a little office. Each were equally neat and dusty like the front room, though the desk in the office looked more used. From there, he went up to the second and then the third floors. Nothing stood out as being out of the ordinary, and the dust was pervasive everywhere but the bedroom. By the time he was finished, Alex was convinced that Colton spent almost no time at his home. Like most alchemists, he had a lab somewhere, probably at the university since he worked there as an alchemist, and it was undoubtedly what occupied the man’s waking hours.

  “Don’t look like the boss’ nephew spends much time here,” Connie echoed Alex’s thoughts.

  “I’d say you’re right.”

  “How are you going to find him, then?” Connie asked. “I thought you needed something special to Colton in order to find him. Nothing here looks that special.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Connie,” Alex said, motioning for the broad man to follow as he made his way down the stairs. “What we need is something that means a great deal to Colton.”

  He moved to the front room and reached behind the picture of Colton’s parents and picked up a small vase with a cap over it that sat against the bricks of the hearth.

  “What’s that?” Connie asked.

  Alex held the vase and pointed to a picture of Colton and his father standing by a large wooden sign that read George Washington University.

  “Colton’s father looks a lot older in that picture than he does in this one.” Alex indicated the one in the middle with both parents, then he held up the jar. “So unless I miss my guess, these are his mother’s ashes.”

  Connie got a startled look on his face, then held up a warning hand.

  “That’s the boss’s sister,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Alex said, cradling the urn in the crook of his arm. “We’re not going to do anything to disturb her rest, we just need the ashes to establish a link to Colton. We don’t even have to take them out of the urn.”

  Connie still looked nervous, but he followed Alex to the kitchen without further comment. Alex set the urn down gently in the center of Colton’s small kitchen table, then opened his kit. He didn’t have a map of D.C., but he did have the old brass compass he’d used since the days of his Harlem office. Without the map and the enhancement circle back in his new office, the finding rune wouldn’t have its full power, but there wasn’t anything Alex could do about that at the moment.

  “How does this work?” Connie asked as Alex set the compass gently on top of the urn.

  “I use the rune and if it makes a connection to Colton, the compass will point right at him.”

  “Then we just go get him?”

  Alex added a folded-up finding rune on top of the compass, then pulled his lighter from his pocket.

  “It might be just that simple,” he said, squeezing the side of the lighter until the cap flipped up and it ignited. “But we have to be careful. If someone has him, they might kill him if we go barging in.”

  He touched the flame to the delicate flash paper, and it went up in a poof of flame. The orange rune sprang to life over the compass, spinning slowly as it pulsed with life. Alex started to lean in, but the rune faded after only a second and the compass needle below didn’t even quiver.

  “Damn,” he muttered.

  “What happened?”

  Alex just shook his head.

  “Does that mean Colton is dead?” Connie asked with a worried look.

  “No. But he might be shielded from scrying, or underground, or even far outside the city. I need to prepare a booster and try again.”

  He picked up the compass, returning it to his bag, then gently added the urn inside.

  “Where are you taking that?”

  “Back to my hotel room,” Alex said. “It will take time to prepare the booster and I’ll need some things.”

  “So that’s it?” Connie said, giving Alex a skeptical look.

  “No,” Alex said, heading out of the kitchen toward the little office. “I’m going to take Colton’s appointment book, his notepad, and these receipts.” Alex scooped up the items from the desk and added them to his bag. “If I have some spare time, I’ll try to piece together what Colton was doing leading up to his disappearance. That might give me some other way to find him.”

  Connie’s skeptical look turned downright untrusting.

  “That’s it?” he said. “That’s all you can do?”

  Alex didn’t get upset, he’d heard this complaint many times before from frustrated clients.

  “You ever had to stake a guy out?” he asked the mobster.

  “Yeah,” Connie said with a curt nod.

  “You know how most of the time you just sit there in your car and watch the front of a building?”

  Again Connie answered in the affirmative.

  “Well, that’s what this is,” Alex said. “There’s no sign of foul play here. Look at all the dust.” Alex swept his arm around at the room. “If Colton had been grabbed here, even if someone cleaned up after, there’d be big patches where the dust was disturbed. So we know that whatever happened to Colton, it didn’t happen here. All I can do now is go through what I’ve got and look for a clue.”

  Connie’s hard look softened a bit, then he nodded.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “So where are we supposed to do our waiting?”

  “I’m going to go back to my hotel before Andrew Barton starts looking for me,” Alex said. “I can work on the booster there and go over all this.” Alex patted the side of his bag. “You go back to your boss and report in.”

  “I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight,” Connie said.

  Alex chuckled at that.

  “By all means, come back to my hotel. I’m sure the Lightning Lord would love to meet you.”

  Connie’s grim expression soured, and Alex could tell he was trying not to show fear. Most people were justifiably afraid of sorcerers, so Alex decided to use that to shake loose from Lucky Tony’s watchdog.

  “Look,” he said when Connie didn’t answer. “Give me a number where I can reach you. If I find anything, I’ll call.”

  Connie didn’t like that idea, but he seemed to decide that Alex was trustworthy. Either that or he felt that discretion was the better part of valor.

  “All right,” he said at last.

  8

  Plans

  “Julian,” Alex called out the moment he hit the lobby of the Hay-Adams Hotel. Several of the patrons cast abashed glances in his direction, but he was in a hurry.

  “Mr. Lockerby,” Julian Rand said, appearing as if from nowhere. “Did you require something?”

  If he objected to being summoned so loudly, he gave no sign.

  “I need a map of Washington,” Alex said, heading for the elevator.

  “A street map or a tourist map?” the concierge said, falling into step beside Alex.

  “Street map,” Alex said. “An accurate one, as big as you can find,” Alex added as the elevator door opened. “And I need it as soon as possible.”

  “Very well,” Julian said. “Anything else?”

  Alex almost laughed at that as he stepped on the elevator. He’d just dropped a very specific request on Julian and the man had accepted it as if Alex had asked for poached eggs and toast.

  “Can you have the kitchen send up a couple of poached eggs on toast?” he a
sked.

  “Of course, Mr. Lockerby,” he said as the automatic door slid closed. “Consider it done.”

  Alex paused outside the door and listened intently for a moment. When he was finally satisfied no one was waiting for him this time, he went in and set his bag gently on the writing desk. Despite Julian’s confidence, Alex was relatively sure it would be some time before an acceptable map could be found, so he took out his rune book and opened his vault.

  He hadn’t been completely honest with Connie. While Alex did need a focusing ring underneath the map to boost the finding rune’s power, he already had one he’d painstakingly painted onto a small rug. All he had to do was retrieve it from the vault and roll it out on the floor. It only took a few minutes, but before he had even shut the vault, there was a knock at the door.

  “Your food, sir,” the short man in the hotel uniform said when Alex answered. He wheeled in a small table with a covered dish on top. “Mr. Rand said to inform you that he’ll have your map within the hour.”

  Alex thanked the bellhop and tipped him heavily before shutting the door. His eggs and toast, simple though they were, appeared to have been done to perfection and the cook had added a side of some kind of white gravy. More impressive, however, were Julian’s scrounging skills.

  Alex carried his food to the writing desk and sat down to eat. Since he couldn’t look for Colton until the map arrived, Alex opened his bag and took out the stack of papers he’d taken from the alchemist’s desk. There was an appointment book, a notepad, and a half-dozen receipts from various businesses. Alex stacked the receipts together, and set them aside along with the appointment book. He’d checked that back at Colton’s apartment and it had no entries for this week. It still might be useful, but he’d have to go over it in depth to determine that.

  Holding the notepad up to the light, Alex saw impressions on the paper, made by whatever had been written on the previous sheet. He considered using a revelation rune to bind graphite shavings into the grooves of the paper, but that tended to make a mess, and he didn’t want graphite in his eggs.

  Taking a bite of his lunch, Alex turned his attention to the pile of receipts. Two of them were from alchemy shops. No doubt Colton was purchasing ingredients or components used in his profession. One receipt didn’t have a shop name or address on it, just the number five hundred written in pencil. Without any identifying data, Alex had no way to interpret the slip of paper, so he set it aside. The last three receipts were for shops around the city. Alex couldn’t tell if they were grocers by their names, but he assumed they were. The amounts on the receipts varied but most were small, as if Colton had only purchased one or two things. One receipt was for twenty dollars at a place called Hallman Brothers, but Alex didn’t know that name any more than the rest.

  “What were you doing?” Alex asked as he went through the grocery receipts. All of them were dated the day he disappeared. “Why buy food from different stores?”

  The obvious answer was that Colton was some kind of connoisseur, preferring one store’s produce to another’s, but the stores in question appeared to be nowhere near each other, based on their addresses. He’d have to check that when the map showed up.

  Setting his now empty plate aside, Alex dug into his bag and pulled out a small bottle of black powder with a screw-top lid. He set the receipts aside and picked up the blank notepad. Unscrewing the lid on the bottle, Alex carefully shook out a thin layer of powdered graphite onto the paper. Returning the bottle to his bag, Alex took out his rune book and paged to the back where he kept the useful, but not often needed, runes. Finding a revelation rune, he tore it out and returned the book to his pocket.

  The rune on the paper was simple enough, a symbol that resembled a squinting eye inside a circle with a few runic words around the outside. Revelation runes sounded more powerful than they actually were. If you had the right catalyst, they could reveal things like hidden marks or fingerprints, but only over a small area. Alex’s lamp could reveal hundreds of fingerprints and many other things over a wide area, so he didn’t have much call for revelation runes. When it came to exposing the indentations of writing, however, revelation runes were indispensable tools.

  Folding the rune, Alex held it over the graphite-covered paper, took out his lighter, and ignited it. The flash paper burned for a moment with a sooty, gray light, then vanished. Immediately the graphite dust on the notebook jumped up off the paper as if a puff of air had somehow passed up through from the bottom. As Alex watched, the dust drifted back down, collecting in the invisible impressions on its surface. Some of the powder had been thrown up too high and it floated down over the desktop and Alex’s now empty plate.

  “Shopping,” Alex read the word at the top of the paper. “Terrific, I’ve discovered Colton’s grocery list.” He continued reading the list that followed.

  Quicklime, Hawaiian Ginger, Cashew Apple, Regulus of Antimony, Bourbon Vanilla, Colloidal Silver, Navel Orange.

  Alex recognized some of the exotic names as alchemical ingredients. Cashew, Orange, and Apple seemed obvious enough, but he’d never heard of Bourbon Vanilla.

  “Must be some kind of fancy liquor,” he said. “I’ll have to ask Iggy about it.”

  Alex set the list aside and pinched the bridge of his nose. Based on the list and the receipts, Colton Pierce went shopping for a few things for his lab and some for his icebox. That wasn’t likely to reveal whoever grabbed Colton, so he tossed the notepad back into his bag. He could use the receipts to retrace Colton’s steps during his strange shopping trip, but if he’d been grabbed when he was out, there wouldn’t have been receipts back at his house. Clearly he was taken after he got home from his shopping trip, but after he’d gone out again.

  Alex picked up the appointment book, but put it down again almost immediately. Something still bothered him about the receipts.

  Reaching into his bag, he pulled the notebook out and tried to compare the receipts with the items on the shopping list. The receipts had the date and the amount of the purchase, but no details on what had been bought.

  “Why did he even do this?” Alex fumed out loud. “Doesn’t he have an assistant at the university to buy his alchemy ingredients?”

  Alex was about to go on, but he stopped.

  His question had been correct. As a professor, the university would have provided Colton with all the ingredients he needed to do his job, and they probably fronted his private research as well.

  “The only reason for Colton to be buying his own ingredients is if they’re for something else,” Alex reasoned.

  Something like the new business venture with his uncle.

  If Lucky Tony and his nephew were the only people who knew about Euphorian, then Colton wouldn’t want his secret ingredients showing up on the university’s purchase logs. Someone might go looking for what the professor was using and work out the recipe for themselves.

  Alex seized the list again and stared at it. He knew that quicklime and colloidal silver were alchemy ingredients. He’d seen them on the shelves in Dr. Kellin’s shop often enough. He didn’t know what Regulus of Antimony was, but that sounded like something an alchemist would use.

  “That’s why he shopped all over town,” Alex declared, standing up and starting to pace around the room. “He didn’t want to risk anyone knowing what goes into Euphorian, so he bought the ingredients from different shops.”

  It was a fairly paranoid precaution, but Colton was in business with a ruthless mobster, one who presumably had enemies.

  “So now what?” Alex asked out loud.

  He was pretty sure he understood the strange pile of receipts, but he was no closer to learning what had actually happened to Colton Pierce.

  A knock at the door pulled his mind away from the problem and back into the present. When he opened the door, Alex found Julian Rand standing in the hall in his silk tuxedo. He had a pleased smile on his face and a paperboard tube under his arm.

  “One map of Washington D.C. ,
” he said, holding out the tube to Alex. “As requested.”

  Alex took the tube and stepped back, allowing Julian to enter. He pulled off the cap and a rolled sheet of heavy paper emerged. From the look of it, the map was about three feet square. Not as detailed as Alex would have liked, but on short notice, it was nothing short of miraculous.

  “Is it to the gentleman’s liking?” Julian asked, his crooked smile never wavering.

  “Very good,” Alex said, taking the map to the low coffee table he’d carried from the sitting area and placed it over his focusing rug.

  “What are you doing?” Julian asked.

  “Looking for someone,” Alex replied. “How well do you know the city?”

  “I’ve been employed here for ten years,” he said by way of answer, “and I grew up in Bowie, just east of here in Maryland.”

  “You’ll do,” Alex said, carefully removing the urn from his bag. He set it on the map, then added his compass and a folded finding rune. “With any luck I’ll need you to tell me what’s in a certain part of the city.”

  Julian was about to ask something, but Alex lit the paper and the rune flared to life. Just like the last time, it spun briefly, then faded out without making the compass needle spin.

  “What does that do?” Julian asked.

  “Nothing, apparently,” Alex growled. He explained the finding rune to the concierge as he moved the urn back to the writing desk, brushing the remnants of the graphite dust away before putting the urn down.

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work, sir,” the young man said. “Perhaps next time.”

  “Perhaps,” Alex said.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  Alex was about to dismiss him, but he did have another case he needed to attend to.

  “You don’t happen to know the concierge at the Fairfax Hotel, do you?”

  Julian looked mildly surprised, but he nodded.

  “Dustin Mills,” he said. “He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, as it were, but he’s a decent fellow.”