by Geonn Cannon
Ari said, “Okay. I appreciate it.”
“I figure I would be doing this anyway. Cancelling contracts and recommending other firms. I wouldn’t recommend any of the other guys Clark hangs out with. They’re all like him. They call me sweetheart and try to look down my shirt when they come into the office. You never tried that.”
“So I get the business just because I was a decent human being?”
“There are worse ways to get a job.”
“True. Thank you for this. You really didn’t have to help me.”
Tiffany said, “No, I’m glad you came along. I was sitting here not knowing what to do next. You gave me a purpose. I’ll get in touch with you when I’ve spoken to his clients.”
Ari took out a card and wrote her personal cell number on the back before handing it over. “For the recommendations. And in case you need to talk.”
“Thank you. That’s very kind. And you’re not hiring permanently, right?”
“Sorry.”
Tiffany shrugged. “I had to ask.” She wiped her eyes one more time, then began packing away her things.
“You said you don’t know anything about his current cases. How was he spending the past few days? Was he out of the office a lot?”
She pursed her lips as she thought. “I don’t think any more than usual. He was in and out a lot. He made a lot of phone calls, but that wasn’t strange. He did a lot of his work over the phone or online. Are you officially on this case?”
“I don’t think there’s a case to be on. No one has hired me. But I do want answers.”
“So do I.” She unzipped a small side pocket on her bag and took out a keyring. “This is for Clark’s apartment. He gave it to me in case I ever needed to drop off his mail or water his plants. I think it was really in case I ever decided to drop by wearing a trenchcoat with nothing underneath it.” She pushed the keys across the table. “You can’t get into the office right now, but you could probably get in his apartment without too much trouble.”
“Thank you.” Ari took the keys. “I’ll get these back to you.”
“I don’t need them anymore.” Tiffany’s eyes started welling up again. “I should go. I can call the clients from home. Thank you, Ariadne.”
Ari nodded. “I’ll walk you out.” When they were on the sidewalk, Ari said, “You might want to think about staying with a friend for the next few days. If something was going on with Wilcox, someone might come looking for him. If he’s not around, they might take revenge on whoever is available.”
“Yikes.”
“I don’t want to scare you, but I also don’t want you to be caught off-guard.”
Tiffany scanned the area as if she expected the anonymous bad guys to be lurking in the shadows. “I appreciate it.”
Another plane passed overhead as they arrived at the lime-green VW, and Tiffany craned her head back to watch it. “Clark hated those planes. He always said they screwed up his thought process, but if I suggested wearing headphones, he would just bitch about not being able to hear himself think at all. And if it wasn’t the planes, it was the viaduct project screwing up traffic. I think he just liked having something to complain about.” Her face was pinched as if she was trying not to start crying again. “He wasn’t a good man, Ariadne. He was a misogynistic jerk. But he could be sweet. I wouldn’t have stayed here as long as I did if there weren’t a few good days.”
Ari said, “I understand.”
“No one deserves to die that way, even if he did pull the trigger himself. A lot of people would’ve just said good riddance to bad rubbish, you know? I’m glad you’re trying to find out why this happened, despite your history with him.”
“A tragedy is a tragedy, no matter who it happens to.” She held out her hand. “I wish I’d gotten to know you better.”
Tiffany said, “I wish I’d met you before you hired a secretary.”
Ari watched her drive away, waving one last time before the bug went around the corner. The parking lot was situated so she could see the forensics van in front of the building as well as the alley that ran behind it. The CSU officers were on the sidewalk putting away their toys, and from the looks of things, the office had been locked up tight.
The alley was a one-lane pockmarked street between buildings, every available space taken up by employee parking and dumpsters. The plain white brick walls were colored by a variety of spraypainted tags. Some of them had been covered by plain gray squares of primer, but the majority looked as fresh as the day they were painted. The name of Wilcox’s agency - or firm, as Tiffany called it - was written on one of the plain metal doors. Ari stepped onto the stone half-circle that formed a step, tried the knob, and pushed it open.
“Technically not breaking and entering,” she muttered, looking over her shoulder to make sure no one had entered the alley. She was still alone, so she stepped inside.
The door led into a cramped kitchenette across the hall from an even smaller bathroom. Ari paused by the mini-fridge and listened to the voices of the forensics team at the front of the building. They were talking about the Seahawks, some reality show that had aired the night before, and she heard the back doors of their van slam shut. One of them rattled the front door to make sure it was locked. She waited until the sound of engines faded before she stepped out into the hall.
She’d been in the offices a few times before, but coming in through the back made everything look odd and slightly different than she expected. She went past the main office and went forward to the waiting area. The front desk smelled of Tiffany’s perfume and an air freshener that had apparently been sprayed liberally through the entire space.
Ari focused hard on natural smells, knowing that she would have better results if she actually became the wolf, but there was no way she was going to strip down and transform in a crime scene. The front room seemed clean, so she went back to Wilcox’s office. She braced herself before going in, preparing herself for the various odors of death, and then opened the door.
The room was a testament to manliness. A football signed by Russell Wilson was in a place of pride directly across from the door. Every piece of furniture was chrome and leather, and the desk was a shiny black slab that reminded her of the monolith from 2001. Wilcox’s chair was twisted to one side, as if he had just stepped out for a moment and would be back in a few minutes. Underneath the prominent stench in the room, she picked up the usual elements of body odor, cigar smoke, and of course an assortment of alcohols.
And then there was the blood.
The wall behind the desk was splattered in a wide delta, thick and bright at head level and thinning near the ceiling. It dotted framed pictures of Wilcox with local celebrities and athletes, as well as his various documents and licenses. Mixed in with the smell of blood was cordite that got stronger when she moved closer to where Wilcox had died. There were other smells in that area, but Ari chose to ignore them.
Diana would obviously have searched for evidence that anyone else was present, but Ari had the benefit of a wolf’s senses. She crouched next to Wilcox’s desk and closed her eyes, breathing deeply.
Bodies, warm and fragrant, cologned and perfumed. She smelled the gun polish and oiled leather of their uniform belts. Cops all had a vague cigarette odor to them, even after the various stationhouses all went smokeless. Something about wearing a badge meant smoking or hanging around people who smoked. Diana’s scent was mingled in with the rest of the cops, familiar like a note half-heard in a symphony. The police smells were all fresh and thick, so she pushed past them. She couldn’t have explained how it worked to a non-wolf. The closest she could get was the bread and coffee aisle at the supermarket. There was a bombardment of different smells comingling until it was just a solid wall of indeterminate smells. A wolf could follow the thread of a smell down to the specific loaf, to a single slice, without fail.
Her nostrils flared as she smelled her way back through the morning. She agreed with Diana’s timeline about when Wilcox’s g
un had gone off, based on how the odor had degraded. The smell of Wilcox’s corpse diminished alongside the gunpowder, forming waves that Ari tracked all the way back to their origin. She opened her eyes and looked at the empty seat in front of her.
Wilcox had been alone in the office when he killed himself. She was ninety-five percent positive of it, though she could never have explained why in a court of law. But just because the wound had been self-inflicted didn’t mean the case was closed. Someone had pushed Wilcox to this extreme, forced him into a corner where suicide was his only option. Wilcox was an asshole, to be sure, but he was the sort of person who could always find a way out. There was always an angle to manipulate.
Clark Wilcox had put the gun in his own mouth and he’d pulled the trigger, but Ari was going to find out who put him in that position to begin with.
Chapter Five
Fact: Clark Wilcox killed himself. Theory: Whoever he was in trouble with and-or running from didn’t yet know that he was dead. They might come looking for him at some point, either at his office or his home. She didn’t think she could stake out the office without eventually drawing attention to herself. And any ‘bad guys’ who came looking for him wouldn’t even slow down once they saw the crime tape. She took a chance that the police hadn’t gotten to Wilcox’s apartment yet. She looked up the address using the internet on her phone after leaving the bloody office as she’d found it.
Glory, the woman who had trained her, had scoffed at the reach of technology. “I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying the amount of things you can do sitting on your ass typing is amazing. Private eyes are gonna be replaced by Ask Jeeves and Yahoo searches.” She’d made sure that Ari knew how to find information in a library, how to dig up old records without relying on database searches, and all the old-school PI tricks. Ari chuckled as she remembered the outdated references, wondering what Glory would think of how far technology had come.
As much as Ari appreciated the hands-on approach, it was incredibly handy to find Wilcox’s home address without first tracking down a payphone and thumbing through the Yellow Pages in the hopes he was listed. If she could achieve the same thing with just a few taps on the screen, then yay for technology as far as she was concerned.
Wilcox lived in a rundown condominium complex on a nearly-vertical street next to the I-5. Ari parked and hiked to the entrance, passing by used condoms and broken syringes that had been pushed into the gutters. Her thighs were burning when she finally reached the lobby. She couldn’t imagine Wilcox getting a similar workout every time he came home. Either he parked at the top of the hill and walked down or there was a parking structure she’d overlooked.
She took the stairs, not trusting the urine-scented and seemingly long-neglected elevator with its doors propped open. A handwritten sign on the wall next to the elevator said, “This thing is like your sister: it goes down, and it goes down FAST!!! Use at your own risk!” Ari peeked inside and immediately retreated when she saw the state of the buttons. The stairs were as steep as the road, and again she wondered how someone as out of shape as Clark Wilcox could survive living in a place that was basically one big Stairmaster. She took the keys Tiffany had given her out of her pocket when she got to the fifth floor. She stopped at the head of the stairs and checked to make sure the hall was empty before she continued on.
The door was warped in its frame, but she managed to shoulder it open. By that point she’d started sweating a bit and was definitely out of breath. She wiped a hand over her face and shook her head once she was inside. She was starting to think Wilcox hadn’t been lazy as much as just tired from walking home every night.
Once she caught her breath, she tried to figure out what was odd about Wilcox’s living room. At first glance it was just a typical living space. Couch, television, desk for the computer, armchair. She didn’t realize what exactly was tripping her senses until she looked into the kitchen and saw the lime-green cabinets and third-hand fridge. The appliances looked like they had all been dragged up the stairs by their cords and then muscled into their current positions. The floor tile was had a faded and cracked pattern that would have looked tacky even in the eighties.
By comparison, the living room looked pristine. Everything new and shiny, everything top of the line. The armchair itself had to cost at least four hundred dollars. A flat-screen HD was hanging on the wall. Ari looked from the screen down to the stained carpeting and deduced that Wilcox had come into quite a bit of money in the recent past. He’d only taken the time to update his living area and hadn’t yet gotten to the kitchen or his office.
“A man needs his sports,” Ari muttered.
The new furniture also indicated his suicide hadn’t been a long-term plan. Something had happened recently to make him desperate enough to do the unthinkable. She went down the hall, bracing herself for whatever den of iniquity Wilcox might call a bedroom. The door was open a crack and she pushed it open with her foot. The bed was a tangle of sheets and blankets, three pillows strewn against the headboard. She ignored the odors and kicked aside a pile of dirty clothes as she crossed the threshold. She really didn’t expect him to have a diary or a journal, but there was always a chance he had some backup of his cases and notes.
She found an iPad on the top shelf of the closet and turned it on, carrying it with her as it booted up so she could search the rest of the room. When the screen came to life, she swept her finger across the screen and cursed when it prompted her for a security code. 1-2-3-4 and 0-0-0-0 were both failures. She didn’t know Wilcox’s birthday or any other important dates he might have chosen for the password. She turned it off again and hoped Dale would have better luck cracking it.
Ari had just started back out into the hall when she heard the front door being shoved open again. She immediately retreated back into the bedroom. She pushed the door shut to a crack and listened.
“Wilcox! You in here? You hiding from us, Clarky? That’s not very nice.”
If either of them had turned left when they came into the apartment, they would have seen her. Instead they continued forward to the living room just as she had. From the weight of their footsteps, she assumed there were two men.
“He’s not here. No one’s here.”
“I told you, I saw her hanging around the office after the cops left and then five minutes later, she’s walking into the building. She must’ve been right behind me on the road. Hell, she might have even followed me. What, you think she just happens to be a neighbor? She’s snooping.”
Ari backed away from the door. The goons wouldn’t leave without a thorough search of the apartment, and the closet wasn’t deep enough for her to hide. She shoved the iPad under the mattress and quickly shed her clothes. A part of her brain reminded her that she was undressing in Clark Wilcox’s bedroom and asked her to consider that one of the signs of the apocalypse. There wasn’t time to be disgusted. She kicked her clothes out of sight and shook out her arms. She fell forward onto her hands and knees and bit the inside of her cheek to keep from shouting when she transformed.
“Clark! We’re not playing around, buddy. Just come on out and let’s have a talk. You can get back to your little girlfriend when we’re done.”
Twenty seconds later, the bedroom door pushed open. Ari lifted her head off her forepaws and the man in the doorway recoiled.
“Holy shit. He’s got a goddamn wolf in here.”
Another man peered over his shoulder. “The hell? I never saw him with a damn dog.”
The first man jabbed a stumpy finger at her. “What do you think that is? Some stray wandered in?”
“Look at this building. I’m saying it’s possible they got wild dogs roaming the halls.”
Ari growled low in her throat. The first man backed into the hallway and thumped the second man on the chest. “Clark obviously ain’t here. Might as well get something for all the trouble of breaking in. Go look around in there, see what you can find.”
Second said, “You’re crazy. I�
��m not going in there with that thing.”
First stared at her, one hand swinging by his belt. Ari didn’t know if he had a gun stowed in the small of his back, and that not knowing was making her nervous. Transforming had seemed like her best chance to avoid detective, but now she was concerned that these were the type of people who would shoot a dog just for getting in their way. She stood up slowly and backed away from the men. When she reached the edge of the bed, she dropped down onto the floor and peered at them over the edge of the mattress.
First chuckled, relieved. “See? He’s just a big chicken. Go on.”
Second entered the room, but he stayed close to the wall and made sure he didn’t turn his back on Ari until he had to. First left the doorway to continue searching elsewhere. Second put his hands on the closet shelf and stretched to look around. If he’d been five minutes earlier, he would have found the iPad. Ari climbed back onto the mattress in the hopes it would prevent him from looking underneath it. He turned at the sound of her moving, but relaxed when he saw she was just lying down.
“Lady isn’t here!” First shouted from another room. “Told ya, you were just seeing things.”
“Wearing the same freaking clothes, looking exactly the same…” Second muttered. He shook his head and went to open the nightstand. He dug through the items inside and wrinkled his nose at whatever he saw. “God, what some people…” He slammed the drawer shut and skirted the edge of the bed again. “There’s nothing here, Tom. I’m telling you, the cops were there because ol’ Clarky decided to hand it all over to them.”
“That’s idiotic. He wouldn’t do that. Besides, they had crime scene tape up. Clark probably got his ass robbed last night, that’s all it is. You better hope whoever ripped him off didn’t find it.”
First/Tom and Second appeared again in the hallway and moved toward the door.
