Shadow of anubis the arc.., p.1
Shadow of Anubis (The Arcane Irregulars Book 2), page 1
CONTENTS
1. The Foreigner’s Brother
2. The Missing Functionary
3. Family Matters
4. The Legacy of Gilbert Sadler
5. The Price of Fashion
6. Frustrations
7. Too Much Magic
8. Inventory
9. Reactions
10. Card Tricks
11. The Legwork
12. The Devil in the Details
13. An Accounting
14. The Coat
15. Fashion Sense
16. White Fulgent
17. Heir of the Dog
18. Schemes
19. The Ragman
20. The Safehouse
21. Limelight
22. The Rowing of the Ducks
23. Green Eyed Monster
24. The Alchemist
25. Deception
26. Follow the Money
Acknowledgments
Also by Dan Willis
About the Author
Digital Edition – 2023
This version copyright © 2023 by Dan Willis.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
Edited by Stephanie Osborn
Supplemental Edits by Barbara Davis
Cover by Mihaela Voicu
Published by
Runeblade Entertainment
Spanish Fork, Utah.
1
THE FOREIGNER’S BROTHER
The phone on the desk began to ring, causing the poorly constructed bit of agency furniture to wobble on its short leg. Agent Aissa Mendes rolled her eyes and leaned down to stuff another matchbook beneath the offending leg.
That problem solved, at least for the moment, she sat back up and picked up the handset from the phone’s cradle.
“Agent Mendes,” she said.
“How’s your paperwork?” the voice of field office director Adam Stevens asked.
Aissa glanced at the top of her desk, at the pile of files she needed to update before they went off to document storage. It was a much smaller pile now than when she started, but there was still a lot of work to be done.
“Going well,” she hedged, not wanting to be too specific. Director Stevens had the power to give her a case and break the cycle of endless paperwork that had engulfed her since she became a full agent.
“You want to get out and do some field work?” he asked.
It was all Aissa could do not to shout into the handset.
“Of course,” she managed.
“Come to my office, I’ve got a job for you.”
Aissa replaced the handset in the phone’s cradle, then closed her eyes and took a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds.
“You look excited,” a new voice startled her.
She let out her pent-up breath and looked up to see her trainer, Buddy Redhorn, standing over her.
“Stevens wants to see me,” she said, standing.
Redhorn raised an eyebrow at that, a vaguely amused expression washing over his angular face.
“Going to get your own case,” he said with an approving nod. “Good luck.”
Aissa wanted to hug him. No one had believed in her more than Redhorn, but the man was the very definition of buttoned down and an outward display of affection would only embarrass him. Instead, she gave him a grin as she picked up her hat from her desk.
“Thanks,” she said, stepping past him on her way to the Director’s office. Before she could go, however, Redhorn grabbed her elbow.
“We work as a team here,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Don’t think you’ve got to handle whatever Stevens throws at you by yourself. If you run into a problem, ask for help.”
Aissa just nodded. They both knew that many of their fellow agents weren’t happy having a woman in their ranks. If she messed up a case, it would give leverage to those who wanted to force her out. If one of the other agents worked the case with her and things went badly, it might take them down as well. Understandably, no one but Agent Redhorn was rushing to partner with her.
“Don’t worry,” she assured him, then turned back toward Stevens’ office.
The Manhattan Field Office of the FBI occupied a single floor in a mid-ring skyscraper, and the office of the director was in the same space as all the agents. Some people in the bureau felt a great deal of importance being a director, but Stevens didn’t care about the trappings of the position. He was much more the kind of man who judged himself by the efficacy of those under his command.
“Come in,” he called out when Aissa knocked.
The office was one befitting an FBI director, with much better furniture and a wall of bookcases. The man himself sat, leaning back in his chair with his legs crossed. A blue case folder was open on his lap and he shut it as Aissa entered.
“Have a seat, Agent Mendes,” he said, tossing the folder on his desk. “I’ve got a case for you; it’s something the police sent over.”
That probably meant it was something the police thought was too hot to handle or didn’t have enough evidence to solve. Aissa resisted the urge to grimace.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Stevens went on, picking up the folder again, “and you’re right. There isn’t much to go on with this one, but it’s important. There are international implications here and I need someone with tact to handle it.”
“Won’t these international people balk at having a woman in charge of their case?”
“Probably,” Stevens admitted, “but then they’ll call me and I’ll handle them. What I need you to do is make sure all the ‘i’s are dotted and the ‘t’s are crossed on this one. Take detailed notes on what you find and what you do so that, if this does turn out to be unsolvable, no one can claim we didn’t do our best.”
Aissa took that in for a moment. She didn’t like the idea of being handed an impossible case, but such things were part of the job. When Redhorn was her trainer, they’d faced several such cases. Still, that didn’t make them any less frustrating.
“Are you the agent for this job?” Stevens pressed when she didn’t speak.
“Yes, sir,” she said, her attention snapping back to the present.
He leaned across the desk and handed her the blue folder.
“If you have any procedure questions, ask Agent Redhorn,” he said. “If anyone denies you access or gets in your way, call me.”
Aissa tucked the thin folder under her arm and nodded, then turned to go.
“Good luck,” Stevens called after her as she stepped back out, into the main office.
The folder Stevens had given her was so thin she had the whole thing read before she made it back to her desk. According to the police report, a British national named Henry Ross was found dead in an alley after having been reported missing from his brother Lionel’s home. Lionel had thrown a party for their cousin, Phineas Drummond, the son of the British Ambassador, and during the party someone broke into Lionel’s office and made off with sensitive documents. One of Lionel’s security guards got a shot off at them, but he escaped over the estate’s wall and disappeared.
“Looks like Henry was the thief and the security guard hit him as he escaped,” she said, setting the folder on her desk. According to the file, Henry Ross had been found that morning, so there would still be police at the scene. She needed to get down there and look around before they left.
Taking out her notepad, she jotted down the address of Lionel’s core mansion and that of the crime scene, then closed the folder and headed for the elevator.
During their time together, Agent Redhorn had never let Aissa drive their government issued car. Senior Agent privilege, he called it. Now that she was a full agent, however, she’d been granted access to the agency motor pool whenever she wanted. It wasn’t as much privilege as Redhorn got, since he took his car home every night, but it wasn’t nothing and Aissa piloted the black sedan expertly through the downtown traffic with a big smile on her face.
She had no trouble finding the alley where the body of Henry Ross had been discovered because, much to her surprise, there were still several police cars parked on the curb just outside it.
It only took half a minute for her to park, but the October weather had turned cold, so she took an extra minute to put on her overcoat. Like everything else Aissa wore on the job, it was a man’s coat, heavy, black, and utterly devoid of style, but it was warm and that made up for a lot.
“Beat it, little girl,” a short officer with a thick neck and a pug nose growled as Aissa approached.
Back in her first year as a trainee, such men intimidated her, but those days were long gone. She’d been through too many dismissive, angry men to let this little runt stop her.
“Shut your yap,” she said, flashing her badge.
The little man bristled, opening his mouth to speak, but his brain seemed to catch up in time to prevent it.
“I’m Special Agent Mendes of the FBI,” she went on. “That makes this my crime scene. Now point me to the officer in charge.”
“You wa nt Detective Arnold,” Pug Nose said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “Guy in the trench coat.”
Aissa suppressed a satisfied smile as she followed the direction into the alley. She’d made her point; rubbing it in would only make an enemy of the little man and she needed to maintain a working relationship with the police.
The crime scene itself wasn’t far down the alley, maybe thirty feet or so. Aissa knew this because the body of a man still lay in the dirt, covered by a thin white sheet. Dark, drying blood had pooled under the dead man’s right arm but none had soaked into the sheet, so he’d been dead long enough for the blood to coagulate.
Standing over the body were a tall blond policeman and a shorter man with unkempt hair and a rumpled coat. The shorter man was pointing at the ground while the bigger man scribbled in a notebook.
“Detective Arnold?” Aissa asked.
The man turned, a look of confusion on his face that evaporated quickly.
“Agent Cortez?” he asked.
“Mendes.”
“Mendes, right,” he said. “Alex Lockerby told me about you, he was very complimentary.”
Aissa blushed a little at that. She’d had a bit of thing for the handsome private detective when they’d first met and she hadn’t really thought about that in a long time.
“Alex is pretty sharp,” she said, covering her embarrassment with a smile. “What have we got here?”
“Right,” Arnold said, turning back to the body. He crouched down and pulled the sheet back, revealing a good-looking man in an expensive shirt. His suit coat was missing, revealing a large bloodstain on the white fabric.
“This is Henry Ross,” Detective Arnold said. “British national, age twenty-seven, reported missing from a party at his brother’s place in the core. Looks like he was shot once in the back, but we won’t know for certain until the autopsy.”
Aissa looked around and found the alley otherwise empty.
“Where is the coroner?”
“He had trouble with the van,” Arnold reported, “but he’s on his way now. If you want a more detailed analysis, you’ll have to wait for him.”
“Who found the body?” Aissa asked, taking the details down in her notebook.
“There’s a bakery around the corner,” Arnold said. “Some of those people have to come in early to get the bread going.” He chuckled and shook his head, “My wife’s always complaining about how long it takes to make the dough. Anyway, one of them cuts through this alley on his way to work and found Mr. Ross about five-thirty this morning.”
Aissa crouched down to look at the stained shirt and the pool of blood near the body.
“Did your people take off Mr. Ross’ suit coat?”
“No ma’am,” Arnold said. “He was like this when the first officers arrived. If someone tried to steal his coat, that blood pool would have been smeared, so my guess is he got here without it.”
“Why was he out in the middle of the night with no coat?” Aissa wondered.
“I couldn’t tell you that,” Arnold admitted, “but there was that guy who survived the sinking of the Titanic.”
Aissa looked up at the non sequitur.
“What does the Titanic have to do with Mr. Ross?”
“Well, there was this story about how when the ship started sinking one of the cooks in the galley got roaring drunk. He went into the water and wasn’t picked up for hours, but when they found him, he was still alive. Doctors think it was because he had so much alcohol in his system that it kept him from freezing to death.”
“And Mr. Ross was reported missing from a party,” Aissa continued, catching Arnold’s train of thought.
“It’s just a thought,” the detective said. “Doctor Wagner can probably confirm how much alcohol was in his system.”
Aissa’s eyebrows drew together as she tried to remember the Manhattan coroner, but the image failed to form in her mind.
“Agent, uh, Mendes,” a new voice interjected.
Aissa looked up to see the tall, Nordic-looking policeman. He’d moved to a spot about halfway between the body and the street and was squatting down to look at the ground. Aissa hadn’t bothered to check for footprints, because by now the police had been all over the alley, to say nothing of the early morning bakers.
“What is it, officer?”
“This is Officer Johansson,” Detective Arnold supplied as they moved to where he crouched. “He’s training to take the detective exam.”
“I think this is blood,” Johansson said, pointing down into the dirt.
Most of the alley was hardpan dirt, packed down by years of foot traffic and the occasional vehicle. Where Johansson pointed, however, the soil had been churned up by what must have been a truck tire and in the middle of the loose dirt was a congealed blob.
“Good eye, Johansson,” Arnold said, getting down on all fours to get a better look. “I can’t say if it’s blood, it might just as easily be motor oil.”
Aissa reached into her trouser pocket and pulled out a folding knife with an antler handle, something her father had given her when she turned ten. Unfolding the blade, she pressed the tip into the grime-covered blob and it came out streaked with red.
“That looks like blood to me,” she said.
“If that’s blood,” Johansson said, “does that mean our dead man was shot over here?”
“It could mean that,” Detective Arnold said, “but it doesn’t look like he fell down here, because none of the other dirt is disturbed.”
“He was probably shot somewhere else and ran here,” Aissa agreed. “It’s an important clue, Officer Johansson, so why don’t you see if you can find another drop out on the sidewalk? That will tell us which way Mr. Ross came from.”
The big officer smiled like a puppy who’d just been given a treat, then headed out to where the pug-nosed officer stood.
“He’s a good man,” Arnold said once Johansson was out of hearing range.
“So,” Aissa said, looking back at the body, “I’m leaning toward the idea that Mr. Ross was shot somewhere else.”
“The real question,” Arnold said, “is was he running here for a reason, or was he just running?”
It was a good question.
Aissa looked around at the buildings flanking the alley. None of them were alchemist shops or drugstores, and the other end of the alley came out near an apartment building. Maybe Henry Ross was trying to reach someone who lived there, but since he was from out of town, that didn’t seem likely.
The more she looked around, the more convinced Aissa became that Henry Ross had run here in a panic and collapsed where his body was found.
“Were there any signs of a struggle when you got here?” she asked.
“If you mean a fight, then no,” Detective Arnold said. “Nothing like that.” He walked over to the partially revealed corpse. “The ground is pretty packed down here, so there won’t be any distinct marks from when he fell.”
“So, no cryptic message written in the dirt,” Aissa said with a grin.
“No, ma’am,” Arnold chuckled back.
She knelt down by the body and looked it over as closely as she could without moving him. He lay on his left-front side with his right arm extended forward. His right knee was bent out to the side, more evidence that he’d been running when he fell.
The forward right hand was clenched into a fist, as if Henry Ross tried to grab onto something as he fell and missed.
Or did he? Aissa thought.
She took hold of Ross’ wrist, trying to turn the palm upward, but it wouldn’t budge. Rigor mortis had set in and she might as well be trying to bend steel.
“Help me roll him on his side.”
Detective Arnold took hold of the dead man’s shoulder and pulled while Aissa lifted.
