The Old Witcheroo (16 page)

Sandwich slapped him on his back. “Aw, leave her alone, Montgomery. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time is all.”

I nodded, fighting more nausea. “What he said. I had nothing to do with this, but I bet once you’re done making fun of me, you’ll appreciate that I took a wrong turn.” I pointed to the locker for emphasis.

Sandwich crossed the room and shoved the locker door open all the way to reveal what I’d seen, his mouth falling into the shape of an “O”.

Detective Montgomery whistled. “Oh boy.”

“Do you think it means anything more than she just had a crush?” I asked him. “You can’t seriously think Eleanor Brown would get a gun and shoot Sophia because she was jealous, can you? She’s so timid.”

Detective Montgomery nodded, pursing his lips. “Which is usually a sign that when they blow, they
really
blow.” He made a fist before letting his fingers explode in my face.

“Should I call her aunt? I don’t think she’s here.”

He appeared to give that thought before he shook his head. “Lemme see what Sean gets out of her first before we decide whether to take her down to the station. In the meantime, I figured I’d better come find you.”

I put my hands behind my back and fluttered my eyelashes at him. “Awww, why ever would you be looking for
me
, Detective Montgomery? Do you need an interrogation dummy to practice on?”

He smirked at me but then his face went serious. “No. I’m just doing this as a courtesy because I know you and Nelson are friends. Figured you’d want to be around to be supportive when they come get him, ya know? We waited until after the memorial because he’s a fellow cop, and we had a close eye on him the whole time.”

“Waited? Waited for what?”

“Forensics came back just about twenty minutes ago.”

An icy chill skittered its way along my spine. “And?”

His lips went thin. “And if you didn’t already know, they found a gun at Nelson’s house in his safe. It’s the same gun that killed Sophia.”

I
didn’t even bother to say another word to Detective Montgomery. I turned on my heel and made a break for the dining room, just in time to see Dana turn his back to his colleagues and offer his wrists.

“Bloody hell,” Win muttered in my ear as I nodded in slow motion.

The only thing I could be grateful for at this point was the fact that almost everyone had cleared out of the diner, so Officer Nelson wouldn’t have to face his neighbors in handcuffs.

Sandwich stood off on the sidelines by the booths, his emotions obviously tightly in check.

“Sandwich! Tell them they’re making a huge mistake! This is wrong! You know this is wrong!” I appealed to him with frantic words.

But he glowered down at me, his eyes angry. “There’s evidence, Stevie!” he whisper-hissed. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but I’m just doing my job, okay? Don’t make me feel like a sad sack for just trying to do the right thing here. The guys in forensics say it looks like a professional hit. Dana knows his way around a gun. Knock it off already.”

I gave up on Sandwich and rushed up to Officer Baby-Face, holding up my hand, my words frantic. “Wait! Just give me a minute with him,
please
?”

Dana shook his head, his eyes solemn and full of defeat. “It’s okay, Stevie. Just let them take me. Don’t make a scene.”

“No!” I shouted up at him before I turned on Officer Baby-Face, who’s real name was Officer McNamara. “It’s
not
okay! Are you bunch of knuckleheads really going to convince me you think this man killed Sophia Fleming? Are you all on crack? I don’t care what the evidence says. It’s wrong! He’s your colleague, for Pete’s sake! You’ve all worked with him. Some of you have worked with him for years! This man would no more kill someone than I would buy a used pair of underwear—even if Diane von Furstenberg hand-sewed them herself!”

“Stevie!” Officer Nelson shouted down at me, startling me enough that I shut my mouth mid name-calling. “
It’s the law
. Now, cut it out and let them take me,” he ordered, much more quietly now. But his eyes…his eyes said, “See? Told you they’d suspect me.”

Those darn tears I couldn’t seem to shake today tickled the back of my eyelids again as Officer Baby-Face began to lead Dana out of the diner. But I followed right behind them, hot on their heels.

“I swear to you, Dana, I’m going to find who really did this and I’ll make them pay! Don’t you worry about a thing! I’ll call my attorney and we’ll have you out in no time flat!”

As the diner’s doors swung open and they led Dana to a squad car, putting a hand over his head to shield him from hurting himself as they put him in the back of the car, I shrieked again. “You’ll all be sorry when I figure out who did this! Every last one of you is gonna have egg on your face when Stevie Cartwright shows you bunch how to find a killer the right way!”

I knew I was overly emotional at this point from sheer exhaustion and worry about Dana and I was yelling at the wrong people. But sometimes, my emotions and my big mouth fly off the handle at the same time.

But no one paid attention to me much and my outburst. They were just as somber as Dana, as each of them got into their cars and pulled away, leaving me in an empty diner with nothing but a bunch of plates littering the tabletops and the sound of the waves, lapping at the shoreline.

* * * *

“Dove? I’m going to insist you sleep. You must sleep if you hope to get anything worthy accomplished. You hardly slept a wink last night, you’ve had an exhausting day, and now it’s half eleven.”

“Did you sleep when nuclear missiles and atomic bombs were out and about, frolicking across the country in the hands of lethal killers, Spy Guy?”

“As I recall,” Arkady intervened with a chuckle, “Zero was quite the catnapper. Always sleeping with the one eye open, right comrade? Do you remember the time I snuck up on you in Prague back in 2009, was it? Yes, it was in that old barn in the mountains with the pretty sheep herder’s daughter. Hah! You almost took the nose right off my handsome face with that knife of yours. Missed me by the hair on his nanny’s chin.”

Now Win laughed, too. “Oh, bollocks,” he deflected. “You were nothing if not stealthy, old friend. Like a bloody cat. And I was aiming for your ear, by the way.”

I rubbed my hand over my grainy eyes and popped two more aspirin, guzzling them down with water. “Hey? Spy buddies?”

“Yes, my beautiful patch of wildflowers?”

“Dove?”

“Can the spy reunion, would you? They’ve arrested Dana, boys. This is bad. This is very bad. He did not kill Sophia! This is serious, for goddess’s sake!” I know I sounded fragile, and maybe it was simply because I was.

The poor man had said goodbye to the love of his life just hours before being arrested for her murder and my two ghosts were chugging back metaphorical vodka as they relived their glory days.

Bel stretched and yawned from the fluffy bed I’d made for him out of an old scarf on our kitchen table. “You two are a laugh riot with all your spy-ness, but the boss is right. Our boy’s in a dirty jail cell. Ain’t nothin’ good about that.”

“Sorry, my little
malutka
. No more spy stories. How can I help turn your frown upside down? You want I should tell you how to break this man free of his chains? A jailbreak is easy enough. Once, when I was imprisoned in Latvia, seven guards surrounding me, I dislocated my bones to free myself. A prison cell is, how you say, cake. I can help. You just have to be very careful not to—”

“No!” I shouted, then winced and stuck the cold pack I’d gathered up when I got home back on my nose. “No. Thank you, Big A. No jailbreaks. I want to
prove
his innocence so there’s never any doubt. Because he
is
innocent.”

“If you say so,” Arkady drawled.

“Okay, so let’s go over where we’re at,” Win suggested. “First up, the gun. The smoking gun. How do you suppose someone got ahold of that gun in order to frame Officer Nelson? Where did he keep it?”

Groaning, I shrugged my shoulders. “In a safe, he said, when we talked earlier today.”

Win sighed. “So how did the coppers get inside the safe? Did he give someone the combination?”

“He said he didn’t, but he assumed they must’ve broken into it—which I guess they’d do if they couldn’t get in touch with him. After they questioned him at the station and let him go, he left. But Dana did give them permission to search his house just after he was questioned.”

“Without a warrant?” Win asked, disbelief in his tone.

“No. They had one. Not that Dana cared. But that’s Dana for you. He knows he didn’t do anything wrong, so why would he think they’d find anything, let alone a gun? I can’t think straight about that right now. If forensics says it was the gun that shot Sophia, why would he do something as careless as put it back where they could find it anyhow? Not even the stupidest of criminals would do that. It’s insane.”

“But it’s def something to tell Luis about,” Belfry chirped.

I made a note of it on the list of many things I had for Luis to look into. One of them being Eleanor Brown. I’d called him the moment I’d gotten into my car to drive home so Dana would have representation when they questioned him.

“Did I tell you Sandwich told me forensics also said it was a professional hit? He made a point of telling me Dana knows his way around a gun, as in, he’d know where to shoot her to make the kill effective, I guess.”

“This just gets better and better,” Win drawled. “And where are we on our search for a connection between Gino Fratiani and Sophia?”

I popped open my laptop and pointed to it before I typed in Gino’s name in the search engine. “That’s just beginning. First, I want to know how this guy died, because if it was anything other than natural causes, I wouldn’t want to be the person responsible for his death. He’s a mob boss’s kid, for goodness sake. I mean, take a look at his father.”

I scrolled to the picture of Loosey Luciano and shivered. He wasn’t your typical paunchy, spaghetti-loving, soft-in-the-middle man in his late fifties. He was like The Rock and a darker Daniel Craig all rolled into one.

Eyes like a razor’s edge, cheeks you could strike a match on and the kind of smug half smile that one only achieved when they were confident.

“Eh,” Arkady poo-pooed. “He is not so scary. Someday, I tell you all about Yuri Popovrakoff. He could cut you from across a room with nothing more than his stare of discontent.”

I grinned despite myself. Regardless of the fact that he was Win’s enemy, he was pretty funny, and if Win didn’t mind him hanging around, I didn’t mind either.

“Who is Yuri Popovrakoff?”

“Big,
big
Russian movie star. You have your Chuck Norris. We have Yuri.”

“Well, Loosey Luciano doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d take his son’s death lying down. According to this article, Gino was killed in a barroom brawl a year ago in Chicago, but they haven’t caught the killer. Some of the suspects were the usual you’d expect in a killing like this.”

“A killing like this?” Win asked.

“Well, yeah. A mob hit. I’d bet dollars to donuts it was in retaliation for something. Taking out a mob boss’s kid is a big deal—it was payback of some kind.”

“Do you mean like a head-delivered-in-a-package-by-the-UPS-guy big deal?” Bel asked, his interest obviously piqued.

I snorted at Bel and his knowledge of mob shenanigans. “It’s probably on par with something like that, yes. Whatever the reason, the barroom brawl is likely a cover. The rival mob boss sends in someone to make it look like a barroom brawl. The stoolie starts the fight, the hitman is somewhere in the background, and during the melee with the stoolie, the hitman takes Gino out. A gun fires, but no one can ever find the gun or the person who shot it. Bel and I watched
The Sopranos
, all eleventy-billion episodes. They did stuff like this all the time.”

“Well, then certainly it must be true,” Win said in his most uppity of British tones.

“Betcha she’s right, Winterbutt,” Bel teased. “Bet when you get deeper into this, you find out at least one of the suspects was from a rival mob.”

I scrolled another article and jabbed a finger in the air. “Aha! Bel’s right. Two of the suspects
were
rival mob bosses, Twitchy Tonio Antonelli and Caesar Ortolini. The article alleges the police thought one of them ordered a hit, but it doesn’t say
why
they’d order a hit, and all the witnesses in the bar claim they didn’t see anything—go figure, right? Of course, nothing was ever proven and Gino’s been dead for over a year now. I wonder if they closed the investigation…”

“See!” Bel rolled to his feet and began to walk the length of our kitchen table like a marching soldier. “I bet they closed the investigation pretty quick because some mob boss paid ’em to. Bet none of the witnesses saw anything either—because they were
paid
to see nuthin’!” he said in a heavy New York accent.

“And when did you say Sophia came to Eb Falls?” Win asked.

My stomach got that tingle, and a rush of adrenaline I didn’t think I had left in me surged to the surface of my limbs. “About eight months ago! Sweet Pete in a Speedo, do you think she knew him? No one knows for sure where she lived before she moved here. She told Dana she lived in New York.”

“Interesting,” Win commented. “Any idea how this could relate to Sophia? Maybe she was in the bar and saw something? You did say she enjoyed espionage novels but her bookshelf didn’t appear to be lined with mobster biographies. Maybe she wasn’t the one who looked up Gino Fratiani at all. It could have been anyone, Dove.”

I ran my hand through my hair. “That’s true, but I got that tingle when I saw the site, and remembered what Chester said about Sophia. It won’t leave me be, Win. I just feel like there’s a connection.”

“Then we carry on,” Win said.

I leaned back in the chair and stretched my arms. “What if Sophia saw something in the bar that night and she ran away because of it? The timeline fits. And what about the picture of the woman who looks a whole lot like her but can’t be because of the difference in their eye color?”