“I thought if I kind of ramped up to it, the solution would come to me,” Shawn said. “And it might have, if you hadn’t distracted me with all that endless blather about mayonnaise.”
Gus was about to respond with a retort so perfect it would have sealed Shawn’s mouth through the next leap year. But before he could utter the words, he opened one last cabinet and what he saw there froze his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
“I mean, really,” Shawn said. “I’m trying to solve the most baffling murder of this or any other generation, and you keep going on about condiments. And I get thrown off my point, I lose track of my thought, and bang zoom, a killer walks free. So I hope that you and Miracle Whip are happy.”
Gus stared into the cabinet, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. He recognized the shapes, of course. They were tall, thin tubes, flat on the bottom and rounded on top, with a smaller tube extending from the apogee. They were gray metal, flecked with nicks and scratches. He had seen these things a million times before. He knew exactly what they were. But they shouldn’t be here. There was no earthly reason for them to be here.
“Are you sure about your theory?” Gus finally asked.
“Why, you have a better one?”
“Yes, but it’s not mine. It’s Fleck’s,” Gus said.
“Fleck didn’t have a theory,” Shawn said. “Unless you mean when he said that his client was a real Martian. You’re not suggesting you believe that?”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” Gus said. He hoisted one of the scuba tanks out of the cabinet. “I’m just wondering why anyone who was born on this planet would need to bring his own air with him.”
Chapter Twelve
As a physical barricade, the seal was completely useless. It was just a piece of paper-slick green paper backed with some kind of sticky stuff. A box cutter would go through it like a spoon through whipped cream. Even a butter knife would be enough to tear it open.
But as a moral barrier, the seal was inviolable. It wasn’t a piece of paper; it was the entire American system of justice. It was the triumph of order over chaos, of civilization over savagery. It was proof that mankind was capable of understanding that there are societal obligations more important than any one man’s desires. It was everything Detective Carlton Lassiter believed in.
That was why his hand shook so badly as he lifted his Swiss army knife to cut through it.
Lassiter didn’t want to break the seal. He was the one who ordered it slapped on the door to the showroom at the Fortress of Magic, and he was the one who vowed to track down and incarcerate anyone who even thought about tampering with it. Because as much as he wanted access to the magician’s machinery inside, he knew a judge had sent down an order prohibiting anyone from examining it. And even though Lassiter had strong reason to believe the judge was motivated by his own personal issues and not by the rational pursuit of justice, the detective could not use that suspicion as an excuse to ignore the order. To do so would be to invite anarchy.
Instead, Lassiter put all his years of experience to work for him. If he couldn’t study the scene, he’d find another way to solve the crime.
Only there wasn’t another way.
It had been thirty-six hours since Lassiter had finished interviewing the last of the magicians, and as he stared at the black print on the electric green seal, his head was still pounding from the experience. It wasn’t the fact that none of them knew how the green giant had disappeared that bothered him. He expected that. It wasn’t even that none of them would admit knowing anything about the dead man. It was possible that they really had never met him, or that if they had, they weren’t used to seeing him floating dead in a tank of water, and the new circumstances made recognition impossible.
What was making his head continue to throb was the way that each of the self-styled magicians insisted that P’tol P’kah was a talentless hack who wasn’t capable of shuffling a deck of cards, and whose disappearance was the most obvious kind of trickery. And yet every time he asked one of them to give him a clue how the missing man had accomplished his disappearance, they all suddenly swore an oath of allegiance to something they called the Magician’s Code. Apparently that was a sacred oath that forbade them to reveal the secrets of a fellow prestidigitator’s tricks.
Right.
Carlton Lassiter hadn’t become head detective of the Santa Barbara Police Department because he was stupid or gullible. He had clawed his way to that position by virtue of his superior intellect and keen instincts, along with a city budget crisis that resulted in a hiring freeze shortly after his employment, eliminating many potential competitors. He knew when he was being lied to, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.
The magicians were all lying about this “code.” There was one simple reason they wouldn’t tell Lassiter how the green guy had achieved his escape: They didn’t have a clue. It didn’t take a detective as good as him to hear the jealousy in their voices when they described their rival as a fraud and a hack. If any one of them had a hint how the Martian Magician had pulled off his stunt, it would have been all over the Internet before Lassiter had a chance to ask his first question.
If the secret behind the miraculous disappearance was the greatest mystery Lassiter had to deal with, his headache probably would have subsided to a dull throb. But right now everything about this case was conspiring to constrict the blood vessels in his scalp. Even questions that should have been easy were turning out to be unanswerable.
To start with, there was the dead guy’s identity. Lassiter had personally supervised Detective O’Hara as she ran his fingerprints last night. He would swear in court that she had done everything right. But the system had been silent ever since. He sent the prints through every database he had ever used, and it kept coming up blank. Apparently the victim had never been arrested, which while frustrating, wasn’t necessarily surprising. But as far as the computer systems could discover, he’d never applied for a passport, requested a driver’s license, or opened a bank account anywhere in the country. He put the dead man’s image through a facial recognition program and didn’t come up with a single match.
Lassiter was a strong enough detective that he had long since learned how to fall back on his own skills when the computers failed, as they so often did. He studied every piece of the dead man’s clothing, searching for any clues to his identity. But there were no personal possessions in any of the pockets, and the clothes themselves were all national brands in stock sizes. They could have come from any store in any city in any state.
Lassiter had hoped the hat would provide a significant lead. After all, you don’t see that many people wearing bowlers in the United States. But the reason for that turned out to be not that no one bought them, but that they rarely took them out of their closet. The hat in question, technically a wool felt derby with a sixteen-ligne grosgrain band and grosgrain-bound brim edges, could have been manufactured by any of a dozen companies and purchased on any of a hundred Web sites, not to mention uncounted retail establishments, and purchased by any of tens of thousands of customers. If its late owner hadn’t removed the label, they might have been able to narrow down its provenance, but without the tag, it was hopeless.
The body didn’t offer any more clues to its identity. Its former occupant was a forty-year-old white male, five foot six inches tall, 195 pounds. He was in good health, and there were no drugs or alcohol in his system. Cause of death was drowning. Analysis of the contents of his lungs confirmed that it was the same water that filled the tank, matched to a sample that had soaked into Lassiter’s slacks when he had knelt by the corpse.
And that was making Lassiter’s head hurt, too, because he couldn’t figure out how the death had happened. This guy was young and relatively fit. He wasn’t drunk or drugged. So how did he end up drowning in a water- filled telephone booth? How did he get in there, and why couldn’t he get out? And how did he drown so quickly?
Lassiter knew there was only one cure for his headache. He needed to see that tank. If he could only figure out how it worked, he was certain the rest of the answers would fall into place. Unfortunately, it was in a locked room in his least favorite place on Earth, sequestered behind crime scene tape and protected by a court order.
He’d spent most of the morning on the phone, searching for a judge willing to overturn the order forbidding
