“We need to get the building secure,” he barked at an officer. “No one leaves. And let’s get the scene closed off.”
Durant was a heavy set older man in a tuxedo and a black Stetson hat. He had wide blue eyes with an angry stare that trusted no one. His wife was a tall, slim, brunette in a sequined, ankle length dress, with a matching shawl and clutch.
“Yes, sir,” the officer replied and rushed off.
While the police scurried around, Marvin stayed with his phone attached to his ear, sometimes a phone on each ear.
“Who wasn’t doing their job in security?” he yelled. “I want to know who! I want someone’s head on a platter! ...What do you mean you don’t know? Well, you better find out! We’ve got a dead body here!”
“Well,” the head of the city council asked the mayor, “do we know anything?”
“Hey, Michael,” she sighed. “Yeah, all I’ve heard so far is that the director was murdered in a dressing room,” she said.
“Do we have a murder weapon?” he asked.
“I haven’t heard,” she said.
“Unbelievable. An unbelievable show of incompetence,” Marvin yelled, and everyone turned to stare as he threw a phone on a table. Another one in his pocket went off, and he answered it.
Leonard Colby, the police investigator showed up backstage. He was in full uniform, but his eyes were still puffy, like he had just woken up. He smiled at me and shook his head. He and I had gone to high school together and ran into each other now and then on cases.
“Trouble follows you,” he said.
I laughed. “I think I go around finding it.”
He chuckled. “I heard you were the first to see the body.”
I gestured toward the dancer who was now sitting on the floor with Vicki holding a tissue. “She found him first, but alerted us, and then Marvin and I saw the body.”
Leonard nodded taking it in so I continued. “He was lying face up on the floor in front of the couch with a dagger in the abdomen.”
He whipped out a memo pad and took notes over what I had just said.
“Any idea how long he had been lying there?” he asked.
“Couldn’t have been long,” I said. “The show had only ended less than ten minutes earlier.”
“Well,” AJ jumped in. “He wasn’t in the final curtain call.”
Leonard and I looked at her.
“I didn’t notice that,” I said.
I had been so bored with the end of the show, I hadn’t paid attention. She pulled out her phone and showed us a photo of the curtain call. She was right. He was missing from the lineup. Leonard took this down.
“How long between the end of the show and the curtain call?” he asked.
“Eight minutes,” she said as she studied Landon’s handheld camera.
“Eight?” Leonard asked. “That’s long for a break.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess they were trying to find him.”
“Seems like the dressing room would be the first place they would look,” he shrugged.
“Maybe it was locked?” she suggested.
He smiled at her. “I like the way you think. I’m going to do a sweep, you wait here. We’ll need to get official statements from all of you.”
He left, and Landon shook his head and laughed.
“This is great,” he laughed again. “Perfect. So awesome.”
“Awesome?” AJ said. “There’s a man dead, here. How is that awesome?”
He turned to her. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you see, though?”
“No,” she said.
“No, the whole thing, it’s all---” he gestured haplessly as if we should all follow. “This is so great!”
He grabbed the camera out of AJ’s hand and flipped it toward himself. “I want to capture all of this.”
“You have any clues on the murderer?” I asked Landon.
He looked at us like we were crazy. “Well, yeah. You don’t see, it’s the… the… I mean, the whole thing… it’s clear.”
I shook my head. “Well, break it down for us, Landon, cause we’re not following.”
He looked disappointed at us, finally realizing we didn’t get “it,” whatever “it” was.
“Okay, so, it’s like, the agenda that they were on, right?” he eased himself into a chair, and then he noticed a whiteboard on the wall. He grabbed a marker. “Here. Let me show you. It’s like this.”
AJ and I stood in front of his whiteboard and listened, and I was getting a little impatient at the buildup
“So,” Landon wrote down ‘agenda’. “The agenda they were about has to do with freeing the people. Their whole thing, I don’t know if you caught it, is a straightforward anti-illuminati message. They had all of these symbols--the Alice in Wonderland thing, and the nuclear explosion wasn’t about a nuclear war. It was about End Game.”
I rubbed my face. I had fallen ass first into a Landon Rabbit Hole. I’m usually pretty good at catching them before they start. But I guess I was tired and after seeing a murdered body, my defenses were low.
“You think the Illuminati killed Beowulf?” Vicki asked as she joined the conversation.
“It’s the only real explanation,” Landon responded.
“What about a simple homicide?” she asked. “Those do happen.”
“No,” Landon said. “Not in this case. This is too high stakes.”
“High stakes?” I raised an eyebrow quizzically. “They were a small time dance group. How were the stakes high?”
“No,” Landon shook his head vehemently. “They were so much bigger than that. They were saying something. Trying to warn us about something, and they were taken out.”
“What were they supposed to have been saying?” Vicki asked. She positioned herself onto a table and crossed her legs and stroked her chin with concern. Concern for Landon’s sanity, I presumed.
“The nakedness wasn’t about this whole ‘emotional core,’” he said. “You see, Beowulf’s character was supposed to represent patriots
