Chapter Thirteen

After breakfast, I went directly to the morgue, arriving early enough that I could sit outside under the cloudless blue sky and pass the time plugging Gideon Black, Ben Rafferty and Tom Benedict into my phone’s browser. I’d known the search would be largely fruitless but I did find a couple of team sports photos from Gideon’s teenage years. As I zoomed in on his proud, smiling face, I was more certain than ever that I’d found my charming thief.

Some more searching and I found mention of Gideon at a small, private university where he’d majored in art history with a minor in finance. He’d gone onto a master’s degree and then seemingly dropped off the face of the earth.

No work history, no social media, no LinkedIn profile.

Nothing to suggest that Gideon had done anything with his life since the age of twenty-two. It was like he graduated and vanished into thin air.

Except I knew he hadn’t.

Somehow he had turned to a life of crime… and it had paid off.

Gideon Black. Ben Rafferty. Tom Benedict. Could they really all be the same person? How many more aliases did he have?

I searched for each name and then in various conjunctions with each other and found nothing. That didn’t deter me. The man had to live somewhere. He had to pay some kind of property tax or utilities. He couldn’t just not exist in between targets.

“Have you been waiting long?” A shadow fell over me and I jumped, my heart thumping. “Sorry for startling you!” said Garrett.

I pressed a hand to my heart, willing it to slow to a more reasonable speed as my brother looked at me with concern. “I didn’t notice you coming towards me,” I said, then waggled my phone. “I was concentrating.”

“The case?”

I nodded and as I got up to join him to walk to the morgue, I filled him in on Maddox’s chat.

“I’ll expect a call from him,” said Garrett when I’d finished. “This case is getting weirder by the day but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I might pay Phoenix PD a courtesy call.”

“Any more news about the jewels?”

Garrett shook his head. “I’m waiting for something to come back in reference to the diamond serial numbers. If they weren’t registered, we might never know where they came from.”

“Surely, no one could write off that kind of cost?”

“We’re assuming all the jewels came from the same place. It’s possible they’re from several different places. It could even be that our body is the rightful owner.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

“Unlikely,” said Garrett. “I plugged Gideon Black into the missing persons database after your call but there weren’t any hits.”

“So no one reported missing him?”

“Apparently not, or at least not under his birth name. I pulled his birth records. Mother deceased when he was a child. Father listed as Charles Black. Known as Charlie. The search on him came back with a missing person as of twenty years ago. Last known address in Rhode Island. I checked and it was a rental that’s changed hands a bunch of times. I don’t need to tell you that’s easy driving distance to here or Boston. The missing person case file was thin and the detective on it passed a few years back so that’s a dead end.”

“Any sign of a sister?”

“I didn’t find any other kids registered to either parent, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t unregistered siblings or half-siblings. I contacted the school too but no one remembers him, which isn’t surprising, given staff turnover. They could confirm his fees were paid in advance, covering until the end of his senior year, and he was a boarder. Tracking down classmates will take time and there’s no guarantee anyone will have remained in touch since our guy seems to have taken great measures to disappear. That’s if he really is connected to this case. Let’s find out what the ME has to say and circle back.”

We’d arrived at the entrance to the morgue and Garrett pressed the buzzer, announcing us both into the speaker. A moment later, a technician appeared and let us in.

“Dr. Barnes is waiting for you in the autopsy suite,” he said. “I’ll take you through.”

I’d been in the basement morgue’s office a few times, rarely by invitation. When we entered, the room was quiet, and only one metal table had a white cover on it. The room smelled of bleach and something unidentifiable and unpleasant. “Lieutenant Graves, nice to see you and your associate. It’s a slow day,” said Dr. Barnes as she entered via another door. She adjusted her big, round, spectacles and smiled. “But I’m sure it’ll perk up!”

“Let’s hope not,” said Garrett just as the implications of that hit me. “What have you got for us?”

“We don’t often get unauthorized burials like this so everyone was interested in taking a look,” she began, reaching for the sheet.

I recoiled as the skeletal remains were revealed and had a moment of indecision where I badly wanted to run out while my morbid curiosity made me want to stay.

“I thought I’d go ahead and get the bones all cleaned up before you dropped in,” she said. “Afraid there wasn’t anything useful for you there unless you want some extra worms.”

My stomach heaved.

“No, thanks,” said Garrett.

“Okay then. Well, cause of death was a bullet to the skull. See here and here?” she said, manipulating the skull and pointing with a gloved finger. “Entry wound here, exit wound here. Small caliber weapon. No bullet. The trajectory suggests he would have died instantly. Your shooter would have been no more than a few yards away when he or she fired. Make of that what you will.”

“Homicide,” stated Garrett.

“I believe so, yes. The skeleton belongs to a man, Caucasian, approximately fifty years old, in good health. No abnormalities. Two fractures to his fingers on his right hand, which hadn’t healed so possibly from a fight close to his death.”

“Could be with the killer,” I said.

Dr. Barnes rocked her head, uncommitted. “It’s possible and it fits with a theory of trying to defend himself before he was shot, but I can’t definitively say that was the case. I’ll leave that to you.”

“What else can you tell us about him?” asked Garrett.

“Some good news. His left leg had been broken and the pin used to set it had a serial number. I ran it against our database and we got a positive match. I just sent my junior ME to collect the print out.”

“So we have an identification?” Garrett flashed a smile at me.

“We do. Here’s Dr. Kimura now,” she said as a younger man came towards us flapping a piece of paper. It was then I noticed what was tucked underneath his arm. A severed head. The eyes seemed to focus on me.

Before I could even fully register what was happening, I turned, my stomach heaving and lost the contents of my stomach on the tiled floor.

“There’s always one” said Dr. Barnes as Garrett pulled back my hair. “Is she a rookie?”

Whatever was said next was lost to me as the world turned upside-down and then I winked out of existence.

~

“Lexi?”

“No heads, thank you please.”

“Lexi?”

“No. No heads. Iz nawt halloweeeeeen !”

“Lexi?”

“I’m schleeping . Night night . ”

“Lexi!” snapped the voice.

I opened my eyes, an acrid taste filling my mouth and blinked under the uncomfortably bright lights in the paneled floor. Or was it the ceiling?

Garrett’s face loomed over mine. “Where am I?” I asked, blinking, the words slurring in my mouth.

“The corridor. You fainted.”

I struggled to sit upright, finding myself lying across several chairs, and planted my feet on the floor. Garrett pressed a plastic water cup into my hand as I groaned. “Sip,” he ordered. “You threw up.”

I sipped and pulled a face. “You can never tell anyone,” I said, wondering about the small wound to my pride.

“It happens to everyone.”

“I will never live this down. Don’t tell Maddox!”

“Why would I tell him?”

I grimaced. “He’ll ask.” No wonder he’d looked so smug when I left him at the café. Happens to everyone , huh?

Garrett squatted in front of me. “How’re you feeling?” he asked.

“Fine.” I touched my head, surprised to find it didn’t hurt.

“I caught you before you kissed the floor.”

“Thanks.”

“Let me know when you feel up to moving and I’ll fill you in on everything.”

“So long as everything doesn’t include that severed head, I’m good to go.”

“Apparently, it was just a joke prop. It wasn’t real.”

“All the same, I’m not sure I’ll ever close my eyes again.” I sipped the water until I drained the cup and gave myself a little shake. “Okay, I’m ready. Hit me with it. What did you find out?” I waved at Garrett to hurry up and fill my brain with new information so I didn’t have to think about that head, real or not.

“You were only out for a couple minutes, so not much but we do have a name. Our body is confirmed as Charles Black. The same man as our missing report. Before you ask, yes, he’s definitely Gideon Black’s father. The ME is going to confirm the identification through dental records once she has them but she’s given me a ninety-five percent certainty verdict based on the plate from the leg.”

“So Joe Smithson was an alias.”

“Yes, we were right on that, but the big question is why?”

“Because he was up to no good,” I said, wondering if maybe I’d had a little knock on the head after all. I ran my hands over my head, reassured to find no bumps.

“Okay, that is probably why. The ME had some more information.”

“I like all this sharing!”

“Don’t get used to it. I’m only telling you because I’m overworked and need another set of eyes on this case, and, even better, your consultancy fee isn’t coming out of our department budget.”

“I wasn’t aware we were charging a fee.”

“Precisely.”

“And there I was feeling all warm and fuzzy about us working together. What’s the extra information?”

“Based on the decomposition, the ME estimated the burial to have taken place between fifteen and twenty-five years ago. His clothing matches the fashion of around that time and when they tested fibers, she was able to confirm the jacket he’d been wearing was from a manufacturer that went of business eighteen years ago. That narrowed the time frame. The leasing information you sent me reduces it further. The missing person report clinches it. I don’t think Joe Smithson ever left that house willingly. I think he was killed there and it was covered up to look like he’d left or skipped out on the rental.”

“Who filed the missing person report?” I asked.

“Looks like his son filed it from Boston. But it doesn’t look like he ever followed up.”

“So either he knows what happened to his dad and was trying to hide his part in it, or something happened that made him lose interest in finding answers. Or scared him off.”

“I had the same thoughts. No one reported a Joe Smithson missing, but I also can’t find a record of anyone by that name paying taxes, utilities or anything else from that time. I think we should assume Charlie Black used more than one identity.”

“Father and son are starting to sound alike.” I thought about it for a moment, then said, “I was about to suggest we should come at this from two sides and meet in the middle. You take Charlie Black. I’ll take Gideon Black, but now I think about it, I have no idea how to find Gideon now. He just disappeared last time. If it weren’t for Maddox’s intel about two possible sightings, I’d say he’d ceased to exist. Or turned law abiding. The first seems more likely.”

“He probably goes to ground between jobs. That could be what the father was doing too. Biding his time and checking in on his son before he picked up another scam.”

“We’re sure Charlie Black was running scams?” I asked. “It couldn’t be anything simpler like he just wanted to change his name to run from, I don’t know, debtors? A gang? Drug lords?”

“You have a fanciful mind. I’m thinking scam but I’d like evidence to confirm.”

“But how did he get those jewels? Everything seems to come back to them.”

“The twelve million dollar question.”

“I think we should focus less on the two men and go straight to the middle ground. The jewels. Gideon is a thief. We know that. We should assume his father is too. He might have even taught his son how to steal. If Charlie Black stole the jewels, someone probably wants them back. Might have even killed for them.” I stopped, stumped again. So why not take the jewels? Why leave them behind?

“I’ll let you know what comes up as I poke around. What are you going to do until then?”

“Inform the Dugans that they’re definitely not going to be arrested.” I side-eyed Garrett. “Are they?” I asked.

“They are not,” he confirmed.

“And then I’m going to focus on the rental records and Lucas’s findings.”

“What are the odds that we have two thieves already in the mix? One who steals jewels, one with a pocketful of ‘em?”

“I don’t know, but it’s starting to sound like the family business is a dangerous one.”

Garrett and I walked outside and after he retrieved me a bottle of water and a candy bar from a vending machine, and checked several more times that I was okay to be by myself, he left for the police station with a promise to call me as soon as he had an update.

Since I had time to kill, I decided to walk back to the office so I could gather my thoughts. More than once as I tried to separate my thoughts about Gideon and his father, I found them sliding together, only to struggle to wrench them apart.

It had to be a coincidence that these cases had dropped onto my lap. Charlie Black had been dead for around twenty years. Yet now I had a solid connection between this town and Gideon Black, I had to wonder if swindling rich women and theft were the only reasons he came here under his Ben Rafferty guise? Or had he also come to search for his father? Gideon had been the one to register his father missing all those years ago so that implied they had regular contact until the older man’s disappearance and premature death. That contact had to be regular enough for Gideon to find his father’s absence concerning. Did he know his father lived under an alias? Was that how he knew how to assume identities too?

If the forger, Owen Weaver, hadn’t been imprisoned for so long, I would have asked him if he gave family referral discounts.

I had more questions than I had answers and by the time I reached the agency, I was deeply frustrated.

Lucas hadn’t sent any information to my inbox or left me any messages, which was disappointing.

I called the Dugans, leaving a message on their voicemail that there was nothing alarming to report, but that there had been developments on the case and that the evidence strongly suggested they had nothing to do with the death or burial. I asked them to return the call so we could discuss the next steps, feeling certain that they wouldn’t want to invest any more of their money. The thought was disappointing. Not the agency’s fee but if they terminated our contract, once I’d sent them my report, I would have no reason to continue digging and I really, really wanted to.

Garrett might be a lot less sharing if he knew I didn’t have a finger in the pie, and I doubted Solomon would want me stuck in if the agency weren’t being paid. I could take the occasional pro-bono case but that involved having a client in need. The Dugans weren’t in need, they were simply inconvenienced.

Despite using every database I had at my disposal, I couldn’t find any variation of Gideon Black’s names with the ages and variables in active use in the area, or any historic references for Charlie Black or his aliases, and there were far too many hits across the States to feasibly check every one. That made me sit back and assess the case.

I had wondered if we were looking at this all wrong.

What if I’d been right when I said to Garrett we should look into the middle ground. What if it weren’t the people that could crack the case open but the jewels?

We had initially assumed all the jewels came from the same place but the jewelers and Garrett had cast a shadow over that. What if the jewels were a hoard made up of multiple thefts and deceptions? The smaller jewels would be the most marketable as desirable stones for all manner of jewelry but it was the large ruby that was by far the most valuable.

There couldn’t be many rubies like that.

It had been hidden for near twenty years so that was where I started searching.

That the jewels were in Charlie Black’s pocket felt significant. Had they recently come into his possession? Or was he preparing to offload them at the time of his death? Otherwise, why not hide them in a safe place?

A search for jewel thefts in the state returned a handful of articles. Broadening my search to nearby states offered a few more pages but none referenced anything as valuable as the ruby. Was that because there was nothing to find? I doubted it. I just hadn’t hit on the right lead yet.

I closed my laptop and headed over to Lily’s bar, determined to clear my head with another walk. Plus, I wanted to check in on her after our unfortunate sprinkler jetwash and maybe avail myself of some nice snacks to appease my empty stomach.

When I arrived, the bar was quiet with just a handful of patrons dotted around the booths and tables furthest from the bar. Lily was serving a couple while her employee, but also our friend, Ruby Kalouza, was polishing stemware. The music was low and upbeat, soft conversation easily flowing over the top, and the scent of leather and polish hung in the air.

“I thought you’d be out chasing bad guys,” said Lily as she returned to the bar. Her hair had been washed and her curls freshly set. Yesterday, she’d been drenched, her curls plastered to her face. “Or did you catch them already?”

I slid onto a bar stool and hooked my bag under the bar. “I’m at an impasse,” I said.

“That doesn’t sound ideal,” said Ruby. Dark-haired, pretty, and with an hourglass figure, Ruby was more trendy than elegant in her crew-neck Lily’s Bar t-shirt and apron. She personified exactly the kind of customer Lily wanted to attract: cool. “Would wine help?”

I shook my head and my stomach gurgled. My mouth tasted gritty and my day’s calorie intake was at the morgue. “Maybe a soft drink and snacks,” I decided.

“Coming up,” said Lily. “If I throw in ice and a lemon slice, will that help?”

“Supremely.”

“What’s the impasse?” asked Ruby.

“My dead thief is related to my arch nemesis and I can’t figure out if he’s committed a crime or was the victim of one.” I let out a sigh.

“Your arch nemesis committed a crime?” asked Ruby, frowning.

“No. Well, yes, he definitely has, but probably not this one. My dead guy is related to him and it looks like they might both be criminals.”

Lily and Ruby exchanged looks and Lily shrugged.

“Ben Rafferty,” I said to clue her in, waiting for realization to dawn on Lily’s face.

“That rat!” she spat. “He’s back in town?”

“No, but it looks like my cold case dead guy might be his dad.”

“Shut! Up!” squealed Lily.

“Okay,” I said, and rested my forehead on the bar. Lily tapped on my head and I lifted it expectantly.

“Do not shut up,” she said. “Is this the guy with all the jewels that we nearly got drowned for yesterday?”

“Jewels?” asked Ruby, looking between us. “Drowned?”

“Long story,” I said.

“I’ll tell Ruby later. You better fill us in,” said Lily. She slid a tall glass across to me, a wedge of lemon over the rim, followed quickly by a small bowl of peanuts and a larger bowl of chips. “You have to earn your keep if you want that on the house.”

I repeated what Garrett and I had discovered, leaving out the part where he had to hold my hair back before catching me. “So you see,” I said as I finished, “With the Blacks’ aliases making it tough to research them, my best lead is the jewels. I think they’re stolen and Garrett is looking into it but there haven’t been any leads so far. There’s no way someone isn’t missing a huge ruby!”

“Did you hear about the Queen’s Ruby?” asked Ruby. She reached into the dishwasher under the bar for the next set of glasses to polish. “Now that was an audacious theft!”

“No. Did it happen here?”

“No, it was in New York. I remember because my dad was working in New York at the time and only coming home on weekends and he said there was a lot of fuss about it. Apparently, it was the big centerpiece of an exhibition at the New York Museum of History and poof! They showed it off at a big, fancy party on opening night, then the next day it was gone! Like magic. No one saw a thing. Every time I went anywhere, all the kids at school called me The Disappearing Ruby for two weeks,” she added with a laugh. “You must have heard about it. It was big news.”

“What happened?” asked Lily. “It couldn’t have simply disappeared!”

“I think there was a break-in overnight or maybe someone hid in the museum after hours? Or maybe it was stolen during the party? I don’t remember. All I know is everyone at the party claimed they never saw a thing.”

“Was it ever found?” I asked.

Ruby shrugged. “I have no idea. I don’t think so, but this was twenty something years ago so I really don’t remember. You mentioning a ruby made it pop into my head.”

I sat up a little straighter. “Twenty years ago?”

“Thereabouts. Not just the Queen’s Ruby but a whole bunch of jewelry too. It was like something out of Ocean’s 11 . Well, I imagine it was anyway.”

“What kind of jewelry?” I asked, reaching for my phone.

Ruby pursed her lips. “Necklaces, earrings, rings, I guess. I’m trying to remember the name of the exhibition. My dad bought my mom a replica necklace from the gift shop and I was really into being a princess at the time, so he got me a little paste ruby tiara. So cute. I think it was called something like…”

“Treasures of Rachenstein,” I said, reading from the screen, which had returned several results following my quick search for the Queen’s Ruby.

“Yeah, that’s it!” Ruby said. “Did you find a picture?”

I scrolled my forefinger down the screen, skimming the article about the incomprehensible theft, the baffled statement from the museum, the determination of the police chief to apprehend the culprit, the discreet refusal to comment from Rachenstein, and then there was a picture.

The ruby rested on a velvet cushion, so large and dazzling that I just knew it was the one unearthed from its decades of concealment only days before.