“Is anyone in here?” Ward called. “Cheyenne PD. Show yourself.”
One of them must have brushed against the tall wire racks because something tumbled from above and landed in the aisle. A blue and white stuffed rabbit in a black top hat, holding a magic wand, gazed up with plastic googly eyes at the three pistols trained on it.
Sam made a sound of amused disgust.
“It looks like nobody’s home.” Ward glanced around uneasily.
“They should be open,” Jason said. “According to their store hours.”
She nodded, holstering her pistol and moving toward the rear exit. “I’ll check behind the building. There’s a parking area back there.”
Sam was continuing his sweep of the store floor. Jason stared at the front desk and the door leading to the storeroom.
“I’ll check the storeroom.”
Sam glanced at him and nodded curtly.
Jason went around the sales desk and craned his head around the doorframe. The room was dark, too dark to safely move around though he could see empty crates and cardboard boxes had been shoved toward the wall. Tall metal shelves were crammed with formless articles.
It sort of looked like a large trunk had been tilted on end and left between two rows of shelves. Something about the outline of that trunk, the way the light from the main floor gleamed on its glossy surface, raised the hair on Jason’s head. Was that thing made of glass?
He felt around for a light switch. Failed to find it. He tried the other side of the doorframe and located the switch.
The overhead fluorescent lamps came on with a ghostly buzz, casting a sickly green light over the crammed interior of the storeroom.
Jason stared at the trunk—stared and stared. He couldn’t look away. He knew what he was seeing, but somehow his brain could not seem to make sense of it.
This was a replica of the Chinese Water Torture Cell. A device invented by Harry Houdini for his most famous escape. The frame and heavy stocks were made of Honduras mahogany and nickel-plated steel with brass fixtures. The front consisted of a plate of half-inch tempered glass. The apparatus weighed around three-quarters of a ton and held 250 gallons of water. It was relatively small. Only 26 and a half inches wide and 59 inches tall. Too small for the large man jammed upside down into the tank.
Ian Boz’s eyes stared in horror through the murky blur of the water still lapping ominously against the glass.
A small yellow and green something flickered at the bottom of the cell. For a crazy instant, Jason imagined it might be a fish. Sanity reasserted itself. Jason knelt and used the zoom on his phone’s camera to get a better look without chancing disturbing any crime-scene evidence.
He stared at the screen of his phone. He was looking at a card. A tarot card. A feckless young man in a green tunic was about to step off a cliff.
Jason knew that card. Special Agent Abigail Dreyfus had mistakenly read the description to him in her office the afternoon Boz had pulled a gun on her.
The Fool.
Chapter Twenty-One
Hard to say what was worse.
SAC Reynolds openly laughing at him, or BAU Chief—and current boyfriend—Sam Kennedy trying not to laugh at him.
“Abby Dreyfus a serial killer,” Reynolds repeated for the nth time, the wobble in his voice barely held in check by what was clearly a will of steel.
Jason couldn’t help looking at Sam who, to his credit, looked grave and sympathetic—except for that goddamned gleam of amusement in the back of his eyes. Sam, who usually had all the sense of humor of a marauding grizzly bear, found this funny. In the middle of a fucking homicide investigation, Sam Kennedy found something humorous.
Jason was never going to live this down.
“Abby Dreyfus a magician.” Reynolds’ voice shook again because apparently it was even more ridiculous to be suspected of being a magician than a serial killer.
“I didn’t know she was your goddaughter,” Jason said. He couldn’t quite keep the edge out of his voice. “I didn’t realize you’d known her all her life.”
“So we heard,” Reynolds said. “You thought she was this Andy Alexander, one half of a brother and sister magic act. The brother being this Terry Van der Beck.”
“Elle Diamond seemed to recognize her.”