Deadly Curiosities (32 page)

“Don’t –” I managed to yell before the white fire hit the fumes and a loud flash-bang exploded behind us.

Sorren and Lucinda stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the doorway. Lucinda had the staff from the Archive in her hands, holding it like a flame-thrower. Sorren grabbed us, dragging us out of the way as foul smelling clouds of smoke billowed toward us.

“The collections!” Alistair despaired, reaching back as if he could save his precious antiquities.

Halon gas nozzles switched on, dampening the fire. Alistair looked stricken, and I felt awful.

Sorren knelt down in front of Alistair. In the distance, we heard sirens. We had to get out of there, quick.

“You went into the archives to put back an artifact, and smelled gas leaking,” Sorren said in the same voice he used to glamor Baxter. Alistair stared at him, wide-eyed, utterly lost in Sorren’s gaze.

“You tried to escape, but the air was bad and you nearly passed out,” Sorren added. “Just as you reached the door, the blast came. It knocked you off your feet and tore the door off its hinges.”

“Yes. Yes, I remember.”

“You never saw us,” Sorren said with a sad half-smile. “You were alone at the time.”

“Yes,” Alistair replied. “I was alone.”

The shadow men and monsters were gone, and we’d just destroyed priceless artifacts. As happy as I was to be alive, I grieved for the irreplaceable history that had been lost.

Corban Moran was going to pay, big time.

Alistair was going to be all right, although the museum might not be. I really hoped Alistair wouldn’t lose his position over the damage. I was shaking with pent-up fear and anger. Sorren hustled us away from the building.

“Teag’s car –” I protested.

“It’s been moved, honey,” Lucinda said, resolutely striding away from the scene of the damage.

“The security cameras in the museum –” “Have been altered,” Sorren replied. “It will look like a power failure.”

“How –” Teag began.

“I sensed where you’d gone,” Sorren said. “And I feared that Moran would interfere. Lucinda and I came as quickly as we could.” He looked apologetic. “I’m sorry it wasn’t sooner.”

“We learned a lot,” I said, still light-headed from our close brush with death. “Most of it can wait. But I think we’ve got what we were looking for,” I said. “Teag’s got the journal and papers from the salvage crew, and Alistair added the missing piece.”

I looked at Sorren and Lucinda. “Storage,” I said. “That’s what they’ve all got in common that we haven’t had time to investigate. Now we’ve just got to figure out why it matters.”

“I’ll see what I can find out through my channels,” Sorren said. “And I’ve requested a demon hunter’s assistance, but he hasn’t arrived yet. In the meantime, take advantage of the break to recuperate. Once we have more information and our demon hunter, we’ll be ready to move.”

“Y
OU SAID THE
last site we didn’t get to was a closed storage facility, right?”

Teag nodded. “Yep. The place was called Stor-Your-Own and it closed about six months ago.”

“What a coincidence,” I said drily. “Landrieu and his salvage team put their dive gear in storage when they were in town. And from the journals, it says the storage facility is in the old Navy yard, fairly close to the warehouse where Moran called the demon. The whole Navy yard is on land Jeremiah Abernathy used to own, back when he controlled the demon.”

“We also know the Foo dog was in storage, and if we can find out where, maybe that’s the connection with the suddenly-haunted antiques,” Teag replied. “Maybe storing something with bad resonance near a demon activates the juju.”

“That’s something we need to find out. And it wouldn’t hurt to see what you can dig up about Stor Your-Own’s history and owners. It’s convenient that it went belly up right at the time Moran surfaced.”

“Let’s do our digging from a safe distance this time,” Teag said. “After what happened in the warehouse and the museum, I’m not thrilled about just going into another haunted building to poke around.”

I held up both hands in surrender. “No arguments here. My bruises have bruises.”

“Now that you mention it, I remember a couple of the folks I called mentioning storage.”

I chewed my lip for a moment, thinking. “If we could prove that even some of the problem pieces were at one time stored at the facility in the Navy yard, then we would know it’s something about that particular site that activated them.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to do some digging into the business records, too,” Teag mused. “Why did it go out of business? Who owns it now? Did something happen to any of the previous owners? There’s a reason it’s just standing there empty.”

Teag grinned. “Sounds like we’ve got a full day in front of us tomorrow. Monday is usually one of our busy days.”

I sighed. “True. But Maggie said she’d come in to make up for the hours she missed. Part of me hopes we don’t get a lot of customers so we can work on this, and the other part of me really wants to pay the electric bill.”

“I agree,” Teag said with a laugh. “But I know you, Cassidy. And I know you won’t let this drop until you get to the bottom of it.”

I finished my drink, thinking about what Teag said. At least a dozen men were dead, including the salvage crew and Jimmy Redshoes. And if Moran had his way, that would be just the beginning.

M
AGGIE WAS BACK
, and seemed fully recovered. For someone who was semi-retired, her near-boundless energy made me feel like a slacker. Her gray hair was cut in a trendy, chin-length bob, and she confided that she liked the cut because it kept her hair out of her face when she was doing her daily yoga. She was slender and dressed in a style I thought of as ‘Woodstock-esque’.

“Good to have you back, Maggie!” I said with a grin. “Glad you’re feeling better.”

Maggie beamed. “Good to be back, Cassidy. I don’t get sick often, but it seems like when I do, it hits twice as hard. Believe me, I’m glad to be on my feet again!”

“Are you up to watching the front for a little bit?” I asked. “Teag and I are working on an acquisition.”

Maggie waved me off. “Happy to do it. It’s been too darn quiet all by myself at home. Take your time.

I’ve got it covered.”

While Maggie handled the customers, Teag took his laptop to the break room and I went into my office to make phone calls.

“We heard back from Debra and Rebecca and the lady with the funeral vase,” I reported after some time on the phone. “And you were right – all the pieces were stored at Stor-Your-Own at some time in the last year.”

“Mrs. Butler doesn’t remember the name of the storage unit, but she’s going to check her records,” I said. “And before you ask, Trinket Ellison said the same thing. She believes the opera glasses were in storage for a little while after her mother’s death while the family sorted things out, but she didn’t make the arrangements herself, so she has to check.”

“I suspect the Ellisons have people for that.”

I nodded. “Knowing the Ellisons, their people probably have people for that.”

“How about Rebecca? She said she bought the Foo dog statue at an estate sale,” Teag said.

I nodded. “Uh huh. And she also said that the sale was fun because there was so much to see, between what had been in the house and what had been tucked away
in storage
.”

Teag crossed his arms and his ankles and gave me a happily smug look.

“What?” I asked, rolling my eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s your ‘I-know-something-you-don’t-know’ pose. Spill.”

“From what I can find online, Stor-Your-Own, definitely has a checkered past,” he said. “And that’s just from what’s in the public record. I haven’t hacked anything yet.”

“Yet.”

He grinned. “Want to know?”

I rolled my eyes, and he laughed. “So, Stor-Your-Own finally closed for good six months ago, but it’s had problems almost since the beginning. The owner died last year, left a total financial mess for his widow. She’s been in and out of court, skirting bankruptcy and lawsuits, and so selling the storage facility probably hasn’t been at the top of her to-do list.”

“Lawsuits?”

Teag nodded. “The guy who owned it, Fred Kenner, wasn’t a real stand-up sort of guy. There’ve been allegations of money laundering, as well as suspicions that he turned a blind eye to drug dealers renting units.”

“Lovely.”

“Isn’t it?” Teag agreed. “Kenner had a lot of shady dealings. He’d filed for bankruptcy before, then moved to a new city and started over again. He had a slew of names, and some off-shore accounts.”

“Why own a storage facility?” I asked.

“It’s cheap to build, and it doesn’t take a lot of work to bring in steady cash,” he replied with a shrug.

“Think about it. Most people put their stuff in storage and don’t come back for months, maybe years, and all the while, their monthly rental goes right into your bank account. All you need is an office manager to sign up new accounts and occasionally sweep the floor. Easy money was Fred Kenner’s watchword.”

“How long was Stor-Your-Own in operation?”

“Kenner converted an empty shipping facility into a self-storage facility about three years ago. And for the first couple of years, it seemed to operate in the black. Then Kenner got in trouble with some kind of pyramid scheme, and started pulling cash out of other, more legitimate, investments.”

“In other words, he was desperate enough to make a deal with a demon – or with Moran, who’s the next best thing,” I said.

“Bingo.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Okay, so the storage facility has been there for three years, but the deaths only began about six months ago. What changed?”

Teag shrugged. “Good question. And my guess is, Moran. Kenner’s world started to fall apart at about the same time the murders started. He was always a shady dude. He beat a rap for tax evasion, and the workers at one of his businesses sued him for not paying them for overtime. But he managed to get away with it until a year ago.”

“So his luck changed?”

Teag nodded, twirling a pencil as he thought. “He was under indictment for fraud. His real estate investments took a big hit when the economy soured, and he owed money to the wrong people. He had gambling debts. The Feds were looking at him for insider trading, and if they had nailed drug dealers using the facility, the government could have seized the property under the racketeering laws.”

“Sounds like a perfect storm,” I said. “And right about that time, Landrieu and his team disappear, Moran summons his demon, and the killings start.”

“And Kenner might have been Victim Number Two,” Teag said. “They found his badly mutilated body inside the storage unit security fence right when all the shit was about to hit the fan around his business dealings.”

He looked up. “They charged the office manager, Flora Beam, with the crime. Her attorney claimed insanity and so she’s locked up in a psychiatric facility.”

My blood ran cold. “When?”

“If my dates are right, Fred Kenner died about a week before the murder near the Navy yard,” Teag replied. “Which means he might have been the first death after the sacrifice we found.”

Something Teag had said jiggled a memory. “You know, when I had the vision at the Dennison house, I caught something about Kevin stealing things from his stash. Do you think he meant the storage facility?”

Teag shrugged. “It’s possible, although he might have been dumpster diving.”

“What about Jimmy Redshoes?” I asked. “Do you remember the kinds of things he sold? They were more like what you’d find in a yard sale than from a street vendor, because he almost never had two of the same thing. What if he supplied his merchandise by breaking into an abandoned storage facility?”

Teag frowned. “Could be. But if it was abandoned, wouldn’t the tenants have cleared out all their things before it shut down?”

“Maybe some of them did,” I speculated. “But if Kenner was such a shady character, and the facility closed up on short notice, maybe some of them didn’t get word in time. Or maybe they never got the notice. You said it yourself,” I continued, “people who store things often don’t pay any attention.”

“That makes sense,” Teag replied. “That’s why there are those reality TV shows about selling unclaimed items.”

I nodded. “But if Kenner was dead and his estate’s been tied up in litigation, they might not have been able to sell things off, or maybe no one’s even gotten to dealing with it yet.”

Just then, the phone rang and Maggie grabbed it before I got there. “Cassidy,” Maggie called, “call on line one.”

I greeted the caller and listened to the voice on the other end. “Thank you so much. I really appreciate your going to all that bother.” I turned to Teag with a Cheshire-cat grin. “That was Mrs. Butler. Says the linens were stored at Stor-Your-Own until about six months ago.”

Teag fist-pumped the air in victory. “Gotcha!”

I poured a new cup of coffee and leaned against the break room counter. “We still don’t know why the bad juju seems to be picking up momentum,” I said. “The murders are happening more often, and it’s only been recently that there are reports of haunted objects causing problems.”

“Landrieu thought he was being stalked,” Teag said. “We know Moran approached him. I wouldn’t put it past Moran to make Landrieu and his team disappear if they got in his way.”

“Meaning that once Landrieu located the
Cristobal
, and Moran had recuperated from the damage Sorren did to him, Moran got rid of Landrieu and retrieved what he wanted himself.”

Teag nodded. “As far as the objects go, maybe Moran’s demon-binding artifact needed time – or exposure to something – to gain strength,” he theorized. “So the objects started out normal, and then got contaminated as the energy in the storage facility strengthened.”

“Could be,” I agreed. “Trinket said that no one else had reported having an incident with the opera glasses.”

“It makes sense,” Teag said. “The people who owned the haunted items had them for years without anything freaky happening. Then there’s a move, a death, a need to clear out space, and the pieces go into storage for a while. And when they come back, they’re not the same.”