Dragons of Drupes - 2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

 

It was definitely dead. The blue and yellow striped fish floated on top of the water, belly up. I pulled my face away from the fish tank and rubbed my steamy breath off the glass. The other fish, partially hidden behind limp green plants, barely moved.

“It must be so depressing being a fish in there,” Faye said, coming closer to check them out. “Oh.” She’d seen the dead fish. “Sad.”

“Died of boredom, no doubt,” I said. “What with nothing to do all day, every day.” I looked at the shiny metal hoops and tunnels inside the tank. It seemed so depressing. “They must have a real blast in there.”

Terry peered over my shoulder. “Blast? Hardly.”

“Kinda what I meant.”

“Damn accent. Sarcasm gets me every time.”

Jack laughed, soft and bubbly like water in a brook. “Totally with you on that one.”

I lightly elbowed him, and was surprised when he chuckled. Jack chuckling? It actually bordered on . . . well, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to get why girls might dig him. “Stop laughing. Be at least semi-professional.”

He snorted. “Says the guy wearing a tee-shirt like that.”

“It’s a print of cuffs. Appropriate. Catch the thief and all that.”

He raised a brow, and read the back of my shirt. “Play with me?”

Wanting to piss him off, I smiled. “No thanks. I’m not into that.”

Jack blushed.

Our footsteps echoed in the closed Berlin Museum of Natural History. Detective Wurz appeared at the end of the corridor. He paused to check his watch before marching over. As he passed in front of a gigantic skeleton of a dinosaur, I said under my breath, “And the way you pronounce the ‘e’ on eggs sounds plain wrong.”

“When you come this way,” Detective Wurz said, ushering us down a hallway, “I introduce you to the staff which were today around the jewel.”

We moved into a well-lit staff room where three uniformed adults stared at us. The man sitting on the right side of the room blinked. “Was ist das? Sie sind Kinder!” Words continued to fly out of his mouth at a terrifying speed.

Us guys turned to Faye, brows raised. What is he saying?

“He’s, well, confused. He wants to know why he has to speak with us and not adults.”

“Confused?” Terry said. “Sounds like he’s about to have a hernia.”

Faye giggled and slapped a palm over her mouth.

Didn’t make it obvious at all.

Detective Wurz turned to us, throwing her a cold look. She stopped, and passed the scowl onto Terry like it was pass the parcel or something.

“I don’t like that you kids are involved. I am not believing in anything with real magic. This is a clever heist—nothing else, but the Chief gave me his orders. So,” he said, inclining his to the two men and woman behind him, “they will each say what happened. Christian and David,” he pointed at the two men on the right, “were in the room at the time Jewel is stealed.” Then he pointed to a slightly chubby smiling woman on the left. “Sara works with information and ticketing, and speaks very good English. But we start right to left.”

Christian stood up and started speaking. Faye quickly translated, trying to keep up with him, her focused brows pushed together. I took out the notepad from my bag and scribbled down their accounts. God I wished I knew shorthand.

At nine o’clock there were maybe twentyish people in the room with the jewel. No one struck him as particularly unusual. He doesn’t have to stare at the jewels the whole time because if someone touches a display case, an alarm goes off. But he didn’t hear any alarm and the next time he went to look at the red emerald, it was gone. Nobody in the room looked suspicious. No one was quickly running out. He rubbed his eyes to double check he wasn’t seeing things. But the jewel was still missing. He immediately used his walkie-talkie to tell security. Then the alarms went off and no one was allowed to leave the museum until they had been searched by the police.

“Ask him when he phoned in,” Terry said.

Faye interrupted Christian, who narrowed his eyes at her, obviously annoyed.

“He only noticed it was missing minutes after it disappeared according to the video cameras. He thought he would have heard an alarm. And the police found nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

I shook my hand. My whole forearm cramped from the sheer speed I was writing. I wanted to get everything down. Not one clue would slip from under my nose.

Faye turned to David next. He smiled meekly and, thankfully, spoke slower than Christian.

David had been thirsty and had gone to the staff room to get a bottle of water, which he brought back and put on the window sill. At that point the jewel was still there. After 10 or 15 minutes, he’s not sure how long exactly, he needed to use the bathroom. When he got back he saw the other guard on his walkie-talkie and then the alarms went off. He looked over and saw that the jewel was gone.

“And what about you?” Terry addressed Sara. “See anyone that struck you as odd or out of place?”

“We get a large variety of people coming to the museum,” she said. “There was no one that I thought was strange. Everyone seemed normal. Except . . . “

“Except what?” I shifted the pad from one knee to the other and continued scrawling. Be nice if they’d offered us a table. Not just these right uncomfortable seats that bit into my ass.

“Well I had a lot of people come up and ask if we had any paracetamol.”

“Paracetamol?” Jack repeated the word slowly as if he were sounding it out for the first time.

“I don’t usually have so many people asking for some.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“Different times. Most before lunch.”

“We are going to need to see the security tapes,” Faye told Detective Wurz.

He nodded. “We organize tapes and you four visit the mineral collection where jewel is stealed.”

“Right then,” Jack said, standing up. He patted the science kit he had over his shoulder with an enthusiasm that made me question his sanity. Really, was science that much fun?

“This way please.”

Jack was the first to follow the detective up the stairs and I went up after him, albeit at a much slower—normal—pace, unable to hold back a chuckle.

Ah, Jack, you nerd.

We walked toward a double set of doors with thick wooden frames, their symmetry marred by a sign nailed onto the right beam prohibiting the use of cameras and digital media. Mineral Palace, the room was named. I stepped inside, welcomed by a wall of tepid air.

Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I scanned the room. There wasn’t much palace about it.

The room was darker than the one we’d come from. Black casings and backdrops show cased the featured semi-precious and precious jewels. At the far back wall was a large temple-shaped cabinet displaying . . . well, to me they were just colorful rocks. I made my way around the room until I spotted the empty stand in the centre.

Across the room, Detective Wurz turned on his heel and walked out, bluntly telling us he’d be back soon. The guy made my blood simmer. Even if he hadn’t blackmailed us into the case, I couldn’t imagine getting on with him.

I waited until his clunky footsteps had disappeared and moved closer to the empty stand. A plaque on the side read:

Auction 23. August

The proceeds of this 3 carat red emerald (red beryl) will be donated to the children’s cancer society. The auction will be held at our annual National History benefit.

I shook my head. There were three things wrong with this. One: stealing. Although, I guess that did depend on the circumstances, but in most cases it was clearly on the black side of black and white. Two: stealing from children. Now there would have to be an excellent justification for that, if one could be found at all. And three: stealing from dying children. As far as I was concerned that was rock bottom. No way out of that one. No possible excuse good enough to even consider there being grey zones.

So the question was: what sod would steal this?

“Not too close, Drake,” Jack said, crouching over a large thick-leathered case. He unclipped the front and flipped the top open. A line of test tubes, filters, gauze mats and a foldable tripod were attached to the lid. On the bottom were other gadgets, bottles of liquids and small containers of metals, all appropriately labeled with letters and numbers.

I glimpsed at the book Jack pulled out: An Encyclopædia of Magical Effects on the Earthly Periodic Table of Elements, by R.T Ronald.

I moved back to Terry. “You want to read or take notes?”

“Read.”

“Faye? Read or notes?”

“Read.” Why had I bothered to ask? Either I delegated or I wrote myself.

I looked at my sore hand, flexing the muscles back and forth. “Fine.”

I grabbed two books from my bag and handed An Index of Magics and Oxions to Terry. “You’ll have to listen to Jack to narrow down the magic.” I held out the second book, Uses of Mystical Minerals, to Faye. “Wait a sec,” I said, pulling the book back and leafing through to the index. “Huh. The technical name is red beryl or bixbite, but it’s also known by the mystical name ‘Red Eye’.”

Faye snatched the book out of my hands, her face lighting up like I’d just told them there was a spell in there to fly.

When she glanced at me, presumably to say ‘thanks, got it now, you can go’, but then she frowned. “What?”

“What?” I asked, shaking my head. “Seriously?”

“It’s just . . . Red Eye? Maybe it sees things, like, the future. How epic.”

Terry jerked his head up at that, but his gaze was cool, and he was looking at Faye . . . almost like he was worried about something.

I shrugged, and as she got herself comfortable leaning against a wall, I took out my notepad. Again.

Poised with the pen, I waited. Faye, Terry—they all knew the drill. Shout out when anything important crops up. After a few minutes kneeling stupidly with nothing to write, I put the pen on the paper and turned to Jack.

He’d unrolled some paper and was evenly pouring iron filings over it. I crossed my fingers whatever magic was used didn’t have a hint of magnetic energy. I couldn’t handle the slow elimination process needed if it did. Way too many worlds with magnetically-based magic.

Jack placed a compass on the other side of the stand. I moved my gaze out the window, in the direction the compass pin was pointing. I thanked my lucky stars. “Pretty sure that’s north.”

Jack grinned. “We’re getting off to a good start.”

I crouched to touch the wooden skirting board lining the room. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

“Hear, hear,” Terry chimed in.

Faye looked up from her book, jerking a finger to my notepad and pen. “It can’t read the future, but it can do a fair bit of stuff.”

She cleared her throat and read aloud. “Among its more powerful properties is the ability to increase life longevity by up to 20 - 50 years while giving its bearer better life quality through agility, youth, and an excess of endorphins. Dissolved in citric acid and taken in small doses, Red Eye has the ability to boost one’s energy without the need to sleep.”

Terry whistled.

Jack said, in a bored, sarcastic tone, “No reason anyone would want to steal it at all.”

I snickered as I jotted down notes. My pen flew across the page. I loved this part. The gathering of information, the different parts of the puzzle . . . that was what I loved about the job.

Faye continued, “Meticulous care is advised when undergoing this treatment. Overdoses of Red Beryl can lead to manic mental states and quicken the heart to the point of risking heart failure.

“Larger specimens of these jewels can freeze, bend, or speed up time. It allows one to travel back or forward in time, but this is considered extremely dangerous as it could change the chain of historic events, and no successful attempts at time travel have been reported. It also has the potential to create portals that cut through different Oxions.”

I shuddered and hoped the culprit stole the jewel because he wanted to live forever, and not to cut into the time/space continuum. While the first might be selfish, at least it didn’t do much harm. But if time and space were messed with? It could have Oxions leaking into each other. Epic disaster.

End of the world, epic.

“Among its minor properties, this jewel can alter electric currents and magnetic fields and therefore be used to manipulate electronic computing devices and magnetic storage.

While red beryl’s capabilities to alter electric circuitry could be useful in technological advancement, it can be abused to manipulate technologies such as computers, cell phones, voting machines, or GPS systems. Until countermeasures are developed against this, Red Eye has been banned for the use in commercial products.”

In the corner of my eye I saw Detective Wurz return. He coughed, garnering Faye’s attention and she stopped reading.

“We have the video tapes for you organized,” Detective Wurz said. “We must go on the first floor to look.”

“Beryllium can be affected by magnetic, ultrasound, electron-optical, and atomic magic.” Jack muttered, so lost in what he was doing, he probably didn’t even notice Detective Wurz was in the room. “We know it isn’t magnetic, and—”

I knew it was cruel of me, but I couldn’t help it. I clapped a hand on his shoulder. He jumped, dropping the plastic container in his hands, sending iron filings scattering. I chuckled. It amazed me just how lost he could get when it came to that science jumbo.

“Jeez, man, make a sound next time.”

“That’d be half as fun. Besides, the way you were going at it, you wouldn’t have heard me.” I inclined my head towards the door and Detective Wurz. “Coming?”

Jack looked down at the mess on the floor, hesitating as if thinking about whether to clean up first.

“Leave it,” I said, jerking my head in a ‘just go’ sign.

We followed Detective Wurz downstairs to the security surveillance room. Faye was the first to go in. She sat herself down on the central desk chair and swiveled closer to the video screens. It made me smile seeing how her face lit up; this was her territory. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect setting for her than being surrounded by technology.

She cracked her knuckles. “My time to shine.”

“You know how this functions?” Detective Wurz gestured to the desk lined with buttons and screens on the walls.

“Easy.” Faye’s fingers were already flying over the keyboard and several windows showing video streams popped up on the screens. The scene played out exactly as we had heard it from the guards. Ten minutes into the video, the jewel just vanished from its case.

Faye, Terry, Jack and I each took a screen showing different perspectives of the same room to have a closer look. We did a round robin of the screens until we’d all checked out the scene from each angle. It was just as the security guards had described.

On one recording we saw one of the guards, Christian, walking around, not looking in the direction of the jewel, and later using his walkie-talkie to report the situation. In another, the other guard, David, laid down his bottle of water and later left to use the bathroom.

Faye rewound the tapes to the moment before the jewel disappeared from the screen. Nobody in the room appeared to be looking as it vanished.

“Are you sure no one’s tampered with the video gear?” Terry said, intently looking around.

“No. Nothing’s been touched or fiddled with. I quickly ran a check for any cuts or merges in the background, and it’s come out clean.” I was glad Faye had moved in with us, she made investigating so much easier. Some of the stuff I’d seen her do made my mind boggle, all those numbers and random words; it really was a foreign language.

Faye shook her head. “Doubt we’ll get much further here without net access. I’ll scan all the faces from the screen to my computer.” She looked at Detective Wurz. “Do you have a list of names the police noted?”

“We became all of the names.”

“You got all of the names. Good,” Faye said, her eyes lighting up, “that’ll make it real easy as pie. I’ll have everything we need to know from birth records to background checks before you know it.” She turned to us, staring at each of us in turn.

When a girl looks at you like that, like Faye was, daring you to challenge her competence, you learn to just nod. Nod and smile.

Nothing good comes of questioning that look.

Terry, though, well nothing could save him. He bit into the wrong hook and didn’t even know it. “Hardly going to be that easy.” He shook his head and looked at Jack and me for backup.

We both shuffled and looked elsewhere, sharing a he’s screwed glance.

“Are you questioning my abilities Terry Parker? Because I will have you know, this next part I could do in my sleep.” She leaned forward, and though she was sitting, the move looked dangerous. Predatory. Terry stepped back, banging into the shelf behind him. “I’ll have us a list of suspects before the night is over, and that’s a bet.”

She turned on Jack, because apparently us guys are a pack and if one makes the wrong move, the rest of us have to suffer too. “Let’s see you figure out what magic our little thief used so fast.”

“And you,” she said, wheeling around to me next, “you can stop that smirk”—(I wasn’t smirking, wasn’t even tempted. Swear. Well, maybe a little)—“and shove it—”

Terry interrupted her, forehead pressed into a frown, staring at the frozen image on the screen next to me. “Can you zoom in, Faye?”

I followed his gaze to the screen. It showed David, a tall woman on his right, and some children playing in the corner. The guard’s bottle was sitting on the sill.

Faye mumbled something inaudible, ending with a begrudging, “What do you want to see?”

“That bottle of water.”

Jack jumped in front of me and Terry as Faye played the tape a couple of seconds.

“It’s moving,” he murmured; not for our benefit, my guess.

“Bunch over.” I budged him to the side with my shoulder and he jolted away from my touch like a hunted rabbit. Or stag. Definitely not a rabbit—that was waaay too cutesy. Nothing at all like Jack.

Except for maybe his grin—.

I shook my head. Jack? Rabbits? Obviously my late night reading was catching up on me. Only way those two compared were if they were feral and snarling.

Looking at the shot on screen, I could see what he’d meant; the water in the bottle was rippling.

Jack inched closer to get a better look at the screen again. “Can you bring up a shot of the entrance at the time of the jewel’s disappearance?”

“You betcha.” Faye brought up the image on screen.

Jack flicked open the book he’d carried down with him. He looked at a couple of pages, hmm-ing and haa-ing. Then slammed the covers together. “I know what magic was used.”

Before anyone of us could ask what?, Jack had left the room. Confused, I stuck my head out the door. He was charging toward the museum entrance. Flipping my hand, I beckoned the others to follow.

Jack stopped in front of the fish tank, the dead fish still floating on top. He tapped the tank. “Our biggest clue,” he said. He addressed Terry. “When you saw the water ripple, it came back to my mind.” He spoke quickly, making it difficult to catch everything. “At the same moment the jewel disappeared, the bottle of water on the sill rippled. That indicates a magic that can pass through liquids. And if it’s strong enough, the waves of magic could pass through things within a large radius, large enough to reach this fish tank. Because it managed to pass through thick walls, the magic must be able to pass through solids, too. That dramatically lowered the possibilities.”

“Uh, how do you know the magic passed through the fish tank?” I asked, taking out my notepad to jot down notes.

“On the video footage, the water in the tank rippled, too,” Jack said. “The last two clues confirmed it though. The receptionist said people had been asking her for painkillers, and look how shiny this fish playground is! It was staring at us right from the beginning.” He shook his head at the last part, as if upset with himself he hadn’t pieced it together sooner.

He paused to catch his breath. “The magic is based on sound. In this case a very high frequency that cannot be heard by the human ear. Ultrasound.”

Okay, he was clever.

I had to give that to him.

Terry said, brows pushing together, “Isn’t that what doctors use on pregnant women?”

Faye laughed. “You don’t know that for sure?” And then promptly stopped laughing when Terry’s cheeks flushed. She bit her lip and looked down as if to curse herself.

Jack continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Well, yes, medical ultrasound uses the same principle,” he said, “but this is a magic. I looked it up and all elements found in the missing jewel can be affected by it. If this ultrasound magic is used in large doses, it can cause pain—explaining the sudden demand for painkillers. Fish can die,” He pointed to the tank “and ultrasound can clean stainless steel when it’s under water.”

I straightened up, shaking my hand and sending the pen I’d been holding skittering across the floor.

“So now?” I said, bending to all fours to find my pen.

“Cross-reference and find the name of the Oxion our culprit came from.”

“Could we have a copy of the video footage?” Faye asked. Detective Wurz nodded and left. Actually, I’d sort of forgotten he was there with us. He was so quiet. No doubt lost to what Jack was going on about. He looked happy to get the hell away from ‘those freaks’.

“Guess Jack did solve it as fast as that, Faye,” Terry said, grinning.

She grumbled, but conceded. “I suppose.”

I spotted my pen by Jack’s foot and made to lunge for it, when he picked it up. “One simple task, Drake . . .” And you can’t even get that right.

Maybe it was payback for making him jump earlier. I probably deserved it. But I still snatched the pen off him with a snarl to match his own.