“What the hell?!” he said, then squatted down and said, “Jesus! What was I doing to you?”
But I couldn’t answer him. I was still simply trying to breathe. Behind MacDonald there was more crashing, and I realized Heath was in big trouble. Using much of my remaining strength I jerked MacDonald’s shoulder and pushed him toward Heath and the intruder. MacDonald jumped to his feet and tackled our suspect.
A moment later the lights were turned on, and Gopher and Gilley stood in the doorway, panting and flushed. “We came up here as fast as we could!” Gopher said. “I saw that guy on the dailies from the earlier shoot and realized he
had
to be the guy we were after.”
My eyes moved over to where Heath and MacDonald were holding the other assistant manager who’d been so grumpy. Next to him was Oruç’s dagger. “Gil . . .” I said, my voice hoarse. “Gimme a grenade!”
Gil handed me the one clutched in his hand, and I struggled with the top. Behind me the microwave dinged, and I knew that if I didn’t get the lid off now I was also out of time. With trembling fingers I tore off the top and tipped out the spike, tossing it over toward the dagger. It landed right next to it, and I collapsed on the ground.
The cavalry arrived about five minutes later. MacDonald called in any and every available backup unit, and the hotel was soon overrun with cops and CSIs. I was checked out by EMS techs, who asked if I wanted to go to the hospital (I declined); then I was approached by a heavyset man in a trench coat, who asked if I’d like to make a statement and have Detective MacDonald arrested.
I blinked at him while holding an ice pack up to my throat. “Why would I do that?” I asked.
“Along with returning to work a case he had been removed from, my detective has admitted to using unwarranted force against you, ma’am,” he said.
“Who are you again?” I was pretty sure the guy had introduced himself, but my brain was still a little foggy.
“Lieutenant Crenshaw,” he said. “MacDonald’s boss.”
I looked at Gil, sitting beside me and holding my hand, his face both guilty and concerned. “Well, Lieutenant,” I said, “I don’t quite remember it like that. I mean, to begin with, I was the one who asked MacDonald to come down to the hotel. When he initially refused, because doing so would be going against a direct order, I tricked him.”
Crenshaw’s eyebrows lifted skeptically. “Tricked him?”
I nodded vigorously. “Yes, sir. I told him that the producer of the television show was working on some background shots for the production, and we just needed to get a nice shot of the detective in front of the Duke. When MacDonald arrived I tricked him again into coming inside and heading up to the third floor, telling him that, because of the rain, we had moved the shoot up there.”
Crenshaw frowned. “I see. And what about those bruises on your neck?” he asked, pointing at them.
“Well, you see, sir, when all hell broke loose up there, it was pretty confusing, and there were four of us in a small room with the lights off. I’m pretty sure I got injured by your suspect and certainly not by Detective MacDonald. So of course I won’t be pressing charges, and you may take that as my statement.”
Crenshaw’s face—which comprised a bulldog’s jowls and a Doberman’s intense stare—was unreadable for several long seconds. Finally, however, he shrugged and waved at MacDonald, who was standing by a group of uniforms, looking for all the world like a rejected puppy. “MacDonald!” Crenshaw barked. “You’re in the clear here, and I want you back on this case. I’m putting you in charge, so don’t screw it up again.” Then he announced, “I’m going back to bed.”
MacDonald jumped, staring first at his lieutenant, then at me. I gave him a big, fat smile to reassure him we were still friends, and he seemed to relax. “Yes, sir,” he said. “On it, sir!”
The rest of the morning was spent watching the techs and police come and go and getting pieces of the puzzle from MacDonald, who filled us in when no one was looking. It turned out that the assistant manager, whose alias had been Joe Fresco, had been hired just one month prior to Anton, and it was Joe who had vouched for Anton to Knollenberg. Knollenberg had only called the most recent employer on Anton’s résumé, a hotel in Berlin, which checked out, and Joe was able to convince his GM that Anton would be a perfect fit for the Duke.
Joe and Anton had indeed been longtime partners, their career in crime dating back a decade, when they teamed up to work as valets at a popular hotel in Paris and fleeced the hotel guests of any loose change and valuables they kept in their cars. The pair eventually worked their way up and became part of the hotel management. They had a long history of working for short stints at several of Europe’s finest hotels, where they established a pattern of stealing from the hotel guests and blaming it on housekeeping.
It was while he was working in one of these hotels that Anton had met Faline, and those two moved on to bigger and better heists, but Anton and Joe continued to keep in touch. When Anton found that his girlfriend was ready to turn him in, he’d called on his old friend Joe to help him secure an alibi for her murder and dispose of the stolen mirrors.
It was Sophie who’d done most of this detective work on Joe and Anton’s background, and she’d meticulously documented all of this on the flash drive stolen from her room and found in Joe’s hotel locker.
During her investigation, Sophie had discovered that Joe and Anton had come up with the plan to spray-paint the mirror frames with an antique gold enamel to disguise their value; then the pair set up an estate sale and sent an invitation to Mr. Beckworth, who was known to attend such functions. The mirrors were attractively priced, and Beckworth took the bait, purchasing the mirrors for a fraction of their real value and unwittingly assisting Joe and Anton by getting the mirrors safely through customs and out of Europe. Joe had then followed Beckworth and the mirrors to the Duke and was able to land himself a job almost immediately. Two months later, Anton joined him and the pair kept a close eye on the merchandise until the international heat died down.
When Anton learned that Lloyd’s was going to settle the insurance claim by the wealthy Turk whose collection they had stolen from, the pair figured the mirrors were safe to remove from the hotel, and had even made local arrangements to melt down the gold. But Sophie showed up just as they were about to follow through with their plans, and she nearly ruined everything. When she was taken care of, the pair then had to wait for an opportunity to remove the mirrors and get out of town fast, but our group kept making it difficult for them.
Still, through persistence they had actually been able to take down the mirrors one by one and hide them in the perfect spot, room 321—a place where no one was allowed to enter, and where Anton and Joe felt the priceless bounty would be safe until the smoke cleared.
However, Oruç’s dagger and its influence over Anton kept botching things and making it difficult for him to make a clean getaway. It seems its dark influence had exerted quite a bit of control over Anton, who’d grown very unpredictable with it in his possession. He’d murdered Faline with it when he discovered she’d been in contact with Sophie, and it’d been Joe who’d managed to get the knife back by paying off one of the German police clerks. Anton had then smuggled the knife into the U.S., and he and Joe had argued about getting rid of it—that was the fight Steven and I heard out in our hallway the night we arrived.
Anton truly believed the dagger had special powers, however, and to prove to him that it was nothing more than an old relic, Joe had sneaked it onto the table during our television shoot when no one was looking. The dailies that Gopher had reviewed while Gilley was following Knollenberg (who’d actually gone to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich) had captured Anton and Joe coming in to watch the shoot, then a blurry few seconds of Joe near our table removing the dagger from his blazer.
To this day we’re not sure which one of them killed Tracy. We suspect that one of the pair had been in the ladies’ room scoping out the miror when Tracy walked in and recognized either Joe or Anton as having been on the set. Either way, we’re pretty convinced it was just a case of wrong place, wrong time for the poor girl.
If it was Anton who was turning darker by the minute because he’d been so attached to the evil of that awful dagger, then he got what he deserved. Joe killed him either because he was sick of the liability that Anton was constantly creating, or because he got greedy. He never did confess.
In the end MacDonald was able to get him for the stolen mirrors, which had his fingerprints all over them, and for Sophie’s murder. The flash drive taken from her room and his lone thumbprint found on her suitcase placed him there at the time of her murder. And because MacDonald had other evidence to rely upon to convict Joe and send him to jail for a very long time, he actually took a huge risk when he passed me something wrapped in newspaper shortly after his lieutenant left. When I peeked under the flaps of newsprint I was shocked to discover the dagger and the magnetic spike from the grenade.
“I can’t let it near the techs,” MacDonald explained. “I taped that spike to it, but there’s no way that thing should be making its rounds at the crime lab, or anyplace else where innocent people might gather.”
I was stunned. Not only could MacDonald lose his job for this, he could very well be brought up on criminal charges for obstruction. I closed the newspaper over the dagger and said, “Thanks, Ayden. I’ll make sure this thing never sees the light of day again.”
“I’d appreciate it,” he said. “And can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” I said, leaning back in the chair I was sitting on, weary down to my bones.
“How did you get me to come back?”
“You mean how did I get Oruç to let you go?” I said, knowing that MacDonald was talking about the point when he was strangling me. “I turned on the microwave,” I said.
MacDonald blinked a few times, clearly not understanding. “Huh?” he said.
“Microwaves have two really powerful magnets,” I said. “When you turn the oven on, you activate the magnets. Anything sensitive to a magnetic field within ten to fifteen feet of the microwave would be affected when it’s turned on.”
“Ahhh,” said MacDonald. “Well, thank God for that, huh?”
“You ain’t kidding,” I said with a smile.
“Again, M.J.,” he said soberly, “I’m really, really sorry.”
I laid my hand on his. “It wasn’t you,” I reassured him. “So there’s no need to apologize.”
At that moment Heath came over and sat down next to me. “I was just upstairs,” he said, a small smile forming on his lips.
“Oh, yeah?” I said.
“On the third floor.”
“How come?” I asked.
“Carol. She actually came down here and tapped me on the shoulder. When I followed her upstairs, she said she’s had enough of all this racket and wanted to know how she could cross over so that she could get a little peace and quiet.”
I laughed heartily for the first time in days. “That’s a new one!” I said. “So she’s gone?”
“She is.”
“Sweet,” I said, then turned to MacDonald. “Have the mirrors been taken away?”
“They’re in the evidence van outside,” he said.
“Can I have ten minutes with them?”
“You thinking about Odolina?”
“I am,” I said, then turned to Heath. “You up for one final bust?”
“Bring it on,” he said, and we followed after Ayden outside.
Three weeks later our checks arrived: one for twenty thousand from Mr. Beckworth and one for five thousand from Gopher. I convinced Gilley to let me give most of it to Steven, who promptly tore up my personal check to him. “I don’t need this money,” he insisted. “You do.”
My heart went all mushy as I stared across my desk at him. “You know . . .” I said, finding it hard to form the words.
“Yes,” he said gravely, “you love me. You can’t live without me. Life would not be worth living without me. You say it too much, and I’m tired of hearing it.”
I laughed. For the record, none of those words had ever crossed my lips, and I suddenly wondered what I’d been waiting for. I got up from my desk and came around to sit on his lap. Crossing my arms behind his neck and looking into his eyes, I whispered, “Steven . . .”
“Yes?”
I opened my mouth, ready to really pour my heart out, when the door to my office banged open and Gilley burst inside.
“Ohmigod you are
not
going to believe it!” he squealed, before noticing our rather intimate position. “Jeez, you guys, get a room.”
I cleared my throat and got up from Steven’s lap. “Do you ever think to knock?” I knew full well that Gilley never thought about something like that . . . ever.
“Whatever,” he said dismissively, then got to his point. “I
just
got off the phone with Gopher,” he said. “And you are
not
going to believe what he had to say!”
I sat back in my chair and sighed. Anytime Gilley began with a line like that, it was never good for me. I waved my fingers at him. “Spill it.”
“Gopher’s shown the footage of our busts from the hotel, and I guess the bigwigs at Bravo are
so
impressed that they want to give you and Heath
your very own show
!”
Gilley was hopping up and down with excitement, and my jaw fell open. Before I had a chance to even react our phone rang. “That’s Heath!” Gilley said, punching the speaker button. “Hello?” he said, while I blinked hard and tried to take in the dizzying pace of these unfolding events.
“Gil?”
“Hi, Heath!” Gilley sang. “I’m here with M.J. and Steven.”
“Did you hear the news?”
“I did!” said Gilley with enthusiasm. “Just got off the phone with Gopher. Are you in?”
“For that kind of money? Hell, yeah!”
“What kind of money?” I asked.