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This made her even tenser. “Like I told you yesterday, my mom loses all sense when he is around. I’m still trying to deal with the fact they slept together. God! She might have slept with a murderer.”
“Don’t get too far ahead of yourself. So far the only thing we can prove is that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“And made threats,” Pro grumbled while waving the papers.
“We assume he did, but we still need to tie the email address to Max. It would make sense to bring him back to interview again.”
Pro shook her head. “This is why I loved my stepdad so much. He was a rock. When he and Mom married, my life became very stable.”
“Some people would call that boring,” Chu suggested.
“Not me. When Max came around, everything was crazy because he always had to run off to do gigs. Schedules would change on a dime. Promised events or parties would be canceled. I had more than enough craziness when I was little. Joe was predictable. I liked that.”
They pulled into their assigned parking space, and Chu turned off the car just as his phone rang.
“Chu!” he spoke into his phone, then listened. “We’re on it.”
Pro had stepped out of the car but stayed in place with the door open. She knew this meant they had been assigned another case and would be off again in a minute.
“We got another murder,” Chu told her from the driver’s seat.
“Of course we do,” Pro said, and got back into the car.
“It’s at another magic shop, so they sent it to us.”
“Do you think it was our killer?” Pro said as Chu started the vehicle.
“According to the officers on site, he was strangled with a rope,” Chu stated as he maneuvered the car back into traffic. “And some of that special rope was lying on his chest—only this time it was blue.”
It was a quick drive to 52nd Street near Broadway, where the pair of detectives soon walked up to the second floor of an office building a few hundred feet from Gallagher’s Steak House.
The hallway had several similar doors, each with a different sign that listed the business. One was marked with a sign that read “Talent Agent”; another had a paper printed on a laser printer and claimed to be an “App Developer.” At the end of the hall was a laminated notice that bore a magic wand and the words, “Tanner’s Magic.”
They walked into a much cleaner and brighter space than Albert Floss’s shop had been. Like Floss, there was shelving all along the walls of the room, but it wore a fresh coat of white and was clear of any dust. The equipment that lined the walls looked new and well-maintained, and the glass cases were undamaged with the glass polished. The cases were filled with cards, coins, and round balls made of sponge. There were also display boxes that contained tricks, the artwork was modern, and the copy printed on the boxes suggested, “Anyone can do it!”
There was a uniformed officer carrying a roll of yellow tape that was printed with the words “CRIME SCENE” in bold black letters. She was a good-looking woman with auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail and her blue eyes watched everything. She had an impressive figure, and when Chu looked at her, she lowered her eyes and smiled a secret smile.
“Detectives,” she said. “You got here fast.”
“Officer Barker, good to see you.” Chu smiled. “What have we got?”
“Without forensics, it’s just a guess.” She led them through a break between two display cases, and when she turned, they saw the body of a man on the floor between a display case and the wall shelves. The man had a full head of hair and was stout and not as tall as Floss had been. He wore a simple white shirt and black pants and lay on the floor with his mouth hanging open, exposing several gold teeth. Around his neck was a red line where something had been pulled into his flesh.
“It appears the owner was strangled, possibly garroted with a blue rope that we found on his chest. However, there was a wit on scene who called it in. He keeps saying that it isn’t really rope. He also identified the DB as Louie Tanner.”
Pro recognized the term “wit” as police shorthand for “witness," and all at once she had a tightness in the pit of her stomach. “Someone called it in?”
“Yes, detective,” Barker said, turning to Pro. “Claims he found the DB, and that he didn’t touch anything. The strange thing is that he called the precinct directly instead of 9-1-1.” She gestured to a doorway behind the counter. “He’s back there with my partner, if you want to talk to him.”
“Do you think it’s—” Chu muttered.
“It better not be,” Pro fumed as they walked past the counter and into a storage room.
They moved into the clean back room where two men sat. One was Barker’s partner, Officer Bailey, who was tall and well-proportioned. The top of his head was bald, and he had brown hair on the sides and around his ears.
Sitting next to him was Max Martin, aka Max Marvell.
He stood as the two detectives entered. “Pumpkin!” he bellowed, and immediately corrected himself. “I mean Detectives Chu and Mar—uh—Thompson.”
