“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.”
I frowned. “Then why wouldn’t the malicious magic register when the pieces came to us at the store?”
I mused.
“Maybe some power at the storage unit made the pieces vulnerable, but the magic didn’t show up until it was triggered – by something, or someone,” Teag ventured.
“I’d love to get my hands on Stor-Your-Own’s files to find out who else had things stored there about the time everything started to go bad,” I said. “And I’d really like to talk to Flora Beam and see what she knows.” I met Teag’s gaze. “If her boss made a deal with a demon, she might have every reason to have gone insane.” And more than a few reasons to kill Kenner, I thought.
“I told you, I haven’t started hacking yet,” Teag said with a mischievous grin. “If the storage facility had information online, I should be able to get in. As for Flora, let me work on Anthony. If we play enough angles, we’re bound to come up with something.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Teag and I were heading to a rural area on the outskirts of Charleston to visit the Wendover Psychiatric Hospital. Anthony had taken the morning off to go with us, and he had already used his connections to gain permission to talk with Flora Beam.