“All right,” Alex said. “Call him back and tell him to meet me at Gino’s. I’ll go over his case while I get lunch.”
“Will do,” she said and then hung up.
Alex picked up the seventeen folders that encompassed David Watson’s surveying career, along with the ones for the first five builds he’d done, and slid them into his kit bag. The room looked pretty much as he’d found it except for the empty shot glass on the desk.
Thinking it would be rude to leave that out, Alex took it back to the wet bar, refilled it, drained it again, then rinsed the glass out in the sink.
Gino’s was a little hole in the wall diner with a short counter and a half-dozen booths. They catered to the beat cops who came in to grab a sandwich or a bowl of chowder. Alex was never one to be picky where food was concerned, and he liked that the proprietor, an older woman named Lucy, never skimped on the meat in her sandwiches.
“Two hot pastramis on white,” he ordered once he sat down at the counter.
Lucy wore a floral dress under a stained apron and her white hair was bound up behind her in a bun. She looked to be about fifty with a lanky, slender build and a rough but smiling face. Nodding at Alex, she took two ready-made sandwiches from a cooler and dropped them on a buttered grill.
“Cup of joe?” she asked, picking up the steel coffee pot from the far side of the griddle.
Alex checked the handful of change in his pocket before nodding.
The bell on the door jingled behind Alex but he was too hungry to care.
“There you are,” Danny’s exasperated voice assaulted him. A moment later them man himself was pulling on his sleeve. “I’ve been looking all over town for you.”
Alex picked up his coffee cup and sipped it, relishing the energy it was giving him.
“Well, you found me,” he said. “Pull up a stool.”
That was meant to be a joke as the stools were bolted to the floor and therefore, immovable.
“Get up,” Danny said, still pulling on his sleeve. “We’ve got to go.”
“What?”
Danny’s usually smiling face showed irritation and excitement in a fairly equal mix. He wore his gray suit with his gold detective’s badge clipped to the outside breast pocket. Danny was very proud of his status as a police detective.
“There’s a break in the case,” he said, still tugging at Alex’s sleeve, “but I need you and your bag of tricks.”
The empty pit in Alex’s stomach started to churn. He remembered his recent string of failures with finding runes. He hadn’t had one that actually worked since Hannah Cunningham came to his office three days ago and he definitely didn’t want to crap out in front of Danny.
“Can I at least eat?” he stalled. “I’m starving.”
Danny pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.
“You remember how I told you that the stuff that was stolen was taken off delivery trucks?” he said, clearly not wanting to have to stop and explain.
Alex shrugged noncommittally. He hadn’t been sleeping well before last night and he wasn’t sure if Danny had told him that or not.
“Well, we caught a break. They found one of the missing trucks,” he said. “It broke down in the Outer Ring by the rail yards.”
“Was the stolen stuff still on the truck?”
Danny’s face split into a wide grin and he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “That means that the thieves unloaded it somewhere.”
Alex was nodding along now, seeing the way Danny’s line of thought was running.
“So as long as they don’t move that truck, I can use it as an anchor and track it back to where it’s been,” he said.
Danny slapped him on the shoulder again.
“I told them to hold the tow-truck until I got there,” he said. “But they won’t wait forever, let’s go.”
Alex downed his coffee as fast as the hot liquid would allow then motioned to Lucy.
“Looks like I need those pastramis on white to go out,” he said.
Alex had finished both his sandwiches in the half hour it took Danny to drive from Gino’s to the rail yards. When he finally pulled off the road, Alex saw a rather dilapidated-looking truck built from the frame of a Model A. It didn’t have any paint or signage on it indicating who might have owned it and Alex wondered how a patrolman managed to recognize it as one of the missing trucks.
A half dozen beat cops stood around looking at the vehicle. A disgruntled looking man with a tow truck was arguing with one of the uniforms but the cop waved him off when he saw Danny pull up.
“It’s about time, Detective,” the officer said. “We need to get this off the street and down to impound.”
“Send the tow guy home, Johansson,” Danny said. “We can’t move this truck till my friend here works his magic.”
Johansson looked dubious but, to his credit, he didn’t argue. The tow truck operator wasn’t so genial, and Alex heard him yelling at Johansson as he put his kit on the curb.
“What was this truck delivering?” Alex asked as he examined the bed.
“Rolls of denim fabric,” Danny said, checking his note pad. “They were on their way to a factory in the Garment District that makes dungarees.”
Alex circled around the truck but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Whoever stole it might have left fingerprints inside, of course, but they’d be impossible to tell from the dozens of others left by people who had access to the truck. He decided he’d let the police sort that mess out.
“All right,” he said to Danny. “When was this truck stolen?”
Danny checked his notes again.
“A week-and-a-half ago.”
“Damn,” Alex swore. “I was hoping I could use the truck to track its cargo to where the thieves unloaded it, but I don’t think that’s going to work.”
Danny looked dismayed.
“Why not?”
“Fabric is easy to sell,” Alex said. “I’m sure they’ve gotten rid of it by now.”
“There must be something you can do,” Danny said.
Alex thought about it. What he needed to do was to find out where the truck had been before it had broken down.
“When was the last time it rained?” Alex asked.
“Uh, Sunday,” Danny answered.
“Perfect,” Alex said, setting his kit on the bed of the truck and pulling out his multi-lamp and oculus.
“Why is that perfect?” Danny asked.
Alex pointed to a tin bucket in the bed of the truck.
“If the truck had been here on Sunday, there’d still be some water in that,” he explained. “That means the thieves kept it somewhere before it broke down here.”
“And you can use a rune to locate that place?”
Alex shrugged as he clipped the amberlight burner into his multi-lamp.
“Not exactly.”
He lit the burner, then pulled the oculus over his head, settling the telescope-like lens over his right eye.
Amberlight was one of the lesser used magics in Alex’s kit. It was essential for reconstructing a crime scene because if you shone it on an object, it would show you where that object used to spend its time. If you shone it on a discarded book, the amberlight would reveal a ghostly trail up to the shelf where the book had been stored.
Alex adjusted the colored filters on the oculus’ lens until he could see the caramel-colored light. The fact that it was early afternoon and the sun was high in the sky didn’t make it easy to see, but he’d manage.
As he looked at the truck, Alex could see almost invisible lines coming away from it and going back up the street the way he and Danny had come. They showed how the truck had moved to get her from wherever it had been.
“This way,” he said, holding his lamp out in front of him. “And grab my bag.”