Grand Theft Griffin Read online

  Grand Theft Griffin

  Book Three of ‘Fantasy & Forensics’

  Michael Angel

  Copyright 2015

  Michael Angel

  Includes a sneak preview of

  the fourth book in the

  ‘Fantasy & Forensics’ series,

  A Perjury of Owls,

  also by Michael Angel.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

  Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark.

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  COLOR AND B&W MAPS OF ANDELUVIA

  Grand Theft Griffin

  Book Three of ‘Fantasy & Forensics’

  By Michael Angel

  Chapter One

  Folk music singers may call the wind Mariah, but in Los Angeles they give it a darker name. Newscasters in fall’s slick new fashions describe the gusts off the desert plateaus to the east of the city as the Santa Ana. But the cops know better. They call it el viento del diablo, the Devil’s Wind, and it does strange things to people at a time when the rest of the country is out shopping for witches’ hats and carving pumpkins.

  I don’t think anyone arrested by the LAPD claimed ‘the Devil’s Wind made me do it’. But whenever the autumn gusts kicked up, we got a statistical bump in the number of people who decided to forcibly reduce the city’s population by one or more. We also got a rash of assorted crimes involving someone else’s person or property.

  Like tonight’s reported burglary.

  Whoever committed the crime hadn’t been particularly thoughtful about my schedule. My phone’s ringtone jolted me from a sound sleep at a hair past oh-my-god-it’s-still-pitch-black-out. I sat up with a groan and groped for the damned phone a second or two before finally grasping it and squinting at the screen. A text message told me to get my sleepy butt out of bed and over to the Natural History Museum in the next twenty minutes.

  Coffee was out of the question. I stumbled to the bathroom to splash some water on my face and give my teeth a quick brush. My lips felt leathery and my throat scratchy from the unpleasantly dry fall weather, but a quarter-cup of liquid direct from the tap fixed that up. Then I fished a handful of jumbo bobby pins out of a bowl by the bathroom sink to fasten my hair back into a loose black bun. I squinted at the result.

  Awful, but not quite awful enough to scare kids or dogs. Large dogs, anyway.

  I had temporary custody of the departmental van from the Office of the Medical Examiner, so I grabbed the keys and took it downtown. As I made my way down the dark asphalt expanse of the freeway, it occurred to me that I really couldn’t complain all that much. Being on call during the graveyard shift wasn’t exactly a plum assignment. But when you came right down to it I was lucky to be working at all.

  It had been more than three months since I’d first been ‘summoned’ to the mystical world of Andeluvia. Two months since I’d helped the Fayleene prince fight off a dragon. And four whole days since I’d finally gotten the paper-pushers under Deputy Chief Bob McClatchy to completely restore my field privileges. A few days on the night shift hadn’t done any favors for my complexion, but it was a price I was willing to pay.

  However, this particular call was a puzzling one from the get-go. The police code from the text message was a 459. A 459-Sam, to be specific. That meant a silent alarm had been tripped. My feelings were mixed. Since this wasn’t a homicide, it wasn’t likely that I’d be applying my Chrissie Scale of Stinkiness (patent pending). Then again, the one constant in crime scene analysis was that it was expensive. If something had been stolen from the museum, it had to be pretty darned important for me to get called out for it.

  The sky had decided to turn a delightful shade of predawn gray as I parked the beat-up van in front of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. The parking lot wasn’t as empty as it should have been at this hour. A quintet of police cruisers, lights still flashing, clustered around the sweeping marble steps that framed the museum’s entrance.

  Off to one side, one of the largest armored trucks I’d ever seen had pulled up into the loading zone. Men in unmarked black suits were busy setting up their own security cordon. A pair of LAPD officers posted by the yellow crime-scene taped perimeter watched the activity with poorly concealed interest.

  I got out, pointedly ignored the smell of dust that hung in the air, and went around to the back of my van to suit up. Off with the comfy flats and on with my Stompy Gothic Boots of Doom. As a final touch I pulled on a gray hairnet and topped it off with a brand new baseball cap. This one was marked with a bright red ‘A’ logo ringed by a golden halo.

  Some of the beat cops razzed me about it and told me I should move down to Anaheim and put Mickey Mouse on my autopsy slab. Actually, I didn’t follow major league baseball one bit. But after having my Dodger’s cap shot off by a rifle bullet, I didn’t want to jinx myself.

  I grabbed the battered aluminum case that held my crime scene gear and slammed the van’s doors shut, then made my way over to where the two lookie-loos in uniform continued to follow the goings-on in the loading zone. One of them finally snapped to when I walked up and flashed my badge.

  “Office of the Medical Examiner,” I said.

  My badge and I got a quick once-over and curt nod in response. Then the officer toggled the hand mic he had clipped to the front of his uniform.

  “Victor One, the Oh-Em-Ee just showed up. It’s Chrissie.”

  “About time she got here. Send her in.”

  That got an eyebrow raise out of me. The voice on the other end of the line was masculine, and it sounded familiar, but a name didn’t leap to mind. And whoever it was had apparently steered this call over to me on purpose.

  The officer lifted the tape barrier for me to cross and addressed me once more. “Look to your right once you go through the entrance. The area of interest is at the end of the hall. You won’t be able to miss it.”

  “Right.” I ducked my head so my cap would clear the sticky edge of the tape.

  I hefted my case up the marble steps, then pushed my way through a set of bronze doors large enough for one of the main passageways beneath Fitzwilliam’s castle. My nose expected a shift from the dust outside to cooler, conditioned air inside. Two steps and as many breaths changed my mind in a hurry.

  On the outside, some traditionalist-minded architect had designed the museum in the flowery style of the Spanish Renaissance. But inside, the building was startlingly modern. The lobby was a cavernous space filled with the looming hulks of Tyrannosaurus skeletons in predatory poses and topped by room-sized panels of glassed-in skylights. Off to the right, a sign hanging by a column shaped like a marble corkscrew identified the area ahead as the Hall of Gems.

  The atmosphere in here smelled as tinder-dry as the outside for a simple reason: it was the exact same air. A second, taped-off section marked off most of the floor at the end of the hall. Scattered across the floor were shards of glass, some as long as my forearm. Overhead, the Devil’s Wind whistled through the shattered skylight. Dust motes swirled like swarms of exotic insects in the ambient exhibit lights as well as the hand-held flashlights of the dozen or so cops that surrounded the area.

  I set my jaw and walked towards all t
he commotion. Again, the guys in blue just couldn’t help but crawl all over a crime scene, scuffing or blotting out the marks I needed to do my work. Not for the first time, I grumbled to myself: Whatever happened to professional courtesy?

  The hallway opened up into a large rotunda. The huge space was taken up along the edges by glass cases full of mineral specimens that gleamed softly as I passed. Now my nose picked up something odd. Something familiar. The barest trace of something earthy, musky. Animal crossed my mind, and I filed it away as I tried to figure out a source.

  A camera flashed from inside the taped-off area. Before I could get close enough to see who was working it, I heard two raised voices over the general bustle of the room. Men’s voices, and if they weren’t quite loud enough to be arguing, they were certainly doing more than simply discussing the latest Lakers’ game.

  Alanzo Esteban’s face came into view as I made my way between the tape boundary and a display case full of mica chips. His stubble-friendly face was redder than normal, as if he were tamping down strong emotions. We’d been trying to make a relationship work beyond the ‘dinner, movie, and kissing’ stage, but between his work schedule and my commitment to not getting killed while helping my friends over in Andeluvia, it was still touch-and-go. And a lot less ‘touch’ than I’d have liked, to be perfectly honest.

  I realized that the voice I’d heard on the cop’s radio belonged to Lieutenant Luis Ollivar. A tall, beefy slab of a man, most of his muscle had migrated south and morphed into a paunch that made his uniform bulge. For that reason, a lot of people called him ‘Ollie’, but never to his face. His complexion reminded me of sun-burnt coffee beans and his narrow-set eyes hinted at a barely concealed mean streak.

  To make things even better, he was a staunch ally of Deputy Chief McClatchy. So much so that I’d once heard Shelly wonder where Bob stuck his hand to work Ollie’s mouth. Unkind, but I’d heard similar things from beat cops in much more graphic detail.

  Ollivar caught sight of me just before Esteban did. He let out a piggish snort, greeting me in a polite tone I didn’t buy for a second.

  “Glad you could make it, Chrissie. Hope I didn’t ruin your beauty sleep.”

  “Good morning, Lieutenant,” I replied, looking over at Esteban. “I’m surprised to see you, Detective. Aren’t you still working Homicide?”

  That got a grunt from the Lieutenant. “That’s just what I said. Everything in this place has already been dead for millions of years, so why butt in?”

  “I live three blocks from here,” Esteban explained. “I got off shift and was pulling into my driveway when the call came in. I just happened to be the first officer on scene.”

  I nodded. It made sense. “So…no homicide to look into, then?”

  “Just a burglary,” Ollivar replied, with a certain relish. “Nothing that should tax the mind of an investigator as good as you. Or so I hear.”

  I declined to comment as he went on. What was Ollie building up to?

  “Turns out, it’s not the missing exhibits that are the most interesting. The custodian here stumbled on the theft while it was in progress. He’s been babbling about it nonstop.”

  “What happened must’ve scared him, whatever it was.”

  “Or the witness in question has been out sniffing glue on his work break.”

  “Lieutenant,” Esteban said, shaking his head in disapproval. Ollie ignored him.

  “I’d go for the glue explanation, myself. He says that he saw a monster in here.”

  Okay, that one stopped me. Right in my tracks.

  “He saw…a monster?”

  “Yeah. Something that was half lion, half eagle.”

  I traded a nervous glance with Esteban.

  Ollivar caught it, his expression going greasy-smug. I didn’t like the man, but I had to remind myself to watch out around him. He wasn’t an office-bound bureaucrat like McClatchy, even if he did back his boss up without question. And Ollie wasn’t a fool. He noticed things.

  “So,” he said, his voice dripping sarcasm, “you two actually believe this story.”

  Esteban’s face went poker-straight. That was one talent I’d never really mastered, so I simply laughed, trying to keep the nervousness out of my voice.

  “Yeah…that would be a stretch. The only winged lions I’ve ever seen were made out of stone. I really have no idea what to make of the witness’ statement.”

  Ollie’s frown turned his forehead into one giant brown crease.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “Because that’s why I asked specifically for you.”

  And Lieutenant Ollivar of the LAPD held up a gigantic white feather. One that could only have come from an Andeluvian griffin.

  Chapter Two

  Only one thing saved me: my knee-jerk reaction from years of working crime scenes.

  “Lieutenant, have you gone insane?” My voice actually cracked on the last syllable in outrage. “You’re contaminating my evidence!”

  Ollivar’s condescending I-have-you-now look sank without a trace.

  “What do you – I mean, I didn’t intend to–”

  “What you intended doesn’t mean a damn,” I said, as I set my case down and dug for a sample bag and a set of forceps. I pulled them out, keeping up the patter. Ollie had scored one on Team Dayna, and I wanted him off his game. “Do you understand what ‘DNA contamination’ means? How about ‘mistrial’ or ‘botched case’? I’m just about ready to report you to my superiors for your sloppy – maybe I should say incompetent – handling of this crime scene!”

  Ollivar’s face took on a gray cast. His expression was glum as I plucked the feather from his fingertips with the forceps and stuck it in the bag. Esteban steadfastly looked in another direction until the Lieutenant spoke up again.

  “So…do either of you think the witness is telling the truth?”

  I let out a breath. At least now I was in control again. “I think he’s telling it as he believes it. He’s obviously seen something. As a matter of fact, I’m not surprised that he saw this particular kind of monster.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. He’s been primed to see one.” I glanced at Esteban, hoping he’d pick up on my lead. “At least, that’s what I was thinking when you first mentioned a lion-eagle thing. Detective, what was that movie called? The flick that came out recently.”

  Esteban blinked, but he figured out where I was going. “Eh? Oh, the one about griffins. Yeah, that would make sense. Everyone was talking about that for a while, they even had a live-action show down at Grauman’s.”

  Ollivar scratched his head. “How come I never saw it?”

  “Bombed at the box office. Lasted a week. I tried to get Dayna to come with me to see it, but I think we’ll have to wait till they put it online or something.”

  I shot Esteban a sharp glance at that last bit, but Ollivar apparently bought the line we were peddling.

  “Well, even if the witness is hallucinating because of a movie he saw, maybe you can tell me what kind of hoax we’re looking at here. Because someone went to an awful lot of trouble to actually make it look like a sizable creature broke in here. It’s ridiculous! Probably why McClatchy had me throw it to you.”

  That surprised me. “Bob’s the one who pulled me into this?”

  “Yeah.” Ollivar’s voice got back a measure of the smugness he’d started off with. “He thinks it’s a shit case that’ll tie someone up in knots. So, he told me that you were a perfect match for it.”

  I grimaced. “Great. Your boss is a piece of work, you know that?”

  “That’s interesting to know. My boss says the same about you.”

  The Lieutenant hadn’t raised his voice, hadn’t sounded threatening at all. But the hairs on the back of my neck and all the way down my arms stood on end. I forced myself to keep an even tone as I leaned in to make my point. Ollivar was a hell of a lot bigger than I was, but then I was used to that when dealing with cops.

  “If you or McClatchy have
anything to say to me, then why don’t you tell me to my face?”

  “I don’t think either of us has much to talk about with you, Chrissie. Not with the things you’re known for.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Everyone knows that you pulled a fast one to get the Deputy Chief hauled back into sensitivity training. You were the one they were going to fire or keep on probation. Instead, presto! You walk out smelling like a rose, and McClatchy’s the skunk. It’s given you quite the reputation.”

  “Dayna…” Esteban said, trying to warn me.

  I ignored him as completely as Ollivar had before. The earlier chill I’d felt had faded away, to be replaced by searing heat.

  “Oh, I have a ‘reputation’ now? Just for trying to keep my job when some paper-pushing hack wants to deep-six me?”

  Ollivar snorted. “Back in my old neighborhood, you’re what we call una trepa. Oh, you act so innocent, it’s like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. But you’ll stick anyone in the back with a rusty shank if they so much as look at you cross-eyed.”

  “In the back?” I sputtered. “You’d be lucky if I didn’t stick it somewhere the sun didn’t–”

  Esteban’s voice cut me off like the crack of a whip. “Dayna!”

  I glared at both men for a second. Suddenly, I realized that Ollivar, even after I’d knocked him back on his heels, had done to me what I’d done to McClatchy. He’d gotten me flaming mad. And then egged me on to get me to say something he could use to hang me.

  This wasn’t going to get any better if I stayed. So, I grabbed my case, turned on my heel, and strode away before the toe end of my stompy boots got lodged in someone’s ass. Behind me, Esteban and Ollivar went back to their heated discussion. Probably more about me than the case sitting in front of us.

  I took a breath to clear my head. Yeah, there was a mystery here, one that possibly included a member of a uniquely Andeluvian species. And that had to take priority over penny-ante work politics. Embracing that newly-found sense of discipline, I found a spot about halfway along the yellow tape line to better survey the crime scene.