CHAPTER THREE
2516 Words
CHAPTER THREE
Carly got off the elevator at the ground floor and headed out the front door of her apartment building just in time to see Lyle pull up in an SUV owned by the BAU.
She climbed into the passenger seat and saw that her partner looked refreshed. Although Lyle had a nice apartment off of the Quantico base, she knew that he kept a change of clothes ready at his office. With his dark suit and the touch of gray in his close-cropped hair, he looked quite ready for an evening at the theatre.
Carly had pulled her own hair back into a bun and donned a dark blue pants suit that she hoped was nice enough for those elegant surroundings.
“So what’s going on at the Shaddon Center?” she asked as they got on Interstate 95 and headed for Washington.
Lyle said, “I guess maybe you heard that the Boundless Bounty Shakespeare Company opened a production of the Scottish Play there recently.”
“Actually, no,” Carly said.
She knew that Lyle tended to keep up with that kind of thing better than she did.
“Well, it’s a pretty big deal, with Emery Hardwick starring as Mackers and Yvette Duryea as his lady. But the tonight’s performance got cut a bit short—at the beginning of Act 3, Scene 5, to be precise.”
“What happened?”
“The actress who played Hecate, Queen of the Witches, was dead when she made her entrance.”
Carly squinted curiously.
“How could she make her entrance if she was dead?” she demanded.
Lyle shook his head, “You know, I kind of wonder that myself. I only know what the Chief Voss told me, which wasn’t much. I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”
“Does it look like part of a serial case?” Carly asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“Then why … ?” Carly began.
“Why are we getting called in? The boss didn’t say, but I think I can guess. The murdered actress’s name was Gentry Chapman. As it happens, she’s the daughter of Sean Chapman, the congressman.”
“So does somebody think her murder might have been politically motivated?”
Lyle said, “I guess that’s one of the many things we’re supposed to figure out. It’s high-profile, anyway, and there’s going to be lots of publicity. I’m sure it will look better if more than the D.C. police are investigating it.”
He scoffed and added, “Too bad about the show, though. I was hoping to catch it. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a production of the Scottish Play.”
Carly tilted her head and asked, “Um … why do you keep calling it that?”
“Calling it what?”
“The Scottish Play.”
“Oh, that,” Lyle said. “Just habit, I guess. I played Mackers myself once.”
Carly’s mouth dropped open.
“You mean you used to be an actor?” she said.
“Naw, it was just in high school, OK?” Lyle said with just a trace of defensiveness. “And I wasn’t any good. Nobody else was either. High school kids aren’t ready to tackle Shakespeare, believe me. And please don’t ask me to show you any pictures. I was just a scrawny kid with a really big cardboard crown hanging down around my ears and a big wooden broadsword all covered with aluminum foil. I looked pretty ridiculous.”
I’d love to see those pictures, Carly thought with a smile.
Lyle continued, “Anyway, I just got into the habit of saying the Scottish Tragedy and ‘Mackers’ instead of the actual title.”
“You mean Macbeth?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. Look, it’s OK to say it here in the car, or pretty much any place except for a theater. But in a theater it’s strictly f*******n, unless you’re saying it as part of a production. So don’t go saying that name to anybody at the Shaddon Center.”
“Why not?” Carly asked.
Lyle darted her a glance of disbelief.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said.
“No, I’m not kidding.”
“You’ve never heard of the Mackers curse?”
“Nope.”
Lyle shrugged and said, “Well, there’s a legend that a coven of witches came to see the play back when Shakespeare first wrote it, and they weren’t amused at how he used their authentic spells and incantations, like they thought it was plagiarism or something, so they put a curse on the play. Ever since then, there’s been all sorts of bad luck associated with it. And you’ve got to be careful about saying the name of the play.”
Carly’s eyes widened with curiosity. Her partner was normally ultra-rational about everything.
She said, “I never took you to be …”
She hesitated at the next word, which always made her a bit uncomfortable, considering her own strange abilities.
Lyle finished her thought for her.
“To be what? Superstitious?”
Carly nodded.
“Well, I’m definitely not superstitious,” Lyle said. “But we did have all kinds of bad luck with our high school production—falling spotlights, laryngitis, even broken bones. Oh, there was nothing supernatural. It’s a psychological thing. When a group of people believes something like that, things start going wrong. They get careless, clumsy, accident-prone. The curse isn’t real, but it might as well be, given how crazy people can get about it.”
It seemed like a reasonable explanation to Carly. Of course, she knew that Lyle was good at reasonable explanations. He’d surely come up with lots of reasonable explanations for Carly’s own peculiar ways.
*
Their drive into Washington took them to the Shaddon Center for Arts, just a few blocks away from the National Mall. Lyle pulled the car up to the curb in front of a gleaming, modern building with posters advertising the production of Macbeth with its two big name stars. Several police vehicles were already there, and several uniformed officers were standing on the sidewalk.
As they parked, Lyle said with a sigh, “It looks like we’re expected.”
Coming out through the glass doors was a plainclothes officer whom Carly and Lyle knew all too well—Detective Lance Brown of the Metropolitan Police Department.
As the two FBI agents got out of the car and walked toward the building, Brown kept his arms crossed, not offering so much as a handshake. His acne-scarred face, as always, seemed to be paralyzed into a permanent smirk, and he had the cynical expression of someone who thought he knew the world better than he probably really did.
“Wish I’d known sooner you’d be showing up,” he growled. “I’d have hired a caterer.”
Although Lyle didn’t look amused, he quipped back mirthlessly, “Next time we’ll plan further ahead.”
Carly noticed that Brown, as usual, seemed barely to notice that she was there. That was just as well as far as she was concerned. She did better work when her colleagues weren’t paying much attention to her.
She followed Lyle and Brown into the theater lobby, which was empty of people.
As they crossed the lobby, Brown said to Lyle, “This case is weird, but really, it looks like just a plain murder. I take it you Feds are here because the victim’s dad is a congressman.”
Lyle said, “Nobody explained it to me that way, but it seems likely.”
Brown shook his head and added, “Let’s face it, you’re probably just window dressing, here to show the powers that be that somebody’s taking the case seriously. But it sure doesn’t look like anything we locals can’t deal with. I’d appreciate it if you just smiled for the cameras and said smart-sounding BAU-type things to the press and left the real detective work to me and my guys.”
“I’m not making any promises,” Lyle replied.
“You never do,” Brown grumbled back.
The three of them passed through one of the doors that led into the auditorium. As they walked past the rows of cushy padded seats, the first thing that caught Carly’s eye was a throne in the middle of the stage, ominously decorated with carved goats’ heads and topped off with an upside-down pentagram.
As they continued on down the aisle toward the stage, Brown explained, “That’s where the body was found. She was playing some kind of a witch queen, and she got flown in sitting in that throne, but she was dead when she hit the stage.”
So that’s how a dead woman made an entrance, Carly realized.
Pointing, Brown said, “You can see blood on the throne and the floor.”
Carly did indeed see the blood, especially the dark puddle on the floor. But she also saw that something important was missing from the crime scene—something that her partner noticed as well.
Lyle snapped at Brown, “Where the hell’s the body?”
“The Medical Examiner’s team has been here and gone already,” Brown said.
“And you let them take the body?” Lyle complained.
Brown shrugged defensively.
“Hey, the cause of death was pretty obvious. She was stabbed straight through the heart. If you wanted us to keep the corpse around, you should have gotten here sooner. Anyway, I’ve got pictures, so what difference does it make?”
“Pictures,” Lyle growled. “That’s just great. What about the audience? I don’t see any of them around. Did you just let all of them go too?”
“There were about thirteen hundred of them,” Brown said. “What was I supposed to do, make them all stay until you got a chance to talk to them?”
Lyle sighed and shook his head.
“I just hope you didn’t let the killer walk out the front door,” he said. “What about the cast and crew?”
“They’re still downstairs in the greenroom,” Brown said. “They’re getting pretty antsy, though.”
“Well, they’ll just have to be patient,” Lyle said. “Show us those pictures.”
Carly, Lyle, and Brown were standing at the edge of the stage now. Brown took out his cellphone and brought up a series of photos showing the elaborately costumed woman’s body sitting on the throne, with her head hanging down and a knife in her chest. Lyle clicked through photos showing details, including the knife wound and the woman’s hands.
Carly felt unanswered questions pile up in her brain. The stabbing must have taken place high above the stage.
But how? she wondered.
And who could have been the culprit?
And what possible motive could the killer have had?
Carly thought about what Brown had just called it:
“Just a plain murder.”
Carly doubted that very much.
Suddenly the three of them heard a booming voice from the wings.
“When are you going to let my people go?”
Carly and her partner turned and saw a man dressed all in black and wearing a cape and a broad-rimmed fedora walking toward them.
Lyle nudged Brown and asked under his breath, “Who does this guy think he is, Moses or Dracula?”
Brown whispered back, “A bit of both, maybe.”
Brown made introductions as the man walked toward them.
“This is Barry Coddington, the play director,” he said to Carly and Lyle. “Mr. Coddington, these are Special Agents See and Ramsey of the BAU. They’re here to help get to the bottom of what happened.”
Coddington sneered angrily.
“You surely don’t need to keep my entire company here to do that,” he said. “They need to get home and get a good night’s sleep. They’ve got a matinee tomorrow.”
Carly’s tilted her head with surprise.
“You’re not stopping the run of the show?” she asked Coddington. “At least for the time being?”
Coddington scoffed, “Why would we? We’re sold out for a month. It’s bad enough that this performance got stopped in Act 3. That wasn’t my call. My damned stage manager brought the whole thing to a grinding halt as soon as the actors saw that Gentry was dead.”
Lyle looked as startled as Carly felt.
“What else was she supposed to do?” he asked.
“Keep the show going, of course,” Coddington said. “All she had to do was give an order to the man on the fly system to fly the corpse right out again. Hecate’s a flashy part, but a small one. Some scholars don’t even think Shakespeare really wrote her lines. We could have skipped the whole scene, and also her appearance in Act 4, and the audience might not have even noticed—at least not most of them. But the stage manager panicked and ruined everything.”
Carly and her partner exchanged puzzled looks. Detective Brown grumbled aloud what she was sure that she and Lyle were both thinking.
“That’s carrying the whole ‘the show must go on’ thing a little far.”
Ignoring the detective’s comment, Lyle asked Coddington, “Do you have any idea who might have meant the girl any harm?”
“No idea at all,” Coddington said. “She was a nobody as far as I was concerned. I didn’t even know she was a congressman’s daughter until one of the cops told me a little while ago …”
As Coddington kept talking, Carly shifted her attention to the empty throne.
Should I touch it? she wondered.
If she did, maybe she could make some sort of connection with the victim. But it was risky to take that chance. Sometimes she could feel overwhelmed by impressions she received.
She gathered up her courage and cautiously reached out one hand as Brown eyed her uneasily. As her fingers barely made contact with the black, coagulating blood on the throne, she got a slight tingle.
Ducking her chin so others might not notice, Carly closed her eyes.
An image popped into her head.
It was one of the photos Brown had just shown them—a shot of the victim’s hand with her fingers curled toward her palms.
But flickering in and out of that hand was something that hadn’t appeared in the photo—a crumpled piece of paper.
Carly stifled a gasp of alarm.
The tingling and the image vanished as quickly as they’d come, but the dead woman had communicated something to her, all right.
There was a piece of paper in her hand when she died, Carly realized.
Someone removed it.
Someone took it out of her hand before the police even arrived.
- Writer
