Impractical Magic

Chapter 1

1

Ryan Ortiz stuck his head into Colin Campbell’s office, dark eyes dancing. Judging by the grin his coworker wore, Colin got the impression that Ryan was up to no good, or at least had stumbled across something he thought was guaranteed to liven up their workday. “You’ve got a visitor.”

“Yeah?” Colin didn’t look up from his laptop’s screen, pretending he was focused on the mind-numbingly boring article he was currently writing about the installation of new solar-powered parking meters in Tucson’s downtown district. The week had been quiet so far, and without any sensational crimes to cover, he’d been relegated to writing the sorts of articles his editor claimed were necessary but which made Colin want to bang his head into a wall. Did anyone even read these things?

He knew it really didn’t matter whether or not he acted interested in Ryan’s latest revelation, because Ryan was going to dole out his story in bits and pieces the way he always did. However, Colin couldn’t let himself get too irritated by that habit, because Ryan was the closest thing to a best friend he had. Three years earlier, they’d bonded over a love of craft beer and mutual commiseration about their crappy divorces, and despite his friend’s tendency to exaggerate for effect, at least Ryan was generally there when you needed him.

“Yeah.” Ryan leaned up against the doorjamb and crossed his arms, apparently nonplussed by Colin’s lack of reaction. “Some older woman. She said she wanted to talk to a reporter, but it had to be you.”

Colin allowed himself to lift an eyebrow. “Why me?”

“She says she’ll only talk to the reporter who wrote the articles about the Escobar case.”

That reply did make Colin look away from his laptop and swivel his desk chair so he was facing Ryan. “Seriously? The Escobar case?”

“That’s what she said.”

The Escobar case had been a nasty one. Colin had the fortunate — or unfortunate, depending on how you looked at it — ability to recall pretty much every detail of the cases he’d covered, and so he remembered all too well that Matías Escobar had been found guilty of the k********g, ritual t*****e, and murder of a young woman named Roslyn McAllister. From up in Jerome, Colin remembered. Her body had been discovered in a seedy apartment building here in Tucson, along with some paraphernalia which seemed to indicate that Escobar and Jorge and Tomas Aguirre, his cousins, had been into some pretty sick stuff, a weird mixture of Santeria and Satanism and God knows what else.

The Aguirres had also been convicted as accessories to the crimes, and all three of them were currently serving life sentences, although the cousins would be eligible for parole at some point in the distant future. There’d been pressure to give Escobar the death penalty, but because he didn’t have any priors, the jury had decided to give him life instead.

At any rate, the story had been splashed over the Tucson papers for some weeks because of its sensational nature. There wasn’t much doubt that Escobar would rot in prison for his crimes, but because Tucson wasn’t known for its spectacular murder cases, this one had held the public’s interest for longer than it might have in a place inured to those kinds of crimes, such as L.A. or New York or Detroit.

“Open and shut,” Colin told Ryan. “That was probably one of the quickest murder trials I’ve ever seen. And Escobar isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so what does this woman want? She have new evidence or something?”

Ryan shrugged, but despite his outward indifference, curiosity gleamed in his dark eyes. “She wouldn’t say. Or at least she wouldn’t say it to me.”

Despite himself, Colin’s was intrigued. Besides, he could probably finish writing this damn parking meter article in his sleep. He might as well hear what the woman had to say. If nothing else, she might make the next fifteen minutes or so pass a little more quickly.

“Okay,” he said. “What the hell.”

“You promise to spill her deep, dark secrets in exchange for some Kilt Lifter?”

“On tap?”

Ryan looked offended. “Is there any other way to drink it?”

Grinning, Colin said, “Send her over.”

His friend disappeared down the hallway while Colin tapped his fingers on his desktop and glanced around to make sure everything in his office was more or less fit for him to receive visitors. The place looked reasonably tidy, though, mostly because he hadn’t been given anything to work on that required the stacks of messy notes he preferred. Assignments like the parking meter article sure weren’t given that kind of in-depth treatment.

He was proud of his office, though, proud that he wasn’t stuck out in the cube farm with the junior reporters. His last promotion had brought him this office, in addition to a semi-decent raise. Well, it would have been decent enough if he hadn’t been forced to hand over a large chunk of it to his ex.

Soon, he thought. Four more months. Four months, and then you’re finally off the alimony train. Considering he’d been making those payments for almost three years now, four months should be a breeze.

“Mr. Campbell?”

He looked up at the unfamiliar voice and saw a woman he’d never met before standing in the doorway to his office. As Ryan had said, she was older, most likely in her middle or late sixties, with hair that had once probably been blonde or light brown but was now the dishwatery gray-yellow that seemed to be the color of choice for women of a certain age in the greater Southwest region. Even so, she was trim and well-dressed, with bright pink toenails peeping out from the sandals she wore. It might have been the first week in November, but temperatures were still just kissing the low eighties in Tucson.

“Colin,” he said automatically. “Please sit down, Ms. — ”

“Ms. Kosky,” she said. “But please call me Eileen.”

“Eileen,” he responded as she took a seat in the spare task chair he kept in one corner in case of visits such as this one. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water?”

“No, thank you,” she said. Her fingers were clutched around the purse she carried. He noted that her nails were bright pink to match her toes. And, just as he was studying her, she seemed to be studying him. “You’re really the Colin Campbell who wrote all those pieces on the Matías Escobar case?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t look old enough.”

He wanted to laugh, but instead he replied gravely, “I’m thirty-two, Ms. — Eileen. I’ve been at this for a while.”

His response seemed to satisfy her, because she nodded. Maybe she’d been unwilling to trust anyone under thirty, but since he’d attained the magic age of reliability, he was worthy of her respect. She said, “I really hadn’t thought about it for some time, because that was all months ago, but then I saw this in the paper this morning….” She reached in her purse and pulled out a newspaper clipping, then laid it on his desktop.

A little surprised, he reached for the clipping. Yes, the physical version of the Tucson Daily Sun went out every morning, or he wouldn’t have a job. Also, there was that whole “daily” thing in the title. Even so, he was always startled to be confronted by evidence that people were still reading the hard-copy version, rather than online.

The bit she’d cut out seemed to be from the lifestyle section, the part of the paper he frankly didn’t pay much attention to. It wasn’t his job to write up the wedding and birth announcements, the obituaries. The clipping showed a photo of an attractive young couple, the groom Hispanic and in his middle twenties, the bride apparently a few years younger, with wavy hair that was a mid-tone gray in the black and white photo but was probably light brown or maybe even reddish in real life.

Caitlin Lysette McAllister and Alexander Maximilian Ernesto Trujillo will be married at St. Augustine’s Cathedral, Tucson, at 5:00 p.m., Saturday, the 12th of November. The wedding will be followed by a reception at The Arizona Inn.

The bride is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Richard L. McAllister of Jerome, Arizona. The groom is the son of Mr. and Mrs. David J. Trujillo of Tucson.

The bride, 22, currently attends the University of Arizona. The groom, 27, who also went to UA, majored in Communications and Marketing, and currently is a marketing manager at KWTN in Tucson.

Caitlin and Alex, after honeymooning in Scottsdale, will continue to reside in Tucson.

Colin set the clipping back down. “And…so? They seem like a nice couple.” He didn’t really want to think about how he and Shannon had seemed like a nice young couple once upon a time. That seemed a little too much like jinxing this Caitlin and Alex before they even got started.

Eileen Kosky raised one penciled eyebrow. “Well, it’s because they were there.”

“There…where?”

“At the shopping mall in Phoenix.”

Around about that point, Colin began to think his visitor might be a few cans short of a six-pack. He also was thinking that Ryan was going to owe him more than just a couple of beers for putting him through this. “Maybe you’d like to go back to the beginning. You saw Caitlin McAllister and Alex Trujillo at a shopping mall in Phoenix?”

“Yes.” Eileen took the clipping and put it back in her purse. What she planned to do with it, Colin had no idea. “I was up visiting my sister in Phoenix last March, and we decided to go shopping, maybe see a movie. We like to do that — one month I’ll go to visit her, and the next she’ll come down and see me here in Tucson.”

That bit of information didn’t seem to require a reply, so Colin only nodded.

“Anyway,” she continued. “Patty had just parked the car, and we were walking toward the mall entrance — you know, over by Dillard’s?”

He didn’t, being blessedly unfamiliar with most of the greater Phoenix area’s shopping centers. But, rather than profess his ignorance, he decided it was better for him to nod again.

“So we were headed toward the entrance when we heard what sounded like several people having some kind of argument in the next parking row. Well, naturally we looked to see what was going on, because maybe it was something that we should call mall security about. And that was when we saw him.”

“Alex Trujillo?”

“Well, yes, he was there, but the first person I noticed was the one who got sent to prison. You know, Matías Escobar.”

The name made Colin sit up straighter. “You saw Escobar before he was arrested?”

“Oh, believe me, there was no law enforcement around right then. He was holding on to a pretty Mexican girl, and it sounded as if he was arguing with the couple from the clipping, Alex and Caitlin.” Eileen paused then, a puzzled expression crossing her features. Like so many fair-skinned women of her age who lived in Tucson or Phoenix, her face was heavily lined from too much exposure to the sun, but beneath those lines Colin thought he could see traces of the young woman she’d once been. He had a feeling that, once upon a time, she’d been kind of a knockout. “What’s strange is that I’d really forgotten all about it. So had Patty, apparently. It wasn’t until I saw that article in the paper yesterday morning that it all came back.”

“The argument they were having with Matías Escobar?”

“Yes, but that wasn’t the really strange part.”

“What was?”

Eileen Kosky’s well-manicured nails fiddled with the clasp on her purse, and her gaze wouldn’t quite meet his. For someone who’d requested this interview — or, according to Ryan, had almost demanded it — she appeared awfully reluctant to continue with her story.

After a long pause, however, she said, “I know this is going to sound very strange — ”

“Try me,” Colin cut in. “You spend enough time as a reporter, you hear all kinds of weird stuff. It takes a lot to faze me.”

His declaration didn’t seem to move her, though. She still hesitated, fingers tapping on the brass fittings on her purse. Then she took a breath, as if coming to some sort of inner decision. “All right. They were arguing, but Patty and I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying. Then that young man — Alex — he lifted his hands, and there was this bright flash of brilliant blue light. And the next thing we knew, Matías Escobar was lying on the ground.”

Well, Eileen Kosky had been right about one thing. That did sound strange. No, scratch that. It sounded downright weird. And impossible. So Colin did what he always did when confronted by something that seemed impossible. He started looking for the most plausible explanation. “Maybe he had a Taser — ”

“It wasn’t a Taser,” she said, her tone emphatic. “I’ve seen those on TV. This looked nothing like that. It was just a burst of light, almost like a transformer exploding. You know, with that bluish tinge? Except not that big, and it didn’t seem to hurt anyone except Matías Escobar. And then these two men came hurrying up — ”

“Mall cops?”

She shook her head. “No. One was tall and quite good-looking, and the other was shorter and heavier. They had two young Hispanic men with them, and a girl with long dark hair. The men started talking to Alex and Caitlin — ”

“Wait,” Colin said. “So Escobar was still knocked out cold on the ground?”

Eileen gave a negligent wave of her hand, as if she considered the question irrelevant. “I suppose so. Anyway, those two men started talking to this Caitlin and Alex, but we couldn’t hear what they were saying. And then — ” Eileen Kosky broke off then, her penciled brows pulling together in confusion. “Actually, I can’t remember exactly what happened next. It’s like there’s a gap in my memory or something. The first thing I remember after that was being in Dillard’s and standing and looking at a shoe display with Patty.”

“Does Patty remember seeing the blue flash?”

A lift of her shoulders. “She says she doesn’t. I called her this morning to ask if she remembered anything about that day, and she said she remembered going to the mall but that was it.” Another shrug. “She’s my older sister, you see. Sometimes things slip her mind, but usually nothing as unusual as this.”

Colin wondered how much older than her sister this Patty was. Eileen Kosky seemed sharp enough, despite the crazy story she’d just told. He supposed that having a “senior moment” when you were somewhere in your seventies probably wasn’t that odd. And yet….

Something felt strange here. He’d gotten the feeling while he was working on his articles about Matías Escobar that certain information was being suppressed, that there were aspects to the story that someone didn’t want to get out. Colin’s numerous requests to question the suspect directly had all been denied. Also, the D.A. had been very careful to keep the case focused on the girl who was murdered, Roslyn McAllister, even though both she and her friend had been kidn*pped by Escobar and his partners in crime. What was the other girl’s name, anyway?

Danica. Danica Wilcox.

She hadn’t been there for the trial, but he remembered how he’d caught a glimpse of her at Escobar’s sentencing. An extremely pretty girl with long dark hair, but a strained, haunted look in her hazel eyes. He couldn’t really blame her for that. Anyone would have probably felt that way after going through what she’d survived. She’d been flanked by a handsome dark-haired couple in their late forties. Parents, he’d assumed.

“Can you describe the girl who was with the two men?” Colin asked. He figured that was a good way to find out if there was any truth at all to Eileen Kosky’s story. None of the papers — including his — had published any photos of Danica Wilcox, so if Eileen was able to describe her more or less accurately, then it would prove that she actually had seen the young woman in question on that warm afternoon in late March.

“Yes,” Eileen said at once. “She had very dark hair, long and wavy, almost down to her waist. She was tall and slim. Very pretty, really. She probably could model, if she wanted to. We weren’t close enough to see her eye color, though.”

“Thanks, Eileen,” Colin told her. Yes, one could argue that her description could have fit a lot of girls, but it also fit Danica Wilcox perfectly. “And the men you saw with her in the parking lot that day?”

“Well, two of them were Matías Escobar’s accomplices. I remember that because I saw their pictures in the paper, too. But the others….” She shrugged, pretending a nonchalance Colin was pretty sure she didn’t actually feel. Once again he glimpsed that flicker of worried confusion in her face, as if she thought she should know the answer to the question but didn’t. “I know one was tall and good-looking, and the other one was much shorter and a little chubby. I can’t remember any details, though.”

“It’s all right,” Colin said, hoping he sounded more or less reassuring. “Did those two men seem to be with Escobar’s accomplices?” He hoped to hell they weren’t connected. Otherwise, the Tucson P.D. might have missed a very important clue, and there could still be several very dangerous men out on the street.

“I don’t think so. Not that I remember, anyway,” she replied, the exasperation clear in her voice this time. “I should remember. It’s not like me to forget things like that.”

He believed her. Sure, parts of her story sounded pretty far-fetched, but he’d interviewed enough certifiable crazies to know that Eileen Kosky was definitely not crazy. “Let’s go back to Alex and Caitlin,” he said gently. “Do you remember anything else they did?”

“No. I think they talked to the other girl, the one Matías had with him.”

And who the heck she’d been, Colin couldn’t figure out. A friend of Danica’s, maybe?

Eileen paused for a moment, another of those frowns pulling at her brows. “I got the feeling she and Alex Trujillo were related somehow. Their coloring and bone structure….”

“His sister?” Colin asked. If Escobar had been trying to make off with Trujillo’s baby sister, Colin could understand why the young man might have attacked him with…whatever that was. He still believed that it had to have been some kind of Taser, or maybe a stun g*n, and Eileen Kosky had amplified the effects in her mind to make them sound a lot more spectacular than they’d actually been in real life.

“Maybe. Since I couldn’t really hear what they were saying, I don’t know for sure.”

“And you don’t remember what happened afterward, how you got into the store?”

“Well, I’m sure my own two feet carried me in there,” she replied, sounding irritated enough that he knew he’d touched a nerve. “But otherwise, no. It’s like those shows where people get kidn*pped by aliens and lose minutes or even hours of their lives.”

“Do you think you were kidn*pped by aliens?” he asked, unable to keep a hint of amusement out of his voice.

“Of course not,” she snapped. “I don’t believe in that sort of thing. But something very strange happened in that parking lot, and it seemed like the sort of thing someone should know about. I thought of you, because you were the one who wrote all those stories about Matías Escobar in the first place. But if you don’t believe me — ” She began to rise from her chair, and Colin immediately put out a placating hand.

“I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” he said. “It’s just my job to ask questions.”

Those words seemed to mollify her somewhat, and she sat back down. “So you’ll look into it?”

“I think it bears looking into,” he replied. As outlandish as her story sounded, elements of it intrigued him. Who was the Hispanic girl, and who were the two men who’d been talking to Alex Trujillo and Caitlin McAllister? Why hadn’t Danica tried to get away from her captors?

He’d have to start poking around on his own time, though; he knew that Ned Tavener, his editor, would never give him permission to start investigating a case that involved weird blue flashes of light and missing time. No, he’d probably make a caustic remark about possibly looking into a position at the National Enquirer, and there would go the office and title Colin had worked so hard to earn. “But it might take some time. Do you have a number where I can reach you?”

“Better to email me,” she said. “EileenK589 at Gmail.” Apparently noting his raised eyebrows, she said crisply, “I do know how to operate a computer, Colin. I just don’t like typing on my phone because the keypad is so darn small.”

“Well, I have to agree with you on that one,” he said, smiling. “So I’ll email you, Eileen, if I come up with anything that might help explain what you saw in the parking lot that day.”

“Thank you.” This time she did get up from her chair. “Thank you for taking me seriously.”

“Not a problem.”

She let herself out, and Colin’s smile faded. He turned back to his computer, then went to the paper’s website and navigated to the lifestyle page. There was the online version of Caitlin McAllister and Alex Trujillo’s wedding announcement, only this time with the photo in color.

Yes, Caitlin’s hair was red after all. Very red. Well, with a last name like McAllister, he supposed he shouldn’t be too surprised that she’d have such stereotypical Scottish coloring. Hell, for all he knew, maybe she was distantly related to him, generations and generations back. His family had come over in the early 1800s, but still….

He leaned back in his chair, staring at the photo. Saturday, the twelfth of November. The day after tomorrow. He knew St. Augustine’s well enough; it wasn’t that far from the Daily Sun’s offices. Not that he usually worked on Saturdays, but….

A grin pulled at his mouth, and he navigated away from the web page with the McAllister/Trujillo announcement on it. After all, it was probably better that no one here at the paper knew what he was planning.

Because it sure looked like he was about to crash a wedding.