Murder in the Magic City: A Micah Brantley Story, G.P. Sorrells [reading comprehension books TXT] 📗

the hall, peering into silent rooms until she stumbled upon the space she had been most interested in investigating. Osteen’s office. It was a quaint speck of a room at odds with the relative behemoths lurking about throughout the rest of the home. A mahogany desk sat in the center of the room; its heft unaffected by the notion that it may be out of place in the repurposed sunroom.

Vivian walked past slowly; her eyes drawn to the heap of paperwork sprawled across half of the desk. She sat down in the chair and let out a sigh.

“It’s been a while, Dan,” she said to his ghost. Whether she was alone in the room hardly mattered. Simply speaking her thoughts out loud from time to time helped calm her mind. Made her see that Osteen had only left the material plane, but he wouldn’t just leave her completely high and dry. Of course, if she were being honest with herself, she often wondered if she may have been going crazy. At least gradually. Osteen had been the first death she’d had to experience of someone close to her. It’s one thing to lose a loved one who you hadn’t seen or spoken to in over a decade. It’s quite another to come to grips with the sudden and unexpected loss of someone who existed as part of your day-to-day life for years.

“I knew my gut wouldn’t steer me wrong,” Vivian said, skimming through the files on the desk. “You never could leave work behind when you punched out for the day.” She leaned back in the chair and pinched her brow. “Of course, I feel like I can’t do that much anymore, so who am I to point fingers?”

A click of the hard-worn mouse at the edge of the desk, and Osteen’s computer chimed its willingness to assist in whatever ventures its new master had in mind. Moments later, Vivian had every file that Osteen had opened in the past year expanded up on the screen. Come Hell or high water, she was going to find the connection between the murders. Or at least gather some insight into what Osteen himself may have stumbled upon.

It was slow going at first, clicking through files of some of their early cases together. Vivian powered through it until she reached the files about their mystery man in Crandon Park.

“Somehow, someway, that motherfucker is connected to all of this.” An icy chill rushed down Vivian’s spine. She brushed off the discomfort and pushed forward to a case she hadn’t recognized. Something about an accidental death at a local crematorium. Marco Fedorov, the owner of Our Dearly Departed Funeral Parlor, had been found dead at a crematorium used by his organization.

Accidental Death = Homicide?

The words were scrawled out in Osteen’s familiar script. His penmanship was anything but scholarly, though it was certainly memorable. “Wonder if this is one of the other bodies he was talking about.” She opened an internet browser and searched various tags from the report. Random phrases that would look like nothing more than word salad to a casual observer. The hope was that something in those words would produce a result intriguing enough to warrant deeper inspection. From there, she would just need to cross her fingers that whatever the tidbit was, it shared some connection to Jennings and Cagney.

The cremation of one, Marco Fedorov, was unsanctioned. No paperwork had been filled out or submitted to alert anyone involved of the facilities being used on the night in question. Mr. Fedorov wasn’t even slated to be on the premises.

“According to witness testimony,” Vivian muttered to herself, reading Osteen’s typed report, “an armed man barged into the premises and forced the attendant to persuade Mr. Fedorov to travel to their location. The witness remembers nothing after that–someone knocked him unconscious. When he came to, he discovered the armed man had trapped him in a box. Fearing the armed man had buried him alive, the witness cried out for help. Once out of the box, he discovered his assailant had disappeared. He immediately called the authorities.”

In searching the crematorium, the witness discovered that the cremation chamber had recently ceased functioning. The body which had been inside was long gone, reduced to ashes. In its wake were the remnants of a titanium knee. He reported his findings to the officers on the scene, but nothing about a dead person’s replacement knee was the least bit interesting.

“Can’t say I blame them. Shit, if I were in their shoes, I don’t think I would’ve chalked it up to anything more than negligence by the staff.”

In her search of arbitrary words, Vivian found a connection. Minor, to be fair, but she had to start somewhere. Cracking any case rarely occurs as the result of a Holmesian ability to manifest a clue out of thin air–combining seemingly unrelated factums and arriving at the answer that had eluded all others. Detective work often relied on a snowball effect, linking enough similar clues together until the picture they combined to create could be nothing more than the answer.

The funeral parlor, owned by the deceased, was in Hialeah, Florida, a mere eleven-mile jaunt from Medina’s home on Fisher Island. It didn’t seem likely that he would have use for the services of a funeral home built for the average person, but the same may not hold true for the men he employed.

“Let’s keep digging,” Vivian said, cheerfully, as she moved forward in her quest for answers.

Chapter 55

Micah sat on the couch, gazing at the television as he waited for the news anchor, a reporter, or hell, some random guy off the street even, to share the good news. Valerie handed him a cup of coffee and sat down next to him, snuggling in close. He put an arm around her and kissed lightly on her forehead.

“Anything interesting?”

“Not yet,” Micah said. “Unless you like hearing the same weather report spelled out to you slightly differently every ten minutes. Otherwise,