Free Murder by Magic by Rosemary Edghill Page B

someone who was a craftsman.
    The camera was still working quite nicely, the tiny light on my side of it blinking steadily. I waited until the thief had the safe open and the package in his hands. I couldn’t resist any longer, snapped off the camera to protect the sensitive film, and hit the light switch. With a hoarse cry, the thief straightened and tore the goggles from his face. Since they were designed to take any ambient light, however faint, and amplify it to the nth degree, a sudden blast of real light had to be agonizing. Of course I’m always sympathetic to those who have problems with light.
    I flicked a small switch on the side of the camera as I turned it on again, switching to regular film to get a good shot of the intruder’s face. Emma came up behind him. While he was still rubbing his eyes, she took the package from his hands and gently guided him to the floor.
    I came out from the filing cabinet where I had squeezed myself, and didn’t waste time. The thief was still trying to focus his blasted eyes, so it was simple to pat him down until I found his wallet. Emma stood a little closer to him, in case he made any sudden moves. Flipping the wallet open, I read his name aloud from his driver’s license. “Mark . . . Harrison? Any relation to Arthur Harrison?”
    Mark managed to get his eyes open and look at me. “So what? Who the hell are you?”
    Emma tapped him on the back of his head, gently for her but with sufficient force to get his attention. “Manners, my friend.”
    He tried to turn his head toward her, but she held his neck in her hand easily, forcing him to look at me.
    “Since you asked so nicely,” I said to him, “my name is Steele, Jonathan Steele. The lovely lady holding you is my wife, Emma. Your brother hired us to prevent this very thing from happening.”
    Mark looked up at me, his eyes still streaming. “He would.”
    I glanced at Emma. She was still holding his neck securely, but her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?” she asked.
    “He stole it from me,” Mark said. “I spent years on it, and he took it. Now he claims it’s his, all his.”
    “Can you prove that?”
    He looked everywhere but at me. “I could explain it, but never prove it.”
    “Try me.”
    He took a deep breath. “My brother used black magic to get my share of the company.”
    As the actress said to the bishop,
I thought,
it’s cute, but a bit hard to swallow.
    Over the years, both Emma and myself had developed contacts and connections, some of which were literally out of this world. It didn’t take much to learn that Mark was telling the truth. His brother, whom I now thought of as Art the Weasel, had hired a
bofour,
a voodoo priest, to perform a spell of change. Translated into English, the brothers briefly traded bodies. Art/Mark kept Mark/Art drunk and drugged, posed as him, and met with an attorney to sign over complete control of the company. After the spell wore off, the real Mark had only hazy memories, but one night the entire episode came back to him.
    I glanced at Emma. She nodded slightly. “It happens like that sometimes,” she said. She knows far more about that than I do, and I, as usual, deferred to her on such subjects.
    “Let’s have a little fun,” was my suggestion.
    “What do you have in mind?”
    “Something massive, I think.”
    Simply put, we stole the code.
    Doesn’t sound like much, does it? We found out that the code to the safe had been changed, but, I, um, got around that fairly easily.
    Once the safe was opened, the written software code was there, along with more than a dozen diskettes. Mark clutched them fiercely, almost sobbing in relief. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.
    “We’ll cash the check your brother gave us,” Emma told him. “I assume that won’t affect you at all?”
    “Not a bit. When this gets out, and if it does as well as I think it will, I’ll double it.”
    “That’s not necessary,” I told him. “We’ve already