I threw the picks in a nearby puddle so they’d melt, pulled my glove back on, and eased into the building.
Donovan followed me and closed the door behind him. I stood still for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the lack of light. With the darkness and clouds outside, the interior of the building was almost pitch-black, as if it were already midnight instead of creeping up on seven o’clock.
Once I was sure no guards were coming to interrupt us, I pulled a small flashlight out of my jacket pocket and flicked it on. Beside me, Donovan did the same.
We stood in a waiting room. Some chairs, a table, out-of-date magazines. A desk in the middle probably belonged to a secretary. Behind it, a corridor led farther back into the building. That’s where I headed, with the detective behind me.
The corridor ended at a closed door with a brass nameplate that read Tobias Dawson. Just whom I was looking for. I tried the knob. Locked, so I had to form two more Ice picks to open it. After I’d picked the lock, I turned the knob and held my breath, waiting. But no alarm sounded. Evidently, Dawson just secured his office as a precaution — or to keep his staff from snooping around while he was away. I stepped inside the room. The detective followed me.
I paused for a few seconds, taking in the view. Tobias Dawson’s office had just as much personality as the dwarf himself did because everything had a Western motif.
The desk consisted of several old-fashioned wooden barrels with a sheet of glass stretched over the top of them.
The art on the walls featured bucking broncos and Native American designs, perhaps Navajo, from the looks of them. One of the lamps on Dawson’s desk was shaped like a miniature cowboy boot. Another one resembled a curling lasso. I looked up. The dwarf even had a longhorn mounted over the door to the office — its stuffed head and horns at least.
“Somebody really needs to move to Texas,” I murmured.
“Forget that,” Donovan said. “What are we looking for?”
“Anything that might tell us why Tobias Dawson wants the Foxes’ land so badly.” I moved off to the right. “So see what you can find in his desk and in the filing cabinets.”
Donovan did as I asked. But before he started pulling open drawers, the detective stared at me. “And what are you going to do?”
“See if he has a safe stashed in here somewhere.”
Donovan shook his head, but he sat down in Dawson’s oversize chair and went to work, methodically opening, scanning, and closing all the files on the glass desk.
I went around the room and checked behind all the framed photographs, looking for a wall safe. Nothing. I ran my gloved hands over the cheap wood paneling, tapping it in several places. Again, nothing.
I curled and uncurled my hands into loose fists, thinking.
Since Tobias Dawson was friends and business partners with Mab Monroe, I imagined there were quite a few documents — legal and otherwise — he wouldn’t want his underlings seeing. Locking his office wouldn’t be secure enough. He’d need someplace to stash them. There had to be some sort of safe in here. A secret cubbyhole, hell, even a loose floorboard. And I needed to find it — fast.
We’d already been inside more than a minute. I wanted to be gone before the five-minute mark rolled around, if not before. Dawson might not have any obvious security here, but it was better not to take any unnecessary chances, especially since I was going to come back later and kill him.
Since I’d crapped out with the walls, I dropped to my hands and knees and scoured the floor, looking for lines cut into the thick rugs. Nothing. Not so much as a single fiber out of place.
“This is weird,” Donovan murmured, shining his flashlight across several sheets of paper.
“What?” I asked, still crawling around on the floor.
“It looks like Dawson’s hired several gemologists in the last few weeks from a variety of firms,” the detective replied.
“There are receipts here made out to Jeweltones, Gems, Inc., and Grayson Enterprises, among others.”
I frowned. “What would Dawson need with gemologists? He’s mining coal, not precious stones.”
“I don’t know.” Donovan pulled out his cell phone and snapped copies of the receipts to examine later.
By this time, I’d made a complete circuit of the office on my hands and knees, and I still hadn’t found anything useful. Besides Dawson’s obsession with the Old West, the only other thing interesting or noteworthy, at least to me, was the dwarf ’s rock collection. Such collections weren’t uncommon among Stone elementals. Even I’d had one as a kid, before my family had been murdered.
A tall, wide glass case against the back wall of the office housed the collection. Three shelves full of rocks perched above a large block of black granite shot through with silverstone. Some of the stones were worthless. Polished quartz you could find just about anywhere. Odd bits of fool’s gold. Others had some serious value. A sapphire almost as big as an egg. A teardrop-shaped ruby. A lovely square-cut emerald. I could hear the stones, of course.
The soft, pretty murmur of the quartz. The sly whisper of the fool’s gold. The flashy elegance of the gemstones.
My eyes dropped to the bottom shelf, and I focused on the slab of granite. It was nothing compared to the gemstones, but still, I wondered why Dawson would even have it in his collection to start with. The others rocks varied in value, but they were all uniquely shaped or interesting in some way. The granite was just a slab of granite. Black and rather boxlike in its appearance. I knelt down and peered at the stone even closer. Hmm.
There was a lock on the glass case, but I took care of that with a well-crafted Ice pick. Behind me, Donovan kept sorting through papers. I opened the door on the case. The stones’ various murmurs washed over me, but I forced the melodies aside and focused on the granite. Its vibration was low and muted in comparison to the other rocks, but I rather suspected that was the point. Still, it only took me a second to attune myself to the stone. And I realized its vibrations sounded… hollow. As though the stone was only a thin layer covering something else — like a secret chamber.
“I think I’ve found Dawson’s safe — so to speak,” I murmured to Caine.
He looked up from the papers. “Can you open it?”
Picking a door lock was one thing. I had a tougher time getting into a traditional metal safe without Finn’s help — or some explosives. But Tobias Dawson didn’t have a traditional safe. His was made of stone — my element, my specialty. Still, we’d been inside more than three minutes now. No time to be subtle.
So I pulled off my glove, put my hand on the granite, and listened to its vibrations. Slow, steady, solid, just like the rock itself. There was also a sense it was guarding something, protecting something important, valuable.
Tobias Dawson’s secrets, whatever they might be.
I drew in a breath and focused my magic on the granite.
Peering at the rock, into the rock. And I realized the stone was only a couple inches deep. Any thicker than that, and Dawson wouldn’t have been able to put much of anything inside. Also, the silverstone I’d noticed earlier formed a wide, circular shape in the middle of the granite, roughly marking the size of the hollow space inside.
The dwarf probably had the metal triggered to his magic, so that no one could open it but him. Since silverstone could absorb magic, anyone who tried to force their way inside like that would probably spin their wheels for quite a while.
But I was a Stone elemental, just like the dwarf. I didn’t have to go through the silverstone — only around it. I held my bare index finger in front of the granite and reached for my magic. A silver light sparked on the tip of my finger like it was a tiny blowtorch. I leaned forward and pressed my finger against the granite, forcing my magic into the stone, deeper and deeper until I broke through the rock shell to the hollow space inside. Once I made the initial break, it was easy enough to drag my finger around the perimeter of the block, forming a square shape much bigger than the circle of silverstone at the heart of the granite.