“Go ahead, Callie.”
“You have the full records of the prison, don’t you? Was there an inmate from the nineteen twenties incinerated? He went by the name of Dutch.”
“I’ll check, but that’s over a decade of paperwork, and there’s bound to be many that fit that criteria. Can you narrow it down?”
“Okay,” I replied and turned to Madi.
“Dutch avoided replying about his crime, except that he said he was innocent.” Madi frowned.
“Try finding out if he was married. Or if he had children, and how long he was imprisoned for. Anything that could lead us to tracking him down. Dutch is probably a nickname,” I replied.
Madi’s frown deepened. “Is Dutch your real name? You like my clothes. Did you grow up in the twenties? Were you around during prohibition?”
“That’s a good question. Dutch may have been incarcerated for bootlegging,” Phil said.
“Was that why you’re here? Because you were a bootlegger?” Madi asked.
The temperature gauge pinged, and Madi gaped. “It just dropped another fifteen degrees,” she hissed.
My EMF spiked at five, and Sunny closed in on us both.
“You need to take a break,” he stated, and Madi and I both threw him a glare.
“Shush,” I murmured.
“Please tell me more about yourself,” Madi asked.
“No.”
Sunny stiffened; we all heard that clear as a bell.
“No? Why?”
“She’s a nosy dame.”
“Shut her up, Dutch.”
“She’ll get us into trouble.”
“Dame’s a peach.”
Madi grew wide-eyed as voices drifted towards us. I counted at least three.
“Do you have a gang?” I called.
“Shut up. Let the dame speak.”
“Holy crap,” Madi exclaimed.
Holy crap was right; we had three distinct voices. They sounded Chicagoan and from the twenties. Even scarier was the fact that we were getting full sentences.
“…Ain’t no snitch,”the words floated back to us.
The two-way crackled, and we jumped as Harry spoke. “I have something. I’m tracking leads, but I found an article that states Dutch Marooney was incarcerated here. He was locked up for a mob-related assassination, and while working for them, he was said to keep his head down. Which made it a surprise they got him on murder,” Harry announced.
“Do we have the victim’s name?” I asked.
“Yeah. Charles Leeward, also known as The Cricket. He was a loan shark who worked for a rival, and Marooney’s side wanted him gone.”
