A mournful cry came from the center of the room. "All my life I"ve been working at my craft," Rudge wailed, "and this punk is able to duplicate the most amazing illusion ever performed without any effort at all."
"There was a little bit of effort," Shawn said. "The backstage door weighs a ton."
"I knew it was all a cheap trick," Jessica Higgenbotham spit. "There was no way P"tol P"kah wasn"t a complete fraud."
"How did you get out of the tank?" La.s.siter said.
"Look," Shawn said, wringing out his shirt. No water dripped out of it. The cloth was completely dry. "I was never in it."
"But we saw you," Detective O"Hara said.
"Did you?" Shawn said. "Did you really?"
"Yes, Shawn, we all did," Henry said. "Do you want to explain now?"
"Or do we have to beat it out of you?" La.s.siter added hopefully.
"Gus!" Shawn called. "Show them."
Gus went over to the tank and picked at the gla.s.s where it met the metal frame. Sc.r.a.ping at it with his fingernail, he pried back a thin sheet of clear plastic, much like the sticky protective wrapping on a new iPod screen.
"Get away from that tank," Major Voges commanded. "That information is cla.s.sified."
"Then we promise not to tell anyone," O"Hara said. "Go on, Shawn."
"It was Augie Bal.u.s.trade who gave me the clue," Shawn said. "Because he wasn"t a crook or a hustler, he really was devoted to his craft. And it personally offended him that P"tol P"kah was perverting it."
Gus stepped away from the tank. "That"s why he was clutching a TV remote when he died. To send us a message from beyond the grave."
"What message?" La.s.siter said.
"That P"tol P"kah was not only our favorite Martian; he was actually My Favorite Martian," Shawn said. "A TV show about a fake alien."
Gus pulled the plastic sheeting off the gla.s.s so that it covered only the left half of the tank. Then he ran up the airplane stairs and fiddled with something on the lid. After a second, the thin plastic came alive with the image of Shawn splashing into the tank. The plain gla.s.s showed nothing but still water behind it.
"Hey, Henry," Bud shouted. "If you want to get me a wedding present to make up for being such a jerk, I"ll take one of those."
"If you flip the latch one way, the lid opens to reveal the water below," Shawn said. "If you flip it again, a panel in the lid slides back and opens a chamber in the back of the tank. You drop down there and step out a hidden door when the lights go out."
"That"s not possible," Jessica Higgenbotham said. "We would have heard of this TV technology if it existed."
"Exactly what I said about the dissolving ray," Gus said. "And the answer turns out to be the same. We never hear of it if the government wants to keep it secret."
"And what branch of the government would be in charge of something like this?" Shawn said.
"I do believe that would be the Federal Communications Commission," Gus said.
"Specifically the Office of Engineering and Technology, Equipment Authorization Branch," Shawn added.
La.s.siter and O"Hara swiveled toward Major Voges, who stared at them coldly.
"I"m thinking that somewhere out there is a company that"s been waiting a long, long time for government approval of their new technology," Shawn said. "Not realizing that the people who were supposed to be testing it had actually put it into use."
"At least they didn"t realize it until Augie Bal.u.s.trade started phoning around, asking if something like that was possible," Gus said. "And when they started to hear rumors, they called the agency in charge. They called Holly Voges."
"And she went to shut him up," Shawn said.
Major Voges glared at Shawn as if she were imagining what he"d look like strapped down to a board waiting for the fire hose.
"Is this true?" O"Hara demanded. "The government organization you work for is the FCC?"
"I never said anything else," she said coldly.
"You certainly implied something else." La.s.siter looked like a kid who"d just opened the giant box under the Christmas tree only to discover it contained socks.
"I am not responsible for your a.s.sumptions, Detective," Major Voges said, "any more than I am for your psychic"s errors in logic."
"I"ve got errors?" Shawn said.
"He"s got logic?" Gus said.
"He got part of the story right," Major Voges said. "We were testing the stick-on TV technology, and it was stolen from our labs. My colleague, Doug Firrell, came under suspicion within the agency. He knew the only way to clear his name was to catch the real thief. Officially he took a leave of absence from the FCC; only I knew what he was really doing."
"Feeling up s.p.a.cegirls in Las Vegas casinos," Shawn said.
Jessica Higgenbotham wheeled furiously on Major Voges. "That chubby dead creep worked for you?" she spit.
"That"s why he knew all about your husband"s telecommunications company," Gus said.
"Hold on," La.s.siter commanded. "Are you identifying the man we found floating in the tank?"
"Try to keep up, La.s.sie," Shawn said.
"He was a product tester for the FCC?" O"Hara said. "Then why couldn"t we find any record of him in any database?"
"He was working undercover on a delicate issue," Voges said. "I had his ident.i.ty cla.s.sified."
"How?" O"Hara said. "You work for the FCC, not Homeland Security."
"Anyone can mark anything cla.s.sified these days," Shawn said. "It"s getting it uncla.s.sified that"s hard. In fact, I"ve just had Gus" waist size marked top secret, so if anyone sells him a pair of pants, he"s going down."
"Doug was trying to prove P"tol P"kah, whoever he really was, had the stolen technology," Major Voges said. "But the magician figured out who he was. He set up the private show here as a trap and used it to kill Doug, then disappeared."
"From the tank?" La.s.siter said. "Didn"t he always do that?"
"In a convertible," Shawn said. "There was a police report that night of Shrek driving through downtown Santa Barbara."
"So now we know the ident.i.ty of the dead man in the tank," La.s.siter said. "We just don"t know the ident.i.ty of the man who put him there."
"Or how he did it," O"Hara said.
"I promise you, I will not stop searching until I find this man," Major Voges said. "Once I take my fallen colleague back to Washington and see to his eternal rest, I will go after his killer."
"Going to be kind of hard to do from a jail cell," Shawn said.
"August Bal.u.s.trade was dead when I got to his house," Major Voges said. "P"tol P"kah must have gotten to him before I did."
"So you took off your clothes and ran into the street in your underwear," Shawn said.
"I have no idea what you"re talking about," Voges said.
La.s.siter and O"Hara inched toward Major Voges. She didn"t move an inch.
"I think we should continue this at the station," La.s.siter said.
"This is ridiculous," Major Voges said. "I was with you at the crime scene. P"tol P"kah set off a bomb to distract the police and he fled. He"s still out there while you"re stopping me from pursuing him."
"There was an explosion, but there was no bomb," Shawn said.
"Something exploded," La.s.siter said. "The neighbors heard it."
"It was P"tol P"kah," Shawn said.
"Wait a minute," Jessica said. "The Martian Magician blew himself up? Why?"
"For the answer to that, we have to return to the definitive work on all things magical," Shawn said. "The Prestige. What that movie teaches us is that it"s easy to disappear from a cabinet. What"s hard is to reappear across the room, unless you happen to have-"
Gus tugged on Shawn"s shirt. "I think you need to say spoiler alert here."
"You need spoiler alerts at a denouement?"
"It"s just basic politeness," Gus said.
"Fine," Shawn said. "Spoiler alert. You can"t make it look like you"re reappearing across the room unless you happen to have a machine for generating clones or a twin brother no one in the world has ever heard about."
"Hey!" Lyle Wheelock looked up from the back of the room, where he, Bud, and Henry had been talking over old times while Shawn explained the case. "You just ruined the movie for me-and it"s at the top of my Netflix queue."
"See?" Gus said.
"But the next-best thing to a secret twin is somebody who looks like a secret twin," Shawn said. "And a secret shaft from your apartment closet that leads into the ceiling of the showroom, where I have to imagine there"s a secret panel."
"The architect told me that was a laundry chute," Fleck said. "No wonder it had rungs all the way down."
"The only problem is finding someone who looks like a seven-foot-tall Martian," Gus said. "That would seem pretty hard to pull off."
"Unless you had the right tools," Shawn said. "Hey, La.s.sie, did you ever get around to testing the air in that tank?"
"I did. It was air."
"Not Martian air," Shawn said. "Plain old Earth air."
"Plain old," La.s.siter said.
"Why would P"tol P"kah possibly need all those tanks of compressed air?"
Gus had retreated to the back of the stage, and came back carrying the tank that La.s.siter"s men had left there for them. He took something dark and shriveled out of his pocket, then attached it to the tank"s nozzle and turned the valve. There was a loud hissing of escaped air, and Gus removed the now-filled balloon from the tank.
"My million-dollar magician was nothing but a balloon animal?" Fleck said.
"A little more than that," Shawn said. "I"d guess he used a smaller version of the stick-on TV for the face. But he did have one thing in common with every other balloon animal. If he came across a sharp object . . ."
Gus held a pin aloft so that everyone could see it, then jabbed the balloon. It exploded with a bang.
"Which is why you should always wear clean underwear when you commit murder wearing a balloon suit," Shawn said. "I"d guess you planned to run out of the house as P"tol P"kah to support your story that you were chasing down your partner"s killer."
Major Voges turned to the doors, but they were blocked by uniformed officers. Before they could move, she"d reached into her purse and pulled out her gun.
La.s.siter and O"Hara already had their guns out.
"You can"t get away," La.s.siter said.
"Don"t even think about it," O"Hara said calmly.
"I"ve already thought about it," Major Voges said. "And there"s no way you can stop me without a bloodbath."
She took two steps backward to the door. Shawn shot his hand up in the air.
"Hank!" Shawn shouted.
A superball flew across the room right into Shawn"s palm. In one smooth motion he hurled it back, right at Major Voges" head.
It missed.
"You idiot," she snapped, and turned the gun on him. But before she could fire, the ball slammed into the door behind her, rocketed off, and blasted into the back of her head, knocking her off balance. La.s.siter and O"Hara leapt across the room, grabbing her gun, spinning her around, and slapping the cuffs on her.
"That concludes the denouement portion of this evening"s events," Shawn said with a bow. "After a brief intermission, maybe we can persuade a special guest to stick knives in her eyeb.a.l.l.s."
Shawn and Gus linked hands, took a deep bow, and started to walk off stage.
"Hey!" Henry shouted. "What about the guy in the tank? How did he get in there?"
Shawn stopped at the edge of the stage. "You don"t really care about how a magic trick is done, do you, Dad?"
"I care," Benny Fleck said. "I have a right to know."
Shawn sighed heavily. "Say, Gus," he said, "what"s the first thing you need to know about any magic trick?"
"When you finally learn the explanation, it"s much simpler than you ever could have imagined," Gus said.