The next day, I called the jail to get Carlo Quinn's fingerprints. It turned out that somehow they'd been hopelessly smudged, and were completely unreadable.

After that, I looked up leprechauns on the internet.

Among other things, leprechauns are cobblers. They like to make shoes.

The End.

I ducked into a crouch to make a smaller target. The figures approached. Susan raised her four-cell flashlight and lit them up.

It was Oldfella and his three-legged dog. Both of them blinking and grinning widely, showing their horrible old teeth.

"Don't do that," yelled Sasquatch, "I could have shot you. What are you doing here anyway? It's the middle of the night."

"Lee-preea-kchan," said Oldfella, smiling. He spread his arms wide, palms up, clapped his hands together, and spread his arms again. All gone now.

"What are you trying to tell us, old man?" asked Ashe. "Do you know something?"

"Lee-preea-kchan, (mumble, mumble) tuatha de danann, (namuddlemuddle) na tuatha de danann. Leepreakchan." He tried harder. He pointed at Carlo Quinn's house. "Lee-preakchan. Leipreachan."

"It'd be easier if he spoke a human language," Juba observed.

"Leipreachan," said Oldfella.

"Wait a second," said Ashe. "I think he's speaking Gaelic. I can't understand it. Did you say 'Tuatha de Danann'?" he asked Oldfella.

Oldfella nodded.

"Tuatha de Danann."

"C'mon Ashe, what's he on about?" asked Sasquatch.

"Tuatha de Danann," said Ashe. "It's Gaelic. It means the fairy folk. I think Oldfella's telling us that Carlo Quinn was one of the fairy folk. A leprechaun."

Apparently, no one could think of anything relevant to say for a time.

"Well, that'd explain a lot," said Juba, finally. "No wonder we've had such a tough time with this case. We've been chasing a leprechaun."

"Oh, give it up," said Sasquatch, looking skyward toward his own heathen motorcycle gods. "You're not buying this, are you? There aren't any leprechauns."

"Maybe there's one," said Juba, egging him.

"No! Not even one. I will not believe in leprechauns. I didn't get a search warrant for a leprechaun's house."

Oldfella nodded again. "Leprechaun," he said, positively.

"Whether or not you believe it, Oldfella believes it, don't you?" Ashe smiled at Oldfella, and Oldfella smiled back. "I think Oldfella's been trying to protect you. He likes you. You took him in, gave him food and shelter, and he's trying to return a favor."

"Protect me?"

"Sure--he gave you a pig, didn't he? Domestic animals don't like the fairy folk, and will try to drive them away. And didn't you tell me that Oldfella dumped dirt and leaves and water all over Sky High Chemical Supply after Carlo showed up there?"

"Yeah, dirt from the vacuum cleaner."

"Earth, green oak leaves, and holy water. He was building a magic barrier against the fairy folk."

"No, dammit. It's not true."

"So," Susan drawled, "I've heard that you can catch a leprechaun, but you have to keep your eyes on him every second, or else he'll just disappear."

"Oh, yeah," said Juan, getting into the needle, "and look how Carlo disappeared from the jail. Poof. Gone."

"No."

"There weren't any beds in Carlo's house," I said. "I don't think leprechauns have to sleep."

"No, no. I won't listen to this anymore."

"And gold--don't leprechauns like gold?"

"This is not happening," said Sasquatch, miserably. "I have to see the judge tomorrow for the return on the warrant."

"Lots of gold," said Ashe. "I guess they like gold so much they try to make it, too."

We were so busy heckling Sasquatch, we didn't see Oldfella leaving. When I finally noticed he was missing, he and the dog were a block away, headed west.

It could have been fatigue, but I would swear in court that when they passed under a street light, the dog rose up on his hind legs and walked two-legged beside Oldfella--old friends, old companions, departing now.

Sasquatch and I ditched Jamison when he visited the restroom, and left him rideless at the jail.

There wasn't much we could do about Carlo Quinn's disappearance. We drove back to Quinn's house to finish the search warrant. By the time we arrived, Jamison's DEA henchmen were gone--departed, presumably, to rescue their marooned, half-electrocuted leader. Their absence was an unexpected bonus--it enabled us to finish the search in peace, without a lot of useless questions to answer.

The six of us spent the next few hours collecting evidence, boxing up the chemicals, and loading them into a rental truck. We'd drive the whole thing into a rented storage unit for the remainder of the night, and sort through it tomorrow. The rest of us wanted to leave all the old books, but Ashe was fiercely protective of them, insistent that they were "too valuable" and "rare" to leave in an unprotected house.

"Ashe, it's just a rotten pile of old paper," I whined tiredly. It'd been a long day, and it was turning into a long night. "Those books stink, too. What are we going to do with them?"

"Well, I'm not going to read them, that's for sure," he said.

"Why?"

"I think some of them may be powerful grimoires."

"Eh?"

"Books of magic. If you read the wrong one, one with a curse on it, you might get stuck in it and couldn't get out. The only way to escape a grimoire is to read it backwards."

"They're in Latin, and other Polish dialects. I can't even read them forwards."

"Lucky you."

Perhaps he wasn't serious, but I packed the books up anyway without reading them.

Something about that first notebook kept bothering me, so before we locked the place up, I took another look at it.

"The Arm of the Moon reaches forth to support the Harlequin in his endeavors, gifting him with the King so that the Harlequin may bring forth the King's children from his servants."

It bugged me. I called Sasquatch and Ashe over, and showed them the passage.

"So, okay. I know the King means gold, and I know that bringing forth the King's children from his servants means converting base metals into gold. But what's the Harlequin?"

Ashe considered.

"The Harlequin was a figure from medieval drama. He's described as a clown, or sometimes a demon, formed from pieces of other things and assembled as a patchwork. He's pictured wearing a sword--sometimes a wooden sword. The Harlequin is a trickster."

"Hm. Do we know any tricksters?"

Sasquatch combed his beard with his fingers.

"Well, you can't get much trickier than Carlo. The way he escaped from the jail. I still haven't figured that out. Maybe Carlo Quinn is the Harlequin."

Goose flesh came out on my arms.

"Say that again. That last part."

"Carlo Quinn is the Harlequin."

We all stopped cold. He was right.

"So if the Harlequin is a person, namely Carlo Quinn, is the Arm of the Moon a person too?"

"The Arm of the Moon reaches forth to support the Harlequin in his endeavors, gifting him with the King."

"Carlo was paid in gold by Arno Desmond. Arno Desmond....Arm of the Moon?"

Ashe squinted in linguistic pain. "Maybe in pig latin, left-handed French, and scrambled German."

"I wonder what's in the rest of this stuff?" I asked. "Maybe Carlo laid out the whole operation in code. We'll be weeks figuring it out."

"Months."

"Let's hope he turns up soon. I'm going to lean on that rascal until he squeaks like a little girl." Sasquatch was the image of a homocidal biker. I shuddered involuntarily.

"You be bad cop," I told him. "I'll be good cop."

"Deal."

We locked the place, strung the door and the perimeter with crime scene tape, and prepared to leave. It was past midnight, and very dark--a cloudy, moonless night. As we were walking toward the cars, a tall, amorphous figure emerged from the bushes, followed by a very short one.

Startled, I grabbed involuntarily for my handgun.

Of course, it was futile trying to keep the DEA away. Jamison's issues with Carlo acted as a magnet to pull him along. He had to come with us to the county jail to see the absent spot where Carlo Quinn used to be. We made Jamison ride in the back seat where the bad guys sit. Hey--it was our car.

The duty sergeant, a fiftyish career sheriff's deputy, was upset--he wasn't in the habit of losing his inmates.

"Quinn was present when we served dinner. Afterwards, we took the inmates in rotation to the exercise yard. Quinn was in the second group. That's when we lost sight of him. Here--watch the tapes."

We crowded around the monitor.

"As you can see, in this frame, he's here, by himself, by the south fence. The camera pans across the yard in a thirty-second cycle. Now watch--"

The camera rotated away to the north fence. Like the south and west fence, it was constructed from twelve-foot chain link topped with razor wire. After fifteen seconds, the camera returned to its original location. Carlo wasn't there.

"When we brought the inmates back inside and did a head count, we realized immediately that Quinn was gone. We put the other prisoners under lockdown and ordered them to return to their pods. Quinn never turned up."

"Is there anywhere in the yard where he might have hidden?" I asked, "I notice there's a shed about thirty feet from where Quinn was standing."

"First place we looked," said the sergeant. "It's for recreational equipment, and it's kept locked all the time, except when we're getting something out or putting it away. It was padlocked at the time, but we opened it up anyway. He wasn't there."

"No way he could have scaled the fence?" asked Jamison.

"I don't see how he could have done it in thirty seconds. Besides--it's electrified and alarmed--if anyone touches it, he gets 30,000 volts of alternating current. Low amperage, of course, not fatal, but really, really unpleasant--like grabbing hold of a goosed bull. The alarm would have gone off anyway. Even if he did climb the fence, there's another fence on the outer perimeter. He'd have had to climb that one too."

"Pretty tough work for a little chubby guy," said Sasquatch, nodding. "Any way he could have sneaked back inside when no one was looking and hidden somewhere else in the jail complex?"

"We've turned the place upside down," said the sergeant. "Unless he's hiding under a coffee cup in the dining hall, I can't think where he might be. None of the other inmates would hide him--they hate being locked down. They'd rat him out in two seconds."

Carlo wasn't small enough to hide in a coffee cup. Even marshmallow-soft, I doubted that he could squash himself sufficiently to hide in the dishes.

"I suppose you've notified patrol," Jamison said.

"Five minutes after we realized he was missing. No one's reported a puffy short man hitchhiking or stealing a car."

"Mind if we go out to the yard to look around? I know your guys have been all over it, but--" I asked.

"Go for it. Frankly, I don't know what to think."

The sergeant escorted us through a series of locked doors, through the gate into the exercise yard. We thanked him, and scuffed our way across to the south fence.

"Think he could have burrowed underneath?"

"Nah. I know for a fact that the yard is made of concrete, three feet thick, and the fence is buried a foot into it."

Jamison, bless him, decided to touch the fence. He very quickly let go when his hair bristled like a cat gone halloween. A klaxon began to wail.

"Doesn't make sense," said Sasquatch, when the noise and Jamison's antics subsided. "The only way he could have gotten away was to fly, or to squeeze through the fence."

"Good and gone," I agreed. "Not even a grease spot left."

1. My S/O, EJ, is a historian, and owns a historical research consulting company. Sounds weird, but they're doing fine. We've been married for oh--must be hundreds of years, anyway. I've tried to get her to blog, but she says she's too shy. Most she's done around here is send anonymous fan mail to Sir Cranky at strippersvsdvds.

2. I used to write a monthly column for a fly-fishing magazine until it folded its tiny pages and ephemerized. I've fly-fished for a very long time. Since long before "The Movie". Those who flyfish know what "The Movie" is, and how much we despise it for rendering our avocation fashionable. "The Movie" is solely responsible for the boom in Montana real estate.

3. TC's doing an internship this year at a local theater in costume design. She's enjoying it very much. I've told her that if she chooses a life among theater types, she will have an interesting one, because drama personalities do not often lead colorless lives. TC has promised to get me a picture of a very large bottle of fake blood that the theater has in their prop room. I would also like some samples. Who wouldn't?

4. We used to have a cabin in the mountains north of town. There were a lot of bears around. The bears would tear down the hummingbird feeders and suck them dry, but we always put the feeders back up. When TC was small, she liked to sit in the yard with a red blanket over her head, and hummingbirds would land on her head and arms, looking for lunch. One night a neighbor of ours heard a knock at his front door, and answered it. The caller was a bear. My neighbor told me that neither he nor the bear really knew what to say after he answered the door.

5. The object in front of me at this moment is a vertebrae from a mammoth.