Rock Wolf Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “I see.” He looked pensive. “So, who is paying for the private detectives? That would fall to Riley Saunders, correct?”

  She licked her lips. This was getting embarrassing. “In theory. But my uncle doesn’t believe there is a problem either. At least no more so than the usual amount of theft that goes on where there are constant hordes of people in contact with the belongings of their peers.”

  Olivia wasn’t entirely sure what was worse—the thought that Duke Dunbar had gone down to the police station and spoken to Mathias and Sellers, or the idea he might have believed the two of them and everything they had to say about Olivia’s failed wedding. What was more embarrassing? Hard to say, really.

  “I was going to pay for this investigation out of my own pocket.” Olivia thought of her savings account. She had been hording carefully for years and years in hopes that someday she would be able to open her own dance studio in Branson. She was in her thirties and being a dancer was not in the cards for her anymore. But she could still dance, and she could teach. Being around the stage was the only part of this job that she liked. It was close, but it wasn’t really what she wanted.

  “Your own pocket,” Duke repeated. “Our basic fee is three thousand dollars. That gets you a basic investigation. If I had to pull more resources and ask more guys to come in and do surveillance, that’s more. You pay their hourly rate, which is a hundred bucks a guy.”

  Olivia swallowed. He was certainly giving her the unvarnished truth here. That was for certain. “A hundred dollars an hour?”

  “We’re not strippers or bouncers,” Duke said flatly. “We’re trained investigators. Some of us are ex-military, others ex-law enforcement. We have a former FBI agent on staff, too. My boss has contacts everywhere and sometimes he brings in freelancers to fill the ranks. It’s cheaper than maintaining all of that staff all the time and it allows us to keep our base fee lower.”

  “Oh.” Olivia swallowed back the lump of dread that had appeared in her throat.

  She was feeling the pinch now. That moment of wondering if it was worth keeping this place open at all. Maybe it was better to pay the man for his time and just walk away from the whole mess. Then she thought of her Uncle Riley. He had no place to go and no retirement plan. Not really. He had always intended to sell the show. But he had never taken in another partner to train to take over. It all fell under the heading of “next year.”

  “So?” Duke’s expectant look made her want to slap the smirk off his face. But then, she probably deserved at least some of this rudeness. “What’s it going to be? You want to pay me for my time and just walk away? Or do you really want to do this? If so, I’ll need the three thousand tonight.”

  “Oh. Tonight.” Olivia felt the sourness of his mercenary outlook on her situation and wished that just one person really cared about what went on in the Moonrise Theater.

  He was staring at her so Olivia decided she might as well just put her money where her mouth was. She unlocked the lower right desk drawer and pulled out a book of business checks. Writing one with a flourish, she made it out in the sum of three thousand dollars to Rock Wolf Investigations and then ripped it out of the book before she could think better of her decision. This wasn’t the time to second-guess herself. This was the time to act. She could straighten it out with Riley later on.

  “Here you go. Your fee.” Olivia felt the acute pain of watching that check leave her hands and go right into that of the private investigator.

  Duke promptly folded the check and put it in his pocket. “I’m going to go have a look at your bathrooms.”

  Without another word, he turned on his heel and stalked out of her office, the door slamming shut behind him. Olivia watched him go. She continued to watch the door long after he was gone. She could not help but feel like whatever compassion the man had felt for her before was gone now. It was an awful feeling. Or maybe what she was reacting to was the possibility that she had lost his respect.

  Respect. Olivia bit her lip and remembered that Duke had wanted to look at all of the reports about the thefts. She pulled those out of a drawer on her left and set them neatly atop her desk. Since she was alone in her office, she could not help herself from reading a few of the reports. She had done that before, sort of. Olivia hadn’t figured they were really all that important. The important piece was that people’s personal items had been stolen, not the last time they’d seen their stuff or when they had noticed it missing. And yet, in hindsight, those were very pertinent questions if you were going to investigate a theft.

  With the reports in front of her, Olivia went over them with a little more care and contemplation. There were eight in all from the last three weeks. It was more than just a coincidence or one of those things. It was more than just distracted tourists misplacing their things. This was real.

  One woman stated she’d had her wallet in the gift shop before the show, but when she had returned to the gift shop after the show, the wallet was gone. It had been inside her purse, but she had admitted the purse wasn’t zipped or buttoned closed. She never zipped her purse closed.

  Someone else thought she might have misplaced her wallet in the bathroom. She was also female, but younger. She had taken her stuff out of her purse in the bathroom in order to touch up her makeup and didn’t remember if she’d put the wallet back inside before leaving the restroom.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  Olivia looked up to find Uncle Riley staring at her with a strange expression on his face. The show must have been over. Riley would be waiting for the last bit where he always made a few rounds in the foyer area to insert himself into the crush of people trying to get to the bathrooms or the gift shop. The guests typically got a kick out of seeing Riley like that. He posed for photos, signed autographs, and generally sucked up to the crowd in hopes of them heading to the store to purchase more merchandise before they left the show to enjoy the rest of their Branson vacation.

  “I was just going over these loss reports from the thefts,” Olivia admitted to her uncle. “I know you don’t take them seriously, but you have to realize this is the sort of thing Harvey could use to shut down the theater.”

  Riley snorted. He was a thinnish man, and tall. That alone made it easy for him to slip through the crowd of guests both in the theater seats and in the foyer. Perhaps that was the mark of a showman, the ability to use his body to his best advantage when performing to a crowd. Wasn’t that what ballet and dance were about? The ability that Olivia had to use her body to perform.

  “Harvey isn’t going to shut the theater down.” Riley had a strange expression on his face, as though he had just smelled something awful. “He blows about it. He talks about it and thinks about it maybe. But in the end, he won’t do it. Not as long as people keep coming to my shows.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Uncle Riley!” Did he really not get it? Sometimes Olivia was very aware of her uncle’s age and the fact he didn’t understand why he needed to post YouTube videos of Snooker and Chili or why he should use social media to push his merchandise or to advertise his shows. Olivia had to do all of that for him. He just didn’t ever see the point. “If people start to say they can’t come to see this show because there’s too much of a chance of getting robbed, then the tickets will stop selling and the show will be in breach of contract!”

  Riley shook his head. “Girl, you worry too much.”

  She watched her uncle stand up and stretch. He had been such an inspiration to her when she was younger. An uncle who had really made it in show business, unlike her parents who both worked dead end jobs until they died of exhaustion. Olivia had wanted to be like Riley. He had taken her in, had given her a job managing the details of his show. She was good at it, but she had always wanted to perform herself. Her parents would not hear of it. Riley had always encouraged her. Except that ship had sailed for her. Riley was all she had left now.

  “I’m heading back out to do my thing.” Riley stood up and stretched. As he mo
ved his body in so many directions at once, Olivia was reminded of a Mother Goose rhyme.

  There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.

  Perhaps that was Uncle Riley. “You should get a cat,” Olivia said suddenly, thinking of the old poem. “You could add a Mother Goose bit about the crooked man and the crooked smile and the crooked cat and the crooked house.”

  “That’s not a bad idea, girl.” Riley’s bushy eyebrows went up. “You’ve always had good ideas. You know that?”

  “Ideas are only good if they make money,” Olivia reminded him. “But you should get a cat. Not a dog. You have Chili.”

  “Cats are hard to train,” Riley observed. He made a face. “But I could try it. See what they have at the shelter.”

  “I’m entirely certain the animal shelter has cats galore,” Olivia said dryly. “You’d better go have fun with your public or your window of opportunity will be gone.”

  “Yes. Off to photobomb!”

  Olivia let him go and did not follow. That was one of Riley’s favorite moves in public. The whole photobombing thing had started out years ago when people actually used cameras. These days, they used their phones and if they actually had an image with Riley in the background making faces, they could tag Riley Saunders in the picture on Facebook and be entered in a drawing to win a free T-shirt. It was all a publicity hype. But that was what made the world go round these days.

  Olivia put her face in her hands and sighed. The world wasn’t going around. Not anymore. It was heading straight for the ground.

  Chapter Eight

  The bathrooms were a dead end. Not only that, but they seemed to be full of harried-looking fathers wishing they didn’t have to go into the restroom in search of a changing table. The sight of that sort of thing always made Duke want to cringe in horror. Kids. Family. Sure. He’d considered going back home and marrying a farm girl. What kept him from doing that was the knowledge that farm girls usually expected to start popping out babies before too many years of married bliss had gone by.

  Duke Dunbar did not do kids. At all. He hated them. Little buggers with their diseases and their sloppy mouths and their snot noses. Although, perhaps he was all wrong about kids. They could say totally embarrassing things to incriminate their parents. Like when the one booger asked his father why he kept looking at some lady’s boobs. That was about the time that Duke exited the men’s room and headed into the crowded rush of humanity in the foyer.

  It took him a moment to realize there was a maintenance catwalk accessible from a narrow spiral staircase set into the far wall of the theater. By stepping over the EMPLOYEES ONLY signage at the bottom of the stairs, he could observe the events below without too much trouble. The set up was actually rather brilliant. Duke felt as though he could see Olivia’s hand in all of this.

  There was more than one photo op station below. People loved these. Not some particle board cutout of the show’s star that they could take a picture with, but something truly odd or unique. These weren’t even advertisements for Riley. They were about the Moonrise Theater. A huge sarcophagus sat in one corner of the foyer with a sign inviting people to take a picture of what had once been a prop for the magic show that had given the Moonrise its name. There was another area where an old cigar store Indian of enormous size lay on its side in a push cart that looked as though it had come straight off some movie scene about the hillbillies in the Ozarks.

  A mannequin of a white pony made entirely out of Lego building blocks sat in another spot. And finally, there was a whopping big plastic goose complete with bonnet, glasses, and her wings spread as though she were trying to suffocate a whole lot of little children in order to sacrifice them to the god of Mother Goose. This actually seemed to be one of the most popular places to take a picture. As Duke watched, he became absolutely engrossed in seeing what kind of idiotic poses the modern public could find to embarrass themselves in a photo.

  Finally, Duke spotted Riley Saunders making his way through the crowd. He was an odd sort of man. Tall, thin, and rather gangly in appearance, Riley had a way about him that seemed to put people at ease. He would make jokes or do classically obvious magic tricks like pulling coins or handkerchiefs out of the ears of random people. He did a lot of photobombing near the Mother Goose figure and also seemed a bit enamored with the white pony, where he appeared to be pretending to be made of Legos himself.

  Duke didn’t see any furtive looking characters in the crowd. It had not taken him long to realize that this was the place where people were most at risk for a brush with a pickpocket. It was a spot like this where they were pressed against other people and the doors did not prevent someone who was not a paid member of the crowd from popping in to steal a few wallets and then slip right back out the doors.

  Of course, there were plenty of paying snakes down there, too. Duke spotted Hilary Allenwood almost immediately. She was photographing the crowd as though she were looking for a good picture to go with her newspaper story. No doubt she would be making sure to let the public know that right there and then they were at the greatest risk of having their wallet snatched right from their purse.

  “Well? What do you see?”

  Duke hadn’t expected to see Olivia up there at all, much less to see her effortlessly walking toward him from the other side of the catwalk. She’d had to traverse the entire length of the room on a narrow walkway that was hung very nonchalantly from a few pipes anchored to the ceiling beams. Most people would have shown at least an ounce of apprehension for such a task. Not Olivia. It made him wonder what her story really was.

  “I see a crowd full of potential victims down there,” Duke finally told her. “That’s what I see.”

  “Potential victims, hmm?” She did not look at him, choosing to stare at the crowd below instead. “And what do you notice about those victims?”

  Duke wasn’t watching the victims. He was watching the way Olivia leaned casually over the railing of the catwalk to get a better look at the scene below. He would have bet money that she was capable of balancing on the railing itself. The grace and agility in each and every movement was something that he had missed when he’d met her earlier today. How had he missed that sort of thing? That wasn’t like him. He had written her off as a scrawny twig girl with no muscle.

  “I’m noticing that there is absolutely nothing suspicious about anyone in that crowd below and yet you can’t help but think that if stuff is getting stolen right from people’s bags beneath their very noses, it’s because they’re all squashed together down there.”

  “True enough,” Duke murmured. Then he shook his head. “Okay. Let’s just get this out of the way. What are you? A gymnast?”

  “Dancer.”

  “Ah.”

  Suddenly, the rail thin frame made sense. Small breasts, a very minimal curve of her hips and her ass. She had spent a lifetime making her body fit into that classic dancer mold. And yet, you didn’t have to look like an Aspen pole to be a dancer. It wasn’t a requirement.

  “Classical ballet,” Olivia offered. “Well, that and some modern movement. I never did the jazz hip hop thing though. It just didn’t appeal to me. I saw The Nutcracker when I was about three and I felt in love with the Sugarplum Fairy, like just about every other little girl out there.”

  “It’s the costume,” Duke agreed. Then he cleared his throat. “At least that’s what I’ve been told.”

  “By whom?” She was no longer paying any attention to the crowd below. She was totally focused on him. “Where on earth did you hear that? I’m not arguing, mind you. I loved the costume. Everyone loves it.”

  Duke huffed out a big sigh. “My younger sister. She was a dancer when she was younger. Not that our little local dance studio was doing huge productions, but she kept wanting to do that solo performance in the annual recital just so my mother would finally have no reason to say no about that costume.”

  “And did your sister dance that solo?” Olivia tilted her head to one side, her cur
ls falling around her face and making her look much younger and somehow a whole lot more innocent. Her big brown eyes were focused on Duke and he could not help but like it.

  He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. This was getting a bit too personal for his taste. “Yes, my mother made the costume. She’s a very talented seamstress. It’s just her thing. She takes in alterations and things there in the town where I grew up. There’s not a whole lot else a farmer’s wife can do to earn a few extra bucks on the side.”

  A sudden light of amazement lit those brown eyes and nearly made them irresistible. “Wow. She made the costume?”

  Duke could not figure out why he was suddenly so very aware of Olivia Houghton. She hadn’t changed. If anything, she should be far less attractive because she had been willing to let him work for free. Intentional or not, that was a shitty thing to do in Duke’s opinion. And no free ticket to a kid’s show on the strip in Branson was going to wipe that away.

  “I’ve always wished that I could sew,” Olivia suddenly admitted. “It would make things so much less expensive around here. The costumes for the animals have to be sent out to be fabricated. If I could make them myself we could save all of that overhead.”

  “You’re always on the bottom line, aren’t you?” Duke wondered why this was her problem. “Doesn’t your uncle worry about that sort of thing? It’s his show, right?”

  “I’m the manager,” she said quickly. “That’s my whole job. Worrying about the bottom line. Making sure we can make payroll. Making certain we are fulfilling every point on our contract with the theater. Those are my personal job objectives. So yeah, the bottom line is important to me. Anything I can to do make this show more profitable is something I’m doing to keep it going just that much longer.”

  Duke pursed his lips and considered what he had learned about her so far. A dancer. Most likely she had performed at some point or another. Perhaps there was some connection with the theater. “This is about more than your uncle’s show for you though.”