Josie Tucker Mysteries Box Set 2

by E M Kaplan

  Tiffany pulled a yellow postal mailer out of her bag and tossed it at Josie. The envelope bounced off her chest and landed in her lap.

  Squishing the envelope with her fingers, Josie felt a stack of folded papers, which could have been envelopes. When she opened the flap and peered inside, she saw the glint of what could have been the knife and a note with the telltale girlish handwriting. “Holy…” The kids had stolen the letters after all, as well as the freaking knife that the stalker had used to pin the last note into the office door. Josie'd had no idea what she’d done, unleashing into action the eye-shadowed ninja and supporting team of highly untrained innocents.

  “You’re welcome,” Tiffany said and she bumped her small fist against Tyshawn’s.

  While Josie sat at her penis-graffitied desk, stunned, Tiffany went on to explain that she’d met someone on the nightshift at the suicide hotline where she worked.

  “I guess I’ll go ahead and name names since I’m already breaking my confidentiality pledge. Because there’s a death involved, I’ve decided to go ahead and do it. It could save a life, so I think it’s more important than keeping secrets. Also, if I find out that any of you has blabbed what I’m about to tell you to other students, media, or anyone else, I will find out which one of you did it. And I will cut you.”

  “Do you want us to sign something that we won’t tell?” Leah said, sounding genuinely concerned. “Because I will totally sign a promise. Just not in blood. That’s too creepy.”

  “No, that’s not necessary,” Tiffany said, a glint in her eye, her jaw tight and intense-looking. “I don’t need your signatures. I know who you are. And I know how to find you.”

  “Okay,” Josie said, getting unnerved. Had she really invited these kids into her home after all this was over? How well did she really know them? Not well at all. “Good enough. Let’s continue.”

  “So here’s the deal. There’s a senior named Olivia who works at the hotline. Last year, she’s working one night when this freshman girl calls, right? The caller’s threatening self-harm, and she goes into the whole story about how she’s in love with an older man on campus—a professor who also loves her. They want to be together, but the man is married. Tiffany paused to nod and to take in all the shocked expressions, including Josie’s own.

  The girl, Alyssa, had called the suicide hotline over her affair with Professor Sanborn.

  “Olivia contacted the police, right?” Tyshawn wanted to know.

  “We have some intense training and protocol we follow. So, no, actually, the police weren’t called immediately, and I don’t know exactly what was said during the course of the initial phone call. But there were many more calls after that, and eventually, that’s what led to the girl being removed from the school. Apparently, it had a lot to do with Professor Sanborn’s wife.”

  Chapter 23

  Josie blinked because her head was spinning. Her dizziness might have been partly from hunger, but also, the big clock tower on campus had just struck midnight, and the five extra bodies in her room were using up all the oxygen and creating enough humidity to grow orchids.

  After the bomb that Tiffany dropped about the suicide hotline, Tyshawn had argued they had no evidence that the call had actually occurred. No phone records. No call logs. Nothing that could be pointed to in a court of law.

  Josie wasn’t too concerned with having to prove any of the events of last year—she was more interested in how to use the information going forward. She was even willing to assume it was true until she found something that suggested otherwise.

  She shooed the gang out of her room and watched Brandon linger, hanging on Tiffany’s door frame much as he’d done to Josie’s on her first day in the dorm. After a minute or so, Tiffany grabbed the front of his t-shirt and twisted it in her small fist. She looked as if she might punch him in the nose with her other fist, which was balled up tightly. Then she pulled him into her room and shut the door.

  Josie shrugged. To each her own. But there was probably a reason Tiffany was so angry all the time, yet aggressive on the sexual front. Whatever the cause, it made Josie inclined to pity her and wonder what the girl had survived already in her childhood years. The tiny ninja was probably a warrior for real.

  Turning the flimsy lock on her door, Josie wondered if it would hold up to her Scooby gang kids’ skills.

  Josie had asked Tiffany privately on her way out, “How’d you get in Professor Sanborn’s office and back out without the cop knowing?”

  “Tyshawn picked the lock while I stayed in view of the CCTV camera.”

  “Tyshawn picked the lock?”

  “I know, right?” Tiffany had smiled a genuine flash of her tiny, pointed teeth. “He learned how to do it by watching videos on the Internet. He barely even had to practice. Took him two tries and—bam!—we were in. The hard part was finding the stuff in all that mess.”

  Alone in her room, Josie cranked the window open to air the place out. Because it was past midnight, most of the noise from the quad outside had died down, other than an errant post-adolescent shout or the slam of a door. The air didn’t circulate much through the single entry point of her window, but at least the relative humidity of her cinderblock cell was slowly falling. Her room’s tropical climate now felt like Galveston instead of Bangkok.

  She flipped on her desk lamp and dug into the mailer that Tiffany and Tyshawn had liberated from the professor’s office. Two envelopes and three pieces of paper. And yep, at the very bottom of the envelope, a knife lay nestled with its sharp end in one of the mailer’s corners. Without touching the weapon, she tilted the envelope upside down and slid the knife onto her desk.

  What the heck?

  Frowning, she leaned closer. She grabbed the corner of her t-shirt and used it to flip the knife over, handling it by the dull edge of the blade. She counted herself middling to decent at recognizing chef’s knives. This one was a well-known German knife, an 8-inch chef’s blade—the manufacturer’s iconic mountain symbol prominently etched at the end toward the handle.

  Other than the very tip, which had been broken off—and was probably still wedged in the professor’s office door—this knife was almost identical to the bloody one she’d seen in the kitchen of the faculty dining hall that afternoon.

  #

  Josie didn’t believe in coincidences, but she was a great believer in karma. What might appear to be coincidence had a way of revealing its connection or significance later. A knife that might have a bloody twin over at the dining hall…probably came from that kitchen. With that in mind, she planned to go back to the kitchen in the morning.

  Once again using the corner of her shirt, she pushed the knife back into the envelope for safe keeping. Lord only knew what DNA was on it. The last thing she needed was to drop it and stab her foot. She’d pledged to herself that she wouldn’t pick up any new scars from this job, and she meant to keep her word.

  She grabbed the new pile of letters and sank onto her bed, scooting herself up until she could stretch herself out. Then remembering Brandon’s butt had been on her pillow, she yanked it out from under her head and shoved it to the foot of her bed. Now lying with her head flat on the flimsy mattress, staring up at the pock-marked acoustic-paneled ceiling, she sighed and grabbed the first letter off the stack.

  Joshua Joshua Joshua

  The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit

  What in the world?

  Josie flipped through the other open messages, but they were more of the same—handwriting practice. These letters were evidence that the stalker had deliberately disguised her penmanship and had worked to do so. Not only that, but the writer had known about the typesetting use of Latin words that the printing industry had used for thousands of years as placeholder or “dummy” text when laying out a page or making a pretend document. Josie knew about it only because Clark, the funny, nerdy dude who’d helped her set up her website and blog,
had used it while he was making the first mock-up of her site. At the time, she’d told him the Latin made her look way smarter than she was and maybe she should keep some of it and see who noticed.

  Josie set aside the practice stalker notes and hurried to open the two envelopes.

  The first wasn’t a letter at all but a receipt—it was the top half of a yellow and green post office money order valued at a thousand dollars. She examined the date, which was August 24th, approximately three weeks ago. No personal information of any kind.

  Holding the paper up to her bedside light, she didn’t see anything weird. No thin marks on the paper where someone might have erased the numbers or altered the information. The silver embossed stripe on the left looked legit. The weight of the paper felt real, though Josie was no expert.

  She slipped the receipt back into the envelope and went for the next one, which seemed a lot thicker—and with good reason. Nineteen more money order receipts fanned out of the second envelope. Each order was for another thousand, and they were dated for two different days a week after the initial money order.

  Twenty thousand dollars in total.

  What was Professor Sanborn doing with these receipts, along with the practice stalker notes? Signs pointed to the fact that he may well know who the letter writer was—that certainly explained his lack of enthusiasm when Josie had arrived on campus.

  But what about the money?

  Was it some kind of payoff? Blackmail? What other kind of payment could it be?

  What exactly had he purchased with his twenty thousand dollars?

  Chapter 24

  Josie woke up, twitching with nightmares and feeling like a popsicle because she’d left her window open. She was curled in a fetal ball on her thin mattress and her neck had cramped up from the lack of a pillow. Stupid Boy Tarzan’s butt was magnifying her grouchiness in untold ways.

  It was early—the sun was barely up—so she was confused as to why she’d woken up, especially since she’d just hit the hay. In fact, she’d fallen asleep with the money order receipts scattered on her mattress—kind of a reverse Demi Moore in that movie where she’d rolled around on the bed in millions of dollars. Filthy lucre.

  Josie’s phone rang, answering at least one question—the one about why she wasn’t still asleep.

  She felt around on the night table for her phone. “Hello?” she said, still lying in bed with her eyes closed—and the battery promptly died.

  After muttering a curse, she sat up, rubbing her dry eyes, and looked around the room.

  Where would Mr. Peepers put my phone charger?

  She couldn’t think straight, the fuzzy feel of her teeth slightly disgusted her. She’d forgotten to brush them before passing out on her—she eyed the wafer-thin mattress—cot.

  Staggering over to the closet, she grabbed the lower hem of her t-shirt and lifted it over her head, tossing the whole thing, inside-out, onto the floor. She figured she’d have time for a shower later in the day—oddball student schedule and all—so she grabbed her deodorant off the top of the dresser and applied it while she examined her array of clean shirts.

  Mr. Peepers had picked out some of her favorites. The Muse logo that looked like a rainbow dodecahedron tractor beam one would do well enough for today. She wasn’t her freshest, but the shirt had seen a lot worse over the years. At least it hadn’t been stabbed through like one of its predecessors.

  She pulled on the shirt. When she opened the top dresser drawer in search of some clean socks, she found her phone charging cord, neatly wound in a circle and held together with a twist-tie, at which she stared in puzzlement.

  “When one arrives at another person’s apartment to pack up her underthings, does one bring his own twist-ties?” she said aloud. She was ninety-nine percent certain her apartment had contained no twist-ties prior to the arrival of Mr. Peepers.

  Not even Drew had managed to bring organization to her home when he’d moved in about six months ago. He’d given it the old college try, for sure, but entropy had eroded most of his efforts. She really needed to try harder to compromise. Or at least, to pretend to care in deference to his enjoyment of tidiness.

  Maybe that Lisa doctor-woman was a neat freak.

  Groaning, she plugged in her phone. If she was in an emotional cage-match with a competitor who offered order and predictability, she was doomed. Absolutely cut from the picture. No question about it. Completely out-classed.

  Her phone blipped and yelped a few times as it powered up and caught a signal. The voicemail sound added an extra beep, so she touched the icon to hear her message.

  “Hey, wake up,” Benjy’s voice said. “We’re here. And we brought you something you’ll love.”

  “Holy…” Good gawd, he was early. What time was it, anyway? She scanned the room a full 360 degrees before she remembered her phone—with its clock on the screen—was right in her hand. She barely comprehended that it said 5:57 in the morning. That meant Benjy had to have arrived at her apartment to retrieve her car not long after five. The drive out to Northam took at least a half hour, though traffic wasn’t too much of an issue at this hour.

  Her phone rang again as she was grabbing her coat.

  “Are you awake?” Benjy asked.

  “Where are you?”

  “We’re by some administration buildings. I parked in a space that says ‘Dean of Humanities.’ That’s probably a bad idea, but it was the only space big enough for the Pimpmobile.”

  Josie tried to keep the crabbiness out of her voice, but the sun hadn’t even risen yet, for crying out loud. She attempted to focus on the fact that Benjy had brought her massive and ugly car all the way out to the suburbs for her, which was incredibly nice—though she wasn’t sure why he kept referring to himself and the car as “we.” But whatever.

  “Yeah, the car should be fine there. I’m on my way.” Lord knew Dean Handley—the poor bastard—wouldn’t need his parking space this morning. Or any day in the immediate future. A person probably didn’t snap out of a coma and drive himself to work the very next day…

  A shiver ripped through Josie. His poisoning hadn’t sunk in yet. Just the other day, she’d watched him chomping his way through lunch at the same dining facility that’d almost killed him, less than a day later.

  “Well, don’t dawdle. Your breakfast is getting cold.”

  #

  Josie had seen a meme on the Internet that said, “Run like Rod O’Connor is waiting at the finish line.” Having met the aforementioned Hollywood hottie, whom she knew as Patrick, she wasn’t inclined to break with her pattern of running only every six or seven years, give or take a few. However, the promise of breakfast—no matter what it was—had her hustling up the hill in the weak morning light toward the center of campus. Maybe that was how people got through cardio exercise. Forget the hottie. The only hot stuff on her mind was a meal.

  She tried not to get her hopes up too high as she jogged up the walking path. Benjy hadn’t ever failed her expectations before, but that was because she held them carefully low where it concerned him—not for vicious reasons, but because, underneath her prickly exterior, she kind of had a soft spot for him. Not that she would ever tell him. That crap needed to be kept private. Caring too much made a person vulnerable—like she was feeling now.

  Weak. Crabby. And starving.

  He was sitting on the long hood of her car, waiting, and when he saw her he waved, all friendly—typical Benjy with a big smile on his face. His curly hair, normally flopping into his eyes, had been cut short on the sides and just a little bit longer on the top. It still flopped, but looked strangely tamed and adult. He was sporting baggy jeans and a tee, which was his basic Benjy uniform. Hers, too, come to think of it.

  She went for the take-out container in his hand, but he held it above her head.

  “Hug first,” he demanded, which was a totally worthwhile trade-off—not that it was a hardship to hug one of her best friends ever. He had a nice and familiar rumpled, just-roll
ed-out-of-bed Benjy smell—a mix of granola and fabric softener. Only after she complied did he forfeit the food.

  Releasing the Styrofoam tabs on the box sprang the lid up with a puff of steam. Inside rested a fluffy heap of scrambled eggs in—no, wait, this was a Denver skillet scrambler with veggies and bits of ham and crispy bacon. Minus the cheese, she noted, as she poked the tines of a plastic fork into the pale yellow mounds. So thoughtful. Her stomach couldn’t take dairy—it was nice of him to remember even when she often didn’t.

  “You’re seriously the best friend a person could have,” she said through a mouthful of eggs which tasted like heaven.

  “Aww, you’re also so cute and tender when you’re eating.” He looked around at the buildings, a crease appearing between his eyebrows. “Huh. I think Benjamin, Sr. is a trustee at this fine establishment.” Benjy’s father was some kind of bigwig, but not in his life anymore—a convoluted and frustrating mess of a situation. No doubt, his father’s style of on-again, off-again parenting had had a big impact on Benjy’s personal development—in particular, his inability to hold a steady job and his stubborn insistence on not giving a crap about it.

  “I’ll pay for your cab home.” She owed him big-time after this. He was worth his weight in gold. No, more than that—he was on the thin side.

  “Kinda got that covered,” he said with a tip of his head toward the other side of the Green Giant. Eclipsed by her car’s massive front wings that stretched about a mile long was Drew’s Jeep. In truth, she’d been utterly distracted by the food, which she stopped chewing—though she didn’t put down the container.

  “What? Where is he?” The driver’s seat was empty. She spun around looking for her boyfriend—the word still made her want to giggle like an eighth grader.

  “He went into the cafeteria to find fresh coffee.” Benjy pointed in the direction of the student center.

  “Oh gawd. I should have warned him. The food here could kill a man.” When Benjy laughed, she added, “Literally. This week a man almost died from eating on campus.” Her friend went silent. She sat next to him on the hood of her car—the beast of a machine easily could have hosted a picnic blanket on its hood.