Armed and Fabulous (Lexi Graves Mysteries)

by Camilla Chafer

  "Dunno, Dad."

  "Bad karma will come."

  I cut a sideways glance at him. "You been reading one of Mom's magazines?"

  "No. I saw it on one of those psychic shows on television."

  "You need to get out more."

  "Tell me about it."

  "You need to put your shoes on, open the door and leave the house and do all the stuff you couldn't do when you were a cop."

  "Funny, Lexi. Funny."

  "Don't forget your keys."

  After a dinner of my mother's baked salmon, new potatoes and greens, topped off with chocolate cake, I went in search of Garrett and caught him sneaking a cigarette on the back porch. He hid it guiltily behind his back when I slipped through the sliding door, pulling it closed behind me.

  "I'm down to one a day," he said, returning the cigarette to his lips when he saw it was me. I drew in a lungful of tar, as well as other carcinogenic gases.

  I put my hands in the air. "I'm not judging," I said. Then coughed.

  "A year ago, it was twenty a day," Garrett continued. "I'm nearly there. I’ll quit soon."

  "Good for you, Gar'. Do you know a detective named Adam Maddox?" I asked, framing the question as casually as I could.

  "Sure. Maddox worked homicide a while."

  "Brown hair, blue eyes, about six-one?"

  "That's the one. Why?"

  I thought about that for a moment. I didn't want to say anything about what went down at Green Hand, so instead, I said, "Oh, a girlfriend wanted to know."

  Garrett raised his eyebrows. "I don't know him too well myself, just in passing, but word is he's a workaholic. Nice guy, though. Doesn't take any shit. Gives respect where it's due."

  That was all I needed to know. Just that he existed. That it wasn't some weird ill-fitting part of the puzzle and the whole taskforce thing wasn't some elaborate joke, or the real fraud enterprise.

  "Thanks. Listen, there's something else, but I don't want you to tell Mom or Dad."

  "Go on."

  "I want to get a gun permit." It just occurred to me today when I saw Adam and Solomon’s weapons drawn as they searched my place. I couldn't rely on my lamp for a weapon to scare people away—unless through laughter—and, truth was, I couldn't close my eyes without seeing the blood seeping from the hole between Dean's eyes. I was scared, and I had ample reason to be.

  "What for?" asked Garrett.

  I shrugged nonchalantly. "Just thought it would be interesting to shoot again. Maybe put in some hours at the range."

  "If Mom gets another cop in the family, she'll never hear the end of it."

  "No chance of that."

  Garrett took his last couple of puffs and stubbed the cigarette out with his foot. He turned to me. "You sure that's all you want a gun for?"

  "Yep," I said, plastering a smile on my face. "That's it."

  "If you're in any kind of trouble, you can tell me. A man, or whatever." Garrett gulped, looking uncomfortable. He gave me the guy talk occasionally when I was a teen, about not trusting them and the best way to kick them in the balls if they got too frisky. He never quite understood that I pretty much only had one thing on my mind then. It was possible I was worse than the boys! "I can cuff 'em and lose the key," he offered.

  I figured that might come in useful one day. "Thanks, Garrett, but it's nothing like that," I said. "Raincheck?" It was about a murderer, and there was no way I was going to tell my brother that.

  "You bet. Come down to the station this week and I'll go through the forms with you. I can take you out to the range too. You used to be a good shot. You'll pick it up again."

  "Thanks."

  ~

  "Sorry the evening was such a bust." I placed the bag of leftovers on the backseat of Lily's Mini and slammed the door.

  "No, it was great, Lex. You know I love coming here."

  "Even though you had to listen to baby talk all night?"

  "I now know more about babies than I ever learned at school, so it's been educational." Bless Lily, she always looked on the positive side of things even after listening to Serena's hideously endless narratives of her friends’ ghastly birth stories, which sounded like “Alien” versus “Predator” mashed up with a Disney ending. "Although I might not have sex for a while," Lily finished thoughtfully. She skittered around to the passenger side, leaving me to wedge myself into the driver's side. I had skipped the wine and Lily had helped herself to my dad's whiskey upon hearing the breech birth story.

  After adjusting the seat, and the mirrors, I pulled out, and both of us waved to Mom and Dad, as I aimed for home, my mind full of Adam Maddox and the hidden room downtown stuffed with the taskforce's equipment.

  I hadn't heard from Maddox, as he’d told me to call him, all night, even though I obsessively checked my phone. I thought about calling him, or sending a message (or seven), but super cool undercover operatives just didn't do that, did they? I even watched the news with Dad just in case Martin Dean's murder popped up, but there was nothing, not even an accident report or a faked suicide. Maybe the body just hadn't been found yet and no one knew where the murderers had taken him? Maddox and I were the only ones who had seen Dean dead, and overheard the murderers’ plan to move his body, but unfortunately, they hadn't left any GPS maps with a big arrow pointing to the dumpsite. For all I knew, Dean could be swimming with the fishes. Clichés aside, his death would have to be announced soon. I didn't know much about Dean's personal life, but I figured someone must be missing him.

  Even my brothers didn't have any police gossip when I gently prodded them. According to them, murder was currently unheard of in Montgomery and even though I knew differently, I didn't press any further, just in case they got suspicious and I blabbed everything.

  This was my one shot at proving myself, and that I was much more than just a temp.

  Chapter Five

  When we got home, I didn't see anyone watching over our building, but I slept a little better knowing Maddox had someone spot checking my apartment, if not simply observing. After a restless night, filled with nightmares of the murderers opening the closet doors and finding us, I was determined to take the snooping business seriously. The joint taskforce seemed to have nothing, as far as they said, and I had no doubt that they'd picked Green Hand Insurance apart as soon as Maddox placed his call; but I wanted to look over the scene of the crime too.

  Dominic, Dean’s assistant, didn't budge all morning, giving me plenty of time to think about my next move. I knew I needed to get inside Dean's office and take a look around. Even though I wracked my brain, I couldn't work out what was so interesting in the reports I’d written. If, however, I could find out what Dean had been doing in the hours leading up to his death, I might find a clue.

  As soon as I saw Dominic move away from his desk, I picked up a stack of papers and made my way to Dean's office.

  "Hey, Lexi," said Vincent Marciano, the company accountant, his head popping over the cubicle wall as I passed his desk. Vincent was about as far from an Italian stallion as a man could get, but he strove to adopt the swagger and supreme self-confidence that he was every woman's fantasy. Unfortunately, that also made him resistant to subtle brush-offs that fell short of screaming and mace, but since he did co-sign my timecard, I had to be nice.

  "Hey," I said, holding up my papers, deflecting whatever silly comment he was about to make. Vincent was probably harmless and might even have been sweet if he didn't try so hard, but he had an annoying habit of always getting in my way when I was in a hurry. I think he just wanted to talk to me. I hoped it wasn't because he had more than a friendly interest, because there was no way that was happening. I was taught never to be cruel unless necessary and I really didn’t want it to be necessary. "Photocopying," I said, flapping the papers.

  "Waits for no man," Vincent finished, chuckling at his joke.

  "You know it."

  "Want to get coffee after work?" Vincent called after me.

  "No can do," I said, glanc
ing over my shoulder to give him an apologetic smile. "I'm meeting a friend after work." Instead of veering off to the photocopy room, I walked past Dominic's desk and down the short hallway, as if I owned it. Then, with a backwards glance to check that no one was watching, I opened Dean's door and slid inside, shutting it softly behind me.

  I placed the papers on the console by the door and darted forwards. My first stop was Dean's desk. I rifled through the neat stack of paperwork on the desk, noting that it was a smaller pile than two nights ago. None of my reports were in the stack, but there was a bunch of papers from accounts, some memos from the call center below us, and a few spreadsheets. I discounted them all after a quick scan and moved to the orderly line of Post-it notes that spanned the side of the desk, adjacent to Dean's phone. It was the usual stuff—calls to return, questions from Dominic regarding Dean's travel to a conference next week, confirmation of a dinner reservation, a credit card bill. I sneaked a peek. A two hundred and forty-six dollar balance, plus a home address. Nothing stuck out as being out of place or unusual. In fact, as I glanced down, there was no blood stain where Dean lay dead either.

  With a frown, I returned to the desk. A selection of newspapers were folded across the top portion. National titles and the Montgomery Gazette, all new. I knew Dominic placed them there every day because I had to run out to get them a few times when he was too busy. I checked the diary printout that I knew came from Dean's Outlook calendar, also managed by Dominic. It also had today’s date and I guessed Dominic had updated it and left a printout just in case Dean came in. I wondered if Dominic was in the loop on Dean's demise. I guessed not.

  Next, I tried the drawers. The top two were locked so I was surprised when the third one easily slid open. There wasn't much inside. A couple of candy bars, a spare tie and one of those miniature Japanese sand gardens, complete with a tiny rake, that was supposed to help de-stress busy minds.

  The door opened abruptly and I don't know who was more startled. Dominic or I.

  "What are you doing in Mr. Dean's office?" he asked.

  I bent toward the files. "I made a mistake in my file and I wanted to get it before Mr. Dean saw," I lied. "It's the pie charts, you see. I put in the wrong numbers." I grabbed a file and held it up. "Here it is!" I plastered on a grin.

  "Mr. Dean doesn't allow people in his office," said Dominic, crossly, his hands braced on his hips.

  "Yes, sorry. Won't happen again," I said, nudging the drawer closed with my leg as I skirted the desk. I crossed the floor quickly and grabbed my papers from the small table. "I'll be off," I said, walking back to my cubicle without a backward glance, hoping no one besides me could hear how fast my heart was beating. Halfway there, I dropped the file that I swiped into a trash basket under someone else’s desk.

  Maddox caught up with me after lunch (chicken mayo, courtesy of Bob), and isolated us into a meeting room. "I saw you go into Dean's office," he said, folding his arms across his chest. He didn’t look thrilled, but he didn’t look too upset either.

  "I went to get some paperwork," I said. "And Dominic wasn't around."

  He raised his eyebrows at my lie. "Our people went through it already. The files were gone when they arrived."

  I groaned and dropped into a chair. "I saw. None of the files on Dean’s desk were mine. Dominic must have put new ones there. You find out what they’re so interested in yet?"

  "No. Our techs said nothing stood out when they pulled the files from your flash drive and it's not like we can ask Dean."

  "Didn't you bug his phones?" I asked, a light bulb popping on in my head.

  "Sure, but he didn't use his personal cell phone, his BlackBerry or the office phone, so we didn't pick anything up, only what I overheard. The call he got that night went to a burn phone that he concealed. We traced it back, but it was made from a burner too."

  "What about DNA?"

  "Nothing. The killers wore gloves. They were both bald, so no hair. They took the gun with them and we don't have his body to do an autopsy, or run a ballistics report on the bullets. They were extremely careful."

  My head shot up. "You don't know where his body is?"

  "Not yet. We've searched his house, his garage. Nothing. Either he's been dumped somewhere or..."

  "Or what?"

  "Or they've still got him."

  "Eugh!"

  Maddox shrugged. "He'll turn up."

  "So... you have nothing."

  "Not exactly nothing. You were in his office. What did you see?"

  It was my turn to shrug. "Everything looked normal. Fresh newspapers, new diary page and a bunch of sticky notes. I couldn't get in the top two drawers of his desk and there were a few candy bars and things in his bottom drawer. Nothing that said, 'Hey, I'm in the fraud biz!'" I thought about it some more. "Oh, and no blood on the carpet."

  "We already replaced the blood stained section."

  "That's fast. It took my parents' carpet people days.” I shook my head. “Don’t ask. So... I didn't see anything unusual. Is there something I should be looking for?"

  "Not in there."

  "What else am I supposed to do?"

  "Just keep your eyes and ears open," said Maddox. "Don't do anything to attract attention." His eyes flickered to the open top buttons of my shirt. "And don't do anything dangerous."

  "Ten-four," I said.

  "And when your day's over, just go home, like normal."

  Nothing exciting happened all afternoon, which was disappointing, and no one was in a talkative mood, so my snooping went downhill fast. I left right on the dot of home time and drove without incident, my VW having decided to come back to life that morning. Lily hammered on my door five seconds after I kicked off my shoes and I let her in.

  "Okay," she said. "What gives? You were acting really weird last night and I've seen two guys in your sex-famined apartment in the space of two days."

  “Wait. How do you know about the second one?”

  “I saw him when he left yesterday. Mrs. Crichton next door asked if you were a masseuse and if she could book Mr. Crichton in.”

  "Yuck. Nothing's going on. What did you tell Mrs. Crichton?"

  "I said they must be your brothers.” Lily took my hand, putting on her best pout. “I'm your best friend and I will never forgive you if you don't tell me."

  "Nothing is going on," I protested, but at the same time, I put my finger to my lips and motioned to the floor. Ever since Maddox had mentioned our cell phones were bugged and our work computers were being monitored, I had a sneaking suspicion that he might have installed some kind of bug in my apartment too. It wasn’t so farfetched, coming from a man who drugged me. I walked through the living room, turned on the television and went back to where Lily waited, confusion etched all over her face. "Listen, I'm going to have dinner, maybe a bath, then an early night. Let's talk tomorrow."

  "Sure, sweetie. Maybe you're just tired," she replied, contorting her face into a WTF? expression. I opened the door and we both slipped out. I followed Lily downstairs to her apartment and flopped onto her couch.

  "Okay, my weirdie friend, what was all that about?"

  “I think my apartment is bugged.”

  "No shit? Why?"

  I couldn’t contain it any longer. My subconscious had been nagging me to tell somebody. I told her everything. When it happened, I was determined to tell Lily nothing, especially after the warning I’d received; but since she lived in the same building as I, to my mind, that put her in danger too. Plus, even though Garrett had confirmed Maddox existed—short of running his badge—and that he would help me get the gun permit, I still wasn't okay with the whole “trust no one” thing. I thought I was being realistic about it. If Martin Dean could get shot in the head and chest, then disappear without a trace, it could happen to me too. I wanted someone close to me to know and start looking for me if the worst happened. A very sobering thought for a Friday night.

  "No. Way," she said when I finished explaining. "And I thought I had
a rough couple of nights working the door for happy night at Mulligan's last weekend."

  "I don't know why you still work there."

  "No one gets shot in the head there and I get free drinks."

  "Point taken."

  "You should come hang out next Saturday."

  I hated Mulligan's. It was loud and crowded and I always got groped. On the other hand, I liked free drinks, which they always poured with generous measure. "Okay," I agreed.

  "So what's going to happen now? Are you going to keep working at Green Hand?"

  "I guess. No one fired me."

  "Always a plus."

  "And I hate my temp manager."

  "Word. Your boss, Shepherd, Maddox, whatever, is a fox though." Lily snapped open a bag of marshmallows and we sat together, munching on them. "You know what I want to know?"

  "What?"

  "Where Dean's body is."

  "Me too."

  "Do you think it's intact?"

  "Huh?"

  "You know..." Lily mimed chopping her hand up and down across her body.

  "Oh, yuck! I hope so."

  "Why? It's not like he's going to need it."

  "Because it would be gross otherwise."

  "True. Do you have any leads?"

  "No." I thought about the address I saw on the credit card bill folded on Dean's desk. "I have his address," I told her and her eyes widened. For a moment, we just looked at each other. "I think I need to do some investigating."

  "We," Lily corrected. "We are so in this together."

  "We need to do some investigating."

  "Are you serious?" she breathed.

  "Deadly serious."

  "Cagney and Lacey serious?"

  "Castle and Beckett serious."

  "I don't want to be Castle."

  "Hey! Castle is sexy. Besides I'm Beckett."