“Hey, it’s me. Look, I’m coming down. Meet me at the Amtrak station? I’ll call you when we cross the river.” He hesitated, then added, “Be careful,” and hung up.
* * *
“Watch the place while I’m gone,” he told her, before getting into the car and leaving her behind.
Penny thought she’d behaved with an impressive level of grace and calm in the face of his abandonment, only the minute twitching of the tip of her tail betraying her annoyance. She couldn’t expect him to take her everywhere, after all—she wasn’t a trained cat at the end of a string, and she did not enjoy being hauled around in a moving vehicle. But she couldn’t be blamed if her ears went back in annoyance, and the entire length of her tail swished as they drove off, leaving her in the parking lot, alone.
“Watch the place while I’m gone.” He’d gone and he’d taken Stacy with him, and he was right, the old man couldn’t be trusted to deal with things, not properly. And the new girl . . . She’d sort the new girl out, once and for all, if nobody else would.
She stalked inside through her usual entrance, and took up residence in the darkest alcove she could find, watching. And plotting.
* * *
Ginny hadn’t heard her phone ring. She sat in the rental car in the hotel parking lot, absently petting Georgie’s head, and listened to Tonica’s message, a slight frown crossing her face. She thought about calling him back, telling him he didn’t need to come down, but based on the time stamp, he was probably already en route.
And part of her, she admitted, was glad. The moment this had become a researchtigation—no, an investigation—she’d needed her partner, and only pride had kept her from saying so immediately. It wasn’t a lack of competence that made them better together; it was doubling the competence.
“At least he probably won’t say ‘I told you so.’ Probably.”
She checked her watch again: she had a few hours to kill before picking him up at the station. And—her brain suddenly clicking on all cylinders—she knew where she should spend them.
After dropping Georgie off back at the hotel and pacifying her with a treat and one of the dog toys from her bag, Ginny headed back downtown, refining her plan.
First step, one she should already have taken: find out the dance steps to the music being played, so she could avoid stepping on toes. For that she needed to talk to someone who knew all the dancers in town. She picked up a paper bag of chocolate chip cookies from a corner bakery and headed for her prey.
Ron was hunched over a cramped desk that, clearly, wasn’t his alone from the number of coffee mugs and Post-its stacked at every angle, and the second chair shoved up against the other side of the desk. A power strip was duct-taped down the center like some kind of no-man’s-land divider. He was the only one currently there, though, a laptop charging from the strip, his phone charging off that, and Ron himself rummaging in the desk for something, his attention focused entirely on that.
Ginny made her way to his desk and sat down on the empty wooden chair on the opposite side, placed the cookies just beyond easy reach, and waited. And waited.
“It’s awfully quiet in here,” she said finally.
He didn’t give her the satisfaction of being startled, or even looking surprised. “What did you expect, someone running through the room yelling ‘stop the press!’ or ‘everyone go cover the wreck on the docks?’”
“No.” She made a face. “Maybe?”
“Yeah well, those days are gone, with the four-drink lunch and the two-drink breakfast. A-ha, there you are, you little bastard!” He triumphantly pulled out a memory card, still in its plastic case, and used his thumbnail to pop it out and insert it into the side of the laptop.
“I miss the drinks but I don’t miss typewriters, let me tell you. Give me modern, portable technology and I’ll get the job done in a third the time. Okay, sorry. You said on the phone that you were free to go. Congratulations. So why’re you still hanging around? Not that it wasn’t good to see you, kid.”
“Yeah, I’m feeling the love. This entire town loves me. They’re going to throw me a parade. I’m still here because I still have questions. What do you know about any federal investigations that might be happening in town?” She pushed the cookies closer toward him.
That got a bark of laughter out of him. “New or pending, and if pending, how far back do you want to go?”
She opened her mouth to say something, couldn’t think of what it had been, and closed her mouth again, thinking. “New, or only going back about . . . six months? It might or might not have something to do with money.”
“In the end, doll, it all comes down to money. But I take your point. If you have a line on something, you’re going to tell Uncle Ron, right?” He reached over and unfolded the bag, pulling one of the thumbnail-sized cookies out and making it disappear.
“If I can,” she hedged, and he sighed. “Yeah, that’s as good as I ever seem to get. My friends are all utterly useless.” Another cookie disappeared. “This has to do with your little run-in with the law?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Once I know that—”
“You’ll know how much trouble you just dunked yourself in?” He shook his head. “You missed your calling, kid. You should have been a reporter.”
“I couldn’t take the pay cut,” she said dryly, and watched him mime a blow to the heart.
“Just for that, young woman, you’re buying dinner. Somewhere with real napkins.”
“If you come up with something by dinnertime, sure.”
“Oh ye of no faith whatsoever.” He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and looked down his nose at her. “Assuming I kept track of such things, there are currently two federal investigations of which I am hypothetically aware that were opened within the past six months and are still active. One of them involves some hinky behavior that may or may not qualify as sex crimes, so I’m presuming that’s not yours because rumor has it it’s about to go to plea bargain, and the other has to do with a certain nonelected government official who may or may not have been raking in a little side financial action involving access to federal project bids. That your puppy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” She couldn’t imagine how that could tie back to the death of an identity forger, but she’d seen a lot of stuff in the past few years she wouldn’t have been able to predict before it happened, so . . . “Wait, sex crimes? In Portland?”
“Yep.” He made the p sound pop with satisfaction. “What, you think just because we’re crunchy granola we can’t be just as horrible as any other city?”
There really wasn’t any way to answer that, so she didn’t.
“I don’t suppose you could find out who’s assigned to either of those cases?” The latter sounded more like Asuri’s “where the money stinks, there sniff I” style, but . . .
That got her a sharp look. “Virginia Mallard, what’s really going on?”
“I wish to hell I knew, Ron. I wish to hell I knew. Right now I’m still trying to gather all the shards and figure out what kind of window they came from.”
“Hrm. You sure it’s a window you’re looking into, and not a mirror?”
She looked at him, her confusion clear, and he shrugged. “A window lets you look at things, but a mirror just reflects what you already know. The worst way to write a story is going in with the ending already decided. Can’t imagine your thing’s much different.”
Ginny chewed on her lower lip, drumming her fingers on the edge of the desk. “A mirror.” Same shards, but a different view. A reflecting view. Something about that idea tugged at her, and she tried to quiet everything else in her brain, following that thread.
Ron looked at her with narrowed eyes, then shook his head and turned back to his laptop, leaving her to sort her own thoughts out.
* * *
Crime might pay better
, but it didn’t pay enough to quit the legit side. Not yet, anyway. After their meeting, Dave had gone off to handle his own side of things. Ben was supposed to be doing the same, had even settled himself in front of his monitors in his home office, the work lights turned on, tools at the ready, when an alert pinged on one of the monitors and caught his eye like a red cape waved in front of a bull. It was from a search he’d set up for any mention of Jamie’s death; perfectly normal behavior when someone you worked for was murdered, nothing the cops could hold against him, if they ever got interested enough to probe his Internet use.
He clicked on the link and skimmed the article, then licked his lips and reread it, feeling his adrenaline surge.
He reached up to grab a piece of paper tacked to the corkboard and compared it to the article, then bolted out of his chair, out of his office, and down the hallway of his apartment, the slip of paper gripped too tightly in one fist.
“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.”
It was just a name, a URL, and an email address, nothing particularly upsetting or disturbing. He’d written it down himself, after Jamie had shown them the article, for a laugh. “Look,” he’d said. “Our eternal opposite!”
They’d laughed, but then Ben had thought, what could it hurt to keep the information? Might be useful to know about an off-the-books, off-license PI someday. He’d been half amused by the thought.
He wasn’t amused now. No matter what Dave said about compartmentalizing the business to protect themselves, so no one piece could topple the other, the truth was that it was all one messy knot of strings, and you couldn’t tug on one without the others feeling it. He knew that. They’d all known that, it was part of—hell, it was probably the only thing that had allowed them to work together, to trust each other.
And now it was all a mess. A mess that—somehow—had that PI in the middle of it.
Ben’s palms were sweating like they hadn’t since the sixth-grade dance, slick and kind of gross, and his stomach felt like he’d swallowed helium, all tight and sick, and the piece of paper he held in one hand, already creased and crumpled, was starting to look worn and grubby, like the trash it should have been, weeks ago.
He’d tried to feel guilt, or sorrow, or something beyond concern for what Jamie’s death meant to them. He really had. But Dave had been right about that much: it wasn’t like Jamie had been a friend or anything. He was just a guy they did business with. Ben hadn’t even liked him, particularly. So yeah, no. No guilt, just a shitload of worry. Because when a guy you did business with ends up beaten to death, you worry.
And when the person who finds the body is an amateur detective? You worry some more. Especially since it wasn’t just any PI, but that PI.
He reached the end of the long hallway, then turned and strode down the other end, making a full circuit of the living area and pausing by the oversized windows. Unlike his high-tech, nearly pristine office, the rest of his apartment was homey, comfortable, soothing. But he didn’t feel soothed. He felt like he needed to get out of his skin somehow.
It was just one line in a two-paragraph follow-up that probably all of ten people in the entire city had read. Dave wouldn’t be worried. Dave would wave his hand and say, “Be cool, man,” like it was that easy.
Ben took a deep breath, exhaling through his mouth, trying to shove the tension in his stomach out that way. Maybe it was that easy. Maybe Dave was right. So Jamie got himself killed. And a PI he’d read about, had clipped an article about, shared with them, suddenly shows up on his doorstep right after that. So what? There was no reason to think that it had anything to do with them. What they did, it was harmless, mostly.
“Okay, not harmless but not the kind of thing that gets you beaten to death.” The words had a solid ring of truth about them. The late afternoon sunlight was warm on his face, and he closed his eyes, letting that bit of grace soothe him for a moment.
“Probably some side deal he had going, or an outraged daddy. And when the cops—or the PI—poked around, that’s what would come up.”
And hell, odds were Jamie had called the PI himself . . . but why? The adrenaline was replaced by a cold ball of dread. To poke around at them? Had Jamie been planning on selling them out?
No. That made no sense: Jamie’d had more to lose than any of them if this went sour. He’d had more bad habits, and they’d all known it.
Ben started pacing again, down the hallway, feeling the ache in his calves matching the ache in his neck and shoulders.
“And Dave had nothing to do with it.” He believed that. He had to believe that. Dave wasn’t that stupid, for one. And two . . . yeah, he had a killer instinct but there was a difference between seeing a chance and taking it no matter what, and actually killing someone. He’d seen Dave mad, and he got cold, not hot. If he’d thought Jamie was a real risk to the business, he would have come to Ben and talked about cutting him out carefully, shifting the work to other photographers until enough time had gone by that Jamie would just shrug and find other work. Purely business.
“And I had nothing to do with it.” He’d wished Jamie dead once or twice, maybe. Had cursed him out over the phone a few times, sure. Told him to clean up his act, or else. But that was all. He hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t caused anything.
Everything had been fine, more or less, until Michal showed up. It all came back to Michal. She’d come out of nowhere, approached them with the golden ticket, gotten them bigger jobs, more money, and now, with Jamie dead, another jump . . . big leagues. International clients. And that was when Ben had thought it might be a good idea to spook Jamie with the PI they’d read about, make him clean up his act.
But he hadn’t done it. Hadn’t called the PI, hadn’t said anything to anyone. Because you couldn’t do that, couldn’t pull one thread and not expect everything to unravel.
Ben rubbed his stomach as though that might make it feel better. He’d known what they were getting into, when Michal made his offer. Nobody had said it, but he knew. They weren’t going to be selling their new product to nineteen-year-olds who wanted to drink, or battered housewives looking for a new identity.
There were some things he could live with, and some things he couldn’t. This . . . He thought about the money they’d be making, and knew he could live with it.
And the current investigation? Dave was right. He hadn’t killed Jamie. Dave hadn’t killed Jamie. Jamie’s own idiocy had gotten him killed. It had nothing to do with them. Nothing could be traced back to them.
PI or no PI.
With a sigh, he paused by the counter and dropped the small rectangle of paper into the trash, then got a beer from the fridge, taking a long drink.
All they had to do is wait it out, let the cops come to the obvious conclusions, and they’d be home free. They just needed to not fuck it up.
12
Teddy had meant to work on the train, had even bought a notebook and pen for the sole purpose of writing out everything he knew so far, in hopes that it would turn up something new, spark some connection he hadn’t seen before. Instead, he’d settled into his seat on the train, plugged his phone into the outlet to charge, and promptly fallen asleep, waking up only when the train chugged its way into the Portland station and stopped, the conductors making enough noise to rouse even the dead.
Which meant that he’d not called Ginny when they crossed the Columbia River, the way he’d promised. Shit. Teddy grabbed his bag in one hand and scrambled to unplug his phone with the other, waiting until he picked up signal again before hitting her contact. He strode through the crowds at Union Station, crossing the tracks and into the building itself, only to stop dead and hang up the phone when he saw a familiar head of blond curls, standing next to an older black guy with long gray hair. The friend she’d been planning to visit with while she was down here, he supposed.
“Lucky for you, I thought to check the schedule,” Ginny said. “Teddy, t
his is my friend Ron. Tom, this is—”
“Yeah, I got it,” the older man said, reaching forward to shake Teddy’s hand. His eyes were a surprising blue. “Glad to meet you, wish it were in less complicated circumstances. Come on, Ginny’s buying dinner.”
“Not for both of you, I’m not!” she protested, already turning to walk out of the station, the two men trailing in her wake.
“Yes, she is,” the older man—Ron—said in an aside, and Teddy grinned, already liking the guy.
* * *
They ended up in a tiny restaurant where the menu was printed on sheets of paper and the kitchen was visible over a low wall, the seven tables already full when they walked in a little after six thirty. Ron raised a hand to signal someone behind the low wall, and an older Asian woman came bustling out, wiping her hands on a towel at her waist, to greet them.
“So finally you show up? Please tell me these two are food reviewers from a national paper? Or NPR? NPR would be good.”
“Sorry, Sandra-san. Just some hungry folks looking to buy my conversation with your excellent food.”
“Nice to see you’re not a cheap date. Come on, then—chef’s table is all yours.”
The table was tucked away out of sight, but with a clear view of both the kitchen and the dining area. The food was excellent, even if Teddy didn’t have much familiarity with most of the menu, and Ron, who turned out to be a local reporter, was unsurprisingly good at helping put bits and pieces of the story together.
They paused long enough to allow the waiter to clear the dishes from the table, then Teddy shook his head. “So we’ve got a photographer moonlighting with fake ID, a possible federal investigation that had him as a potential person of interest in their case, and someone who hated the guy enough to bash his face in with extreme prejudice. And at least one fed with an ongoing interest in this case. And, on the side, we have a mysterious nonexisting person who hired Ginny to come down here for a nonexistent job just in time to find the very existent dead guy.”
Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery Page 15