“That’s hardly ‘on the side,’ from my point of view,” Ginny said.
“Suck it up, buttercup,” he retorted. “Having the feds poking around makes you secondary.”
“The two cases you know they’re here to investigate are none of the above, though,” Ginny said. “Officially, anyway.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure how either a sex scandal or payola could tie into this,” Teddy agreed, having been brought up to speed on the car ride over. “And that still doesn’t tell us who actually called you in, and why. Which is what we’re supposed to be focusing on. Right?”
“Maybe it does,” Ron said thoughtfully. “And maybe we’ve been looking at this all through the wrong end.”
“Like a mirror, not a window?” Ginny said, and Teddy shook his head, not getting the reference.
“Exactly. We’re trying too hard to figure out who might have called you in, and why, but we haven’t been thinking about why they might have wanted any PI.”
Ginny looked at Teddy, who made a face at her—it was a good point and Ron was right, they’d totally bypassed that.
“You had something going on in your head earlier, Virginia, and enough time for it to germinate. So spill for the rest of the class.”
“You’re mixing your metaphors again,” she teased, then her expression went sober again. “What you said earlier, it made me think about that room in the house, the one he was obviously using to take photographs. About maybe someone not liking what they saw? But I couldn’t get much further than that. I mean . . . it was a small room, it wasn’t like the kind of setup you’d get blackmail photos out of.”
“Or sex tapes,” Teddy said, and lifted his hands when they both looked at him. “What? Like neither of you thought about that?”
“I hadn’t, actually,” Ginny said, although the reporter made a face that indicated that yeah, he had. “But no, it wasn’t set up like that at all. There was one chair—a stool, really—and the supply cabinet, and that was it.” She stopped to remember more carefully. “No, there wasn’t any video equipment visible. I suppose he might have had something hidden, but . . . Whatever they did they’d have to do standing up. I don’t think there was even enough room to lie down, not unless you moved everything out of the way. And ugh, that carpet was not nice.”
“So no sexcapades that we’re aware of. Or that the cops are aware of and have let us know.”
“Nothing on the radar?”
“The sexual antics of ordinary citizens tends not to blip my radar,” Ron said. “Not unless they’re shtupping an elected official out of season.”
“So . . . photographs of something unwanted?” Ginny shook her head. “I can’t make it work. Head shots aren’t the kind of thing that need investigation. . . . Unless someone wanted to find out if their kid was using a fake ID? But then why not approach us—or any PI, if we’re going that route—directly?”
“Maybe it wasn’t someone else they wanted investigated. Go back to basics.” Teddy might have had the advantage, coming in more or less cold, while Ginny’d been in the thick of things, her thoughts all tangled. “Maybe they wanted the dead guy investigated, before he was dead. But they couldn’t risk being involved in it, having anyone know they were having him investigated.”
“That . . . might have legs,” Ron said, making a notation on the palm-sized notebook he’d pulled out when they started talking. “Someone who was dirty, but not as dirty as him? Or more dirty but with more of a grudge?”
“That’s almost razor-proof,” Ginny said. “The simplest, most logical explanation. But it’s all still theory. We’d need to know who would want him taken out, though, and why, to prove anything. And that’s where we’re still seriously lacking in information.”
Ginny frowned down at the now-empty table, then looked up at Teddy. “I think that’s going to require another look at that studio, maybe the entire house this time. See if there’s anything the cops didn’t realize was important, something that predates the actual murder.”
“Breaking and entering, and without Good Samaritan justification, this time,” Teddy said, gloomily.
“In that case,” Ron said, closing his notebook with a snap, “I think we’re going to need dessert.”
* * *
None of them really had much appetite for dessert, though, and after watching them push it around the plate with forks, Ron finally put them out of their misery, sending them back to her hotel, where Georgie and Tonica had a happy reunion, the shar-pei giving the human a thorough face-washing, followed by the two of them wrestling on the floor.
“Good thing you’re not a pet person,” she said dryly, throwing his own words, now several years old, back at him, and getting a raised finger in return.
She willingly handed the leash over to her partner, along with a few poo bags, and sent them off for Georgie to do her business while she took a hot shower. By the time they came back, she was dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed and drying her hair with a towel.
“We’ve got three hours to kill,” she said, “and I for one—not having had the opportunity to take a four-hour snooze today like some people—intend to take a nap. Feel free to order a movie or whatever, so long as it’s not from the porn channel.”
Tonica gave a snort that could have done Georgie proud and dropped himself into the room’s single armchair, while the dog headed for her travel crate, turning around several times before making herself comfortable on the padding. “Sounds like a plan. See you at midnight, Sleeping Beauty.”
Ginny had thought it would take her a while to fall asleep, but she would have sworn she’d just put her head down where there was a beeping near her ear, and then a hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake.
“C’mon, Mallard. I walked Georgie, so all you have to do is wake up.”
She batted his hand away, then sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Tonica was already dressed, his usual dark jeans and pullover shirt covered by a dark windbreaker. She didn’t have anything like that with her, but she’d packed for a professional trip, so she had a dark green blouse that wouldn’t catch the light, to go with her black slacks. Her shoes had enough of a heel to be impractical, so she went with her sneakers, even though they were eye-catchingly pale, and hoped for the best.
“We should have stopped at Target and bought watch caps and face paint,” Tonica said, and she ha-ha-ha’d at him. “The first rule of successful breaking and entering is to never look like you’re there to break and enter.”
“Life isn’t a caper movie, Mallard.”
“And that’s just more of a pity, Tonica.”
They stuck their tongues out at each other at the same moment, but she started to laugh first. She’d been right: having him here made it seem more manageable.
All they needed was Penny, sitting placidly on the desk and watching them with unblinking green eyes, to make everything right again.
Her phone vibrated, and she checked it to see the expected text from Ron. “He’s here. Let’s go.”
* * *
Ron’s car was a four-year-old Toyota Camry, black and slightly battered, nothing that would attract attention or cause comment. He pulled to the first clear spot on the curb he could find and cut the engine, then reached up to shut off the automatic overhead lights.
“I’m going to stay here long as I can,” he said. “Cops come by I’ll tell ’em I felt too tired to risk driving the rest of the way home, and was taking a nap, but they’ll probably watch to make sure I move on after a while, so if you see the map light’s on, don’t come back until I pull out, and then I’ll meet you around the corner. If I’m not here, meet me two blocks south. Got it?”
“You sure you’ve never done this before?” Ginny asked, not entirely joking.
“Dear heart, I’ve been at this job since you were in junior high. The things I’ve done would match the devil
’s to-do list. Now go.”
They both slid out of the car, Ginny from the front passenger’s side, Teddy from the back, and started walking down the street. They’d waited until after midnight in the hopes that the night owls would be watching TV, or otherwise occupying themselves, not sitting outside investigating the neighbors. There was a slight risk of someone paranoid after the murders, or an impromptu neighborhood watch, but Ginny had thought that if that was a thing, Angel and Marco would have mentioned it to Agent Asuri and herself, when they talked about the neighborhood meeting to come. Or not, and they were going to have a very unpleasant surprise any minute now.
They made it to the house without seeing so much as a twitch in anyone’s curtains, or being accosted by a neighborhood vigilante. Tonica took her arm at the elbow, tugging gently toward the back of the house. Thankfully there was enough light to see, and nothing left in the pathway one of them might have stumbled over.
“Gloves,” she said, and they paused a minute to pull on the thin latex gloves Ron had given them in the car. She resisted the urge to snap them into place, rubbing her fingers together and grimacing at the feel. “Finger condoms.”
“Not leaving fingerprints,” Tonica said. “C’mon.”
There was a brief scuffle over who was going to pick the lock, which Tonica won by dint of actually being able to maneuver his credit card and a piece of wire to do the job. Ginny made a mental note to add her lock-pick kit to her always-take-with list, after this.
And then they were inside the kitchen, and she had to force herself to look at the table where she’d seen the body. The space was empty, the floor clean, and she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“You okay?” Tonica’s voice was low, somewhere between his normal voice and a whisper.
“Yeah. I wasn’t sure but . . . yeah.” Whispers carried more than normal voices, she’d read that somewhere, and kept her own voice as close to normal as possible. “C’mon, through here.” Ron had given them each a tiny flashlight in addition to the latex gloves, and she switched hers on now, letting the powerful beam sweep over the doorway, keeping the illumination below any window. “I feel like Dana Scully.”
“If anything with fangs or ectoplasm jumps out at us, I’m going to make a new door out of here,” Tonica warned her. “And none of that ladies-first crap. You’re on your own.”
“So noted.”
The room was pretty much exactly the way she remembered it, except most of the equipment was gone—police evidence locker, probably. She bent down and pulled open the cabinet door, flicking the flashlight’s beam over the insides.
“Empty,” she said, unable to hide her disappointment, even though she really hadn’t expected anything else. “You got anything?”
“File cabinets are empty, too,” he said. “Hang on. . . .” There was a faint metallic noise, and she turned to see him pulling the drawer out, and checking the sides. “A-ha.”
“What is it?”
“Old trick a friend of my dad’s used. He wasn’t much for computers, didn’t trust his housekeeper, so he kept his list of passwords taped to the underside of his filing cabinet drawer. Most people only look on the side.” He tucked his own penlight under his chin and carefully peeled the piece of paper away. “Huh.”
“What?”
“Hang on.” He repeated the exercise on the other side, then pushed the drawer back in and shut off the light. “That’s it, here.” He looked around the room, then at her. “You want to risk tossing the rest of the house, or are we ready to go?”
“There were computers out front. Think they’re still there?”
“Unlikely. But let’s check.”
The computers were gone, the table barren of the paperwork that had been there, and Ginny felt a twinge of regret that she hadn’t snooped harder, her first visit. But if he’d been hiding a guilty secret, something dirty enough to warrant calling in a PI, it wouldn’t be down here. The dirtier a secret, the closer people held it, she’d learned.
“I’m going to check upstairs,” she said. “Keep watch.”
“Yeah, ’cause if someone walks in the front door, me warning you is going to do a lot of good.”
“Well, I can go out the window while you’re distracting them by getting arrested,” she said, already halfway up the stairs. Humor was a good way to keep her nerves from biting her on the ass, even if their banter might not be up to their usual standards.
Upstairs wasn’t much: two small bedrooms and a bathroom between them. One bedroom had clearly been used for just that: a queen-sized bed filling most of the space, no nightstands, and a single dresser. It looked like he’d slept in there, but not much more.
The second room held a love seat and a large-screen television mounted on the wall. “He lived up here, worked downstairs. Nice separation of personal and private space.”
But that meant they probably wouldn’t find anything useful up here: no computers, desks, or filing cabinets to be seen. And absolutely no sign of the alleged but very much unreal Mrs. Adaowsky.
“A cop car just drove by,” Tonica’s voice said, low on the stair. “Let’s get gone, okay?”
“Yeah.” She looked around one last time, thinking that it was a sad residue left behind, and wondering if hers would be any better. “Yeah, okay.”
* * *
The cop car—or another one—drove by again as they were walking away from the house. Tonica grabbed her hand so they looked like any couple out for a late-night stroll home from the bar. She let her eyes rest on the car, an ordinarily curious citizen, and something about it bothered her, but she couldn’t quite figure out what. Paranoia, probably.
The sedan was where they’d left it, the overhead light dark, so they walked up to the car and slid inside, even as Ron was starting the car. “You weren’t in there long,” he said.
“Not much left to see,” Ginny said. “Cops didn’t give you a blink?”
“I slid down enough so they probably didn’t notice—any extra patrols they put on were just a community song and dance to make taxpayers feel better. Like you said, if your boy was into some dirty things, they’re going to assume it was related to that, and not a neighborhood-general attack. And contrary to rumor, murderers don’t often come back to the scene of the crime, especially if they’re pros. They’re already on to the next job. You find anything?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” She turned around in her seat to look at Tonica, who still had the papers. “Did we?”
“Two sheets of paper tucked away where paranoid people normally keep passwords.” He was squinting at the writing, and Ginny pulled out her microlight again and trained it on the paper. “Thanks. First one’s just two names, first names only, and phone numbers. Second one’s a list of names. First only, again, no phone numbers.” He frowned, then looked up at her. “The second list’s all female.”
“You think that’s important?”
“Call me a protective paranoid bastard, but when a guy has a list of women’s names hidden away somewhere? It’s usually not a good thing.”
“Oh. Yeah.” And now she felt like an idiot for not thinking of that first.
“He’s not wrong,” Ron said. “Give me the names, I’ll run a search, see if anything in recent news comes up. And yes, missy, I know you can do a search almost as well as I can, but it’s nearly two a.m. and right now all you’re doing is going back to your hotel and getting some shut-eye. Let the professional insomniac handle this.”
She wanted to argue, but with the adrenaline from the break-in fading, her body felt like it was made out of lead, and the idea of going to sleep for about six hours—or until Georgie woke her up—sounded too good to pass up.
“I got a queen,” she said to Tonica. “So long as you don’t kick while you sleep, we can share.”
“At this point, I’d be okay with the flo
or, so long as Georgie didn’t object.” He folded the papers in half, the way they’d been taped up, and passed them over to Ron. “I don’t know about you, but my nerves are shot. I’m not cut out to be a cat burglar.”
“Should have brought Penny,” she told him, and it was a measure of how tired they both were that they found that funny.
“There’s a coffee place nearby, the Toot,” Ron said. “I’ll meet you guys there in the morning, seven thirty?”
Tonica groaned, but nodded, and Ginny added her agreement. “All right, then. Here’s your stop,” he said as he pulled into the hotel’s driveway.
Ginny noticed that Ron waited until they were past the doors, and nearly to the elevator, before he pulled away. “He’s worried,” she said quietly, not wanting to catch the attention of the sleepy clerk behind the counter, although the man hadn’t done more than lift his head and nod when they walked in.
“You’re not?” he replied.
“About being accosted in my own hotel? Not until this moment, no, honestly. No more than usual, anyway.” The elevator came, and they stepped on, Ginny punching the button for their floor. “Right now, I’m tired, and I’m annoyed, and I’m more than a little skeeved out by what that list might mean. That’s about it.”
And tired was winning over annoyed and skeeved. There would be time enough for all that in the morning. Later in the morning, she corrected herself, and prayed that Georgie wouldn’t need to go out before then.
13
The queen-sized bed was large enough for both of them, although Teddy woke up Friday morning without a pillow, and with a dog licking his face anxiously. He may or may not have yelped loudly enough to send Georgie scurrying across the room, forcing Ginny to spend five minutes reassuring the dog that big mean uncle Teddy hadn’t meant to scare her.
“Now I need someone to reassure me,” she said, finally. “Or prescribe a tranquilizer.”
“You’re too tightly wound for pharmaceuticals,” he said. “If you got that loose, you’d fall apart entirely.”
Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery Page 16