Who, what, where, when, die (An Avery Shaw Mystery)

by Amanda M. Lee

"Yeah, have fun."

  My brain told me to walk away -- and be cool about it.

  "What are you doing tonight?" I've never been one to listen to my brain. I'm as cool as the Fonz jumping over a shark on water skis.

  Eliot shrugged. "I don't know. I'll probably just go out and listen to some music or something."

  Or something? I had a sneaking suspicion the "or something" was brunette and perky and she worked at the Vampire Lounge.

  Eliot's gaze met mine. I didn't see any guilt hidden there. Of course, if I was being totally honest with myself, he had no reason to feel guilty. We weren't exactly betrothed to each other. Actually, we weren't exactly anything to one another but two people who'd once stuck their tongues down each other's throats.

  "Well, have fun." If it worked for him it could work for me. I was as cool as Han Solo in a crisis.

  "Oh, I plan to."

  "Well, than you just do that." My voice sounded shrill even to my own ears.

  So much for cool.

  Twenty-Two

  When I returned to the office, I called the missing woman's husband and listened to him fake being distraught for a half an hour. I had a sneaking suspicion that his wife wasn't missing, she was dead, and we were probably going to find her chopped up and spread out in one of the area parks in the upcoming weeks. Until then, though, she was just missing.

  Marvin and I took a long lunch at the Coney place, where he went into even greater detail about his previous evening, and then returned to the office. My afternoon was filled with about twenty minutes of work and three hours of online shopping. My new Chuck Taylors were set to arrive on Tuesday.

  Before leaving the office, I debated changing into something different to avoid the wrath of my mother at dinner. In typical fashion, I decided against it. If I didn't piss her off, I'm not sure we'd having anything entertaining to talk about.

  Despite the overcast sky, it hadn't rained all day. The humidity of waiting for the oncoming storms was becoming oppressive. I rolled down the windows, cranked Eminem in the CD player, and let my mind wander.

  In the wake of the flurry of activity in my personal life, I'd kind of let other things slide away. I realized that I hadn't received a threat, or had an attempt on my life, in almost three days. Things were looking up -- at least in that department.

  On the other hand, I had a real problem in the romantic department. I couldn't deny that Jake and I would always be tied to one another, and I'd probably always be jealous of anyone else in his life. The problem was, I didn't think Jake and I could make it work.

  Jake has high expectations of the people in his life. I'd never been able to live up to them. To be fair, I'd never really tried to live up to them. Sometimes it's just easier to let yourself fail than to try to succeed.

  Jake, also, is bossy and a stickler for the law. I hate being bossed around and I live my life in a moral gray area most of the time. I don't see right or wrong. I see what's good and easy for me on one side and everything else on the other.

  I couldn't deny that I was still attracted to Jake, but to live full time in his world -- the girlfriend of a politician -- sounded like hell on earth to me.

  Then there was Eliot. I knew, without a doubt, I wanted to get Eliot into my bed. Once I did, though, what was I supposed to do with him? I didn't think Eliot was a commitment type of guy. In fact, if I had to place a wager, I'd bet he was one of those guys who had sex with a woman and then lost all interest.

  Don't get my wrong, I have no problem with "no strings" sex. In fact, I didn't have a problem with "no strings" sex for the majority of my college career. The problem was, I didn't just want no strings sex with Eliot. I didn't want a relationship either, though. Where Eliot was concerned, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted. I just know I wanted him.

  Of course, I wanted Jake, too.

  I chewed on my lip as I debated the pros and cons of the two. Both were hot. Jake was more lean muscle, compared to Eliot's actual bulk. They were sexy in different ways, though.

  Jake was successful and, though I'm loathe to admit it, patient.

  Eliot radiated sex. He was successful in a different way. He didn't have a lot of patience, though, I'd wager.

  Ugh. It was really an impossible choice. And, to be fair, I'm not sure I even had a choice. The only thing Eliot had offered was sex. Jake had once offered me forever -- well, a preamble to forever in the form of a promise ring -- and I'd walked away. He wasn't exactly offering me forever at this point, but what he was offering was a lot more substantial then what Eliot was offering.

  Before I realized what was happening, I had reached the family restaurant. I pushed all thoughts of Jake and Eliot out of my mind. The last thing I was going to talk to my family about was my sex life. Okay, my lack of sex life in the present moment.

  When I entered the restaurant, I greeted a few regulars and made my way to the family table. It looked like practically everyone in the clan had made it to dinner tonight. My mother is one of five siblings and I have fifteen cousins in varying degree of age -- I'm fairly close to the majority of my cousins who are in my age range. The three little ones kind of lost out on the cousin camaraderie. I can’t be sure, but they’re probably thankful for that.

  When I got to the table, I immediately noticed my cousin Lexie spinning her version of the umbrella story to everyone.

  "I didn't hide in the bushes," she was explaining to my mom. "I thought I dropped a contact. And when I found it, I couldn't see very well and I tripped coming out of the bushes and I just fell on her. I wasn't hitting her. It was totally an accident."

  Sounded completely plausible to me.

  My mother was more pragmatic. "Maybe you should try wearing glasses,” she suggested helpfully.

  I slid into the booth next to Lexie, choosing not to comment on her story. It's really not worth it. My mom frowned at my Star Wars jacket. I chose not to comment on the dirty look on her face either.

  Derrick slid in on the other side of me, essentially trapping me between Lexie and himself. I didn't like the feeling.

  "Anything else happen since the car thing?"

  "What car thing?" My mother can smell a secret a mile away.

  I glared at Derrick. He smiled. Of course he'd said it on purpose.

  "I almost got hit by a car the other night. It's no big thing."

  My mother frowned; I could tell she was thinking. "Were you jaywalking?" She always jumps to the explanation that blames me. When I was a teenager, the wine in the house disappeared one day. She just assumed it was me. When I told her it probably evaporated, she didn't even attempt to believe my lie.

  "Yes, I was jaywalking." Seemed easier then telling the truth.

  "She wasn't jaywalking." Derrick never lies. It's his biggest fault, other than being a cop, in my book. "Some guy tried to run her down outside Roseville City Hall."

  "What did you do to him?" I'm sure, in my mother's mind, I'd accidentally started him on fire or something. She'd never got over the time when I was in college and my friend and I had inadvertently set the fringe on some skinhead's denim vest on fire with our lit cigarettes. She's so suspicious, even though I've clearly never earned that suspicion.

  Luckily for me, everyone's attention had been diverted to the arrival of my Aunt Vera. I just want to point out that Vera and I are not related by blood. She married my Uncle Tim when I was young -- and then proceeded to cheat on him with anything that moved throughout the years. Derrick and I had often joked, behind her back of course, that she was the town bike and everyone got a ride.

  For her part, Vera pretended not to notice that we all referred to her as Elvira when she wasn't around. The name stemmed from an incident a long time ago, when she and her sisters walked around the property line of her new home and chanted away evil spirits. She's always been odd -- which is something I can accept -- it's the cheating that I can't stomach.

  Tonight, Vera was wearing a crochet dress -- without the shell that was supposed to go underneat
h it. Apparently, she thought that part of the dress was optional. Derrick and I did not.

  "Do you think she knows that we don't want to see her bra and underwear while eating?"

  "I'm just thankful she's wearing underwear. It could be worse." Derrick is practical in everything, I guess. When he's right, though, he's right.

  Luckily for us, Vera settled down at the other end of the table.

  I decided on the fish and chips for dinner and fell into the mindless chatter that accompanies a family that's as close as ours. In the middle of the table, my grandmother was telling old stories about when Derrick and I were kids. We both rolled our eyes, but humored her, interjecting the right comments where she expected us to. Yes, I was a better fisher than Derrick. Yes, it was funny when I gave Derrick a black eye. Yes, it was funny when I never let Derrick talk. I don't think either one of us liked any of the stories, just for different reasons.

  After awhile, we noticed that almost everyone at the table had turned their attention to Vera. Apparently, she was spinning one of her infamous yarns. Did I mention she's a pathological liar?

  Instead she was spinning one of her conspiracy theories. Even better.

  "I was reading in the New York Times that all the people who disappear in the Bermuda Triangle are actually in a black hole in outer-space. Our government put them there to experiment on them."

  "You read it in the New York Times?" More like the National Enquirer.

  "It's the truth."

  How do you argue with something like that? You don't.

  "Soooo," Derrick said turning to me. "I heard all the crop circles are actually caused by farting aliens." His sense of humor springs up at the oddest times.

  "Really? I heard that all those alien abductions are actually done by giant ants who take people away to their giant ant hills in the woods and make them dress up like clowns."

  Vera glared at both of us. "My story is true. Your stories are just ridiculous."

  The second half of the evening was pretty much identical to the first. I'll spare you the boring details. Just suffice it to say, my grandfather Jasper got caught by his nosy neighbor sleeping on the trampoline naked -- again -- and my aunt Marnie was under suspicion from local law enforcement for beheading a six-foot bunny in her former boyfriend's driveway.

  "I really liked that bunny," Lexie lamented of her mother's former possession. "I called it Tibby and dressed it up when I was a kid."

  "Why did she behead it?"

  "Because it didn't make sense for all the fake blood to be all over it if there wasn't a big wound." Lexie was matter-of-fact.

  I couldn't disagree with her logic.

  Finally, I excused myself to leave. I glanced at my watch as I left the restaurant. Three hours had never felt so long. I made my way to my car, blowing out a breath of relief. I was free for another week.

  I didn't notice the sound of crunching gravel behind me until whomever it was had moved practically on top of me. I prayed it wasn't Vera with a follow-up to her conspiracy theory. It wasn't.

  Before I even turned around I felt something heavy come down on the back of my head. Before I lost consciousness, I registered one second of blinding pain and then I was falling into Vera's black hole.

  I just hoped there was no one waiting to do experiments on me on the other side.

  Twenty-Three

  The pain I felt when I regained consciousness was acute. My head felt like it was double its normal size and it seemed to take me forever to focus. When I finally did, I realized I wasn't missing much.

  Everything was pitch dark, except for a faint light that managed to shine through a relatively small window up near the top of the walls. I was clearly in a basement, but where?

  I tried to shift my position and see if I could stand, but quickly realized that didn't seem like a reasonable option -- especially since I was tied to a support pole with my hands behind my back. Great. In addition, when I had tried to move, I'd woken up some stiff muscles that had been locked in the same position for hours and no longer wanted to move.

  I grunted in pain and tried to shift again. It only seemed to make things worse.

  "You finally woke up, I see."

  The voice came from a couple feet behind me. It sounded familiar; I just couldn't put my finger on it. I could only hope it wasn't some deranged pervert I'd covered in a previous story.

  "Who is it?"

  "What, you don't recognize me? I guess that shouldn't surprise me. The only thing I'm sure about where you’re concerned is that you're a spoiled bitch."

  Spoiled bitch? Sounds like someone I used to date. Crap, it probably was a pervert.

  "Maybe if I put on some Ed Hardy shoes?"

  Crap. Not someone I used to date. Even worse.

  "Rob? Rob Jones?"

  "Ding, ding, ding, give the witch a prize."

  "Who are you calling a witch?"

  My eyes had pretty much adjusted to the darkness at this point, and I could at least make out shapes in the room. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Rob was pacing like a caged animal towards the far wall. He looked deranged.

  "Why am I here?"

  "Why are you here? Why, you're here to understand."

  "Understand what?"

  Rob was quiet a minute. He paused in the back and forth trail he was wearing into the rug and stalked towards me. Uh-oh. He dropped down and put his face right in front of mine, I could smell the liquor on his breath. Jack Daniels. Man, I could use a glass of that about now.

  "I want you to understand that some things aren't about you."

  That sounded personal. "I know not everything is about me."

  "Really? Because you don't seem too concerned about people losing their jobs. You don't seem to care that people are losing their houses. You don't seem to care that the county government is screwing us."

  I wouldn't say I didn't care. Like I said before, though, I was generally apathetic. I decided not to point out the difference to Rob. Something told me he wouldn't really care either way.

  He was just hitting his stride anyway.

  "I've been watching you."

  "Well that's . . . flattering." I thought I'd try to appease him to the best of my ability. "If I was into psychos I'd totally go for you." Hey, that is to the best of my ability.

  Rob chuckled. It was kind of maniacal. "You just think everyone is into you, don't you? Just because you have the sheriff and that muscle-bound idiot sniffing around, you think every guy is into self-absorbed trolls like yourself."

  Trolls? This guy was asking for it.

  "Well, I'm not interested in you. I prefer my women to actually have an IQ above 60."

  Something told me it wasn't the time to tell Rob I'd read that IQ tests actually weren't a good gauge of intelligence.

  "So, why have you been following me?" I thought it best to get him back on track. I was already getting bored.

  "At first, I just wanted to scare you," Rob admitted. "After that story you wrote about Bart, I thought it would do you some good to realize the hurt you cause families and don't seem to care about. I just wanted to make you aware of your actions."

  "Hey, I'm not the one who got drunk, got a gun and then got naked. How is that my fault?"

  "Bart didn't hurt anyone!" Rob was getting angry. Of course, since the day I'd met him, I'd known he was an angry guy.

  "Hey, if it's any consolation, Bart will probably only do like a year in prison since they're so overcrowded. They'll give him some counseling there and he'll probably be better off than when he went in." This was, of course, if he managed to avoid being someone's bitch while incarcerated.

  "Better off? Even when he gets out everyone will know. Everyone will know what he did."

  I decided to change tactics. "Well, that's not my fault. I didn't make him do it. And, you seem to forget, I wasn't the only media there. Why not go after them?"

  "Like I said, at first I only wanted to scare you. Unlike the other reporters, you were dum
b enough to be listed in the phone book. It wasn't until I met you that I decided I wanted to hurt you."

  Believe it or not, this is not the first time I've heard that.

  "I watched you for days. I watched you waste your life. I mean, seriously, who can spend as much time as you do playing video games?" Only someone truly dedicated.

  "Even tonight, with your family, you seemed disinterested. Why is that? You have a large family. You should be thankful you have so many people that care."

  "They don't all care," I corrected him without thinking. "Some of them care and some of them are just plain crazy."

  Rob glowered at me. "I see your judgmental ways aren't just reserved for strangers."

  Despite how calm I probably seemed to Rob, I was starting to panic. He was eerily controlled. Given the times I'd seen him fly off the handle, I didn't think this was a good thing.

  "So, what are you going to do to me?"

  Rob, who had seemed lost in thought for about thirty seconds, snapped back to regard me. "I'm going to kill you, of course."

  My mouth went dry and I swear I thought my eyes were going to roll back into my head. For a second, I thought I was going to lose consciousness again. Something in me stopped that from happening, though. I was certain if I blacked out, I'd never wake up.

  I finally regained the ability to talk, unfortunately my voice sounded terrified -- even to my own ears. "Why are you going to kill me? What good is that going to do?"

  Rob seemed relaxed as he regarded me. "Well, I thought about it. The county didn't react to my water demonstration. The cops didn't seem to care even when Bart went off the deep end. Then, when you wrote that story about my sister, Kathy, I thought that people would understand now. I thought everyone would join together and we'd stop the county from what they were doing. Now, I think it's going to take a dead body to get my point across."

  Okay, I may be scared, but I'm not stupid. That seemed like some circular reasoning to me. Rob wasn't dedicated to a cause, he was just nuts.

  "You're willing to kill someone about water rates?"

  Rob snapped. "It's not just about water rates! It's about our politicians thinking they're above everyone else. They think that they don't have to give up anything and we can just give and give and give and never stop. They took away my job because I uncovered the fact that they were funneling money out of the water department and using it for their own vacations." Ah, the missing $500,000. I couldn't wait to nail Clara Black on that.