Dead Girl Running (Cape Charade Book 1)

by Christina Dodd

  “Philadelphia? That’s a long way to come. Why would he fly in from so far away?” From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that city of cold and dark, blood and cruelty. “That is, can’t you find someone closer?”

  “Maximilian’s Pennsylvania home is in the Brandywine Valley. He also has a home in Oregon. He came to Bella Terra for the holiday celebration. When he learned about your situation, he volunteered to help. Max is a wonderful man.”

  Kellen knew the fact he was from Pennsylvania was no reason to prematurely dislike him. She knew that, theoretically, most of Pennsylvania was pleasant…

  But not Philadelphia. It had taken her a long time to recall anything about Philadelphia, and each of those few memories were jagged shards, broken, never to be assembled again.

  Philadelphia. The rumbling train, the 30th Street Station, the river, the mugging. No money. No credit cards. Months on the streets, cold, hungry, desolate, terrified.

  Then the child, the sobbing little girl.

  Annie’s voice sounded in Kellen’s ear. “Did we lose our connection?”

  “No! I’m still here. I was thinking that it’s kind of Mr. Di Luca to want to help, but—”

  Annie interrupted, “Maximilian is competent at everything he does. He’s powerful, aware, responsible, attentive. You’ll see.”

  Nothing Annie said banished Kellen’s disquiet, and in fact her emphasis on his qualities made her queasy.

  “Max is taking the red-eye and he’ll be there first thing in the morning,” Annie finished triumphantly.

  So it was too late to turn him back, and really, why would Kellen want to? Even if he wasn’t All That, he’d at least take part of the burden. “Thank you, that sounds great.”

  “Maximilian can stay as long as he’s needed. In fact, while he’s there, I’m sure he’ll also keep up his work for Di Luca Wines, although at this time of year, there’s not much happening in the business. Now, dear, Leo says I’m babbling, so I’ll get off the line. Say hello to dear Maximilian from me. I hope you two get along.”

  “I’m sure we will.” Kellen hung up, held the phone out and looked at it.

  Annie was behaving very oddly, almost guilty, definitely excited. That painkiller must be great stuff.

  22

  Leo’s firearms collection included some real gems: an 1894 Winchester .30-30 designed by John Browning and with the name of every owner engraved on the scabbard, a Winchester model 1873 with an octagonal barrel, a Colt Single Action Army, a Smith & Wesson Model 3. Kellen passed over the antiques and chose a Ruger LC9s. Slim and accurate, it felt good in her hands, and the holster fit well under her jacket. When she had it strapped on, she looked at herself in the mirror and nodded at her reflection. Only someone with combat experience would know she was packing.

  Then she ran up the stairs to the office. She turned on the computer and searched for Maximilian Di Luca. She found him on the Di Luca Wines website, with a bio so brief as to be curt. Based on the information, she started a file in her mind.

  MAXIMILIAN DI LUCA:

  MALE, 30S, ITALIAN AMERICAN. FORMER FOOTBALL PLAYER. CURRENTLY WORKS FOR DI LUCA WINES. STERN FACE, TANNED SKIN, BLACK SHADOW OF A BEARD, CURLY BLACK HAIR CROPPED INTO A BUSINESSMAN’S LENGTH. BROWN EYES…

  She zoomed in. Long dark lashes surrounding gloriously light brown eyes… Reaching out her fingers, she almost touched the screen, then clenched her hand into a fist. His face was not familiar, but he was from Pennsylvania. If she’d met him before, she didn’t remember.

  Annie had behaved oddly about him. Did Annie know something she wasn’t saying? Or was the danger that haunted the resort stealing Kellen’s precious sanity? She’d always feared succumbing to whatever madness had taken that year from her. Had she not saved that child? Had she instead hurt the child?

  That would explain…this… Kellen touched the scar on her forehead.

  Oh God. She’d been through this a million times before, plucking at her mind, seeking memories. If the truth hid there, she couldn’t find it, only fragments of fear and, perhaps, insanity.

  She pulled up the resort employee group email, then sat with her fingers on the keys, ready to address the issue of safety…as soon as she figured out what to say. She didn’t want to shout out that Lloyd Magnuson was missing when no one was sure what had happened to him. At the same time, she had to say something. Finally, she typed a brief note that let them know Annie was recovering, expressed her sympathy for those who had known Priscilla Carter, gave the assurance that law enforcement would investigate and that they had a new security director on his way. She included a heartfelt request that everyone be extra vigilant and take every care of themselves and others. Finally, she asked them to report to her anything they observed that struck them as peculiar, and thanked them for their continued diligence. She pressed Send, shut down the computer and the lights and sat in the dark room.

  She had found herself unable to tell Mr. Gilfilen about Nils. She considered Mr. Gilfilen a trustworthy man, but she wasn’t willing to jeopardize a federal sting operation based on her belief.

  She knew she would not tell Nils about Mr. Gilfilen. She didn’t completely trust Nils.

  She didn’t trust Sheri Jean. Or Mara. Most definitely not Chad Griffin. Adrian and Mitch she believed would guard her back in a combat situation, but when it came to making a profit by whatever means? She felt a wobble in her trust-o-meter.

  She couldn’t even confide in Birdie or Temo. Anything she said would put them in danger. So she would say nothing. She would tell no one what she knew from any source; she remembered her aunt’s favorite saying, “Of course I can keep secrets, it’s the people I tell them to who can’t keep them.”

  This news about Lloyd Magnuson changed everything. He’d gone to the Virtue Falls coroner with the body of one of the Librarian’s victims…and disappeared. Sure, it was possible he’d hit the bars and run into trouble. But no one had seen him, and seriously, who went on a bender with a plastic container of rotting flesh in the trunk?

  So what exactly had happened? The Librarian had disposed of Priscilla’s body somewhere close to the resort on the coast, it had washed ashore, and when the identity of the body became known, the Librarian had been alarmed. Perhaps having the body examined by a coroner might somehow lead to the Librarian’s identity.

  Yes. What they’d discovered had worried the Librarian and made him, or her, take extraordinary measures to reacquire Priscilla’s body, and what happened to Lloyd Magnuson as a result didn’t matter. Except it did. The guy’s only crime was being a part-time policeman.

  Kellen had, she realized, cratered in on herself, erecting that familiar ice wall between herself and everyone else, the way she had after the explosion, in those traumatic days in New York and on the grim streets of Philadelphia…

  Turning on the desk light, she pulled a yellow tablet close, got a pen and in her brain pulled up the files for each person she deemed a suspect. If she believed everything Nils Brooks had told her, and she more or less did, then the Librarian was one of these people. Probably. And if she or he had a couple of flunkies, they’d be on the list, too. Probably.

  She jotted down each detail about each person.

  Then she checked vacations. She knew when Jessica had been killed, so she looked for the employees who had been gone in January. Which was just about everybody except her, who wanted to hunker down here, and Birdie, who didn’t want to go home to Detroit. Oh, and Carson Lennex had been in Machu Picchu, a fact that hadn’t mattered before and now seemed grossly ominous. She weeded out a few names, but—the Librarian ran a big operation at multiple sites. What size was the Librarian’s organization?

  Oh. And a large number of the Yearning Sands staff were still on vacation. What if Nils was wrong and the Librarian wasn’t currently here?

  So many questions, and none of them easily answered.

  K
ellen tore off the paper and shrugged into her oversize coat, then headed down to employee dining. It was late; she needed something to eat.

  There she found Temo digging through the freezer and loading ready-made dinners into a Yearning Sands Resort insulated tote bag.

  “You’re back!” she said. “How was LA? Did you find friends to hire?”

  “No.” He was brief to the point of being curt.

  “Did you clear up the family situation?”

  “Sí. Yes. Everything is fine.” He didn’t look as if everything was fine. He looked tired, he had two days’ growth of dark beard on his chin and his scowl brought his forehead down over his eyes.

  More problems in the Iglasias family, she guessed. “How’s your mom and your sister?”

  He looked back into the depths of the freezer, grabbed another couple of meals without looking and dropped them into the bag. “Fine. Good! Well, my mom’s in prison, but other than that—”

  “That’s something different, isn’t it?”

  “First time for federal prison, sí, but no.” He had a bitter set to his mouth. “I’ve bailed her out of jail more than once.”

  “Is your sister okay?”

  “She is now.” He shut the freezer a little too hard. “I placed her with relatives.”

  “She’s okay now? You’re glad you went?”

  “Sí. Sí.” He edged away.

  “I could talk to Annie, ask if you could bring your sister to live with you.”

  He froze.

  “You know how kind she is. She would probably say yes.” Kellen’s mind leaped ahead. “School would be very different for her, and you’d have to cut back on your hours, but—”

  “Look, I just got back. I have to go to my cottage. I have, um, things I…”

  She caught his arm. “Temo, before you unpack and do some wash, I have to ask—did you see Lloyd Magnuson put that corpse into his car?”

  Temo looked at Kellen’s hand, then into her face. “I loaded it into that policeman’s toy car.”

  “Toy car?”

  “He had a toy car, a Smart car. It looks like one of our golf carts, only smaller. I put the plastic box in the back.”

  “Then he headed toward Virtue Falls?”

  Temo pointed north.

  “He didn’t get there. The body never got taken to the coroner. No one has seen Lloyd Magnuson.”

  Temo stood with his mouth half-open. Then, “He wrecked his toy car?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. No one has found him, wrecked or otherwise. Maybe whoever killed that girl went after him.”

  “I bet they find him wrecked somewhere.” Temo sounded oddly certain.

  “Why? Did he say anything that sounded off?”

  Temo scratched his cheek. “He was very cheerful for someone who was driving a toy hearse.”

  “That’s weird.” She looked in Temo’s bag. “You’re going to eat all that tonight? Did you not eat the whole time you were gone?”

  “Not much eating. It was a fast trip. Tonight, Adrian…he came over. You know him. Always hungry. I’ll see you tomorrow. You don’t have to worry. I’ll work.” Temo fled.

  “I know you will,” Kellen called after him. She didn’t know if she was looking for trouble or whether Temo was acting weird. Maybe he was having a party and hadn’t invited her. That would be so embarrassing. But not surprising, either. Since they had both left the service, the things that had bound them had vanished. They were both Americans, both retired from the Army, yet they were separated by position, race and language. Only friendship held them together, a friendship she treasured. Had she been mistaken in his affections? Did he not support her as she supported him? That would break her heart.

  She poked through the freezer, collected a small square aluminum casserole marked “Dungeness crab mac and cheese.” In the refrigerator, she found a bag of prepared green salad and a small container of salad dressing. She loaded them into one of the insulated tote bags, checked to see that her holster was in place and her tactical flashlight close at hand, left through the kitchen door and ran, avoiding the lighted paths, all the way to Nils Brooks’s cottage.

  She knocked, and when he opened the door, she said, “The way I figure it, these killings are the jurisdiction of the FBI. So why is the MFAA investigating them?”

  23

  Nils opened the door wide and stepped aside. “The FBI claims they haven’t got a clue what’s going on with these mutilation killings.”

  She walked in, wiped her feet on the welcome mat, shrugged off her coat, walked through his living room and into his kitchen. “So you do work with the FBI?”

  “In cases of domestic crime, which this is.”

  She set the oven to three hundred and fifty degrees and placed the mac and cheese on the middle rack. “But you don’t believe what they’re telling you.”

  “I don’t believe they’re going to share information with the MFAA. To them, the MFAA is like the upstart child who babbles about its pretty antiques while the world is falling into anarchy.”

  “Not even when Jessica was brutally killed at her desk?”

  “The FBI is investigating her death, even though she worked for the CIA.” Kellen thought she could hear Nils’s teeth grinding. “But the investigating office is run by a dick who’s pissed that we’ve got a plan to shut down the smuggling depots and he didn’t get invited in as the lead. Why would he? He doesn’t know jack shit about art or artifacts or anything but brute force.”

  “O-kay.” Bad blood there. “Mara Philippi says she talked to an old boyfriend at the FBI.”

  “She’s pretty. Maybe she’ll get someone to pay attention.” He sounded intensely bitter.

  Kellen reached into his cupboard, brought out a serving bowl, emptied the bag of salad into it. She washed her hands, then tossed the greens with her hands. She caught a peculiar expression on his face. “I know where everything is. All the kitchens are arranged the same.”

  “I have never seen anyone actually use their hands like salad tongs.”

  “Think about it. Someone in the kitchen used their hands to cut up the lettuce, celery, radishes…”

  “Wearing sanitary gloves, one hopes!” Still he looked pained.

  She thought about that photo of the affluent Brooks family. She suspected they had a home that included a staff and their own cook, and the idea of anyone actually touching food with their fingers would be an anathema to him. That both amused her and helped convince her of the authenticity of his personal history. “I promise I’ll use utensils when I add the dressing.”

  “What kind of dressing?”

  “What do you care? I’ve seen you. You’ve been in the resort eating all day. This is for me.”

  He looked even more startled and offended.

  Wow. He was spoiled.

  She pulled the list of possible Librarians out of her pocket and handed it over. “Here. See what you think.”

  He pulled a stool up to the eating bar and looked over her chart and her profiles.

  “I like the pilot, too,” Nils said. “Chad Griffin. In and out, travel the country, transport the goods, stay here when the weather’s bad and check up on everything.”

  “I’m prejudiced against him because I don’t like the man, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t the Librarian.”

  “Why did you put Carson Lennex above him?”

  “Archaeology degree. The man knows his stuff, he has a huge book collection, went to Machu Picchu on vacation. Which a lot of people do, but…” She shook up the simple dressing of red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard and extra virgin olive oil, drizzled it on the greens and dug in.

  “Fascinating.” He pulled a pen out of his pocket and scribbled a note on the list. “I would have never suspected him. He’s too old and too famous. So I would have never done the research. Good
job.”

  “Snooping pays off.”

  “I thought you’d include your local policeman, the guy who took the body to the coroner.”

  Nils was asking all the right questions. “He’s disappeared.”

  That got Nils’s attention. “When did you find that out?”

  “This evening.”

  “Disappeared to where?”

  “If we knew that, he wouldn’t be disappeared.” She waved him to silence and told him about Leo’s call. “I was aggravated with Lloyd for not getting back to me, but now he’s vanished and no one thinks he deliberately ran off with the body. Not even me, because if he’s the Librarian, that would be stupid.”

  “It would. Foul play is suspected?”

  “The sheriff has her men searching for him, but the countryside is wild and includes many places to hide someone who is kidnapped, or to stash a body.” She stared into the salad and reimagined the rugged mountains, the dense forests, the long stretches of beach battered by ocean. “As we’ve discovered.”

  “So only two men made the list?”

  “I do suspect a man simply because in the greater world a man is more likely to command the respect and be in the position to obtain power. But if your suspicions are right, that the Librarian is using Yearning Sands Resort as a base, the possibility exists it could be a female because the hospitality business is predominantly female. We have a lot more choices here.” She pointed at the names on the chart. “I’m suggesting these two because they have the physicality to handle the rigors of the job. Pickups, drop-offs, if needed.” She paused a beat. “Murders.”

  “I also had Mara Philippi on the list,” he said smugly. “She has a murky background.”

  That brought her interest into sharp focus. “What does that mean?”

  “It means I don’t believe the research I was able to assemble about her. There are legitimate reasons for her to have faked credentials. She might have worked at a federal agency that obscured or changed her records, she might be in witness protection, she might be running from an abusive relationship—”