by Mary Malcolm
Table of Contents
Excerpt
Praise for Mary Malcolm
Trouble Comes Knocking
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
A word about the author…
Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
“About last night…”
I stood by the counter, arms folded, ready for a fight.
“I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss you.”
My insides vibrated and an unwanted quaver crept into my voice. “No, you shouldn’t have. But it doesn’t matter. I know you’re here to tell me you found out what I said was true, and now you’re afraid your captain will look poorly on you because you dismissed a lead. But I don’t plan to stay at that job so I’m no longer a lead. Take whatever information you found and do your own work.”
He tapped his thumb on his thigh and leaned slightly forward. “You’re right. All of that is right. And I wouldn’t blame you for leaving. But thing is…”
“This is an active investigation and now you need my help.”
“Yes but—”
“But you don’t want to bring a kook into your investigation.”
“I wasn’t going to say—”
“No, you may not have used those exact words, but the gist is there, right?”
“Will you stop doing that?”
“What?”
A tic formed by his jaw. “Finishing my sentences.”
Praise for Mary Malcolm
“Oh crap this was awesome! This was definitely not what I expected. When I read the blurb, it piqued my curiosity and it was because of that, that I decided to read it. I felt like it didn’t have that must-read factor, but boy, oh boy was I wrong. I was consumed, and there was no turning back.”
~a reader
~*~
“Mary Malcolm created a fantastic dynamic for this book, solving the main mystery in the story, yet keeping the one mystery we all want solved under wraps. I gotta tell you, I was reading this book on my smartphone and it took all of my willpower not to hurl my phone against the wall. Luckily, she is working on a sequel and I just have grabby hands for it already.”
~a reader
~*~
“All I have left to say is that this was freaking awesome and thank you for this brilliant, mind-blowing read.”
~Monique, ‘The Editrix’
Trouble Comes Knocking
by
Mary Malcolm
Trouble Series, Book 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Trouble Comes Knocking
COPYRIGHT © 2018 by Mary Malcolm
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by Debbie Taylor
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
PO Box 708
Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Mainstream Mystery Edition, 2018
Previously published by Entangled Publishing, 2013 Print ISBN 978-1-5092-1915-5
Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1916-2
Trouble Series, Book 1
Published in the United States of America
Dedication
To Bennett, who is the original Ana.
And to my parents,
who supported me as a writer
before I even knew I was one.
Thank you all for your love and support.
Chapter One
I paced the distance of the interrogation room, chafing my arms in static energy as Officer Len sat waiting for me to answer his question. The room didn’t look anything like interrogation rooms on cop television shows. Instead, it reminded me of the counseling room at my college with its cream-colored walls, stained concrete floor, and inspirational posters.
Other than appearing stereotypically Asian, Len also had the patience of a saint, so when he motioned for me to sit, I did. The metal chair scraped on the floor, and I placed my arms on the table. “It’s not like I wasn’t provoked.”
Len cleared his throat but didn’t speak.
“I’m not a bad person, or some criminal anarchist bent on taking down the force one officer at a time. I’m a goody-goody, you know? I was homeschooled until I was sixteen. Hell, I didn’t even have a social security number until then. That’s when my parents disappeared and I came to live with my aunt Dolores in Fort Worth, where—”
“Wait.” Officer Len raised his hand as if to physically stop the words from spilling from my lips. “What does any of this have to do with your arrest tonight?”
“I’m getting there. You see, this whole thing started about a month ago…”
****
I hit snooze on my alarm clock and rolled over to catch an extra seven minutes when Aunt Dolores used her outside voice to bellow from the bottom of the stairs, “Lucy, you’re gonna be late for your first day! Get your lazy bones out of bed and come down for breakfast.”
“I’m up!” I kicked at the tangled mass of blankets and sheets, attempting to free my feet. It only took a second to remember the nightmare that caused the mess, and my breath caught. I hated having nearly identical versions of the same nightmare every night: In an antiseptically white room a woman leaned down to me. You’re next she promised before she turned and left the room. The door stayed open and her heels clacked against the floor while flames engulfed the entire hallway, swallowing her whole.
I grabbed the journal and pen from my nightstand. In moments, I recorded the dream and could breathe normally. I scrubbed at my tired eyes and then ran my fingers through my pixie cut hair. I found myself itching for a cigarette, but I’ve been trying to quit so I took deep breaths and counted to ten—then twenty—instead.
“Today will be a good day. Today I will start my new path. Today I will not stick my nose where it does not belong,” I chanted, smearing on enough teal eyeliner to make my hazel eyes pop. When the smell of blueberry muffins made me salivate and a quick glance at the time on my phone pushed my ass into gear, I grabbed my favorite lip-gloss and sailed down the stairs.
I found Aunt Dolores at the kitchen island slathering margarine onto the top of a still-steaming muffin. She looked up as I entered the room.
“You’re wearing that?” Dee chided, handing me the muffin.
I’d procured a cute pair of tan cargo pants and a brown and green printed thermal from one of the local thrift stores, knowing I would wear the outfit for my first day. I looked cute. Not over-dressed, not a slob.
“Yes, why not?”
“It’s your first day. You ain’t gonna get another chance for this impression. You need to go on and change. Maybe a nice dress or skirt or something.”
“I’m not changing.”
Dee stuffed her hands into a sink full of
sudsy dishwater and refused to say another word.
“Be careful, Aunt Dolores, there’s a sharp knife in the water.”
She cleared away the suds and pulled out the knife. “Thanks, Lucy. I forgot I used this.”
That day I started my data entry job at HGR Enterprises. They’re one of the large tech firms in Fort Worth, and if I had to have a grunt job, might as well be a prestigious grunt job. I’d graduated with a degree in philosophy, but it isn’t as if the world is strife with need for the next Socrates when we have Wikipedia and Siri. I’d believed a degree would get me in the door. Underwater basket weaving would have gotten me about as far as philosophy.
All the apprehension and angst I felt about starting yet another new job faded once I met John Poole. John worked in the security department of HGR; he made my name badge.
“First day, huh?” He flashed an easygoing smile that took away my jitters. Delicious dimples popped-up just below his cheekbones, and after shoving shaggy brown hair away from his eyes, he scratched his slight muttonchops. A white shirt, ironed and neatly tucked, told me he styled his hair like that deliberately.
Tapping thickly calloused fingers on the table as we waited for my badge to finish, his sleeve moved up slightly revealing a tattoo of Santa Muerte on the inside of his wrist. “Are you in a band?”
He looked taken aback before laughing and saying, “Yeah. Wild Monkeys Don’t Fly. Have you seen us play somewhere? I mean, we’re not doing gigs right now, but we’ve had a couple.”
“No, a guess.”
After my badge, he took me on a tour of the building. He walked with the cool, casual swagger of a wannabe rocker. Someone who plays at the Aardvark but probably wouldn’t be getting into Hard Rock anytime soon. Still, he wasn’t old and creepy and hadn’t spent an enormous amount of time staring at my tits (unlike the other security guy, major creep vibes from that one), so that definitely landed him in the good guy category in my book.
The day started out fine, the first couple of days, really, but then things got a little hinky.
Being new to the company, I didn’t want to rock any boats or challenge anything that might take away from my benefits in ninety days, but the data on my screen contained an appalling number of discrepancies. Zeroes where ones should be. Entire lines of missing data. And this wasn’t a normal spreadsheet. My system let me put the numbers in, not double check them, so if I’d just been doing my job I would have never seen a problem. Unfortunately, I’m me and while these changes were not anything most people would notice, they stood out to me. Little numbers didn’t add up, bits of data made no sense once I entered them into the computer. My job was solely to type the information into the Datanet system so it could be consolidated for later use, not check its accuracy, but these were only naked-eye right.
It wasn’t as if I sat there with a calculator adding everything up, or tried to find these problems, it’s more that I couldn’t avoid them. Even as a little girl I saw things other people couldn’t. Not like witch-see or psychic or third-eye, nothing like that. More, I can’t not see what most people ignore.
I went to my boss on Wednesday.
“I don’t understand the problem,” Seth said.
“It’s not a problem,” I said. “Well, it is a problem, but it isn’t your problem. There’s data missing. Not technically data, more chunks of money. Hundreds of dollars here, a couple thousand there.”
“So you’re interrupting me for an accounting error?” Seth tapped his pen on his desk calendar, signaling that I should shut up and move on. His pasty-white face and round red cheeks got redder the longer I sat across from him. Still, I couldn’t shut up or move on. When things like this happen, it’s like I can’t help myself. I get involved—I need to make things right.
“I’m entering in the numbers for the third quarter. They’re over half a million short.”
“Are you working as an analyst now and no one informed me?” he asked, studying something on his computer. Probably a game of solitaire.
The desire to do no more than the bare minimum lived Jedi-strong in this man; I needed to talk to someone else.
So I told John, who had become my only friend so far after three days. Plus, his blue eyes gave me girl wood.
“Half a million,” he said, letting a low whistle slip between his slightly gapped teeth. “That’s a pretty penny.”
“A lot of them. Fifty million two hundred forty-three thousand eight hundred pennies, to be precise.”
He double-blinked. “You counted?”
I ignored the question. “Either someone sucks at their job, or someone’s stealing from the company. I know I’ve only been here three days, but I can’t imagine the higher-ups at HGR wouldn’t want to know about this.”
“Sure you’re looking at it right?” His brow cocked and eyes squinted, seemingly unsure whether I knew what I was talking about…or he had a child-star-like desire to seek attention.
I took a deep breath. “You live with your mother. Your parents are divorced, but recently so. You have two cats and a fish tank. Last night, you watched Sleepless in Seattle even though you told me you stayed in and chilled.” I said the last part with air quotes.
His face paled, and I wondered for a moment if I should have held back.
“How the hell do you know all that?” He took a step closer to his desk. At the sound of John’s raised voice, one of his co-workers glanced in our direction.
That happened sometimes. Like I said, not psychic; I just see things. When I landed this job, my aunt only had one request for me: Don’t ruin this one like the last. I didn’t mean to ruin the last job. It’d been at a department store where I’d been hired as a part-time salesperson at the perfume counter. Wear a pretty dress and smile, spray people with the newest designer perfume, and hand them a sample; that’s all I had to do. Get them interested in buying it. I didn’t even need to try to sell it to them, per se, just get them buzzed.
During my two-week tenure, I managed to break up three relationships and “out” the lead of the department. To my defense, he had no reason to pretend to be straight. A five-year-old could have guessed his sexual orientation. I mean, c’mon, no straight guy I’d ever met knew all the words to “La Vie Boheme” from the musical Rent, much less sang them while closing at night. Besides, no one there cared once the truth came out, nor did they trust me. I became the woman people whispered around, and no one actually talked to. They feared I’d discover their secrets too.
“Seriously, Lucy, I’m freakin’ out here.” John pushed an unsteady hand through his hair, and his eyes darted back and forth, as if looking for the nearest exit or witness or both.
“Problem?” John’s co-worker asked, standing up. He looked to be about our age and had a tattoo on his neck, but I couldn’t make it out. He had a military haircut with brown hair and eyes. He wasn’t too tall, but definitely looked like he worked out. Not exactly someone I’d want to make angry.
John, apparently realizing I wasn’t actually a threat, turned to him. “No, Ben. We’re cool.”
“You’re going to be okay,” I said, making light of the fear lurking behind those brilliant blue eyes. “I’m not some psycho stalker or anything weird. I’m just observant. You brought your lunch yesterday, but it was in stacked Tupperware, not a disposable dish. I know you aren’t married or seeing anyone, and it isn’t likely that a twenty-five-year-old guy went out of his way to buy Tupperware, so either you live with Mom, or you inherited her stuff when she died. Since you already told me both your folks are alive, that means you live with her.
“Dad’s out of the picture, but only recently so. You talk about both of your parents, but defend your mom a lot more. Which means you still blame him for whatever happened. If it had been a long time ago, you would most likely be over it by now. You aren’t, so it means it’s probably been pretty recent.
“You have orange cat fur on one pant leg and black on the other. So you could have more than two cats, but I took a stab at
two. Plus, there’s a little bit of fish flake on your shoe, so obviously you have a tank.”
He shook his head. “You’re a trip. That’s awesome, like some kind of party trick or something.”
“No trick.” In fact, it made me lonely-girl-at-the-prom miserable most of the time.
“Dude, I’d take total advantage of it.”
In the lobby, a cacophony of elevator dings, loud voices, and laughter, not to mention the smell of over-priced coffee from the building’s kiosk jarred my senses. All around, people held private conversations on their cell phones, their words etching on my brain where they would forever be stuck. When John’s coworker took a break, I sat Indian style in his chair and thought about how I could never get away from the noise. About how no one would want my ability longer than a day, much less want to take advantage of it. Still, I asked, “Yeah? Like how?”
“Man, think of how much you could get away with just knowing things about people.”
Truth is, you don’t want to know as much about people as you’d think. I’d never want to be able to read minds, or have the ability to see people’s futures. There is only so much I want to know about the person making my burger. Anything more would probably make me starve to death.
A few hours later when we went to lunch, I asked again. “So what do I do?”
He had an hour break, me a half hour. I’d been picking at a salad, kinda mopey but not wanting to face what I thought I’d figured out. It seemed, at least from what I’d been seeing, that someone at HGR figured out how to cheat the system. I didn’t know why, or who it might be, but someone was definitely doing the dirty.
John took a huge bite out of his sandwich, a bit of mustard slipping from the side of his mouth. I wiped at my own, trying to signal that he should, too, but apparently he didn’t know the universal signal for hey, there’s food on your face. So instead I attempted to talk without staring at the glob of yellow as my OCD went into hyper overdrive.
“Take it on up,” he said. “Think of how good this is going to make you look.” He panned his hands wide. “Girl wonder saves company half a mil after one week of work.”