Explosive Eighteen

by Janet Evanovich

  “You got a ring mark,” Grandma said. “Of course, I guess there could be other explanations. You could have the vitiligo, like Michael Jackson. Remember when he turned white?”

  My mother put two platters on the dining room table. “I have antipasto,” she said. “And I have a bottle of red open.”

  My father went to the table shaking his head. “Vitiligo,” he said. “What next?”

  “Annie’s been helping Lorraine Farnsworth with her love life,” Grandma said, forking into a slice of hard cheese and prosciutto.

  My mother looked over at Annie. “Lorraine is ninety-one years old.”

  “Yes,” Annie said. “It’s time for her to make a decision. She’s been seeing Arnie Milhauser for fifty-three years. It might be time for her to move on.”

  My father had his head bent over his antipasto. “Only place she’s gonna move on to is the bone farm.”

  “She’s doing pretty good for her age,” Grandma said. “Sure, she rolls her share of gutter balls, but heck, who don’t.”

  “She’s doing better now that we got her the longer tubing to her oxygen tank,” Annie said.

  Grandma nodded. “Yeah, that helped. She was on a short leash before.”

  I had my phone clipped to the waistband on my jeans, and it beeped with a text message. We need to talk to you. It’s urgent. Come outside. It was signed The FBI.

  I texted back no.

  The next message was Come outside or we’re coming in.

  I pushed away from the table. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I need to step outside for a moment.”

  “Probably got to let a breezer go,” Grandma said to Annie. “That’s always why I got to step outside.”

  My mother drained her wineglass and poured another.

  I went to the front door, and saw they were the fake FBI guys. They were standing at the curb in front of a black Lincoln. The bigger of the two, Lance Lancer, motioned me forward. I shook my head no. He pulled his badge out, held it up for me to see, and crooked his finger at me. I did another head shake.

  “What do you want?” I yelled.

  “We want to talk to you. Come here.”

  “Move away from the car. I’ll meet you halfway.”

  “We’re the FBI. You gotta come to us,” Lancer said.

  “You’re not the FBI. I checked. Besides, the FBI doesn’t ride around in big black Lincoln Town Cars.”

  “Maybe we got it on account of it was confiscated,” Lancer said.

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  “I told you we want to talk, and I can’t be yelling to you. It’s confidential.”

  I moved out of the house onto the walk. “I’ll meet you halfway,” I said again.

  Lancer mumbled something to Slasher, and they marched over to where I was standing.

  “We want the photograph you got on the plane,” Lancer said. “Bad things are gonna happen if you don’t give it to us.”

  “I told you. I don’t have it.”

  “We don’t believe you. We think you’re fibbing to us,” Lancer said.

  Good lord. As if the vacation wasn’t disastrous enough, now I’m involved in God knows what.

  “I don’t have it. I’m not fibbing. Go away and bother someone else,” I told them.

  Lancer’s eyes opened wide. “Get her!” he said.

  I whirled around and jumped away, but one of them managed to snag my shirt. I was yanked back, clawing and kicking. There was a lot of swearing and ineffective bitch-slapping, and somehow my foot connected with Slasher’s boys. His face instantly went red and then chalk white. He doubled over, hands to his crotch, and he went to the ground in a fetal position. I ran into the house, locked the door, and looked out the window. Lancer was dragging his partner into the Lincoln.

  I straightened my shirt and returned to the dinner table.

  “Feel better?” Grandma asked.

  “Yup,” I said. “Everything’s good.”

  “Your digestion will improve when we get your romantic problems solved,” Annie said.

  Little alarm bells went off in my head and my scalp prickled. We? Did she say we? I had enough trouble going on with the men in my life without Annie getting involved. Annie was a sweet person, but she was only a few steps behind Morelli’s Grandma Bella in the Whacko of the Year competition.

  “Honestly, I haven’t got any romantic problems,” I told Annie. “It’s all peachy.”

  “Of course it is,” Annie said. And she winked at me.

  “I hate to rush everyone, but we gotta get a move on,” Grandma said. “Bowling starts at seven o’clock, and you gotta get there early or all the good shoes are gone and only the fungus shoes are left. I’m going to get my own shoes, but I have to wait for my Social Security check.”

  Rushing through dinner is never a problem. My father doesn’t waste unnecessary minutes on bodily functions. He slurps his soup down boiling hot, has seconds, mops the bowl with a crust of bread, and expects to immediately move on to dessert. This no-nonsense approach to dinner gets him back to the television in record time and cuts down on time spent tuning out Grandma.

  “I was talking to Mrs. Kulicki at the bakery today, and she said she heard Joyce Barnhardt was mixed up in something bad and got compacted at the junkyard,” Grandma said, helping herself to an almond cookie.

  “How awful,” my mother said. “How would Mrs. Kulicki know such a thing? I haven’t heard anything.”

  Grandma dunked her cookie in her coffee. “Mrs. Kulicki’s son Andy works at the junkyard, and it came from him.”

  That would be a real bummer if it were true. It was a pain in the ass to get money back on a dead FTA. Especially when the body was incorporated into the bumper of an SUV. Plus, I suppose I’d miss Joyce, in a perverse, sick sort of way.

  After Grandma and Annie took off, I helped my mom with the dishes and spent a few minutes watching television with my dad. No one mentioned rings or marriage. My family solves problems with silence and meat loaf. Our philosophy is, if you don’t talk about a problem, it might go away. And if it doesn’t go away, there’s always meat loaf, mac and cheese, roast chicken, pineapple upside-down cake, pasta, potatoes, or baloney on white bread to take your mind off unpleasant things.

  My mother sent me home with a bag of cookies, a half-pound of deli ham, provolone, and a loaf of bakery bread. If you come to eat at my mom’s house, you leave with something in a bag.

  I stopped at the entrance to my apartment building parking lot and did a fast survey. No black Lincoln Town Car in sight, and I was sure I hadn’t been followed. So probably it was safe to go to my apartment. I took the stairs, walked the second-floor hall, and listened at my door. Silence. I pushed the door open and peeked in. No fake FBI guys lurking in the kitchen. Most likely, Slasher was sitting somewhere icing down his privates. I’d made a good connection. Imagine what sort of damage I could inflict if I actually knew what I was doing.

  I gave Rex part of a cookie, went to my computer, and searched around until I found a news story on the man murdered at LAX. His name was Richard Crick. Age fifty-six. Surgeon. Had an office in Princeton. He’d been in Hawaii attending a professional conference. Police were speculating it was a random robbery gone bad.

  I suspected different. Crick had something valuable … the photograph. For whatever reason, he slipped the photograph of the man into my bag while I was sleeping. And then either he fingered me before he died, or else a bunch of people figured it out. I had no clue as to the significance of the photograph, and didn’t especially want to know.

  I tapped Crick into one of the bonds office background search programs and watched the information scroll down. He’d been an army doctor for ten years. Three were in Afghanistan. Three in Germany. The rest Stateside. He’d gone into private practice when he left the army. Divorced. Two adult sons. One living in Michigan, and one in North Carolina. Squeaky clean until a year and a half ago, when he was hit with a wrongful death malpractice claim. So far a
s I could see, the claim was still pending. He owned a home in Mill Town. The latest appraisal was $350,000. He owed $175,000 on his mortgage. He drove a two-year-old Accord. No other litigation. No liens. No reports of bad credit. All in all, a pretty boring guy.

  No point to sneaking into his house and his office and looking around. I was coming to this game late. The fake FBI, the legitimate FBI, local police, employees, and relatives would already have combed through everything.

  I remoted the television on and surfed around, finally settling on the Food Channel. I fell asleep halfway through a Food Truck special and didn’t wake up until eleven-thirty. I checked my phone for messages, found none, and went to bed.

  FIVE

  I AWOKE DISORIENTED. The room was dark. An alarm was going off. I was next to a warm body. Morelli. He reached across me and shut the alarm off. The alarm had been coming from his cell phone.

  “What the heck?” I said. “What time is it?”

  “It’s five o’clock. Gotta go. Early briefing. And I need to go home and feed Bob before I leave for work.”

  “When did you get here?”

  “Around midnight. You were asleep.”

  “So you just crawled under the covers? I thought we were having issues.”

  He slipped out of bed. “I was tired. This was easy.”

  “Easy?” I was up on an elbow. “Excuse me? Easy?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t have to talk to you.” He kicked around in the dark, picking clothes off the floor. “These boxers are mine, right?”

  “Who else would they belong to?”

  “Could be anyone’s,” Morelli said.

  I rolled my eyes and switched the bedside light on. “Does this help?”

  He tugged his jeans on. “Thanks.”

  Now that the room was partially lit, I could see the Band-Aid across Morelli’s nose, and his black eye. The fight in Hawaii had been violent but short, terrifying to witness and infuriating to remember. Ranger had needed seven stitches to close the cut under his eye, and he’d cracked a bone in his hand rearranging Morelli’s face.

  “How’s your nose?” I asked Morelli.

  “Better. The swelling’s down.”

  “That fight was horrible!”

  “I’ve been in worse.”

  I knew this to be true. Morelli’d had some wild years.

  I sat up and hugged the quilt to my chest. “I was afraid you were going to kill each other.”

  “I was trying,” Morelli said, sitting in my chair, pulling on socks. “Remember, you’re talking to Berger this morning. And don’t mess with him. He can make trouble for you if he wants.” He came to the bedside and gave me a fast kiss. “I’ll try to get away earlier tonight.”

  “I might have plans with Lula.”

  He took his gun off the nightstand and clipped it to his belt. “Don’t mess with me, either. I’m running with a short fuse these days.”

  Jeez Louise.

  I thrashed around in bed for a couple hours, trying to get back to sleep and having no luck. I finally rolled out of bed around eight and out of the apartment around nine. My plan was to stop in at the bonds bus before heading off to the FBI.

  Traffic was slow on Hamilton, and I saw the reason for the gridlock when I was half a block from the bus. The bus was no more. A couple orange traffic cones marked the area of destruction. Beyond the cones lay the smoldering, blackened cadaver of twisted metal and stinking charred upholstery that used to be the bonds bus. I parked across the street, behind Vinnie’s Cadillac, Lula’s Firebird, and Connie’s Hyundai. DeAngelo’s Mercedes was noticeably missing. Vinnie, Lula, and Connie were on the sidewalk, eyes glazed, aimlessly staring at the mess.

  “I’m thinkin’ lightning,” Lula said. “This here looks like a natural disaster. I’m thinkin’ the lightning came in through the fan in the crapper and snaked around inside until it found the microwave, and then BANG.”

  “There was no lightning last night,” Connie said. “It hasn’t rained in days.”

  “Well then, my next theory is terrorist,” Lula said. “A suicide bomber.”

  “Why would a suicide bomber blow up the bonds bus?” Connie asked.

  “They don’t need a reason,” Lula said. “They just be walking around with bombs stuck up their butt, and when they feel like pushin’ the button—KABOOM—there’s terrorist guts everywhere. Maybe one of them walked by the bus and smelled doughnuts, so he went in, ate a doughnut, and blew himself up.”

  I was pretty sure it wasn’t a terrorist who destroyed the bus. I was pretty sure it was DeAngelo, and I knew Connie was thinking the same thing. Neither of us was saying anything because we didn’t want to set Vinnie off on a screaming rampage. Although it seemed unlikely, as he was currently one shade from comatose.

  “Terrorist,” Vinnie said. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “Lucille must have fed him a Valium smoothie this morning,” I said to Connie.

  Connie looked over at Vinnie. “He’s been here since three this morning. He’s as fried as the bus.”

  “Can we still operate?” I asked her.

  “Yes. We lost the bus but not much else. I’ve been working off my laptop, and it travels with me. We lost a lot of files in the fire that took out the original office, but we didn’t lose anything with this fire. It’s all electronic now.”

  I glanced at Lula. She was dressed in black. Black faux lizard-skin cowboy boots, black jeans that looked like they were painted on her, black tank top with an acre of boob squishing out. Pink hair.

  My curiosity was raised. “What’s with the black?” I wanted to know. “You never wear all black.”

  “I told you yesterday, I’m gettin’ serious. I’m not takin’ this job lightly no more. I’m channeling my inner Ranger, and I’m wearing black like him. I figure he’s on to something with the black deal.”

  “He wears black so he doesn’t have to match socks in the morning.”

  “See, that’s what I’m sayin’. It’s about being efficient. Get the job done. Wham. That’s gonna be my new motto. Wham. Now that I’m in black, I’m thinking I could catch Joyce Barnhardt. No problemo.”

  “It might not be that easy,” I said. “There’s a rumor going around that Barnhardt’s been compacted.”

  “Darn,” Lula said. “That would take all the fun out of capturing her.”

  “I heard the same rumor,” Connie said.

  “Too bad,” Lula said. “I was ready to be all over Barnhardt. I was ready to wham her.”

  “I need to talk to a couple guys downtown this morning,” I said to Lula. “It shouldn’t take long. I’ll pick you up when I’m done, and we’ll go to the junkyard.”

  “Being that we don’t have a bonds bus no more, I’ll be at the coffee shop,” Lula said. “I’m thinking about having one of them cinnamon rolls. What would Ranger eat?”

  “He’d have half a bagel with a small amount of cream cheese and some smoked salmon.”

  Lula shook her head. “That man don’t know much about eating.”

  SIX

  I LEFT THE FIRE SCENE, drove down Hamilton, and spotted the tail when I turned onto Broad. Black Lincoln two cars back. Most likely they were with me when I left my apartment, and I hadn’t been paying attention. The FBI had offices in a building in the center of the city. There was underground parking, but I chose not to use it. Even when security cameras were in play, I felt vulnerable in a parking garage. I found on-street parking half a block away, locked up, and walked to the FBI building. I waved at the Lincoln as it rolled past, but no one waved back or beeped the horn. Guess Lancer and Slasher were busy thinking up a new cover, since FBI was obviously out.

  Berger’s office was on the sixth floor. He had a small cubby with a desk and two chairs. I imagined Gooley had an identical cubby somewhere in the vast room filled with cubbies.

  “Did you bring the photo?” Berger asked.

  I sat in one of his chairs. “I don’t have the photo.”

  Berger blew
out a sigh. “Did you ever have the photo?”

  “Yes. I discovered it when I got home. I had no idea how it got into my bag or what it was. There wasn’t any writing on it. No name or address. I assumed I’d grabbed it by mistake when I bought magazines for the flight. So I threw it away.”

  “Any chance of retrieving it?”

  “No, I tried. The garbage had already been picked up.”

  “Was it a man or a woman?” Berger asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  He shook his head. “To my knowledge, only one person knew the identity of the person in the photo, and that person is dead.”

  “Would that dead person happen to be Richard Crick, the doctor who got stuffed into the trash can at LAX?”

  “Bingo.”

  “It was a photo of a guy standing on a street corner,” I told Berger. “Casual. Not posed. Completely unexceptional. No piercings or tattoos. Just a nice-looking guy. Somewhere around forty. Short brown hair. Fair-skinned. He was wearing a dark suit.”

  “Did you recognize the street corner?”

  “No. It could have been anywhere. It looked like an office building in the background. No vegetation, so I don’t know if it was Hawaii, Oregon, or New York.”

  “Would you recognize this guy if you saw him again?”

  “Hard to say. Maybe. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the photo.”

  “I’d like to set you up with an artist,” Berger said. “At this point, anything is better than nothing.”

  “Do I want to know why this photo is so important?”

  “No. I don’t even know. And I don’t want to know. Something to do with national security.”

  “I’m being harassed by two men posing as FBI. Morelli ran them through the system, and they’re not with the Bureau.”

  “American?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s possible you’ll also have some foreign nationals sniffing around,” Berger said.

  “Great. What am I supposed to do with these people?”

  “Don’t let them get too close. I imagine some of them are nasty buggers.”

  “Shouldn’t you be protecting me?”