Paper Bullets

by Reed, Annie

  I grinned back. “Hardly. I investigate accidents for insurance defense counsel. Interview witnesses. Serve subpoenas. Those are for civil cases, and most of the time the people involved are civil, especially to me.”

  Her grin dimmed. “But sometimes they aren’t. The first time we met, your arm was in a sling and you were all bruised up.”

  The week before we’d first met, I’d been kidnapped in a grocery store parking lot, thrown in the back of a panel van by a father and son who’d just killed a fifteen-year-old girl, and held captive in my own home. That case had started out as a search for a missing person.

  “I don’t get involved with those kinds of cases anymore,” I said.

  It was something I’d made clear to Norton Greenburger when I’d agreed to work part time for him. I was more than willing to track down and interview missing witnesses, but I wasn’t about to investigate crimes to try to find evidence to exonerate his clients. The real perpetrators tended to take a dim view of that, which I’d learned firsthand last December.

  “Good,” June said. “I like you. You and your daughter, you’re what I call ‘good people.’ I don’t trust just anyone with my son, not if I’m going to let him stay for a day or two on his own.”

  I tried not to do a double take. So far all the kids’ visits had been fully chaperoned, one-day things.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think you’re good people, too.” I got up from the couch and picked up her empty glass to give myself a distraction. “Let me get you some more water.”

  I took the glass into the kitchen without waiting for a reply.

  Samantha hadn’t said anything about Jonathan staying with us overnight. The kids must have chatted about it online where they did most of their talking, but it would have been nice if she’d mentioned it to me.

  I shot a look down the hall as I brought June’s new glass of water into the living room. The door to Samantha’s room was still open. I could hear murmuring voices and the occasional giggle.

  My daughter was growing up. She had a boyfriend. I supposed I should be grateful that she didn’t put up a fight because I wouldn’t let the two of them spend time behind closed doors, but I still felt a little hurt that she hadn’t mentioned the possibility of Jonathan spending more than one day here—on his own—with me.

  It looked like we’d have to have a little mother-daughter chat. Not tonight. She’d be sad enough after he left, and I didn’t want to go into the discussion when her emotions were already heightened.

  No, I’d wait until tomorrow night. After a day of tailing Melody, I’d need a little mother-daughter time. And maybe by then I’d figure out the right way to broach the subject so we could talk about it logically.

  I hoped.

  CHAPTER 4

  BY NOON ON MONDAY I’d tailed Melody to the gym, to the bank, to a juice bar that sold smoothies and wheat grass extract, to the dry cleaners, and then back to the gym. I hadn’t caught sight of the man Ryan said was stalking her, and I’d begun to feel a little like a stalker myself.

  When Ryan had texted me her schedule the night before, he’d also given me instructions not to let her see me. That got under my skin at first. I didn’t need Ryan telling me how to do my job. I’d never told him how to run his law practice.

  Then I realized why he’d given me that specific instruction.

  He must not have told Melody he’d hired me to find the identity of her stalker.

  Did that mean he didn’t trust her?

  Or did that mean she didn’t want anything to do with me, so I’d be the last person she’d want following her around?

  While Melody and I would never be the best of friends, I’d never been one of those ex-wives who’d put the entire blame for the breakup on the other woman. The way I saw it, it took two to tango, as the saying went, and Ryan certainly bore his share of the responsibility for that particular dance.

  Not that I’m a saint. If I’d had Melody and Ryan voodoo dolls in the house immediately after Ryan left me, they would have both ended up with mysterious aches and pains and maybe a broken bone or two, and I might have slept better at night after exacting my petty revenge.

  Once I’d started to cope with the idea that my marriage was over, I’d also started to come to terms with the fact that Ryan, and by extension Melody—or her future replacement because lord knows she hadn’t been the only one who’d caught his eye over the years—would always be a part of my life because Ryan would always be Samantha’s father. Just because we didn’t get along anymore didn’t mean either one of us could make unilateral decisions about the major issues involved with raising our daughter.

  Or as my divorce lawyer patiently explained to me, Ryan and I would continue to have legal obligations to each other even after the divorce decree was signed. If both of us remained civil with each other and addressed those obligations like adults, we’d save ourselves a lot of grief and legal fees, not to mention spare our child any more fodder for future therapy sessions than she already had.

  Melody didn’t have the same obligations toward me, and I was fine if she didn’t want me in her life. As long as she treated Samantha well, and according to Samantha, Melody was nice but “she’s not you, Mom,” I was fine not having to interact with her.

  So—why had I agreed to shadow her? Possibly for days, until her stalker showed up?

  Oh, yeah. That’s right. Because I was trying to be friends with my ex, and he needed a friend.

  In the cold light of day, now that I was actually doing the job, I wasn’t so sure about the whole sap thing.

  I sighed and tried to get comfortable. World’s Biggest Sap was currently melting in the front seat of her car which was parked down the street from a trendy cafe on California Avenue a few blocks away from where Norton Greenburger had his office. Melody was inside the cafe having lunch.

  The cafe probably had air conditioning. I’d cracked the windows in my car, but I was still sweltering.

  She’d gone in the cafe alone, and I couldn’t see through the cafe’s front windows, so I had no clue who she was having lunch with. She could have made my job a little easier if she’d decided to eat at one of the little two-person tables on the sidewalk in front of the cafe, but then again, she might have spotted me just sitting in my car. I’d take what I could get.

  I settled in for the wait with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich I’d brown bagged that morning.

  Forty-five minutes later she came out the front door and headed toward the little parking lot on the side of the cafe. She was still alone, which seemed odd to me. If she’d met someone for lunch, wouldn’t they have all come out together?

  Less than a minute after Melody left the cafe, a man walked out. Like Melody, he was alone. He wouldn’t have caught my attention except for the fact that he didn’t immediately head toward the parking lot or down the street in the opposite direction, like he was heading toward a car parked on the street.

  No, this man just stood on the sidewalk in front of the cafe.

  I wasn’t the only one who must have thought that was weird. An older guy sitting alone at one of the outside tables looked up from his tablet and frowned. He’d been eating his lunch in solitary silence, alone with whatever was on his tablet. I hoped it was a good book. I read a lot myself, but so far I stuck to books of the dead tree variety.

  The man who’d disturbed Reader Guy’s lunch had a cell phone in one hand. While he might have looked like he was checking messages, it was clear, even from my vantage point, that he was faking it.

  What he was really doing was watching Melody.

  Hello, stalker suspect.

  I grabbed my camera. It’s a small digital model, but it’s got a built-in zoom that makes the clunky zoom lens on my ancient 35mm camera look like the Hubbell telescope in comparison. I steadied the camera on my steering wheel and zoomed in on the guy, and he jumped into high definition on the display on the back of the camera.

  He was tall and trim with an athletic build�
�sturdy shoulders, narrow waist, lean legs. He had dark hair cut moderately short in a style that made me think lawyer or banker, and he was wearing a conservative dark suit that could have put him squarely in either profession.

  I estimated his age at somewhere in his thirties—the little screen could only show me limited details, so I’d have to enlarge the pictures on my computer later if I wanted to check for crow’s feet or fine lines around his eyes and mouth. He was clean shaven and wore his tie snugged up tight even though the temperature outside was in the middle nineties.

  I clicked off a few pictures while he stood on the sidewalk outside the cafe staring after Melody. He could just be a horny guy who’d decided to check out the hot chick—Melody had gone to the cafe wearing an oversized tunic over slinky salmon-colored tights that left nothing to the imagination—but I didn’t think so. Something about this guy’s posture said his interest wasn’t casual.

  Was this Melody’s stalker?

  Would a stalker be that bold? I’d had a mental image of a guy lurking in shadows or hiding in his car, like I was, and conducting discrete surveillance of his subject. Not somebody standing out in the open checking her out like a guy at a singles’ club.

  I kept clicking off pictures, hoping that the guy would turn around and give me a few full face shots.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Melody drive her brand new Volkswagen Beetle out of the parking lot and onto California Avenue. She’d be driving right past me, but as long as I stayed still in my car, chances were she wouldn’t see me. From what I’d observed so far from tailing her, Melody was fairly oblivious to her surroundings while she was driving.

  I was so busy concentrating on the guy on the sidewalk who’d turned to watch Melody drive away that I almost didn’t see another car pull away from the curb and into traffic directly behind Melody’s car.

  The second car was a white SUV, a smaller model with tinted windows—what car salesmen liked to call “soccer mom” cars—and it had been parked on the street almost right in front of the cafe’s parking lot along with a bunch of other similar cars crowded against the curb.

  I hadn’t seen anyone get in the SUV. I would have noticed. Which meant that whoever was in that car, they’d been sitting inside the car at least as long as I’d been sitting in mine.

  Someone else doing surveillance?

  I refocused the camera and managed to click off a couple of quick shots of the white SUV as it drove past me, now a couple of car lengths behind Melody’s car. The sun glinted off the windshield at precisely the wrong angle. I’d hoped to at least get an impression of whether the driver was a man or woman, but I couldn’t tell. At least I thought I’d gotten a shot of the license plate.

  The whole thing with the SUV could have been a coincidence, but it didn’t feel like it. That car had been waiting for Melody.

  Had I seen it earlier today and not realized it? I had no idea. It seemed like everyone in the city drove an SUV, and a majority of the SUVs were white. Nothing I’d spotted on this one made it stand out from any other white SUV on the road.

  Then there was the guy outside the cafe. He’d hung around just to stare at Melody while he pretended to look at something on his cell phone.

  Or was he taking pictures of her with his cell? The newer cell phones could take camera quality photographs. I’d taken some of my own for Norton Greenburger.

  After a morning of nothing, I suddenly had two potential stalkers. The white SUV had been heading west on California. The guy on foot outside the restaurant was heading toward the same parking lot where Melody had parked her car. I couldn’t tail them both, so I had to decide which one to follow.

  Based on the schedule Ryan had provided, I knew Melody was working at the gym that afternoon. She coached spin classes at one-thirty and three, and wouldn’t be leaving again until at least four. If the SUV was tailing her, I knew where it would be. With any luck, I already had a license plate number, and if I didn’t, I could grab it later in the afternoon.

  The man on foot, on the other hand—I had nothing but his picture. No name. No license plate number. No fingerprint or DNA or even shoe size.

  I needed something else.

  I put my car in gear and drove toward the parking lot.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE MAN WHO’D BEEN STANDING on the sidewalk staring at Melody didn’t get into a car in the parking lot next to the cafe. Instead he cut through the lot on foot and kept walking down Hill Street toward downtown.

  Following a pedestrian with a car is no easy feat. Unless I wanted to piss off every driver behind me by coasting along at fifteen miles per hour, I couldn’t just tail the guy, and even if I did, all the blaring horns would blow the whole stealth aspect of the job.

  Nor could I just keep circling the block again and again. If he went into one of the many old houses that had been converted into offices that crowded the side streets in this part of Reno while I was on the other side of the block, I’d be screwed.

  I had to improvise. Luckily, I’d gotten good at this part of the job thanks to years of waiting out reluctant witnesses who didn’t want to be served with the subpoena or the summons they were trying to duck.

  The parking spots along both sides of Hill Street were crammed with cars, but there was an empty loading zone near the back of a two-story mansion that had been converted into office suites.

  I pulled into the loading zone, switched on my car’s hazard lights, and picked up a clipboard I’d stashed in the pocket behind the passenger seat. I pretended to look through the documents I kept on the clipboard—a phony but authentic-looking subpoena complete with notes on where to find a non-existent witness—while I kept one eye on Mr. Not So Subtle.

  He crossed the street in the middle of the block, and then cut across another parking lot, this one behind the Nevada Museum of Art. When he got through the parking lot, he headed east on Liberty Street, still on foot.

  I could barely see him now, so I pulled back into traffic. I got to the corner of Hill and Liberty just in time to see him go into one of the many bank buildings near the intersection of Liberty and Virginia Streets.

  I swore under my breath. This particular building had at least ten stories full of offices. I should have gotten out of my car and followed the guy on foot. Even though he’d been walking at a pretty good clip, I might have been able to follow him closely enough to tell whether he took the elevator, and to which floor.

  I did have one advantage, though. I had his picture on my camera.

  I parked in a space in the building’s attached garage earmarked for bank customers. Before I got out of my car, I brought up the clearest picture I’d taken of the guy on my camera’s display screen and then took a picture of the picture with my cell phone. The end result wasn’t perfect, but at least now it looked like something I’d snapped with my cell.

  I took a twenty dollar bill out of my wallet and shoved it in the pocket of my jeans, and I was ready to go.

  This building had a security guard instead of a concierge. The lobby where he sat was a vast open area with no locked gates or metal detectors, so I wasn’t quite sure what the elderly Hispanic security guard was supposed to secure. The entrance to the bank was at the other end of the lobby from where he saw behind a built-in desk. I doubted he could get to the bank in time do to anything constructive if robbers hit the place.

  Maybe his real purpose was to help lost souls. If that was the case, he was just the person I was looking for. Next to the man I was really there to find, that is.

  I put on my best “trust me” expression and headed toward the guard desk.

  He looked up from his own clipboard, and I smiled at him. He didn’t exactly smile back, but he didn’t look like he wanted to shoot me, either.

  “Hi,” I said. “I wonder if you could help me.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said. He had a faint accent, not exactly south of the border but definitely not a local.

  “This is kind of silly, and maybe
I’m being too honest, but I was having lunch at that cafe on California—you know the one all the lawyers go to?”

  His expression said he knew where I meant but it wasn’t someplace he cared to go.

  “Well, this guy dropped twenty dollars on the sidewalk.” I pulled the twenty out of my pocket. “I yelled at him, but I guess he didn’t hear me. He just took off down the sidewalk. I tried to catch him, but his legs are longer than mine. Plus, I’m not in really great shape.”

  I smiled again, this one a “what can I say?” type smile, and this time the guard smiled back. He had a few extra pounds around his middle himself.

  “I saw him come in here,” I said. “Maybe you could help me figure out who he is so I can give him his money back?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “A lot of people come in here. If you’re gonna describe him to me, I hope he’s got a missing arm or a flashy earring or some interesting tattoos. White guy in a suit would be most of the guys in this building.”

  “I can do better.” I pulled my cell from my pocket. “I have a picture.”

  Now he looked at me like I was nuts. “You took his picture?”

  I shrugged. “I was about to take a picture of myself outside the restaurant—a selfie, right?” Samantha had taught me that term. Up until this moment I’d never actually said “selfie” before. “I had the camera on. I never even thought twice, just snapped his picture.”

  I turned my phone around so the guard could see the picture of Mr. Not So Subtle. It wasn’t the best picture. I’d deliberately chosen one I’d taken by accident when I’d tried to get a picture of the white SUV. In the shot, the guy was clearly walking away from my position.

  The guard gave me a long look. “Lady, if you’re just trying to meet this guy, I have to give you credit for coming up with the craziest story I’ve ever heard. If you’re not, if you really just want to give this guy his money back, I’m not sure that means you’re still not crazy.”

  I tried to look sane and non-threatening. Sweat was running down my back and freezing on my forehead. The building didn’t skimp on air conditioning.