Deep-Fried Homicide (The Laurel Falls Mysteries Book 1)

by Patricia Lee Macomber

  “I just want to thank you guys for helping me out. I’ve never known anybody in my life who was that generous.”

  Rachel waved her off with a smile. “Aw, it weren’t nothing. We’d do the same for anybody.”

  Rick nodded by way of agreement.

  “Matter of fact, we all met under bad circumstance,” Rachel continued. “We sort of saved each other.”

  “Tell her how you and Rick met, Rach.” Logan grinned from behind his glass. “That’s quite a story.”

  “Rick, you tell it better than I do.” She winked at him for good measure.

  Rick put down his fork and wiped his mouth, his eyes suddenly sinking into the past and locking onto something that the others couldn’t quite see. “Well, I was in the Navy back in those days, before I became a cop.”

  “And I was in college, studying computer science,” Rachel added.

  “We were on liberty in San Diego and a bunch of the guys and I had gone out to this bar they all knew. I was never one for drinking, though, so I took off early and went to find a motel room for the night. Mind you, I had had one beer, but I wasn’t drunk. So, I turn the corner onto the main drag where all the hotels are, and I see this thin, tiny woman and she’s up against this little red hatchback that looks like it was new back when Nixon was president.”

  “It was,” Rachel laughed, covering her mouth.

  “And there’s this guy standing there with her. He’s got a knife and he’s pinned her against the car. Well, the guy has his back to me and Rachel doesn’t see me until the last minute, but I sprinted across the street and came up behind this guy. I grabbed his arm first, so he wouldn’t have control of the knife. Now, I’d been trained in all kinds of fighting techniques and I wasn’t that big in those days. Heck, I was only twenty-two. So, I wasn’t entirely sure that any of what I was doing would actually work.

  “I also didn’t know just how strong I was.” He looked down at his feet and chuckled for a moment. “So anyway, I grabbed this guy’s arm and I jerked it back, over his shoulder. And when I did it, I heard something snap. I figured at that second that I had dislocated his shoulder, but my adrenaline was pumping and, frankly, I was kind of scared. So, I gave his arm another hard jerk and at the same time I kicked his feet out from under him. As he went down, I twisted his wrist and the knife popped right out of his hand.”

  “My knight in shining armor,” Rachel giggled.

  “Yea. And suave dude that I was, I was still standing on his neck when I asked Rachel if she wanted to go out for coffee after we got done with the cops.”

  “How could a girl turn that down, I ask you?” She broke off in a high-pitched giggle that took ten years off her face.

  “And we went out for coffee and ended up talking until dawn. Then we went out the next night and the next and every night until I shipped out again.”

  “And on the night he shipped out, we went to dinner and he proposed to me.”

  “And by the grace of God, she said ‘yes.’”

  Rachel reached across the counter and took his hand, gave it a little squeeze. “And we’ve been happily married ever since.”

  “Wow!” Diane declared. “So, you two were brought together by a carjacking. Amazing!” Diane paused to take a long drink of her coffee. “So, how did you all meet Logan?”

  Logan’s eyes shot to Rick’s and his head shook violently, casting strands of black hair across his forehead.

  Rick stared him down, the corners of his mouth slowly pulling back into a smile. “It’s embarrassing. Maybe we’ll tell you later, when we know you better.”

  “Rick was a cop back in those days,” Rachel began. Logan shot her an angry look but she only paused briefly to giggle. “He let the Navy pay for his college and gave them eight years, then he went to work for the San Francisco PD. I had graduated college, too, and I was working at the hospital as a programmer. Things were a little stressed back in those days. Rick worked odd shifts and I worked at night mostly, so we didn’t see each other as often as we’d have liked. We were sort of like ships passing in the night.”

  “Come on, you guys,” Logan said dolefully.

  Rick continued slowly, carefully, checking Logan’s response every few sentences. “I was working another guy’s shift one Friday night. His wife had gone into labor and I stayed on to cover his shift at the last minute. We patrolled the downtown section of town and, as luck would have it, Logan was on liberty.”

  Logan slumped with resignation and shook his head. “I was in the Army. Special Forces, headed for Delta Force if I played my cards right. I will stress here that I was one of the good guys. Rowdy…but good.”

  “We got a call at about eleven-thirty that there was a disturbance in the alley just down the street from Candlestick Park. So, we put on the lights and siren and made for the alleyway. It didn’t take us more than about three minutes to make it there. We pulled up, ready for just about anything except what we saw.”

  “Oh God!” Logan exclaimed, letting his head drop onto the counter.

  “We pull up and shine the spots on the alley. There’s nobody around but we could hear footsteps running away from the scene. We figured we’d scared them off and could break for coffee…right up until I shined my light down the alley.”

  Logan shot a murderous glare Rick’s way and growled.

  Diane was on the edge of her seat, her face pushed back into dimples and her eyes shimmering.

  “I shine the light down in that alley and at first, all I see is the Dumpster, a stray cat, and a fire escape. But when I looked closer, that’s when I saw Logan. He’s sitting there on the ground, legs splayed out.” Rick started laughing and had to calm himself before he could continue. “He’s cuffed to the fire escape and…get this…he’s wearing a wedding dress and full makeup.”

  The women burst into a gale of laughter. No matter how many times they heard the story, Rachel and Macy found it hilarious. By contrast, Logan hung his head, studying his hands with dark eyes.

  “Yea, cuffed, wearing a dress, his feet jammed into high heels and a blonde wig on his head. The veil was pulled down so I couldn’t see his face. Naturally, I thought it was a woman, the victim of some sort of abuse or hazing or something. My partner and I got out of the car in a hurry and ran down the alley to see if we could help. By that time, Logan’s head had fallen onto his chest. He’d passed out again. And the closer I got, the stranger that woman looked until I got right up to him and could see the two day’s growth on his face. But when I whipped that veil back and got a look at his face….oh, man!”

  Again, Rick had to get his laughter under control in order to continue. “We managed to wake him up again and get the whole story out of him. Seems he had been out for two days, partying with his buddies and getting just about as wasted as a guy can get without actually dying. And he had the misfortune of being the only one to pass out. Once he was out, his good pals there decided to play a little trick on him. So, one got his mother’s wedding dress and another found his wife’s wig and makeup, and they went to town on him. And just for good measure, they took him out in the alley and cuffed him to the fire escape.”

  “And I want you to know that I was just twenty-one and that I never touched another drop of liquor again for the rest of my life.”

  Diane swiped tears from her cheeks. Her face hurt from laughing so much and her sides were in knots. “I think that would put me off it, too,” she said.

  “While we worked to get the cuffs off him, he told us the whole sad tale. We got to know him over the next hour or so and I figured he was an all right kinda guy but that he needed a new crowd to hang out with. So, we cut him free and stuck him in the car and took him back to my partner’s house to get him some clothes and clean him up. We never did turn him in or let on to what really happened. Our report simply said that we had responded to a disturbance and that by the time we reached the scene, the perps had already fled.”

  “And every time I had liberty or leave, I stayed wit
h Rick and Rachel. Once I’d gotten my degree, I decided that being shot at in foreign countries wasn’t the best life for me. Rick and Rachel had become disenchanted with their jobs and the big city, so when they asked me what I really wanted to do, I told them the truth. I wanted to be a chef.”

  “And we had the dream of owning our own business,” Rachel said. “Only we wanted to do it in a small town, away from the hustle and bustle.”

  “When Rick explained that he had been a cook in the Navy and tried out his chili recipe on me, I was sold. There was nothing to do but move somewhere quiet and open a restaurant.”

  Rick nodded and snorted. “We couldn’t decide where to go, so we bought this map and stuck it on the wall. Then we took turns throwing darts at it until we finally hit something with a population. And here we are.”

  “That’s not exactly all there is to the story,” Macy said sheepishly.

  “Oh yea! I can’t forget about you, Bob.” Rick ducked as she punched at his shoulder, making slight contact but posing no real threat. “Rachel, you tell this one. She’ll hit me if I tell it.”

  Rachel shifted in her seat and cleared her throat. “I grew up in a family that never did anything but work. We didn’t take weekend trips to the beach. We never went on vacations. My parents just worked. So, when Rick and I had some money in the bank, I suggested that we get a hobby. Something we could both enjoy, maybe get away once in a while. He originally joined the Navy because he loved the water and I knew he missed being deployed. I had always just felt wrong when I got too far from the water. And I had spent one summer with my aunt and uncle in Kennebunk, going out on their sailboat every chance we got. That’s why, when a friend of ours got transferred to Norfolk and he couldn’t take his boat, he sold it to us.

  “We used to keep it at a friend’s house on the bay and we used it every chance we got. When we finally got some vacation time that coincided, we decided to sail down to Long Beach. Yea. It was about as good an idea as you might think.” She broke off in a giggle then, shaking her head and smiling.

  “I’ll tell you now that we never made it out of the bay that morning and into deep water. And I’ll tell you why.”

  Beside her, Macy buried her face in her hands and pretended to weep.

  “We tacked out of the channel where our friend’s house was and everything was going well. We were in high spirits, anxious to hit blue water. All our supplies were stowed, we’d thought of everything. And the winds were just so perfect! About two miles out of the channel, just before we reached the last marker in the bay, we see this thing bobbing up and down in the water. We had started out early, so there weren’t even any other boats on the horizon. Most people were still docked, making ready to sail.

  “I squinted into the distance and poked Rick. He couldn’t tell what it was either, so I went below and got my binoculars.”

  “My binoculars.”

  “Yea, yea. Anway, I got the binoculars and looked out over the water. We weren’t sailing directly toward it but sort of at an angle to it and I asked Rick to correct our course to take us right over there. And the closer we got, the clearer the floating thing became. And the louder the noise grew. I thought I had heard something before, but it kept getting louder and finally I realized that it was somebody singing.” She broke off in laughter again, eliciting a groan from Macy.

  “We pulled up alongside this bobbing thing and only then did I realize that there was a woman, clutching her life vest and floating on her back singing ‘The sharks are gonna eat me, the sharks are gonna eat me, the sharks are gonna eat me and I’m gonna die.’” Laughter broke out and it took several minutes for calm to return.

  “I called out to her. ‘Ahoy! You there in the water. Do you need assistance?’ And she calls back, ‘Oh no! I’m fine. Just floating here in the water, amid the debris of my boat and waiting for the sharks. Don’t mind me.’ ‘Okay then,’ I answered, and we started to sail off. Then she panicked. Started thrashing around and screaming at us. I thought I was going to die laughing.

  “We fished her out of the water and explained our plans, that we were headed for Long Beach and weren’t planning to be back for two weeks. And that silly girl, all water-logged and crazy-eyed, told us it was no problem. She’d enjoy seeing Long Beach and we could drop her back by her house when we came back. Such a strange one, she was back then.”

  “So, did you take her?” Diane’s face was eager and joyous.

  “Yea, I don’t know why, but we took her with us. But we darn sure didn’t let her steer the boat. I mean, she’d already wrecked her own boat, ramming it into the blasted buoy. That’s how she ended up in the water in the first place. And once we got back to town, she found that her boyfriend had moved out, taken most of her stuff, and let the bills lapse. She threw up her hands and declared that her life was over, she might as well go back in the water where we found her. And since we already had plans in place to move out here, we told her that she was coming with us. We even thought for a while that she might make a good partner for Logan, if you know what I mean.” She winked at Diane, a lopsided grin stuck to her face.

  “But after about a week, we realized that was never going to happen. But we were all good friends by then. We were a good fit and we had a lot of skills to bring to the table. Macy, God love her, had an MBA. Just what we needed to start a new business. So, we grabbed everything we owned and headed out here. And lived happily ever after.”

  “Amazing. You’re all amazing.” Diane shook her head and chuckled.

  “Together we’re amazing,” Rachel said softly. “Separately, we’re each a hot mess.”

  “And now you’re a part of all this,” Rick added, sweeping his arms in a wide arc.

  “Yep. And that’s the story of how we all met and how we came to be here, running a small diner in a small town…”

  Logan finished for Rachel. “And loving it.”

  “And now, let’s shove our dishes into the hopper and head home. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m beat and we’ve got the meatloaf apocalypse coming.” Macy eased off her stool and took her dishes to the other side of the counter. Then she collected the rest of the dishes and carted the whole mess into the back room. “You guys go on home. I’ll clean up here and close up.”

  “Deal,” Rachel said, slipping an arm around Rick’s waist. “See you in the morning, guys.”

  Rick tugged her out the door and around the corner. It was their nightly ritual and they relished it. Walking the mile home gave them a chance to unwind, to separate work from home, and to depressurize when needed. They held hands as they walked, just as they had since the day they met. But tonight, they were quiet as they started off. The usual chatter and joking was delayed. Diane’s entrance into their lives had thrown their synchronicity a little off-kilter. They needed to digest it all, fit her square peg into their oddly-shaped hole.

  By the time they reached the house, Rick producing his key and Rachel grabbing the mail, the exhaustion had hit them. The door creaked open and the dim house exhaled a mixture of cat-box and potpourri.

  Rachel waved a delicate hand beneath her nose and pulled a face. “Guess what we need to do.”

  “Yea, I gotcha. You feed the cats and I’ll uncork some wine.”

  “Meet you on the sofa?” She smiled up at him, re-acquainting herself with his handsome face.

  “Deal.” He stooped to kiss the top of her head, noticing the way her eyes closed blissfully when his lips made contact.

  She watched him walk into the kitchen, no doubt expecting her to be right behind him. Then she slipped into the chair and turned on the computer. As she waited for the laptop to boot up, two blurs ran past, cats in search of food, bound for Rick’s ankles, no doubt.

  Eyes squinted, she focused on getting the URL right. She had only logged onto the security site once or twice. The system had only been put in as a precaution and – thank God – so far they hadn’t had to call upon it. Still, she could access the day’s video fro
m her own computer. And if her hunch was right, she would have some pretty darn good pictures of the robbers.

  Once she had logged on, she selected the video from the dropdown menu and waited. The player took a few seconds to load and it aggravated her.

  “You might want to come feed these cats before they eat your husband,” Rick called from the kitchen.

  “On my way,” she hollered distractedly.

  The video started and she fast-forwarded it until she hit the hour when the robbers had run past. In regular play mode, she saw them running down the street, past the camera. Then came the part where Rick dashed out the door after them.

  She slid the bar to the left and slowed it down, then paused just as the robbers came around the corner and faced the camera. Frame by frame, she advanced until she had the best possible picture of them. Two had ski masks, one did not. She screen-captured a close-up of his face and dropped it into her image software. Then she played it again, more slowly this time, until something caught her eye.

  The robber without the mask looked right at the camera as he approached it. Then one hand came up, slipping over so that his arm crossed his chest and he made a sign with that hand, extending the thumb, pinky and forefinger.

  “Damn,” she said softly.

  ”Gee, Morgan Fairclaws, I don’t know where your mommy is with your food,” Rick said loudly.

  “Coming,” Rachel called, more loudly this time.

  She clicked quickly through to the social network, typed in Diane’s name. Her page came up but there were no more than three posts a day on any given day; some days there were none. Obviously, she had been too busy with real life to worry about her virtual one.

  Rachel had to scroll back over two months before she found a picture of Diane with a man. It was marked simply as “Mike and me.” Rachel smiled and clipped the picture into her software.

  “What are you doing out there?” Rick yelled. His tone had become increasingly more frustrated, definitely bordered on angry.