I watched her as she paused in the doorway to let her eyes adjust to the watery light admitted by the Wharf Rat’s salt-sprayed windows. With hands in pockets and collar turned up against the outdoor chill, she had a young and somewhat vulnerable look. I pegged her at twenty-five, no more. Her hair was dark and curly, cut short against a well-formed head. A straight, rather narrow nose topped a mouth that looked as if it could smile easily. Her eyes were a warm brown, her skin fair. She wasn’t terribly tall, maybe five-five or so. But the straight-cut jeans held long dancer’s legs. I knew underneath the soft denim would be muscular calves and smooth elongated thighs ending in small solid buttocks that would be the perfect handhold. As she removed her jacket, the high, round little breasts nudged her sweater as if reminding it to touch them gently.
CAUGHT IN THE NET
An Alex Peres Mystery
Jessica Thomas
2004
Copyright© 2004 by Jessica Thomas
Bella Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First Edition
Editor: Karin Kallmaker
Cover designer: Sandy Knowles
ISBN 1-931513-58-9
For Marian Pressler
With many thanks for ‘giving’ me Fargo and his owner,
and for being a good friend, near and far.
And for my editor, Karin Kallmaker,
who guided me through ‘the first time’
with humor, patience and grace.
Chapter 1
We hadn’t been looking for trouble that day. We hadn’t been looking for anything, actually. But you never know when something is going to show up out of the blue and give you a solid kick in the tail and send you off in another direction. Right direction? Wrong direction? I’m still trying to sort it out. And it will be some time before I do, I can tell you that for certain.
It all happened in Provincetown, that strange and beautiful place where the men are pretty and the women are tough. And I’m one of the women. Not tough looking, actually. At five-eight with hazel eyes and wavy light brownish-red hair, I’ve been told by my grandmother that I’m beautiful and by my brother that Halloween is my best day.
As I move inexorably toward my mid-thirties, I find that I am less concerned about the one comment and less believing of the other.
Anyway, most of the local straight guys got the message early on in my life not to mess with me. Those that didn’t walked a little delicately for a while. Even nowadays I don’t worry overmuch about trouble from men, or women either, for that matter. Between my partner and me, there isn’t much we can’t handle.
My partner, my companion, my playmate and guardian against all things bad: Fargo is my love and my best friend. He’s a big ninety-pound black Lab with eager brown eyes and a keen nose and a really glorious deep bell of a bark. He walks ever close and alert by my side and only a fool would hassle me.
But Fargo and I do share a dirty little secret. One fall day, he and I were walking down by the marsh when a nearby duck hunter fired his gun, and I found myself flat on my back in the pine needles as Fargo tried to jump into my arms. Another time, on the beach, he and a chubby little black female Cocker Spaniel had been playing nicely together. They came upon a hamburger wrapper that must have had a tiny piece of food left in it. Fargo assumed it was his— he was bigger, wasn’t he?—and reached for it.
The snippy bitch bared every sharp little tooth and charged him. Once again I found myself on my back spitting sand. Once again his leap for safety caused us to leave the field in humiliating defeat. Eventually, I learned to forestall these leaps by grabbing his collar and doing a fast sidestep, but I had to face it. The mighty Fargo was a creampuff.
But he loved me and he made me laugh. He never asked why I was wearing that ratty old sweater, or why I never learned to cook or why I was sometimes late. He looked the protective part and he did his best and we both kept quiet about the other thing. Anyway, I was tough enough for both of us. I was hard because life had been thrown at me hard. And in my business, soft and sweet wouldn’t have hacked it anyway.
My business? I’m a private investigator. And how does a rather small resort town like Provincetown support a P.I.? Actually quite nicely, thank you. Don’t confuse me with the TV types of investigator. I can’t remember when my 9mm Glock was last out of my safe and on my person. Nor does it come immediately to mind the last time a beautiful woman whispered, “Oh, you are so brave. Take me, take me!” ten minutes after meeting me . . . or even twenty.
Still, like any PI, most of my business revolves around the less savory aspects of human nature. Like the tourists, God help us. I’ve always been fascinated by the change some people undergo the minute they are on vacation and a hundred miles from home, in a place where they are unlikely to run into anyone who knows them. People who, in their hometown would run after a stranger, calling “Stop! You’ve dropped a quarter back here!” become determined petty thieves on vacation. For instance, although I don’t investigate these little nuisances, there is the matter of purloined towels, ashtrays, glasses and salt and pepper sets.
Most middle and lower scale hotels, B&Bs and restaurants long ago gave up monogramming the above items in an effort to avoid theft. It has not worked. An amazing number of tourists walk out with nondescript towels, ashtrays and even bud vases from their rooms. They pocket plain glass salt and pepper sets, all the sugar packets and any cloth napkins found on a restaurant table. Who knows why they do it? No visitor to their homes will know that they lodged at the Bayside Bed and Breakfast or dined at the Savory Seafood Restaurant just from looking at the loot. And the purloiners don’t even get a little freebie, since eateries and lodgings factor these thefts into the cost of a meal or room anyway. Go figure.
My work is largely with people whose tendency toward larceny has gone a bit beyond Towels 101. They are usually people who attempt insurance fraud, most often by claiming personal injury. After all, if wearing an Ace bandage and limping a bit for a few days will get you a vacation paid for by an insurance company, why not? I see the same attempts at fraud over and over. Only the names are changed to protect the investigator from dying of boredom from the sameness of the stories.
And their lack of originality is eclipsed only by their greed. The victim-to-be will surreptitiously place a grape, a lemon slice or a pat of butter on the floor of the supermarket, bar or restaurant. Then they carefully step on it, sink to the floor with more or less grace and lie there moaning, “Oh! My back!” or “Ooh, my neck! I’m gonna sue!” It’s the same process for guest-house steps or a tricycle fortuitously left on the sidewalk. Or they will walk between the cars of the bumper-to-bumper, turtle-paced traffic of Commercial Street in the summer, fling themselves across a hood and start screaming.
Sometimes the less athletic will arrive at the emergency clinic around 2 a.m., claiming to have gotten food poisoning at a local restaurant, usually an upscale one, figuring they’ll get more money. Of course by now the vomiting has usually stopped (if it had ever started), so they are simply given some palliative or other and sent home clutching their proof of having seen a doctor, when they go to threaten the restaurant owner.
How prevalent were these thieves? Enough that no less than four Boston insurance companies kept me on retainer, and several others made sure I was up front in the old Rolodex. They paid me to make a fast, on-the-spot decision regarding potential claims. The obviously or probably legitimate I kicked back to the com
panies to be handled by their legal departments. The barely legitimate I could usually settle in a hurry and on the spot by waving a few large bills and a release form.
The openly frivolous were the most fun for me. Watching the bastards back down from the million dollars they initially swore they were owed, to a whining, “Look, just forget it, okay? Just forget it,” when I threatened them with arrest for attempted fraud was a treat. At this point I usually flashed my private investigator’s license, complete with a colorful replica of the Great Seal of Massachusetts. I kept my thumb over the word “private” and it worked like a dream! None of us rests easy around what we presume to be officialdom.
Then there was the occasional arson for me to look into, usually committed by a local resident who figured it might be nice to let the insurance company pay for the new roof. There was one time when a tourist damn near burned down a whole motel rather than pay two days room rent for himself and his family. I got a few divorce cases where one spouse wanted pictorial proof that the other had the nerve to enjoy life somewhere besides home. Once in a while I had to locate a missing heir in order to settle an estate. Fairly frequently, I investigated someone who was on the short list of potential hirees for a sensitive spot with a local company.
The runaways, those were the sad ones. They were usually twelve years old and up, where the parents had some cause to believe—or at least reason to hope—that the kid had headed for Ptown. We rarely found them. Usually they had been detoured— often terminally—long before they got here. Once in awhile we were treated to a tearful yet joyful reunion scene, with fervent assurances on both sides that family relations would improve. It kind of gave you that worthwhile, God’s in His Heaven feeling. For about an hour.
Most of this activity took place between April and October. After that, the majority of Provincetown more or less shut down until the spring, when once again the tourists would grace us with their heartily welcome, thoroughly despised presence. October to April was a time when most residents rested, went on vacation, repaired, redecorated—and drank.
I had already done the first four and was trying not to do too much of the fifth (no pun intended) until things picked up again. It was March now, so at least the days were longer and brighter. Still, I was sufficiently bored to be whiling away the lunch hour at my “other office” in the Wharf Rat Bar and happy to have picked up a small “case” that morning.
I had received a call from one Diane Miller, who wanted to see me “right away” on a “vitally important and sensitive personal matter.” People who had finally worked up the courage to call a PI always needed them “right away,” before—I suppose—they lost their nerve again and canceled.
I had visited the home of Ms. Miller that morning, and found her flopped moodily on a spotty couch, listening to a woman on a TV talk show confessing with obvious relish to a series of sexual exploits that would have put Caligula to shame. Ms. Miller’s four-year-old daughter was sketching on the picture window with a chocolate chip cookie, while her two-year old son rattled the bars of his so-called “play pen” cage and screamed.
Has any kid ever actually played in a “play pen”? All the ones I’ve ever seen seem to be practicing to rattle jailhouse bars, shriek their innocence and demand a lawyer, preferably at the taxpayers’ expense. Neither the house nor its occupants looked particularly appetizing, and I wondered briefly if the urgent problem might be to find a housekeeper and/or nursemaid. Finally, the TV was turned off, the daughter wrapped up and sent out to play and the son’s screeches assuaged by the remains of his sister’s cookie.
Unsurprisingly, Ms. Miller was “certain” that her husband Raymond was ah, seeing another . . . you know, woman and that she wanted some . . . ah, you know, information and . . . ah, pictures that would fix the son-of-a-bitch in case they were ever needed in, you know . . . court.
She had been delighted when I told her I would log her husband’s activities during whatever hours she specified and would take pictures of him entering or leaving any buildings at that time, alone or accompanied. Disappointment came when I explained I would not climb trees and peer through windows nor burst through locked boudoir doors to supply her with sexually explicit photos with which to pass the lonely hours. Outrage followed when I quoted my rates, and she almost told me to leave, which wouldn’t have particularly upset me. I didn’t much like domestic cases, and I didn’t much like what I had seen of the Miller family either.
I shoved the notes from my morning meeting in my pocket and took a belt of my beer, looking around from my back corner table at the Rat. In the summer most visitors seemed pleased by the determinedly nautical decor. Lobster pots and fishing nets hung from the ceiling, with starfish, crab and oyster shells hooked in them. The walls held binnacle lights, oars, buoys and ancient life preservers stuffed with cork. The tables boasted clam or scallop shell ashtrays. In one corner stood the engine room telegraph from a long-retired ferry, its indicator frozen on “All Astern Slow,” which seemed a proper designation for the Wharf Rat. Those of us who lived in Provincetown year-round had long since ceased to notice the decor, unless its generous coating of dust became caught up in a sneeze-provoking errant breeze.
As I checked out the other occupants of the bar I realized the late winter doldrums were still upon us. Customers were few. A couple of businessmen eating lunch. A single gal at the bar. I knew her. She would still be there at closing. Several fishermen gathered around a table toward the front. Harmon, more loose-tongued than his friends, argued loudly, “If the feds are going to make fish illegal with these damn quotas, you know some folks’ll find something that’s worth more money.”
His buddies grunted in surly agreement and the conversation was off and away on the ever-popular talk of drug runners. Everybody “knew” that “millions of dollars were made everyday” bringing drugs onto the Cape in certain fishing boats. Some drugs came in through New Bedford, some through Provincetown. They were picked up at sea from other fishing boats or various cargo ships and brought ashore, where they were variously disseminated— perhaps wind-borne—throughout New England.
I listened with half a mind. Maybe everybody “knew,” but nobody seemed able to “prove,” so what was all the posturing about? When I heard one man say confidentially that he had it on high authority that the drugs were being landed on Truro Beach from a Pakistani submarine, I knew it was time to get some fresh air.
When I got in the car, Fargo greeted me with a sorrowing look that told me I’d been gone too long to suit him. “Mea culpa, Fargo, how about a run on the beach?” He lapped at my face and wagged his tail in a circle that I took to mean yes, and we drove out to Race Point. It’s usually deserted this time of year, but there was one other vehicle in the lot, a large van with Jersey plates and a noisy family of four eating sandwiches. No matter what the season, the tourists are never quite gone these days—the only cash crop left that is both legal and without quota.
The storm from the night before had left as swiftly as it had come, and the empty beach was littered with the detritus the sea doesn’t want and flings back at us from time to time: fishermen’s boots, heavy gloves, tangled lines, plastic boxes, broken lobster pots, cans and bottles mixed among the more natural and less objectionable litter of logs, seaweed and shells. I wished I’d brought my camera. Post-storm debris often provided dramatic or even humorous combinations of items for great photos. And I take a lot of photos. It’s not just a hobby with me, but also a sort of secondary job that’s rewarding, both emotionally and financially. There’s a good and growing market, and I enjoy tapping into it. The camera, however, was safely—and uselessly—at home.
But the sky was that bright clear blue it only gets to be after a storm, and the sea was a calm blue-green with delicate little wavelets lisping almost apologetically along the shoreline. It didn’t get much better.
Fargo had gone ahead of me, running off some of his incredible energy. He plunged in and out of the shallow water as if it were August,
stopping now and then to dig frantically at some small burrowing critter which he never caught and probably didn’t want to. Then he went up on the dry sand to check out something that had been cast ashore.
He looked at it sideways and then barked. He pawed at it, backed off and wagged his tail and barked again. I called him but he didn’t come. Now that was rare and I started toward him. I really hoped he hadn’t found some small animal or bird alive and wounded by the storm. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with it.
I caught up with him, collared him and pulled him away. It was only a man’s sneaker. What the hell did he find so fascinating about that? Then I realized I really wasn’t going to be in the mood to deal with this.
Inside the sneaker was a foot.
Chapter 2
Having been unfairly yelled at and yanked around, Fargo sat staring out to sea with a sour look on his face, thinking—no doubt— of the many injustices he suffered in our relationship. I stood beside him, staring out to sea with a sour taste in my mouth, trying not to think about that effing sneaker with the white bone sticking up, sheared off rather neatly right above the ankle, and the pale, porcine-looking flesh that surrounded it. Where the bloody hell had it come from?
Oh, it came via the sea, of course. I knew that. But where in the sea? From the looks of it, it had to have been cut off by a boat propeller or some other machinery . . . or perhaps a saw. Not that I was any expert, but somehow it did not look as if it had been surgically removed. Anyway, I thought, with only a marginally hysterical giggle, wouldn’t the surgeon have removed the shoe before he removed the foot?
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