Dead Man Stalking (Barbara Marr Murder Mystery Series Book 5)

by Karen Cantwell

  We’d all given our statements, and I managed to talk the grumpy cop into not pressing charges against Roz and Peggy. By the time the police finished it was dark.

  Outside, we told Isbel, Red, Carney, and Wee Willy to meet us at the Peach Tree metro park and ride. Specifically, at bike locker number twenty-five.

  On the drive over, I noticed a lightning flash far to the west. Of course, I’d been otherwise occupied most of the day and had not seen any weather forecasts. “Is it supposed to storm tonight?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Bad,” said Roz.

  The wind was whipping the limbs around on the trees along Rustic Woods Parkway.

  Peggy tapped on the screen of her phone. “I just got a weather alert: Tornado Watch until 11:30 p.m.”

  I hated storms.

  By the time everyone had congregated with flashlights around bike locker twenty-five, the temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees and everyone’s hair tangled around their faces. Even Moyle’s ‘fro swayed on his head.

  Luckily, the commuter lot was extremely well lit. The bike locker itself was right under a street light.

  I positioned Peggy and Roz to my left and asked them to take out their guns.

  Isbel’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. I knew she was going to hiss, I could just feel it coming. “Hey!” she shouted. “What is this for? You are going to shoot us?”

  “No one is shooting anyone,” I said, “but this is protection in case anyone gets out of hand. Now, if we find a ticket in there, Vikki is taking possession of it and will read off the number. Who wants to check it against the winning number?”

  Wee Willy raised his hand. “I will,” he said. “It’s burned in my memory like a bad dream you can’t shake. Let’s hope this turns into a happy dream. I need me a happy dream.”

  I slipped the key into the lock. That part went easily. The turning part, not so much. I tried and tried, but it just wouldn’t turn. I pulled it out and then back in, trying again. Still it wouldn’t turn.

  “It fits into the lock,” I said, “so it must belong to these lockers, but it doesn’t turn. Moyle, are you sure it was locker twenty-five?”

  “Positive.”

  It seemed logical. Page twenty-five, locker twenty-five.

  “Try pushing and turning,” Red said. “That’s how the lock works at my gym. Push and turn.”

  Thunder rumbled in the distance, and I felt a drop of rain on my hand. “Push and turn,” I repeated. Pushing and turning was a winning combination. The plastic door of the locker swung up, revealing a long, dark cavern where a bike would fit. The locker was nearly empty. One lone, large duffel bag sat just inside the door with the initials C.C. in faded black ink.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The crowd pushed in for a look. I can’t blame them. I wasn’t getting any money out of this deal, but was so curious I was practically jumping out of my skin.

  I reached my hand in and pulled the duffel bag toward me.

  “That is my Cee Cee’s,” Isbel shouted. “There was more I knew. Open it. Open it.”

  “Everybody back,” I said. “I can barely breathe.”

  Instead of stepping backwards everyone shuffled in place, not really giving me any extra room. “More,” I demanded. “In fact, everyone take three large steps back, except Vikki and the ladies with the guns.”

  The others rolled their eyes like chastised teenagers, and moved back reluctantly.

  A flash lit up the sky and a moment later, thunder rumbled.

  “Hurry up, man!” shouted Wee Willy. “Lightning scares me.”

  I unzipped the duffel. It was filled mostly with clothing. I began pulling out each piece, one at a time. When I pulled a blue shirt out, a watch fell on the ground.

  “Hey,” said Red, “my father’s watch.”

  He really was looking for a watch. I thought for sure he’d made that up. I handed the watch to Vikki who gave it to Red.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “The ticket,” grumbled Carney. “Where’s the damn ticket?”

  Another flash of lightning snapped, this one close enough to make me flinch.

  “Faster, man,” Wee Willy yelled. “Faster. It’s a phobia, man!”

  Peggy put her gun down and began going through the pockets of the clothes I’d discarded. Meanwhile, one or two drops of rain were turning into three and four drops. It wasn’t a downpour, but that was coming soon enough.

  At the bottom of the duffel was a picture frame. I shined my flashlight on it. In the frame was a picture of Vikki and Cecil. Vikki looked to be about nineteen or twenty.

  “That’s a nice picture,” I said, handing it to her.

  She smiled. “It was his favorite picture of us,” she said. “He’d point to it and say, ‘Look at those two gorgeous people. Those are a couple of winners.’”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Winners!” shouted Isbel.

  Vikki broke the frame over her knee and picked the glass shards off a few at a time. When she had the photo out, she turned it over. I stood, afraid to see if we’d found what we’d been looking for, or if we’d just hit another dead end.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  As luck would have it, Howard had caught an evening flight out of Chicago that managed to land just before the storm hit. He’d sent several texts that I didn’t see until after the discovery at the commuter lot. By the time I finally responded, he may have been ready to call the National Guard to find me.

  Still wet from the deluge, I dragged my exhausted, bruised and battered body home with Puddles in tow. Howard was at the door, waiting, his gorgeous brown eyes confessing his relief.

  “How was your flight?” I asked. “Not bumpy I hope.”

  He pulled me to him for what should have been a very passionate moment.

  “Ouch,” I winced. “It hurts. Tread lightly.”

  “Where does it hurt?”

  I closed the door behind me. “Hm. My back, my neck, my eye, my face... everywhere. It hurts everywhere.”

  “Does it hurt here?” He brushed my cheek with a feather soft kiss.

  I smiled. “Not now.”

  “Does it hurt...” he lowered his lips to the curve of my neck, “here?”

  “Gee,” I moaned a little, “your kisses seem medicinal.” I pointed to my bruised eye. “Try here.”

  Soon we were embracing and smooching, and I forgot all of my aches and pains. Then I realized something was wrong.

  Actually, something wasn’t wrong, something was very, very right.

  “Is the air conditioning running?” I asked while Howard nibbled playfully at my neck.

  “Yeah.”

  I pulled back. “Don’t tell me you just turned it on and it started working. If you tell me that, I’m going to scream.”

  “I installed that capacitor you left on the table.”

  “In the rain?”

  He nodded. “I needed to keep my mind occupied. Otherwise I kept picturing you dead in a ditch somewhere.”

  I planted a huge smackeroo on his lips, which he returned with gentle, sexy tenderness.

  Don’t worry, I won’t go all Fifty Shades of Marr on you at this point in the story. I was far too exhausted to go even one shade. Thankfully, Howard was understanding. To help me soothe my weariness, he poured me a glass of wine and ran me a hot bubble bath. While I soaked my aching bones, I told him about my day.

  The water was lukewarm when I stepped out, wrapping the towel around me.

  “So we could still be in possession of the big winner?” he asked.

  “Theoretically,” I said.

  “How disappointed were they?”

  “Not terribly. Well, Isbel had a dramatic episode. But two million split five ways is nothi
ng to sneeze at. A few hundred thousand is still better than zero dollars. Red said he’s going to open another cigar store.”

  “So that one liquor store near the Winslow Building had the big jackpot winner and a two-million-dollar winning ticket on the same drawing?”

  I shook my head. “We don’t know. Isbel insists Cecil bought all of the tickets at the Winslow Building liquor store, but Moyle says he bought them all at different locations to increase his chances of winning. They’ll find out soon enough, I guess.”

  Howard handed me my pajamas. “What’s bothering you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I’m hiding things from you, I have my tweak, when you’re worried about something you have your twork.” He pointed to the area right between my eyebrows. “This tightens right here and makes the skin on your nose wrinkle.”

  “You’ve never told me that before. Why twork?”

  “I don’t know. I just made it up.”

  “Well unmake it. That’s an ugly word. Weird and ugly.”

  “So what’s bothering you?”

  “You’re going to think I’m off my rocker.”

  “Let’s face it, we passed the off-your-rocker exit a long time ago.”

  “He disappeared again. And I... I think I’m worried about him.”

  Howard frowned. “Worried about who?”

  “Moyle. Some time after the emotional dust had settled, he disappeared. He said that business about Cecil buying different tickets at different locations, then I was talking to Vikki. When I looked for him again, he was gone. Poof. Nowhere to be seen.”

  “Isn’t that usual for him?”

  “Yeah...”

  “So, just to be clear, you didn’t fall in love with this wacko, right?”

  I slapped him. “Stop it. I worry about him, that’s all.”

  “You like taking care of him. It’s the mother duck in you.”

  My eyes brightened. “Speaking of ducks, can we have one?”

  He pulled me in for another long, hot kiss that made my toes curl. And he did other things. Steamy arousing things that made me forgot all about lottery tickets and ducks and childlike wanderers who think they’re from the future.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The days immediately following the discovery of the ticket had been whirlwind for Vikki. She had agreed to an interview with Guy Mertz. Miraculously, that interview was picked up nationally. Not only was she able to tell her own side of the publisher battle saga, but she captivated the imagination of America with Cecil’s story of the lottery ticket. Overnight, her publisher dropped the suit. They were thrilled to enter discussions with Vikki on a new project: her plan to revise and edit Cecil’s novel. Carter Hoskens would publish Dead Man Stalking by Vikki and Cecil Cleveland in the new year.

  And with her interview going national, suddenly Arlen Arliss was given the green light to start production on the movie version of her first book. Long story short, her life had turned around both financially and creatively.

  And since she couldn’t share her happiness with the man she regretted not getting to know better, she wanted to share it with his dear friend, Moyle.

  So, several days after the ticket was discovered, Vikki and I drove to the homeless shelter looking for Moyle. He hadn’t appeared of his own accord and my concern for him had increased.

  At the shelter, a tall woman with kind eyes shook her head at us. “We haven’t seen him for nearly a week now.”

  “Is that normal for him?” I asked.

  “It can be. Sometimes he doesn’t come around for weeks. I have a friend who works at a shelter in Washington, D.C. She says he shows up there sometimes, but goes by a different name—Sam something...”

  “Sam Storm?” Vikki asked.

  “That’s it,” she said smiling. “Isn’t that a great name?”

  I handed the lady my card and asked her to please contact me if and when he showed up again. “We have good news for him,” I said. “He won’t have to live in homeless shelters anymore.”

  “That would be nice,” she said. “I wish all of the people here could get news like that.”

  That night, Howard and I met Vikki and Colt for a double date at an upscale waterfront restaurant in Georgetown to celebrate everyone’s good fortune. We chose to sit at an outside table and enjoy the cooler, dryer weather that had blown in after the storm.

  Colt’s protests at my double date idea had been weak at best. When I told him I’d cry if he didn’t agree, he buckled. And not because he can’t stand to see me cry. No, he had eyes for Vikki from the moment he met her. And sitting there under the umbrella on the outdoor patio, I could see she had eyes for him too. She’d styled her hair in a pretty bun at the back letting some wispy tendrils fall over her nearly bare shoulders. And she twirled a tendril self-consciously on occasion while laughing at any remotely humorous comment Colt made. The man was going to have to scuttle his pledge to give up women for a year, plain and simple.

  “So, Curly,” Colt said, squinting against the setting sun, “don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m glad to see your hair is more tame these days.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, for only three hundred dollars, JuJu at La Voila Day Spa gave me a cut I can wash and wear. Blow dryers and me just don’t jive.”

  Vikki whistled. “That’s a lot of money for a haircut.”

  Howard raised his glass of wine. “Thanks to Mariah Hahn, Baron and Marr Investigations now has two contracts for ongoing work with major companies, so I’m not as worried about paying for it.”

  While I sipped after Howard’s toast, Vikki focused on something in the distance past my shoulder. “That’s strange,” she said.

  “What?” I turned in my chair. “What are you looking at?”

  Trying to be discreet, she kept her hand close, but pointed to a set of tables at the Brazilian steak house next door. “That woman cleaning the tables. Does that look like Rosetta to you?”

  “Hard to tell.” I squinted.

  “I think that’s her,” Vikki said.

  “That’s the woman you hired, right?” Colt asked. “We did her background check for you?”

  She nodded. “I called her cousin yesterday to see how Rosetta’s mother was doing and to ask if he knew when she’d be back in town. He said her mother was still very ill and that Rosetta didn’t have any plans to return.”

  “It can’t be her then,” I said.

  The words were barely out of my mouth when the woman stood and began arranging the chairs neatly back around the table she’d been cleaning. It was immediately clear to see, the woman was Rosetta.

  She lifted her gaze momentarily, catching sight of us. Panic flashed in her eyes and she spun around.

  “I wonder if she didn’t like working for me,” Vikki said. “I don’t know why she’d feel the need to lie.”

  “Maybe she heard you were in financial trouble?” I pondered out loud.

  Rosetta scooted into the building, making sure to keep her head down and back facing us.

  “When I interviewed Mr. Chang about her during my background check, he did say she was a little odd. Very good. The best cleaner he’d ever had...”

  My voice trailed off while my mind started making connections it hadn’t before.

  “She brought her own cleaning products to your house, didn’t she?” I asked Vikki.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve had housekeepers before. Did they bring their own?”

  She shook her head. “No, actually. Rosetta was very particular. Very clean. I could eat off the toilet seat, I swear.”

  Colt winced at the toilet seat comment.

  I dialed Guy Mertz’s phone. No time for texts.

  Howard narrowed his eyes at me. “What are you doin
g?” he asked.

  “Guy,” I said when he answered, “Mr. Chang. The former employee. Where are the investigators on that, do you know?”

  “Hello to you too,” he said.

  “I don’t have time. There’s a woman who used to work for him, Rosetta—”

  “They can’t question her, she traveled home to...somewhere. South America. Mexico, maybe,” he said.

  “Brazil. Only she’s not in Brazil,” I said, “she’s working as a bus person at a Brazilian steak house in Georgetown.”

  “I’m calling the police,” he said and hung up.

  Commotion erupted at the outside patio of the steak house. A waitress had dropped a tray of plates and glasses. The patrons yelled and moved their chairs back. A man I took to be a manager waved his hand in the air and hollered into the building, “Rosetta! Come clean this up!”

  When she didn’t appear, he hollered again. “Get me Rosetta! Where is she?”

  The pandemonium next door had drawn the attention of nearly everyone around us.

  Rosetta peeked out of the doorway onto the patio, then stepped quickly back in, disappearing entirely. I stood, but Howard stood faster, glaring at me. “Sit,” he told me. “You call the police. I’ve got this.”

  Colt pushed his chair back and stood too. “We’ve got this,” he corrected Howard. “I don’t know what we’ve got. I’m in the dark here, but it sounds exciting.”

  Howard and Colt stepped over a cord that separated the two restaurant patios. Howard motioned Colt to talk to the manager, and he moved with a guarded stance into the building where diners ate at tables inside.

  While I dialed the police, Vikki pointed to a door at the side of the building. “She’s getting away!”

  I handed the phone to Vikki. “Give them our address. Tell them she’s wanted for questioning in a murder investigation.”