What others are saying about My Boss is a Serial Killer
"This story of a burly detective, a spunky legal secretary, and her obsessive-compulsive boss is wildly funny."
Foreword Magazine (March/April 2009)
"Paralegal Harlin pulls out all the stops in this witty, catty and romantic mystery debut . . . Harlin's memorable, entertaining characters populate a well-crafted mystery that keeps readers guessing to the end."
Publisher’s Weekly (February 2, 2009)
"Mixing hot suspense, sexy romance, and wonderfully quirky characters, Harlin's My Boss is a Serial Killer is one for the keeper shelf."
Gemma Halliday, author of the High Heels series
"John Grisham and Danielle Steele seemingly meet head on in Christina Harlin’s wonderfully entertaining debut novel, My Boss Is A Serial Killer.”
Susan Gregg Gilmore, author of Looking for Salvatoin at the Dairy Queen
My Boss is a Serial Killer:
A Tale of Murder, Romance, and Filing
Christina Harlin
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Christina Harlin
Visit the author at http://www.christinaharlin.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Chapter One
I worked for Bill Nestor almost three years before a sexy detective started asking questions about dead women.
The detective came to our firm on a Wednesday afternoon. Markitt, Bronk, Simms & Kowalsky, diminutively known as MBS&K, was only a mid-sized law firm in mid-sized Kansas City, Missouri. But any person in any office across the nation can tell you that Wednesday afternoons rival Monday mornings for being the worst chunk of time all week long. When Lucille paged me, it had been 2:30 for the last hour and a half.
From the overhead speaker I heard: “Carol Frank, call the operator please.”
I was doing some work for a pain-in-the-ass paralegal named Suzanne, typing a deposition summary wherein two grown men argued for four hundred pages about how many screws it takes to effectively mount ceiling tiles. You might find it hard to believe that so much animosity and dispute could arise over the pattern of screws in a ceiling tile, but believe it you may. Screw, screw, screw, I typed. Screw this, I had been thinking when my summons came from above.
“Carol Frank, call the operator please!”
Lucille doesn’t like to be ignored. She is the princess of her little domain. I called her as commanded.
“There is a Detective Gus Haglund here to see you.”
“A cop?” This was surprising. I wondered if my complaints about our parking arrangements were finally being acknowledged by someone important. We’d had a rash of license plate sticker thefts. Having grown tired of hearing the other staffers complain, I called building security (one guy named Danny) to see if the police could do something. Our garage security was a ridiculous affair anyway. They made us employees carry keycards to get our cars in and out, yet no one paid any attention to our cars once they were admitted. I suppose the point was to cause annoying delays to kidnappers transporting victims in their trunks. At any rate, our license plate stickers were not safe. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover Security Guard Danny was the one stealing them.
Lucille answered, “Yes, a cop. Oh, and are you still expecting that call from Bobby Lane?”
This fully caught my attention. Bobby Lane was office code for “attractive man.” My visitor met with Lucille’s approval, and she assumed he would also meet with mine.
Encouraging! I hurried toward reception.
A helpful art print hung on the wall just before the lobby. It was just some modern piece of crap, but it had a fabulous reflective casing that allowed a woman to check her appearance for any embarrassing mishaps. So I gave myself a good once-over before greeting the promise of a Bobby Lane. I was a thirty-year-old, studious-looking brunette, and sometimes people (particularly those like my stupid ex-husband) liked to project a dark bookishness onto me, hoping I would be a mysterious, depressed dramatic figure, perhaps on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Actually I was a content and undemanding woman, and my mother always told me I was very pretty when I smiled. That’s not as exciting as a suicidal beauty with her nose crammed in a book of philosophy, I’ll admit—but my type is a lot easier to deal with and less expensive to entertain.
Lucille was happily chatting with an adorable man. Our receptionist was very good with men. Rumor had it that twenty-five years ago Lucille had been a beautiful, slutty girl who had dated many members of the Kansas City Chiefs—often more than one at a time. She still believed herself to be every bit as gorgeous as she once was. She had the honeyed accent of rural Georgia, and it never failed to make men stupid and accommodating. Half the time when I found her with a new victim, he was inquiring about where she was from and she was confessing to her Southern upbringing as if it made her shy.
“…from Georgia,” was in fact what she was saying to Detective Adorable. “Not Atlanta but pretty close nearby.”
“I’ve been to Atlanta,” he replied, “and to that town where Jimmy Carter was raised. What was that town called?”
“Plains.” Lucille’s eyes shone. Being the only native Georgian in the office, she still called President Carter her governor. “Did y’all have some Billy Beer?”
“I was only eight at the time,” he said.
“Now I’ve gone and shown my age.” Lucille groaned as if miserable. In truth she loved to let everyone know she was fifty because she looked pretty damned good for fifty.
“Hi,” I said, thrusting out my hand. Left to her own devices Lucille could flirt until Judgment Day and overshadow mere mortals. “I’m Carol Frank.”
Detective Adorable shook the offered hand. Touching him made me feel all yummy inside. This was, in large part, because he was a bright spot on an otherwise endlessly awful Wednesday afternoon. He could have had a hunchback and an extra head and probably still elicited some enthusiasm from me, but he was a cutie-pie. Screw, screw, screw, I thought dizzily. He had a friendly, innocent blue-eyed look about him, sweet and almost dopey, with loosely curly, dark blond hair probably worn a little too long for departmental regulations, and a round and cherubic face, cheeks and all, with a little bow mouth that could erupt—alarmingly—into a heart-stopping lopsided grin. He did that right then, and it almost knocked me over. This was a detective? He must be either terrible at his job or fabulous at it. Maybe no suspect could see that grin coming.
“Oh, hi,” I said. Had I already said hi? “I’m Carol Frank.” Had I already introduced myself?
He caused further havoc by showing me his badge, which he pulled out of his inside jacket pocket and flipped open just like they do in the movies. Augustus Haglund was his full name, I noticed.
“Detective Gus Haglund, KCPD,” he said, raising an eyebrow at me.
“How can I help you?” I asked, hoping for an answer that had to do with nudity.
“You’re Bill Nestor’s secretary?”
I agreed that I was. We had so much in common, this detective and myself.
“I understand that he’s out this afternoon. I was wondering if I could arrange some time tomorrow to speak with him about Adrienne Maxwell.”
Oh, yes. Adrienne Maxwell. I might have seen this coming.
; Then came the really shameless part, because I could have been done with this in four seconds by saying, “Come by any time from eight to ten tomorrow morning; he’ll see you then.” Bill trusted me with his calendar and I kept a close eye on his schedule. Bill wouldn’t mind meeting with a detective about his recently deceased client. But since I had nothing waiting for me at my desk but the screw deposition and a big stack of mail to post, I decided that Augustus Haglund was going to take as much of my afternoon as was possible for me to give.
“Lucille,” I said with great seriousness, “do we have a free conference room where the detective and I can look at Mr. Nestor’s schedule together?”
“Conference Room 3 is open,” replied Lucille helpfully. Her eyes were glinting.
“Follow me,” I instructed. “Can I get you a coffee? Coke? Are you allowed to have mind-altering substances while on duty?”
Detective Haglund said he would like a Coke very much and so, after offering him a chair at the conference room’s round table, I sprinted away to get it for him. In our lunchroom I searched desperately for a clean glass. There was a power struggle underway between the cleaning staff and the file room crew over whose responsibility it was to start the dishwasher and, as a result, we seldom had clean glasses. Giving my new friend a lipstick-stained glass didn’t leave the impression I wanted, but washing a glass myself might take extra precious moments of Detective Adorable Time away from my afternoon.
Like a stealth bomber, Charlene Templeton materialized at my shoulder, startling me so badly I almost dropped the glass I’d found. Charlene’s age and size belied her ability to move silently. She wasn’t fat but she was a big woman—broad-shouldered, log-legged and built like a cylinder from top to bottom—and she was well over forty years old. She moved slowly and complained that she had bad knees, so one expected her to wheeze and groan when she moved but she was as quiet as a cat burglar. Though her face was round and apple-cheeked, her auburn hair was streaked liberally with gray, and she looked a lot like everybody’s youngish grandmother; she was not a person I’d recommend tangling with in any capacity. She was a career secretary and damned serious about it. Working for Aven Fisher, she had to be brilliant. Divorce attorney Aven Fisher—a decent human being but a legendary workaholic—demanded an utterly devoted secretary who could remember hundreds of tasks and details simultaneously, and I had never known Charlene Templeton to forget anything. Her steel-trap mind had another advantage: the woman knew absolutely everything that happened in the office. She’d probably known there was a cop here to see me before I had.
“Why are the Kansas City Police rousting you?” she asked, as soon as I’d regained my wits from the scare she’d given me.
“It’s about Adrienne Maxwell.” I resumed my anxious search for a Coke and the ice machine. Happy nerves had rendered me almost too giddy to function. I couldn’t remember the order in which these tasks had to be performed.
“Lucille says he’s a Bobby Lane. Oh, here.” Charlene plucked the glass out of my hand and set about filling it with ice and soda.
“He’s a doll,” I declared vehemently. “And he’s a detective. I feel like I’ve won some kind of Wednesday-afternoon lottery.”
“Well, don’t let him bully you into breaking confidentiality just because he’s cute,” she warned. “You can’t talk to him about anything to do with our clients.”
“Now don’t mother-hen me,” I told her. Charlene seemed sometimes to think that she was the only one with an ounce of common sense. “I don't plan to discuss business at all, if I can help it. I want to hear the story of his life and hopefully about how he’s never found a woman he could really love before.”
She granted me one of her rare, flat smiles. “Maybe you can ask him to catch our food bandit.”
I refrained from doing a double take, and pretended I didn’t know exactly who the food-bandit was. I said instead, “Then he can look into our license plate sticker thefts. With luck, I can keep him here all week long.”
“Well, let me carry this in for you. I want to see him up close.”
I’m sure we looked like a ridiculously redundant duo when we returned to Detective Haglund. I was carrying Bill’s black calendar and a fistful of business cards, and Charlene was only holding a glass, but the detective was perhaps smart and/or experienced enough to know that his presence caused a lot of curiosity and speculation, especially around bored secretaries. Charlene eyed him and then left us in her discreet and silent way, closing the door behind her. I would have to give her a big hug for that later.
“So,” I said to Detective Haglund, perusing the hard copy of Bill Nestor’s calendar as if it merited careful study. “What time were you thinking of coming by?”
“The earlier the better,” he said. “Your office is on my way to work.”
“Eight?”
“Sounds great.” He drank his soda and smiled at me again. Before taking a chair, he’d removed his jacket and confirmed what I’d suspected about his body already. He was a big guy, with very good, broad shoulders and a thick solid build with hard-as-wood muscles like a hockey player. There was a hint of softening about him, a little weight gain that showed age was sneaking around his tummy. He was in his mid-thirties, I guessed, so that was typical but very sexy to me. I liked men who enjoyed eating and weren’t so vain that they freaked out about carrying ten extra pounds. And it feels nice, to rub against a tummy that has a little give to it. I would have liked to have rubbed his tummy right then.
The small conference room was quiet and softly lit, a simple room with nothing more than a table, some chairs, and a speakerphone, plus more bland modern art. If the attorneys wanted to impress a client or scare an opposing counsel this wasn’t the room where it was done. Since I felt cozy and overly warm, I gave in to the atmosphere and became more candid.
“Of course, I didn’t have to drag you in here to write an appointment down.” I closed Bill’s schedule dismissively. “You said you wanted to meet about Adrienne Maxwell, right? The suicide from last week.” Adrienne was an estate client of Bill’s, and she had overdosed on pills the week before. I asked, “Do the police usually investigate suicides?”
Detective Haglund broke eye contact with me.
“You’re probably not allowed to give me details.” I glanced behind us at the conference room door as if to ensure our solitude. “I imagine that there’s usually a good reason, when a suicide is investigated. On television, it means that it wasn’t a suicide at all, but a murder.”
“Well.” Detective Haglund made a production out of drinking his Coke some more, stalling for time.
“You probably get tired of people telling you what they saw on television.” Stupid man, I thought. I didn’t care about the case. I didn’t care if Adrienne Maxwell had been eaten by sharks. I was trying to have a conversation. “I can’t stand watching lawyer shows. They get all the details wrong. Besides, after I spend all day with lawyers, I can’t stand the thought of spending all night with them, too.”
“But you like detective shows?”
“Oh sure. I like spending the night with detectives.”
Allow me to pause here and say I was not normally given to blatant double entendre. I was not by nature a flirt or a tease. I’m sure I was acting up because of some pervasive chemical imbalance in my brain brought on by the screw deposition and the general malaise of Wednesdays. Members of an office’s staff will do desperate things to break the cycle of boredom. Flirting with the detective was a better option for me than, say, crawling under my desk and stabbing my hand with a letter opener.
My comment, awful though it was, caused Detective Haglund to smile—not the killer grin, but a cutie-pie smile this time—and he even laughed a little. He said, “I don’t watch much television.”
“I watch it almost constantly.”
We looked at Bill’s closed schedule together, eye contact once-removed. I felt it as clearly as if he’d put his hand on mine.
To my new friend I
said, “I’ll retrieve her file from storage tonight so Bill can review it before your meeting.”
My new friend said, “I may need a copy of it.”
“Bill is very vigilant about confidentiality, just like you.”
“I have some papers…” Detective Haglund produced a stack of documents folded lengthwise. He went through the stack to show me court orders, warrants, and releases but I wasn’t really listening. This would all have to go through our risk management people anyway; the contents of the documents weren’t really my problem. Secretaries are fairly good at figuring out what matters are not their responsibility and ignoring them. I was taking note of things about the detective, for later when I would be grilled by my coworkers. One—no wedding ring. Two—no cologne. Three—no cigarette smoke. It was really very cute that he thought he could show me all those important papers and I’d be able to do anything about it.
“These will have to go through Mr. Miller,” I told him. “Is it all right if I keep them tonight and return them to you tomorrow? I can arrange for all your paths to be cleared before you talk to Bill.”
“Would you do that?” Detective Haglund’s friendliness attained a new gravity.
This was my chance to show him the real extent of my powers. Secretarial power is a vague thing and seldom seen or appreciated. We’re like the folks who work backstage at a play: we’re doing our job best when you never realize that we’re there.
I said, “I’ll take care of it, but after you leave. Mr. Miller is our quality assurance maniac and the go-to guy for confidentiality matters. If I take these things to him while you’re here, he’ll want to meet you. That’s code for interrogation. Before you realize it, you’ll be up to your chin in a departmental meeting and you’ll probably be billed for the time.”
Detective Haglund’s face grew solemn at my joke, and I sensed a past run-in with an attorney.
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