Death, Taxes, and a Shotgun Wedding

by Diane Kelly

  “It doesn’t look safe to drive. I’ll get a tow truck out here.” With that, she squeezed the button on her shoulder-mounted radio to contact the Dallas PD dispatcher.

  Being the sweet dog that she was, Daffodil seemed to realize that the girl, too, was rattled. She looked up at her and wagged her tail, giving a soft woof? of concern. The girl crouched down and ran her hands over the dog, the effect seeming to soothe them both.

  The officer pulled a notepad and pen from her pocket. “Either of you ladies get a look at the person driving the truck?”

  “I didn’t,” the girl said. “I didn’t even see the truck. All I saw was the mailbox flying out into the street and the airbag coming at me.”

  The cop shifted her gaze to me.

  I raised my palms. “Sorry. It all happened so fast and there was a glare on the windshield from the morning sun.”

  “Can you at least tell me whether there was anyone in the truck besides the driver?”

  I shook my head, knowing my responses had to be frustrating her. I felt the same way when a witness was unable to provide helpful information in my cases.

  “Did you recognize the truck?” she asked.

  “No. It was just a typical white pickup.”

  “Make or model?”

  “Couldn’t tell ya.” I should’ve paid more attention.

  “Anybody got a reason to try to run you down?”

  I issued an involuntary snort in response.

  She arched an intrigued brow.

  “I’m a special agent for IRS Criminal Investigations,” I explained. “Since I joined the agency last year, I’ve arrested an ice-cream-truck driver, several businessmen and tax preparers, a televangelist, the leader of a secessionist group, members of a terrorist operation, a drug-dealing pimp, a country-western singer, members of a drug cartel, a mafia boss, a guy who’d catfished women online, a local talk radio personality, and a human smuggler.”

  “Among others,” Nick added.

  The woman looked up and down my relatively scrawny five-feet-two-inch frame. “Never would’ve taken you for such a badass.”

  “Most people don’t,” I acknowledged. “Sometimes that works to my advantage.” I told her that despite my numerous arrests, I wasn’t aware of anyone in particular being after me. “This whole thing could have been nothing more than an accident.” Maybe the driver had been using a cell phone and accidentally hit the gas and swerved our way. Or maybe the driver panicked after hitting the mailbox and had driven off to avoid the repercussions. After all, distracted drivers and hit-and-runs were not uncommon.

  “Maybe.” She wrote down my contact information as well as the girl’s. “If anything comes up, I’ll be in touch.” She slid her pen and notepad back into her pocket. “In the meantime, let’s see about getting that mail rounded up. Sure seems to be a lot of it.”

  “I’d just mailed our wedding invitations.”

  She cut me a look. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  She shook her head. “I hope you don’t believe in bad omens.”

  While the police officer held traffic at bay with a raised palm, Nick and I scurried about, collecting the envelopes and stuffing them back into my bag. I found three in a storm drain. Some of the invitations had ended up lodged in the branches of nearby trees. Fortunately, Nick was able to reach those or get them down by shaking the branches until they fell. Many of those that had landed on the road bore telltale tire marks. But at least the addresses on all of them were still legible.

  After we finished collecting the envelopes, Nick grabbed the dented mailbox and dragged it up onto the curb. He looked inside and found a couple more invitations lodged between the frame and the damaged door.

  The tow truck arrived, followed by the girl’s mom. The anxious mother eyed the squashed front of the Fiesta, leaped from her car, and ran over to wrap her arms around her daughter. “I’m so glad you’re okay!”

  Cocooned in her mother’s embrace, the girl burst into fresh sobs.

  Her mother eyed me over her daughter’s shoulder. “What happened?”

  “A truck came out of nowhere and hit the mailbox. It flew into the street. Your daughter was coming up the road and had no time to stop.”

  Her eyes narrowed and her jaw flexed. “Was it a drunk driver?”

  “Could be,” I said, though it seemed too early for anyone to be drunk. Then again, maybe the driver had gone to brunch and downed a few too many mimosas. “Or it could have been someone on a cell phone who accidentally hit the gas pedal. There’s no way of knowing.”

  Nick, Daffy, and I parted ways with the two. “Take care.”

  When we returned to Nick’s town house, I overturned my bag on Nick’s kitchen table.

  He took one look at the dirty envelopes and groaned. “This sucks. I know how much time you spent on those.”

  Money, too. The invitations hadn’t come cheap. Neither had the postage. “Besides the time it would take to readdress the invitations,” I said, “we’d have to pay a rush fee if we reorder. I say we send them as is. They don’t look pretty, but at least they’re intact.”

  He stepped over and pulled me into another hug. “That’s one of the many things I love about you.”

  “What is?”

  “You don’t sweat the small stuff.”

  We sat down at the table and compared the names on the envelopes to the guest list, making sure we had them all. We did. Phew.

  The crisis now contained, I fixed Daffodil four of my world-famous fried baloney sandwiches and hand-fed them to her, all the while singing her praises. It was the least I could do for the dog who’d saved my life. “You’re a good girl, Daffy. My hero!”

  She wagged her tail in appreciation and wolfed the food down.

  * * *

  Little did I know that outgoing mail wasn’t going to be my only problem. Turned out a certain piece of incoming mail would bear a surprise for me, too.

  At work on Monday afternoon, my ears picked up the squeak-squeak-squeak of the mail cart as it rolled up the hall. Someone should oil that darn wheel. The young clerk stepped into my office with a small stack of envelopes and paperwork and slid it into my inbox.

  I was on my phone, arguing with an attorney who’d been hired to defend a target in one of my tax cases. I gave the mail clerk a smile and a thumbs-up in appreciation for his delivery services as I reamed the lawyer. “The records your client sent over are incomplete. There were none of the invoices we asked for. Either you send the rest of the documentation over by one o’clock on Friday or I’ll be out to arrest your client that afternoon.” With that I hung up the phone. I’d had enough of his and his client’s bullshit.

  I reached over and pulled the stack of mail from the tray. At the top was a postcard advertising a continuing education workshop on the finer points of oil and gas law. No, thanks.

  Next was an envelope containing a check for $47,368.92 made out to the U.S. Treasury, payment of a settlement I’d negotiated. Good job, Tara, I mentally told myself. You’re a superstar! Okay, maybe that was a bit too self-congratulatory, but it’s not like the American public ever thanked us for doing our jobs. Heck, most people didn’t even know there was such a thing as the IRS Criminal Investigations Division or a special agent who carried both decimals and weapons. I can’t tell you how many times someone saw the holstered Glock at my waist, gasped, and exclaimed, “Auditors carry guns?” We IRS special agents worked in the shadows, like Batman. Of course some might say that cockroaches also worked in the shadows and liken us agents to the filthy bugs, but those people would be assholes.

  The third piece of mail was an interoffice memo from Viola reminding the staff that any items left in the refrigerator at 4:30 on Friday afternoon would be tossed out. One too many tuna sandwiches had been left to grow fuzz over the weekend. While I didn’t enjoy the stench when I went for my coffee creamer in the fridge come Monday morning, the shades of blue and green mold could be quite pretty if you didn’t th
ink too much about their source.

  My last piece of mail was a pink greeting-card envelope. There was no return address on the front. I turned the envelope over. None on the back, either. That’s odd. Looked like the sender must have forgotten. I checked the front again. The postmark indicated the piece had been mailed from somewhere in Dallas last Thursday.

  I opened the envelope and pulled out the card. It was a flowery model, with “You’re Engaged” written across the front in a fancy font. How nice, I thought. Our first formal well-wisher.

  But when I opened the card, I realized I’d been sorely mistaken. The preprinted message “Best Wishes for a Lifetime of Happiness!” had been marked through in thick red ink. Instead of the sweet sentiment, the sender had instead scrawled a handwritten message. “At Death You Will Part.”

  Uh-oh.

  Remember what I’d said about trouble always finding me? Looked like it had found me again.

  chapter three

  Best Wishes, Death Wishes

  While I had eventually written off yesterday’s near-miss with the pickup as a random event, this card told me it might not have been. The driver of the pickup could have actually been trying to kill me. Given that the card had been mailed from within the city last Thursday, the sender might have assumed I’d receive the card on Friday, prior to their attempt to run me down. If not for the fact that the mail clerk had taken a vacation day last Friday, I probably would have received it then. Viola had sent an e-mail to the agents telling us to sort through the mail ourselves if we were expecting something important. Given that I hadn’t been anticipating anything urgent, I hadn’t gone to the mailroom to check. If I had, I might have been more careful yesterday, kept a closer eye on my surroundings. That’s what I get for being lazy.

  I took the card across the hall to Nick’s office and held it out to him.

  “A wedding card?” He smiled as he took it from me. “I hope it has a big fat check in it.”

  “Not exactly.”

  His smile faltered and he looked down at the card. When he opened it and saw what was written inside, his face tightened and he rose reflexively from his seat. “What the hell?”

  When he looked to me, I shrugged. I had no answer to his question.

  He came around his desk. “We need to show this to Lu.”

  He and I hightailed it down the hall to the office of our soon-to-retire boss, Luella “Lu” Lobozinski, otherwise known as the Lobo. Viola, Lu’s secretary and gatekeeper, sat at her desk, typing on her keyboard. She eyed us over her bifocals.

  “Is Lu available?” Nick asked.

  She answered by angling her head toward Lu’s door, the gesture indicating we could proceed.

  We continued past Viola and Nick rapped on Lu’s open door. “Got a second, boss?”

  Lu looked up from her desk. Her towering strawberry-blond beehive defied the laws of gravity, while her 1960s-style fringed and beaded pantsuit defied the laws of fashion. She was a very defiant woman. “Come on in, you two lovebirds.”

  We stepped into the office and Nick handed the card to Lu. “Take a look at this.”

  The Lobo’s expression morphed from mildly curious to deeply concerned as she read it. When she finished, she looked the envelope over. “No return address.” She gazed up at me through her false eyelashes, her orange-lipstick lips turned down in a frown. “This isn’t good.”

  “Death threats usually aren’t,” Nick snapped.

  “I had a close call with a pickup truck yesterday,” I told her. “I wrote it off afterward, but now I’m thinking it was intentional.”

  Lu leaned to the right and called out her door. “Viola? Get all my agents in here. Pronto.”

  “Will do!” Viola called back.

  In minutes, the other special agents who weren’t out in the field had gathered in Lu’s office, forming a semicircle around her desk. Viola had come in, too, surely wondering what the hubbub was all about.

  From her chair, Lu held up the card. “Someone wants to kill Tara.”

  A snicker emanated from Senior Agent Eddie Bardin, a dark-skinned, seasoned agent who’d been my first partner and would be sharing codirector responsibilities with Nick once Lu left the agency. “That’s nothing new.”

  He had a point. In fact, Eddie had taken a bullet to the skull when a target in one of our early cases had taken shots at us. He and I had also nearly been blown up together by an improvised explosive device. Good times.

  “Yeah,” agreed Agent Josh Schmidt, the office tech guru who sported cherubic blond curls. “That crazy woman we arrested a few weeks ago tried to choke Tara and dragged her down a flight of stairs.”

  All in a day’s work.

  Our newest agent, Will Dorsey, chimed in now. “First case I worked with Tara we ended up in a shoot-out in a trucking yard.”

  Not to be left out, Agent Hana Kim said, “Don’t forget the mob boss who tried to burn her to death in his restaurant.”

  Hana had assisted me in that case. I’d nearly been smoked, literally and figuratively.

  I raised my hands in surrender. “Okay! Okay! We can all agree that people have tried to kill me in the past. But all of those attempts involved investigations that were ongoing at the time. Nothing I’m working on now strikes me as risky.”

  My current caseload was heavy but involved run-of-the mill tax evaders. A freelance home health nurse who’d tried to get away with deducting personal expenses on his business return. A nightclub that had failed to report a significant percentage of cash receipts. Ditto for a farmer who ran a horse boarding facility on his acreage. None of them seemed dangerous. Dishonest, sure, but not threatening.

  “Maybe it’s someone related to an older case,” Lu suggested.

  Eddie shrugged. “Or maybe it’s personal.”

  All eyes turned to me.

  I raised my palms. “I can’t think of anyone in my personal life who’d want me dead.” I got along well with my family, friends, and neighbors, and had given no one a reason to have a vendetta against me. At least not that I knew of.

  Hana turned to Nick. “Got any old girlfriends who might want to kill your fiancée?”

  That was an angle I hadn’t thought of, but Nick quickly quelled the questioning murmurs. “None of my exes are psychos.”

  Lu exhaled a sharp breath. “Until we figure out who’s trying to kill Tara and get that person under lock and key, I’m assigning each of you to rotating bodyguard shifts.”

  Josh gasped. “You mean I’d have to take a bullet for her?” He cut his baby-blue eyes my way, his pinched expression saying he didn’t like the idea one bit.

  “Let’s call it security detail instead,” Lu said. “I’m not expecting anyone to sacrifice themselves, but there’s safety in numbers and she’ll need some help keeping an eye out. Everyone wear your vests and holsters and stay on guard.” She quickly worked up a rotating schedule and e-mailed a copy of it to everyone. Once the e-mail had set off through cyberspace, she shooed the agents out of her office. “Back to work, everyone.”

  I was the last to go. As I reached the door Lu sighed from behind me and said, “Tara?”

  I turned around and our gazes met. Worry darkened her heavily made-up eyes. “I’m looking forward to the wedding. Don’t go getting yourself killed. Okay?”

  I swallowed the lump of emotion choking my throat. “I’ll do my best, ma’am.”

  I returned to my office and plunked down in my chair, running my gaze over my files, trying to decide which case to work on next. Hmm …

  My cell phone chirped and I consulted the screen. It was Detective Veronica Booth calling from the Dallas Police Department. Detective Booth and an FBI agent had recently recruited me to assist on a case involving a mobster who’d extorted money from business owners and left a slew of dead bodies around the metroplex. That same mobster was the guy who’d tried to burn me to death in his wife’s restaurant, along with his wife and another employee. I wondered why the detective was calling now. Only
one way to find out.

  I tapped the icon to accept the call. “Hello, Detective Booth. How are you?”

  “Out of ideas, that’s how I am.”

  Though her words might sound short, those of us in law enforcement were always overworked. We often didn’t have time for niceties and had to get straight to the point.

  “You’re calling me for a fresh perspective?”

  “That,” she replied, “and maybe some assistance.”

  “Whatcha got?”

  “Rent scam.”

  Seemed a new financial scam was always popping up, and rental scams had become the crime du jour.

  “I’ve got something I want to run by you, too.” Namely, the threat I’d received. “How about I pop on over?”

  “I’ll tell the front desk to send you up.”

  When I ended the call with Detective Booth, I consulted the schedule Lu had prepared, picked up my desk phone, and dialed Hana Kim’s office. “I need to head over to the Dallas Police Department headquarters. Looks like you’re on backup for me today.”

  “Do I get paid extra for babysitting?”

  “It’s not babysitting,” I snapped. “And, no, you don’t get any extra pay. But if you stop complaining I’ll buy you a coffee on the drive over.”

  “Deal.”

  I closed my door, slipped my ballistic vest on under my dress shirt, and buttoned it back up.

  When I stepped out into the hall to meet up with Hana, Nick stood from his desk across the way. He’d pulled out the blue stress ball he squeezed to relieve tension. I hadn’t seen him use the thing in months, but apparently my death threat had pushed him over the edge. “Promise me you’ll be extra careful?” he asked, the ball disappearing in his fist as he closed it.

  “I promise.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hana added, “I’ll take care of your bride to be.”

  I eyed her to ensure she’d also donned her vest. She had. After bidding Nick good-bye, we made our way to the elevators and I punched the down-arrow button.

  “Here.” Hana held out her hand. “Eat this.”

  I opened my palm and she dropped three small wrapped candies into it. I’d never seen them before. “What is this?”