The Fear Hunter

by Elise Sax

  “That wasn’t me. I just found the knitting needle.”

  “So she says,” Remington said and winked at me.

  “It was the cats,” someone said from another table, butting into our conversation.

  “Yeah, the cats did it,” another diner said.

  “Cats don’t have opposable thumbs. How could a cat hold a knitting needle?” another diner asked.

  “No, moron. The cats ate Donald. I don’t know anything about a knitting needle,” the first diner said.

  “You’re both morons,” another diner said. “The girl killed him with the knitting needle first, and then the cats ate him.”

  “Then, what about the shark?” the first diner asked.

  “The shark killed Felicia. It doesn’t have opposable thumbs, either,” another diner said.

  “You know what?” Paolo said to Remington and me. “I think you two need veal. Veal will wash away all the knitting needles and burning lifeguard towers from your day,” Paolo said. “And it comes with spaghetti bolognese, which revs up the body for love.” He winked at me and walked away.

  “I don’t think I need any spaghetti,” Remington said and took my hand in his on the table. He caressed my palm with his thumb in little circles that made my body tingle from head to toe. Maybe I didn’t need any spaghetti, either. The conversation about my guilt and thumbs died down in the restaurant. “Did I tell you how beautiful you look?”

  “You said something about it. You can say it, again, if you want.”

  “You’re very beautiful, Aggie. The sun is setting, the waves are crashing onto the shore, I’m with a beautiful woman, and nobody’s calling me about a dead body or wildlife gone crazy. I have a very good feeling about tonight. Very good.”

  Me too. I was having a great feeling about tonight. Remington only had eyes for me. He was giving me his unbridled attention. I felt beautiful and special, and my mind was exploring all the possibilities of what was to come. If his thumb on my hand could make me go this wild, I could only imagine what his other body parts could do to me.

  Paolo arrived with a bottle of wine and our veal. Remington poured me a glass but didn’t pour one for himself. “I don’t drink. I’m still a fighter, part-time, so I eat clean. My body’s a temple.”

  My face grew hot again when he said “body.” I was revving up without the spaghetti. I didn’t know how I was going to get through the meal without jumping over the table and ravaging his clean-eating temple body. The only thing stopping me was the fact that I had no idea how to ravage his body.

  Being a virgin wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.

  “What do you want? You can’t just come back here!” I heard Paolo yell from the other room. I turned my head just in time to see the two Homeland Security agents storm onto the patio. They were still wearing black suits and dark sunglasses. They glanced at me briefly, but it was clear that they were focused on Remington.

  “Detective Remington Cumberbatch?” one of them asked him.

  “Yeah, that’s me. Which one are you? Will Smith or Tommy Lee Jones?”

  “Huh?” the agent asked.

  “He means from the movie Men in Black,” the other agent explained.

  “No funny business, Cumberbatch,” the first agent sneered. “We’re here because of what happened today. You’ve got a violent insurgent organization in your town. The violence has escalated, and you need to make it stop.”

  “Shouldn’t you be talking to the chief of police or the mayor?” Remington asked.

  “They’re at a bocce ball tournament and couldn’t be disturbed,” the agent said. “So, it’s up to you.” He punctuated the words by poking Remington in the chest.

  I figured that was a mistake. So did the rest of the diners. Everyone stopped eating and was watching the action. Remington didn’t disappoint them.

  Remington stood and towered over the two agents. It was almost comical to see the three standing together. Remington was a big man. Big. Hercules big. The other two men were average, and even with their attitude and dark glasses, they couldn’t hide the fact that they were intimidated by Remington’s size.

  “Apologize to the lady for ruining her evening,” Remington ordered them. His voice was calm and cool as usual, but deep and booming.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” they said, surprising me. Remington signaled them to follow him into the restaurant to finish their conversation.

  Remington winked at me. “I’ll be right back.”

  I watched him go. His back half was just as nice as his front half. When he was out of sight, I took a sip of my wine and looked out over the water. The government was sure worried about the Area 38 group, I thought. Perhaps Frances and Amy were on the right track, suspecting that the super-secret government facility was killing folks in Sea Breeze.

  Did super-secret government facilities kill people with antique whaling hooks and knitting needles, though? That didn’t sound like the weapon of choice for government types. But what did I know? I hadn’t read any government mysteries. I made a mental note to ask Doris which ones to read.

  If the government didn’t kill Donald and Felicia, who did? It was just like Frances said: the town was full of suspects. There were scads of people who had reason to kill Felicia and Donald. They had led secret lives and were probably up to no good.

  Secrets about money. Secrets about their house. Secrets about a boat. And secrets about lots of other things, I was sure. What did Frances say about Donald? Oh, yes. Something about him and Bunty, the woman with no body fat, who worked out every day in the park. Donald and Bunty were having an affair. Yes, that’s right. Donald and Bunty were having an affair, and Bunty’s husband Sid was miserable, losing weight, and eating crap.

  Holy crap.

  I spilled my glass of wine and gripped the table hard. Donald and Bunty were having an affair? Sid was miserable?

  The answer to the mystery had been right in front of my eyes the whole time. I had even served soup to the answer.

  Sid killed Felicia and Donald. It was so simple. So logical.

  The change in Sid’s physical appearance.

  The change in Sid’s emotional state.

  Sid flew into a jealous rage and killed them both.

  Easy peasy.

  I was a detective-ing genius again.

  The next morning, the soup shop was quieter than normal. Four of the Area 38ers had dropped out of the group, and another two were in the hospital for trauma and mild burns. There were quite a few knitters in the shop, but they weren’t knitting as much as they were tossing death stares to the Area 38 group. Bad blood. The knitters blamed the conspiracy group for planting the knitting needle and for making them look bad. They were also worried that the group would do something to sabotage the success of the Punk Rock Knitting Competition. They were probably right.

  “Today’s soups are sweet and sour cabbage, butternut squash, miso, and beef and bacon,” I told the Area 38 group table behind the stacks.

  “I’ll take the cabbage,” one of the leaders ordered. “There’s a meeting in two hours. Are you coming? We’re learning how to evade bullets.”

  “Evade bullets? Is that possible? Aren’t bullets fast? And hard?”

  “Yeah, but we got a strategy.”

  “Are you going to use real bullets?” I asked.

  “How else would we know if we’re evading them?”

  “I’ve got a thing in a couple hours,” I said, vaguely and walked away.

  Actually, I really did have a thing. Since Sid and Bunty didn’t show up for lunch today, I was going to bring soup to Sid and ask him a lot of questions. I was going to make him confess to the murders and clear Rocky’s name. I got Sid’s address from Doris. Sid and Bunty Black lived only a few blocks inland.

  When Frances and Amy came in, I told them about my plan, and they decided to join me instead of learning how to duck bullets. I packed a thermos of beef and bacon soup, three slices of Mouse’s sourdough bread, and four of her cinnamon r
olls, and we left the shop.

  “If he gets suspicious, let me do the talking,” Frances said as we arrived at the house. “I’ll tell him I want to sell his house. That’ll cover us.”

  “It’s weird not walking cats. I walk so much faster,” Amy said.

  “Have you ever thought of getting a dog?” Frances asked her.

  “No way. I know where my loyalties lay,” Amy said.

  “I heard that you were out with the hottie cop last night,” Frances said. “Was that a rumor?”

  “We had veal.”

  “Don’t tell me that,” Amy said. “I’m anti-veal.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “But I’m not anti-gossip,” she added. “Spill the beans. How was it? What does he look like naked?”

  “I bet he can work wonders with his tongue,” Frances speculated. “Tall men are usually talented that way.”

  I wasn’t used to talking to people who weren’t my family about my personal life. Actually, I wasn’t used to having a personal life. Not a personal life with someone alive, in any case. So, I figured it was okay to spill the beans about Remington.

  “I didn’t see him naked, but I bet it’s all good,” I said. “Homeland Security interrupted our dinner, and they made Remington take them to the lifeguard tower to discuss the violent insurgent group in our town.”

  “Oh, that’s good intel about the government,” Frances said.

  “They’re probably the killers, and they just wanted to return to the scene of the crime,” Amy said.

  “I wish we got to talk to them,” Frances said. “I bet we could worm a confession out of them.”

  “I have one of their business cards back at the soup shop, if you want,” I offered.

  “It’s a shame you didn’t get to see Remington naked,” Amy said.

  “He did touch my hand. He drew little circles on it with his thumb.”

  “Oh, I bet he does great thumb,” Frances said.

  Sid and Bunty lived in a small bungalow, a lot like Donald and Felicia’s, except that the front yard was perfectly tended with a lovely flower garden. We walked up the two steps to the front porch, and Amy rang the doorbell.

  Nothing.

  Nobody answered.

  We rang again, but it was the same thing. No one answered, and there wasn’t a sound. “That’s funny,” Frances said. “I could have sworn that Sid worked from home.”

  “Does this mean that we have to go back and duck bullets?” Amy asked. “That doesn’t sound as fun as trust exercises to me.”

  “Hold my soup,” I told Amy and handed her my basket. “I’m going to see if anyone’s home.”

  Frances and Amy followed me as I opened the side fence and went in back. I peeked through every window. The inside of the house was as tidy as the outside, and nobody was there. I tried the back door, but it was locked. Then, I tried each window, and the window to what looked like a home office, opened.

  “I’m going in,” I said.

  “You’re what?” Amy asked, alarmed.

  “I’m going in. I need to speed up my detective-ing.”

  I climbed through the window, and Frances climbed in after me. Amy handed her the basket through the window and climbed in, too. “This is called breaking and entering. We could get twenty years in San Quentin for this,” Frances said.

  “Then, let’s hurry before we get caught,” Amy said. “I’ll start in the bedroom.”

  “I’ll take the office,” I said.

  That left the kitchen and living room for Frances.

  There were two desks in the office. One of them was obviously Bunty’s. I found her personal stationery and a calendar with her weight and measurements written down every day in longhand. From her papers, I found out that she was a professor at Imperial Community College.

  But I couldn’t find anything pointing to her having an affair with Donald. I moved on to Sid’s desk just as Amy and Frances returned.

  “Nothing,” Frances said, throwing her hands up.

  “I found a whole bedroom full of sex toys,” Amy said, rubbing her eyes. “I’ll never be the same again.”

  “Nothing on Bunty’s desk. Just work and her weight,” I said.

  I rifled through the papers on Sid’s desk.

  “Hold on,” I said, looking through his credit card statement. “There’s a lot of jewelry purchases here. Have you two ever seen Bunty wearing jewelry?” They hadn’t. I found some receipts in one of the desk drawers. “Here’s a receipt for a turquoise necklace. I’ve seen Felicia wearing that. You know what? We’ve got this turned around. Bunty wasn’t having an affair with Donald. Sid was having an affair with Felicia.”

  Chapter 15

  “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”

  –Raymond Chandler

  “Sid and Felicia? Not Bunty and Donald? How did I get that so wrong? What has the world come to when I can’t count on my sources for good dirt on my neighbors?” Frances complained.

  We had gone through Sid’s desk and found a wealth of information. He had spent a fortune on Felicia. Jewelry, dinners, sex toys.

  “It’s good to know that a man his age is still that sexually viable,” Amy said.

  Frances agreed. “And I didn’t see any Viagra in the bathroom. So, it’s all him. Maybe it’s all the working out that he does.”

  “He hasn’t been working out for a while,” I pointed out. “He’s been in a bad mood.”

  “Maybe he’s in mourning for Felicia,” Frances suggested.

  Yes. That was exactly it. Frances had hit the nail right on the head.

  “If I was Bunty, I would have killed Felicia,” Amy said.

  “I would have killed Sid,” Frances said.

  “I would have divorced him and lived happily ever after,” I said.

  Frances and Amy stared at me with their mouths open. “I never thought of that,” Amy said. “That’s pretty smart.”

  “I would have preferred to kill Sid than get divorced,” Frances said. “That way I’d get the life insurance.”

  “Let’s go,” I said, getting up from the desk.

  “Where now?” Frances asked.

  “Please don’t make me run from bullets,” Amy whined.

  “We’re not going to run from bullets. We’re going to college.”

  Frances drove us to Imperial Community College in her MINI Cooper. Bunty was a women’s studies professor there, and according to the website, her office hours were just about to start at 1:30.

  “What’re we going to say to her?” Amy asked on the way there. “’Hello, Bunty, Sid bonked Felicia?’ Is that what we’re going to say?”

  “If she killed Felicia, she probably knows already,” Frances said.

  “But what if she didn’t kill her?” I asked.

  “My money’s still on Area 38,” Amy said. “They made a man glow, so killing a couple of people isn’t that far off.”

  “Maybe the glowing man is the killer!” Frances said, like she had just discovered electricity.

  Oh, no. More suspects.

  “Even if the glowing man is the killer, what are we going to say to Bunty?” I asked.

  “We’ll go around the truth,” Frances said. “I’m selling Donald’s house. It’s the perfect ice-breaker into her hound dog husband’s activities, and then you can lower the boom and accuse her of ripping off her husband’s lover’s face with an antique whaling hook.”

  Charming. I couldn’t see how that strategy could go wrong. “You’re still selling his house, even though Donald’s dead?” I asked Frances.

  There was a long pause before she answered. “Oh, sure,” she said, like it was no big deal. “He signed it over to me since he was leaving town and didn’t think the house was worth anything.”

  “That’s lucky for you,” Amy told Frances.

  It sure was. Very lucky.

  When we got to the college, Amy found Bunty’s office for us without a problem because she had t
aken an animal husbandry class on campus a couple years before and knew her way around.

  Bunty’s office was open and the lights were on, but she wasn’t there. We walked inside and stopped dead, riveted by the décor. “That man has four penises,” Amy said, pointing at a sculpture on Bunty’s desk.

  “That woman has five vaginas, and they all have teeth,” Frances said, pointing at a framed painting on the wall.

  The office was decorated with all kinds of penises and vaginas. In my very long life, I had never seen so many penises and vaginas. In fact, I had never seen a penis up close and personal, and I wondered if any of these representations were accurate.

  “Is this what women’s studies means?” Amy asked.

  “Women’s studies means a lot of things, or are you one of those people who believes that women are one-dimensional, cookie-cutter Barbies with no personalities?” Bunty asked, walking into her office.

  “I don’t think I’m one of those people,” Amy said, sounding unsure of herself.

  Unlike Amy, Bunty was sure of herself. She sidestepped us and sauntered to her desk. She took a seat on the large leather chair behind it, and rested her elbows on the desk and steepled her fingers together.

  “What may I do for you women? If you want to audit my introduction to women’s subjugation class, I’m sorry but it’s full up,” Bunty said.

  “These are my friends Agatha and Amy,” Frances began. “I’m Frances Finkelstein, and I’m selling Donald and Felicia White’s house.”

  “I know who you all are,” Bunty said. “It’s a small town, and it’s hard to forget a cat walker. And Agatha has fed me on more than one occasion. I’m a fan of your million-year soup, by the way.”

  “Thank you,” I said, pretending to look at a figurine of a woman with four breasts. I was sure that if we made eye contact, she would know that I wanted to accuse her of murder.

  “Why should I care that you’re selling the Whites’ house?” Bunty asked Frances.

  “It’s a lovely mid-century bungalow, two blocks closer to the ocean than your house,” Frances said. “If you act fast, I can get you and Sid in there. Wouldn’t that be nice?”