by R. J. Blain
“I would say love makes people do stupid things, but I’ve come to the conclusion love wasn’t a part of that relationship, so I can’t give you a free pass on that. But to be fair, you need all of the patience to put up with me, so she was a suitable teacher for patience.”
“I don’t think you need me for coming up with zingers tonight, Bailey. That was a good one. Do I get an encore?”
“No, but you’ll get dragged into the shower at the hotel. Does that count?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. I have us booked into a decent hotel two hours from here, and the staff knows we’ll be late. I asked for them to prepare dinner for us, so it should be ready when we arrive. I figured you’d want something quiet tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll try harder to appropriately dine you, although you do not get to partake of any wine.”
“They better not take away my coffee.”
“I have no idea if coffee is in the diet of pregnant cindercorns. Since most women wouldn’t find out they’re pregnant for at least another two or three weeks, I think it’s safe to say your coffee is safe for at least that long, but I’ll ask my grandfather and uncle. They probably know more about cindercorns than anyone else. I mean, I’ve been ordered to reserve most of my venom for you, so it’s obvious you don’t play by anyone’s rules. Cobra venom? Typically not safe for pregnant women. Compared to that? Coffee’s nothing.”
I did the math. Quinn’s cobras plus me being bitten by Quinn’s cobras equaled a fun time. “I don’t know who gave you that advice, but I will be very upset if you make your poor snakes sit around with uncomfortably full venom sacs. You better bite me daily. Right after dinner, every night. After we’ve sent the children to bed, of course. But we’ll make sure they know they can read for an hour before lights out.”
“Better give them two hours, as one hour is not sufficient time to appropriately care for my cindercorn.”
“That sounds reasonable. Should we call and check in on them?”
“I’ll call at the hotel to make sure they’re fine. It’s customary they don’t speak with us directly for the most part. That helps make sure they understand my grandfather and grandmother have full authority over them while in their care. It’s a gorgon thing, which he’ll be teaching them. They’ll probably cling when we get them back, but that’s also normal—and doubly so in their case. Since they’re with a familial hive, they won’t feel abandoned, so don’t worry. Family is pretty important to gorgons, and they’re probably overwhelmed with how much they need to learn right now.”
“I can work with that. Drive, my gorgon-incubus doohickey. I’ll fight with numbers and see if I can make sense of them. The next time you gas up, you can hand me the first of the files, so I can start matching things, too, assuming I haven’t found anything interesting by then.”
“You have a deal. But no homemade napalm today, even if I stop at a gas station with diesel.”
“That’s just mean, Quinn.”
“You’ll survive.”
Nine
Ew, ew, ew.
The insignificant, with new knowledge, could become significant in the blink of an eye, and Audrey’s financials told a chilling story. Lacking any reason to suspect his ex-wife, there was no reason for my husband to become suspicious over some—no, a lot—of the transactions in the spreadsheet.
However, understanding there might be a link between her, Chief Morrison, and the gorgons who’d kidnapped Janet changed the way I viewed her receipts.
Three years before her questionable marriage to Manhattan’s Most Wanted Bachelor, Audrey McGee had made weekly trips to the Hamptons. Those had changed to monthly trips to the Hamptons, although where she went remained fixed. Making use of my phone, I determined she’d gone for coffee at a shop several blocks away from the primary police station serving the rich and famous in the area, the perfect place for her to meet someone.
Most times, she returned home the same day, but before her marriage to Quinn, she’d stayed until morning more often than not, filling up at a gas station not far away.
How odd.
Near the end of their marriage, her forays to the Hamptons became weekly again, and she tended to go to the gas station several hours after the coffee shop. Sometimes, she went to the pharmacy. The purchases at the pharmacy baffled me until I checked the price of condoms and got a match on a common brand.
What a bitch.
Grabbing my phone, I went through my options and finally texted Janet, asking if she was aware of where Chief Morrison lived.
She replied with an address in the Hamptons.
I checked the address compared to the pharmacy to discover it was a quarter of a mile away from where the chief lived.
Ew, ew, ew.
I thanked her, wondering what to do about what I’d learned.
If Audrey had been involved with the batch of gorgon dust production, which seemed obvious to me, considering she’d become a gorgon and had been found with a batch, how did she relate to Chief Morrison? More importantly, how did Chief Morrison tie into the gorgon dust problem?
Considering Morrison was likely guilty of aiding and abetting gorgons into kidnapping a police officer, how was he tied to the rabies problem?
I worried Audrey’s activities might give me the clues I needed. I returned to her financials and filtered out all transactions from New York and focused on when she left the state.
Sure enough, I found several trips that took her through Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts.
“Your ex-wife is quite the character,” I told my husband.
“Yes, I had figured that out, which was why I asked for your help divorcing her. I really should have just tipped off an incubus. That would have done the trick.”
I spied an exit sign with a gas station ahead, and I pointed at it. “Stop there, because I do not want you to crash the rental.”
“That doesn’t sound promising. Did you find something?”
“I think so.”
The exit led to a full-fledged rest center with several restaurants, enough gas and diesel to make a life-time supply of homemade napalm, and a visitor’s center, one that was miraculously open. “Oh! We should get stuffed animals for the kids, then we’ll talk.”
“Sure.” He parked, and I shoved my laptop into my bag, and hurried for the gift shop in case it was about to close. I searched for presents for our kids, debating how best to break the news to Quinn.
They had stuffed cindercorns, and I stared at them with wide eyes, my mouth hanging open.
Quinn spotted them, laughed, and reached up to take two off the shelf, and then he retrieved two more, which he handed to me. “Two for the whelps, two for the twins, and I should get two for us so we can play with the kids.”
He did just that, and after a moment of thought, he grabbed the remaining stock.
“That’s too many.”
“It’s not enough. I’ve been warned, Bailey. We’re the kind of parents who will inevitably have more kids because we love children. And two are for us.”
So much for sane purchases. I pointed at the white unicorns on the neighboring shelf. “Grab a few of those, and we should get new travel mugs.”
On his way to the register, he snagged a black and red blanket to add to the pile. “You’ll get cold.”
“While true, you’re being excessive again.”
“Leave me to my excessive ways, woman. Go grab some candy and some jerky so you can appease your carnivorous ways.”
Giggling, I obeyed, joining him at the register and adding to the pile. While he paid for everything, I headed for the bathroom so I wouldn’t be bothering him in thirty minutes, taking the time to tame my hair and pretend I wasn’t a hot mess of a woman.
When I emerged, he waited for me burdened with a ridiculous number of bags.
“You bought more stuff, didn’t you?” I accused, wondering how we’d make it all fit in the SUV.
“Maybe.”
“You’re crazy, Quinn.” He’d be angry withi
n five minutes, so I didn’t complain about spending extra money, settling with taking some of the bags from him and helping him carry everything.
To my amazement, it all fit in the vehicle with room to spare.
“This is a pretty good pitch for buying an SUV,” my husband admitted.
“We should do that. Buy an SUV, that is. If we need a break from the investigation because of frustration, we can shop for one.”
Quinn got behind the wheel. “All right, my beautiful babbling brook. What has you so nervous you didn’t mind spending extra money in the gift shop?”
“Busted,” I admitted, getting into my seat and digging out my laptop. “I followed the money and found a few coincidences I don’t like very much. And at some point, the coincidences stack up to the point where is it really a coincidence?”
“When there are that many coincidences, it’s probably not a coincidence at all. That’s something we look for during investigations. Coincidences happen, but when they’re stacked repeatedly in a way that fits the evidence, the likelihood that it’s a coincidence is slim. What do you have?”
“Judging from receipts, Audrey was purchasing condoms at a pharmacy disturbingly close to Chief Morrison’s home, and she was going to a coffee shop near the copper shop there—and filling her car up at a gas station nearby. I had Janet tell me where Morrison lived, as it seemed odd she was going to the Hamptons every week for years. Then she married you and only went once a month. Near the end of your marriage with her, she was going back weekly again. This was going on for years before she married you, by the way.”
“With Chief Morrison?”
“I suppose it could be another cop that happens to live near his place, but she was definitely visiting someone in the Hamptons, and I bet she was buying condoms. The receipts I have don’t say what she purchased, but I did some searching on the internet, and one brand costs the amount she was consistently spending when tax is included. There are very few restaurant purchases, so someone was buying her dinner or feeding her. Likely before or after one of her trysts.”
“If you look on your laptop in my folder, you’ll see a folder with my name and date tracking as the file name. That has my records of when she was cheating on me. Do the dates line up?”
I opened the file, and it didn’t take long for me to match up most of the dates. “Most of them.” I checked the other dates, and several over a short period of time coincided with one of her trips to Maine. “She went on a trip to Maine once.”
“To visit family.” According to his tone, he hadn’t bought that line when she’d originally gone, either. “When she told me she wanted to go, I’d already guessed she was going to meet someone for yet another tryst. But with Chief Morrison?”
I checked the locations in Maine against the rabies records in the CDC database, and I went through the hassle of checking distances between where Audrey had gone and the largest concentration of infected animals, discovering one location was within twenty minutes of where she’d gone. More importantly, the rabies outbreak began three weeks after her departure, which was the baseline time for animals to begin showing symptoms of infection. “Or someones. Not far from where she went, there was a severe rabies outbreak. It infected a small group of wolves, some raccoons, a couple of skunks, and a lot of bats. There was one infected fox that showed up a month after the largest cluster, likely as a result from being bitten by or eating an infected animal if I had to make a guess.”
“Let me see if I understand this. Audrey, long before she even met me, was possibly seeing Chief Morrison, who likely allied himself with gorgons to kidnap Janet long after my divorce from Audrey.”
“And was probably banging her the whole damned time. Except for that bit where she was playing you. Or something.” Crap. “I mean, she may not have been playing you?”
“Oh, she was playing me as much as I was playing her, Bailey. We didn’t get married because we loved each other. We got married because I got tired of being hunted by a bunch of women, and she promised she wouldn’t need much attention and liked my looks.”
“Have you been checked for any diseases? Maybe we should both get tested. You know, just to make sure. Because now I’m utterly creeped out.”
“I have been tested several times, and with a few notable exceptions involving pixie dust, I wasn’t sleeping with her. Definitely not often.”
“That’s probably a good thing. But at least it looks like she was using condoms?”
“Let’s confirm that, shall we?”
“Good thought.”
Quinn retrieved the files from the back, and we spent twenty minutes searching for pharmacy receipts. Sure enough, she liked buying condoms from the pharmacy, and the times the amounts hadn’t matched, she’d purchased a few other products for her evening adventures—likely with Chief Morrison.
Ew, ew, ew. “We’re going to that hotel and eating dinner, after which I’m going to begin an exhaustive therapy session with you. Also, with you as an exception, her taste in men is absolutely disgusting.”
In record time, he returned the file folders to the back of the SUV, got behind the wheel, and started the engine. “I love the way you think, Mrs. Samuel Quinn.”
“What? You’re hot in that jacket.”
He smiled. “Well, I’m certainly glad you think so. You’re not so bad yourself.”
I regarded my laptop with a sigh. “This is a mess. You really should quality check your wives, Sam. I mean, you did an excellent job of getting rid of the first one, but you may have jumped the gun on the second one.”
“If you say so, Calamity Queen.”
“See? That right there is evidence you need to at least make sure you’re marrying a quality woman. I’m a disaster on two and four feet.”
“You picked me, and I’m not letting you talk yourself out of how perfect we are for each other. I heard you very clearly, Bailey. You wanted to know how you could make the bastard marry you, so I helped you figure that out.”
He really had. “It turns out you’re not really a bastard, your parents are really nice, and I even like the rest of your family despite their oddities.” I sighed. “My mouth always gets me into trouble.”
“You’re perfect for me, and that’s all I care about. I should have quality checked Audrey a little better, but realistically? Because of her, I now have you. That means a lot to me. Life won’t be perfect, but while you’re a disaster on two and four feet, you’re my disaster on two and four feet. So, we’ll go figure out why and how the hell Audrey had gotten into so many messes, put an end to the rabies and gorgon dust issues, and start the rest of our lives without that looming over our heads. Will we find out everything? Probably not. But I’ll sleep better at night knowing we stopped two dangerous threats to humanity.”
“That sounds like a plan to me.”
“Good. Now chin up, work your magic with numbers while I drive, and prepare yourself. I need therapy. I’m terribly distraught and in dire need of your love.”
“And you say I’m something else, Quinn.”
“Well, you are.”
“Kettle,” I accused.
“But I’m a very happy kettle, my beautiful pot.”
I rolled my eyes and focused on the spreadsheets, wondering what other secrets they hid.
Quinn made up for lost time through a mix of driving a little too fast for my comfort and refusing to stop until we reached the hotel, resulting in us arriving right on time. As promised, dinner was ready shortly after our arrival, and rather than worry about rabies, gorgon dust, and Audrey McGee’s long-lived treachery and betrayal, I spent the rest of the night with my husband.
The evening was quiet, and I wondered what storm lurked in our future.
When morning came, I woke first, tiptoeing around the hotel room to let Quinn sleep, a rarity thanks to his genetics. I tidied and packed, and when I ran out of things to do, I ordered breakfast for both of us and resumed my work chasing after information on Audrey’s activities wi
th Chief Morrison.
As a public figure, people took pictures of police chiefs often, especially when they went out into public unexpectedly. While my husband’s looks made him a common target of photographers, Chief Morrison oversaw the protection of the rich, which offered him a certain amount of prestige.
With Audrey’s receipts as a guide, I scoured the internet for evidence of the woman’s wrongdoings. As I expected, Chief Morrison was popular with newspapers in the Hamptons, leaving me to wade through hundreds of pictures of the asshole. Restricting my search by date helped, and after an hour of searching, I began uncovering photos of him with Audrey in the background.
Not only was Audrey in the photos, so was the idiot cadet I’d squished like a grape for threatening my husband.
Then, like some omen determined to ruin my day, I found a picture of Audrey with the person I’d recognized at the demonstration. That got me on the move, and I bounced onto the bed to wake my husband.
With startling speed, he caught me in his arms and dragged me down onto the mattress. “Wicked woman, sneaking out of my bed while I slept. I should discipline you for not cuddling me awake.”
Damn it. I didn’t want to work when he talked like that. “I love you, but I found something important.”
That woke him up, although he didn’t release me. “On a scale of one to ten, can it wait an hour?”
“I’d worry about it the entire hour,” I admitted.
“All right, my beautiful. I’m up, I’m up. What did you find?”