"Yes, and before you ask, I can guarantee that it wasn't deposited there by a giant dog. An elephant wouldn't have left such a mess."
With a nod, Mike encouraged, "What happened after that?"
"It was this morning, on my way here. Someone spray painted an obscenity on my front door in big black letters."
Mike took all this in as they moved closer to the edge of the table. Then he asked the obvious. "Can you think of any reason someone you know might have done all that?"
She shook her head. "I've thought and thought, and I simply can't imagine that anyone I know would do such a thing. My best guess is that it's someone I wrote about in the newspaper."
"You mean a criminal type?"
"That or the family member of a criminal type. All you have to do to see what I'm talking about is go to the Herald's website. Folks who don't like what we print about them or the felons in their lives, love to beat up on us, telling us what we didn't do right, what we should have done, and so on."
They'd reached the table. Mike took two clean plates, gave one to Lacy, and then they began to load up on salads, main dishes, and what was left of the desserts. After he found them a relatively quiet spot by the stage, Mike pulled up three chairs, turning one of them into a table, and they sat down.
"Okay," he said, continuing the conversation. "Say your prankster is someone you wrote about. How would he know where you live?"
As Lacy considered this she took a taste of pasta salad. It was seasoned perfectly and had just the right crunch of peppers and onions to make her wish she'd taken a larger amount. Holding off on a second bite, she said, "My name is included on my byline of course, but I don't have my address listed in the phone book. I don't know how a reader would find out where I live."
"Then it's not likely you were followed. I don't recall seeing a picture of you with your stories."
"Oh, but that's not true. In addition to my byline, I also have a weekly column in the Sunday edition of the Herald. It's called Crime Beat."
Mike had only recently taken a subscription to the Bismarck Herald and hadn't gotten much past the first section where most of Lacy's articles were located. "I haven't seen that column. What is it, just a list of crimes over the week or something?"
"No, it's the funny side of law enforcement, the crazy, weird things that happen. My photo is included with the column."
"Crime Beat. Huh." He forked a large chunk of lasagna into his mouth and chewed as he thought. Then he swallowed and said, "Would you put something like my bowling paraplegic in this column?"
"Exactly, and actually, I plan to write about him without using his name as soon as I can include a court date."
The curtains on the stage opened then and Brian approached the microphone. After telling everyone to go on eating, he then announced the name of the first of the performers. Lacy was expecting some kind of gospel music, but was surprised when the young man whipped out a banjo and started in with a rousing Cajon song.
She and Mike listened in as they finished their plates of food, and after the banjo player concluded his set of three songs, Mike continued to question her.
"Did you document both pranks?" he asked. "How about pictures?"
She shook her head. "I didn't think to do that. Besides, it's probably just some neighbor kids with too much time on their hands."
Mike relieved Lacy of her empty plate, stacked it on top of his own, and then took her by the hands. "I think it would be a mistake to dismiss this as childish pranks. Why don't you let me come home with you and have a look around?"
"You really think that's necessary?"
He looked deeply into her eyes, his expression grim. "I don't want to alarm you, but I think it's entirely possible that you have a stalker."
Chapter 8
Three hours later, Mike had documented the damage, helped Lacy clean and repaint her front door, and made a trip to a nearby hardware store. He drove.
As he finished installing the second of two deadbolts to the front and back doors, he said, "There. Now your place is at least twice as secure as it was."
Lacy laughed. "Bismarck isn't exactly a hotbed of crime, you know. I think we had something like fifteen murders last year in the entire State, and this year's figures are even lower than that."
He set his tools on the counter, leaned back on his heels and regarded Lacy with a kind of sad speculation. She wasn't sure what to make of this expression, but became keenly aware of the intensity in Mike's gaze.
"What is it?" she asked.
He didn't answer at first; just stood there staring. When they'd first come to the house and he'd decided to help her paint the door, Lacy changed into jeans and an old shirt. Mike stripped off his dress shirt and donned an electric blue sweatshirt he kept in the truck. The color made his eyes seem even blacker, ringed with fire. Between the look of him and his smoldering expression, Lacy didn't know whether to run away or throw herself into his arms.
He saved her the trouble by responding at last. "Even one murder is too much, especially if it's you. I like you, Lacy. I like you a lot, and I'd really like the chance to get to know you better. What do you say?"
Her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. The best she could manage was, "I—I'm not sure what to say."
Mike pushed away from the counter and took three very deliberate strides in her direction. Standing just inches away, he took her face between his hands, bent his head, and dropped a kiss on her lips. It was short, sweet, incredibly soft.
Then he released her and said, "How about now?"
"Now's good," came her automatic and not at all thought out response.
Mike chuckled from deep in his throat. "Good for what?"
Lacy shook her head, clearing it. "A good time to get to know each other better?"
He nodded and smiled, crinkling the corners of his eyes. Then he took Lacy by the hand and led her to the soft, buttery yellow sofa that faced her bay window. The couch was relatively new and set off with orange and brown throw pillows. In six easy payments, it would be hers, all hers.
They sat down, each careful to give the other enough space, and Mike said, "I suppose since I brought this up, I should be the one to get things going. What do you most want to know about me?"
"Are you married?" Lacy blurted out, again without forethought.
Mike laughed and shook his head.
"Sorry," Lacy said quickly. "I'm not usually that abrupt."
"It's perfectly all right," he assured her. "I just assumed that Brian had filled you in on my marital status. I was engaged to a woman named Stephanie. We broke up well over a year ago."
From the few things both Mike and Brian had said, she'd assumed something like this. "Can you talk about it, maybe give me some idea what went wrong?"
Mike sighed and leaned back against the cushions. "The reasons are too many to list, but I think the thing that brought us together in the first place, was the thing that tore us apart. In a word, partying."
"Partying? That can mean a lot of things."
He nodded. "And in our case, it did. I was already a cop when we met and Stephanie worked dispatch—still does. I didn't understand it back then, but eventually came to realize that Stephanie is one of those women who can't resist a man in uniform. She's a kind of cop groupie."
Lacy's heart went out to him. "That must have been awfully hard on you."
"Oh, no." He chuckled a little. "Don't get me wrong. I wasn't a poster boy for how to be a good finance, not by any stretch. As I said, we liked to party and hung out at our favorite cop bar most nights. We share equal blame for our breakup."
"So it was a mutual decision to cancel the wedding?"
Mike thought about it, delving into a past he'd just as soon forget. "I guess you could say that. Once I figured out that I was ready to settle down and quit the partying, I couldn't convince Stephanie to settle down with me. For a while there I actually thought we might have a family together. That would have been a big mistake."
"So you just ended things?"
He shrugged. "Once I stopped going to the bars as often, we kind of drifted apart. After I got shot and was no longer a cop, well, I think Stephanie sort of lost interest in me."
Lacy lowered her head. "That's sad."
"Not really. By then I'd figured out that I wanted a better life for myself. I wasn't quite sure how to get it until a Minneapolis cop friend of mine who was raised in Bismarck suggested I come here and start over. I think it may have been the best advice anyone's ever given me."
"Oh? Then you're planning to stay here in Bismarck?"
He shrugged. "If you mean have I gone out and bought myself a house, no. I'm still renting an apartment off Washington, but I am liking the lifestyle here as well as a lot of other things."
Mike turned, gave her a pointed look, and added, "More and more."
Because she could feel her cheeks coloring, Lacy turned away and asked, "This cop friend of yours from Minneapolis. Does he know Brian?"
Mike shook his head. "I found Brian by accident when I was working a case of insurance fraud. A woman claimed her car had been stolen and sheriff's deputies found it parked sideways on the side of a hill in a rural area. It cost a small fortune to have the car safely removed and returned to the woman. Enter the detective—me."
"You were already working for the insurance company?"
"Yes. This was my first case for them, so I was pretty determined to get to the facts." He smiled at the memory. "Turns out the woman had been to one of those small town bars where the drinks just keep on flowing. Witnesses watched her drive away, clearly too drunk to drive, and she somehow wound up on the side of the hill. She figured if she reported the car stolen, she wouldn't have to pay the towing charges."
Lacy laughed. "I imagine she wound up paying for a lot more than that."
"That she did and that's also when I met Brian at the Sheriff's Department. Meeting him was even more life-changing than the physical move."
"Oh? In what way?"
He looked at her with a great deal of speculation, and then said, "Let's save that for another day."
"Okay, then. What about family and friends? Doesn't it bother you leaving them behind?"
"Not as much as you might think. My older brother is a Commander in the Navy and moves around a lot. I think he's somewhere in the Middle East right now. By October first of each year, my parents pack up and move to a small Greek Island where they have a second home. They don't come back until April or May. If I'm still here, it's only a six or seven hour drive to go visit them."
"So you have a good relationship with them."
It wasn't a question, so Mike just nodded. "As for friends, I do miss the camaraderie at the station, but not the afterhours partying. There are a couple of guys I phone now and then, but even those calls are getting few and far between."
He swiveled on his hip and turned to face her. "That's enough about me. It's your turn. What's your story, or is that a bad thing to say to a reporter?"
"I don't have much of one," she said with a laugh. "I'm actually a pretty boring person."
"Not from where I'm sitting." He stared down at the carpet, thinking about something, and added, "Why don't I tell you what I do know, and you can fill in the blanks?"
Lacy shrugged, not at all interested in talking about herself.
"You were married for what, two three years?"
"Three."
"And you lost your husband in an accident. Do you mind telling me what happened?"
Usually just thinking about what happened was enough to bring tears to her eyes, but for some reason, explaining the accident to Mike didn't produce the expected sense of sadness and loss.
"Danny was a pilot," she explained. "He loved flying and was very good, or so I'm told. Anyway, his main job was crop-dusting. The day of the accident he was working a field that was split by Highway Eighty-Three. He would have to weave in and out of traffic to get to the crops. Something happened—nobody knows for sure what, but it went down as pilot error—and he crashed into the field."
Mike slowly shook his head. "That must have been devastating. I'm so sorry."
She took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. "That was around two years ago. I'm doing a lot better now than I was."
Deftly changing the subject, Mike said, "How about your family? Do they live around here?"
Lacy gave him a sly grin. "My older sister, not my twin, lives in Montana, but I think you already know that."
He raised a hand. "Touché."
"My older brother runs the family farm down in Napoleon," she continued. "My mother lives near him, his wife, and their two boys."
"And your father?" he asked warily.
A long sigh, and then, "He's got advanced Alzheimer's. Mom had to put him in a facility a few months back."
"I'm sorry to hear that. What a dreadful, awful disease."
Lacy couldn't think of a thing to add to that. She just sat there staring at her hands until Mike thoughtfully changed the subject into something more conversational.
"There's one particular thing I've been wondering about you, a real deep, dark mystery."
Lacy snapped her head up. "Me, mysterious?"
He nodded sagely. "I swear the day we met out at the refuge, you had freckles. What have you done with them?"
It was all Lacy could do to keep from laughing out loud. She swallowed hard and said, "Freckles? I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Yes, you do. I saw them with my own eyes, and thought they were absolutely adorable. What have you done with them?"
Allowing no more talk of freckles, she abruptly changed the subject. "I don't know about you, but I'm suddenly starving."
Mike shrugged. "I could eat."
Lacy pushed off the couch. "Good. My mother taught me the polite thing to do is invite your handyman for a home-cooked meal. Let's go see what I've got in my pantry."
"I wouldn't want you to disappoint your mom," Mike said as he followed her into the kitchen.
Once there, Lacy looked into the refrigerator and quickly realized that she didn't have much to offer in the way of sustenance. In a panic, she opened the pantry cupboard but couldn't find much there except for a couple of boxes of Little Debbie snack cakes.
She pulled out a box, one filled with seasonal pumpkin-shaped cakes, and said, "How do you feel about starting with dessert?"
Mike cocked his head and frowned. "Are you serious?"
"Pretty much," she admitted. "Cooking for one is really boring, so I'm afraid I don't have much on hand with which to make a decent meal. We could go to the store."
Mike shook his head and pointed his index finger toward a refrigerator magnet stuck to the freezer door. "I hear this guy is a really good cook. Why don't we let him fix supper?"
Lacy broke into a wide grin. "Gino is the best chef ever as far as I'm concerned. Pepperoni or sausage?"
"Both?"
Her eyes lit up. "Black olives okay?"
"You bet, but hold the green peppers."
She shuddered at the thought. "For sure. Extra cheese work for you?"
"As long as there's a final dusting of parmesan."
"I'll call."
"I'll buy."
* * *
In a very rural area outside of a small town in South Dakota, Martin and Sara Jones were trying to come to terms with the trials in their new life.
Since they'd been told that their son had been born to a drug-addicted prostitute and that they were in effect, rescuing him from a dreadful life, they named him Moses, and likened him to the little baby tucked away in the weeds of a riverbank.
They loved this little boy, so small and so helpless, but were having second thoughts about the realities of parenthood. Neither of them had much experience with children and zero with infants, but still they'd expected smooth sailing once they finally brought their very own baby home.
This was not to be. Little Moses vomited almost as much formula as h
e took in, and soiled his diapers so vilely and so often, both took to smearing Vicks Vapor Rub beneath their nostrils. Worst of all, and most puzzling, the baby cried and cried until Martin and Sara thought they might lose their minds.
What to do? It wasn't as if they could take him to town for a visit with a doctor. He didn't even have a birth certificate. What if the authorities asked too many questions? In addition to having Moses taken from them, they feared there might be criminal charges of some kind. Martin could not take a chance on being sent to prison again. It would be the end of him.
And so they struggled on, still loving their son, but learning day by day to resent him, too. They wondered during those infrequent hours of quiet, if the negotiator between them and the baby's birth mother had a liberal return policy—something along the lines of say, Wal-Mart.
Chapter 9
Monday morning Lacy stopped by the public information office at the police department, took notes on the crime reports, and then headed over to the sheriff's department for the same general information. It had been a fairly calm weekend for law enforcement, which would give her more time to work on an ongoing series she was writing about the illegal drug problems facing North Dakota.
When Lacy walked into the Herald's newsroom, she got the sense that it, too, was unusually quiet, especially for a Monday morning. She said hello to her fellow reporters, made a brief stop by the city editor's desk, and then finally sank down onto her own chair.
Something was in the air. Not a scent, but a feeling, a sense that she was about to become the victim of a prank or a personal confrontation. Lacy glanced at her desk, an area defined by massive disarray, if not total chaos. Nothing appeared to be out of order. She checked her workstation. The computer sat at just the right angle, her coffee mug was in its usual spot, and a Styrofoam cup held the correct number of pens. She was about to check her bulletin board when something caught her eye.
A small jar, perhaps it once held baby food, was snugged up against her monitor. It was filled with clear liquid and in that liquid floated a plastic eyeball. She leaned forward and saw that someone had written on the lid with a magic marker. It read; Eye's watching you.
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