One Last Scream (Special Agent Ricki James Book 2)

by C. R. Chandler

  “When did we start the whole kissing thing?”

  He looked over at her, the grin still on his face. “If you thought that was a whole kissing thing, then we need to speed up our timetable on this relationship.”

  She hadn’t minded it, but her eyes automatically narrowed as she made her way to the same folding chair she’d been sitting in before talking with her uncle. She sat down and folded her arms over her chest. “We don’t have a timetable, so there’s nothing to speed up. And I’m pretty sure that was a kiss, Thomas.”

  “Uh-huh. But it was one kiss, not a whole ‘kissing thing.’”

  “Well, whatever it was, it doesn’t happen while we’re on the clock.”

  “Okay.” His grin grew wider. “Which means we will be doing it when we’re off the clock?”

  Having just discussed her ex-husband with her uncle, she was in no mood to be dragged into a relationship discussion. There would be no kissing on the job, she was firm on that. As for the rest of it . . . Well, she wouldn’t object to it, but given the fact she had a murder on her hands that might have occurred before she was born, she wasn’t going to have much free time anytime soon.

  Satisfied with that answer to her internal debate, Ricki pointed to Clay’s cell phone lying on the desk. “Are we going to call Miss Lansanger?”

  Clay kept a steady gaze on her face long enough that she had to fight to keep from grinning. He had been a little high-handed with that kiss and deserved the cool stare she was sending back to him. The look in his eyes silently said he wanted to stick to the topic of their relationship, but after a good five seconds ticked by, he blew out a heavy breath and picked up his phone.

  “Yeah. Let’s call her.” He looked at a scrawled note on his desk and quickly tapped the keys on his screen before setting the phone down between them. “Fair warning, Miss Lansanger is on the emotional side.”

  “Understood.” Ricki leaned forward when the ringing stopped. The first thing she heard was a very loud sniff.

  “Hardy Investigations.” The female voice on the other end was faint and came with a definite tremor. She also sounded a lot younger than Ricki had envisioned, more like nineteen than the thirtysomething all the assistants on the old investigator TV shows used to be.

  “Miss Lansanger?” Clay said. “This is Chief Thomas from Edington, Washington. We spoke earlier?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you get my email?”

  “Yes. But before—”

  He was cut off by a loud squeal erupting from his cell phone.

  “OMG. I’ve been holding my breath ever since I sent it. Is it Max? The dead guy, I mean. Is it him?”

  “Before we get to that,” Clay began again in a firm, no-nonsense voice. “I want to let you know that you are on speakerphone, and Special Agent Ricki James is here in the office with me.” He was forced to pause again when another loud noise filled the room.

  “Special agent? Like the FBI or something? Are you looking for Max because he killed that guy you found? I’m telling you, Max would never do something like that. You’re chasing the wrong guy, Mister Special Agent Rick James.”

  Clay pointed a finger at Ricki and mouthed “Your turn.”

  Great, Ricki thought, but she nodded and shifted her gaze to the phone.

  Having had her share of experience in dealing with excitable teenagers, she tried for something to steer the assistant into a calmer discussion. If she opened with Oh by the way, your boss has been murdered, the odds were good she’d have to sit through half an hour of hysterics before she could get another question in.

  “Actually, Miss Lansanger, I’m Ricki James, and I work with the Investigative Services Bureau of the National Park Service.”

  “Park service?” The assistant’s tone changed from weepy to astonished in the blink of an eye. “You mean like Yellowstone or something?”

  “Or something,” Ricki said dryly.

  “So, what did Max do? Forget to pay for a candy bar in your gift shop?”

  OK, Miss Assistant to a PI. Time to rip the Band-Aid off.

  “No, Miss Lansanger, that’s not why Chief Thomas and I are calling. The picture you sent has allowed us to make a positive ID on our murder victim. I’m sorry.”

  There was a drawn-out silence and then came one word. “Murder?”

  “I’m sorry,” Clay said, echoing Ricki’s words. “The picture you sent, of the man you identified as Max Hardy, matches the victim.”

  “But murder?” Miss Lansanger’s voice rose a notch. “When you said a dead guy, I thought you meant a heart attack, or maybe some kind of accident. Not murder. What happened?”

  “He was shot,” Ricki said baldly, drawing another loud wail through the phone and an exasperated look from Clay.

  “Shot?” The assistant was back to screeching. “He doesn’t even own a gun. How can he have been shot?”

  Clay rubbed two fingers against the center of his forehead. “Well. We’re assuming the other person he was with had a gun.” After stating the obvious, Clay once again pointed at Ricki.

  Sending him a quick “You’ve got to stop doing that” glare, Ricki turned her concentration back to the disembodied voice.

  “Demi—do you mind if I call you Demi?”

  “Dem. I’d rather be called Dem. My mom named me after Demi Moore. She loves all her movies.” Dem drew in a breath so quickly she made a whistling noise. “Oh God. I have to call my mom. She’s not going to believe this. And Max’s sister! What am I going to say to his sister?”

  “We will notify his sister, Miss Lan . . . uh, Dem,” Ricki put in before the woman could work herself into hysterics. “But you could really be a big help if you’d answer a few questions for us.”

  “Like what? I don’t know anything,” Dem wailed. “Max never discussed his cases with me. I already told Chief Thomas that I only found out what he was working on when I had to write up his reports, and he hadn’t given me any for the last few weeks. He didn’t leave me any notes to put into a report. Oh God, oh God! Max owns this place. There isn’t anyone else. I’m going to have to find another job.”

  Tamping down her exasperation, Ricki leaned in a little closer. “Did your boss mention anything at all about who he was working for? Maybe dropped something casual and called his client a he or a she?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.” There was another brief pause. “We walked over to a food truck that parks over in the next block for lunch the day before he left on his trip. He said something about working with an old client.” Dem sniffed. “That’s what he said, an old client. But I don’t know if he meant the guy was, like, ancient, or if he’d done a case for him before.”

  “So the client was a guy?” Ricki asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dem wailed. “I just think he probably was. Max talked in that voice he always uses when the client is rich. You know, not just lives in a nice house but in a mansion and has tons of money, that kind of rich. Those are mostly men, right?”

  Ricki didn’t bother to answer that but zeroed in on what Max Hardy might have left behind. “You said he left you notes for a report. Were they handwritten or printed off a computer?”

  “Oh, he never gave me his handwritten notes.”

  “But he did make handwritten notes?” Ricki persisted.

  “Yeah. He had a little notebook he always carried with him, but no one could ever read those scribbles of his. He used some kind of weird code. Like a shorthand that only he knew how to read,” Dem said. “He only put them in the computer when the case was done or the client needed an update. He’d print it out and give it to me to polish it up, you know? I’m good at all that grammar and writing stuff.”

  Her little declaration was a stretch of the imagination, but it was how the PI had kept his case details that was interesting. Ricki looked over at Clay, who was rolling his eyes in disbelief. She waited until he was finished and then mouthed “Notebook” at him, which had Clay shaking his head.

  Taking a breath, Rick
i let it out slowly. “So your boss had a notebook that he always had with him. Are you sure about that? Did he sometimes leave it back at his home, or his hotel, or maybe in his car?”

  “Never,” Dem insisted. “It was like a body part or something. He always had it with him, even when we would go out on double dates, he made sure he had that stupid little book with him.”

  A double date with her boss? Ricki had to suppress a shudder at the thought. That was almost as bizarre as Dem’s claim that she was a wiz at grammar and writing. She rubbed her fingers against her temple and forced her concentration back to the way Max Hardy ran his business. “He always put his notes into a computer?”

  “Oh yeah. But like I said, not until the case was finished or he needed to give an update.”

  As the thread she was tugging on began to crystalize for her, Ricki absently tapped her fingers against the desktop. “I need to go back a step, Dem. I need you to remember your first conversation with Chief Thomas.” Ricki heard the chair behind the desk creak as Clay shifted his weight. “Do you remember telling him that you hadn’t written up any reports lately that involved a case in Washington?”

  “I haven’t.” Dem was back to sounding like she was on the verge of crying. “I’m not hiding something.”

  “I know,” Ricki hastily assured her. “But you said you hadn’t done anything lately. Does that mean Mr. Hardy has been to Washington on a case before?”

  “Well, yeah,” Dem said, her teary voice once again magically disappearing. “He’s been there before, and I made all the travel arrangements that time, just like I did this time.” She hesitated. “But I didn’t write up that report. My mom was having an operation, so I had to take some time off. Max must have done the report himself when I was gone.”

  Ricki frowned. Dem might not have written up the report, but she’d bet there was a copy of it filed away somewhere. And that report wouldn’t have been the only thing to go out to that client. “Do you do the billing, or did Mr. Hardy do that himself?”

  “Well, sometimes he delivered the bill to the client, sometimes it was mailed, but I always got the bill ready.”

  “And what were the travel arrangements?” Ricki asked. “Do you remember those?”

  “That’s easy,” Dem said. “Both times he flew into Seattle and rented a car. I booked him a room at some hotel named the St. Armand. I remember the name because it sounded like some kind of convent. You know, for nuns.”

  “I know,” Ricki said. “In Brewer? It was the St. Armand in Brewer?”

  Dem giggled. “Uh-huh. Funny name. Like they make beer there or something. Can’t you just see it? A bunch of nuns making beer?”

  Ricki ignored the ridiculous comment and the giggles that went with it. “Both times? Your boss stayed at the St. Armand both times?”

  “Uh-huh. In Brewer.” Dem giggled again.

  Ricki smiled. Bingo. “Dem. This is very important. Can you get into your boss’s computer?”

  “Nope.”

  Okay. Dead end there.

  “Did he keep hard copies of all his reports? Maybe put them in a file cabinet somewhere?”

  “Nope,” Dem repeated. “The office is kind of small, so we keep everything on the computers. Max had me back up all my stuff into a cloud server he paid for. He copied all his stuff there too.”

  Ricki sighed. And another dead end. Trying to narrow down the pool of people who would know who Max had come out to Brewer to see, she backtracked to an earlier part of the call. “Are most of your clients men?”

  “What? No. I mean, I don’t know, really. It’s not like I keep track of that. We do a lot of cheating spouse work, and those are usually women.” She gave a watery-sounding laugh that ended on a sob. “I mean, I mean the clients are usually women. Their husbands are the ones cheating.” She stopped to draw in a breath. “But we do some company kind of work. You know fraud, embezzlement, skimming off the top. Stuff like that. Those clients are usually men. And the missing persons gigs can be either. Wait. Hang on, hang on.”

  Ricki kept silent and waited as the only sound coming from the phone was Dem’s choppy breathing.

  “He was going to Washington to look for someone. Yeah. He told me that while we were waiting for our lunch order to be cooked. He was looking for someone.”

  “Looking for someone,” Ricki repeated. “Did your boss ever try to find someone who’d broken the law? Maybe some of those company clients you were talking about?”

  “I don’t think it was a company client. We don’t get much of that kind of work, and I’ve never seen a repeat. Maybe it was a cheating husband that he didn’t catch in the act the first time around,” Dem said slowly. “That’s happened. Max couldn’t find anything, and the wife is so sure that she hires him to go looking again.”

  Or a missing person he didn’t find the first time around, Ricki thought.

  Now, who in the Bay wanted to stay hidden badly enough to kill for it?

  Chapter Eight

  As Clay went over a few details with Dem, Ricki leaned against the hard metal back of the folding chair and stretched her legs out in front of her. She stared down at her hands, folded in her lap, and mulled over the murder. Maxwell Hardy was technically a local case and fell to Clay, but her instincts were insisting that the mysterious skeleton, with its neatly folded ranger’s uniform, and the dead PI were connected somehow.

  After Clay hung up the phone, he also leaned back and locked his fingers behind his head to study the ceiling with its original white acoustic tiles. “Do you still think the two murders are linked somehow?” he asked, stating out loud the same thought echoing in her head.

  She did, but there was a whole list of other possibilities. “It could be that two killers simply had the same idea a few decades apart. The lighthouse is a good place to hide a body.”

  Clay glanced over at her. “Maybe. But you aren’t giving off that vibe.” He went back to studying the ceiling. “You think the two are connected.” He was quiet for a moment. “Same killer?”

  “Not with that much time between them,” Ricki said.

  The chief straightened up in his chair and rested his forearms on the desk. “Maybe he left the area and has been operating all this time somewhere else, and now he’s worked his way back here. Which would explain why he knew the lighthouse would be a good place to stash something he didn’t want found. Like a dead body.”

  “Lovely thought,” Ricki said under her breath before drawing her legs in and getting to her feet. “I need to get over to the diner and check on things. I’ll work from there until Eddie gets out of school and then head on home. I’m hoping we’ll have some forensics back by then and maybe the autopsy. I don’t know how busy Dr. Naylor is, but I’d guess your ME could bully him into doing the autopsy right away.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past TK.” He studied her with those smoky-gray eyes that could look right through her. “Is Hamilton going to send you some help, or did you not bother to ask?”

  “I bothered. I told him I was going to ask Cy for some of Dan’s time to help with the research.”

  Clay grinned. “Good idea. Former CIA guys tend to be pretty good at research.”

  While Ricki had never been too thrilled with Dan’s background, she did appreciate the skill set it came with. And as long as none of his former colleagues came snooping around, she didn’t have to think about Dan having once worked for the covert agency. After all, he’d made the decision to leave that all behind him, so at least he’d stepped away from the dark side. She could live with that.

  “Any other help coming?”

  Ricki put her hands on her hips as her eyes narrowed on his very practiced, innocent expression. “Dr. Blake wasn’t mentioned.”

  Jonathan Blake worked for the FBI and was one of the best profilers in the nation. They’d worked together on her last case, and even though they’d only talked on the phone or over the internet, for some reason, Clay, who hadn’t spoken to the man at all, had taken a disli
king to the doctor.

  “But you might mention the good doctor at some point?”

  “We don’t even know who the second vic is.” Ricki moved her hands from her hips and crossed them over her chest. “I thought I’d work on that first.”

  “Where are you going to start on that?”

  “With Dan and his much-discussed research skills,” Ricki said. “Which brings us back to where this whole conversation started.” She took several steps toward the door before turning around to look at him. “Want to come over for dinner tonight?”

  Clay’s whole face instantly lit up with a smile. “Does that mean I should bring the pizza?”

  Ricki nodded. “I’ll stop and get beer.” Feeling like they’d had a spat and then made up, Ricki returned his smile. “Around seven?”

  “Sounds good,” Clay said. “Maybe we’ll have some evidence to look at.” He sighed as he swiveled his chair around to face the computer. “We could use some.”

  Hoping he was right and something would pop up this afternoon, Ricki strode down the hallway, stopping at Ray’s desk out front just long enough to ask him to let Ranger Dan Wilkes know where she could be reached, if Ray happened to see him.

  Two minutes later she was climbing into her jeep with its faded yellow paint job and patched-up seats. Silently repeating her usual prayer, she turned the key, nodding when the engine came to life. Satisfied that her prayer had worked this time, she maneuvered her way out of the parking lot and onto the two-lane road that connected the three towns along the Bay.

  It only took her fifteen minutes to reach the outer edge of Brewer, and one minute more to pull into the alley behind the diner. She hopped out of the jeep, sparing it her usual kick to the tires since it had started up on the first try, and walked over to the back steps that led into the diner’s kitchen.

  Her eyes widened in surprise when she spotted Eddie standing at the stove, a huge spatula in one hand as he stared intently at the burger sizzling away in front of him. He had the same look of concentration that he did whenever he was building one of his bots. She smiled at the great picture her tall, gangly son made with his dark glasses sliding down his nose and a snow-white apron wrapped around his narrow waist. Anchorman stood behind him, leaning against the long prep table. When she started to shrug out of her jean jacket, intent on putting her gun into the small safe bolted to the floor in the closet, Anchorman reached out and wagged a finger back and forth at her.