Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery (14 page)

*    *    *

Ginny hadn’t heard her phone ring. She sat in the rental car in the hotel parking lot, absently petting Georgie’s head, and listened to Tonica’s message, a slight frown crossing her face. She thought about calling him back, telling him he didn’t need to come down, but based on the time stamp, he was probably already en route.

And part of her, she admitted, was glad. The moment this had become a researchtigation—no, an
investigation
—she’d needed her partner, and only pride had kept her from saying so immediately. It wasn’t a lack of competence that made them better together; it was doubling the competence.

“At least he probably won’t say ‘I told you so.’ Probably.”

She checked her watch again: she had a few hours to kill before picking him up at the station. And—her brain suddenly clicking on all cylinders—she knew where she should spend them.

After dropping Georgie off back at the hotel and pacifying her with a treat and one of the dog toys from her bag, Ginny headed back downtown, refining her plan.

First step, one she should already have taken: find out the dance steps to the music being played, so she could avoid stepping on toes. For that she needed to talk to someone who knew all the dancers in town. She picked up a paper bag of chocolate chip cookies from a corner bakery and headed for her prey.

Ron was hunched over a cramped desk that, clearly, wasn’t his alone from the number of coffee mugs and Post-its stacked at every angle, and the second chair shoved up against the other side of the desk. A power strip was duct-taped down the center like some kind of no-man’s-land divider. He was the only one currently there, though, a laptop charging from the strip, his phone charging off that, and Ron himself rummaging in the desk for something, his attention focused entirely on that.

Ginny made her way to his desk and sat down on the empty wooden chair on the opposite side, placed the cookies just beyond easy reach, and waited. And waited.

“It’s awfully quiet in here,” she said finally.

He didn’t give her the satisfaction of being startled, or even looking surprised. “What did you expect, someone running through the room yelling ‘stop the press!’ or ‘everyone go cover the wreck on the docks?’”

“No.” She made a face. “Maybe?”

“Yeah well, those days are gone, with the four-drink lunch and the two-drink breakfast. A-ha, there you are, you little bastard!” He triumphantly pulled out a memory card, still in its plastic case, and used his thumbnail to pop it out and insert it into the side of the laptop.

“I miss the drinks but I don’t miss typewriters, let me tell you. Give me modern, portable technology and I’ll get the job done in a third the time. Okay, sorry. You said on the phone that you were free to go. Congratulations. So why’re you still hanging around? Not that it wasn’t good to see you, kid.”

“Yeah, I’m feeling the love. This entire town loves me. They’re going to throw me a parade. I’m still here because I still have questions. What do you know about any federal investigations that might be happening in town?” She pushed the cookies closer toward him.

That got a bark of laughter out of him. “New or pending, and if pending, how far back do you want to go?”

She opened her mouth to say something, couldn’t think of what it had been, and closed her mouth again, thinking. “New, or only going back about . . . six months? It might or might not have something to do with money.”

“In the end, doll, it all comes down to money. But I take your point. If you have a line on something, you’re going to tell Uncle Ron, right?” He reached over and unfolded the bag, pulling one of the thumbnail-sized cookies out and making it disappear.

“If I can,” she hedged, and he sighed. “Yeah, that’s as good as I ever seem to get. My friends are all utterly useless.” Another cookie disappeared. “This has to do with your little run-in with the law?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Once I know that—”

“You’ll know how much trouble you just dunked yourself in?” He shook his head. “You missed your calling, kid. You should have been a reporter.”

“I couldn’t take the pay cut,” she said dryly, and watched him mime a blow to the heart.

“Just for that, young woman, you’re buying dinner. Somewhere with real napkins.”

“If you come up with something by dinnertime, sure.”

“Oh ye of no faith whatsoever.” He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and looked down his nose at her. “Assuming I kept track of such things, there are currently two federal investigations of which I am hypothetically aware that were opened within the past six months and are still active. One of them involves some hinky behavior that may or may not qualify as sex crimes, so I’m presuming that’s not yours because rumor has it it’s about to go to plea bargain, and the other has to do with a certain nonelected government official who may or may not have been raking in a little side financial action involving access to federal project bids. That your puppy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” She couldn’t imagine
how
that could tie back to the death of an identity forger, but she’d seen a lot of stuff in the past few years she wouldn’t have been able to predict before it happened, so . . . “Wait, sex crimes? In Portland?”

“Yep.” He made the
p
sound pop with satisfaction. “What, you think just because we’re crunchy granola we can’t be just as horrible as any other city?”

There really wasn’t any way to answer that, so she didn’t.

“I don’t suppose you could find out who’s assigned to either of those cases?” The latter sounded more like Asuri’s “where the money stinks, there sniff I” style, but . . .

That got her a sharp look. “Virginia Mallard, what’s really going on?”

“I wish to hell I knew, Ron. I wish to hell I knew. Right now I’m still trying to gather all the shards and figure out what kind of window they came from.”

“Hrm. You sure it’s a window you’re looking into, and not a mirror?”

She looked at him, her confusion clear, and he shrugged. “A window lets you look at things, but a mirror just reflects what you already know. The worst way to write a story is going in with the ending already decided. Can’t imagine your thing’s much different.”

Ginny chewed on her lower lip, drumming her fingers on the edge of the desk. “A mirror.” Same shards, but a different view. A reflecting view. Something about that idea tugged at her, and she tried to quiet everything else in her brain, following that thread.

Ron looked at her with narrowed eyes, then shook his head and turned back to his laptop, leaving her to sort her own thoughts out.

*    *    *

Crime might pay better, but it didn’t pay enough to quit the legit side. Not yet, anyway. After their meeting, Dave had gone off to handle his own side of things. Ben was supposed to be doing the same, had even settled himself in front of his monitors in his home office, the work lights turned on, tools at the ready, when an alert pinged on one of the monitors and caught his eye like a red cape waved in front of a bull. It was from a search he’d set up for any mention of Jamie’s death; perfectly normal behavior when someone you worked for was murdered, nothing the cops could hold against him, if they ever got interested enough to probe his Internet use.

He clicked on the link and skimmed the article, then licked his lips and reread it, feeling his adrenaline surge.

He reached up to grab a piece of paper tacked to the corkboard and compared it to the article, then bolted out of his chair, out of his office, and down the hallway of his apartment, the slip of paper gripped too tightly in one fist.

“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.”

It was just a name, a URL, and an email address, nothing particularly upsetting or disturbing. He’d written it down himself, after Jamie had shown them the article, for a laugh. “Look,” he’d said. “Our eternal opposite!”

They’d laughed, but then Ben had thought, what could it hurt to keep the information? Might be useful to know about an off-the-books, off-license PI someday. He’d been half amused by the thought.

He wasn’t amused now. No matter what Dave said about compartmentalizing the business to protect themselves, so no one piece could topple the other, the truth was that it was all one messy knot of strings, and you couldn’t tug on one without the others feeling it. He knew that. They’d all known that, it was part of—hell, it was probably the
only
thing that had allowed them to work together, to trust each other.

And now it was all a mess. A mess that—somehow—had that PI in the middle of it.

Ben’s palms were sweating like they hadn’t since the sixth-grade dance, slick and kind of gross, and his stomach felt like he’d swallowed helium, all tight and sick, and the piece of paper he held in one hand, already creased and crumpled, was starting to look worn and grubby, like the trash it should have been, weeks ago.

He’d tried to feel guilt, or sorrow, or something beyond concern for what Jamie’s death meant to them. He really had. But Dave had been right about that much: it wasn’t like Jamie had been a friend or anything. He was just a guy they did business with. Ben hadn’t even liked him, particularly. So yeah, no. No guilt, just a shitload of worry. Because when a guy you did business with ends up beaten to death, you worry.

And when the person who finds the body is an amateur detective? You worry some more. Especially since it wasn’t just any PI, but
that
PI.

He reached the end of the long hallway, then turned and strode down the other end, making a full circuit of the living area and pausing by the oversized windows. Unlike his high-tech, nearly pristine office, the rest of his apartment was homey, comfortable, soothing. But he didn’t feel soothed. He felt like he needed to get out of his skin somehow.

It was just one line in a two-paragraph follow-up that probably all of ten people in the entire city had read. Dave wouldn’t be worried. Dave would wave his hand and say, “Be cool, man,” like it was that easy.

Ben took a deep breath, exhaling through his mouth, trying to shove the tension in his stomach out that way. Maybe it was that easy. Maybe Dave was right. So Jamie got himself killed. And a PI he’d read about, had clipped an article about, shared with them, suddenly shows up on his doorstep right after that. So what? There was no reason to think that it had anything to do with them. What they did, it was harmless, mostly.

“Okay, not harmless but not the kind of thing that gets you beaten to death.” The words had a solid ring of truth about them. The late afternoon sunlight was warm on his face, and he closed his eyes, letting that bit of grace soothe him for a moment.

“Probably some side deal he had going, or an outraged daddy. And when the cops—or the PI—poked around, that’s what would come up.”

And hell, odds were Jamie had called the PI himself . . . but why? The adrenaline was replaced by a cold ball of dread. To poke around at them? Had Jamie been planning on selling them out?

No. That made no sense: Jamie’d had more to lose than any of them if this went sour. He’d had more bad habits, and they’d all known it.

Ben started pacing again, down the hallway, feeling the ache in his calves matching the ache in his neck and shoulders.

“And Dave had nothing to do with it.” He believed that. He had to believe that. Dave wasn’t that stupid, for one. And two . . . yeah, he had a killer instinct but there was a difference between seeing a chance and taking it no matter what, and actually killing someone. He’d seen Dave mad, and he got cold, not hot. If he’d thought Jamie was a real risk to the business, he would have come to Ben and talked about cutting him out carefully, shifting the work to other photographers until enough time had gone by that Jamie would just shrug and find other work. Purely business.

“And I had nothing to do with it.” He’d wished Jamie dead once or twice, maybe. Had cursed him out over the phone a few times, sure. Told him to clean up his act, or else. But that was all. He hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t caused anything.

Everything had been fine, more or less, until Michal showed up. It all came back to Michal. She’d come out of nowhere, approached them with the golden ticket, gotten them bigger jobs, more money, and now, with Jamie dead, another jump . . . big leagues. International clients. And that was when Ben had thought it might be a good idea to spook Jamie with the PI they’d read about, make him clean up his act.

But he hadn’t done it. Hadn’t called the PI, hadn’t said anything to anyone. Because you couldn’t do that, couldn’t pull one thread and not expect everything to unravel.

Ben rubbed his stomach as though that might make it feel better. He’d known what they were getting into, when Michal made his offer. Nobody had said it, but he knew. They weren’t going to be selling their new product to nineteen-year-olds who wanted to drink, or battered housewives looking for a new identity.

There were some things he could live with, and some things he couldn’t. This . . . He thought about the money they’d be making, and knew he could live with it.

And the current investigation? Dave was right. He hadn’t killed Jamie. Dave hadn’t killed Jamie. Jamie’s own idiocy had gotten him killed. It had nothing to do with them. Nothing could be traced back to them.

PI or no PI.

With a sigh, he paused by the counter and dropped the small rectangle of paper into the trash, then got a beer from the fridge, taking a long drink.

All they had to do is wait it out, let the cops come to the obvious conclusions, and they’d be home free. They just needed to not fuck it up.

12

T
eddy had meant to work
on the train, had even bought a notebook and pen for the sole purpose of writing out everything he knew so far, in hopes that it would turn up something new, spark some connection he hadn’t seen before. Instead, he’d settled into his seat on the train, plugged his phone into the outlet to charge, and promptly fallen asleep, waking up only when the train chugged its way into the Portland station and stopped, the conductors making enough noise to rouse even the dead.

Which meant that he’d not called Ginny when they crossed the Columbia River, the way he’d promised. Shit. Teddy grabbed his bag in one hand and scrambled to unplug his phone with the other, waiting until he picked up signal again before hitting her contact. He strode through the crowds at Union Station, crossing the tracks and into the building itself, only to stop dead and hang up the phone when he saw a familiar head of blond curls, standing next to an older black guy with long gray hair. The friend she’d been planning to visit with while she was down here, he supposed.

“Lucky for you, I thought to check the schedule,” Ginny said. “Teddy, this is my friend Ron. Tom, this is—”

“Yeah, I got it,” the older man said, reaching forward to shake Teddy’s hand. His eyes were a surprising blue. “Glad to meet you, wish it were in less complicated circumstances. Come on, Ginny’s buying dinner.”

“Not for both of you, I’m not!” she protested, already turning to walk out of the station, the two men trailing in her wake.

“Yes, she is,” the older man—Ron—said in an aside, and Teddy grinned, already liking the guy.

*    *    *

They ended up in a tiny restaurant where the menu was printed on sheets of paper and the kitchen was visible over a low wall, the seven tables already full when they walked in a little after six thirty. Ron raised a hand to signal someone behind the low wall, and an older Asian woman came bustling out, wiping her hands on a towel at her waist, to greet them.

“So finally you show up? Please tell me these two are food reviewers from a national paper? Or NPR? NPR would be good.”

“Sorry, Sandra-san. Just some hungry folks looking to buy my conversation with your excellent food.”

“Nice to see you’re not a cheap date. Come on, then—chef’s table is all yours.”

The table was tucked away out of sight, but with a clear view of both the kitchen and the dining area. The food was excellent, even if Teddy didn’t have much familiarity with most of the menu, and Ron, who turned out to be a local reporter, was unsurprisingly good at helping put bits and pieces of the story together.

They paused long enough to allow the waiter to clear the dishes from the table, then Teddy shook his head. “So we’ve got a photographer moonlighting with fake ID, a possible federal investigation that had him as a potential person of interest in their case, and someone who hated the guy enough to bash his face in with extreme prejudice. And at least one fed with an ongoing interest in this case. And, on the side, we have a mysterious nonexisting person who hired Ginny to come down here for a nonexistent job just in time to find the very existent dead guy.”

“That’s hardly ‘on the side,’ from my point of view,” Ginny said.

“Suck it up, buttercup,” he retorted. “Having the feds poking around makes you secondary.”

“The two cases you know they’re here to investigate are none of the above, though,” Ginny said. “Officially, anyway.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure how either a sex scandal or payola could tie into this,” Teddy agreed, having been brought up to speed on the car ride over. “And that still doesn’t tell us who actually called you in, and why. Which is what we’re supposed to be focusing on. Right?”

“Maybe it does,” Ron said thoughtfully. “And maybe we’ve been looking at this all through the wrong end.”

“Like a mirror, not a window?” Ginny said, and Teddy shook his head, not getting the reference.

“Exactly. We’re trying too hard to figure out who might have called you in, and why, but we haven’t been thinking about why they might have wanted
any
PI.”

Ginny looked at Teddy, who made a face at her—it was a good point and Ron was right, they’d totally bypassed that.

“You had something going on in your head earlier, Virginia, and enough time for it to germinate. So spill for the rest of the class.”

“You’re mixing your metaphors again,” she teased, then her expression went sober again. “What you said earlier, it made me think about that room in the house, the one he was obviously using to take photographs. About maybe someone not liking what they saw? But I couldn’t get much further than that. I mean . . . it was a small room, it wasn’t like the kind of setup you’d get blackmail photos out of.”

“Or sex tapes,” Teddy said, and lifted his hands when they both looked at him. “What? Like neither of you thought about that?”

“I hadn’t, actually,” Ginny said, although the reporter made a face that indicated that yeah, he had. “But no, it wasn’t set up like that at all. There was one chair—a stool, really—and the supply cabinet, and that was it.” She stopped to remember more carefully. “No, there wasn’t any video equipment visible. I suppose he might have had something hidden, but . . . Whatever they did they’d have to do standing up. I don’t think there was even enough room to lie down, not unless you moved everything out of the way. And ugh, that carpet was not nice.”

“So no sexcapades that we’re aware of. Or that the cops are aware of and have let us know.”

“Nothing on the radar?”

“The sexual antics of ordinary citizens tends not to blip my radar,” Ron said. “Not unless they’re shtupping an elected official out of season.”

“So . . . photographs of something unwanted?” Ginny shook her head. “I can’t make it work. Head shots aren’t the kind of thing that need investigation. . . . Unless someone wanted to find out if their kid was using a fake ID? But then why not approach us—or any PI, if we’re going that route—directly?”

“Maybe it wasn’t someone else they wanted investigated. Go back to basics.” Teddy might have had the advantage, coming in more or less cold, while Ginny’d been in the thick of things, her thoughts all tangled. “Maybe they wanted the dead guy investigated, before he was dead. But they couldn’t risk being involved in it, having anyone know they were having him investigated.”

“That . . . might have legs,” Ron said, making a notation on the palm-sized notebook he’d pulled out when they started talking. “Someone who was dirty, but not as dirty as him? Or more dirty but with more of a grudge?”

“That’s almost razor-proof,” Ginny said. “The simplest, most logical explanation. But it’s all still theory. We’d need to know who would want him taken out, though, and why, to prove anything. And that’s where we’re still seriously lacking in information.”

Ginny frowned down at the now-empty table, then looked up at Teddy. “I think that’s going to require another look at that studio, maybe the entire house this time. See if there’s anything the cops didn’t realize was important, something that predates the actual murder.”

“Breaking and entering, and without Good Samaritan justification, this time,” Teddy said, gloomily.

“In that case,” Ron said, closing his notebook with a snap, “I think we’re going to need dessert.”

*    *    *

None of them really had much appetite for dessert, though, and after watching them push it around the plate with forks, Ron finally put them out of their misery, sending them back to her hotel, where Georgie and Tonica had a happy reunion, the shar-pei giving the human a thorough face-washing, followed by the two of them wrestling on the floor.

“Good thing you’re not a pet person,” she said dryly, throwing his own words, now several years old, back at him, and getting a raised finger in return.

She willingly handed the leash over to her partner, along with a few poo bags, and sent them off for Georgie to do her business while she took a hot shower. By the time they came back, she was dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed and drying her hair with a towel.

“We’ve got three hours to kill,” she said, “and I for one—not having had the opportunity to take a four-hour snooze today like some people—intend to take a nap. Feel free to order a movie or whatever, so long as it’s not from the porn channel.”

Tonica gave a snort that could have done Georgie proud and dropped himself into the room’s single armchair, while the dog headed for her travel crate, turning around several times before making herself comfortable on the padding. “Sounds like a plan. See you at midnight, Sleeping Beauty.”

Ginny had thought it would take her a while to fall asleep, but she would have sworn she’d just put her head down where there was a beeping near her ear, and then a hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake.

“C’mon, Mallard. I walked Georgie, so all you have to do is wake up.”

She batted his hand away, then sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Tonica was already dressed, his usual dark jeans and pullover shirt covered by a dark windbreaker. She didn’t have anything like that with her, but she’d packed for a professional trip, so she had a dark green blouse that wouldn’t catch the light, to go with her black slacks. Her shoes had enough of a heel to be impractical, so she went with her sneakers, even though they were eye-catchingly pale, and hoped for the best.

“We should have stopped at Target and bought watch caps and face paint,” Tonica said, and she ha-ha-ha’d at him. “The first rule of successful breaking and entering is to never look like you’re there to break and enter.”

“Life isn’t a caper movie, Mallard.”

“And that’s just more of a pity, Tonica.”

They stuck their tongues out at each other at the same moment, but she started to laugh first. She’d been right: having him here made it seem more manageable.

All they needed was Penny, sitting placidly on the desk and watching them with unblinking green eyes, to make everything right again.

Her phone vibrated, and she checked it to see the expected text from Ron. “He’s here. Let’s go.”

*    *    *

Ron’s car was a four-year-old Toyota Camry, black and slightly battered, nothing that would attract attention or cause comment. He pulled to the first clear spot on the curb he could find and cut the engine, then reached up to shut off the automatic overhead lights.

“I’m going to stay here long as I can,” he said. “Cops come by I’ll tell ’em I felt too tired to risk driving the rest of the way home, and was taking a nap, but they’ll probably watch to make sure I move on after a while, so if you see the map light’s on, don’t come back until I pull out, and then I’ll meet you around the corner. If I’m not here, meet me two blocks south. Got it?”

“You sure you’ve never done this before?” Ginny asked, not entirely joking.

“Dear heart, I’ve been at this job since you were in junior high. The things I’ve done would match the devil’s to-do list. Now go.”

They both slid out of the car, Ginny from the front passenger’s side, Teddy from the back, and started walking down the street. They’d waited until after midnight in the hopes that the night owls would be watching TV, or otherwise occupying themselves, not sitting outside investigating the neighbors. There was a slight risk of someone paranoid after the murders, or an impromptu neighborhood watch, but Ginny had thought that if that was a thing, Angel and Marco would have mentioned it to Agent Asuri and herself, when they talked about the neighborhood meeting to come. Or not, and they were going to have a very unpleasant surprise any minute now.

They made it to the house without seeing so much as a twitch in anyone’s curtains, or being accosted by a neighborhood vigilante. Tonica took her arm at the elbow, tugging gently toward the back of the house. Thankfully there was enough light to see, and nothing left in the pathway one of them might have stumbled over.

“Gloves,” she said, and they paused a minute to pull on the thin latex gloves Ron had given them in the car. She resisted the urge to snap them into place, rubbing her fingers together and grimacing at the feel. “Finger condoms.”

“Not leaving fingerprints,” Tonica said. “C’mon.”

There was a brief scuffle over who was going to pick the lock, which Tonica won by dint of actually being able to maneuver his credit card and a piece of wire to do the job. Ginny made a mental note to add her lock-pick kit to her always-take-with list, after this.

And then they were inside the kitchen, and she had to force herself to look at the table where she’d seen the body. The space was empty, the floor clean, and she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“You okay?” Tonica’s voice was low, somewhere between his normal voice and a whisper.

“Yeah. I wasn’t sure but . . . yeah.” Whispers carried more than normal voices, she’d read that somewhere, and kept her own voice as close to normal as possible. “C’mon, through here.” Ron had given them each a tiny flashlight in addition to the latex gloves, and she switched hers on now, letting the powerful beam sweep over the doorway, keeping the illumination below any window. “I feel like Dana Scully.”

“If anything with fangs or ectoplasm jumps out at us, I’m going to make a new door out of here,” Tonica warned her. “And none of that ladies-first crap. You’re on your own.”

“So noted.”

The room was pretty much exactly the way she remembered it, except most of the equipment was gone—police evidence locker, probably. She bent down and pulled open the cabinet door, flicking the flashlight’s beam over the insides.

“Empty,” she said, unable to hide her disappointment, even though she really hadn’t expected anything else. “You got anything?”

“File cabinets are empty, too,” he said. “Hang on. . . .” There was a faint metallic noise, and she turned to see him pulling the drawer out, and checking the sides. “A-ha.”

“What is it?”

“Old trick a friend of my dad’s used. He wasn’t much for computers, didn’t trust his housekeeper, so he kept his list of passwords taped to the underside of his filing cabinet drawer. Most people only look on the side.” He tucked his own penlight under his chin and carefully peeled the piece of paper away. “Huh.”