Dead Eye (A Tiger's Eye Mystery Book 1) (11 page)

She made it through the maze of tables and people who wanted to talk to her—everybody loved Molly—and I stood up so she could hug me, even though she’d seen me only a few days before. Molly was a big hugger.

“Hey, Molly.”

“I heard, why didn’t you call me, I think you should move in with me for a while, this is insane, do they have any leads?” This came out all in one breath.

Jack looked up from inhaling his second piece of pie, his eyes widening. “Molly Chen? When did you grow up and get tattoos?”

She grinned at him and rolled up her sleeve, showing off the rest of her newest. “What do you think?”

It was a beautifully designed and inked koi fish, swimming up the length of her arm. She’d only had it about a month.

“It’s gorgeous, but I prefer tigers,” he said, and she laughed.

“You know Molly?” I looked back and forth between them. “When did this happen?”

“Her dad was a collector, and he used to bring her into the shop sometimes when she was a little kid,” Jack said.

“Only a few times, and I’d forgotten about it, to be honest,” Molly said. “Dusty old pawnshops are the most boring thing in the world when you’re little, and I was too young to notice teen boys, cute or not.”

“Hey! Dead End Pawn isn’t dusty or boring,” I protested.

This time, both of them laughed.

Molly squeezed in next to me. “So, are you coming tonight?”

I was confused. “Coming where? It’s my turn to host, remember? Pizza, wine, ice cream, a
Resident Evil
marathon?”

“You have great taste in movies,” Jack said. “Am I invited?”

“It’s girls’ night,” I informed him.

Molly frowned. “I’m sorry, Tess, but I must have forgotten to tell you. I’ve been so busy, what with Mom and Dad on that anniversary cruise to Europe. I can’t make it tonight. My band has a gig at the Swamp Rat this week and we’re playing all weekend. You’ll come, won’t you?”

This was unwelcome information, on several levels. I really needed a girls’ night, I wasn’t all that crazy about the Swamp Rat, and I wanted a break from Jack to figure out how I felt about the way he’d invaded my life. Also, if Mr. Chen was out cruising then he wouldn’t be around to settle the legal stuff we needed to figure out for Jeremiah’s estate.

Finally, I really, really liked
Resident Evil.
Alice was a badass, and I could use a little bit of that this week.

“We’d love to come,” Jack said.

“Wait, what is this ‘we’ stuff? I might have had plans,” I blurted out.

Molly tilted her head and gave me her “are you nuts?” face. “You did have plans. You were going to spend the evening with me. So nothing’s changed, right?”

“Um.” Damn it. Foiled by logic.

“I’ll see you there.” She started to rise, but then sat back down and looked at me. “You know, this is maybe a weird thing to say, but it’s going to be kind of creepy and sad tonight, so I’m glad you’ll be there.”

“Why sad and creepy? I mean, it always smells like stale beer and sweaty bodies there, but…”

“Say that again, Tess,” Jack said slowly.

I nodded. I’d thought of it too. The same smell was on Chantal when we found her. We needed to ask around the Swamp Rat.

“No,” Molly said. “It’s about Chantal. She was there Wednesday night, when we were setting up and doing a sound check. I even talked to her for a few minutes, before she and Hank took off with their friends.”

“Hank? Hank Kowalski?” This was getting weirder and weirder. “They were together? I thought she was dating some biker.”

She shrugged. “I don’t keep up with people’s dating histories, but she was definitely in a romantic mood with Hank, if you know what I mean.”

Jack leaned forward. “Did you tell the sheriff this?”

“Sure. Well, not Lawless. He hasn’t asked anybody in the band anything, which is kind of half-assed, if you ask me. But I called Susan and told her who I’d seen Chantal leave the club with that night. Hank, Walt, and some of their crowd. Mostly people I avoid, to be honest, but I never had anything against Chantal. She was nice.”

I was shaking my head before Molly even finished. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would Chantal be hanging out with them? Mrs. Kowalski is the type to call Chantal ‘that nice colored girl,’ and think she was paying her a compliment, and Walt and Hank are much worse.”

Molly raised her hands in a “who knows” gesture. “She was drunk. They were all drunk. Hank kept bragging about some windfall he was coming into—a winning lottery ticket or something. Even I overheard him, and he was four tables away from the stage. Maybe he convinced her to go out and roll a couple of fat ones.”

Dirt roads near swamps were custom-made locations for hanging out and smoking pot, especially around Dead End, where no sheriff had ever given a crap about
The Marijuana
, as Aunt Ruby had called it hysterically the one time I’d come home high. (Uncle Mike had laughed himself silly and fed me junk food until I’d gotten violently sick, putting an end to my druggie inclinations for all time. To this day, I couldn’t even
think
about pot without smelling the faint odor of corn chips and ranch dip.)

I shuddered, and Molly grinned. “Ranch dip?”

Like I said, she’d been my friend for a
long
time. “We don’t talk about that. Ever.”

“Poor Owen. Does he know about your checkered past?” Jack clucked his tongue in mock sympathy for Owen, whom he’d never met and was never going to meet.

Ever.

Molly stood up again. “Gotta bounce, first set starts at nine, don’t be late.”

“Wait. Was Chantal wearing a jacket that night?” I didn’t know why I was fixated on the jacket, but I was. For some reason, seeing her lying there in that flimsy tank top, with her arms bare to the cold, had bothered me almost as much as the blood. Or maybe it was just my mind trying to deflect the horror of it all.

“Yes, actually. It was a red leather jacket, and I told her how much I coveted it, and how gorgeous it looked against her dark complexion.” She grinned at Jack. “We Asian girls can get away with mentioning the color of another woman’s skin.”

He sighed. “I thought you said you didn’t remember me?”

“I didn’t. It’s coming back to me.” She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “He asked me if I liked fried rice.”

I winced. “Ouch.”

“I was eleven years old,” Jack said, looking sheepish. “But you only spoke Chinese at the time, so I didn’t even realize you knew what I said.”

Molly and I both burst out laughing. “She never in her life
only
spoke Chinese, Jack,” I said, pityingly.

We watched as his mental light bulb clicked to the “on” position. To be fair, it only took a split-second, and then a smile filled with pure admiration spread across his face.

“Nice. Very nice,” he said.

In seconds, she was gone, dancing her way across the room to the door. We left money on the table for the bill, plus tip, and followed her.

Jack waited until we’d made it outside, and nobody else was within earshot, and then nodded toward the truck that he’d parked next to my car. Shelley had chosen to ride with
him
, naturally. “I’m going to go snoop around Chantal’s place. I don’t know if she has any connection to Jeremiah at this point. Probably not, if she was out drinking with friends the night she was killed. Maybe somebody got high and accidentally shot her.”

I shook my head. “Except for one problem. Why would they leave her at the pawnshop? Everybody knows you can dispose of a body in the swamp and it will never be found until somebody cuts open a gator one day and sees bones.”

I said it matter-of-factly, because it was hard to be squeamish when you’d grown up in Dead End.

“Yeah. The coincidence just doesn’t work for me. Was somebody leaving a message? If so, why? For you? For me? None of it makes sense at all, and I’ve never liked things that don’t make sense.”

“Has the P-Ops agent talked to you yet?”

“The who?”

I explained about Agent Vasquez and his story about a job offer and questions about the sheriff and the Blood Moon. “Sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but there was Walt, and then Shelley.”

Jack had started laughing when I got to the job offer part, and he was still smiling. “Me as a fed. That’ll be the day. I wonder what he meant about the Blood Moon, though.”

“Are you going to go all nuts when it happens?”

He got a pained expression on his face. “Yes. I always have a mad catnip festival on Blood Moon.”

“Really?” I contemplated exactly what that would involve.

“No, not really. Sheesh, Tess. Only wolves and the Dark Fae really pay attention to the Blood Moon, I think. Oh, and the witches, of course.”

“Why the witches?”

“It does something freaky to their magic, I think. But only for witches who practice black magic, so it’s nothing to worry about. We would have heard if Dead End had any of those here.” Jack opened the truck door. “I should get going. Standing around speculating isn’t getting us any closer to figuring out who killed Chantal or my uncle.”

I really needed to get back to work, but some impulse made me look up just in time to catch the expression of profound sadness in his eyes. “Want company?”

“I was hoping you’d ask.”

*

Chantal Nelson had
lived in a small apartment building near the fire station. I wasn’t quite sure when she’d moved into town, but it hadn’t been more than a couple of years ago. We Dead Enders tended not to ask nosy questions about people’s backgrounds. It worked out better for everyone that way.

A large palm tree stood guard in front of the office, where a faded sign was taped to the door.

Welcome to Pleasant Acres

Free First Mo W/Dep

Absolutely no fire-breathing pets

“Pleasant Acres? Sounds like a cemetery,” Jack said. “Didn’t it used to be called something else when that old guy who only wore overalls with no shirts owned it?”

“It was Windsor Farms, then it was something with Shores in the name, and then the old guy just called it The Apartments,” I recalled. “Being ironic before ironic was a thing, I guess.”

“Or just literal. The man didn’t own a shirt; I doubt he was a hipster,” Jack pointed out. “Anyway, should we ask permission now or just break in and ask forgiveness later?”

I pointed to the smaller, handwritten sign in the window and read it to him. “
Out to lunch. Back at 3 p.m. Don’t call me.
”

Jack looked at his watch. “That’s a late lunch. It’s only two, now.”

“Think we should call her?”

We stood there on the sidewalk, grinning at each other like fools, and I had the unpleasant niggle of a thought that Owen and I had never fallen into such an easy rapport, even though we’d been out on several dates. Mostly, Owen was nervous and I was edgy; sometimes it was the other way around.

I had the feeling that Jack had never been nervous a day in either of his lives.

“Let’s just go look. Do you know what apartment?”

I froze. That might have been a good thing to find out. There were six.

Jack shrugged. “Well, how hard can it be to find out? We can look in the windows. We can—”

“Read the mailboxes,” I said, pointing. There was a rectangular set of six boxes set back in an alcove, each one neatly labeled. Chantal had lived in number three. We quickly figured out that it was the apartment on the far right side of the building, on the bottom floor. Okay, that was easy enough. Now, though, how did we get in without a key?

“Are you going to pick the lock? Bust the door down? Do some secret tiger moves?”

Jack shot me a look and then reached out and tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked.

I was a little bit disappointed.

“Secret tiger move,” Jack said dryly. He stuck his head in and looked around, took a deep sniff of the air, and then motioned grandly. “It’s empty. After you.”

I hesitated, glancing around to make sure nobody was watching me, like Sheriff Lawless or the P-Ops agent, then walked right into the apartment as if I belonged there. When I looked around, though, I saw something that neither my mystery novels, nor any TV show or movie I’d ever seen, could have adequately prepared me for.

Nobody had trashed the place.

“N
obody trashed the
place,” I said, and Jack looked at me like I was a moron. Or maybe I just felt like a moron. “It’s just…the criminals always trash the place, looking for something vital to the investigation. We don’t have any trashing. So is there nothing vital here?”

Jack sighed. “You read a
lot
of fiction, don’t you?”

“Fiction is the spice of life.” I took a couple of steps into Chantal’s apartment, suddenly shivering with a hideous sense of intruding into her privacy. What right did I have to be here, after all? I wasn’t police, or a P.I., or Nancy Drew.

“There may be nothing vital. But there’s also no red jacket in this room or in the coat closet,” Jack said, closing the closet door. “Maybe it’s in the bedroom? But if not, does that confirm that she never made it home that night? And is that evidence that suggests an accidental shooting rather than anything to do with Jeremiah’s death?”