Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery (3 page)

“Huh.” She reached up to look at the smaller stack more closely, then frowned and went down the line, checking each one.

When she’d been in college, someone down the hall had pulled in decent money making fake IDs for underage drinkers. He’d set up an oversized replica of a driver’s license, and the person buying it would stand in front of the display and have their photo taken, then he’d downsize the entire thing and laminate it. A quick glance by a bartender or bouncer wouldn’t have seen anything fake about it.

These looked about a thousand times more sophisticated, but were pretty clearly fake. Unless the DMV in Oregon worked out of residential homes. “I know we’re outsourcing everything these days,” she said, “but that’s a bit extreme.”

The sound of her voice echoed in the enclosed space, reminding her that she was poking around in a stranger’s house, and while making fake IDs might be amusing in college, it was still illegal. Whoever was involved probably would not be happy about finding her in there. And it was pretty clear by now that Mrs. Adaowsky was not at home, and odds were, this wasn’t her home at all.

Right now, she was
hoping
the latter.

Ginny replaced the card in the box and wiped her hand against the fabric of her skirt, then retreated back into the kitchen, turning off the light as she went. Her nerves were prickling now, and the need to be out of the house overwhelmed her worry about her missing client. She would call again once she was in the car, and see if she’d misread their meeting place somehow.

The bright lime-green paint of the kitchen seemed unbearably gaudy after the dimmer white of the smaller room, and Ginny squinted instinctively, turning to push open the swinging door back into the living room, when her entire body froze.

She was almost a hundred percent certain that the body hadn’t been there before.

3

S
he’d never had to call
911 before. The dispatcher took her information, confirmed her number and location because she was using her cell phone with a Seattle address, then told her to go wait outside, and not to touch anything.

She sat on the front porch, wishing Georgie was with her, for nearly half an hour before the ambulance arrived, a cop car hot on its wheels. To be fair, Ginny admitted it wasn’t as though the person inside was going to mind waiting, and she wasn’t sure she could have stood up steadily before then. The sirens drew a few people outside, staring at the house, and Ginny suspected there were a bunch of curtains being pulled aside in other houses. This might be the most excitement this block had seen in years.

The paramedics pushed past her with their gear, followed by one of the cops. The other walked up to Ginny and—after identifying her—gave her a thorough once-over and motioned for her to come down off the porch. “You okay?”

“For not-okay versions of okay, yeah,” she managed to say, and his mouth twisted a little in what she thought might have been a smile. He was middle-aged, with an odd mole next to his left eye, and an attitude that said he’d been on the job a few years too long, but his voice was gentle when he had her run through everything she’d seen and done that morning.

He wrote down everything Ginny said, then glanced back at the house and asked her again, “And you didn’t touch anything?”

“No. I . . . I saw it, and then I came outside, and I called it in. And I waited here until you arrived.” She had told him this already, same as she’d told the dispatcher, but she knew they’d ask again, and probably again, as though she were going to change her story. At least they hadn’t made her go back inside: the sight of the body shoved under the kitchen table, its limbs curled around itself, neck at an angle that
said
it was broken, even though she’d never seen anything like that before . . .

“All right, wait here.” And he walked off, she guessed to see what was going on inside, although he didn’t actually go inside the house, just checked in via radio. Was he watching her? Or keeping an eye on the people who were clumping on the sidewalk across the street? Probably both, Ginny decided.

This made the second dead body Ginny had ever seen up close and personal, but somehow it was so much worse. Because she hadn’t been expecting it? Because it was so obviously a violent death, not prettied up to seem like natural causes, or an accident?

Or because it was the body not of the elderly handicapped woman she’d been expecting to meet, but a man probably—from the quick look she’d had—about her own age? In the still coldly rational part of her brain that was observing everything that was going on, Ginny suspected it was the latter: that she was not shocked that there had been a dead body, but that it hadn’t been who she was expecting.

That wasn’t a particularly good thing to realize about herself.

She waited another fifteen minutes while things happened out of sight inside the house, resisting the urge to check her phone or tablet in case that was a no-no she hadn’t been warned about, feeling the itch for information like a thousand mosquitos all at once. The crowd across the street had grown to about fifteen people, not counting the curtain-twitchers, and she wondered if they were coming in from other neighborhoods as word spread.

Eventually, the cop who’d been inside came out again and met up with her partner, just as an unmarked sedan that screamed “cop” pulled up to the curb. A white news van pulled up behind that. She wasn’t sure if she should be surprised someone sent a crew to cover this, or insulted that they hadn’t gotten there earlier. Wasn’t her murder important enough?

Both cops turned and frowned at her, as though they’d heard that last thought. She lifted her hands and widened her eyes in a “what? I’m just standing here like you told me” response. Snark might not be the best response, but she was pretty sure that she hadn’t done anything wrong—other than walking in the house, but she’d thought she was meeting someone there!—and they were still giving her dirty looks.

The cops came back to her, the woman scowling. “And what were you doing inside, again?”

She had explained that to them already, too. Twice. So might as well go for three. “I had made an appointment to meet with a potential client.” She’d given the first cop her business card, showed him the information in her schedule, and the call log on her phone that connected to the landline inside. “When she didn’t respond, but the door was unlocked, I went inside to see if she was in need of assistance.”

So far, nobody had mentioned illegal entry, so she was probably right about some Good Samaritan law covering her ass. Or they were waiting for her to say something incriminating. “I’ve told you three times already: I thought I was meeting a woman named Amanda Adaowsky, for a business meeting.”

She didn’t mention poking around in the studio, was thankful that she’d had the presence of mind—or the paranoia—to wipe where she’d touched the cabinet door, hoping to make her fingerprints unreadable. Whoever that guy was, and whyever he’d been killed and shoved under the table, she just wanted to be the poor woman who’d found him, not someone of interest.

The problem was, one of the first things she’d learned during their very first job was that if the cops were looking at you, you were already in trouble. And the fact that she claimed to be here to meet someone who—according to the first cop’s terse comment—didn’t live here? Yeah, she was already on their radar. She should just give her statement and get the hell out of Dodge. But her curiosity was warring with her desire to disappear, and curiosity was winning. As usual.

“So what happened?”

The second cop was still scowling, shooting a glance over to where a woman with short, graying hear, wearing a Portland Police Department windbreaker and cap, but with no obvious gun, was standing, looking at the house. She must’ve arrived in the second car. “And you have no idea who the individual inside might be?” the female cop asked again, ignoring Ginny’s question.

Ginny shook her head, feeling the once-smooth knot of hair at the back of her head start to fall apart, curls brushing against the back of her neck. She didn’t even bother to try to tuck them back in: nobody was going to be impressed by her professional appearance at this point. “No. Mrs. Adaowsky”—except that there was no Mrs. Adaowsky here, it seemed—“didn’t mention having a son or a caretaker, so no. Is he, was he . . .”

Of course he was: you didn’t end up shoved under the kitchen table accidentally, not like that, not without any signs of an accident, but she had to ask, anyway.

“That’s still under investigation, ma’am.” Deadpan stonewall. “You’ll be staying locally, in case we need to speak with you again?”

They didn’t tell her not to leave town, but it was implicit in the tone. The fact that she’d come here to see someone who didn’t seem to live here at all, and found a dead body . . . Yeah, she wouldn’t let her leave town, either. Ginny smiled politely and told them again where she was staying, and watched them write it down again. The advantage to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth was that it was a lot harder for someone to catch you out in a lie. But it got boring, repeating it over and over again.

She glanced at the activity on the front porch of the house, then at the small crowd of rubberneckers, trying to decide if they were more interested in the activity on the porch or the two local news teams now covering the activity, then looked at her watch again.

“May I go now? I left my dog at the hotel, and she’ll need to be walked soon. . . .” Georgie would probably be fine for another hour or two, but as reasons to go it seemed like one cops couldn’t give her grief about.

The first cop flapped his hand at her, which she took to mean “yeah, go on, get out of my face.” They were taking the body away now, a covered gurney, and Ginny hesitated a moment, then shook her head. She wasn’t involved, she didn’t need to linger—especially since if one of the news crews saw she was off the cop’s leash, they might try to corner her for an interview. She really didn’t want to talk to anyone right then: she just wanted to get back to her hotel, walk Georgie, and let everything that had happened today shake down into some kind of sense.

Of course, she was too flustered to pay attention to where she was going, missed a turn, and got lost on her way back to the hotel. By the time she let herself into the room, enough time had gone by that her excuse was true: Georgie was nearly frantic with the need to go for a walk, although she’d been a good girl and not done anything that would have required apologizing to the housekeeping staff.

Despite the worry and chaos that was tangling her thinking, Ginny smiled at the dog’s exuberance, all other thoughts put aside for a few seconds. “Hey, girl, you were a good girl, weren’t you?” A blue-black tongue washed her face, paws pushing against her legs as she knelt down to say hello. “Yeah, okay, hang on a minute.”

The act of clicking the leash onto Georgie’s collar and shoving a few poo bags into her jacket pocket was familiar enough to be soothing, as was watching her dog’s simple pleasure at the smell of the air outside, the feel of grass under her paws, and the relief of being able to pee. The shar-pei dragged her from one end of the designated dog walking area to the other, sniffing at everything, and occasionally remembering what she’d come out here to do in the first place.

The physical act of walking the dog let Ginny’s brain focus on the day’s events with a little more composure, pushing aside the mildly emotional weebling and focusing on the facts.

Fact one: her client had not been at the house.

Fact two: her client did not, by all appearances, live at that house.

Fact three: someone probably not her client had been, by all appearances, running a fake ID shop out of that house.

Fact four: someone—probably someone who did live in that house, or maybe worked there, or was just a random stranger, although she thought that was unlikely—had been killed there.

She had the where, and could guess at the how, but the who and the why were still unanswered. The cops would be able to get the who pretty quickly, but the
why
 . . .

“People are complicated, Georgie,” she said. “We lie, we cheat, we steal, we do things that require fake ID, and then we kill people and shove them under tables. What’s with that, anyway? What in that guy’s life made him worth killing? Was it the fake IDs?” She shook her head, having trouble imagining that. “Who gets murderous over fake driver’s licenses?”

Her dog, finished with her rounds, bumped her head against Ginny’s leg and aimed deep brown eyes up at her owner with a quiet plea.

“I’d rather be a dog, I think. You’ve got all the basics covered, don’t you?” Ginny said, giving Georgie the expected treat from her pocket. “Food, shelter, belly rubs . . .”

Georgie took the treat gracefully, then whined as though to say, “Well, yes, and where
are
my belly rubs?” and flopped over on the pavement, wiggling happily against the rough surface. Ginny laughed and bent down to oblige, one hand scratching the plush fawn-colored fur on the dog’s stomach.

“Not my circus, not my monkeys, isn’t that the saying?” She should just walk away, leave it be, leave town as soon as the cops gave her the all clear, which hopefully would be today, or tomorrow at the latest.

“It is weird, though,” she went on, still rubbing Georgie’s belly. “Not the dead guy, because sadly that’s not weird at all, I’ve discovered.” Even before she’d started looking into people’s uglier secrets, she’d not been an idealist about human behavior—she’d worked in too many offices for that. “I mean, Mrs. Adaowsky. She contacts me, hires me, pays my retainer, which, okay, isn’t huge but it’s not chump change, either, and then gives me the wrong address, the wrong phone number? And it just happens, hey, to be a murder scene?” Ginny frowned, staring across the parking lot without really seeing anything, still petting Georgie’s belly. “Which raises the question of, if Mrs. A actually calls me back, do I
want
to take the call? Or do I tell her that her retainer bought my trip down here, but her games cost her the rest of me?

“What do you think, baby? Maybe I should call Tonica, get his take on this?”

Georgie whined again, but that could have been requesting harder scritches, not telling her to call her sometimes-partner.

“No,” Ginny decided, pushing back to her feet. “This is weird, and my serious bad luck in getting caught up in any of it, but we’re done. Whatever the hell is going on, this one’s for the cops to figure out, not us. And Mrs. Adaowsky can whistle for me—I’m done.” Ginny worked with a wide range of divas—that being the personality type who hired private concierges, as a rule—but she wasn’t a docile lapdog they could ignore and scoop up at whim. She demanded respect from her clients, as well as a respectable fee—it was the only way to get the job done. And giving her the runaround was not respectful.

“And neither is dumping a dead body on me,” she said out loud. “I need to add that to the website’s FAQ. If you have a dead body, you have to say that right up front.”

So what now? The job was a bust, but she’d already paid for the night’s stay. The hotel wasn’t going to give her a refund just because her client turned out to be a no-show. And while she didn’t think the cops would really give her shit about going back to Seattle—they could find her there easily enough, and there was the technological marvel of the phone, if they had anything else they wanted to ask her—wanting her own bed didn’t trump the probable annoyance of having to call the police station and tell them she’d changed her mind, she was going home.

But sitting in the hotel room with nothing to do except wonder about a dead body she shouldn’t even know about wasn’t going to do her any good. Might as well try to get some positive out of this trip. . . .

Fortunately, Portland wasn’t without friendlies. She pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket and dialed a number from memory, waiting for the other person to pick up. “Ron, hi, it’s Ginny again. Thanks for the advice on the rental car, it’s as solid as you said. But it looks like my job fell through so I’m free for dinner tonight after all. You still—all right, yeah, that sounds good. Just tell me where.” She listened to Ron yelling to someone else, then giving her an address.