Coffee & Crime (43 page)

"You love me?"

He laughed despite his mood. "Yes, of course. But that's not the point. I can handle this. You don't need to fix it."

I leaned across his desk and scolded him with a look. "I vaguely remember saying the same thing to you. And you respected my wishes by scheming with Zelda behind my back, and then stalking me." I cocked an eyebrow and he had no comeback for that. "I just want to make a couple of calls to gather intel and I have to back off? Hardly seems fair."

Ted held up his hands. "Okay, okay. I'm a hypocrite, I admit it." He cupped my chin. "But I don't need you to make the calls. I have my own people for that. If it is Jake, then I'll sue his pansy ass. See how he likes being the defendant for a change."

I didn’t like other people solving my problems so I could hardly insist that Ted let me solve his. "Okay. But if you change your mind…"

"I’ll call Joe myself.” He waved his hand. "Besides, I'm more interested in Farmer. It’s great that he took the bait, but he should’ve been more careful. What does he think we have to act that recklessly?"

I shrugged and sat back in my chair. "He wasn’t careful when he broke into Joe’s or when he smashed Zelda’s window. Maybe he’s not very bright. What time was the break-in?"

"Last night about eleven."

"So while we were eating pizza, he was trying to pry open your door?" I frowned. "Don’t you have a dispatcher here at night? Isn’t the place open?"

Ted gave me a naughty grin. "We were probably writhing around on the floor by then, but yeah, about that time. During the week, we close earlier. If a driver has a late run, he has a key to the garage, so he can leave the car."

The image of Ted and I writhing threw me for a few seconds and I lost my train of thought. "Nice visual, thanks for that." I shook my head. "Why didn't the security company call you or text you?"

"I turned my phone off because I wanted to spend the evening with my girlfriend." He shrugged. "Irrelevant, they called Steve instead."

"Who's Steve, your security guard?"

"My brother and my partner," Ted said casually. "He came down and sorted it out. Farmer didn't get in. Some damage to the door, but nothing else."

Until then, I'd thought of Ted as an orphan, like me. And discovering actually had a family disturbed and disappointed me. "You have a brother?"

He flapped a hand. "There'll be plenty of time to meet the family, honey. We need to focus.

Family – not just a brother – but a family? I cringed. "Do you have a big family?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Meanwhile back to the problem at hand."

"Right." I put the mysterious Jordan family out of my mind and thought about Farmer for a minutes. "Did your driver see a tail? Did he spot a VW following him?"

Ted ran his hand through his hair. "No, but that doesn’t mean Farmer didn’t follow
—
just that he wasn’t seen. And if we were going to hide 'evidence' the obvious place would be here. Farmer could've figured that out without having to follow at all."

I pulled Ted's tracker out of my pocket and tossed it from hand to hand, like a baseball. "Where'd you get this thing?"

He shrugged. "An online security company. So?"

"Pretty easy to get, right? Actually, there's a spy shop near George's lawyer's office. They have all kinds of spy toys; nanny cams, night vision goggles, long-range cameras, trackers, bugs, parabolic mikes..." Ted reared back his head in surprise. I jabbed a finger at him. "That's right! I researched this. The point is, that spy gadgets aren't hard to get, right? You don't need a license to buy them?"

"Uh-huh."

"Listening devices would be as easy to come by, wouldn't they?"

He gaped. "Are you kidding me? You didn’t check for bugs after the break-in?”

Suddenly I didn’t feel so clever anymore and stammered. "No."

Ted threw up his arms and groaned. "No wonder they knew your every move." He scoffed. "Right?"

Panic clawed at my insides and I jumped to my feet. "What if he wired my place too? Those three days when I was gone, Boomer was with me. All he'd have to do is climb over the wall and walk through the front door after Zelda had gone."

Dumbfounded, Ted stared at me. "You don't lock your doors?" He smacked his forehead. "Scotti!"

I made a face at him. "Yes, I lock the doors. But Zelda barely remembers to close the door, much less lock it."

Ted grabbed his phone. "We’ve got to put a plug in this thing."

After a quick texting session with Joe and Zelda, it was decided that a couple of Ted's guys would do a sweep of Joe's office, my place, Ted's place, and our vehicles that evening.

With time to kill, I went home and tore apart the house for some early spring cleaning —secretly hoping I might find a bug. Joe and Zelda helped and complained the whole time. But what else could we do? As a reward, I baked cookies and made soup.

As promised, Ted's guys showed up to do the sweep, which took about ten minutes. After all the locations were swept, we found that the only location compromised was Joe’s. They found several bugs — in the phone, in Joe’s desk lamp, on the underside of Eric's desk and two outside on the patio. Not a full-on assault, but enough for the listeners to get an earful. We considered leaving the bugs in place so we could intentionally misdirect our listeners. But aside from getting a little self-satisfying revenge, there was no point in playing games with these people.

When the devices were removed, our listeners would realize they'd been caught and likely come up with a contingency plan. But we were in the same position because up to that point, they knew everything — our theories, our strategy, and our evidence.

We huddled at the butcher-block over coffee. "Realistically, what could they do to us?"

Zelda sighed. "I don't know. Put you in jail again? Put all of us in jail?"

Joe shook his head. "Nah, that was a one-time ploy. If I was them, I'd hightail it out of town. Cut my losses and make myself scarcer than hen's teeth."

I shook my head. "Lily's worked hard to get her hands on George's money. She's close, if she hasn't succeeded already. She won't walk away from that. Farmer might. We don't know who he is, but I doubt he's as invested as Lily. Jake has the two million from the insurance settlement so he could go anywhere he wanted." I raised my eyebrows at them. "Would they split up?" I sighed. "We don't know if they're working together
—
but if they are
—
would they?"

Zelda twisted her lips. "We might be screwed. They have everything we had. Plus if they got an earful at our last meeting they know about you and Ted breaking into Lily's place." She threw up her hands. "What we need to know is who was listening."

Joe slurped his coffee and reached for a cookie. "Ain't no way to know that, Miss Zelda. We gotta assume it was all three." He happily munched his cookie. "Or four, could be Maggie's part of the pack too."

Zelda slouched down on the counter. "Then we're screwed. Royally, totally screwed."

Joe slapped his hands together to knock off the cookie crumbs and said, "Either of you ladies know how to use a firearm?"

"What?" I squeaked. "You think they'd try to kill us?"

"Not if you're armed."

I shook my head, rejecting the idea. "No. No."

Joe lean across the counter and tapped my hand with a finger. "We may not know who, but one of them killed George. You want to leave that to chance?"

I refilled our coffee cups. "Yeah, with a brownie, not a bullet." I put the coffee pot back on the burner and slumped in my stool. "And you're right Joe, we don't know who did it. Jake? Maggie? Lily? This Farmer guy?"

"All the more reason to have the extra protection."

All the hand-wringing about contingency plans and repercussions turned out to be unnecessary. Because everything got very quiet. We knew Lily was on to us when her tracking went offline. After that, she gave our surveillance guys the slip and disappeared. I hoped she’d left town — forever.

An out of the blue, panicked call from Manny seemed to confirm that perhaps Lily had done just that. "Where's your friend Lily?" he demanded.

I snickered. "My friend. Ah, no. She's your partner, or buyer or whatever, it's not my problem you lost track of her."

Manny whined over the phone line. "Scotti don't be that way."

"I'm sure she'll show up eventually." Actually I wasn’t sure at all and hoped she didn’t. "What are you so freaked about anyway?"

Zelda came out of the kitchen to listen my side of the conversation.

"Check, she's no good," Manny muttered.

I fought the urge to hoot and jump in the air. "Sounds like a problem."

"Hey Scotti, what about this? What about we do our deal like we never met that Lily?"

"No can do."

"How come? It's a good deal for you and me, chica."

"I bet if you thought really hard, you'd be able to figure it out, Manny. Well, good luck. Gotta go." I ended the call and grinned at Zelda. "I guess there is justice in the world after all."

Zelda made a face. "What did el jerko want?"

I started to laugh. "Lily's check bounced and he can't find her."

We both screamed like little girls and had a good laugh at Manny's expense. Then half-heartedly debated going to the diner to gloat, but I was over that particular drama, and we decided to leave Manny to flail on his own.

A couple of days later, Jake Kannanack lost the Trumball case, and the press crucified him. Maybe like Ted, he'd learn how it felt to lose big clients and a lot of money. Although Ted didn't have a two million dollar insurance check like Jake had
—
but hope springs eternal. Rumor had it that Jake had even hired a security team
—
whether to keep us at arm's length or protect himself from the media, I didn't know. But it was gratifying to see the big bully being bullied.

Nick Farmer also disappeared. We assumed he left with Lily or was hiding out with her. But the truth was, Nick Farmer was a still total mystery. Without questioning him, we'd never know how he fit into the puzzle. So all the players were in the wind and we were stuck in neutral.

I walked into the kitchen where all the copies of our evidence sat stacked on the butcher-block. I'd read it so many times that I dreamed about it. Without new leads our investigation was over. I scowled at Zelda. "Any news from Eric?" She shook her head and shrugged. I didn't say anything to Zee, but my confidence in Eric's hacker skills waned. Wasn't breaking codes what hackers did best? I threw up my hands and pushed the stack of papers aside. "I give up."

Zelda stuck her nose in the fridge. "Yeah, let's take a break. Do we have any of that soup left over from last night?"

"I don't need a break. I need to stop!"

Zelda's head came out of the fridge. "Chill out. Things will pick up again."

I hopped off my stool and closed the fridge door. "That's not what I'm saying, Zee. We need to start thinking about normal life again. Like getting jobs for example. I can't finance us with my savings forever. That money is supposed to be for the future, not groceries and rent. I'll be damned if I'm going to fritter it away chasing my tail."

Zelda nudged me aside with her hip and opened the fridge door again. "Okay, we'll find jobs. Once Eric cracks that code..."

I groaned and stomped out of the kitchen. If I heard that phrase one more time, I'd put my head in the oven. I stormed into the bedroom and pulled George's briefcase out of the closet, then brought it back to the kitchen.

Zelda hunched at the counter eating the leftover chicken I was saving for Boomer. I rolled my eyes and slammed the case down on the counter.

Zelda jumped. "Are you trying to make me choke?"

I opened the lid and threw everything into the case without caring how it landed. When I was done, I slammed it shut. "No! I'm trying to make you listen. It's over, Zee. O. V. E. R. Over. Time to forget all this bullshit and move on."

Zelda gnawed on her chicken leg but said nothing which only frustrated me more. I grabbed the handle and swept the case off the counter top. Since I forgot to button the latches, the case opened and all the papers flew into the air, landing willy-nilly on the floor. Grumbling, I got down on all fours to pick up the papers.

Zelda finished her chicken and got down on the floor to help me. "Everything will be okay, you'll see."

I sat back on my haunches and stared at her. "Really? Since when did you become an optimist?"

Zelda crawled around the kitchen on all fours, retrieving papers. "Change is good. You should try it." She reached under the lip of the cabinet and tugged out an envelope. Holding up the envelope she said, "Remember this?"

I crawled across the floor to Zelda and grabbed the envelope. "George's weird letter? I'd forgotten about it." I frowned at the letter. "Never did figure out what it meant." Leaving

the rest of the papers on the floor, I got to my feet and carried the letter back to the butcher-block. "Probably nothing, like everything else."

Zelda followed me back to the butcher-block and pulled up a stool. "Read it."