Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3) (13 page)

“It’s mine.” I talked in my sleep.

“Lucky duck.”

He placed a warm, eucalyptus scented weighted mask over my eyes. “You’re going to love the bull sperm mask, except it’s cold. And smelly.” I could feel him rolling around in a chair behind me. “After I put it on, I have to ice it down with cold towels.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a big ol’ mess if I don’t keep it near frozen. The good news for you is it will make this hair grow back in no time.” He began painting an ice cold paste along my hairline.

“Ricky?”

“Hmmm?”

“How do they get the bull sperm?” I was imagining bulls behind closed doors with cow magazines.
Have a Cow. Cows Come Home
.
Holy Cow.

“They cut the testes off and boil them down.” Ricky painted. “Then the broth is infused with Katera root and whipped into a paste.” He’d painted almost all the way around. “They call it Viagra for the hair.” He used his hands to glob it onto, then pull it through the rest of my head. Which is about when the smell hit me. I bolted off that bed, wearing the warm blanket, and made a run for it.

“Every time,” I heard Ricky say.

*     *     *

I needed to be dressed as a virtual assistant and in the Strike It Rich casino in less than an hour, so I didn’t have time to wash the bullshit out of my hair. I ran screaming into the employees-only room, scattered it of three therapists emptying a pizza box, dressed in a spa uniform, and buttoned my semened head into a spa turban towel I grabbed from a laundered stack. My only shoe option was the standard-issue spa flip-flop. I loaded a small cart with a dozen random bottles of spa stuff and a stack of towels, then pushed out a door at the back of the room into a back hallway. I dabbed at the bull semen dripping down my face with one of the towels. As the elevator climbed, my scalp began itching like it had a poison ivy chickenpox. I drummed my fingers all around the turban until I grabbed a big bottle of glycolic resurfacing lotion and began hitting myself in the itchy head with it. Which is what I was doing when the elevator stopped, the doors opened, and Hashtag Elspie dressed again in her unremarkable, don’t-take-a-second-look-at-me camo, open-mouth stared at me. I ducked my turbaned head, shoved the cart out, and flew past her before she could get a better look. I cleared a corner, froze until she was gone, then flip-flopped down the hall, bull goo running down my back.

Why hadn’t James Bond let me know she was back at the Bellissimo?

Room twenty-five nineteen had a Do Not Disturb placard on the doorknob.

I looked both ways as I snapped on gloves, swiped, pushed the spa cart through, then threw the bolt and locked myself in. I paused a second to catch my breath, got a whiff of bull, but geared up again. Speedy was the way to go. That way, the smell trailed me.

Nothing in the foyer but a mini Farmer’s Market all over the bar—squash, kale, bananas, Hostess Twinkies (kidding), Taco Seasoning (not kidding), raspberries—and a Vitamix blender. This would be where Elspeth prepares her liquid meals. I stepped through to the sitting room to see that she’d redecorated it into a surveillance suite, complete with a two-way mirror looking into the Jennings sitting room. (How’d Hashtag get in here and knock out a square foot of wall? Then get into the Jennings suite next door and hang a mirror?) All was quiet at the Jenningses, but Elspie had done a
Beautiful Mind
number on hers. Dozens of aerial shots of the Lickskillet property were double-stick taped to the walls, along with head shots of the Jennings and Cassidy Banking, copies of financial transactions going all the way back to the Montecito, photographs of Missy Jennings’s dance studio (Strike Up the Band), photographs of the Pilatus airplane, and in the middle of it all with a wide blank border, a photograph of Hashtag Elspie and Brianna Strother cheek to cheek, laughing and clinking fruity drinks, with sunburned noses and hers-and-hers signature-Elspie ponytails. They were on the deck of a cruise ship with a sparkling teal-blue ocean behind, white-hot sun directly above, and flower leis around their necks.

I took a wide shot photo of the wall.

I poked my head in the door of the bedroom, expecting nothing, because Elspie was coming and going from the Bellissimo, not sleeping here, and this room didn’t have any access to the Jennings’s suite, so I doubt she’d have knocked out any walls. In the middle of the king-sized bed was my James Bond Super Spy pen. In forty pieces.

FOURTEEN

“Your hair is growing back,” Angela said.

“I know.” I was in the makeup chair. “It itches.”

“No.” She met my eyes in the mirror. “I mean it’s
really
growing. You have a half inch of growth since yesterday.” She put her nose to my head and sniffed. “What have you done?”

It was four o’clock. I was already late for my virtual assistant job at Strike. Time heals all nightmares, and I had very little time, so I’d agreed to make friends with Colour Couture aerosol again. I looked at it from a math perspective: my hair had been sprayed hundreds of times without catching fire and only the once going up in flames, so the odds were in my favor.

“I went to the spa today and had a bull semen hair mask.”

“That’s the smell.”

“That’s the smell. I washed it twice.”

Angela held up a handful and let it drop. “You need to get a hold of more of that bull mask and not wash it out. Sleep in it. At the rate it’s growing, you could have your length back in a month.”

“I wouldn’t want to put my pillow through it.” Not to mention Bradley Cole. I put him through enough as it was.

“I swear I can almost see your hair pushing out of your scalp. It’s a miracle drug.” She finished spray painting me. “Maybe you should rent a bull.”

“And what, exactly, Angela, would I do with it?”

She chewed on that.

(Don’t go there. Just don’t.)

(Can you even rent a bull?)

Angela reached for a blazing hot flat iron. “Let’s vogue you up.”

Twenty minutes later, I presented my credentials and vogued through the Strike It Rich doors. I asked the beefy bouncer what I’d missed, dropped my camera at his feet, let him be a gentleman, and in a very ladylike way, picked his pockets as he picked up the camera.

“A lady playing the dancing game hit a big one.” He tugged at the lapels of his jacket. “Two hundred thousand.”

That put her tournament take, on Day Two, at half a million dollars. Missy Jennings couldn’t stop cracking the code and advancing. Could we stop her before she bankrupted the Bellissimo?

I went about my social media business as instructed, letting the tech-savvy gaming-hungry world know what they were missing and what they had to look forward to. I kept the little camera going, and when I could stop taking evidence shots of Missy Jennings miraculously winning, and Cassidy Banking laundering money for her brother-in-law, I tweeted a community jackpot win. Or a picture of the gold icicle chandelier. Or Fantasy’s butt.

The phone in my pocket buzzed.
We need to talk
.

I scanned the room for my boss, Hashtag Elspie, who was holding up the same granite wall she’d been observing from yesterday. It would seem that tonight she’d been observing me, and I’d been too busy trying to nail the Jennings and Cassidy Banking to notice.

Our eyes locked, then Elspeth and I shared a long look. I took a deep breath and returned her text with a picture of the Beautiful Mind wall in guest room twenty-five nineteen.
Yes, Elspeth. Let’s talk.

*     *     *

“Cool hair.”

“Thank you.”

We met in a liquor storage closet behind Strike. Metal shelving held row after row of premium liquor. I stood, tapping a foot, while Elspeth rested on the metal rim of a keg of beer. Hipster super-charged “On! Their! Dime!” cheerleader was gone and in her place, a dead-serious federal agent. With a mile-high ponytail and glitter on her face.

“Who do you work for?”

“I work for the casino. Who do
you
work for, Elspeth?”

“I work for the federal government and I need to know who is working with the Jennings. Is it you, Amy, or whatever your name is?”

She was probably packing. I had a camera.

“No, Elspeth. I work undercover for the Bellissimo. I want to know who’s working with them too, which puts us on the same team.”

Of course, she didn’t believe me, and I could see now that the only way out of this was to bring her into our circle, combine our resources, and probably in the next two minutes. Before she shot me.

“I won’t let you compromise my case.”

“What case?” I asked. “Are you drug enforcement?”

She didn’t trust me enough to answer, and had she, both our covers would have been blown. One of the three bartenders, the bald one, the mean bald one, the quiet mean bald one, opened the door so quietly neither of us even heard him approach.

Elspeth was off that keg and on me in a millisecond. The bartender looked from my face to hers, then back, trying to decide what he’d interrupted.

“Excuse me, ladies.” He smiled, a wicked, twisted grin, grabbed a bottle of liquor, then backed out. “Carry on.” He closed the door.

*     *     *

My hair grew another half inch during the night, so I had to touch up my red roots with squirts of Colour Couture before I left for work the next morning. Five short hours after I’d come home from work the night before. Bradley snuck up behind me.

“It’s dark out, Davis.”

“I know.” I dropped a short Alice + Olivia black and white A-line dress over my Chocolate Covered Cherry hair, then climbed into big black suede boots. Bradley smiled his I-like-it smile. I smiled back my I’m-all-yours. “I’m going to sneak into Strike early, while it’s closed, and see if I can hack into the system to take a look at the Jennings in-house account.”

“You need to let the feds worry about hacking into the system, Davis.”

“Oh, right.”

“You did bring the feds in yesterday, didn’t you?”

“Absolutely.” Hashtag Elspie’s in. She’s federal.

Bradley raised one eyebrow. I got busy looking for my mascara.

“Actually,” (and this is the whole truth) “I’m sneaking in to take a peek at the game. I need to see how Missy Jennings is winning so much. No Hair, Fantasy, and Baylor are coming too, but later, daylight or so, because we’re meeting with Elspeth.”

“Why would the four of you meet with Elspeth?”

“We’re meeting with her,” I finally found my Dior Show, “because she nailed me last night.”

“Your cover’s blown?”

Coat two, Dior Show. “Uh-huh.” I barely swiped my bottom lashes. “She made me.” Lip liner. “After that, if she doesn’t shoot us, we want to play the game while the casino’s closed.”

“You should work on this aspect of your job, Davis.”

“Which one is that?”

“The gambling addict one.”

“Just wait till you see what that game does, Bradley. You’ll want to play it too.”

“How are you going to get in this early?” He wrapped me up in his arms from behind and we talked to each other in the mirror.

“I swiped a bouncer’s keys last night.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“Davis!”

“Bradley!”

“I’m having an affair, living with, engaged to, a woman who breaks into casinos and is
married
.”

I pushed free of his arms.

“I was kidding.”

“It’s not funny.”

We observed a moment of silence. (#Squirrel)

“Want me to go with you?”

It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. There were times I felt as if Bradley were more concerned with what happened at the Bellissimo than what happened at his own casino.

“Sure,” I said. “Come with me.”

“Want another shower?”

A tempting offer. “Rain check,” I said. “I’ll make us to-go coffees.”

Thirty minutes later, which would have been four hours later had we not let a Bellissimo valet park Bradley’s BMW, we were at the front doors.

“You go right, I’ll go left, and we’ll meet at Strike.” Everyone watching, all the time.

Seven-thirty Sunday morning was a quiet time in gambling land; Saturday night drunks clear out around six, and even the diehard poker players sleep in. I passed a couple staring at the floor, dragging their feet and rolling suitcases, counted four blackjack tables with a little business each, and there might have been fifty slot players on my side of the building. Bradley beat me to the Strike It Rich doors.

I raised my arm and made a semi-circle swipe through the air with my Strike It Rich badge for the cameras on the off chance someone in surveillance was awake. We got one foot each in the door when I fell against Bradley.

Elspeth Raiffe was spread out on the mahogany bar, one arm dangling off. She stared at us. Seven inches of a gold glass icicle protruded from the middle of her chest where it had been driven in like a stake. Drops of dried blood were suspended and frozen on the tips of her dead fingers.

*     *     *

“For now,” No Hair pocketed his phone, “we clean.”

Fantasy and I had already snapped on gloves, jumpsuits, and goggles. No Hair removed his Swiss cheese tie, rolled it, and placed it on a table across the room. Near Bradley. Who was fifty shades of green and ticking off a list of how many laws we were breaking. He used the words tampering, hindering, abuse, aiding, abetting, destruction, corpse, and breakfast, which he said he no longer wanted and might never want again. I told him he was free to go. He said he would stay with me.

No Hair gloved up. He peeled back the edge of one to look at his watch. “We have thirty minutes max. Baylor, go get some wheels.”

“How big?”

“Enough for Elzbath.” No Hair pointed.

“Luggage cart?”

“That’ll do.”

We went to work. Dusting the granite bar for prints was pointless, because it had eight gazillion, so we removed trace. We videoed, bagged, tagged, bleached, then restored the crime scene, clearly primary, enough blood pooled around her to see she’d not been moved. We used bar towels to absorb all we could from the black carpet, then bagged the towels, until there was nothing left but her cold body. Still on the bar. Baylor, bless his heart, extracted the gold glass icicle, which hopefully would have prints. She’d already bled out, so it was only horrifying. We all looked up at the blown glass light fixture murder weapon above our heads.

And then there was her.

Elspeth’s right hand was pierced cleanly through the middle, like Jesus, as she’d tried to defend herself. She’d seen it coming. There was no other evidence of a struggle on Elspeth’s part, so she’d known her killer. There was nothing in her pockets and no weapon on her. We rolled her in a tarp, sealed it, arranged her on the luggage cart, and covered her with a tablecloth Fantasy found in a storage closet. Baylor pushed her out the back way and transported her to our 3B offices. Fantasy and I cleaned the bar where her body had been. No Hair paced, and alternated between holding his breath and letting it out in whooshes. I tore out of my CSI clothes, rolled them, and added them to the evidence bag. I crossed the room slowly, fell into Bradley, and sobbed.

*     *     *

@StrikeWaiters #Congratulations @ElspieBabie Good luck at your new job!

@StrikeWaiters #Promoted #NewBoss @Tra_Raines a.k.a Gold Cowboy Boots!

@StrikeWaiters #BellissimoBarre cancelled until further notice.

@StrikeWaiters #GoldTan cancelled forever. #Itchy

*     *     *

I drove a Strike Town Car to The Pointe apartments on Cedar Lane Road. I parked in Elspeth’s space. I sat there five minutes staring at my lap and listening to myself breathe. I knocked on the door, Brianna Strother answered in a bathrobe, I introduced myself. Real name. Real job. Chocolate Covered Cherry hair. I asked if I might come in.

She collapsed at my boots.

*     *     *

The women met at the Criminal Investigators Training Program in Glynco, Georgia, nine years ago. Half of the class, like Elspeth, was ATF. The other half of the forty-eight CITP students were, like Brianna, from other federal agencies. They were randomly chosen as partners in a federal court mock trial and that led to the women deliberately choosing each other for better or for worse. They were married on the Fourth of July, 2007, in Montpelier, Vermont. Their jobs kept them geographically separated, most recently for eight months, together on scattered weekends and occasional holidays, and stolen months between assignments. Then Elspeth was placed on the DeKalb County, Alabama drug task force. Target: Jennings Christmas Tree Farms. At the time, Brianna was working out of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness on Perdido Street—as we guessed, working a cargo drug smuggling ring—and it took the women less than two weeks to determine they were working the same case. At which point, they were able to share a rare roof.

This was to have been Elspeth’s last assignment. Having completed the six-year waiting period and an additional year of paperwork, then two bank-breaking trips to Kajaani, Finland, the last strip of red tape had been torn and the ink was drying on the adoption papers for their nine-month-old daughter. They’d already booked business class seats on Air France for December 28th.

My heart broke, and broke, and broke, and broke. Then broke.

*     *     *

By early evening, Strike in full swing, the last of the proper authorities had arrived, and our 3B offices were invaded. Crawling all over the three large rooms that made up our work space were representatives of the Department of Justice and an even larger crew from the Federal Action Task Force. A forensic chemist team from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives took gentle care of their fallen comrade Elspeth. They praised our preservation and documentation.

I called catering. “Sandwiches, salads, cookies, coffee,” I said. “I don’t think it matters. Just lots of food.” Someone behind me in a blue jacket—they were all wearing blue jackets—asked for shrimp.

“And you really want all this delivered to Gamer, Mrs. Sanders?”

Gamer is a kiddie casino around the corner from the darkened doorway, which gets you to the Super Secret elevator, the one that leads to our offices. “Is there a problem?”

“No, ma’am.”

Fifteen minutes later, Elspeth’s bagged body rolled out the door on a gurney and five minutes after that, a gurney full of food and drink rolled in. The blue-jackets swarmed. A man, who’d been sitting quietly in a corner, rose from his seat. He was pale, with thick white hair, steel-gray eyes behind Drew Carey eyeglasses, and a neck like a tree trunk. When he stood, the blue-jacket people stopped chewing. When he opened his mouth to speak, the blue-jacket people stopped breathing.

“You have forty-eight hours.”

“We need more time.” The way No Hair said it caused a semi-circle of open air around him as everyone and their sandwiches took a giant step back.

The white-haired DOJ man sniffed. “Bring me the killer by Wednesday.”

“I need ten days.” No Hair took a deliberate step in his direction. The DOJ man raised him, taking two steps toward No Hair. Any second now I expected to hear zippers and there’d be pants on the ground, then the rest of us would be asked to vote on whose was bigger.

“You have until Saturday, then I’m taking over this investigation.”

“Midnight,” No Hair said.

“Deal.”

*     *     *