Where's Hansel and Gretel's Gingerbread House?: A Gabby Grimm Fairy Tale Mystery #2 (9 page)

“You’re telling me that you wanted her to
come to me for help?”

“Off the record?”

“Sure,” I replied nicely. Good cop, bad cop
works for me. I don’t mind being nice, but if you screw around with
me, I’ll turn bad cop in the blink of an eye and take you down,
even if you’re a federal agent.

“My bosses wanted me to turn her into an
informant. She would be the star witness in the federal trial.
I...I wasn’t willing to do that.”

“Meaning you have feelings for her?” I
demanded.

“I...um, it’s complicated.”

“Give me the uncomplicated version.”

“We went into the investigation assuming that
Annette was apprised of her boss’s criminal background and his mob
connections. Once I got to know her, I realized that she was too
distracted by Paul’s cancer to have absorbed any real information
until after she returned to work. But my bosses didn’t care. They
figured we had spent all that time and money trying to get inside
Frist and Company, she was still going to be our source.”

“Which means you reported my call to you, and
your boss called my boss, because you wanted us to interfere with
the FBI’s investigation?”

“I know I crossed the line with Annette. I
shouldn’t have...”

“Slept with her?”

“It wasn’t like that. She’s a nice woman. I
didn’t want her to be forced into becoming an informant.”

“You compromised her by sleeping with her.
Your bosses wanted to keep using her as an informant because she
was suspected of being a willing participant in Frist’s criminal
activities. What part of all this makes you a hero, pal?”

“When I realized she was innocent, I tried to
get her out of it. What more can I do? I’m between a rock and a
hard place!”

“Oh, I think you’ve got a ways to go before
that happens. You obviously still have room to wiggle your sorry
ass. You’re about to find out how much tighter that squeeze can
get, pal, if you don’t start telling me the whole truth!”

“Deputy, give me a break here. You owe
me.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Albany. The Mobil station.”

“You fired those shots?”

“I had to,” he insisted. “I couldn’t let
those punks kill Annette over small change. They were a couple of
crack heads bent on robbing the convenience store for cash to buy
drugs.”

“Why did you steal the gingerbread house?” I
wanted to know.

“My bosses heard that it was an exact replica
of the 1423 model. The Assistant United States Attorney thought it
would make a great courtroom display. Annette would be known as the
gingerbread lady who brought down the condo king with her
baking.”

“So you arranged not only for a replacement,
but for that sergeant to call me and let me know it had been
found?”

“I had to, Gabby. If I just stole it, you’d
waste time looking for it and people would pay too much attention
to it. Annette would just be in even deeper. As we speak, Assistant
US Attorney Rita Maloney is asking a judge for a warrant to seize
it.”

“And you want them to have the duplicate
gingerbread house, not the original?”

“I do. I want them to think Annette doesn’t
bring anything to the table.”

“How are you going to clean up this big mess
on Aisle Four?” I demanded. “How do you repair the damage to
Nettie’s reputation and still make the case?”

“Ah, that’s the problem,” he admitted. “I
still need to make the case. Frist is a bad guy.”

“No kidding. You know that the building isn’t
structurally sound, right?”

“Talk to me.” As soon as he said that, I knew
he was in. I went over the conversation I had had with my
cousin.

“If I had to guess,
Whatever-Your-Name-Really-Is,” I started to say. He cut me off.

“Jondahl. Will Jondahl.”

“Okay, Jondahl. If I had to guess, I’d say
that Frist is onto you. He told Nettie he doesn’t want her to see
the showcase unit until the decorator is finished with the place.
He’s trying to buy time. Maybe he suspects she will recognize the
differences in what the blueprints called for and what construction
was actually done. And to my mind, that can only mean one thing.
He’s got to destroy the condos before Nettie can see them.”

“An explosion would do it, right?” Even as he
said that, I could see the potential. What were the pitfalls?

“Sure. But he’s risking public safety. If he
blows up the building, it’s likely to result in a massive loss of
life.”

“Not really,” said the now enthusiastic FBI
agent. “The 1423 location is in an area of vacant old factories
that are in disrepair. Phase One, which is just being completed, is
in the center of the complex. The buildings of Phases Two and Three
surround it. That means they could safely blow up the first
building, collect the insurance money, and keep their investors
happy by rebuilding Phase One. Frist keeps the money he stole from
Phase One of the project and uses the insurance money to start
again, and no one is supposed to be the wiser.”

“Your job is to catch him in the act before
he can destroy the evidence?”

“That’s it in a nutshell. The trouble is I
haven’t figured out how to do that without putting Annette at
greater risk. Frist has some serious organized crime connections. I
have a couple of informants inside and they tell me that when the
renovations were going on, they deliberately bollixed up the gas
pipes, vents, and furnaces they installed. Phase One is rigged to
blow the day they turn on certain sections of the gas lines. The
condos will slowly fill with gas overnight. There are lights
operated by timers throughout the complex. One of those will create
the spark that will ignite a blaze, blowing the place to Kingdom
Come. Frist was afraid Annette would figure it out, so he hired me
to wine and dine her.”

“You worked for Frist? You walked down both
sides of the street? You bastard!” I was ready to report his lying
fanny to the powers that be. To think I was starting to trust him.
The man was unbelievable! How could he do that to Nettie?

“It wasn’t like that, Gabby. I was working
undercover. The FBI sent me to flip Annette and others at Frist and
Company. I was in the process of that when Frist hired me to break
her heart. I thought if she believed I was a rat who set her up,
she’d go to you for help, and you’d do what you did, which was to
check me out. I also knew that when you checked me out, I’d have an
excuse to tell my boss you were interfering, and my boss would
threaten your boss. That would get Annette out of the way until
things got sorted out. Once the FBI serves that warrant and takes
custody of the gingerbread house, Annette will no longer be of any
value to the case. I think we can both agree she doesn’t really
have any information of value.”

“Not exactly true,” I corrected him. “She
actually does have some. She knows more about building construction
than you might think. Annette understands those blueprints. She can
tell you what’s missing and what’s not missing in Phase One.”

“I can get a structural engineer to do that,”
he replied.

“But it will take time, won’t it? And it
won’t save Nettie’s reputation. I don’t want her spending the rest
of her life hiding from the world.”

“It’s a risk.”

“What if we could let her contact the FBI on
her own, to share her concerns? What if we could put it all out
there as a complete package from Santa, wrapped up with a big red
bow? I could drive her to the Albany FBI field office.”

“She can’t just show up with that gingerbread
house, not with the US attorney’s office grabbing up a warrant,”
Jondahl insisted. “How do we explain the duplicate?”

“Simple. It was a diversion to protect the
real one until it could be delivered to the FBI. I have photos of
the missing documents on a cell phone I bought in Manhattan when we
took possession of it. We could turn that over as evidence that we
intended to provide the material to the FBI. I can fill Nettie in
on the drive.”

“Only one problem. The gingerbread house is
down here in New Jersey.”

“Then I guess you’d better get moving,
Jondahl, if you’re going to get to the Albany rendezvous in
time.”

Chapter Ten --

“You want me to what?” That was the first
thing out of my cousin’s mouth when I arrived back at the
farmhouse. She was incredulous. Not to mention furious. I thought
she was going to take a chunk out of me. “You must be joking.”

Ervina and Gerhard met us there a few minutes
later, so I could go over the plan. They would handle the FBI when
the agents arrived to accept possession of the gingerbread house,
taking them to collect it at the winery. Hopefully, that would give
us enough time to walk into the Albany field office, toting the
original gingerbread house, the photocopies, and the photos on the
phone I bought, to offer our services in bringing down Frist and
Company.

“No, Nettie. I am not joking. We have to do
this, not just for you, but also to prevent Frist from getting away
with his scheme.”

“But how do you know he’s involved?” There
was disbelief written all over her face. Jondahl predicted she
would be skeptical. Part of the reason she was suspected of being a
co-conspirator by the FBI was that she was a champion of her boss
and her company. We expected her to deny any possibility of
wrongdoing by Kevin Frist and she did, talking about all the
charity work he did and the scholarships he funded. By the time she
finished, I was almost convinced the man walked on water and turned
the water into wine.

“I’ll explain it on the way,” I promised,
“but we have to go now. Ervina, can we borrow the cheese van?”

“Of course. I put gas in it yesterday.” She
went to the key rack and pulled down a key chain with a plastic cow
dangling from the silver ring. “Take good care of her.”

That was “Ervina speak” for don’t get shot at
or run off the road, her way of telling me she would worry about us
the whole time we were gone. Far from being the archetypical evil
stepmother, she was a very warm, caring person, and sometimes that
made my job as a deputy even harder. Lord knows I didn’t plan on
throwing myself into danger on a daily basis, but sometimes it’s
just what happens when bad guys do what they do. I occasionally
managed to keep the less serious incidents from her, but in the
case of the tumble off the roof of the Kinsey Building, some idiot
by the name of Earl shot his big, fat mouth off and asked her how I
was the next day at the post office. I had a very frantic
stepmother on my doorstep at nine in the morning, wanting to make
sure I was still alive and kicking.

“This is nuts,” Annette announced, shaking
her head as she pulled on her parka. She was still glaring at all
of us, annoyed that Gerhard and Ervina were in agreement with me.
“It will never work, Gabby.”

“It has to work. The FBI is planning to force
you into becoming an informant by threatening to charge you with
federal offenses. We’re going to grab that bull by the horns and
take charge of the situation, so we can better control the outcome.
We want you to look like a heroine, not some floozy who can’t keep
her panties on.”

“Gabby!” The woman was positively apoplectic.
But let’s be honest. Her post-husband interludes with men were less
than stellar. Having been someone’s wife for so long, she was out
of practice with the dating game, and that made her look like bait
to the circling sharks.

“Nettie!” I returned fire.

“That was unnecessary!”

“On the contrary, it was very necessary.
You’re in deep doo-doo and we’re doing this to get you out. Unless
you want everyone to find out that you slept with Willy Boy!” I
gave her another dose of reality to help her understand just how
embarrassing this was going to get if we didn’t make this work.
Sometimes ripping that Band-Aid off quickly yields the best
results. If she was appalled that Gerhard and Ervina knew about her
sex-capades, how was she going to feel when it was in all the
newspapers during the trial?

“How dare you!” Those big blue eyes were
blazing, her fists were tightly clenched, and for a fleeting
moment, I actually thought my cousin was going to slug me.

“You slept with the FBI agent on the case?”
Thank you, Gerhard, for putting two and two together and shouting
out the answer. “What were you thinking?”

“I didn’t know he was an FBI agent!” she
cried, like a wounded bear.

“He took advantage of you?” Ervina wanted to
know. “That wasn’t very nice.”

“Yes. I was used. He fooled me.” Perfect. She
walked right into the “I was a victim because I am an idiot”
scenario. Even as my cousin defiantly stood her ground, my
stepmother shook her head sadly.

“Nettie, that’s no good. You sound like a
loose woman who sleeps with every Tom, Dick, and Harry.” That was
the wonderful thing about Ervina. Good-hearted, decent, she
understood a lot more about people than most of us.

“Not to mention Joe,” I pointed out
helpfully. “And don’t forget Pete.”

“How many men were there?” my father
wondered. He’s rather old-fashioned and circumspect, believing that
people should control their passions in a reasonable fashion. It’s
not that he’s a prude. He just thinks you shouldn’t discuss your
steamy sex-ploits of swinging on the chandelier or share photos of
your naked water skiing adventures on Lake Champlain in mixed
company.

“You’re just plain mean!” Here come the
waterworks, I warned myself. Annette was always good at turning on
that faucet when all else failed. I went to the hallway and I
grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the bachelor’s chest
there. Returning to the kitchen, I thrust my hand out, the tissues
flapping like a white flag. She snatched them out of my fingers and
drew them up to her damp eyes, dabbing delicately. Classic stage
performance. It wasn’t going to work today. Time to kick some sense
into her.