Skin and Blond (Blond Noir Mysteries Book 1) Page 15

  “Well, there’s the boss, but he’s the one who told me about Derek O’Shaunessy.”

  “See? Maybe that guy was trying to throw you off his own tail by implicating the O’Shaunessys.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. He really didn’t have any idea what he was saying when he brought it up. I don’t necessarily trust him, but I don’t think he was trying to get me off his trail.” I tapped my bottom lip. “I definitely think the O’Shaunessy connection is something to pursue. I’ve got to figure that out. There’s something there.”

  “You’re going to get yourself hurt.”

  “That’s a risk I’ve got to take.” I squared my shoulders.

  Crane took a drink. “I can’t believe you sometimes.”

  “Don’t be like that,” I said. “It’s not a big deal. Let’s talk about your job instead, huh? You have any really funny papers get turned in lately?”

  He wouldn’t look at me. “I’m not going home with you tonight if you’re going after the O’Shaunessys.”

  Seriously? Well, he was being a jerk. “That’s fine. I never said I wanted to go home with you tonight. You know, it’s not like I can’t get laid if you don’t have sex with me.”

  “You make me so angry sometimes.”

  “I’m doing my job. It’s none of your business.”

  “It’ll be my business if something happens to you. I care about you, you know?”

  I sighed heavily. “Look, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll try to keep it professional with Colin. I’ll be upfront with him about the case and tell him I need to talk to Derek. I’ll tell them to come to my office.”

  “I guess that’s better than nothing.”

  “I don’t think it’ll work though,” I said. “I’ll probably have to resort to something a little bit more down and dirty.”

  * * *

  “Look,” I said into the phone, “I can appreciate that you might not want to talk to me.”

  Colin was quiet on the other end of the line.

  “I know that I might have said and done some things that didn’t make you particularly happy. And I just want you to know—”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  I hadn’t been expecting that. “It is?”

  “I realize that the way I treated you the other day was wrong,” he said. “I should never have been so forceful with you. I wasn’t in my right mind. Truth is, I’m really upset about what happened with Rhonda. I guess I just wanted to replace her right away. If I focused on having a new connection with another woman, then I wouldn’t have to focus on my own pain.”

  That was bullshit. Colin hadn’t been focusing on me so much as being really creepy, and only when it suited him. But I wanted to play nice, so I accepted his explanation. “I guess I could see that.”

  “I came on too strong, and I freaked you out,” he said.

  “A little bit,” I said.

  “Well, I won’t do that again. I promise. And since you’re calling me, I’m hoping that means there’s a possibility you’re interested in giving me another chance. Are you?”

  “Well, it’s complicated, Colin,” I said. Whoa, this was going better than I had hoped. I could skip past all the groveling that I’d had planned and just get right to the tangled little web I wanted to spin. “See, there’s another case I’m working on. A missing girl. And it’s come to my attention that a friend of yours might be involved.”

  “A friend of mine?”

  “Yeah, that night we took shots?” I said. “You were with Derek O’Shaunessy, right?”

  “So?”

  “Well, Derek might be connected to my case.”

  “So?”

  “I’ve told you before that I don’t want my work life and my personal life to intersect. If Derek knows something about this girl, and it turns out that he’s tangled up in it, it would make things really awkward.”

  “Then you’re saying no? So why’d you call me in the first place?”

  “I’m not saying no. I’m saying the opposite of no. Listen, just get Derek into my office so that I can talk to him. Maybe he can help my case. Maybe he can’t. But hopefully, I can clear him off my list, and remove the last barrier between the two of us trying to officially date.”

  “Oh,” said Colin. “So, you’re saying that if Derek isn’t involved—”

  “I’d sure like his help,” I said. “If he knows something, it would be wonderful. If he could give me something that would help me close this case, I’d be very…” I let my voice get breathy and suggestive. “Grateful.”

  “I see,” said Colin.

  “What do you think? Do you think you could get him to come by my office later? Just to talk?”

  “And if I do?”

  “If you do, then we can talk too.” I smiled into the receiver, even though inside, I was gagging. I didn’t really want to be anywhere near Colin Pugliano ever again. But if this worked, then it wouldn’t be so bad at all. I’d have them in my office, and that would be a lot safer than, well, Shamrock’s, for instance.

  Colin chuckled on the other end of the phone. “I think I’d like that.”

  “So would I,” I murmured.

  “All right, I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Let me get back with you, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We hung up, and I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that had worked. It was a convoluted little cover story, and it didn’t really make any sense. If Colin thought too hard about it, he’d probably see all the holes in it. I was hoping he wouldn’t think too hard about it.

  I purposefully hadn’t tried too hard, figuring that I’d have to go straight for the jugular. I thought I’d have to seduce Colin and use my feminine wiles to get him to let me talk to Derek. This was so much easier.

  Hell, I must have made more of an impression on Colin than I’d originally thought. I thought that the first time we had sex was okay, but it wasn’t mind blowing. What had I done when I was blacked out? What the hell had we done? What would make a guy that eager to see me?

  It was too bad that I hated Colin Pugliano, because he was a good lay. If all I cared about was sex, he’d probably make a decent boyfriend. Problem was I wanted more than that. Companionship, interesting conversation, shared interests… that kind of thing.

  Colin didn’t qualify, and he never would.

  The fact that he was connected to the O’Shaunessys was the final nail in the coffin. That sealed the deal. Nothing would ever happen between Colin and me. Nothing important.

  A knock on my door.

  I looked up, and Brigit was peering inside, door open a crack. “You still on the phone?”

  “No, I’m done,” I said. “Is something up?”

  “Andrew Webb’s here. He wants to know what the status of Madison’s case is.”

  “Did I have an appointment with him?”

  “No, he just showed up. He’s waiting out there. Should I tell him to come back another time? Have him make an appointment?”

  “No, it’s fine. I’m not busy at the moment. Send him on in.”

  She smiled. “You got it.”

  * * *

  “What do you mean they were friends?” Mr. Webb’s face was red and he was gripping the back of the chair in my office. “That man was corrupting her. He was making untoward advances, and I know it.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Brian made it pretty clear that they were only associated because of their drug habit.”

  “And stop saying that,” he said. “My sister did not have a drug habit.”

  I sighed. Sometimes, this was the worst part of the job, having to let family members know things about their loved ones that didn’t fit with their mental picture of the lost member. “Mr. Webb, maybe if you could just sit down and take a couple deep breaths.”

  “Are you patronizing me?”

  “No, sir, I—”

  “You’re patronizing me. Well, that’s rich,” he said. “I hired you, remember? You work
for me.”

  “You hired me to find the truth about your sister,” I said. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “You’re not digging deep enough into Brian Crohn,” he said. “I know that he was up to something.”

  “Madison apparently deleted all the applications from her phone so that she could communicate with him without your knowledge. Were you checking her phone?”

  “I was worried about her. I’ve been worried about her.”

  “And you should have been. Because she was doing drugs, and she was mixed up with bad people.”

  “Mixed up?” he said. “You mean sleeping with?”

  “No, I didn’t say that,” I said.

  “She better not have been doing that.” He threw himself into the chair in front of me, and suddenly he was crying—big tears squeezing out of his eyes and trailing down his face. “It’s like I didn’t know her at all. I thought I knew her better than anyone on earth, and here she was hiding things from me and trying to keep me out of her life.” He buried his face in his hands and broke into loud sobs.

  I was alarmed. I didn’t know what to do other than offer him a box of tissues. Of course, he couldn’t see the tissues because he had his head buried in his hands. I wasn’t used to men breaking down like this in my office. He was really crying. He was in anguish.

  I just averted my eyes and kept quiet.

  He stopped after several minutes and seized the box of tissues off my desk. He began to mop at his face. “We were inseparable as kids. We did everything together. I had friends who would make fun of her. They’d tell me not to bring my stupid kid sister along for everything I did. And I told them that if they had a problem with Madison, they had a problem with me. I wouldn’t leave her behind. She meant way more to me than they did. She always has. But ever since we grew up, it’s been so much harder. I’ve been feeling like I was losing her for years. Every year, she seemed to get further and further away from me. Now… she’s really gone. Not just emotionally distant, but gone. And no one knows where she is.” He blew his nose.

  I cleared my throat. “Well, I’m going to find her.”

  “You won’t find her,” he said.

  “Mr. Webb, I can assure you that I’ll do everything within my power—”

  “She’s dead. I just know it.” He pounded the center of his chest with one hand. “I feel it here. She’s gone forever.” He started to cry again.

  I didn’t know what to say again.

  “Oh, maybe it’s for the best,” he said.

  “Mr. Webb?”

  “If she really was the druggie slut you’re painting her to be, then there isn’t much reason for her to have kept going. She was already doomed.”

  I furrowed my brow. That was a very weird thing to say.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “So, that was strange,” Brigit was saying. “I could hear him crying from out here. I never heard a man cry like that before.”

  Andrew Webb had exited into the hallway just a few minutes before, still clutching a tissue to wipe at his eyes.

  “Yeah, I guess he and his sister were really close,” I said. “But… I don’t know… how much of that did you hear?”

  “Well, pretty much all of it,” she said. “You weren’t kidding about the walls in this place.”

  “So, he’s maybe a little overly obsessed with his sister,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Brigit. “What were you saying about her phone?”

  “Apparently, he got hold of her phone and found messages from Brian the boss on it. And good old Andrew wasn’t the slightest bit happy about that, so he started harassing Madison about it. It bothered her so much she decided to keep him from being able to snoop on her phone by telling Brian to email her and deleting her email app from her phone so that Andrew couldn’t look that way.”

  “But he’s just her brother. And besides, they’re both adults. What does she care what he thinks?”

  “That’s weird all right,” I said. “He acts like he’s her father or something.”

  “And then there’s the fact that he’s convinced she’s dead.”

  “Yeah…” I chewed on my lip. “Suspicious, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “But he didn’t kill her,” I said. “I mean, he wouldn’t have hired me if he killed her.”

  Brigit tapped her chin. “Would he have?”

  “It wouldn’t make sense,” I said. “Because if he did it, he wouldn’t want to call attention to it. He’d let it go, and then he’d play the concerned brother. The end. Why make a fuss? And besides… what’s his motive?”

  “Um… he was angry at her for throwing her life away? It was a crime of passion?”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s not the brother. It just can’t be the brother.”

  “Maybe he didn’t kill her, but there’s still something weird about him.”

  I made a face. “Yeah, he definitely rubs me the wrong way. Hell, maybe she did run away. Maybe she just wanted free of her crazy, whack-job brother. And if that was the case, I don’t know if I’d tell him where she was.”

  “Well, if she really wanted rid of him, there are things she could have done to keep him away. She could have got a restraining order or something.”

  “No, she wouldn’t have done that. She didn’t play on the right side of the law. She did a lot of drugs, and she wouldn’t have wanted to attract police attention.” I paced the length of the outer office, thinking. “She wasn’t a person with a lot of backbone, I don’t think. She let Curtis walk all over her. She let her brother walk all over her. She was a college graduate who was working as a waitress. She wasn’t chasing after her dreams or using her degree.” I turned back to Brigit. “Madison Webb wasn’t a fighter.”

  “Well, that’s why we need to fight for her,” said Brigit.

  I nodded. “You’re right. She needed an advocate before it came to this, and—”

  I was interrupted by a series of shrill barks, coming from overhead.

  I cast my glance up at the ceiling. “Oh, hell, no.”

  Brigit looked up too. “What is that?”

  “It’s Kitty Richards’s dog. The dog she locks up in the bathroom as punishment, because she’s a total idiot about animals.” I strode over to the window to look out. Sure enough, she was getting in her car and pulling out of the parking lot.

  “Um, so, last time that happened, you disappeared for a while. What were you doing?” said Brigit.

  The dog was really barking now, just going to town.

  My jaw twitched. “Well, I can’t get any work done with that damned dog barking up a storm, can you?”

  “Uh…” Brigit looked a little nervous.

  “Not good for the dog anyway. You should see the size of the bathroom that woman locks the poor thing up in.”

  “How did you see it?”

  I stormed out of the office, ignoring Brigit’s question. The barking was getting even louder. I needed to stop the dog from making noise before it drove me absolutely insane.

  But Kitty hadn’t lied about not leaving a key outside the door. It was gone. It wasn’t under the mat, it wasn’t under the potted palm she had by the door, and it wasn’t on the top of the door frame. I looked around for a little longer, hoping she’d just hid it somewhere tough, but I couldn’t find it.

  So, I stalked back down to the office.

  “Um, Ivy?” said Brigit. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing?”

  “Freeing the damned dog.” I went back to my inner office and tore through some drawers until I found a set of lock picking tools. I’d purchased them online when I first got my job as a private investigator. It wasn’t strictly legal to break into locked places when looking for clues, but that didn’t mean that I necessarily paid attention to that. Sometimes, I needed lock picking tools. I didn’t use them often, but they were good to have when I needed them.

  I went back to Kitty’s apartment once again, but this time Brigit came after me. “Seriou
sly, Ivy, you’re acting crazy.”

  “Go back to the office.” I knelt down in front of the door and inserted the first lock pick, a long, thin piece of metal that would depress the tumbler inside the lock.

  “You’re picking the lock? You can’t just do that.”

  “Someone needs to be manning the phones,” I said. “That’s what I pay you to do, isn’t it?” I inserted the next pick, a slightly smaller thin metal piece, this one with a series of notches on it. The trick was to move the notches so that they worked essentially the way a key would, making all the tumblers line up so that the door would open.

  “Oh my God, you have to stop,” she said.

  “I need to concentrate, and you’re not helping.” Picking a lock took some time. It was something you kind of had to feel out. It was trial and error kind of work, and I needed to be able to listen to the lock, to feel how it responded.

  “This is insane,” said Brigit.

  I wiggled the picks, ignoring her again. “Ha!”

  “What?” she said.

  “I’ve got part of it. I just need to get the rest of it to…. There!” The doorknob turned and the door opened. I grinned.

  Brigit shook her head, her jaw hanging open.

  “Don’t worry, little dog,” I called. “I’m coming to put you on the porch.”

  The barking quieted almost immediately.

  * * *

  Brigit’s mind was blown. “You broke into that woman’s house.”

  “I just let the dog out onto the porch,” I said. “I didn’t steal anything. I didn’t hurt anything.”

  “But that’s, like, illegal.”

  “The dog was suffering,” I said. “It was an issue of being humane. Cruelty to animals and all that. I should really report Kitty to the ASPCA.”

  “I don’t think putting your dog in a bathroom is cruelty.”

  “You didn’t see the size of the bathroom,” I said. “I told you to come and look, but you wouldn’t.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to go in there. Then I’d be just as guilty as you were.”

  I shrugged.

  “You can’t do that anymore,” said Brigit.

  “What am I supposed to do? Just let the dog bark?”