Skin and Blond (Blond Noir Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  “Um… maybe a hard cider?”

  “Sure thing,” I said, grinning at her.

  I ordered the drinks, and then Brigit and I sipped at them in silence for several minutes. I was totally fine with it, but I could sense that she felt the urge to fill the silence with something, and so I began trying to think of small talk that I could make with Brigit.

  I couldn’t think of much. I didn’t know anything about her other than she liked to make art and that she wanted to be independent. Also that she was the best assistant I’d had thus far, and that she was brave and smart. I guess I could have said that stuff. Probably would have made her feel good. But I couldn’t figure out how to just say that out of the blue. Those compliments needed to be worked up to, and I didn’t know how.

  So, I didn’t say anything, and neither did she.

  Luckily, Crane showed up. He’d been in the back of the bar, and now he was coming up for a refill. I introduced Brigit as my assistant and indicated we should all find a table somewhere.

  After we sat down, Crane immediately started asking about the case. “Anything new happening? I haven’t seen you in a couple days, Ivy.”

  “I’m thinking it’s the brother,” I said, taking a swill of High Life.

  Crane was squinting at me. “What’s up with your face?”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “The brother?” said Brigit. “Andrew Webb? But you said that it didn’t make any sense for it to be him.”

  “You did say that,” said Crane. He pointed at me. “It’s like you’re wearing a lot of makeup to cover up something. Do you have a black eye?”

  “Never mind that,” I said. “And I know it doesn’t make sense for it to be Andrew, especially since he hired us. But there’s too much weird shit going on with him.”

  “Did something happen to you? Did you get hurt?” said Crane.

  “Actually,” said Brigit, “she just got out of—”

  “Brigit.” I shook my head. “I’m fine, Crane. More than fine. Better than fine.”

  “What happened with the O’Shaunessys?” he said. “How’d that plan work out?”

  “It didn’t.” I shrugged. “Whatever. I don’t think it was them.”

  “You know I worry about you,” said Crane.”

  “Stop,” I said. “If you want to help me, try to figure out why someone would hire a private detective to solve a murder he committed.”

  “I called the brother in the beginning.” Crane took his e-cigarette out of his pocket. “I think that was the first thing I said, wasn’t it?”

  “You did?” said Brigit. “He knows all about this. Do you discuss cases with everyone?”

  “Just Crane,” I said. “He uses them for fodder in his novels.”

  “You’re a writer?” said Brigit. “What do you write?”

  “Unfinished things,” said Crane, putting the electronic contraption to his mouth.

  “Anyway,” I said, “sometimes getting it out and talking about stuff with someone helps me figure out a case. When I was police, I had a partner for that stuff. But now, not so much. Crane’s a good sounding board.”

  He sucked on his e-cigarette, and it lit up. “I do what I can.”

  “Wait a second,” said Brigit. “Aren’t you Dr. Drakely? Don’t you teach English?”

  “My fame precedes me,” said Crane, blowing out vapor. It smelled like butterscotch. “Did you go to Keene?”

  “Yeah,” said Brigit. “I can’t believe I’m drinking with a professor.”

  “You never did that the whole time you were in college?” I said. “Keene’s changed since I went there.”

  Crane laughed. “It’s a drinking school with a liberal arts problem.”

  Brigit laughed too.

  “It used to be,” I said. “It’s turning into a liberal arts school with a drinking problem if the professors and students aren’t fraternizing over drinks anymore. But anyway, what about Andrew Webb?”

  “Why do you think it was him?” said Brigit.

  “Well, the biggie is that he hid the fact that he went to see Madison the night before he discovered she was missing. That’s an enormous red flag.”

  “Totally weird,” Brigit said. “Actually, everything the guy does is weird. Like, why is he so convinced that Madison is dead, anyway?”

  “Unless he knows she’s dead,” said Crane. “Because he killed her himself.”

  “He doesn’t have a motive, though,” said Brigit. “He adored Madison.”

  “He was hard on her,” I said. “He had standards, and she didn’t match up to them. He was an overbearing big brother. He didn’t approve of her boyfriend. He didn’t approve of her drug habit. He didn’t approve of her job. Maybe he just got sick of her being such a fuck-up and strangled her to death.”

  “I don’t know.” Crane took a drag on his e-cigarette. “As motives go, that’s not the strongest one I ever heard.”

  “I know,” I said. “But maybe we don’t even know the motive. Maybe it’s something she said to him when he came to visit her. Maybe he flew into a rage, and he couldn’t stop himself. Then she was dead, and he bundled her up in her bedsheets, threw her in the back of his trunk and got rid of her body. The next morning he came back and pretended to ‘discover’ that she was missing.”

  “That’s not unheard of,” said Brigit. “It’s like that guy who killed his whole family on Friday night, got up and went to work Saturday, and then acted like he ‘found’ them after work. Did you hear about that?”

  “If that was his plan, why not just leave the body?” said Crane.

  “DNA?” I said.

  “But if he was always at her house, he could have just argued it was transference,” said Crane. “His DNA’s probably all over her apartment.”

  I furrowed my brow. “I don’t know.”

  “He’s sketchy, though,” said Brigit, taking a sip of her cider. “There’s something very weird going on with him.”

  * * *

  “You wanted to see me?” said Andrew Webb, poking his head into my office.

  I’d beaten Brigit here that morning. She’d been pretty sloshed when I left the bar, though we hadn’t been hanging out anymore. She’d run into some people she apparently knew from the area, and she’d still been going strong when I got out of there.

  I didn’t go home with anyone last night, not even Crane. Especially not Crane. I didn’t want to explain my bruises and cuts. I was still pretty sore too. Derek had roughed me up bad. I was lucky that nothing was broken and that I hadn’t gotten a concussion, but I wasn’t anywhere near a hundred percent yet. The only kind of sex I could handle would have been gentle sex.

  If I’d been a normal person, I might have gone home and masturbated, but that would have meant that the reason I sought out sex was for the orgasm, and it wasn’t. It wasn’t about sensation for me. It was about escape.

  Not that I was trying to claim that I didn’t masturbate. Everyone masturbates.

  I even had a few vibrators in a drawer somewhere, and I did use them when I got the urge. But that urge was completely different from the urge to go home with a guy. They came from different parts of my brain. The urge to hook up was about soothing myself. The urge to have an orgasm was natural and earthy. It didn’t frighten me—not the way the other urge did.

  Anyway, I’d gotten a good night’s sleep, woken up early, and come in to the office around noon. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and I didn’t have any appointments, but there was Andrew Webb, claiming I’d summoned him.

  “Hi, Mr. Webb,” I said.

  “My wife said you wanted to talk to me,” he said.

  Oh, that was right. I had asked her to have him get in touch. “Yes. Please come in.”

  He sat down across the desk from me. “What’s going on?”

  “Well, I have to admit I’m a little confused, that’s all. When you first came in here, you told me that you’d discovered Madison missing on Friday. But then your wife tells me that you saw her
on Sunday night, and that you discovered her missing on Monday morning.”

  “Oh, right.” He nodded. “I just… I didn’t want the police to think that I was crazy for worrying about her so soon. I figured it would be better if she’d been gone for days. They’d take it more seriously right off the bat.”

  “But I’m not the police,” I said. “I’m working for you. Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

  Andrew cocked his head, giving me a funny look. “Well, why are you asking me that question?”

  “Because I need to understand.”

  “I explained it to you,” he said. “I assumed you wouldn’t start looking if you thought she hadn’t been gone for very long.”

  “Mr. Webb, the precise advantage of a private investigator is that we’ll go to work on a missing persons case before the police will. I can track people down for any reason if you pay me.”

  “Well, I didn’t know that.”

  “Now you do,” I said. I wasn’t sure I liked that answer, but I couldn’t fault it. “Is there anything else you’ve been keeping from me, anything at all? I need to know if I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

  “Why would you say something like that?” His voice had tightened.

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. It’s only that—”

  “It sounds like you’re accusing me.” Now his voice was downright strained.

  “That’s not my intention. I apologize—”

  “What is it you think exactly, Ms. Stern? Do you think that I’m the one who killed Madison?”

  Okay, he had just leaped to that on his own. I shook my head slowly.

  “Why would I hire you if I was guilty?” he said. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. I’m paying you a small fortune to find Madison’s killer, and you’re accusing me? I don’t believe how incompetent and stupid you are.”

  “Mr. Webb, I never said that you were responsible for anything that happened to Madison. And to be very clear, we can’t even be sure that she’s dead.”

  “She’s dead, all right.”

  “Why are you so certain? If you could share with me why you know this—”

  “I told you. I feel it. Madison and I were close, and her spark has gone out of the world.” He stood up. “You need to rethink your position on this case.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  “You better not be,” he said. “Because as you pointed out, you work for me. And you need to keep that in mind.” He got up out of his chair and threw open the door to the inner office, only to come face-to-face with Brigit, who was standing just outside and had obviously been listening.

  His nostrils flared, and he stalked past her.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Brigit made a face at me. “Oops.”

  “Not your fault,” I said, peering around the door as Andrew left, his footsteps echoing down the hallway outside.

  “I couldn’t help but listen in,” she said.

  “It’s him,” I said. “He did it.”

  “How do you know?” she said.

  “Just a feeling at this point,” I said. “We need proof. Hope you’re not too hungover.”

  She grimaced. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s going to be a long day,” I said. “We’re going to need to widen our search and go over everything we’ve looked at before. Dig out her phone, go through all the texts, see if there’s anything suspicious there from him. Look through her email again, try to find anything from him that would cast aspersion. Any mention of him elsewhere—like if she talks to someone else about him. That kind of thing.”

  “Oh.” Brigit’s grimaced deepened.

  “Yeah, it’s not going to be fun,” I said.

  To Brigit’s credit, however, she was a trouper, even though I don’t think she was exactly functioning on all four cylinders that morning. I let her take the email messages, since that had a handy search function. The text messages were a little more complicated to go through, that is until I got frustrated and called Eden to ask if there was some way to get the text messages onto my computer.

  She directed me to a program to install, and within a short period of time, I could search the text messages in the same way as the email, which did make things easier.

  Still, in order to be very thorough, we read each and every mention of Andrew in the messages, and it took hours.

  By the time we’d searched for every phrase, name, or word that could possibly be connected to Madison’s brother, we each had a stack of messages we’d printed out and highlighted, but nothing concrete. No real proof, not even anything all that suspicious.

  It was late afternoon. Brigit sorted through her stack of email. “He goes to see her a lot. She turns down several offers to hang out because he’s coming over.” She doled out the messages as proof. “It seems like he’s there every few days. But that’s not anything we didn’t know. Andrew says they were really close.”

  “True,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “She seems annoyed by it a lot. A lot of her messages are like, ‘Oh, I wish I could, but my brother’s coming to see me’ kinds of things. Not always, though. She does defend him on occasion.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  Brigit handed me an email. “See? Her friend was complaining that Andrew controls her life, and Madison says that he cares about her and that he means well.”

  I furrowed my brow. “Right.”

  “There are a couple more like that.” Brigit handed over the pages.

  I sorted through them, scanning the parts that Brigit had highlighted.

  “Again, though,” she said, “it’s nothing we don’t know. They’re close, and he’s on her case all the time. It’s understandable that she sometimes finds his meddling endearing and other times intrusive.”

  “Any indication that he’s ever violent towards her?” I said.

  Brigit shook her head. “Nothing like that. And she doesn’t seem to communicate with him via email. She only talks about him, not to him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I seem to have all the direct conversations, but they’re in texts, and there’s a lot of context missing, so there’s really nothing there either.”

  “Nothing?” Brigit’s shoulders slumped.

  “Well, there are discussions about when he’s coming over or if he’s running late, and there a couple oblique references to arguments, like this one.” I sorted through my text messages until I found it. “He says, ‘I promise to be nice.” And she says, ‘You better. Stop trying to tell me how to run my life.’ Another time, they have a conversation where he says he only does it because he worries about her, and she says that she understands.” I riffled through the papers. “Right there. See?” I showed it to Brigit.

  She barely looked at it. “We just wasted our entire afternoon, didn’t we?”

  I laughed. “This is being a detective, Brigit. Most of it’s boring and most of it’s a waste. Being a police detective’s even worse. You wouldn’t believe the paperwork.”

  She laughed a little. “No, I guess I know that. It’s only that it’s discouraging, isn’t it? I feel like we’ve been working on this case forever, and we still don’t know anything.”

  “It’s a process,” I said. “We’re getting there.” I flipped through the pages of messages idly. “He was so defensive when I spoke to him. He’s hiding something. I can tell he’s hiding something. I just don’t know how to prove it.”

  Brigit massaged the bridge of her nose.

  “He’s got to have made a mistake. I’ve got to find his mistake.”

  Brigit stretched her neck.

  “Why don’t you go home?” I said to her.

  “But I’m supposed to be here for another two hours.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’ve put in enough work for today. I can get the phone if it rings. You go home and clear your head, rest a little, sleep off last night.”

  She grinned sheepishly. “That d
oes sound nice.”

  “Go on, get out of here.”

  She didn’t protest any further, just got her stuff and headed out, leaving me alone with a stack of messages and my own thoughts.

  * * *

  After Brigit left, I poured over the messages a little longer, hoping something might jump out at me, but it didn’t. I felt strongly that there was something off about Andrew Webb, and I’d felt it from the beginning. There was the fact that he insisted that Madison was dead without any proof. There was the way that he seemed overly involved in her life. There was the way he was overly judgmental about perfectly valid life choices like being a waitress. The drug stuff was certainly a reason to be concerned, but apparently he hadn’t known about that. He also hadn’t much liked Madison’s boyfriend, Curtis, which could be seen as fitting the pattern of his being an overbearing older brother, sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. However, Curtis really was a shit boyfriend, so I wasn’t sure if that fit or not. I wouldn’t want my little sister to date him. If I had a little sister, that is. Which I didn’t.

  But back to Andrew. He’d also beaten up Brian at the restaurant, and his reason for this was that he was convinced that Brian was sleeping with his sister and “corrupting” her. That was strange, wasn’t it? It was violent.

  To me, it showed that Andrew was possessive of Madison. He seemed to think of her as an object that belonged to him. If that was the case, then he would have reasoned that he was well within his rights to snuff out her life. Maybe Andrew didn’t have a clear-cut motive because he was just an abusive crazy man. It wasn’t as if that didn’t happen, after all.

  I had my back to the door when it opened, but I turned around pretty quickly, startled by the noise.

  “Hi, Ivy.”

  Shit. It was Colin Pugliano. What the hell? Why was he here?

  I dove back into the inner office, shutting the door behind myself. Colin was out in the waiting area, where Brigit’s desk was, but there was a wall between us.

  I locked the door and braced my body against it. I didn’t want him to come in. “Go away, Colin!” I yelled.