“What about selling your car?” he asked.
Crap. I hadn’t realized he’d seen me in it. “It’s not mine, I promise. It’s a company car.”
There was more thoughtful chin rubbing as Mr. Black considered this.
“It wouldn’t be lying, Mr. Black. You really have terrified me into getting the money.”
The chin thing continued.
“Please. I’m just trying to get by and provide for my family, like you are.”
His hand dropped to his side. “You have a family?”
What had possessed me to say that? I thought fast. “Er. Well. I have a cat. I’ll show you.” I ran and fetched Meow and held her up to the window, which was difficult while clutching my Taser and phone at the same time.
“Cute,” Mr. Black said.
“Please?”
“What’s to stop you from bolting? Then I’d get in trouble.”
I chewed my lip. “How about you hold something of mine hostage until I pay?”
He seemed to like this idea. “Like that cute cat?”
Shit. “Oh, I suppose. But she’s got a medical condition and is very delicate. In fact, she just got back from the vet an hour ago. So you need to give her lots of medicine and round the clock care. Plus, she likes to poop in shoes,” I lied.
He wrinkled his nose. On him it looked a bit like a fissure splitting the earth. “I wouldn’t like poop in my shoes. What else do you have of value?”
I thought fast and realized I owned nothing of value. Because I was broke. “Um…”
“How about that car?”
“It’s not mine.”
“Sure. But you could loan it to a friend for a few days. They wouldn’t even know.”
My mind raced, but I couldn’t come up with any better ideas. “Okay.”
“Deal?”
“Deal,” I said, before figuring out I was going to have to open the door to give him the key. I took a deep breath, hung up my phone, put the Taser in my waistband, and removed the Corvette key from my key ring. Then I stood in front of the locked door trying to grow enough balls to open it. I thought about only opening it as far as the chain would allow, or just throwing the key out the window, but I had a feeling Mr. Black would be offended if I didn’t trust him to uphold his end of the deal. I didn’t want to offend him. I steeled myself and swung the door wide open.
I forgot how to breathe when I saw how big he was up close. When I regained control of my bodily functions, I handed him my key. “Please look after her for me.”
He took it from my hand gently. “It was a pleasure doing business with you, ma’am.”
He’s just a big gentle giant, I told myself. Wouldn’t hurt a Disney Princess watch.
I gave him a smile. “Thanks for being willing to negotiate. Say hi to your daughter for me.”
He returned my smile, and I concentrated on controlling my sphincter. “Will do. You have a nice day.” He turned to go, but hesitated and looked back at me. “I should warn you, Ms. Avery.” He fiddled with the key I’d given him. “If you don’t have the money in eight and a half days, I’m going to have to break you real bad to keep my boss happy.”
He waited for me to respond. Like he needed my approval.
I couldn’t give it.
The moment stretched out.
I forced my head to jerk up and down. As soon as he lumbered away again, I shut and locked the door, then yielded to my quaking legs and slid down to the floor. Okay. So I just gave away a car that wasn’t mine that was worth as much as my accumulated payments. To a criminal. Who said he’d give it back. Connor would understand. It wouldn’t ruin my chances of passing the final evaluation and convincing the Taste Society to advance me the money. Sure it wouldn’t.
I slumped down even lower against the musty green carpet. If I couldn’t get the money, running home wouldn’t save me now. I was a dead woman.
19
Connor knocked on the door a few minutes later. I scraped myself off the carpet, gave my hair a quick pat, and let him in.
“Thanks for the phone call,” he said. “I guess we’ll be going to Porterville in my car.”
I shot him a sheepish smile, grabbed Kate Williamson’s letter off the counter, and patted him on the cheek like Etta had done to Oliver. “Gosh, you’re good at deducing things, schnookums. You should be a detective.”
Maybe I was overcompensating for the whole lying on the carpet thing.
“Call me schnookums one more time and I’ll fail you.”
“You’re in a happy mood then, I see.” I gestured to the open door and the staircase beyond. “Shall we get going?”
He led the way out, and I locked the door behind us. We had to sidestep to squeeze past the outdoor sofa that had appeared by Etta’s door this afternoon. I had only myself to blame.
“You realize giving away the company car is a lot like getting a loan from the Taste Society like I suggested yesterday, right?” he asked as we headed down the stairs. “Only dumber.”
Okay. I admit it. I hadn’t thought it through very well. My mind had been preoccupied with the small matter of preventing my bones from being broken. “I didn’t give it away. I just let him borrow it for a few days, until I can pay them.”
“And if you can’t pay them in time?”
“Well, the Taste Society has the Corvette insured right? I figured they’d get their money back if they claimed it was stolen. Much faster than if they gave me a loan.” I’d figured no such thing but thought it was a stroke of genius to pretend I had. I peeked at Connor to see if he was impressed. He wasn’t.
“Especially if I don’t pass this assessment,” I added.
Connor grunted and opened the car door for me.
I waited until he’d sat down too and started the engine before chancing it. “I was meaning to ask you about how long these assessments usually take.”
He gave me a dirty look. And not a sexy dirty look either. “I guess yours will have to go for a maximum of eight more days.”
“You’re amazing. Thanks, sch—” I caught myself just in time “—sharklike one,” I finished. Brilliant save.
Connor raised an eyebrow. “Sharklike one?”
“Um. Well, I mean you seem kind of cold and scary at first, but you’re just misunderstood, and responsible for way less deaths than a lot of people think.”
“I see,” was all he said, but the comparative lightness of his tone made me pretty sure I’d distracted him from my encounter with Mr. Black.
“So, what did you do while I was digging up Josh’s potential mystery child?”
“Like I told you, I wanted to review all of the case information. Having multiple people on a case is useful for covering more ground, but it means connections can get overlooked because no one’s seen the complete data set. Old information can have new meaning in the light of something you’ve found out since, too. So I started with Dana’s file and went from there. One of the researchers looked through her file for red flags at the beginning of the case, but it’s a statistical improbability that a Shade would have anything to do with the poison attempt, so I hadn’t read it until today. When I did, I found out that the woman in the clipping, Kate Williamson, is Dana’s mother.”
“You’re kidding. How did we miss that?”
“Simple. Dana ran away when she was sixteen and changed her last name to Williams. She explained everything to the Taste Society when we did the background check, but nothing about it suggested her mother would try to kill her and a celebrity, so it didn’t raise any flags and no one thought any more about Kate Williamson. We only found the newspaper clipping later, and a different member of the team dug up the article it came from, so the connection wasn’t made.”
Okay, I could understand that.
“Even when I found out, it didn’t seem worth investigating because all it did was give Dana an innocent reason for having the clipping. Her birth certificate lists her father as unknown, so when I saw she’d requested to work wit
h Josh Summers, I figured she was just curious about her mom’s old boyfriend.”
Shades are allowed to nominate the top three celebrities they’d like to work with, and if a job ever comes up with one of those people, that Shade gets priority placement consideration for the assignment. So it was no coincidence Josh and Dana had been working together.
“It wasn’t until you called with the news that Kate Williamson might have had a child with Josh that the connection became meaningful. If Dana is Josh’s daughter, that changes things. Maybe Kate felt abandoned by both of them and did it out of spite or heartbreak, or maybe someone else knew Dana was Josh’s daughter and targeted her because of it. We’re about to find out.”
“Good.”
“I also made sure Kate Williamson wasn’t dead before we drove all the way out to talk to her.”
I rolled my eyes but turned away first so he couldn’t see. “That’s good too.”
“In the meantime, the research team is searching for connections between Wholesome Food stakeholders and people we know accessed Josh’s house during the window of opportunity. My criminal contact reported one hit out on Josh Summers, not two, and I’d expect word to get around if there were two contracts out on the same target. Since we’ve ruled out our telemarketer hitman from being the one who planted the Ambience, somebody at Wholesome Foods bribing or blackmailing Colette, Juan, or Tahlia seems the most likely scenario. If we don’t uncover any new leads on this trip, that is.”
We lapsed into silence.
A lot of admiring of the scenery later, I was starting to feel bored. I looked at the clock on the dash. We’d been driving for thirty minutes and only just reached the northern outskirts of the San Fernando Valley. Two hours and ten minutes to go.
I was going to have to make conversation. “So, Connor. Do you have a real girlfriend when you’re not training up new recruits?”
“Are you asking because you’d like to be one?”
“No. I’m asking to pass the time.”
“Pass the time some other way then.”
Ten minutes ticked by. “Are you hungry?” I asked. “Because you look kind of hungry.”
“You must be mistaking me for a shark again.”
“Fine. I’m hungry. Can we please stop at a drive-through?”
Connor exhaled slowly. “Which drive-through?”
“Anywhere will do. Whatever one we come across next.”
The lucky winner was Jack in the Box. I ordered a Bacon Ranch Monster Taco with fries and a salted caramel ice cream shake. This occupied me for another fifteen minutes.
“Do you think our caffeinated hitman has escaped yet?” I asked a few minutes later.
“For someone from Australia, where everything is miles from everything else, you’re not good at road trips,” Connor said.
“Well, usually I listen to music.”
“Fine. Turn on some music.” His car stereo had Bluetooth, so after a little fiddling, I connected my phone to it and started my favorite playlist.
Two songs later, he turned it off.
“Do you feel like talking now?” I asked.
“No, you just have terrible taste in music.”
“Are you kidding?” How could he not like Montaigne or Mumford & Sons? On the other hand, he liked drip coffee, so maybe I should’ve seen it coming. “What do you listen to, then?”
“Classical mostly.”
“Seriously?” It struck me again that we would never work as a real couple. Not that I wanted to be part of a Connor couple, but if I did, we wouldn’t be able to get through a single day without arguing over coffee or music. Travel would be atrocious. Sex would be sublime. Or so I imagined anyway.
“Be honest with me. What are my chances of passing and getting hired permanently?”
A line appeared in Connor’s forehead. The equivalent of me thunking my head on the steering wheel.
“Now is not the best time to ask me that.”
Okay. I knew I was annoying him, but I needed the answer to this one. “Please?”
Connor exhaled slowly again. “So far, your poison detection has been excellent. I can’t see you failing on that account. However, your acting is inconsistent. You seem to do okay when you put your mind to it, but often you forget your cover and react instinctively, like when you flinch. Other times, your attitude gets in the way.”
My hopes sank like a scrawny kid in a swimming pool. I hoped Mr. Black enjoyed the Corvette.
“It does take some Shades a while to pull their acting together. It’s one of the reasons for the faux first assignment. But you’ve given yourself a short timeline.”
I rubbed my face. “How do I get myself into these situations?”
Connor took it as a rhetorical question. Small mercies.
“I’m happy to give you some leeway, considering the unorthodox nature of this assessment,” he said, “but you need to show me you can pull it together and keep it together. On some assignments, the paparazzi will be hounding you every moment of every day. The Taste Society can’t afford for you to be unconvincing.”
“Makes sense.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Should I be going to acting classes or something?”
Connor glanced at me. “You could. But it’s not that you can’t be convincing, you just need to focus on staying in character better. And trying not to piss off your client too much.”
I swallowed again. Okay. I could do that. Right?
“Should I be in character now?” I asked. “Have I told you how beautiful you are today?”
“When you’re in a private, contained area with your client, like a car, or home alone, you don’t need to talk the talk. Even so, you should maintain appropriate body language. There’s always a chance of a paparazzo hiding in the bushes with a telephoto lens. If there are any staff around, it’s best to stay in character audibly as well, in case any of them are in the habit of eavesdropping.”
Maybe this job didn’t pay enough after all. Not that I had any other options if I wanted to be free of debt sometime this decade. Short of forcing my parents to sell their house, anyway.
Connor must have noticed my downcast expression. “It gets easier, Avery.”
“I guess not all the clients could be as bad as you,” I joked.
He patted my leg. I didn’t flinch. “That’s the spirit.”
One pee stop and ninety minutes later, we arrived in Porterville; a dot on the map one hundred and sixty miles north of LA. Connor might have been speeding.
Porterville wasn’t any more impressive in the flesh than it had been as a dot on the map. The landscape was flatter than month-old roadkill and just as dry, with the distant mountains of the Sequoia National Forest the only point of interest. Large suburban blocks holding mostly squat, characterless houses dominated the town. Landscaping was not a high priority in Porterville either, with brown lawns and chain-link fences the current vogue.
If the address we had was correct, Kate Williamson lived in a small, run-down clapboard house on the outskirts of town. It was unfenced and isolated, surrounded by dry, vacant land and a factory of some sort in the distant background.
We parked the car on the road out front.
The home’s timber facade had once been painted mint green but now sat somewhere between brown and gray. A rusted gutter on the corner was attempting to jump ship in the hopes of a happier life, and her garden was a dust bowl, even less green than the paint.
As I placed my first foot in the dirt, an abrupt chorus of gobbles rang out, followed closely by the appearance of a flock of at least thirty turkeys. They ran toward us, stopped about a yard in front of us, and stalked back and forth, their feathers fluffed. I took a step back. They took a step forward. “I don’t think they want us here,” I whispered to Connor.
He smirked at me. “They’re just turkeys.” He strode ahead. The turkeys retreated, but their feathers ruffled further, and one of them gobbled in a sharper tone than before.
“I’m serious,”
I said, retreating another step. “We raised chickens when I was a kid, and there were some nasty roosters that would attack. I don’t trust them.” These turkeys were much bigger than those roosters.
Connor looked back at me in exasperation. As soon as his back was turned, the turkeys closed in.
“Watch out!” I yelled.
The front door of the house opened, and an older version of the woman from the newspaper clipping stepped out.
“You’re not hurting my turkeys are you?” The turkeys ran over at the sound of her voice and milled around her like ducklings around their mother.
I resisted taking another step backward. “No, ma’am. We were just admiring them,” I lied.
She was pretty in a middle-aged girl-next-door kind of way, but her mismatched baggy clothing and crooked haircut suggested she didn’t care about that. She patted a couple of the turkeys on their bald, wrinkly heads. “Who are you and what do you want, then?”
Connor spoke up this time. “I’m a private investigator, Connor Stiles, and this is my colleague, Isobel Avery.”
I guess he’d decided presenting a businesslike front to Ms. Williamson was more important than working on my acting skills.
“We’d like to speak to you about a matter concerning Josh Summers.”
Her eyes narrowed at him.
“And your daughter, Dana, too,” I added.
She hesitated a moment longer, still patting the turkeys absentmindedly. “My Dana did you say? Then I suppose you better come in.” Now that she’d made up her mind, she gestured at us impatiently. “Come on, come in, my turkeys won’t bite.”
Personally, I had doubts about that, but I kept my mouth shut and caught up to Connor so I was close behind him when we waded through the gang of turkeys.
We stepped through the door, and I was exceedingly relieved when Kate left the turkeys outside. She led us through a dark, wood-paneled hallway and into a living room crammed with a sofa, two recliners, a coffee table, and four display cabinets. Miscellaneous items were scattered over every available inch of the display cabinets, from dirty dishes and newspapers, to framed photographs and turkey figurines.
Eat, Pray, Die Mystery Box Set Page 17
