by Tara Sivec
“Oh, my God, that was the guy who pranced around his kitchen in fishnets and stilettos?” Paige asks in shock as I close the door behind us.
Kennedy nods as she shines her flashlight from left to right. “That’s him. The ex came home early from work to see him doing the entire final dance sequence from Dirty Dancing.”
Paige and I stand behind Kennedy while she looks around and decides which direction to head.
“This place is really creepy. Someone died here,” Paige complains quietly as we inch slowly through the foyer and toward the library.
Even though it’s dark and Kennedy has her back to us, I can tell she’s rolling her eyes. “Oh, stop being such a baby. It’s not like his body is still in here.”
“You can’t tell me this doesn’t freak you out a little bit. You just stepped over the exact spot where his body was. That’s just gross,” Paige says with a shiver as we all walk around the bloodstain on the cream carpet.
Kennedy ignores her and makes her way over to the giant oak desk on the far side of the room. “I’ll start with this room. Lorelei, you check the rest of the first floor. This dude has a house the size of a small country. He could have ten offices in a house this large, but instead, he uses the library right on the ground floor. Obviously he’s weird. Paige, you can start going room to room upstairs and see if you can find any other file cabinets or some place where Richard would keep paperwork. He’s got to have a safe in this house—see if you guys can find that too.”
“Why the hell do I have to be the one to wander through the upstairs by myself?”
Paige stands by the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself.
“There is nothing to be afraid of. It’s just an empty house. Suck it up and get to work,” Kennedy tells her. “Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll come across the ex’s closet. She moved out a while ago, but I heard the officers talking the other day when we were here that she left some things behind.”
Even with just the faint beams of our flashlights I can see Paige’s eyes light up with excitement.
“If you need me, I’ll be upstairs.”
She turns and races out of the room and a few seconds later I hear her feet pounding up the stairs quickly.
For the next twenty minutes, I stroll from room to room downstairs, not finding anything of any interest. I make my way back to the library and see that Kennedy has pulled out all the files from the desk and is reading through them.
“I can’t believe Paige was creeped out coming in this house,” Kennedy says with a laugh when she sees me walk in. “She is the biggest puss—SON OF A FUCKING BITCH, WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?”
The uncharacteristic girly scream from Kennedy has me racing over to her. I watch as she jumps up on the chair behind the desk, whipping her hand with the flashlight back and forth under the desk.
“Something touched my leg! SOMETHING TOUCHED MY FUCKING LEG!” she screams.
Aiming my flashlight under the desk, I walk slowly around it until I’m right next to Kennedy’s chair.
“I don’t see anything. Are you sure you didn’t just bump up against the desk?” I ask as I crouch down to get a better look.
“I didn’t bump against the Goddamn desk! Something reached out and smacked my ankle,” she argues angrily.
I try to hide my amusement at how upset Kennedy is right now.
“What were you saying to Paige a few seconds ago?” I ask as I continue my way around the massive desk. “Stop being such a baby?”
I can’t contain a snort of laughter.
“Don’t make me come down off of this chair and kick your ass, Lorelei.”
I laugh again and shake my head at her. “There’s nothing here. I think you just—OH, MY GOD, WHAT IS THAT?!”
Something that sounds like a cross between a rattlesnake and a dying person keens from under the desk. I scramble away from it, tripping over my feet and landing on my butt. My flashlight falls from my hand and rolls across the floor, the beam flashing around the room like a strobe light.
“I told you! I told you something touched me!” Kennedy yells in victory.
I continue scooting backward, as far away from the desk as possible. “Stop sounding so excited that something is under that desk trying to kill us!”
Suddenly, the room is bathed in bright light and I wince, blinking my eyes rapidly to adjust to it.
“Turn off the light! What if someone sees it?” Kennedy yells at Paige, who stands in the doorway.
With a roll of her eyes, Paige stalks across the room then gets down on her hands and knees, the top half of her body disappearing under the desk. The hissing and moaning gets louder when Paige suddenly pops back out from under the desk with a white ball of angry cat in her hands.
“Seriously? I could hear you screaming all the way upstairs. The neighbors probably heard you. Having a light on is the least of your worries,” Paige complains as she stands up with the cat firmly grasped by the back of its neck.
After getting up from the floor, I walk over to the cat.
“Awww, you poor thing. You’ve been alone in this house for a week. She still has dried blood on her paws.”
The cat answers my concern for her by hissing with so much force that spit flies from her mouth.
“While you two idiots were freaking out over a cat, I found some interesting e-mails in a drawer in Richard’s room,” Paige tells us, handing the cat over to me and then bending down to pick up a few pieces of paper that she set down on the floor when she crawled under the desk.
The cat looks up at me with big, sad eyes and right when I feel like we have a connection, she starts the low growl in her throat all over again and hisses at me.
Kennedy hops down from the chair and I turn to hand the cat off to her.
She immediately puts her hands up in the air and shakes her head. “Oh no. Don’t even think about it. That cat is an asshole.”
The cat hisses and tries to lunge out of my arms for Kennedy. I grip her as hard as I can to keep her from ripping Kennedy’s face off.
“Don’t call her that,” I whisper. “Obviously she’s traumatized from watching her owner get killed.”
I hold on to her with one arm and try to calm her down by scratching her behind the ears.
Kennedy takes a step forward and glares at the cat. “Not so tough now, are you?”
The cat growls and I turn away from Kennedy so she’ll stop taunting her.
“So, what are these e-mails you found in Richard’s room?” I ask Paige.
She holds out the pieces of paper and Kennedy takes them from her and glances over them.
“Well, well, well. It looks like Richard’s lawyer was trying to blackmail him,” Kennedy says with a smile. “A month ago he sent Richard an e-mail telling him that if Richard didn’t give him a quarter of a million dollars, he would tell everyone what he knows.”
“Does it say what he knew?” I ask.
Kennedy flips through the pages. “Nope. They go back and forth a few times and Richard basically tells him to fuck off.”
Kennedy hands the papers over to me, and when I see the name and e-mail address at the top of the page, my mouth drops open. “Oh, my God. I know this guy. I went to law school with him.”
Miles Harper. He was in my graduating class and I had a few study groups with him. He was a jerk then and the few times I’ve seen him at social functions since law school have only proved he hadn’t changed a bit.
“Well, then, getting him to talk to you should be a piece of cake,” Paige tells me with a smile.
“Paige, why do you have on sparkly silver shoes?” Kennedy suddenly asks.
I look down at Paige’s feet and sure enough, the black boots she wore here have been replaced with a pair of four-inch stilettos covered in crystals.
“Did you really think I would find the closet of a billionaire’s ex-wife and NOT try on a pair of her shoes? I can’t believe she left these behind.”
Paige twists and turns her foot
so that the light sparkles off of her footwear.
“The shoes stay here,” Kennedy warns her.
Paige stomps her stilettoed foot. “But she doesn’t even want them! And she’s got six pairs just like them. These are from Daniele Michetti’s Summer 2010 collection. It’s Swarovski!”
“What are you, Russian?” Kennedy complains. “I have no idea what you’re saying to me.”
The cat growls at Kennedy.
“Oh, pipe the fuck down, cat. Put the shoes back and let’s get the hell out of here.”
Kennedy grabs my flashlight off of the ground and follows Paige as she stomps out of the room to put the shoes back. Kennedy pauses by the door and looks back at me when she realizes I’m not following her.
I resist the question in her gaze, giving her my best pout, and I pet the cat’s head. Finally, she throws her hands up in the air. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
I huff. “Kennedy, I can’t just leave her here. She’s dirty and hungry and all alone.”
Kennedy shakes her head at me and sighs. “Fine. But if that thing so much as looks at me funny on the ride home, I’m opening the car door and shoving you both out into oncoming traffic.”
CHAPTER 5
After we got home from searching Richard’s house a few nights ago, I fed Snowball a can of tuna and attempted to give her a bath. I still have scratches up and down my arms and the wet cat didn’t come out from under my bed for a full day. Even dry, she still chooses to hide under there, hissing and growling at me all night long, every single night.
I’m now thinking the name Snowball isn’t very fitting for her.
In between research on Richard Covington and trying to coax the cat out from under my bed without injury, I looked up what I could find on Miles Harper in our alumni directory. It turns out he’s practicing law at my father’s old firm. Since I’m having dinner with my parents this weekend, I figured I’d wait until I’m out that way to try and talk to him.
In the meantime, I decided it was time to start questioning a few people. For the most part, Richard Covington led a pretty normal life. He was raised in an upper-class family, he had no siblings, and there aren’t any living relatives left. He went to school to be a doctor, invented a new type of mechanism for heart catheters, and made billions. He met his wife a few years ago while he was giving a speech at his alma mater. She was a student there, of course. Why should a fifty-five-year-old billionaire marry someone his own age?
According to all of the research I’ve done so far, he was an upstanding citizen and a philanthropist, giving to as many charities as he could. His only downfall was his addiction to porn. Or so said his ex-wife’s Facebook page. The majority of her status messages ever since they separated were along the lines of, “I struggled with this for so long, but it’s finally time to come clean. Richard and I separated because of his addiction to porn.”
I am so glad I didn’t grow up in the land of Facebook. Nothing like airing your dirty laundry for the entire world to see. This just makes her even more of a suspect now in my book.
Since I don’t want anyone knowing what I’m up to, I’m using a fake name and fake reason for all of the questions. I decided a good place to start would be the ex.
“Hello, Mrs. Covington, I’m Lori Wagner. We spoke on the phone the other day?”
Stephanie Covington stands in the doorway of her condo with a cup of tea in her hand and looks at me in confusion for a few moments.
“Oh, that’s right. You’re the reporter,” she says as she nods, holding the door wider. “Come in; I was just making taheebo tea. My herbalist told me I have a sluggish liver. Would you like a cup? Do you have a sluggish liver?”
I have no idea how to respond to this, so I just smile and politely decline as I walk through the doorway.
Stephanie Covington isn’t at all what I pictured when I found out she was thirty years younger than her husband. Well, looks-wise she fits that picture to a T. She’s twenty-five years old and supermodel gorgeous with long blond hair and a chest that has had some help, judging by the way she’s practically spilling out of her skintight red dress.
But to be honest, I imagined she would behave like an elitist, gold-digging child. But when we spoke on the phone, Stephanie was more than happy to answer some of my questions and was extremely polite.
“You’ll have to excuse the mess. I’ve just been too depressed since I heard about Richard to even think about having the maid come by,” Stephanie explains.
I glance around and briefly wonder what this woman thinks is a “mess.” The place is pretty spotless from where I stand.
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Covington. As I said on the phone, I just need to ask you a few questions.”
She sits down on the love seat in the sitting room and gestures for me to take a seat across from her on the matching couch.
“Please, call me Stephanie.” She leans over the arm of the love seat and pulls a tissue out of a box, dabbing gently under her eyes. “It’s still such a shock. We had our differences and the divorce wasn’t going very smoothly, but he was still my husband, and I loved him when we married.”
I smile softly at her and give her time to compose herself.
“If you don’t mind me asking, Stephanie, why were you and Mr. Covington separating?”
Aside from the porn addiction.
She sighs and folds her hands in her lap. “It’s the same old story. A few years after we got married, he decided to turn me in for a younger model. I caught him screwing his secretary on his desk. I had decided to surprise him with dinner when he was supposed to be working late.”
Even though I feel bad for Stephanie, she just made herself a prime suspect.
As if reading my mind, she continues. “I know what you’re thinking. I know what everyone is thinking. I killed him in a jealous rage. But Richard and I had been having problems even before I caught him cheating. To put it delicately, Richard had a fondness for pornographic movies. And I’m not just talking a few viewings here and there. I mean, he watched it all the time. Morning, noon, and night. He even took it to the office. I begged him to get help, but he just laughed it off. I told him I would leave him if he didn’t stop and the next thing I know, I’m walking in on him reenacting a scene with another woman. People think I might have killed him because he was trying to stiff me in the divorce. But Richard was worth more alive than he is dead.”
I look at her in confusion. “I’m sorry; I don’t follow.”
“My dearly departed ex didn’t believe in life insurance. He was fifty-five years old and he refused to go to the doctor even for a checkup. And now that he’s gone, his board of directors will take over the shares of his company, because even though he didn’t believe in protecting his life, he made damn sure to protect the only thing he ever loved,” she says bitterly.
Well, there goes that idea.
“Do you know anyone who might have had a grudge against your husband? A business associate or a friend whom he might have wronged?”
“I went over all of this with the detective who stopped by yesterday. Dallas, I think he said his name was. He was so nice—he took me out for drinks,” Stephanie says with a sniffle.
Oh, I’m sure Dallas was very nice at helping you forget by trying to get in your pants.
“Anyway, I just realized that I forgot to tell him last night that he should also question Richard’s old business partner, Andrew Jameson,” Stephanie tells me, crossing her legs and leaning back against the love seat.
Well, at least one good thing came from Dallas being a man whore last night: he was so busy feeding her alcohol and making her “forget,” that I know something he doesn’t.
“I don’t know everything that happened between them, but I know that they didn’t part on the best of terms when Andrew decided to leave the company. Are you going to put all of this in the article you’re writing? I don’t want Andrew to know I’m pointing fingers at him or anything.”
&nb
sp; Oops, the article!
“Um, no, don’t worry about that at all. I’ll make sure to keep your name out of it,” I lie.
Stephanie looks relieved at my answer and continues. “I don’t know how many times I heard Richard on the phone with Andrew arguing. Richard was offering him quite a lot of money to buy him out, but Andrew felt like it wasn’t enough. Their arguments were just horrendous. They disrupted my chakras and I just couldn’t seem to get my life force back on track after that. My herbalist had to cleanse my aura three times a week just so I could sleep.”
Oh, my God.
I don’t want to seem rude, but I need to get out of here right away and get to this Andrew Jameson’s house before Dallas finds out about him. Or before Stephanie wants to cleanse my chakras.
“Stephanie, I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today. I have a prior appointment I need to get to. Would it be okay just to chat on the phone if I have any more questions?” I ask as I rise from the couch.
She walks me to the door. “Absolutely. I’ll do anything I can to help Richard’s killer be brought to justice. If you don’t mind my saying, you seem to have a very gray aura about you, Lori. That usually means you’re troubled by something or you have deep secrets. People with gray auras are usually struggling to find balance.”
Seriously? Is this a joke?
“I’m going to have my herbalist put something together for you. In the meantime, the best cure for a gray aura is love. You should get some love in your life, Lori.”
I thank her without laughing and as she closes the door behind me, I wonder what color her aura is. Is there a color for mentally insane?
Rushing down the stairs, I see a 1965 black Mustang pull into the circular drive and park a few feet behind my car. I’m instantly filled with longing when I see it. I always wanted a car like that when I was a teenager, but my father thought it was impractical. There was a girl in my high school who had a car just like it. She was wild and fun and I wanted to be just like her.
