Oh boy.
I sorted through the requests that had come in over the weekend. Three were from Ranger. I'd do them first. He was the boss. And he was hot. One was from someone named Alvirez. The rest were Rodriguez. Ranger's files were all standard searches. Nothing unusual. I had them done by noon. My plan was to get a quick lunch, run the Alvirez and two for Rodriguez, and then see what I could turn up at Fort Dix . I prowled through the kitchen, not finding anything inspiring to eat.
I settled on the turkey again and took it back to my cubicle with a bottle of water. I finished lunch, finished Alvirez and Rodriguez, and started surfing Fort Dix .
I called my mother, Morelli, Lula, and Valerie and told them I had a new cell phone. Valerie was in the Magic Kingdom and said she'd be home at the end of the week. They liked Florida , but the girls missed their friends, and Albert had broken out in hives when he was approached by a six-foot-tall, four-foot-wide Pooh Bear. Lula wasn't answering. I left a message. Morelli wasn't answering. I left a message. My mother invited me for dinner, and I declined.
It was midafternoon when Ranger returned to my cubby. I was pacing, unable to focus on anything beyond my need for a cupcake.
“Babe,” Ranger said. “You're looking a little strung out. Is there anything I should know?”
“I'm in sugar withdrawal. I've given up dessert, and it's all I can think about.” That had been true five minutes ago. Now that Ranger was standing in front of me I was thinking a cupcake wasn't what I actually wanted.
“Maybe I can help get your mind off doughnuts,” Ranger said.
My mouth dropped open, and I think some drool might have dribbled out.
“Did Silvio show you how to search the newspapers?” Ranger asked. No.
“Sit down and I'll show you how to get into the programs. It's tedious work, but it accesses a lot of information. You want to go to the local paper and look for something bad that happened when the four men were at Dix. An unsolved murder, a high-stakes robbery, unsolved serial crimes like multiple burglaries.”
"Morelli thinks there were five men involved. Originally, I thought Anthony
Barroni was the fifth guy, but now I'm not sure. Is there a way to get a list of men who were in that unit at Dix?"
“I don't have access to those records. I could get someone to hack in but I'd rather not. It would be safer to have Morelli do it.”
I was hearing the words, but they weren't sticking. My brain was clogged with naked and sweaty Ranger thoughts.
“Babe,” Ranger said, smiling. “You just looked me up and down like I was lunch.”
“I need a doughnut,” I told him. “I really need a doughnut.”
“That would have been my second guess.”
“I'll feel better tomorrow. The sugar will be out of my system. The cravings will be gone.” I sat down and faced the keyboard. “How do I do this?”
Ranger pulled a chair next to me. His leg pressed against mine and when he leaned forward to get to my keyboard we were shoulder to shoulder, his arm brushing the side of my breast when he typed. He was warm and he smelled delicious. I felt my eyes glaze over, and I worried I might start panting.
“You should take notes,” Ranger said. “You're going to need to remember some passwords.”
Get a grip, I said to myself. It wouldn't be good to jump on him here. You'd be on television. And you haven't got a door on your cubby. And then there was Morelli. I was living with Morelli. It wouldn't be right to live with Morelli and boink Ranger. And what was wrong with me, anyway, that I needed two men? Especially when the second man was Ranger. Ever since we'd had the discussion about marriage my imagination had been running wild dredging up possibilities for his deep dark secret. I knew it had nothing to do with killing people because that was no secret. I knew he wasn't gay. I'd seen that one firsthand. The memory brought a new rush of heat, and I resisted squirming in my seat. Was he scarred by a terrible childhood? Had his heart been so badly broken he was unable to recover?
“Earth to Babe,” Ranger said.
I looked at him and unconsciously licked my lips.
“I'm going to have to disconnect your cubby's security camera,” Ranger said.
“I just heard everyone in the control room gasp when you licked your lips. I could have a hatchet murder taking place in full monitor view on one of my accounts, and I don't think anyone would notice as long as you're sitting in here.” Ranger signed off the search he'd just pulled up. He took my pad and wrote out instructions for retrieving information from newspapers. He returned the pad to my desk and stood. “Let's go on a field trip,” he said.
“I want to see the area where the bodies were recovered.”
I thought that sounded sufficiently grim to be a good doughnut diversion. I stood and clipped my new cell phone onto the waistband of my jeans. I pocketed the key fob. And I stared at the gun. The gun was in a holster that attached to a belt, and I wasn't wearing a belt.
“No belt,” I said to Ranger.
“Ella has some clothes for you upstairs in my apartment. Try them on. I'm sure she's included a belt. I'll meet you in the garage. I need to talk to Tank.”
I took the elevator to the top floor and stepped out into the small marble-floored foyer. I'd lived here for a brief time not long ago, so I was familiar with the apartment. I opened the locked door with the key he'd given me and stepped inside. His apartment always felt cool and serene. His furniture was comfortable, with clean lines and earth tones, and felt masculine without being overbearing. There were fresh flowers on the sideboard by the door. I doubted Ranger ever noticed the flowers, but Ella liked them. They were part of Ella's campaign to civilize Ranger and make his life nicer.
I dropped my keys in the silver dish beside the flowers. I walked through the apartment and found my clothes stacked on a black leather upholstered bench in Ranger's dressing room. Two black shirts, two black cargo pants, a black belt, a black windbreaker, a black sweatshirt, a black ball cap. I was going to look like a mini-Ranger. I stepped into the cargo pants. Perfect fit. Ella had remembered my size from the last time I'd stayed here. I belted the cargo pants, and I tugged the shirt over my head. It was a short-sleeved shirt, female cut with some spandex. It had a V-neck that was relatively high. Rangeman was embroidered on the left breast with black thread. The shirt was a good fit with the exception of being too short to tuck into the cargo pants. The shirt barely touched the top of the cargo pants waistband.
I called Ranger on his cell. “This shirt is short. I'm not sure you're going to like it on the control room floor.”
“Put a jacket over it and come down to the garage.”
I shrugged into the windbreaker. Black on black again, with Rangeman embroidered on the left breast of the jacket. I took my phone off my jeans and clipped it onto the cargo pants. I grabbed the black-on-black ball cap, and I left Rangers apartment and rode the elevator to the garage.
Ranger was waiting by his truck. He was wearing a windbreaker exactly like mine, and the almost smile expression was fixed on his face.
“I feel like a miniature Ranger,” I said to him.
Ranger unzipped the windbreaker and looked me over. “Nice, but you're no miniature Ranger.” He took my Sig out of his jacket pocket and snapped it onto my belt just in front of my hip, his knuckles grazing bare skin. “There are some advantages to this short shirt,” he said, sliding his hands under, fingertips stopping short of my bra.
“Okay, here's the deal,” I said to him. “You know how when you squeeze a jelly doughnut and the jelly squirts out in the weakest spot of the doughnut? Well, if I'm a jelly doughnut then my weak spot is dessert. Every time I get stressed I head for the bakery. I'm trying to stop the dessert thing now, and so the jelly is squirting out someplace else.”
“And?”
“And this place that it's squirting out. . . maybe squirting out isn't a good way to put this. Forget squirting out.”
“You're trying to tell me something,” Ranger said.
“Yes! And it would be a lot easier if you didn't have your hands under my shirt. It's hard for me to think when you've got your hands on me like this.”
“Babe, has it occurred to you that you might be giving information to the enemy?”
“The thing is, I have all these excess hormones. They used to be jelly-doughnut hormones, but somehow they got switched over to sex-drive hormones. Not that sex-drive hormones are bad, it's just that my life is so complicated right now. So I'm trying to control all these stupid hormones, to keep them locked up in the doughnut. And you're going to have to help.”
“Why?”
“Because you're a good guy.”
“I'm not that good,” Ranger said.
“So I'm in trouble?”
“Big time.”
“You told Ella to get me this short shirt, didn't you?”
Ranger's fingers were slowly creeping up my breast. “No. I told her to get you something that didn't look like it was made for Tank. She probably didn't realize it was cut off at the waist.”
“The hand,” I said. “You have to remove the hand. You're poaching.”
Ranger smiled and kissed me. Light. No tongue. The appetizer on Ranger's dinner menu. “Don't count on my help with the overactive sex drive,” he said. “You're on your own with this one.”
I looked up at the security camera focused on us. “Do you think Hal will sell this tape to the evening news?”
“Not if he wants to live.” Ranger took a step back and opened the passenger-side door to the truck for me.
Ranger took the wheel, drove out of the garage, and headed for the patch of scrub woods east of center city where the four men had been found. Neither of us spoke. Understandable since there wasn't a lot to say after I explained my jelly doughnut dilemma, and Ranger'd declared open season on Stephanie. Still, it was good to have cleared the air, and now if I accidentally ripped his clothes off he'd understand it was one of those odd chemical things.
The crime-scene tape blocked the dirt road leading back to the crime site and covered a couple acres along the road and into the woods. Ranger parked the truck, and we got out and scooted under the yellow tape. I could see a van through the trees, and snatches of conversation carried to me. Men's voices.
Two or three.
We walked the dirt road through the scrubby field and into the woods. The graves weren't far in. There was an area about the size of a two-car garage where the vegetation had been trampled over the years, leaving hard-packed dirt and some hardscrabble grass. This was the end of the road, the turnaround point.
This was the place where drug deals were made, sex was sold, and kids got drunk, stoned, pregnant.
The van belonged to the state lab. The side door was open. One guy stood by the open door, writing on a pad. Two guys in shirtsleeves were working at the grave site. They were wearing disposable gloves and carrying evidence bags. They looked our way and nodded, recognizing Ranger.
“Your FTA's long gone,” the guy at the van said.
“Just curious,” Ranger told him. “Wanted to see what the scene looked like.”
“Looks like you got a new partner. What happened to Tank?”
“It's Tank's day off,” Ranger said.
“Hey, wait a minute,” the guy said, smiling at me. “Aren't you Stephanie Plum?”
“Yes,” I said. “And whatever you've heard ... it isn't true.”
“You two are kind of cute together,” the guy said to Ranger. “I like the matching clothes. Does Celia know about this?”
“This is business,” Ranger said. “Stephanie's working for Rangeman. Are you finding anything interesting?”
“Hard to say. There was a lot of trash here. Everything from left-behind panties to crack cookers. A lot of used condoms and needles. You want to watch where you walk. Be best if you stay on the road. The road's clean.”
“How deep was the grave?”
“A couple feet. I'm surprised they weren't found sooner. It's on the far perimeter of the cleared area so maybe it wasn't noticed. Or maybe no one cared. From the way the ground's settled I'd say they were here for a while. Couple weeks at least. Looks to me like they were shot here. Won't know for sure until the lab tests come back.”
“Did he leave the shells?”
“Took the shells.”
Ranger nodded. “Later.”
“Later. Give Celia a hug for me.”
We got back to the truck and Ranger shielded his eyes from the low-angled sun and studied the road we'd just walked.
“There was just barely enough room back there for five cars,” Ranger said.
“We know two of them were SUVs. Probably they could at least partially be seen from the main road. And that probably ensured their privacy. We know when three of the men left work and got into their cars. If they came directly here they'd arrive around six-thirty, which meant there was still daylight.”
“You'd think someone would have heard gunshots. This guy didn't just pop off a couple rounds.”
“It's an isolated area. And if you were a passing motorist it might be hard to tell where the shots originated. Most likely you'd just get the hell out of here.”
We climbed into the truck and buckled ourselves in.
“Who's Celia?” I asked Ranger.
“My sister. Marty Sanchez, the guy by the van, went to school with Celia. They dated for a while.”
“Is she your only sister?”
“I have four sisters.”
“Any brothers?”
“One.”
“And you have a daughter,” I said.
Ranger swung the truck onto the paved road. "Not many people know about my
daughter."
“Understood. Do I get to ask more questions?”
“One.”
“How old are you?”
“I'm two months older than you,” Ranger said.
“You know my birthday?”
“I know lots of things about you. And that was two questions.”
It was five o'clock when we pulled into the garage.
“How's Morelli doing?” Ranger asked.
“Good. He's going back to work tomorrow. The cast won't come off for a while, so he's limited. He's on crutches, and he can't drive, and he can't walk Bob. I'm going to stay until he's more self-sufficient. Then I'll go back to my apartment.”
Ranger walked me to the bike. “I don't want you going back to your apartment until we get this guy.”
“You don't have to worry about me,” I said. “I've got a gun.”
“Would you feel comfortable using it?”
“No, but I could hit someone over the head with it.”
The bike was a black Ducati Monster. I'd driven Morelli's Due, so I was on familiar ground. I took the black full-face helmet off the grip and handed it to Ranger. I took the key out of my pocket, and I swung my leg over the bike.
Ranger was watching me, smiling. “I like the way you straddle that,” he said. “Someday . . .”
I revved the engine and cut off the rest of the sentence. I didn't have to read his lips to know where he was going. I put the helmet on, Ranger remoted the gate open for me, and I wheeled out of the garage.
It felt great to be on the bike. The air was cool, and traffic was light. It was just a few minutes short of rush hour. I took it slow, getting the feel of the machine. I cut to the alley and brought the bike in through Morellis backyard. Morelli had an empty tool shed next to his house. The shed was locked with a combination lock, and I knew the combination. I spun the dial, opened the shed, and locked the bike away.
Morelli was waiting for me in the kitchen. “Let me guess,” Morelli said. "He
gave you a bike. A Due."
“Yeah. It was terrific riding over here.” I went to the fridge and studied the inside. Not a lot there. “I'll take Bob out, and you can dial supper,” I said.
“What do you want?”
“Anything without sugar.”
�
�You're still on the no-sugar thing?”
“Yeah. I hope you took a nap this afternoon.”
Morelli poked me with his crutch. “Where are your clothes? You weren't wearing this when you left this morning.”
“I left them at work. I didn't have a way to carry them on the bike. I could use a backpack.” I still had the wind breaker zipped over the shirt. I thought it was best to delay the short-shirt confrontation until after we'd eaten. I clipped Bob to his leash and took off. I got back just as the Pino's delivery kid was leaving.
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