Mind-Bending Murder

by Leslie Langtry

  "I find it very interesting," she said before turning back to her computer.

  An image of the stunning redhead walking into the place, asking for information on membership, and Stewie promptly exploding, popped into my head.

  "Maybe I'll see you there," I said awkwardly. "I'm their Bird Goddess."

  Claire didn't acknowledge me speaking. Hopefully, she hadn't heard me.

  "That went well," Kelly whispered.

  "Hey," I asked her, "how are you going to find this cat, Effie, out of all the cats in Bladdersly?"

  "I have an idea." Kelly winked before returning to her desk. As she sat down, she looked me over. "Are those the shoes you were wearing the night of the murder?"

  "Huh?" I looked down to see the white canvas shoes on my feet. They had some fancy name with a patent leather swoosh on the side. "I guess I was wearing these."

  "It's the only pair you've worn all summer," my best friend said.

  I gave her a dry look. "I've worn other shoes."

  "Maybe once or twice," Kelly corrected. "But you've worn these 99% of the time. You always get fixated on one pair until you wear it out."

  "I do not!" I totally did. I just didn't want her to know that she was right.

  Kelly got up and took off her sport sandals, handing them to me. "Let me check those out. You can wear my shoes."

  I couldn't think of any reason not to swap, so I handed them over and flounced out the door. As the most responsible of the two of us, she probably knew what she was doing. And we wore the same size shoes, so why not?

  Back at the Chapel of Despair, I punched in the code and let myself in. There was no one around. I found my copy of the book and made my way home.

  "You're home?" Rex was feeding the cats. "Hey, I thought you threw the werewolf mask away. Philby's got it on."

  Sure enough, the feline führer was sitting next to the frog's aquarium wearing the werewolf mask she'd commandeered from us after a Halloween parade a while back. I had no idea where she'd kept it. She hid it somewhere in the house where I suppose she thought we'd never look. Which was silly since we had no intention of taking it from her, and I'd certainly never throw it out.

  "She's trying to intimidate Rufus." Rex kissed me.

  "Is it working?"

  "No. Leonard, however…" Rex pointed to the corner of the dining room, where our Scottish deerhound was sitting in a corner, face to the wall. "Is appropriately terrified."

  I sighed and walked over to the dog, who nuzzled my hand. And he'd been so happy earlier. "Poor Leonard. Philby is so mean to you. Come on. Let's get a treat!"

  After a wary glance at the kitty werewolf, Leonard followed me to the kitchen, where I gave him three dog treats. He wagged his tail and trotted out to the living room.

  "Would you mind filling me in?" Rex asked. "I promise not to tell Carnack or Vanderzee."

  I was tired. This case was like the Hydra—chop one head off and two more grew back. There were too many suspects. Too many threads to follow.

  "Why not?" I told him about what I'd found in Tyson's basement.

  My husband frowned. "I don't remember hearing anything about stolen computers. And a haul that large would've come in to me."

  That was a surprise. "Even if it's outside of your jurisdiction?"

  Rex nodded. "It's kind of a specialty of mine. The other small-town PDs often help each other out. I reach out to neighboring towns all the time for info."

  That was interesting. "But Vanderzee never asked?"

  "No. Maybe it hasn't been reported. Or maybe this theft was from somewhere else. Like Des Moines or Omaha or the Quad Cities."

  "Well, Riley is looking into it. Maybe it's relevant. Maybe it's not." Back in the living room, I stretched out on the sofa. "You didn't say anything about me sneaking into Tyson's basement or using your brothers-in-law to get me out of there."

  "That's because it isn't my jurisdiction." Rex joined me on the couch and took my hand. "I've decided that if I want to have you home and want to keep track of your antics, I need to leave the job at the office."

  "Good idea. I know I'm a pain in the butt."

  "Yes, you are." Rex kissed me again. If I didn't have to reread this book, I might go for an all-out make out session on the couch.

  Wait a minute… "Why are you being so nice to me?"

  Rex gave me a long look. "Because we're going to a cookout tonight."

  I sat straight up. "Yay! Steaks? Are we taking wine? Is it Kelly and Robert's house?"

  Rex shook his head. "With Randi, Ronni, and their husbands. At their place."

  I slumped against the couch. "Oh."

  My husband put his arm around me. "Out of the four of them, three love you. Remember that."

  "Why are we going?" I grumbled.

  "Randi has been chewing Ronni out for her dislike of you. She wants to make it up to you."

  "Dislike is far too weak a word to describe it." I held up the book. "And I've got some serious reading to do."

  "You have half an hour. I'll get everything ready." Rex started to walk into the kitchen. "Hold on." He held up the beard that Philby must've discarded earlier. "What is this? I almost shot it when I walked into the kitchen when I got home."

  I took it from him. "My disguise from the other night. The one you didn't think was sexy."

  "Oh. Right," he said. "And why are you wearing someone else's shoes?"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Rex and I walked around to the backyard, where Ron was standing at the grill with an apron that said Kiss the Chef Or I'll Break Your Legs.

  "Rex! Merry!" Randi flew over to us, pulling us to her in an embrace. "We are so happy you're here!"

  "No, we're not!" Ronni shouted from inside the house.

  Ivan and Ron came over and crushed me in a group bear hug. Once I got free, I noticed that they only shook Rex's hand. There was no doubt that they loved him too. They just treated him a little more respectfully than they did me.

  Rex took food inside with Randi while I pulled the guys aside.

  "Thanks for bailing me out today," I said.

  Ivan frowned. "We did not bail you out. Were we supposed to do that?"

  Ron added, "We thought you wanted distraction."

  "I did. And you crushed it."

  The men looked at each other doubtfully.

  "It means you did a good job," I added.

  "Really?" Ivan asked. "Because crushing is bad."

  They were still struggling with American slang. Once, in the taxidermy shop, a customer told Randi that she'd recently dumped her husband. The men got excited, asking where people dumped bodies around here. And on multiple occasions, I'd had to explain that being shredded had nothing to do with an industrial chipper or that having a blast didn't mean blowing up the local utilities in an effort to strike back at Russia.

  I wasn't worried. They'd figure it out. Eventually.

  "Did you get tattoos?" I asked.

  They grinned wildly and showed me their biceps. Each of them sported a small Chechen flag.

  "Those are normal!" I smiled. "I like them!"

  "Good," Ron said as he flipped the steaks, "because Ronni said she would divorce me if I got any more weird tattoos."

  "She said any tattoos," Ivan corrected.

  Ron paled. "Really?"

  Ivan patted his friend and brother-in-law on the back. "She does not seem to care, dude."

  Ivan's adding of the word dude was jarring. But I kept that to myself. "Did Neil say anything to you about Tyson?"

  "He said he is leaving town soon. Says he does not like Lance Armstrong."

  Ron said, "We threatened to break his legs…"

  "Because we still needed to get tattoos," Ivan added helpfully.

  "But Neil said no. He is selling business to other guy."

  Now that was interesting. Was Neil fleeing the coop before the case was solved? Was he leaving because he was Tyson's killer? Or was he leaving to fence the laptops?

  "Hey, gu
ys!" Kurt strolled around the corner, carrying a sheet cake.

  "What are you doing here?" I asked.

  Ivan took the cake from the kid. "We invited. We are thinking of going into bounty hunter business with this guy."

  Kurt nodded eagerly. "I'm going corporate."

  "You haven't had one single case!" I protested.

  He set the cake down on the table. "That's just splitting hairs. Besides, if Kayla is impressed with me being a bounty hunter, imagine how she'll feel toward me when I'm CEO of the most powerful bail recovery agency in the county!"

  "We can catch bad guys!" Ron said. "And bust their heads!"

  Kurt laughed. "Aren't they great? And so big! No one is going to go on the run with these two on their tail."

  I wasn't sure this was a good idea. "I thought you were thinking of working for Riley?"

  Ivan shook his head. "We changed minds when Kurt sent us the first season of Dog the Bounty Hunter."

  "I might get mullet!" Ron said.

  "And spandex pants!" Ivan added.

  Ron frowned. "No spandex. Too weird."

  This from a guy who was putting ketchup on his steak…while it was still on the grill.

  I looked at the house. "And what do Randi and Ronni think of this?"

  The two men looked at each other before Ivan replied. "We weren't going to tell them."

  Great. I didn't want to be in on secrets kept from my sisters-in-law. "Why not?"

  Ron held up his index finger. "We are men. We bring home money. That's how it is."

  "That's sexist thinking," I protested.

  Ron frowned. "It is not sexy."

  "It would be if we wore spandex!" Ivan brightened.

  "Not sexy. Sexist. Saying that you are the man…" I gave up. "Forget it. Go with the spandex."

  "I don't think spandex is a good idea," Kurt mused. "Unless you think Kayla would like it."

  "Who's Kayla, and what would she like?"

  Randi, Rex, and Ronni appeared with plates, food, and a tablecloth.

  "One of my druids," I answered Randi as I took the other end of the cloth and helped her spread it over the table.

  Randi looked thoughtful. "Druids? We just got a big order from some local druids. I wonder if they're the same ones?"

  I wondered what the twins would do for the druids. They were very creative. Recently the twins had finished a huge project—the recreation of the Nuremburg Trials, featuring meerkats as the Nazis and flamingoes as the prosecutors. It's almost tasteful.

  Why did people believe that there could be more than one? "There's only one druid group in town that I'm aware of. What did they want?"

  "A Stonehenge diorama with Sasquatch and aliens!" Randi clapped her hands together with glee. "I'm so excited! We've never done anything weird before!"

  I thought about the one in their kitchen where snakes, dressed as little girls with curly blonde wigs, are playing with Barbies. I still have no idea how they did that without hands. And yet the twins thought what they did was perfectly normal, until this order.

  I was curious. "What are you thinking about using?"

  "We just got six goats in from a farmer who accidentally mixed poison with his feed. And goats are very otherworldly. They'll be the pagans. And there's a cougar that the Department of Natural Resources had to euthanize because it ate someone. And he'll be Sasquatch." She looked concerned. "I'm not sure about the aliens yet. But we'll come up with something."

  "That sounds cool!" Kurt enthused. Apparently, he had never seen their work before.

  "You must be Kurt!" She noticed the young man and hugged him. "Nice to meet you! The boys have said you own your own company and you're thinking of giving them jobs doing landscaping!"

  Kurt, the guys, and I all exchanged about ten full seconds of meaningful glances.

  "I want them to get dental!" Ronni shrieked.

  Kurt, to his credit, decided to run with it. "Oh sure. In fact, Merry here is hiring me to redo her old house."

  I was? And how did he know about my old house?

  Ron jumped in. "Oh yes! We will do topiary trees shaped like giant iguanas!"

  Ivan even got caught up in the web of lies. "And very large cactuses! We will turn front yard into a desert!"

  Rex turned away, and from the shaking of his shoulders, I could see he was laughing.

  "Well," I said, going against my instincts. "We're not fixed on the details yet. I'm not sure desert plants will survive a Midwest winter."

  "But we can still do iguana topiaries, right?" Ron asked hopefully, seemingly forgetting this was all a lie.

  "We will see," I said.

  Ronni took off her sweatshirt, and I noticed that she had on one of her Justice for Pancratz shirts. I wondered if she was making any money.

  "Ronni!" Randi chastised. "I asked you not to wear that today!"

  Ronni threw her arms up in the air and screamed, "I have to be true to my beliefs!!!"

  "Dinner!" Rex shouted as he scooped the steaks off the grill.

  I silently thanked him. And we ate, mostly in peace. Randi took to kicking Ronni every time she brought up the murder, and for some reason, it worked. Kurt was bombarded with questions about his new "landscaping" business and managed to handle it so well that even I was convinced.

  As everyone else cleared the table and cleaned up, Kurt drew me aside.

  "Do you think they bought it?" he asked me, his eyes nervously following Ronni.

  I nodded. "I do. How do you know so much about landscaping anyway?"

  He shrugged. "I have two cousins in the business."

  I studied him for a moment before saying, "You know, you could be a suspect in Tyson's murder."

  Kurt frowned. "Why would you think that? I didn't know him!"

  "Which is exactly what the murderer would say."

  "But I really didn't know him."

  I changed tactics. "Okay, then you wrote Boats of the Midwest."

  Getting someone worked up into protesting their innocence on one thing when you really wanted to know about another had worked well for me in the past. It catches them off guard. You have to start with an accusation that shocks them. Then you hit them with what you really think they did, and they're usually so relieved to be off the hook for the worse accusation that they will cop to the lesser plea. I was hoping this would work with Kurt.

  His mouth opened and then closed. "Again, why do you think that?"

  "You know everyone in town." I ticked off my fingers. "Your mom is a bartender at The Dew Drop Inn where, you have told me, she hears a lot of gossip. And I'll bet that, with only a paper route, you had enough time on your hands to write it."

  I let this sink in.

  After a few moments, he said, "Those are all good arguments."

  "Are you admitting that you did it?" I asked hopefully.

  He shook his head. "No. But I can see how you might think that. I do know a lot about most people in Bladdersly. And Mom is my informant."

  "But you didn't write the book," I sighed.

  "No. But I could have. In fact, I could corroborate most of the stuff that's in there. Not with proof, but from what I've seen."

  That might turn out to be helpful. "I think you could be useful to Riley if he ever has any cases in Bladdersly."

  Kurt jumped up and down with glee. "Yes! I could run the Bladdersly office as a branch of the office here!"

  I held my hands up and looked around. "Keep it quiet. You don't want to bring on the wrath of Ronni. She thinks you're giving her husband respectable work."

  Kurt stopped. "Being a bounty hunter is respectable work. Look at Dog the Bounty Hunter."

  "That's exactly what I'm talking about. Ron and Ivan are impressionable. They think that show is real."

  "It is real." Kurt's eyes widened.

  I lowered my voice even more as Ivan and Ron came near. "No, it's scripted reality TV."

  "Oh," was all Kurt said.

  "Merry." Ivan threw a thumb over his shoulder. "Rex say
s he is ready to go." He looked at Kurt. "What is business casual? Can I beat up a guy in such clothes?"

  I left Kurt to answer him. Personally, I wasn't sure. In Estonia, I once fought off three women while dressed as a banana, but I wasn't going to tell them that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I finally sat down to really read Boats of the Midwest. Now that I knew kind of what I was looking for, it was surprising what stood out (and what I'd missed the first time).

  There was a town police chief named Wamsee, who had a barely legal, ethically questionable racket on the side. Wamsee had invested in all of the businesses on Main, including the tattoo shops. And as an investor, he insisted, for insurance purposes, that each place have security cameras with sound. Once a week, he collected all the footage and screened it.

  According to the author, Wamsee used this intel to apply pressure on everything from donating to the Benevolent Police Fund to writing an insane amount of tickets with dubious claims that people paid so as not to have sensitive info leaked. Of course, this was all speculation with no actual proof behind it, but it did give me ideas.

  "I think you need to read this when I'm done." I nudged my husband, who was reading in bed next to me. "You might have to share it with Carnack."

  Rex looked up from his book. "That good?"

  "I'm not sure." I turned the page. "The author might have made it all up. But there has to be some real truth in there somewhere."

  I continued on. Next, there was Stella, who was hooking up with half the men in town in the very shed I allegedly murdered Tyson in. While not explicitly stated, the author implied that she might be taking money for her favors, which would basically mean she was the town prostitute. Huh. I'd always assumed there was way more than that in Bladdersly.

  Mordecai Brown seemed a lot like the character Menachem Black, who did not hold pawned items like he was supposed to but sold them online for a high price, only paying the owner a pittance when challenged. He also trafficked in stolen merchandise.

  Had Tyson stolen the laptops from Best Bye for Mordecai? That would make sense. And then Mordecai could fence them online, and no one would necessarily be the wiser. I sent a text to Riley, accompanied by a screenshot of that page.