Death By High Heels (The Kim Murphy PI Series Book 1)

by Violet Ingram

  Finished with my breakfast, I walked into the bathroom and groaned. Smeared lipstick, black smudges under bloodshot eyes, and hair sticking out in half a dozen directions was the scary sight in the mirror. I was impressed Grant hadn’t run away screaming when he saw me. Though, considering the icky, disgusting things he saw on the job, my face wasn’t so bad in comparison.

  I couldn’t believe Grant had seen me like this. Just great. I stripped and stepped into the shower. I considered stuffing my hands into sandwich bags again but decided against it. I was willing to risk infection rather than fight to rinse the conditioner out of my hair. All too soon the water turned cool. Feeling human again, I toweled off and got dressed. To compensate for my earlier appearance I spent extra time applying my makeup. This meant I actually put on more than just lipstick and mascara.

  Over my favorite Victoria’s Secret bra and matching panties, I pulled on a purple v-neck t-shirt and skinny jeans. With socks and shoes on I was ready to go. I grabbed my purse and headed out the door.

  Two cups of coffee had been a good start but I was starving and needed something more. Desperate, I pulled into the McDonald’s drive-thru and ordered an Egg McMuffin, a hash brown, and a large orange juice. At my office I sat at my desk and gobbled down my breakfast. I tossed the empty wrappers into the trash and checked the machine for messages.

  The first was from Lindsay, left shortly after her morning visit. The second was from Brandon reminding me of our one o’clock appointment. Like I could forget. Okay, I could have, but I hadn’t.

  The third was from a woman who hired me to see if her loving husband was really a lying, cheating bastard. Evidently her hubby had called to say he was hanging out with a couple of his buddies after work. I would need to be at his office by five thirty in time to follow him.

  Since following suspected cheaters around was how I made most of my income, it paid to always have a camera at the ready. A few times I had even hired someone to come on to the suspected cheater. This method had proven successful but cut into my profits. It didn’t appear the bait method would be necessary for this one.

  I turned on the computer and deleted a bunch of junk emails offering to either enlarge or harden my nonexistent penis. The last one was from someone claiming to be from the FBI wanting to warn me there was a million dollars waiting for me in an account in Belgium but I needed to hurry before the account was closed. Yeah, right.

  I began searching the websites of the local news stations. It seemed my luck was holding. So far only the one reporter had made a connection between Brian, Lindsay, and me. Unfortunately, I knew it was only a matter of time before the others made the connection and began hassling me, especially now after Adam’s murder.

  Several months ago, when I’d been involved in a shooting, I was front page news for weeks. The press had seemed to take immense pleasure in pointing out I was the police chief’s daughter. Some business savvy people suggested I should consider it as free advertising for my agency. The reality was it had been a giant pain. I was not a fan of hunting, but if the government had open season on reporters, I would have seriously considered getting a hunting license.

  The incentives to wrap this case up were increasing daily. The problem was I didn’t know what my next step should be. Though the causes of death were different in both cases, odds were they were connected. It was unusual for a killer to use more than one method to kill his or her victims but not completely out of the realm of possibilities.

  Lindsay had hired me to solve one murder and now there had been another. I wondered if she’d be willing to pay extra for the new case. Probably not. Like I did with Brian, I went online and found out whatever I could about Adam Mullen. According to his grandmother’s obituary, Adam was raised by a single mother until she died when he was thirteen. From then on he lived with his grandmother in the duplex he still lived in today. Adam’s grandmother, Jocelyn Mullen, died last year after a long battle with breast cancer. I wondered if her illness was why he had turned the empty side of the duplex into a marijuana grow facility. Doubtful. From what Grant had said, there were enough plants in there to give a third of the town a buzz.

  Besides three arrests for drugs—big surprise—Adam had a lead foot, five speeding tickets in the past year. His last arrest had been with Brian, David, and Kevin. One would assume he’d been clean since then unless they’d had the misfortune, as I had, to spend time in his home shortly after he’d lit up.

  Jeez, this kid had had a tough time. He was only six years younger but it seemed like a much bigger age gap separated us. Since I was already snooping, or rather searching, court records, I began looking into his friends’ records and Angie’s as well.

  Though there were a few little surprises, nothing stood out that shouted, Look at me. I’m going to kill a bunch of people. David’s arrests included petty theft, drug possession, assault during a bar fight, and drunk driving. His license was under suspension for the drunk driving offense.

  Angie had two arrests for marijuana possession. The most recent was two years old. She also had received two speeding tickets three months apart last year. Other than that she was clean.

  Kevin seemed to have gotten his life turned around. He only had the one arrest and zero traffic tickets. Good for him. Heck, even I couldn’t say that. I was a member of the lead foot society.

  From the bits of information I had learned about the people in Brian’s and Adam’s lives, I wasn’t any closer to finding who killed them. I didn’t even have a possible motive for their deaths.

  We were fast approaching the forty-eight hour mark on Brian’s murder and no suspects in sight. Personally, I wouldn’t mind if David turned out to be the killer. I had no real reason to believe he had anything to do with his friends’ murders. I just didn’t like the guy. It was probably a good thing I didn’t have the power to arrest people I didn’t like. The jails were overcrowded as it was.

  Lost in thought, I jumped when the phone rang. “Murphy Detective Agency.”

  “Hello, sweetie. How are you doing today?”

  “Fine.”

  “Kimberly, you know you can’t lie to your mother.”

  I laughed. She was right. Even on the phone I couldn’t hide things from her. The ability to lie was an important part of a private investigator’s job. As an adult I had managed to become quite good at it. I’d spent a great amount of my teen years in my room thanks to my inability to lie successfully to my parents. That had totally sucked.

  “You don’t sound fine, sweetie.”

  “Really, I’m fine. This case is just driving me nuts. I’m no closer to solving it than when I started. If it’s possible, I’ve actually gone backward instead of forward.”

  “From what I overheard of your father’s conversation, that nice, young Detective Tompkins isn’t having much luck either.”

  My initial reaction was joy to know Grant was also struggling, but there was also a part of me that wished he’d wrapped up both cases and I could get Lindsay out of my hair. Unlike unwanted strands of gray, there wasn’t a bottle to wash her out. Not that at my age I’d know anything about that, yet, but if there was such a wonderful product, I’d buy it whatever the cost.

  “Detective Tompkins seemed convinced the cases were connected and he was looking into the friends and families of those poor young men,” she said, jarring me from my thoughts.

  The knowledge Grant and I were on the same path to finding the killer or killers held little comfort. “If the same person killed them both, he used two different murder weapons.”

  “I just don’t understand why that first young man just sat there and let someone stab him. That is rather scary.”

  I’d been wondering about that myself. According to the autopsy, Brian’s body showed no signs of defensive wounds. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’m sure Grant will have this all wrapped up soon. He’s a good cop.”

  “Well, of course he is, dear, or your father wouldn’t have hired him.”

  My mother’
s faith in her family, even when we didn’t deserve it, was one of her finest qualities. After assuring her we’d talk soon, I hung up the phone.

  I couldn’t let go of the thought Brian had probably known and even trusted his killer. It kind of made me want to reevaluate the people in my life. Not that I thought any of my loved ones would come after me with a sharp object. They’d be much more likely to torture me with embarrassing stories from my childhood. Like the time my brothers convinced me there were piranhas in the neighbor’s pond just before they tossed me in. My screams could be heard for miles, as could the sounds of my brothers’ laughter.

  Things weren’t looking good for Lindsay, but they weren’t looking so great for any of Brian’s friends either. What were the odds that, with the exception of Lindsay, all the suspects had been home alone? Without witnesses to corroborate their stories, any one of them could have killed Brian.

  What was Brian doing in Lindsay’s apartment? Who called 911? Presumably, it was the killer, but why? Why was Lindsay’s apartment ransacked after the police seal? It would have been too late to worry about cleaning up evidence.

  I had plenty of questions but none of the answers I needed. It was like being back in school at exam time. Only this time if I didn’t come up with the answers, an innocent woman, namely me, could go to jail, and so could Lindsay.

  I didn’t gamble. I worked too hard to just give away my money, but I’d bet serious cash that this hadn’t been a robbery gone bad. Nothing had been stolen from Lindsay’s apartment. What kind of robbers broke in and forgot to take anything?

  Just great, another question.

  The killer was pretty gutsy. He or she broke into an apartment in the middle of the afternoon, killed a guy, and then broke in again after the cops were done.

  As hard as it was to believe this kind of violence happened in my hometown, it was even harder to wrap my brain around the fact it happened in my quiet little apartment complex. I moved in three weeks after walking in on my now ex-husband giving our slutty neighbor a breast exam with his tongue. If he had claimed he had been using his penis to give her a pap smear, I swore I would have shot them both.

  After cussing them out and tossing a few breakables in their general direction, I fled to my parents’ home where I was fussed over and fed the best Italian food outside of Palermo.

  It took exactly twelve days of my parents’ smothering, er, comforting, and a nightmare of me in my forties and still living with my parents before I combed through the want ads searching for an apartment I could afford on my own. Two movers over six feet tall arrived on the big day and made quick work of getting my stuff safely packed and loaded onto their truck. They were hard workers and cool enough to ignore when Michael accidently dropped my loving husband’s beloved flat screen TV.

  Until Lindsay moved in less than a month ago, I was the newest resident in the building. The other residents had been there for ten years or more. Ninety-two-year-old Irene Kanisky was the former resident of Lindsay’s apartment. Irene had been independent until the last couple of months. That was when she’d had to have a home care nurse. She died on a Monday morning and her son emptied her things out by Wednesday evening. Two weeks later, Lindsay moved in.

  All this thinking was giving me a headache. I was never far from a bottle of Tylenol. Thanks to Ohio weather, sinus headaches were one of the constants in my life. I took two with the last of the coffee in my mug. I laid my head down on my desk and waited for the Tylenol to kick in. When it did I picked up the phone and called the real cause of my headache. I needed to talk to Lindsay in person. She agreed to meet me at her hotel in twenty minutes.

  I gathered up the mug shots of Brian and his friends. Just because Grant and I hadn’t found a connection between Lindsay and Brian didn’t mean there wasn’t one. I was determined to find out what the connection was. Before leaving I took a Hershey’s Bar from my top desk drawer and tossed it into my purse. Conversations with Lindsay were draining.

  Stepping outside, the heat smacked me in the face like a two-by-four. I put on a pair of sunglasses before getting into my car. Not wanting all the work I had done on my hair going out the open windows, I flipped on the air conditioner. I seriously could have done without the blast of hot air, though it was probably exactly what I was going to get during my conversation with Lindsay.

  The Lakeview Inn was next door to the Lakeview Mall. Convenient, I guessed, if you shopped so much you couldn’t make it home. After parking in the half-empty lot, I walked inside the lobby and past the front desk. An older gentleman with gray hair smiled and nodded his head. Having been raised by an Irish father and Italian mother, it had been drilled into me about respecting our elders. I smiled and waved at the old guy, then pressed the button for the elevator.

  When I was a kid my family took a vacation to Canada. The hotel we stayed in had these cool glass elevators on the outside of the building. One evening, my siblings and I spent an hour going up to the twentieth floor, where a restaurant was located, and all the way back down to the lobby. Even better, the hotel had been built on top of a hill overseeing the small town. We were too young to appreciate the amazing view of the city lit up at night. We were, however, just the right ages to pretend we were on a grand adventure. Though I was sure the guests who had the misfortune to join us on one of our trips probably hadn’t seen it quite the same way, especially on our last trip when Justin and Jason pressed the buttons for every floor.

  The elevator doors opened and I hesitated. Sucking in a breath, I stepped inside and pressed the button for the fourth floor. It was my bad luck that elevators no longer invoked the feelings of excitement and adventure. Now when stepping inside I had the urge to jump back out and run away as fast as I could. For a brief moment I had considered taking the stairs but it just didn’t seem worth the effort. I tried to think of it as a way to make up for my skipping my morning workout but decided it was okay to skip one day. I’d work out an extra hour tomorrow, I lied to myself.

  Relieved when the doors opened, I rushed out, almost knocking into a young couple. I mumbled an apology before making my way down the hall. Before I could come to my senses and leave, I pounded on the door. Lindsay opened the door, a fake smile firmly in place, and invited me inside. She was still wearing the same clothes she had been wearing during her early morning visit. The only difference was she had removed her two-inch Jimmy Choo Faith Lace Peep Toe Pumps. The only reason I knew what they were was my best friend had the same exact pair. They had set Melissa back nine hundred bucks. With that amount of money, I could pay the rent on my apartment for two months and have enough left over for a very nice dinner for me and a guest of my choice. Okay, dinner for me anyway.

  We sat in matching hunter green side chairs. I noticed a man’s tie on the floor beneath her chair. Not big on small talk, Lindsay wanted to know what I had learned since this morning. Instead of answering her question I handed her the mug shots and asked if she recognized any of them.

  “What kind of person do you think I am that I would associate with these kinds of people?”

  “Just look at the pictures,” I snapped.

  “Fine.”

  As she flipped through the pictures, I watched her face for any sign of recognition.

  “Sorry, I don’t know any of them. Who are they and what do they have to do with me?”

  “This one,” I said, picking up the picture of Brian, “is the young guy who ended up dead in your apartment.”

  Lindsay looked down at her lap and brushed at imaginary lint before talking. “Oh, yes, of course. I didn’t recognize him.”

  Truth was, she probably didn’t. Lindsay seemed to have an infuriating habit of dismissing anyone or anything not important to her. Not in the mood to lecture her, I picked up the rest of the pictures. “This one is…was Adam Mullen. He was a friend of Brian’s. The police found him dead last night,” I said, not bothering to mention I was suspect number one in his murder.

  “Good.”

  �
�Why is it good?” I asked

  “Well, obviously these men’s deaths are related, and since I don’t know either of them the police will have to clear my name. This ordeal has been absolutely trying on me. I want to get my life back.”

  I was sure Brian and Adam, wherever they were, would like theirs back also. “Detective Tompkins and I are both doing everything we can.”

  “Oh, well, if he has any more questions, I’ll be sure to be available.”

  I’d bet. “I’m sure he knows your number. So, are you sure you don’t recognize these other two?”

  “Kim, don’t you think I’d have told you if I’d seen them before?”

  At this point there wasn’t much I was sure of. “Look, I don’t believe you had anything to do with the murders, but somehow you are involved in all of this.”

  “I did not hire you so you could turn around and blame this on me. You have no idea how stressful this whole ordeal has been for me.”

  It would be pointless to tell her I knew exactly how she felt since I myself had been a murder suspect a time or two. Considering my lovely early morning chat with Grant, it was more than likely I was about to live through that experience again.

  Since Lindsay didn’t seem the type to be interested in anyone’s problems but her own, I turned the conversation back around to a possible connection. “Your apartment was broken into and searched. Nothing was stolen, but they left a dead guy.”

  “I already know all this.”

  “Just be quiet. I’m trying to work something out.”

  “Fine.”

  “Okay, so, when Brian and his friends were arrested, all four used the same defense attorney, Evan Hardin.”

  How had Brian and group been able to afford the services of the Hardin Law Firm? It wasn’t the most prestigious firm but it sure as heck wasn’t the public defender’s office. There it was, the thing that had been bugging me. “The Hardin Law Firm is in the same office building as your office.”