Marriage Vow Murder

by Leslie Langtry

  Was it Harvey Oak? Prescott Winters III? Vy Todd? Had someone from Rex's past decided to take their revenge?

  Or was it someone who was out to get me? If so, that was going to be a very long list. And I knew how to winnow it down. I texted Riley and told him to be at his office early in the morning.

  We had a list of our own to investigate.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  As I walked through the door in the morning, I noticed that my former handler had been busy. New furniture filled the room of his strip mall office. Two desks sat at opposite ends of the room, which seemed optimistic on his part since I'd turned down his offer of a job.

  In the middle of the room were two overstuffed leather love seats, facing each other. On the ends were two leather wingback chairs. In the middle was a long, rectangular coffee table. Riley had obviously been shopping at Midland Furniture, the town's only furniture store. It was currently under new management after a rather disastrous turn of events back in October.

  "Give me a minute." Riley held one finger up without taking his eyes off his computer monitor.

  I nodded and sat on the sofa. That was when I noticed the gorgeous green plants and beautiful artwork on the walls. He'd really gone to a lot of trouble.

  And then it hit me. Where did he live? He'd been here, setting up his private investigation business for a few months now. He couldn't be staying at the Radisson, could he? No, Mom and Dad would've said if they'd seen him there. But if he had a house, why didn't I know that?

  Maybe because I didn't want to know. Riley had the bad habit of popping in and out of my life, sometimes to help me, and sometimes to drive me crazy. I'd kept him at arm's length, so it seemed legit that I'd made no effort to find out where he was staying.

  I shouldn't be that way. We had a past. And we'd worked very well together. Sure, we'd had a brief romantic fling, but we'd been partners for years. And Kelly (who had Riley's number on speed dial) had told me that he was happy for me and Rex. I was being a selfish friend for not showing more interest in his life.

  "Okay." Riley sat on the opposite couch and set a couple of file folders on the coffee table.

  "Before we start," I said. "Where do you live?"

  Riley arched his right eyebrow. "You don't know?"

  I didn't have time for this. "No. I just wondered. I've been a little distracted this past year. Where are you staying?"

  He wanted to tease me—I could see it in his eyes. But in the end, he didn't.

  "I have a nice house at the opposite end of town from you. It's small, more like a bungalow. It'll make an amazing bachelor pad." He grinned, white teeth gleaming against impossibly bronze skin.

  "Okay, I don't care anymore," I said tiredly. "What have you got?"

  Riley laughed. "I've talked to a couple of contacts, and there's a lot going on since I retired."

  "Going on? What does that mean?" I was getting a little irritated with his usual theatrics.

  He leaned back against the sofa. "There have been some developments in a few cases you've worked on. Bad developments."

  I shrugged. "That's just the life of a spy. What's happened?"

  For a moment I thought he wasn't going to tell me. Surely he knew me better than that. I once threw him through a plate glass window for teasing me. Okay, it was on the first floor, it was safety glass, and he'd landed in some nice, soft bushes, but still…

  "I'll cut right to the chase." He opened the file, rotating it toward me, and the photos of two women made me jump.

  No!

  "Lana was traded to Russia in a spy swap a month ago," he started. "And Leiko Ito has escaped from a maximum security prison."

  "You're joking," I said weakly as I picked up the two photos.

  Lana, or Svetlana Babikova, had been a Russian agent I'd turned years ago. After I'd made my rather involuntary exit from the CIA, the agency hustled her out of Ukraine and brought her here for safekeeping.

  In fact, Riley had brought the buxom bimbo to my house, thinking it was the safest place for her to hide out. But he'd been wrong. It hadn't been the safest place for anyone after her arrival. Needless to say, she was serving time in prison. Or so I'd thought.

  Leiko Ito was the daughter of Midori—a ruthless Yakuza lady boss who, on more than one occasion, had tried to kill me. Naturally, the evil mob boss turned up dead in my house. And Leiko came after me and Riley for revenge. She had also been sent to a hardcore prison. A prison she'd managed to escape from. The Yakuza have a long reach.

  "They must've skipped out of the country," I insisted. "Leiko is back in Tokyo, and Lana is probably rotting in a Siberian jail."

  Riley shrugged. "We don't know. Both of them have disappeared. Gone underground. There's zero chatter about them anywhere. It's like they vanished into thin air."

  "That's possible," I said slowly, staring at Lana's huge blue eyes and impossibly glossy blonde hair. "The Russians could've killed her for turning on them and hiding out here. Do we know what she thought of the exchange?"

  He pulled a sheet from the file and read it. "According to her cell mate, Lana was thrilled about the exchange."

  I frowned. "That doesn't make any sense." Nothing did.

  "And Leiko? How did she break out?"

  "The Yakuza got to the guards. Threatened three of them, which got them to cooperate. In fact, the reason we still don't know how she escaped is because these three men are too terrified to talk."

  I slumped against the back of the couch and closed my eyes. It just wasn't fair. Here I was, ready to get married and start a new life, and now people I'd helped lock up were on the loose.

  "My spy skills are getting too rusty to handle this," I groaned.

  I wasn't fit for duty. Sure, I could still break in to places, and my fighting form wasn't that bad, but I'd been out of the game for three years. That's like four decades when you consider the constant changes in technology.

  "It might not be them," Riley said. "Like you said, Lana is probably languishing in a Russian prison, and Leiko went back to Tokyo to get a grip on her vast Japanese enterprise." He picked up another sheet. "It looks like her businesses are failing at a rapid pace. She'd need to get home and straighten things out."

  I buried my face in my hands. "This can not be happening."

  Ex-cons, I was fairly certain, I could handle. A chop shop thief, a one-time murderer, and a drug smuggler? No problem. But two lethally trained harpies with a thirst for vengeance and some killer skills? I wasn't so sure.

  After a moment, I sat up and took a deep breath. There was no time to panic.

  "We need to know if there's anyone new in town—someone who seems out of place."

  Riley agreed. "I'll check with the Radisson and the two other hotels in the area. Maybe my Fed buddies can scout the hotels in Des Moines."

  I shook my head. "If they're in the city, they're at a safe house. Here, they'd be in a hotel."

  "You say that like you think they are working together," Riley said.

  "I hope that's not true. But we have to be prepared."

  Riley studied the files, "If Leiko is here, she'd have a couple of her lieutenants with her. Shouldn't be too hard to find a small Japanese woman flanked by two or three giant Japanese men."

  "And if it's Lana?" I asked.

  He blew out a sharp breath and leaned back. "We might be screwed. She lived here. She knows where you live, where Kelly lives, and who's in your troop. One woman is much harder to track than three or four Yakuza."

  Riley was right. Lana knew a lot about me.

  "I'll move the animals to Rex's house and set up some major security measures." I thought for a moment. I'd need a pet sitter. Maybe Kelly knew someone.

  "I'll get back to you once I've asked at the hotels." Riley closed the file with a snap. "Where will you be staying?"

  "In my house. I know it better and have all my weaponry there." I ran through a mental inventory in my head. Guns, check. Knives, check. Flamethrower made from an Altoids tin, che
ck.

  He stood up and frowned. "I don't think that's a good idea."

  I shrugged. "We have clues coming in. To me. I need to be where I can find them."

  It was time to brief him. I told Riley about the clues, the three ex-convicts who might be suspects, Linda, and Juliette Dowd's break-in at Rex's house. He listened patiently and waited to speak until I was done.

  "Rex was the one who arrested Vy Todd?" Riley gaped. "Wow. That was a huge deal."

  "How did you know about her?" I asked.

  Riley shrugged, "She's actually my second cousin."

  "What?" I screamed. "How did I not know that? You were in Mongolia with me when we found out! You didn't say anything about it then!"

  "I guess I didn't think it mattered. I'd only met her once or twice at family reunions. It's not like I knew her."

  "You're related to her!" I shrieked. "We actually talked about this case when we were in that yurt!"

  He grinned. "That's not all we did in that yurt."

  I threw the only thing I had on hand, a pillow, at his head. He ducked.

  "Okay," he protested. "I should've told you."

  "You knew I was from Iowa!" I wasn't letting this go.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  Not sorry enough. "You have some lovely floor-to-ceiling windows here," I mused.

  Riley blanched, but only for a second. "I'll see if anyone in the family has seen her since she moved to Des Moines. It's a long shot, but maybe I can find something there."

  "What am I supposed to do? You're doing all the legwork!" I whined. "I don't want to sit home and wait for Lana or Leiko to attack."

  "I'd love to tell you that they're probably not involved, but…" His voice trailed off.

  I narrowed my eyes. "But what?"

  "Broke into your van without leaving a trace?" Riley whistled. "That's pretty sophisticated for your average criminal. Because I suspect you have some special security measures, like I do. And if you can't figure out how they got in…"

  I stood, grabbed his arm, and dragged him out to the van. Unlocking the vehicle, I reached in and pulled out two flashlights, handing one to Riley. This was one thing I could do right now. He nodded and took the driver's side, while I took the passenger side.

  We'd had training in looking for car bombs and that sort of thing. In the back of my mind, I wondered if we were chasing phantoms. Were we too eager to believe this had something to do with my past? It still could be someone local. My head was spinning with the possibilities, and I was angry that I wasn't any closer to solving this.

  I needed something to do, and it didn't matter if it was busy work. Either this was a spy from my past or someone from my present. We might as well search the van. I started with the front passenger door, going over the mechanics with the flashlight. I'd installed a small alarm that would go off if the door was opened with something other than the factory-issued key. Tiny wires ran from the edge of the doorframe to the mechanism. They were intact. If someone had jimmied open the door, the wires would've been cut and the alarm would've sounded.

  Next, I focused on the window. Turning the key in the ignition, I hit the controls that made the window move up and down. I'd installed a sort of gummy substance, whose chemical compound is classified, to make the windows stick just a bit before working. If the windows operated smoothly, the gummy substance was gone, and I'd know that someone came in that way. Nope. The windows stuck a bit. And I tried all four.

  Inside the van, I ran the flashlight over every bit of leather on the door. There was a chance that someone got past my security and tore open the upholstery. The seams were all intact, and there were no holes.

  I repeated this procedure on the other door, with the same results. Riley reported the same. We popped the hood on the car and together went over every single centimeter of the engine and other mechanics. This was where I was less qualified, but Riley assured me that nothing was out of place.

  The snow on the ground was frozen hard, but that didn't stop us from lying down and studying the undercarriage. I was pretty sure they couldn't get into the van this way, but you have to check everything, no matter how tedious. Skipping steps makes for dead spies.

  "The trunk?" Riley asked over the top of the van when we stood back up.

  I nodded. This was a definite possibility because my security measures were lacking there. I remembered the day I worked in the garage to set things up. At one point, I was hungry and wandered into the house for some Pizza Rolls. I was pretty sure from there I got dessert, some wine, and never made it back out to the garage.

  Under the gloomy, gray sky, Riley and I went over the tailgate.

  "The thing is," I mumbled. "Going through the back of the van was a risk. Once inside, you'd have to climb over seats and reach over the headrest to place the clue."

  Riley nodded. "It would definitely take more time. Probably would've added to the intruder's time to get in and out."

  "I was inside the house for a while." I sighed. "How much time he took might not have mattered."

  Nonetheless, we continued going over every inch of the back door. And we came up with nothing.

  "Come on," Riley said. "I can make some hot tea."

  Once we started warming up, Riley made a couple of calls to his family. I tuned him out. He'd brief me if he found something. I wondered if Linda was working on the puzzle. It was almost eleven, and I'd bet she was.

  My stomach rumbled.

  "Well," Riley joined me. "I've called a few relatives. No one has been in contact with Vy since she went to prison."

  "Do you believe them?"

  Riley frowned. "I do. None of them are in the espionage business. But I'll follow up. They don't live in Iowa, so if she's in Des Moines, it would make sense she'd go underground."

  My stomach roared.

  I got up and grabbed my coat. "Tell you what. It's time for lunch, and I hear the Radisson has a mean stuffed pork chop. Let's go. After, you can investigate and I'll run by Linda's to see how far she is on the clue. Deal?"

  "Deal."

  * * *

  I texted Mom before I left Riley's, inviting them to lunch. It would be bad manners not to. Riley met me there five minutes later and held the door open for me as we walked in.

  The Flying Pig, the restaurant in the hotel, was part of a chain throughout the state. I'd never eaten at this one, but I knew of their reputation for an authentic, stuffed Iowa chop. The name also appealed to me. Although, so did the irony that if pigs could fly, this place wouldn't be able to make a mean pork chop.

  Mom and Dad waved us over to a table, and we joined them. The décor was simple, with barn doors, wood walls, and a few plaster pigs with wings suspended from the ceiling. But the scent of fried, grilled, and smoked meat turned me into a drooling, monosyllabic carnivore. The waitress took our orders then dropped off a bowl of steaming homemade rolls and a cup of honey butter. I dug in.

  "So, Riley." My dad buttered a roll, but I was on my second already. "How's the new business?"

  Mom put her hand on my arm, a gesture she has always used on me when she didn't want me to fill up on bread and save room for dinner. Here, she was probably making sure I'd fit into my wedding dress when the wedding did take place. I finished the second roll and set my knife down on my plate.

  "It's coming along, Senator." Riley hadn't touched his bread. He was averse to carbs or anything unhealthy. "It takes time, but since I'm technically retired, I'm not in a rush."

  "This is your first case then?" Mom asked. She was just now buttering a roll. It would be her only one.

  He grinned. "I guess so."

  "It's pro bono," I said quickly. There was no way that Riley was getting one penny from me.

  "Okay." Riley laughed. "But I get bragging rights."

  Bragging rights. Rex was missing, and Riley wanted bragging rights when we found him. Fine. He could have that. After all, I'd get Rex. That was the big prize.

  Mom sensed what I was thinking. "I postpone
d the wedding with the church, caterer, and reception. And I cancelled the honeymoon reservations. This is just a setback, that's all." She smiled and squeezed my hand.

  "And I'm taking vacation time," Dad said, squeezing my other hand.

  Riley rubbed my foot with his, possibly because he felt left out. I kicked him. Hard.

  "Riley's not the only one helping," I said as I went ahead and buttered a third roll. "Do you guys remember my fourth-grade teacher? Linda?"

  Dad nodded. "I'd heard she retired. The teachers lost a real champion when she left."

  "What about her?" Mom asked as the waitress set down our drinks.

  I explained about the puzzle I'd found. "And she's kind of a puzzle master. She's working on it right now."

  "Who are the suspects?" Dad asked.

  Riley explained about the three criminals that Rex had put away. He forgot to mention that he was related to Vy Todd.

  "Vy Todd? Really? Good Lord!" Dad started.

  "We know Prescott Winters II," Mom offered.

  Riley gaped, "You know the man who killed his wife?"

  She shook her head. "No, his father. He was a major donor to your dad's campaign until that strange heart attack."

  Dad nodded. "His son was a bad sort. When his mother died a month later, also from a heart attack, he inherited and cut the ties to all of his parents' legacy charities. A couple of the nonprofits folded under the strain of their budgets. It was too bad."

  "His parents would've been horrified," Mom added. "They were very generous people. It would've broken their hearts."

  I leaned forward. "They all died of heart attacks? Sounds suspicious."

  "One investigation at a time." Mom patted my hand.

  "And Prescott III's wife? How did she die?" I had to ask.

  "Her parents were even wealthier than his. Only child and orphaned. Fell down a flight of stairs," Dad said. "The detective at the time noticed that there was way too much blood at the bottom of the stairs for it to be a simple accident."

  "That was Rex," I explained. "Rex was the detective for that case too."