Skin and Blond

by V. J. Chambers

  I cocked my head to one side. This was a bit interesting. Why was he leaping to the conclusion that his sister was dead? Admittedly, it was strange to find a stripped bed in someone’s house and a girl missing, but jumping to murder wasn’t the first place that my brain would go.

  He kept talking. “My wife says I’m being melodramatic. She says I watch too much TV, and that she’s sure that there’s nothing wrong, that Madison’s fine. But I just… know that’s not true.” His lower lip trembled. “Something bad has happened to her. Something terrible. I went to the police, but they said there wasn’t much they could do in a situation like this. No evidence of foul play, they said. I started to get angry. I tried to tell them that I was sure that a crime had been committed. And that was when they told me about you. So, here I am. Can you find out what happened to my sister?”

  “I can certainly try,” I said. “I can look into everyone that’s close to her. I can track her credit cards and her cell phone—”

  “No, no, no,” he said. “You have to believe me when I tell you that she’s not out there spending money someplace. She didn’t run away. She’s been killed. Maybe only hurt or kidnapped, I guess, but I don’t think so. They don’t do things like that, really.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Men who capture women, of course. They don’t so much capture them unless they think they can get money, and Madison doesn’t have any money. Neither do I, really, for that matter.”

  “Mr. Webb,” I said, “you must realize that if something bad did happen to your sister, it’s more likely that someone who knew her did it. Someone close to her.”

  His eyes widened.

  “But let’s not jump to any conclusions,” I said. “Wouldn’t you like it if you found out that you were wrong? That your sister really had just skipped town and was on an impromptu vacation somewhere?”

  “She hasn’t.”

  “Well, let’s rule it out,” I said. “If you’re willing to hire me, the first thing I’ll do is cover all those bases, make sure I can’t locate her anywhere. I’ll also check out the house and see if it looks to me as if there was a struggle.”

  “There was a struggle.”

  “Then I’m sure I’ll see evidence of it.”

  He twisted his hands together in his lap. “Do you really think she could have gone out of town?”

  “It’s always a possibility, Mr. Webb.”

  “All right, I suppose let’s try to find her.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I really wished I had an assistant as I hashed out the money with Mr. Webb. It seemed so crass to me to be giving my own rates and explaining to him how I’d like to be paid. It always seemed more official coming from a third party.

  So, after he left, I went out to talk to the girl in the lobby, really hoping that she was going to pan out. I hadn’t had a lot of interest in the position, frankly. I’d been advertising for over two weeks, ever since my last assistant quit. She was great at her job, but the two of us really hadn’t gotten along. She liked the part-time hours, since she had two children at home, but she didn’t like me much, considering I was always showing up hungover and swearing a lot. My last assistant had been a born-again Christian, but she wasn’t one of the nice, hippie kinds who were all accepting and sweet and loving. She was one of the judgy kinds, who’s only into Jesus because she thinks that following rules makes her better than everyone else. Anyway, she got very offended because I said goddamn. We had a lot of discussions about it, and when I made it clear that I wasn’t going to stop saying it because of her, that I would say whatever I goddamned pleased whenever I goddamned wanted to, then she stormed out. I didn’t really miss her, but I did miss how good she’d been with organizing everything and dealing with clients.

  I sized up the girl in the lobby. Could she possibly handle this job?

  The girl stood up, smiling. “Hi there. I’m Brigit Johansen, and I’m really glad to meet you.” She had perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth. And dimples. She was… adorable.

  “Hi there.” Was she too adorable? I wished I knew.

  She offered me her hand.

  Damn it. I probably should have offered my hand first, shouldn’t I? That was the polite thing to do. I really sucked at polite shit. I took her hand and shook it. “I’m Ivy Stern.”

  “I know.” She was still grinning. “I mean, it’s your office and everything. I just think it’s the neatest thing ever that you own your own business and everything. You’re a real private investigator. It’s like something in a movie.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Really, really adorable.

  She had the decency to look embarrassed. “Sorry, I’m acting like an idiot.”

  “Why don’t you come back to the inner office?” I gestured.

  She nodded and then started forward.

  I followed and closed the door after both of us. I took a seat at my desk and flipped to a fresh sheet in my legal pad. “Do you have any experience?”

  “With being a detective?”

  “No, with being an administrative assistant.” That was a fancy word for secretary, and it was what people called it these days. My last assistant had told me this when she answered my ad for a secretary. I, of course, made the necessary adjustments.

  “Oh, well, I worked on campus in the history department. I did odd jobs for the professors. Ran off copies, scheduled appointments, that kind of thing.” She leaned forward. “Do you need another copy of my resume, because I have one right here?”

  I didn’t trust resumes. People had lots of time to make resumes look good. Conversation was spontaneous. I’d rely on her answers instead. So, I ignored the question. “On campus?”

  She nodded eagerly. “Uh huh. At Keene College, just down the road.”

  My office was in Renmawr, but I lived in Keene, which was about a twenty-minute drive away. There was a college there, and it was a much more subdued area. A nicer place to live than Renmawr. The city had a bad organized crime problem, lots of drugs. It was nasty here. Good place to work as a private investigator. Bad place to live.

  “Did you graduate from Keene?”

  “Yep,” she said. “You did too, right? I read that on your website.”

  It was true. I’d come to the area for school and never left. “And what did you study?”

  “Art,” she said, still beaming. “I do paintings. Portraits, actually. I’m good, but I guess I vastly overestimated how easy it would be to make a living doing fine art. Especially trying to pay back my student loans. So, getting a part-time job like this would be really perfect for me. And I think I’d be awesome at it. I’m organized, and I’m good on the phone, and the hours are perfect for me.”

  I narrowed my eyes. She’d just graduated from college. Of course she didn’t want to work before one in the afternoon. She really was bubbly, wasn’t she? I scribbled on my notepad. “Do you have any strict… religious beliefs?”

  Her eyes widened. “Um, are you allowed to ask me that?” Then she shrugged. “I mean, I don’t. I’m not really religious, but still, I don’t think you can discriminate on the basis of—”

  “When can you start? Can you start tomorrow?”

  Her jaw dropped. “Did I get the job?”

  I needed an assistant. No one else had answered the ad, and there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. I was going to give her a shot. If she didn’t work out, well, then I’d be back to square one. But if she did, my problems were solved. I had everything to gain and nothing to lose.

  * * *

  Linda Hopkins was the department secretary for homicide. She didn’t like me. “The lieutenant isn’t in the office right now,” she told me, tossing her curls.

  I peered around her. Homicide was contained in one big room, with most of the detectives working at desks set up back to back in rows. Lieutenant Miles Pike, head of the department, however, had his own office in the back of the room. The door was closed, and the blinds were drawn over the windows, so I cou
ldn’t see inside. I had no way of knowing if Linda was telling the truth. And I wouldn’t put it past her to lie about it.

  “Look,” I said. “He sent me a case. I’m just here to find out if he has any thoughts about it.”

  “I don’t see why he would ever want to speak to you.” She glared at me. She had the tendency to look at me as if my presence was about as appreciated as road kill.

  “Well, he sometimes sends cases my way,” I said. “So, obviously, he doesn’t hate me as much as you think he does.” I wanted to strangle Linda. I used to work here, in this very department. She was a lot more polite to me then. But that was back before the Internal Affairs investigation and my eventual dismissal for “conduct unbecoming an officer.” Basically the department’s way of saying that what women employed by the force did with their personal time wasn’t personal after all.

  “He should. After what you did to him.”

  I rolled my eyes. Pike had known it was going on, that was the thing. He and I had an understanding. Pike and I were good together in some ways, but in other ways, we were a disaster. Still, that didn’t mean there was some kind of grudge between us. Well, I think he felt a little bit humiliated. I guess I did too. That was why it was over, at least that was what I figured.

  She surveyed me, eyebrows raised.

  I shoved my hands into my pockets.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, you should go. He’s not here.”

  “Did he leave anything for me? A file? A message?”

  She made a face. “What’s the case?”

  I told her.

  She turned to her computer and typed on her keyboard. “That’s missing persons. We’re homicide.”

  “No, I know that, but a lot of times people report directly to homicide and that’s how the lieutenant hears about it, which is what Mr. Webb did, and that’s why I’m on the case in the first place.”

  “We don’t have files on missing persons cases up here.” Her voice had changed to the tone she might use to talk to a three-year-old. “You need to go to missing persons for that.”

  I really might strangle her. Really.

  But then the door to Pike’s office opened, and I saw Pike walking two detectives out.

  “I thought the lieutenant wasn’t here,” I said.

  Linda turned around. “Huh. He must have sneaked back in while I wasn’t watching.”

  Right.

  I stalked around her desk and started back towards his office.

  “Hey,” she said. “I have to call him to see if he wants to see you.”

  “He can see me already.” I locked eyes with him.

  He swept his gaze over me, head to toe. He didn’t smile. Pike wasn’t one for smiling. But something changed in his eyes. There was a unique softening to his expression, and he only ever did it for me.

  In spite of myself, my heart started to speed up and my palms got a little sweaty. He still had that effect on me.

  We gazed at each other as I made my way across the room, moving between the desks of the other detectives, my former co-workers. Miles Pike was one of those guys who’s truly handsome. He wasn’t cute or dreamy. He didn’t have a baby face with a pug nose and a dimpled chin. Instead, he had straightforward good looks. His face was nice to look at, and he looked mature. There was something about him that put a person at ease, but he also had the capability to be unsettling as well. One flick of his cool, grey eyes had taken down many a nervous perp, leaving them squealing like a pig.

  He held open the door to his office. “Stern.”

  “Pike.” I walked inside.

  He shut the door behind us.

  I turned to look at him, feeling nervous. I didn’t see him very often anymore. Even when I did see him, he often made me feel unbalanced, like a giddy girl at a junior high school dance with her ultimate crush. And he was right there. We were so close. If I lifted my hand, moved it over a few inches, I could touch him.

  I always wanted to touch him.

  And he didn’t much like being touched.

  He looked down at the ground.

  I backed up.

  He sidestepped further into the office, keeping distance between us.

  I was used to his hands-off behavior, but—even after all this time—it hurt a little bit.

  “I guess you’re here about the Webb case.” His back was to me as he leaned over his desk to sort through the file folders that haphazardly covered it.

  “I just met Webb this morning.”

  He barked out a laugh. “It’s two in the afternoon.”

  Right. I laughed a little too. “Well, it’s morning to me.”

  He retrieved a file from the desk and handed it over to me. “There’s not much in there. I didn’t have time to investigate, but I did have a couple uniforms take pictures of the scene before I had to send it over to missing persons.”

  I opened the folder. Two photos, both of the bedroom, where Webb had said there was a struggle. The room did look messy, but it wasn’t conclusive. Maybe she wasn’t a clean person. I wrinkled my nose and flipped to the next picture, which had a good shot of the stripped bed.

  “He said that the sheets were gone on the bed,” I said.

  “Yeah, that doesn’t prove anything. Maybe she was doing laundry.”

  “Are there sheets in the washer?”

  “She doesn’t have a washer,” he said. “Must use a laundromat.”

  I looked back at the picture. “The missing sheets are kind of weird.”

  “And that’s the only thing missing,” he said.

  “Oh, you’re not kidding,” I said, pointing at the photo. “Her cell phone’s still there.” It was sitting on the bedside table.

  “I knew you’d spot it.” Pike’s face splintered into a genuine grin. When he was grinning, he looked like Prince Charming. Classic good looks, like an old time movie star.

  “Who runs off without her cell phone?” I said.

  “Well, that’s why I thought there might be something there for you. I’m not saying there actually is foul play, but it’s interesting, anyway. I thought it might be up your alley.”

  I closed the folder, smiling back. “Definitely. Thanks.”

  We stared at each other for a little too long.

  “Uh…” He broke the gaze and turned back to his desk. “You doing okay?”

  “Fine,” I said quickly.

  We were quiet.

  “You doing okay?” I asked.

  He looked up, smiling again, but not his dazzling-Prince-Charming smile. Instead, his tight-lipped-professional smile. “Great.”

  “Great,” I said.

  We watched each other for several more seconds. Then he cleared his throat and moved around his desk. He sat down behind it and began going through the mess of file folders and papers.

  I turned and left.

  * * *

  The cell phone wasn’t the only thing that Madison Webb had left behind. She hadn’t taken her car, her purse, or her laptop. That is, unless she had more than one of any of those things and had left behind her spare.

  But her purse, which was by the door as if she’d hung it up upon entering, still contained everything a person might need. She’d left behind her wallet and her driver’s license. There was cash inside. Credit cards, too.

  I came over directly after talking to Pike. Andrew Webb had given me the key so that I could investigate the scene myself. Madison’s place was just off the interstate at the edge of Renmawr. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the first floor. The door hadn’t even been locked, so it was easy to get inside.

  I skulked around the apartment, getting a feel for the place.

  I still felt that the bedroom, where Andrew claimed there were signs of a struggle, was inconclusive. The rest of Madison’s apartment was fairly sloppy. She had left dirty plates out in the living room on her coffee table, which was also covered in various other junk. Without a doubt, the sink was
full of dirty dishes too. She wasn’t exactly obsessed with cleanliness. I thought that the room might just be messy, the way she’d left it.

  Of course, there was a bookshelf that had been knocked over, spilling its contents all over the carpet. Most people didn’t just knock over their bookshelves.

  However, if Madison Webb had done it—say by accident—I didn’t think she would have rushed to put everything back to order.

  That didn’t mean that I wasn’t suspicious. So far, when I tried to put together a scenario that involved stripping her bed of sheets, leaving everything behind, and then going on the run, I couldn’t make it stick. But when it came down to it, there was no real evidence of foul play. I could see why homicide wasn’t rushing to take the case. There was no body. There wasn’t even any blood. It was weird, but it didn’t scream crime. At least not yet.

  I headed back to the office afterward, and I went ahead and ran a credit report on Madison Webb. I had her credit cards in her purse, of course, so I didn’t think it was likely that I’d actually find any numbers that I didn’t already know she wasn’t using.

  However, I was in luck. I did find one lone credit card number that wasn’t in the purse. Of course, it hadn’t been used in over a year, so it was likely she just didn’t use it anymore.

  Still, I set up traces on her bank account and on all three of the credit card numbers, reasoning that she might have the numbers memorized or saved in online applications and be able to use them that way. Of course, I wasn’t sure how she’d access all those online applications without either her laptop or her cell phone, but it was best to cover my bases.

  By that time, it was coming up on early evening. I usually stayed in the office until about six or seven every day. Afterward, I’d leave the office, but keep working if I needed to, doing surveillance or investigation until nine or ten at night. That was a typical day for me.

  I was about to close up and go try to find some dinner somewhere when the door to my office opened. A man with dark hair in a blazer and jeans came inside. I didn’t have an assistant until tomorrow, so I had to go out and meet him.