Another Day, Another Dali

by Sandra Orchard

  While my food was being nuked, I changed into jeans and my favorite Wash U sweatshirt and debated what to do with the couple of hours I had before Nate arrived. Paint? I wasn’t really in the mood. Laundry? I still had two clean white blouses. Research the case more?

  I clicked on the computer.

  The microwave beeped. I grabbed a fork and brought my dinner to my desk. Harold had already commandeered my chair and was swatting at the mouse, his eyes fixed on the screen.

  “You want to watch more cat videos, do you?”

  I clicked onto his favorite site and found a video of a cat sneaking up on a dog and pouncing on it. Harold was mesmerized. No doubt wishing he could have such a fun playmate to terrorize.

  Pounding erupted on my door.

  “Hold your horses,” I called out, then checked the peephole because it wasn’t like Nate to hammer my door, and he wasn’t due for half an hour.

  Matt Speers stood in the hall, looking haggard, his two-year-old son on his hip.

  I yanked open the door. “What’s wrong?”

  “Good, you’re home.” Matt shoved a diaper bag at my chest. “I need you to take care of Jed until my mother-in-law can get here to pick him up.”

  “What? Uh, Matt, someone tried to make a bus sandwich out of my car last night. You don’t want me anywhere near your child right now.”

  Matt’s face went pasty, but he shook his head. “It can’t be helped. I’ve got no one else close enough. I’ve got to get Tracey to the hospital. There’s something wrong, but she refuses to go in with Jed along. She doesn’t want him to be frightened. She almost died with the last—” His voice faltered.

  I scooped Jed into my arms. “Okay, go. Go.”

  “Thank you. And pray. Please.” He raced off without any further instructions.

  Jed looked at me as if he might burst into tears at any second, and my heart did a nervous flutter.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said, bouncing him in my arms. “We’ll have fun. Wait until you meet Harold.”

  Harold took one look at the little guy and darted under the couch.

  “Chicken,” I said. I shut the door behind us and glanced around my living room. I only had a few breakables I’d have to put up. Hopefully the new surroundings to explore would distract him from his parents’ panic.

  “Uh!” Jed pointed to the replica of my grandfather’s old Ford pickup I had sitting on the bookshelf.

  “You want to play with the truck?” I asked.

  He eagerly reached for it.

  “Okay.” I set him and the truck on the floor and then grabbed a box to collect everything potentially dangerous that looked too enticing to a twenty-month-old.

  Jed happily pushed his toy truck around my living room floor as Harold watched suspiciously from under the sofa and occasionally took a swat at the truck’s wheels when it got too close. I locked the box in my spare room and shut the other doors to be on the safe side, then checked out the diaper bag Matt had left. It contained all the paraphernalia I could possibly need—diapers, PJs, a well-loved teddy and blanket, and—“Ooh, animal crackers.”

  I peeked around the corner at Jed and snuck a sample. “Yum.” Taking a seat in the living room, I finished eating my dinner while watching Jed muscle his car around my coffee table. He was adorable, with curly blond hair and the cutest dimple in his left cheek when he smiled, which he seemed to do often. And it was one contagious smile. I could see why Mom was so eager for grandkids.

  I slipped into the kitchen, rinsed out my frozen dinner container for recycling, and poured myself a glass of juice.

  Crash!

  I dashed back to the living room. “Jed? Where are you?” My heavy coasters were scattered across the wood floor—the crash. “Jed?”

  “Uh.” The sound came from under my desk, where Jed had his little hands fisted around the dangling wires.

  “Oh no, no, no.” I grabbed the keyboard and mouse inches before they hit the floor.

  Thankfully, Jed didn’t cry the way my cousin’s daughter did when you told her no. He just toddled off to the sofa as I set the keyboard and mouse back in place, fished the dangling wires up to the top of the desk, and then wedged the chair into the opening so he wouldn’t be able to crawl under again.

  I spun toward him and clapped my hands. “Okay, what do you say we—oh no, Jed!”

  He was happily plucking items out of my purse.

  “Let’s put those back in,” I said in my best isn’t-this-a-fun-game voice.

  He fell for it and stuffed my comb and then my pack of gum back inside as I dug my keys out from behind the cushion.

  “What’s in your mouth?”

  He grinned up at me with that adorable dimple, his lips clamped tight.

  I held out my hand. “Let me see.”

  His lips pinched tighter.

  “Je-e-ed,” I said sternly.

  He scampered to the other end of the couch.

  I grabbed his foot. “I gotcha. Now let me see.” I forced my fingers into his mouth and pulled out what looked like—I gasped. “Where did you find this?”

  He pointed to the purse. “Uuuuh.”

  I grabbed my phone and called Tanner. “You’ll never guess what I just found in my purse. A GPS tracker.”

  “That explains how our Lexus driver tracked you down.”

  “Yeah, and now he knows I’m home.” My voice rose a tad hysterically. Checking it, I glanced back at Jed a second before he disappeared into the kitchen. “And I’m babysitting Matt’s little boy.”

  “I’ll come over and pick it up,” Tanner said, sounding as if he was already jogging out the door. “We can devise a trap to lure him into.”

  Crash!

  “I gotta go.” I thumbed End on the phone and dashed into the kitchen. “Ah, so you think my pot cupboard needs rearranging, do you?” I said sweetly, willing my racing heart down a couple hundred beats. “You’re probably right. You go right ahead.” I didn’t have anything breakable in my lower cupboards. “Oh.” Then again . . . I snatched my cleaning supplies out from under the sink and pushed them to the back of the counter. “There, now you should be okay.”

  He held up a pot with holes in the bottom. “Uh?” His little voice modulated up on his three-syllable version of the word, which I took to mean “What’s this?”

  “That’s a steamer.”

  He held up a circular pan that folded in half. “Uh?”

  “That’s to make omelets.”

  He pushed to his feet and toddled back to the living room, leaving the pots strewn across the kitchen floor.

  “Are you done?” I called after him. “We should clean these up before you play with something else.” I stacked them back in the cupboard. “I could read you a book. Would you like that?”

  Silence.

  I hurried back into the living room. “Jed?”

  The smell hit me two feet in. “Whoa, Jed. You little stinker.”

  He was back at his truck and grinned up at me. “Uh.”

  “Uh is right. We need to change you.” I fished through the diaper bag and found the wipes and a clean diaper. “C’mon, mister, we’ll do this in the bathroom where we can put on the ventilation fan.” If I’d had a clothespin, I might’ve even clipped it on my nose. How did mothers do this every day?

  But I had to chuckle when I saw what else was in the diaper. He’d pooped out a smiley face sticker! Then again, I sure hoped his parents didn’t find something of mine in there tomorrow.

  The instant I got his bum wiped, Jed twisted off the clean diaper I’d set under him.

  “Hey, hey, we’re not done yet.”

  He twisted the other way as I tried to figure out how to open the tape. “Uh!”

  Apparently uh was the only word he knew, but he said it with a dozen different inflections I couldn’t translate. “You’re a regular pettifogger, aren’t you?”

  He slipped out of my fingers and made for the hall.

  I slung the diaper on him on the run and had t
wo of the three snaps snapped on the diaper shirt by the time he hit the living room. “And I thought suspects were slippery!” I hurried back to the bathroom to bag up the foul-smelling diaper before it polluted the whole building and then slipped out to drop it directly down the garbage chute. As I stepped back inside, I glimpsed a dark shadow cross the window.

  I snatched up Jed and doused the light.

  “Waaah,” he wailed.

  “Shh, shh, it’s okay, baby,” I whispered, edging toward the hall door. No way could Tanner have gotten here this quickly. It had to be one of Dmitri’s guys monitoring the tracker.

  Pounding erupted at the kitchen’s exterior door.

  Jed abruptly stopped crying. “Uh?”

  I reached for the doorknob of the door that opened into the building’s central hallway. “C’mon, bud, let’s get you to safety.”

  “Serena?” The shout came from outside the kitchen door.

  Billy? I flipped on the outside lights, and my prowler knocked off his night-vision goggles. I yanked open the door. “Are you crazy? I could’ve shot you.” He was wearing black camo from head to toe and had a gun and a billy club slung on his hip and night-vision goggles dangling around his neck. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Zoe was worried about you. Suggested I keep an eye on the place. I heard crying and thought you were in trouble.”

  “That was Jed.” Who was now straining to get back to his exploring. I set him on the floor, and he went back to the pot cupboard. “You’re lucky I had Jed to worry about or I might’ve shot first and asked questions later.” Billy was ex-military and apparently had become his family’s own personal peacekeeper.

  “Should he be in there?” Billy looked seriously concerned.

  My gaze dropped to the pot cupboard. No Jed. I spun around. “Jed, no!” I pulled him out from under the kitchen sink and yanked the cleanser-laden steel wool he was clutching from his hand. “Did you put that in your mouth?”

  He burst into tears.

  Billy backed toward the door. “Is he okay?”

  I pried open Jed’s mouth and saw no sign of foreign stuff inside. “I think so.” I bounced him in my arms. “Shh, you’re okay. I’m sorry I scared you. You scared me.”

  “I’ll go now,” Billy said, backing out the door, his gaze fixed on Jed like he might be the IED that would finally take him out.

  “Right, thanks for”—Jed wailed louder—“shh, shh, it’s okay. The scary man is going.”

  I locked the door behind Billy and startled at the sound of someone tromping through the main door. I spun around. “Nate!”

  “What’s going on? I heard screaming and crying and no one answered the door, so I used my passkey. Who’s the kid?”

  “A friend’s. I’m sorry. I should’ve called.” I lifted my voice higher to be heard over Jed’s fussing. “I don’t think we’ll be able to watch the movie.”

  Nate made a goofy face and even goofier noises.

  Jed laughed and stretched his arms toward Nate.

  Nate scooped him up and blew a big raspberry on his belly, which sent Jed into rip-roaring peals of laughter.

  My smile must’ve wobbled because Nate threw me a concerned look. “Hey, you alright?”

  “No. He’s adorable, but he gets into everything. A second ago he almost ate a pot scrubber. Who knows what chemicals they put in those things.”

  Man, people think my job is scary. Being responsible for a baby is way scarier.

  Tanner stepped inside my kitchen door and took the small microchip-sized tracker from my fingers, his gaze straying to Nate bouncing Jed.

  “Matt’s wife had a sudden complication with her pregnancy, and they needed a babysitter fast,” I explained.

  Tanner’s expression didn’t betray what he was thinking. He studied the gadget. “It’s the same model as the one they found on your car.”

  “What? They found a tracker on my car? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “Sorry, did I forget to mention it when I delivered the SUV?”

  “Yeah! I’m sure I would’ve remembered if you had.”

  “I wish I’d thought of planting one on you after last night’s scare,” Nate chimed in from behind me. Jed was now perched on his shoulders, playing the drum on the top of Nate’s head.

  Tanner’s lips twitched into an almost-smile, as if he agreed but didn’t want to admit it. “I’ll take it. I already talked to Benton. We’re going to set up a sting.”

  Matt appeared at the kitchen door, rapped his knuckles on the window, and immediately let himself in. “What’s going on? Did something happen?” His gaze zinged to Jed. “Jed’s okay?”

  I lifted him from Nate’s shoulders and handed him to Matt. “He’s fine. Was as good as gold. How’s Tracey? I didn’t expect you back. I thought your mother-in-law would be coming.”

  “Tracey’s stable. Her mother’s with her at the hospital. They admitted Tracey and then she started worrying about Jed being here.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry.” I patted Jed’s back and gave Matt an encouraging smile. “It’s all good. Haven’t heard a peep from any bad guys.”

  Matt looked skeptically from Tanner to Nate. “Then why the bodyguards?”

  I shrugged. “You know what they say. It takes a village to raise a child.”

  Tanner showed him the tracker. “Your kid found this in Serena’s purse. You ever see one like this?”

  “Sure, it’s the model our detectives use.”

  “You aware of anyone having Serena under surveillance?”

  “Only me. I asked a buddy to cruise by every half hour.”

  A lot of good that did me. He hadn’t spotted Billy skulking around the place.

  Nate backed toward the door. “I’ll get out of your hair. Maybe we can catch the movie tomorrow night?”

  “Yes, I’ll call you.” So much for my normal evening.

  Matt gathered up Jed’s paraphernalia. “I better go too.”

  I closed the door behind him. “Why would a cop be following me?” I asked Tanner. “Do you think a cop’s in cahoots with the Russian mob?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time cops were on the mob’s payroll. Sloppy of them to use department-issued equipment, though.”

  “I guess anyone could pick up this kind of thing at a high-tech store. Even Aunt Martha was checking them out one day online.”

  Tanner eyeballed the piece again, a smile stretching his lips. “You don’t think she or your mom planted it, do you? Because they might go ballistic on me if they see it spend the night at my place.”

  I laughed. “It would serve them right.”

  21

  The next morning, Lucas’s financials were waiting for me when I arrived at headquarters. Tanner and Benton weren’t. I texted Tanner to find out if their plan to lure Lexus Guy worked.

  Not yet, he texted back. More SWAT training today. Have the tracker with me. If he shows up here, he’ll be sorry. He added a winking emoticon.

  Perfect. I set to work analyzing Lucas Watson’s financial data. It didn’t take long to confirm he’d needed a serious influx of cash to cover the calls on some bad investments. And he’d made three large cash deposits within the last twelve weeks. The last deposit fit the potential time frame for a windfall from fencing his mother-in-law’s painting. The deposit before that fit the time frame for the stolen Keane. The first deposit didn’t fit the time frame of any other known art thefts, but I wasn’t ready to rule it out.

  On the strength of the data, I prepared a search warrant for Lucas’s phone and email records, along with a search of his house, in particular his computer and printer. I hadn’t seen a printer at Capone’s place, so his customers must’ve provided him with the photographs of work they wanted copied. As I recalled, several of those photographs had seemed to be homegrown print jobs.

  An hour later, I stood in the prosecuting attorney’s office at the courthouse, straining to unclench my fists. “What do you mean the judge won’t sign the warrant?”


  “He says your evidence is circumstantial and conjecture.”

  “Would he feel the same if Watson wasn’t CFO of the bank?”

  The attorney handed back the papers. “I suggest you ask Watson’s wife to show you what you’re after. If she thinks he’s cheating on her, she’ll probably relish the thought of sticking it to him.”

  I groaned. I’d hoped to orchestrate a no-knock warrant so if nothing came of the search, Gladys wouldn’t have to know about it. I returned to headquarters to find Tanner back from his training. “I need to sweet talk a beautiful woman into letting me search her house. Wanna help?”

  He grinned. “Sure thing.”

  Tasha answered the door in a filmy sea-green number that left little to the imagination. “Oh, Miss Jones, I didn’t expect—” Her gaze shifted to Tanner.

  “I hope we’re not interrupting anything,” I said.

  Tasha blushed. “No, no. What can I do for you?”

  “Do you have a computer in the house?”

  “Yes, in my husband’s den.”

  “May we look at it?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “At the hospital the other day, you said you wouldn’t be surprised if your husband took your mother’s painting. I want to see if he printed a photograph of it from his computer.”

  Tasha’s eyes widened. “You think I’m right about him?”

  “He’s a strong suspect.”

  She swung the door wide and invited us in. “It’s this way.” She led us into a small, dark room that smelled faintly of cigar smoke and motioned toward the computer sitting in the center of a heavy walnut desk. “There you go. Have at it.”

  Tanner edged past her to sit at the computer. “Could you enter the password for me?”

  “Oh.” She flipped the desk calendar to the last page and pointed to the letters scrawled there. “We got hacked a while back, and when my brother Pete fixed it for us, he said we needed a stronger password, but I can never remember it.” She stood at the corner of the desk, nibbling her fingernail, and anxiously watched the screen as Tanner’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

  “Could we have something to drink? Ice water, perhaps?” I asked to give her something to do.