Icing Allison

by Pamela Burford

  The padre pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to me. “You’re going to call him and get him out of the house.”

  “Oh, I am, am I? Just like that. Hey.” I looked more closely at the phone. It was smaller than the one Martin usually carried, cheaper looking. “Is this new? What happened to the last one?”

  “Oh, I still have it.” He patted a different pocket. “Trust me, you don’t want to make this call from your personal phone, and I don’t want it traced back to me either.”

  It took my wee brain a couple of seconds to figure it out. Then I gaped at him, bug-eyed. “This is a burner phone!” I dropped the thing as if it might indeed burst into flames. It was one of those prepaid, no-contract phones that criminals bought with cash, used for some nefarious purpose, then discarded, along with the phone number. Not trackable, no incriminating trail.

  “Careful.” He reached over and picked it up from the floor. “This thing won’t take much abuse.”

  He tried to hand it back to me. I glued myself to the passenger door, palms raised. “Don’t give that to me. I don’t want it. You shouldn’t even have it.”

  “You’ve been watching too much Law & Order,” he said. “People buy these for a lot of reasons, most of them perfectly legit.”

  “Why did you buy it?” The question was out of my mouth before I could stop it. Burner phones definitely qualified as one more Thing I Would Rather Not Know About Martin. Fortunately, his selective deafness prevented him from answering.

  “The goal is to get Nick out of the house,” he said. “An hour should do it, with both of us in there searching. Forty-five minutes minimum. Put on your thinking cap.”

  “Um...” My thinking cap was on the fritz. What would motivate Nick to run out of the house? I was coming up empty.

  “Does he have family that you know of?” Martin asked.

  “No one who was at the funeral. At least I didn’t get introduced to anyone. I hope you’re not thinking I’d call pretending to be from a hospital or something, like your mama’s been in an accident.”

  “An oldie but a goodie,” he said. “There’s always Skye. It doesn’t have to be an accident. Maybe his baby mama has a bad case of food poisoning. He’d go running to hold her hand in the ER.”

  “Forget it, Padre, that’s just too mean. I won’t do it.”

  He spread his hands. “Hey, I’m just brainstorming here. You’re the one who wants to find out if someone offed Allison.”

  “Correction,” I said. “I know no one offed Allison. I’m just trying to put Jim’s mind at rest. I owe him that much. I’m the one who gave him the videos and got him thinking along those lines.”

  “Back to Nick. Let’s look at it from his perspective. What does he want more than anything?”

  That was easy. “Allison’s money. But I don’t see how we could use that to— Oh. Hmm.”

  Martin was staring at me. “‘Oh hmm’ what? What’s going on in that devious little mind of yours?”

  “My mind isn’t devious.”

  “Yes it is, whether you know it or not.” He wore a silky smile. “And I find it sexy as hell.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, fully aware that the blush warming my face contradicted my blasé tone. “Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking. Sten Jakobsen’s office is a good twenty minutes from here.”

  “Closer to thirty with rush-hour traffic.”

  He was right. It was a little after four. The roads were starting to get congested. I said, “Nick gets a call from Sten’s paralegal saying, I don’t know, we found a loophole in the prenup or something. A mistake in your favor. You stand to inherit oodles of money after all.”

  “But you have to get here right this instant or the coach will turn back into a pumpkin.”

  “Right,” I said. “Think it’ll work?”

  “Depends how convincing you are.” Martin shoved the burner phone in my face. “He’ll recognize your voice, so find a way to disguise it.”

  I hauled my own phone out of my bag to retrieve Nick’s number from my contacts, then took a deep breath, tapped the number into the burner phone, and waited for the young widower to pick up.

  “Hello?” Nick said, with the suspicious tone of one who doesn’t recognize the number on his screen.

  I roughened up my voice and went all nasal. “Mr. Birch?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Sharon from Sten Jakobsen’s office. I’m his paralegal.” I let out a couple of coughs. “’Scuse me, I have a bad cold.”

  Martin gave me a thumbs-up for effective voice disguising.

  Nick asked, “What happened to Jeanie?”

  “Who?”

  “Jeanie,” he said. “Mr. Jakobsen’s paralegal.”

  “Oh. She quit. I’m new.” Before he had a chance to question the abrupt change in staff, I said, “Mr. Jakobsen would like to see you at his office.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “Anything that old shyster has to tell me, he can say to my new lawyer. You guys have his name and number. Don’t call me again.”

  Before he could hang up, I said, “Wait! Wait! Mr. Birch, this is about the prenuptial agreement you and your late wife signed.”

  “You mean the prenup I was tricked into signing? That prenup? Like I said, he can talk to—”

  “Mr. Jakobsen made a, um, technical error,” I blurted. “The prenup is invalid. It’s like it never existed.”

  I waited while he digested that. “Really? Then does that mean I get my share?”

  “It’s my understanding,” I said, “that in the absence of the prenuptial agreement, you would be eligible to inherit one third of your late wife’s estate. We need your signature, though, on the paperwork.”

  Nick almost blew out my eardrums with, “Yes! I knew it would work out. Tell him I’ll be in sometime this week.”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Jakobsen won’t be in the office for the rest of the week, or even for the next...”

  I cast about for an appropriate time frame. Martin held up six fingers.

  “For the next six days,” I said, and watched the padre smack his forehead. “Weeks! He’s going away for six weeks, to... to Mongolia for a, um, an international legal symposium. He’s leaving for his trip in a half hour, and he has to be present to witness your signature, so you have to come in right now.”

  “I don’t know... I just nuked a chicken pot pie. The paperwork will still be there when he gets back.”

  “Um, no, it won’t,” I said, thinking fast. “The deadline for filing the papers is five o’clock today—that’s forty-seven minutes from now—otherwise the prenup stands and can never be undone. You need to get here pronto, Mr. Birch.”

  Radio silence as I imagined what was going on inside his handsome head. Hmm... four million bucks or a chicken pot pie? Yeah, I could see how he might be conflicted.

  “All right, all right,” he said, “I’m leaving now. Tell him to wait for me.” The line went dead.

  I tossed the burner phone at Martin and slumped back against my seat, feeling like I’d just run a 10K. Not that I’ve ever run a 10K, but I can, you know, imagine it feels something like that.

  “You’re a natural.” Martin patted my thigh, his hand lingering just long enough to accelerate my pulse and supply a reviving boost of energy. He threw open his door and jumped out of the car. “Tick-tock, Jane, we have a home to burgle.”

  “Don’t say that.” I got out of the car, arranging my purse strap crossways, bandolier-style. “It’s not like that, Padre. We’re not burglars.” Well, I wasn’t. The jury was still out on Martin. “What we’re doing is... well, all I know is it’s not burglary.”

  He opened the car’s trunk. “Sorry to burst your bubble, but once we get in, you’re talking second-degree burglary.”

  “What if we leave empty-handed?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said cheerfully. “Our intent matters, and we intend to take something that doesn’t belong to us. You could get up to fifteen years in the slammer. M
aybe more if they tack on criminal impersonation. Glad you asked?”

  Well, they say you should try everything once, right? No, I don’t know who says it—they, all right? The same they who tell me to exercise for thirty minutes every day and replace my mascara every three months. Both of which are as likely to happen as my trying everything once.

  He closed the trunk and tossed something small at me. I fumbled the catch and had to bend to pick up the item, which turned out to be two items: a pair of latex gloves. I watched him pull on a pair.

  This was getting too real. Up to that point, the only thought I’d given to fingerprints had been how to keep them off Irene’s—now my—obscenely expensive glass-topped coffee table with a burl-wood cube base.

  I started to whine about the gloves, but Martin had already taken off through the winter-bare woods. I struggled to catch up, picking my way cautiously in my impractical pumps. I stuck close to him as he located Allison’s sprawling backyard and paused behind the cover of a large fir tree. Within moments I heard an unmistakable metallic rumbling. Peering through the branches, I spotted Nick hurrying from the back door of the house to the old carriage house, which apparently had been updated with an automatic garage door opener. Within moments a white Audi emerged and raced down the long drive to the street.

  Martin peered at our surroundings for long moments, listening intently, as alert as a jaguar, before grabbing my hand and sprinting with me across the tree-studded yard to the back porch. We passed the covered hot tub, which should have been an inviting sight on a cold winter day, but all I could think, considering its notorious history, was Eww...

  Opening his coat, he reached into a pocket of his black pants, part of his priest getup, and produced a credit card. Only, it wasn’t a credit card. I knew this because I’d seen it before. It was solid black and a little thicker than an actual credit card, and when he slid the back off as he was doing now, one could see the five adorable little lock picks nestled inside.

  “Possession of burglar’s tools.” He grinned. “Class A misdemeanor.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Well, aren’t we grumpy,” he said as he went to work on the lock. “I’m doing this for you, remember, risking serious jail time so you can—what’s your story again?—oh yeah, so you can reassure this guy Jim, a virtual stranger, that there was nothing suspicious about the death of his old girlfriend, a woman he hadn’t laid eyes on in, what, nearly a decade. Do I have that right? And we’re in.”

  It took me a moment to realize that last comment had to do with the lock. “That was fast.”

  “There’s probably an alarm. Stay here. And get those gloves on.” Martin eased the door open. I expected a warning tone indicating an armed house alarm, but heard only silence. He stepped into the mudroom and glanced at the alarm pad near the door before beckoning me to join him. “He didn’t set it.”

  I knew from experience that if Nick had set the alarm, it wouldn’t have caused much of a delay in our breaking and entering. I myself had finally stopped installing newer, better, wowee kazowee alarm systems in my house. If the padre wanted to get in, he got in. This was both disturbing and strangely exciting. Disturbing because if he decided to slip into my home in the middle of the night, I had no way to stop him. Exciting because if he decided to slip into my home in the middle of the night, I had no way to stop him.

  The padre strode swiftly into the kitchen, checking the time on his phone—one of his phones. I still couldn’t believe he’d manipulated me into using a burner phone. Correction: using a burner phone to commit criminal impersonation so we could burgle the place. And I’d been worried about littering.

  “Shake a leg, Jane. In thirty-nine minutes we’re out of here, with or without that flash drive.”

  “If it even exists,” I said.

  He was yanking open drawers and cabinets, quickly pawing through utensils, dishes, pots and pans as Nick’s uneaten chicken pot pie cooled on the counter. The darn thing smelled better than it had a right to. I wondered what the young widower would think if he came back to find a bite or two missing.

  I went into the butler’s pantry and opened the freezer, shoving aside a half gallon of rocky road and about two dozen chicken pot pies to peer into the corners. That’s a favorite hiding place, right? The freezer?

  We split up on the first floor. I emulated Martin, rifling quickly through every conceivable hiding place in the living room and sunroom while he took the dining room and den, both of us being careful to leave everything as we’d found it. We met up in Allison’s office.

  Martin checked his phone. “Twenty-seven minutes left.”

  “You know, there’s a basement,” I said. “Not to mention the second floor and the attic. This is a huge place.” The subtext being: There’s no way we’ll search the rest of this house in twenty-seven minutes and I’m getting really nervous, so let’s get the heck out of here.

  Either he was oblivious to the subtext or he chose to ignore it. My money was on that second thing. He was rifling through Allison’s desk drawers. “Did you check behind the pictures?” he asked. “Something that small could be taped—”

  “Yes, of course,” I snapped, in the wounded tones of a seasoned criminal whose expertise had just been challenged. I’d have to slip back into the rooms I’d searched and look behind the darn pictures.

  “Ha!” he said.

  My pulse leapt. “Did you find it?”

  “Her phone.” He displayed his booty, a sleek smartphone in a silver-pink case, and slipped it into a pocket. “Might be something useful on it.”

  “You can’t take that.”

  “I just did.” He closed the drawer and opened another. “Don’t worry, I’ll return it. Nick will never know it was gone.”

  “It probably doesn’t even work,” I said. “She must have had it on her when she went into the lake.”

  “I’ll try to power it up later. No time to mess with it now. Shake a leg, Jane. Time’s flying.”

  My heart was no longer in this project, if it ever was. Yeah, that’s right, it was a project, not a burglary, so you can just save the judgmental attitude for a, you know, real burglar.

  I made myself cross to the antique cherry-wood bookcase and start tipping back the books to check behind them. There were best-selling novels, anthologies of short stories and poetry, and volumes on photography and history—including, yes, the history of photography. Several shelves had been set aside for small framed photos and assorted souvenirs and tchotchkes, crammed together in sociable groupings.

  An African figurine carved from dark wood. A small silver box encrusted with amethysts. A marble paperweight. A crystal hedgehog. Russian nesting dolls. An ornate Victorian teacup and saucer with gilded edges and an intricate floral design. A bowl carved from petrified wood and filled with small seashells and chunks of frosty beach glass in pastel tones.

  I peered at a small, framed snapshot of a grinning Allison standing on a crowded sidewalk—Times Square, by the looks of it. She wore a sundress and sandals. A camera hung from her neck by a strap, a serious-looking camera with a long lens. I smiled. She’d been doing what she loved best.

  I poked my gloved finger into the bowl of shells and felt around for something the size and shape of a flash drive. As I did so, my gaze skated over the objects behind it and came to a startled halt on one object in particular, half-concealed behind a painted porcelain Buddha. It was a small piece of handmade ceramic, two to three inches tall, glossy black blending to an oatmeal-colored glaze at the edges. I saw a rounded top studded with tiny holes.

  “Martin?” I said.

  “Twenty-five minutes, Jane.” He was digging around in a cardboard accordion file crammed with papers filed in alphabetical order. “More searching, less talking.”

  I reached behind the Buddha and picked up the little shaker shaped like a mushroom. I turned it upside down and shook it. No pepper came out. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I was holding the missing mate to the salt shake
r Joleen had given me. She’d assumed it had been broken.

  My breathing quickened as I pried the tiny cork out of the bottom. A dab of poster putty had been stuck to the inside of the cork, and pressed into that—yes, I know you’re way ahead of me, I’m so proud of you—was a tiny flash drive identical to the one I’d handed over to Jim yesterday.

  10

  A Couple of Gullible Nitwits

  “MARTIN?”

  He looked up from the accordion file, his hand jammed into the N section, his irritated frown only adding to his hotness quotient, damn his sexy hide. “What?” he barked, before focusing on the prize I triumphantly held in front of his face.

  In one smooth movement he snatched the flash drive, pocketed it, and unceremoniously shoved me toward the doorway.

  “Hey!” I dug in my heels. “Give that back.”

  “Later.” He marched me down the hall and into the living room. “If we’re caught, I don’t want it found on you.”

  Oh my. A gallant gesture from Martin McAuliffe. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It wasn’t the first time he’d acted selflessly where I was concerned, but in the past it had been precipitated by a life-threatening situation.

  We were passing the front vestibule when we heard the door lock turn. Nick was back! I froze. We had no hope of making it out of the living room, much less out of the house, before that door swung open.

  Fortunately for me, the padre wasn’t one to stand around waiting to be caught in the act. As the doorknob began to turn, he propelled me across the living room to the staircase. He couldn’t possibly think we had time to make it up the stairs. I started to pull back, only to have him grip my arm tighter, open the door to the little closet tucked under the staircase, haul us both inside, and shut us in just as the front door swung open.

  The closet wasn’t empty, as it turned out. We’d had to duck just to get into the cramped space and ended up falling on top of assorted stuff piled in there, impossible to identify in the pitch blackness. I thought for sure the noise would give us away, but at that precise moment a shrill female voice drowned out all else.