Paper Bullets

by Reed, Annie

  Copyright Information

  Paper Bullets

  Copyright © 2014 by Annie Reed

  Published by Thunder Valley Press

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2014 Thunder Valley Press

  Cover design by Thunder Valley Press

  Cover art copyright © Volodymyr Leus | Dreamstime.com

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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  Full Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  ABBY MAXON MYSTERIES

  Pretty Little Horses

  Paper Bullets

  for Dave and Katie, with love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My heartfelt appreciation and thanks to Donna Kodalen for her eagle eye and to Melissa Taylor for her talented red pen. I also owe a hearty thank you to Scott William Carter and Jennifer Rachel Baumer for their insightful comments which improved this book, and to Jason Stone for his expertise in a field I know little about.

  And last but certainly not least, many thanks to you, dear reader, for making these books possible.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE LAST THING I WANTED to do on a hot Saturday afternoon in August was meet with my ex-husband.

  I’d spent the morning shopping with my clothes-conscious teenage daughter, Samantha, just the two of us along with about a million other parents and kids crowding the aisles in Target for a little last-minute back-to-school shopping. We also had a messy house we needed to wrestle into shape before tomorrow when her boyfriend and his mother would be in town for a visit. And to top it all off, I had a date in a few hours, and I needed time to transform myself from a sweaty, frizzy-haired mom into actual date material.

  But then Ryan had called and said the only thing guaranteed to interrupt my day: “I need your help.”

  So here I sat in a nice air-conditioned Starbucks, ready to meet my ex and offer whatever assistance he needed.

  Yes, there are days I feel like Abby Maxon, World’s Biggest Sap. Why do you ask?

  At least we weren’t meeting in the Starbucks where I sometimes had coffee with Kyle.

  Kyle Beecham’s my boyfriend, and boy does it feel weird to acknowledge that I actually have a boyfriend. Kyle’s a detective with the Sparks Police Department, and we’ve been dating semi-seriously since the first of the year. He’s a busy cop and single dad. I’m a busy private detective and single mom. It’s a wonder we have time for anything other than a quick coffee at Starbucks. Tonight was one of our rare Saturday night dates, and I wasn’t about to blow him off, no matter what Ryan needed.

  I’d arrived a few minutes before we were scheduled to meet, so I grabbed a table near the back. Starbucks wasn’t crowded, wonder of wonders, but the line at the drive-through was a good ten cars deep. I wasn’t surprised. August in Nevada is not for the faint of heart. When I’d pulled in the parking lot, my car had helpfully told me it was ninety-five degrees. Drive-throughs do a bang up business during the dog days of summer when people don’t want to leave the comfort of their air-conditioned cars.

  I thought about ordering myself an iced latte—the aroma of fresh-ground coffee was making my mouth water—but I hoped I wouldn’t be here that long. Ryan was punctual to a fault, and he’d always been a man who got right to the point.

  Except, apparently, for today.

  I’d looked at my watch for the tenth time in as many minutes before Ryan arrived.

  Ryan Maxon had always been a handsome man. Even in his mid-forties, he still had the athletic body he’d had when I’d first met him in college. I felt a little guilty about the fact that I noticed how in shape he still was. He had a fiancé and I had Kyle, and weren’t we supposed to be moving on? So instead I made myself concentrate on the gray hair at his temples, the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, and the shadows beneath his eyes.

  I blinked.

  Wait a minute. Those were some serious shadows, and the lines in his face looked deeper than the last time I’d seen him.

  Ryan was a trial attorney. He’d worked long hours when we’d been married, and I was used to seeing him stressing over a hard case or a particularly difficult client. I was used to tired Ryan. I wasn’t used to a Ryan who looked like he’d just lost his best friend.

  I didn’t feel like the world’s biggest sap anymore. Maybe he really did need me.

  He didn’t apologize for being late. Instead he asked me if I still drank mocha lattes.

  I said yes without thinking. Before I could tell him I didn’t really want anything, especially anything hot, he was at the counter ordering coffee.

  Well, at least that hadn’t changed. He was still the same take-charge kind of guy.

  He came back with two large drinks. Our fingers brushed when he handed me my latte, and I was surprised at how cold his hands were. Maybe it was just the air-conditioning, but I doubted it. Whatever was going on, Ryan was seriously upset.

  Well, okay then. Time to get down to business. Ryan had always appreciated when his clients did that. I hoped he appreciated it now.

  “Tell me why you called,” I said before he had a chance to try to make awkward small talk.

  Most people don’t look me in the eye when they need to tell me something difficult. I don’t take it personally. Telling secrets to a private investigator isn’t easy. It’s not like confessing your sins to a priest. There’s no anonymity, no convenient partition to hide behind, so people tend to distract themselves in order to pretend I’m not there.

  Ryan didn’t do that. Whether it was his legal training—trial lawyers don’t let anything intimidate them in the courtroom—or because we hadn’t hidden from each other during that horrible time in our lives when Samantha had nearly died thanks to a hit-and-run driver, he looked me in the eye instead of staring down at his coffee.

  “I need help with Melody,” he said.

  Melody was his fiancé. She was also the woman he’d left me for. While she wasn’t exactly a forbidden topic, Ryan didn’t mention her around me unless he had to.

  “Okay,” I said, drawing the word out. “What kind of help?”

  “She has a stalker.”

  I blinked. “Aren’t there laws against that kind of thing?”

  “Civil and criminal.”

  I wasn’t a cop. I also wasn’t the kind of private investigator you’d find on television or in the movies. I didn’t carry a gun, and I certainly didn’t go around threatening men who made a habit out of harassing women.

  “So what do you need me for?” I asked.

  He took a sip from his cup and grimaced. I didn’t think the grimace had anything to do with the taste of the coffee. “I need you to figure out who this guy is.”

  Wait a second. “She doesn’t know who’s stalking her?” Which, when I thought about it, wasn’t all that strange. I dimly remembered an old television show where a stalker turned out to be a computer repairman the woman had only seen once. Things like that probably happened in real life, too.

  Now Ryan glanced away. I’d hit a sore spot, and I could guess what it was.

  “She knows,” I said. “And she won’t tell you.”

  “I don’t know that for sure. I just have a gut feeling. I want to get a protective order issued against him. I’d like to get his ass thrown in jail, but I’ll start with that. I can’t do any of it if I don’t know who he is. I can’t seem to make her—”

  He stopped himself, but I knew what he’d been about to say: Make
her understand.

  I’d heard the phrase often enough when we’d been married.

  Why can’t I make you understand how important this case is? This one could make my career.

  Why can’t I make you understand I need to put in extra hours? I’m doing this for us.

  Or the one that stuck with me the most:

  Why can’t I make you understand how hard this is for me?

  He’d said that the night he packed a suitcase and left my world in tatters. I’d spent a lot of time during our marriage putting Ryan and his career first because I understood how hard it was to build a career. I’d put our family first when I forgave him for his other “little” indiscretions, the ones he said didn’t mean anything to him, because I understood how hard it would be on Samantha if we got divorced.

  In fact, I’d spent so much time understanding him, I think he was surprised that when it came to the actual divorce, I didn’t put him first. I’d put Samantha first with me a close second, and we damn well deserved it.

  I took a deep mental breath. I was over all that now, right?

  Right?

  Water under the bridge, as my mother would say.

  Well, it better be, or I shouldn’t be here.

  Ryan’s fist, the one not holding his coffee, was clenched tight. He was trying to keep a tight rein on his emotions just like I was. I guessed he’d had more than one argument with Melody about this subject.

  The last thing I wanted to do was help my ex-husband with anything to do with that woman. it was clear—at least to me—that we still had too much unresolved baggage where she was concerned. The smart thing to do would be to tell tell him thanks but no thanks, find yourself another investigator.

  Then again, I’ve never been particularly smart where Ryan was concerned. And deep down I believed that no woman—no woman, no matter who she was—should have to put up with a stalker.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you do know?” I said.

  A bit of the tension left his face. He hadn’t been sure I’d say yes. That surprised me. Maybe he didn’t think I was such a sap after all.

  “It started out with the flowers,” he said. “A single red rose delivered to her at work.”

  “She still work in your building?”

  He gave me a look. “No. Not since we moved in together.”

  Melody had been the concierge at the upscale office building where Ryan had his law practice. That’s how they’d met.

  “She’s working as a trainer at Right Track Fitness.”

  Of course she was.

  Melody was five feet two inches of non-stop energy, someone who’d look like the former cheerleader she was until she turned eighty. I’d seen her more than once when I used to stop by Ryan’s office. She’d always been pleasant to me. Once I’d found out they’d been having an affair, I’d wondered if she knew who I was all those times she’d been so cheerily pleasant or if Ryan had never bothered to tell her he was married. We’d never left his office together when she was at her desk in the building’s first floor lobby.

  I used to think that was a coincidence. When Ryan told me he was moving out, I realized he’d planned it that way all along.

  “She said she thought I sent the rose,” he said. “I didn’t. Then she said it must have come from a grateful client. I didn’t like the idea of some guy sending her flowers, especially since she doesn’t always wear her ring while she’s working, but I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. Then I found out it wasn’t just one rose. It was a rose a day for a week.”

  “How did they show up? Floral delivery? Or from a mail-order floral delivery service?” Florists would have a record of credit card purchases. So would an online floral delivery site. If the guy had shown up at a florist’s in person and paid cash, the company might have a security camera on the register and I could at least get a blurry picture of the guy.

  “I asked,” Ryan said. “She wouldn’t tell me. Said it was just a few flowers and I was making a big deal out of nothing.”

  He sat for a minute without saying anything. A frown had creased his brows, and I realized something I’d never noticed before. Ryan wasn’t the one with the power in his relationship with Melody.

  He’d had it in ours, partly because I’d never understood why a guy like Ryan—handsome, athletic, popular—would like a girl like me. I was the one who gave in whenever Ryan wanted something. The situation was reversed in his relationship with Melody, and it made me look at him differently. Not with pity, but with something like kinship.

  I’d told myself that someday I’d be able to be friends again with my ex without the hurt getting in the way. Maybe today was that day.

  I took a sip of my latte and waited. It was finally cool enough to drink without scalding my tongue. Ryan had added a sprinkle of cinnamon on the top, just like I used to do myself. I hadn’t had cinnamon on my lattes since he left. When I had coffee with Kyle, I had the barista add a shot of vanilla. I’d forgotten how much I liked the taste of cinnamon.

  An older couple was sitting at one of the other little tables near the back. He was working on a crossword puzzle and she had her nose in a tablet reader. At first I thought they were ignoring each other until I noticed that their sandal-clad feet were rubbing up against each other beneath the table.

  I missed that kind of companionship. Kyle and I weren’t there yet. We might never get there, not if his daughter didn’t warm up to me. His daughter was as important to him as Samantha was to me.

  My mother wouldn’t have approved about the way I made Samantha the center of my life, especially after Ryan left. Kyle had done the same thing after he and his wife split.

  “It’s hard to be married to a cop,” he’d told me on our second date. “The hours are lousy, my moods are lousy when a case is going badly, and I can’t always shake work by the time I get home, and then there’s always the fear that when I leave for work, I won’t be coming home.”

  I’d asked him if he was trying to scare me off.

  “Just want you to know what you’re getting yourself in for,” he’d said.

  Ryan tapped my foot with his beneath the table, startling me. When was the last time he’d done that?

  “You were always good at that,” he said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Spacing out?”

  “Waiting me out. It’s one of the things that makes you a good listener. You don’t need to fill the silence.”

  It made me a good investigator, too. It was one of the things I’d learned. Given a chance, people would tell me their stories as long as I gave them the opportunity to talk.

  Ryan seemed to be stalling, though, and that wasn’t like him. The other thing I’d learned was that sometimes people needed a push.

  “You wouldn’t have asked for my help if it was just flowers,” I said.

  He nodded. “You’re right. It started with flowers. Then came the phone calls to the condo. If I answered, he’d hang up, but not before I could hear him breathing. One call a night at first, then two, then five or six. We had the phone number changed—it’s unlisted now—but it only took him a couple of days before the calls started again. We have caller ID, but the number was blocked. I was about ready to call in a couple of favors and put a tap and trace on the line when the calls stopped. I figured that was the end of it until she got the first picture in the mail.”

  He rubbed his upper lip. It was an old habit he’d picked up during the years he’d decided to try wearing a mustache and a little goatee. At the time he’d thought it made him look older, and he was under the impression juries took older attorneys more seriously. He didn’t want to look like he’d just graduated law school.

  The only problem was that he was constantly touching the thing. He’d rub the mustache or stroke the goatee, and that made him look more than a little like Snidely Whiplash.

  When he figured out his winning record had gone downhill, he’d shaved the thing off. He’d been clean shaven ever since, but he still rubbed at
his upper lip whenever he was near his emotional limits.

  “Pictures of Melody, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He took a deep breath, his gaze somewhere over my right shoulder, but I knew he was remembering the photographs. “Melody leaving work. Melody out shopping with a friend. Melody behind the wheel, waiting for a red light and talking on her cell phone. He’d printed ‘bad girl, breaking the law’ on that back of that picture.”

  Kyle had told me once that the police department had a handwriting expert they used on occasion. It was a long shot, but maybe Melody’s stalker was in the system. He could have even left prints on the photographs.

  “Do you still have the pictures? I’ve got a friend in the police department. Maybe I could—”

  “She threw them out. It was another thing we fought about—destroying the evidence. Something I could have taken to the cops myself, but with no evidence...”

  There was nothing the cops could do, especially if she didn’t file a police report.

  That’s why he’d come to me.

  “How’s she going to feel about your ex-wife shadowing her?” I asked. “Isn’t that going to make things tense for you at home?”

  Not to mention tense for me.

  When he looked me in the eye this time, I saw something in his gaze I hadn’t seen since we thought Samantha might die: fear.

  “She doesn’t realize how sick some of those bastards can be. I have friends who left left criminal law because they couldn’t stand dealing with the clients.”

  I’d come face to face with two killers myself not that long ago, and they’d both been sick bastards.

  “You do realize you’re asking me to find someone you’re afraid could be dangerous.”

  “You’re smart, Abby. You know how to handle yourself. Melody?” He shook his head. “She always gotten attention from men. She thinks if she ignores this guy, he’ll go away. I know better, but I can’t convince her.”