Paper Bullets

by Reed, Annie

  “My guess is that his captain chose to look the other way,” Kyle said. “I suppose I can understand it, from his perspective. Richards had an impressive track record. His information was responsible for putting a bunch of drug dealers behind bars.”

  “Wouldn’t the bad guys eventually make the connection to him?” I asked.

  “If he was sloppy, sure, but from what this guy told me last night, Richards wasn’t sloppy. He had a network of informants who didn’t have a clue they were passing along information to a cop. They thought they were just flying high with a fellow druggie, telling stories while they passed around the bong or snorted lines or did whatever other drug they were sharing. In a way I can admire the guy. It takes a certain level of focus to keep your head in a situation like that, and Richards had been on the job for years.”

  “Had been?”

  “He was suspended six months ago. The press never got wind of it, not like when an officer’s involved in a shooting, and the department kept it quiet, but apparently Richards was told to clean up his act or he’d be out for good.”

  I wondered if that’s when he became Mr. Muscles. Spent all his time at the gym working out to get the drugs out of his system. Either that, or he’d replaced street drugs with steroids. One thing I knew about chronic steroid users was that they could have short tempers.

  “I saw him arguing with Melody yesterday,” I said. “You think he could have had anything to do with what happened to her?”

  Kyle shrugged. “My guy said department gossip pegged Richards as a hot head, that he either mouthed off to his handler or belted the guy when he didn’t like what he was getting told, so yeah, I guess it’s possible.”

  “It’s a lot more probable than Ryan torching Melody’s car while she was inside.”

  “Where did they find the car?”

  “I don’t know exactly. All the cops mentioned was that it was in some vacant lot downtown and that someone passing by called it in. Norton might know. Or it might be on the news. I haven’t checked this morning.”

  I hadn’t wanted to look at the news. I’d been too afraid to see my picture or Ryan’s mentioned in connection with Melody’s murder.

  Kyle stretched out his back, and I heard his jaw creak as he yawned.

  “You should go home,” I said. “You’re exhausted.”

  His arm tightened around me. “I don’t want to leave you alone today.”

  “Because you think I’m an emotional wreck, or because you’re afraid I’m going to keep investigating this?”

  He kissed me on the top of my head. “A little of both, but more because I’m worried you’re in over your head and you haven’t realized it yet.”

  A ginger cat hopped up on the back fence and walked along the top of the boards that gave me a little privacy from my neighbors. The dove on the power line tilted its head and gave the cat a beady-eyed stare, secure in the knowledge that it was out of the cat’s reach.

  “He’s always going to be my daughter’s dad,” I said. “I can’t just stand by and not do anything.”

  Kyle sighed. “I know. That’s why I debated whether to tell you about Richards, but I figured you’d find out on your own anyway. These people are dangerous. Even if he didn’t do it, the people he’s run with are more than capable of killing someone just to send a message.”

  “But why kill Melody to send a message to Richards? She’d have to be someone important to him for that to matter.”

  Which brought me back to the question of why an undercover—former undercover—cop would be tailing her. What in the world did Melody have to do with any of that?

  I didn’t know, but I sure as hell was going to find out.

  CHAPTER 17

  SAMANTHA DECIDED TO CALL her dad around noon. I wasn’t surprised when the call went straight to his voicemail.

  I tried not to listen in, but the house was still quiet. Kyle had gone home to sleep, and I’d been pretending to read a book in the den, but all I was doing was reading the same paragraph over and over again because the words refused to make sense.

  Samantha cried a little, her voice thick, when she left a message for her dad telling him how sorry she was about Melody, that she loved him, and that she wanted to help if there was anything she could do. After she was done, she asked me if she could call Jonathan, and when I said yes, she took her cell phone into her room and shut the door.

  I had a feeling it was going to be a long call, so I powered up my laptop again. I had work to do.

  Ryan had suspected that Melody had a stalker, and the evidence he’d told me about had sure pointed in that direction. I had no proof that the stalker was the same person who’d murdered her, but I had no proof that he wasn’t, either.

  Kyle and Norton were both right, too. I couldn’t investigate her murder the way I usually went about most investigation—by going backwards from the incident. Not only did the police have access to reports and data and investigation techniques that I didn’t, if I butted in on their investigation, I’d just end up in jail for real on a charge of obstruction. I was better off concentrating on the stalker. At least it gave me a place to start.

  According to Ryan, Melody’s stalker had started by sending her flowers. A single red rose a day for a week to her at work.

  Melody hadn’t wanted to talk to Ryan about the roses. Okay, fine. But the roses had to come from somewhere.

  Like a grocery store.

  A guy could buy a single red rose along with a loaf of bread and a stick of salami at any number of grocery stores around town, but if that’s where the roses came from, the guy who bought them would either have to deliver them in person or make arrangements for someone else to do it. If the women at the gym were like women everywhere, a red rose a day would get noticed.

  So would whoever delivered it.

  Stacy, the fashion-model thin woman behind the front desk at the gym, struck me as the kind of person who’d pay attention to a man who’d make that kind of romantic gesture, whether the gesture was wanted or not. If the roses had been delivered by a florist, she might even remember which one. The only way to find that out was to talk to her, something I wasn’t looking forward to.

  If a florist was involved, they might have a record of who bought the roses. Even if the guy paid in cash, a lot of retail stores had video cameras trained on the cash register. I couldn’t compel them to let me look at surveillance tapes, but I’m pretty good at talking people into showing me what I needed to see.

  Most days, anyway. Today I might look a little too stressed around the edges to carry off my normal, easy-going, you-can-tell-me-anything manner.

  Of course, if the guy had used a bunch of different florists, it would take me a lot more time. I might be able to cut that time down if I contacted the florists by phone first instead of paying each of them a visit.

  Speaking of phone calls, Ryan had told me that after the roses stopped, the stalker had moved up to harassing calls to the house and no doubt to Melody’s cell as well. Ryan had told me the caller ID on those calls had been blocked.

  The cops might be able to trace those calls. I couldn’t. I’m not a computer hacker and I don’t have any contacts who could get me information like that.

  Even if I knew what phone company to check. I had no clue who Ryan’s telephone service provider was, and Melody’s cell probably burned up along with her car. Besides, if the stalker was smart, he would have used a prepaid phone and then dumped it. From my perspective, trying to track the phone calls was a dead end.

  So were the photographs. Ryan had told me that Melody destroyed them. Nothing for me to track there.

  Or was there? Justin Sewell had clearly been taking pictures of Melody with his cell phone. What if Sewell had taken the pictures Ryan saw? If he had, he could have been the guy on the phone as well, the one who’d hung up whenever Ryan answered. Was that why Melody told Ryan she was used to dealing with unwanted attention from men, because she knew Sewell was the guy making the phone
calls and she’d just assumed he’d taken the pictures, too?

  But then what about the roses? Had she assumed they’d come from Sewell as well?

  Come to think of it, how had Ryan even found out about the roses if they’d been delivered to Melody at work?

  I should have asked him back when we first discussed the whole thing, but I’d been too surprised by his request to really think through everything I might need to know. I couldn’t ask him now since I wasn’t supposed to be talking to him, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to make Samantha be the go-between on something like that.

  It seemed from the photo I’d taken that the attention Sewell had been showering on Melody wasn’t exactly something she hated. From Ryan’s perspective, she’d attracted a stalker. Maybe what she’d really attracted was a new boyfriend, and she didn’t care if one of Ryan’s friends found out.

  I needed more information on Sewell, so I did a quick background check.

  Born in Boca Raton, Florida, Justin Sewell was thirty-eight years old. He’d worked for his current bank for the last four and a half years, which was how long he’d lived in Reno. Before that, he’d been employed by a series of mortgage brokerages in Southern California.

  The addresses where he’d lived since he’d come to Reno were all apartment buildings or condos, and it seemed like he bounced from place to place every six months. He had a modest bank account, an unremarkable credit history, no bankruptcies, he owned no property, and he had one car registered to his name, a three year old Prius. He’d never been married, and he had no litigation history in the court records I could access online. His parents were both deceased, and I could find no record of any siblings.

  I was much more social media savvy now than I’d been last year when Samantha had introduced me to the world of blogging. These days I included searches of all major social media sites whenever I did a background check.

  Justin Sewell had a LinkedIn profile, which was nothing more than typical banking promotional material. If he had a Facebook account, it wasn’t under his own name. Ditto for Twitter and Pinterest.

  Sewell was a big fat nothing online. If he was a player, he didn’t talk about it and no one else talked about him. Even a Google Images search on the name resulted in nothing except a picture of a smiling farmer in his eighties who’d grown a record-setting pumpkin a few years back.

  The only thing out of the ordinary about Sewell was that he changed addresses frequently. Then again, he’d seemed to be new at that particular branch of his bank, so maybe he hopped from branch to branch every six months or so and just moved to be closer to his work. The address for his current apartment was near Reno High, only a couple of miles away from the branch where he worked.

  The other way to get a handle on whether Melody knew Sewell as more than just a casual lunch date was to see what I could find online about her. I’d never bothered to look her up before, not even when Ryan and I had first split up. Back then my ego couldn’t have handled it. Now I didn’t have a choice.

  Unlike Justin, Melody was all over the social media sites. She had a LinkedIn profile as a personal trainer, complete with a photo of her in skin-tight lavender leotards. She had a Twitter feed, although she didn’t seem to post there often, unlike Facebook where I found multiple posts per day and more photographs than I had on my thumb drive.

  The majority of the photographs were selfies. I felt ghoulish as I scrolled through picture after picture taken by a smiling, happy woman who’d pointed her cell phone camera at her own face, recording each happy day, blissfully unaware that her life was almost over. She’d taken some of the pictures in the foyer at the gym. I recognized the rock wall behind her. She’d snapped others at different night clubs or restaurants around town, only some of which looked familiar.

  Then there were the pictures she’d taken of herself with her friends. Stacy from the gym was in a few of the pictures with Melody. One picture showed Melody with a group of women, all wearing paper party hats and blowing noisemakers. The date the picture had been posted was last New Year’s Eve. The caption below the picture identified the women by name: Melody, Stacy, Meghan, Gloria, and big sis Naomi.

  I’d never known Melody had a sister. The resemblance was obvious, although Naomi’s hair was a shade darker blonde and she had maybe ten pounds or so on Melody, a difference that was only noticeable because her cheekbones weren’t quite as defined as her sister’s. The picture had been taken at a private party—I could see a living room couch and a flat screen television in the background with the Times Square ball slowly descending toward the new year—but the one thing I didn’t see in the picture was Ryan.

  In fact, Ryan wasn’t in any of the pictures on Melody’s Facebook. Most of the pictures were of Melody alone or Melody with her girlfriends. No LOL cats or cute dogs, funny cartoons or memes, another term I’d learned from Samantha.

  I scanned Melody’s Facebook wall as far back as the program would let me. Whenever she made an actual post that wasn’t a picture, it was about the fun she’d had the night before or a great new clothes shop she’d discovered or the smoothie she couldn’t believe was low calorie because it just tasted so good.

  Not one mention of Ryan anywhere, which made me wonder if that was Melody’s decision, or his.

  Ryan had worked hard to build a reputation as a quality attorney. The website for his law firm oozed solid professionalism from every pixel. None of the partners in the firm were over fifty, but the website was so old school that I always expected to see a picture of John Houseman on the home page.

  The firm had hired a media consultant to spruce up their internet presence back when we’d still been married. I used to tease Ryan about the difference between his real personality—former college jock who still played every sport like he was going for the gold—and the calm, competent, professional persona he was trying to convey. He’d told me that flamboyant personalities went hand in hand with criminal law, but in order to attract business clients, the ones with deep pockets who could afford to pay their legal fees, he had to appear more serious than he really was.

  Image gets them in the door, he’d said. From there, it was up to him to keep them from walking back out again. If all of that meant he had to act more dignified than he really was, so be it.

  If Melody was really the party girl her online persona portrayed, that wouldn’t have fit with the brand Ryan had worked so hard to create for himself. I could just imagine the discussions he’d had with her about what he did and did not want her posting as far as he was concerned.

  But did that explain why Melody hadn’t included a relationship status on her Facebook page?

  Ryan had his own Facebook account. Just like the firm’s website, Ryan’s Facebook was subdued to the point of being downright staid. Melody could have mentioned that she was engaged to Ryan Maxon and left it at that. She hadn’t.

  Then again, when I clicked over the Ryan’s Facebook page for a quick look, I noticed that he hadn’t indicated a relationship status either.

  Maybe teenagers were the only ones who did that.

  But were teenagers the only ones who looked at Facebook to determine if someone was single? If Justin Sewell had looked up Melody on Facebook, he might have assumed she was available. And if she accepted the roses he sent, talked to him on the phone, and agreed to meet him for lunch and flirted with him after she left, didn’t that point to an affair in the making rather than a stalker?

  I clicked back to the picture of Melody and the other women taken on New Year’s Eve.

  Ryan had told me they were going to a party at a colleague’s house. At the time I’d been nursing a separated shoulder and living with Samantha in a rented condo while Norton Greenburger was having the crime scene my house had become cleaned so that Samantha and I could move back home. Ryan had been more attentive to me during that whole time than he’d been since we’d been divorced, and because of that, he’d been sure that I knew what his plans were for New Year’s Eve.


  Ryan should have been in that picture with Melody.

  I knew what he was like. He just didn’t decide a day or two before Valentine’s Day to pop the question. He would have known, even back then, that he loved this woman enough to marry her. Hell, he’d loved her enough to break his daughter’s heart when he’d left us for her.

  Of all of the pictures on Melody’s Facebook, he should have been in this damn picture. So why wasn’t he?

  Something was stabbing me in the hand. I looked down and realized that I’d clenched my fingers into such a tight fist my nails were digging into my palm.

  I was furious, and worse than that, I was furious with a dead woman. She’d hurt the man some part of me would always love. She’d died and left him alone and broken, and I couldn’t fix it.

  It wasn’t logical to be angry at her because she was dead, so I’d shifted the focus of my fury to some imagined slight because he’d been left out of this picture. But why did I assume he’d been left out on purpose? For all I knew, he’d been watching a football game with the guys in another room or taking a bathroom break or been doing any one of a million other things. He could have been the one taking the picture, for god’s sake, since this one wasn’t a selfie.

  I slammed the laptop closed more forcefully than the poor machine deserved.

  I had to get a grip. Norton and Kyle were right. I had no business working this case, not if I couldn’t keep a lid on my emotions.

  I’d only stepped away from a case once in my life, and it had been because my emotions wouldn’t let me see straight. I still had a file in my desk drawer at the office where I’d stuffed all the work I’d done trying to find the hit and run driver who’d nearly killed my daughter. Norton would have called that file my albatross. I thought of it as my white whale.

  I didn’t need a second white whale in my life. Especially not one of my own making.