Dirty Little Secrets (Romantic Mystery) Book 1 in the J.J. Graves Series

by Hart, Liliana

  Jack sat at the small table in the kitchenette that had been added on to the downstairs of the funeral parlor when my parents had first married. I looked at the clock, surprised that I’d been at it almost an hour.

  “You are a sadistic bitch,” he said.

  “Yeah, isn’t it great?” The green tinge had left his cheeks, but he was still pale. “Here are your samples,” I said as I handed him a small paper bag. I tossed the file of notes I’d taken on her body in front of him, and he gave me a curious look before he picked up the file and began to read. Looking at the torture Fiona’s body had been through had affected me more than I’d expected.

  His mouth tightened as he saw the extensiveness of the damage to Fiona’s body. And then he stiffened. “Two sets of bite marks? You’re sure?”

  “I measured them twice. But who the hell knows who the second set belongs to.”

  “I’ll get someone to take an imprint of George’s mouth so we can compare. I have no idea who else is going to come up in this investigation, but things could get sticky.”

  “I really hope you’re wrong, Jack. I want it to be George.”

  “There’s all kinds of justice, Jaye. If George is responsible then he’ll pay.”

  I nodded and wrapped myself back up in my coat and gloves. “Let’s grab some breakfast. I’ve been up for hours and I’m starving.”

  “Are you still having problems sleeping? You should have bought illegal sleeping pills from Denny instead of those birth control pills. It’s not like you have to worry about getting pregnant wearing outfits like that.”

  I narrowed my eyes, but my lips twitched before I could help it. It was hard to argue with the truth.

  “You’re a bastard.”

  “But you love me,” he said, pulling my hat down low so it covered half my face. “Let’s go. I want to stop by the Murphy’s and see what my boys have found before we get breakfast. I’ll drive the sample into Richmond myself so it gets there before they close for the day.”

  Jack looked towards the basement stairs and back at me. I saw the conflict and indecision on his face on whether or not he could eat breakfast with me and keep it down. I had a tendency to talk shop at the dinner table.

  “You own me for that stunt you pulled earlier. If I wasn’t such a gentleman I’d make you buy breakfast.”

  It was a good thing Jack was a gentleman because I only had about four dollars and seventy-three cents in my wallet.

  Fiona’s car was being towed away as we passed by the scene of the murder. An officer stood in the middle of the road, flagging us down as we made our way towards the Murphy’s.

  “What’s up, Riley?” Jack asked.

  “I just thought I should give you this, Sheriff,” he said, handing Jack a small key. “I found it in a second search of the car. It had fallen between the seats, so I had a little trouble getting it out.”

  “It’s a safe deposit box key,” Jack said, holding it out to me to get a look at. “I’ve got one just like it for First National here in town. Good work, Riley.” Jack put the car in gear and headed to the end of the street.

  The crowd had dispersed to go back to their homes or jobs, and there were only two police cars parked in front of the Murphy house when we got there. A pair of scuffed boots stuck out from underneath George’s truck, so Jack and I headed in that direction to see if anything of consequence had been found.

  “Officer Mooney?” Jack asked. “Is that you under there?”

  “Yes, sir,” Mooney answered. He scooted out on his back and then stood up slowly, working the kinks out. He held a plastic bag in his hand, but I couldn’t really see what was inside.

  Jeremy Mooney had been two years behind me in school, but his sister Alice had been my age. Alice had barely gotten her cap and gown untangled and thrown on the floor before she’d headed out to the nearest big city. Jeremy had decided to do two years of junior college in Nottingham and join the force. He was the kind of guy who’d live in Bloody Mary forever, marry a local girl and breed a fifth generation of Bloody Mary Mooneys. He was twenty-eight years old and still carried the pudgy baby fat of adolescence and a light sprinkling of peach fuzz on his upper lip. He always looked like a kid playing dress up in his patrolman uniform.

  “What have you found?” Jack asked.

  Jeremy held up the little plastic bag so we could see what looked like a tiny sliver of mud. “I’ve found damned near to nothing,” he said. “Excuse my language, Dr. Graves. And I had to work to scrape this much off the tires. If he’d left prints with this vehicle in the mud down yonder then there would be splatters up under the wheel wells and the undercarriage, but I haven’t found anything. It’s clean as a whistle.”

  Jeremy chewed a wad of pink bubble gum and had a thoughtful look on his face. “George is one of those people who's blessed with having both balls and brains,” he said. “Pardon me again,” he apologized, face turning red.

  I just rolled my eyes because being irritated at Jeremy was like being irritated with a homeless puppy. It just wasn’t possible.

  “I’d agree with that statement,” Jack said patiently.

  Jeremy scratched the top of his sandy head. “Well it just seems to me that George wouldn’t be one to kill his wife and then go into town, plain as day, for a car wash to get rid of the evidence.”

  I hoped I’d concealed the surprise on my face that Jeremy was able to come to that conclusion by himself. He’d never struck me as the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I was sure Jack had hired him for some reason or other.

  “People who commit murder do all kinds of crazy things,” Jack said. “Why don’t you head into town and start talking to people at the diner and at the places across from the car wash. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will have seen him around town.”

  “Yessir, I’ll get right on it,” he said, leaving the bag with us.

  “He surprises me sometimes too,” Jack said, reading my mind. “Behind the naivety is a pretty sharp brain.”

  We headed inside the house just in time to hear the commotion. Detectives Colburn and Nash had identical grins on their faces. Both detectives were about a decade older than Jack and had been part of the department before Jack had been elected. I didn’t know either of them well, but they gave Jack the respect he deserved and didn’t try to cause trouble for him like a couple of the other older officers.

  “We found the motherlode,” Colburn said. “Would you like door number one or door number two?”

  “Just give it to me in order,” Jack said. “Tell me what you found first.”

  “There was a hidden panel inside the closet,” Nash said, taking over. “Let’s just say that George’s tastes in erotica run to the exotic. And some of it looked painful.”

  I thought of Fiona’s battered body and shuddered.

  “You okay?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just remembering.” Colburn and Nash looked at me oddly, and Jack squeezed the back of my neck in warning not to say too much, even in front of other cops, so I shut my mouth and gave them a blank-eyed stare. I wasn’t a good liar on my best day, and it was plainly obvious they wanted to ask more questions, but good manners kept them from doing so.

  “What else?” Jack asked to distract them.

  “We found a piece of paper with several sets of numbers printed on it in a box of Playtex hidden under the sink. They look like bank account numbers.”

  “Nice work, Detectives.” Jack had a grim smile on his face as he held up the piece of paper. “We’ll take a look. Finish up here and then close it down,” he said, slapping Colburn on the shoulder. “Make sure everyone has their report on my desk before they go off duty. We don’t want anything to slip by us.”

  We headed back to the Suburban in silence. I couldn’t think of very many situations where an abused woman would have the courage to keep multiple bank accounts and get herself a safety deposit box. And what could she possibly have of any worth to hide in them?

  “Would yo
u look through a box of Playtex if you thought a woman was hiding something important in there?” I asked Jack.

  “I wouldn’t look through a box of Playtex if there was gold bullion in there,” Jack said. “There are just some places a man should never go.”

  That’s what I’d thought he’d say. Fiona had obviously still had some wits about her. But why didn’t she take the account numbers with her if she was really leaving her husband? It seemed to me a woman starting a new life would need something to start it with. If Fiona had money saved then she’d definitely be taking it with her.

  I thought of my own scenario of picking up and starting over, and I wondered how I’d make it without leaving any electronic tracks behind and enough cash so I wouldn’t have to sleep under a bridge or beg for food. There would be no possible way to get that kind of start up cash without delving into the darker side of life. It left me asking the question again of what the hell Fiona had been mixed up in. Only this time I wasn’t so sure that George had anything to do with it.

  Chapter Four

  Slaughter’s Café was the only place in town to have a sit down breakfast in the mornings. It consisted of one tiny room with tables crammed into every available space, a kitchen that I never tried to look into because I didn’t really want to know what was going into my stomach, and a long cracked linoleum counter with a hand crank cash register on top. The walls were painted the color of egg yolks and the floor was covered in twenty years of bacon grease. Despite the potential for ptomaine poisoning, it did a brisk business because the food was outstanding.

  “When is Fiona’s family set to arrive?” I asked over a steaming plateful of eggs, bacon and pancakes. Jack had offered to pay, so I was able to get more than the measly eggs and toast my four dollars and seventy-three cents would have bought. I shot Jack’s own bowl of lumpy oatmeal a look of disgust. The man might be fine to look at, but he had no taste in food.

  “Her sister’s the only family she’s got left. Phyllis is her name. She was several grades ahead of us in school, so I don’t really remember her. She and her husband will be in this afternoon to help make arrangements for the body.”

  Jake spooned up a glop of oatmeal onto dry, whole-wheat toast and took a satisfied bite. “You know,” he said. “You’re going to keel over with a heart attack if you keep eating like that. Think what a bind that’s going to put us in if our only coroner dies. We’ll have to give your body to John Luke Stranton over at the Here and Now Funeral Parlor, and he’ll use too much rouge like he always does and you’ll look like a hooker. I hear he doesn’t put underwear on the bodies either.”

  “I’ve heard that too. Cheap bastard. And his prices are outrageous. I can’t afford him. You’ll just have to bury me in my back yard.”

  “We could just weigh your body down with rocks and throw you off the cliffs by your house. There’s always room for one more body in the Potomac.”

  “That’s not a bad idea. You know, I had no idea how much it cost to bury a loved one until I took over the business. Mom and dad had left instructions to be cremated, and they’d already taken care of the cost, so even then I didn’t realize how exorbitant it all was.”

  Jack squeezed my hand and looked at me steadily, but I focused my attention on my food and pretended the tears pricking at the corners of my eyes weren’t there. My parents had left me in a real fix financially, but they’d also left me in a fix emotionally. Jack was probably the only person who really understood how much it had hurt me to not be able to say goodbye to anything but their ashes. They’d already been cremated by the time I’d been notified of their deaths. And there was a rage inside me that was festering into something I wasn’t ready to face. It was so much easier to just put one foot in front of the other and try to tackle the other problems they’d left me with.

  “If you feel so guilty you could always lower your prices.”

  “No way. If I go any lower I’ll be able to qualify for food stamps. If more people died in this stupid town it wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Bite your tongue. Life makes my job a hell of a lot easier.”

  “Well, then, as long as your life is easier then I’m fine with being destitute. The house is falling down around my ears, I have student loans to pay off, and mom and dad took out a second mortgage on the funeral home.” I still didn’t know what the hell that money had been used for. I couldn’t find any record of it being spent, and just the thought of it made my stomach cramp. My parents couldn’t be criminals. Not on top of everything else.

  I drizzled more syrup on my pancakes and took joy where I could find it in the pained look on Jack’s face.

  “That’s disgusting, Jaye.”

  “You know, a lesser woman would probably be huddled on the floor in the fetal position crying her eyes out after everything that’s happened to me in the last year. But nothing can get me down. Things might look bad now, but in another twenty years my education will be mine free and clear. And then I can start shoveling my way out of the rest of it. My attitude is so fucking positive that I could give Oprah lessons.”

  Jack grinned a lopsided smile and spooned up another bite oatmeal. “I was just thinking the other day that there was something different about you. You know, all that good fortune that’s coming your way is a reason to eat better and live to see the day. Or I could give your stubborn ass a loan.”

  “No thanks, Jack. It’s my problem. I’ll deal with it my way.” It was the same thing I told him every time he offered. I’d feel like I was taking advantage of our friendship if I took his money, and that friendship was pretty much the only solid thing I had left in my life.

  I cleared my plate with a satisfied grunt, thankful I’d worn sweats with an elastic waist, and licked the last bite of syrup off my fork. “I’ve got to take off. I have a few errands to do in town before I get back to Fiona. Are you going to stop by the bank of your way back from Richmond?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” Jack said. “Don’t forger poker tonight. I’ll let you know what I find out then.”

  “Thanks for breakfast.” I eyed Jack’s oatmeal and an idea popped into my head. “You know, that oatmeal looks a little like…”

  “Don’t even think about saying it, or I’m going to arrest you.”

  “Sounds kinky,” I said. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  Bloody Mary was like most small towns. It had all the usual fixtures—a bank, a post office, a grocery store, a gas station, a funeral parlor and a smattering of independent businesses that barely scraped by from one month to the next. We had a mix of the very wealthy (usually tobacco farmers like Jack’s family) and the very poor. The town was more than two hundred years old, and the historical society didn’t approve of anything modern built between the crumbling brick buildings and the preserved wooden structures. But we did have two brand new stoplights that were put up last spring when Mrs. Meador and old lady Barlow got into a fist fight over who had the right-of-way. The police and fire stations were right next to City Hall, and all three structures sat smack dab in the center of King George County, since they served all four cities in the county.

  And like most small towns, any event that occurred, big or small, was going to be discussed and speculated over everyone’s morning coffee. And this morning, the death of Fiona Murphy was the biggest event to happen in Bloody Mary in quite some time.

  I parked the Suburban in two of the tiny parking spots in front of the post office. It was a perfectly square, red-bricked building with a flat roof and two small windows in the front. It sat on the corner of Henry VIII and Tudor, and thanks to its strategic location, it ran a close second to Martha’s Diner as the center of gossip.

  As soon as I walked through the doors to check my post office box I knew I’d made a mistake.

  “Well, Dr. Graves, I didn’t expect to see you in today,” Carlton Fisk said.

  Carlton had been the Postmaster for fifty-two years and he knew everything. And I really do mean everything. I’d been scared s
pitless of Carlton Fisk my whole life. The man was creepy. He could predict what the weather was going to be on Tuesday of next week, he’d picked the winning lottery numbers twice, and he knew when every woman in town was ovulating. Like I said. Creepy.

  The fact that he was about six feet eight and as old as Methuselah didn’t help matters any. His skin stretched taut over his bones, and thin white hair fell in strings down to his shoulders. His eyes were milky blue, and he drove a 1925 Studebaker Phaeton. Oddly enough, he’d decided to sell his house and move into one of the new condos that overlooked the County Square. He said it was better for his social life. He’d been married once upon a time, but his wife had died before I’d been born. Probably before my mother had been born.

  “Good morning, Mr. Fisk,” I sang cheerfully as I headed towards my mailbox as fast as I could go.

  The few people who were inside the post office stopped what they were doing to listen, just in case there was something new to discover.

  “I hear you’ve had a busy morning,” he continued. “Poor Fiona. That girl never stood a chance against George. We all knew what he was doing to her, could see the bruises plain as day, but she wouldn’t accept any help.”

  Carlton shook his head at the pity of it, while I dug around frantically in the bottom of my purse for my mailbox key. Why was it that I could never find what I was looking for when I was in a hurry?

  “Aha!” I said after unearthing it. But since I was an equal opportunist when Murphy’s Law was involved, I dropped it on the ground.

  “I heard from someone over at the police station that the size of those footprints they found matched George’s shoe size,” Carlton went on. “But they said there were no shoes in his closet that matched the tread. They also said the tires were the same as on his truck, but there was no mud on the wheels of George’s tires like there should have been. I’ve always thought that George was a lot smarter than he let on. Though I probably should have guessed it. He is a damned good mechanic.”