Black & White & Dead All Over: A Lost Hat, Texas, Mystery (The Lost Hat, Texas, Mystery Series Book 1)

by Anna Castle

  I doggedly opened each file, popping it up long enough to see that it wasn’t one of mine and quickly closing it again. I am no prude. I like sex as much as the next person. But I like the real-world kind: the touch, the smell, the warm. The connection.

  Which only proved that I was a woman.

  I got through the whole mess in twenty minutes by the clock on the screen. My head was woozier and I was bored. I wanted to find my photos and get out of there. I spent another ten minutes searching by every keyword I could think of with no useful hits. No tiffs, no gifs. No folders labeled victims or blackmailees or secrets. No files with the words Ty or Penny or Trigg anywhere in them. No Krystle or Cameron, either.

  “I don’t think our stuff is on this computer. It’s probably all on a flash drive in his closet at home.”

  Krystle slammed a file drawer shut. She seemed to be swaying. “This is hopeless. I found a folder for you, all right, but it’s just your service agreement and your bills. Nothing that says, For blackmail details, see document 10/B or whatever.”

  “What about yours?”

  “I don’t have a computer. He must’ve got me at the clinic. I read email there, sometimes, even though we’re not supposed to.”

  “Jeez, Krystle, if he’s spying on the clinic, he could have all sorts of things on people. Private medical things.”

  “Ugh.” She only sounded mildly concerned. “But nothing here that looks like what we’re looking for. Just regular business stuff.”

  “Is there a list of his customers? Maybe we can find another ally. Somebody who knows more about computers than we do.”

  “Hmm.” She opened a drawer, studied it for a minute, and pulled out a file. “I’ll make a copy.”

  “Make two.”

  She left the room and soon I heard a copy machine humming in the reception area. I turned my own flashlight back on and studied the shelves beside the desk. Mostly manuals and books about technical stuff. I found a stack of DVDs, but they looked like movies. What did he do for backups? Something only wizards would know, probably. Something fancy.

  I jiggled the mouse on the other computer to wake it up. All I got was another gray-lit screen, blank except for that cryptic /home/MIS::>. By now I was feeling bolder and more desperate.

  I typed find jpeg and got find: bad argument. I typed eat my shorts and got a message saying eat: command not found. So I typed Greg, you are the most obnoxious asshole in the history of assholes, and got an avalanche of error messages, from Greg: command not found to assholes: bad argument.

  Couldn’t have put it better myself.

  Chapter 15

  I felt stupid and frustrated and more than a little soiled, from clicking through all that pornography. I tried to focus. Greg was a bona fide computer expert. We were going to need another expert to get us out of his clutches. And I knew just the guy: a high-tech security wizard who spent half his Saturday nights in bed with me. A weight of resignation settled on me like a sack of wet towels. The only way out was the right way. I had to tell Ty everything.

  On the other hand, if I confessed, I would no longer need his help. Round and round in the circle I go. My feeble brain couldn’t fight through the conundrum. “Crap all over it.”

  I slumped in Greg’s stinky chair, staring at that gray screen. Suddenly I realized that the first thing Greg would see when he came in was assholes: bad argument. He would know somebody had been here. I crawled under the desk, found a power strip, and switched it off. Both computers went dark with a whir and a clunk.

  I waited for a minute to make sure everything was really all the way off, crouching under the desk on my hands and knees like a dog.

  The light from Krystle’s flash illuminated a circle on the floor behind the desk. “Woof,” I said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m in the doghouse and there’s no way out.”

  “You and me both.” She yawned hugely. “Let’s make like a banana and split.”

  Suddenly a broad beam of light flashed down the hall and across the side windows. We heard the crunch of tires on gravel. A car was pulling into the lot.

  “Oh, shit!” Krystle said.

  “Oh, shit!” I echoed, hitting my head on the underside of the desk.

  “What’re we going to do?”

  “Hide!”

  We clicked off our flashlights at the same time and promptly ran into each other as we tried to squeeze through the door. We were doing a rerun of I Love Lucy; I knew it. If only Ricky and Fred would come and save the day.

  “Hide where?” Adrenaline was flooding through my system in such a rush I felt shivers up and down my spine, raising gooseflesh on my arms.

  “In the bathroom. In back. Hurry!”

  Krystle grabbed my arm and pulled me through the kitchen and across the short back hall. We saw a well of light under the back door turn to darkness and heard a car door close quietly. Footsteps crunched on the gravel outside.

  The bathroom door thumped open against an inner wall. I used both hands to fumble my way in. Krystle was on my left so I went right, pressing up beside a small sink. I managed to squash myself in enough to close the door and flipped down the latch, locking us in.

  I was breathing through my open mouth, trying to get enough air to calm my heart rate without making a sound. The darkness was so deep I saw neon spirals before my eyes. I felt Krystle’s hand flap against my face and twitched. Her hand traveled down my arm to my hand and gripped it tight. I gripped back.

  We heard scratching sounds on the back door and then a soft clunk. The door squeaked as it opened and slow steps entered the hall. A muffled bump and light glowed under the bathroom door. Now I could see the pale outlines of the sink and the toilet. Krystle’s dark form was pressed against the wall alongside the john. The light faded. We stood in utter darkness, trying not to breathe. I felt a tickle of hysteria stirring in my belly, rising into my throat, nearly breaking out in a giggle. I bit my lip to force it back down. A small noise from Krystle’s direction told me she was suffering the same problem.

  What were the odds that the new intruder was another blackmail victim come to look for his incriminating documents? It couldn’t be Greg or a deputy checking out a possible burglary. Either one of them would turn on the lights. So here we were, Burglars Number One and Two, hiding in the powder room from Burglar Number Three. If a Number Four showed up, we were going to need another tin of cookies.

  A masculine voice said, “Shit,” loud enough for us to hear plainly. Krystle drew in a sharp breath.

  I shifted my head as close to Krystle as I could get, and whispered, “Another Mac user.”

  She made a strangled sound and pushed me away.

  Then nothing: no light, no sound. I don’t know how long we stood in that dark bathroom, waiting. Fifteen minutes? Thirty? It was colder in here than it had been in the office. I took my gloves out of my pocket and pulled them on.

  Finally, the bottom of the bathroom door glowed brightly and we heard footsteps on the vinyl floor of the kitchen. Cupboard doors opened and closed. We hadn’t even thought to look in there. I heard the unmistakable rattle of a metal tin being opened.

  On top of everything else, he was eating the cookies. He’d better have left me some.

  The tin clinked back onto the countertop. The light under the door grew stronger as the footsteps entered the hall. For a moment, we could almost see each other’s faces; then the back door opened and closed and the light was gone.

  The minute the car started up, Krystle pulled the bathroom door open, flattening me against the wall.

  “Hey!”

  She ignored me. I struggled out from behind the door and followed her down the hall. She was silhouetted against the front blinds, peeking through a crack. “That was Mike.”

  “Who?”

  “Deputy Finley.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “That was a county car. And I know his smell.” She took a big sniff by way of illustration.
<
br />   I sniffed, too, and got distinct traces of patchouli.

  “Polo Black,” she said.

  “Wow, you’re good!” She was like a scent detective.

  “We had a beer one night.”

  Jim had been right: the two beautiful blond people had found each other. “With lashings of Polo Black?”

  “Just a beer. I can’t get involved with anyone right now.”

  I wondered why not, but decided this was neither the time nor the place for a review of her romantic issues. “He must be another blackmailee,” I said. “I wonder if that’s good or bad for us.”

  “Bad,” Krystle said. “If that creep can blackmail a deputy sheriff, he’s got more pull than we can handle.”

  “Handles are for pulling.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.” What had I said? Words were flowing past me like dark water. “I feel weird.”

  “Me, too.” We stood in silence for a minute, feeling the weirdness.

  “We are so stoned,” Krystle said.

  “We are, aren’t we? But how?”

  “I think there was something fishy about those pfeffernüsse.”

  “Fishy pfeffer? Pfeffer fishy?”

  Giggles burst out of us like water gushing from a broken fire hydrant. Soon there were tears streaming down my eyes and I was holding onto the wall for support.

  Krystle recovered first, gasping and wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “We gotta get out of here.”

  I nodded. My stomach was starting to go sour and my legs felt like stumps of wood.

  We filed down the hall in silence. We got to the kitchen and Krystle flicked on her light to check out the window area. “We’re going to have to lay low for a while,” she said. “Until we come up with a better plan.”

  “It’s probably all in his house.”

  She shot me a speculative look.

  I shook my head vehemently. “No. No way. I’m not breaking into his house. We’d have to do it in the middle of the day, when he’s here. Someone would see us.”

  She held my gaze until we both started wobbling. Eyes were too strange when you were high on spice cookies.

  “What do you think it is?” I asked.

  “What what is?”

  “Whatever is in those cookies.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been into drugs.”

  “Me, neither. I think Deputy Finley ate some of ’em.”

  Krystle gave a short laugh. “Maybe we can ask him.”

  “It didn’t sound like he found anything, either.”

  “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

  “Bad,” I said. “It means we’re still on square one.”

  We sighed hugely. “We need to move,” she said.

  “I thought we were moving.”

  We managed to get out the back door, which Finley had left unlocked. We put the screen on the window and lugged the cinder blocks back to where we’d found them. They were twice as heavy this time.

  Krystle had hidden her bicycle behind the overflowing dumpster at the back of the lot. I had jogged over, Doc Martens and all, and was looking forward to getting warm again on the jog back. Unless I fell asleep in someone’s shrubbery.

  “What about that guy you’re seeing?” Krystle whispered as she swung her leg over her bike frame. She missed the first time and had to whirl the pedal back up to try again. “Ty Hawkins, right? Isn’t he like some big computer wizard?”

  “Uh,” I said, “there’s a slight problem with that.”

  “Oh. Well, we’ll think of something. But we’re gonna have to get into his house.”

  Oh, goody. More B&E. I was adding a whole new set of skills to my repertoire. And people had told me moving to Lost Hat would be a dead end for my career.

  Chapter 16

  I woke up late, feeling groggy. Those pfeffernüsse had definitely been spiked. With the aid of a fistful of ibuprofen and a pot of extra-strong coffee, I managed to drag myself over to the studio. The phone was ringing as I unlocked the back door.

  Surprise! It was my new best friend.

  * * *

  Greg wiped pink icing off his lips with a paper towel as I dropped the flash drive with my website designs on his desk. He had missed a spot: a dab of pink jagged with coconut clung to his soul patch. It reminded me of Jim and gave me a wrench of mingled disgust and sadness. “How can you eat those things? After what happened to Jim.”

  “Nothing to do with me. I always have a snack in the middle of the morning. Keeps my energy up.”

  I sat in the visitor’s chair in front of his desk, trying to scan the area through my peripheral vision to see if anything seemed out of place. Nothing leapt out at me. Of course, he’d been in there for a while already.

  I wondered if I should say something about drugged pfeffernüsse and the possibility that the cake Jim ate had been drugged as well. Then I flashed on Greg offering me a pink cake the last time I’d sat in this chair. Maybe he drugged the cakes himself; one more way to screw with his victims. Maybe he liked a little buzz in the middle of the morning, to tide him over until he started drinking shots at five o’clock. He was a blackmailer. Drug abuse could easily be part of the picture.

  Greg looked at me with a speculative glint in his eyes. “I think someone broke in here last night.”

  “What?” I tried to sound shocked. “What makes you think that?”

  “The back door was unlocked.”

  “You probably forgot to lock it. I do that at the studio sometimes.” I shrugged. “Small town. You know.”

  “I never forget. And there were footprints in the sink.”

  “Footprints!” We hadn’t thought to check the sink before we left. Thinking fast, I said, “What, like raccoons? People warned me about them. They’re persistent and clever and they have hands. If you left the back door unlocked, maybe they got in and rummaged around in your kitchen. You’ve got all these sweets in here.” I gestured at the cake wrappers in the wastebasket.

  “Not raccoons. Boot prints.” He glanced pointedly at my feet. I’d worn my Doc Martens again. They were my favorites in the winter.

  Greg’s tongue flicked his bottom lip in a gesture he seemed to think was meaningful. All it said to me was that he didn’t have anything concrete or he’d be threatening me instead of doing toad impressions.

  “Boot prints in the sink, huh? That’s weird. Why would anybody stand in the sink?”

  “I think they came in through the window.”

  “I thought you said the back door was open.”

  He glared at me. He knew, and he knew that I knew he knew, but he also knew that I knew he couldn’t prove it. “I think they came in the window but went out the door.”

  “If they could get through the door, why would they bother with the window?” Now I was having fun. Knowing that we’d gotten away with our midnight adventure was better than all the pills in the pharmacy.

  “I think they came in the window, which must have been left unlocked yesterday and found the spare key in Pam’s drawer.” He jerked his chin toward the reception area. “Then they went out the back door.”

  I nodded sagely, wondering if that spare key was still in Pam’s drawer or if it might be somewhere about the person of a certain deputy sheriff. When had Deputy Finley stolen that little key? Perhaps the last time he’d had to sit in Greg’s office to get instructions for his penalty?

  “That sounds plausible. What did they take?”

  He held my eyes for a moment in a level gaze, to show me that he wasn’t buying my innocent act. I fluttered my lashes and smiled a guiltless smile. He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his belly. The fluorescent lights reflected off his glasses so I couldn’t see his eyes, but the smirk on his lips showed me that he knew he still had the upper hand. “Nobody’s going to find anything interesting here. Not unless they know a whole lot more about computers than” — his smirk broadened into a grin — “than a raccoon.”

  Very funny. An
d yet, he was not wrong. None of us had gotten even a whiff of what we’d been looking for last night.

  “Still,” Greg said, “I do fear that some of the small creatures in this town have too much time on their hands for their own good. So I’ve come up with a new job for you.”

  “I did the website templates,” I said, pointing at the flash drive.

  He nodded, but didn’t bother to look at it. “Good girl. I’ll check your work later. In the meantime…” He jerked his chin toward the sagging couch.

  My nostrils flared and my ears went back as I leapt to my feet, fists clenched. “No. Fucking. Way. I’ll kill you first. I mean it, Greg.”

  “What?” He looked genuinely taken aback — almost afraid — which was good. I liked that look.

  He glanced from me to the couch and back to me and his cheeks flared as pink as a raspberry snack cake. “Oh! Oh, no, you’ve got the wrong idea! I meant the yearbooks!”

  “The what?” I relaxed a notch.

  “Sit down and I’ll explain it to you.”

  I gave him a wary look, but the fire had gone out. Not enough fuel. I sat down. “What yearbooks?”

  “Those.” He pointed at three tall stacks of bound volumes on the coffee table in front of the sofa. “The high school alumni club hired me to put their old yearbooks online. A paltry amount of money, but it’ll earn me a lot of goodwill. Everybody who’s anybody in this town graduated from Lost Hat High School.”

  I knew what was coming. I sighed and closed my eyes. All of a sudden I felt as limp as leftover salad.

  “You’re going to scan those books for me, one image per page, in order, one folder per year. Then you’re going to link each image into the template that I’ll send you, listing the names of everyone on each page in the keywords tag at the top. I’ll send you the full instructions.”

  I went over and sat on the couch. I opened one of the top books and flipped through it. “There’s like a hundred pages in each of these volumes. It’ll take weeks. I can give you a better estimate after I do the first one.”

  “You’ve got three days. Three and half, counting today. I want the images uploaded by the end of day on Friday.”