“And do you have a man in your life?” she asked. “I ran into that ex-husband of yours, and he said he’s seeing someone.”
Just the type of news I want from home. I was homesick sometimes, but never for my ex. Steve was a charming Italian who was fond of cooking his family’s secret pasta recipe in nothing but an apron. I used to watch, fantasizing about both the apron and the pasta. Nowadays I fantasized about what I’d do with the kitchen knives he’d taken in the settlement.
I forced myself to answer her question. “No one at the moment. What about you?”
Henrietta’s head shot up. Aunt Alice sniffed again, but before she could respond further, fate had a change of heart—or remembered I’d never stolen money from the collection plate—because Oliver stumbled out of the bedroom. He was still pulling his shirt on over his head and was followed closely by Meow.
Aunt Alice saw his naked torso, with its tattoo of eleven tiny birds circling his left shoulder, and cast her eyes away in disapproval. But Henrietta’s eyes lingered a little too long. Or had I imagined it?
Oliver blinked a few times as he adjusted to the light, wiped his hair out of his face, and looked over at our guests. “Good morning. Who do we have here?”
“Oliver, meet my aunt Alice and cousin Henrietta.” I turned to the women who shared my blood. “Oliver’s my housemate,” I explained, to stop Aunt Alice assuming I’d lied about the boyfriend thing or that he was some random stranger I liked to have sex with. Not that I’d ever been the type to have sex with random strangers, but Aunt Alice believed I was capable of anything… so long as it was bad. Or something she considered bad. And she considered a lot of things bad, so I guess I should’ve been flattered in a way.
Oliver was looking over Henrietta with appreciation. I tried not to blame him, considering she hadn’t opened her mouth yet. She was stunning after all. Long ash-blond hair, determined blue eyes, and lips with the ideal amount of pout. And that was from the neck up. She was also tall and slim with muscle tone she honed at the gym six days a week and accentuated with chaste but flattering designer clothes.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you both,” he said. “Is this your first time in LA?”
Henrietta nodded. Aunt Alice merely lifted her chin.
“I’m afraid visiting in December doesn’t show her off to her full, sunny advantage, but even now she’s got England beat by a mile.” Oliver had come to Los Angeles for a girl but stayed for the weather. I could understand that; the winter in California was the same temperature as summer in the UK.
“Is that where you’re from?” Henrietta asked. “I love your accent.”
I was so shocked I almost fell face-first into the bowl of minced cod liver I was preparing for Meow. I’d never heard Henrietta flirt before. I looked up to see her blushing prettily and began to formulate a plan. “Will you two excuse us for a moment?”
I grabbed Oliver and dragged him into my room. “Could you do me a huge favor?” Okay, I felt kind of bad for throwing him to the wolves, but as a bartender, he’d perfected the art of dealing with all personalities and didn’t let anything anyone said get to him. I had neither of those skills going for me, so it was more like putting the strongest team member in play. At least they were well-washed wolves with good oral hygiene, which made getting snapped at less unpleasant. Plus I’d bake him a lot of cookies in return.
“Let me guess,” he said. “You want me to babysit.”
“Well, I’ve got a lot on today.”
He looked at my pajamas. “Obviously.”
“And Aunt Alice is my worst nightmare.”
“That sounds more like it.”
“And I’ll cook you whatever you want and clean the house for a week.”
“Just one?”
“I caught you admiring Henrietta.”
“Make it two.”
I held out my hand and we shook. “Deal.”
It was the best bargain I had ever made.
I stepped into the shower on the pretense of getting ready for my oh-so-important day’s business while Oliver herded my nightmare and her daughter out of the apartment. My phone rang when I was lathering shampoo through my hair. Grumbling, I leaned out of the shower to peek at it. Connor.
I wiped my hand on a towel and put the call on loudspeaker, wondering why I still had his number in my phone. It was probably against Taste Society regulations. Personal relationships among Shades were discouraged to make us harder for prospective poisoners to identify, and the same might go for Shades and investigators.
“Change of plans,” Connor said. “You’re going to be helping me on the case after all. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.”
He hung up before I could respond. Jerk. How did he even know I was home? Had he never gotten rid of that GPS app that allowed him to locate me? And why the change of plans?
Despite his presumptuousness and lack of explanation, my mood lifted. I hoped there weren’t any Freudian implications to that either.
I hurried to finish off my shower and considered what to wear. It shouldn’t matter, seeing as I’d turned down an invitation to sleep with Connor months ago and wasn’t angling for another, but I wanted to look good. Especially after the sweats yesterday. I fought with myself over it and settled on an ivory long-sleeved dress to hide the cat scratches, with stretchy leggings and flat-soled ankle boots. Connor loved heels. So did masochists.
I didn’t have time to do any more than swipe some serum through my hair to prevent the electrocuted look and gunk up my eyelashes with mascara. It’d have to do. Somehow I doubted Connor would be impressed.
Ugh. Another thought hit me. How was I going to explain Connor’s presence to Etta? I was composing a text asking him to park down the street when I realized Etta was probably waiting for me to carry Dudley down the stairs. Stuff it. I’d think of a way to explain his presence. My back depended on it.
He arrived before I had a chance to shovel any food into me, and I’d left my muffins at Earnest’s. This was not my week. I grabbed a banana and tried to convince myself it would be good for me.
I don’t mind banana, but I prefer it in pudding or cake.
Etta beat me out onto the landing. “Connor! It’s so lovely to see you.”
I bet she was finding it lovely. He was wearing his usual PI attire: a tailored shirt (pale gray, today), black dress shoes, and blue jeans that were just the right amount of snug. I saw Etta’s eyes dip down as he turned to face me.
“Don’t listen to her,” I said. “She only wants you to carry Dudley down the stairs.” Okay, that’s what I wanted, but he didn’t need to know he was doing me a favor.
He’d had a haircut, and the stubble was gone. Making me feel even more scruffy. I knew for a fact that he looked equally good in a T-shirt or a suit too.
“Who’s Dudley?” he asked.
Etta had left the door open, and Dudley moseyed out. I was gratified that he came to say hi to me first before going up to sniff Connor. “Meet Dudley, Etta’s new gentleman companion.”
Connor gave Dudley a scratch behind the ear before picking him up. “Where do you want him?”
“Oh, aren’t you a dear? Down the bottom of the stairs is fine. He’s still learning to navigate them. We got halfway up yesterday, but he seems to find going down harder.”
Eighty pounds of couch potato was nothing to Connor. Etta shot me an I-told-you-so look before hurrying to catch up with him. “What brings you here anyway? We’ve missed seeing you around. Are you and Izzy getting back together?”
“No.”
He could have at least hesitated. I rolled my eyes at myself. It’s not like we’d ever been going out to begin with.
“We’re just friends,” I told Etta. “But my company has, uh, hired him for a project, and we’ll be working together for some of it.”
“What kind of project?”
“The usual kind, meaning confidential,” I said.
Connor deposited Dudley onto the sidewalk. Etta clippe
d on his leash before eyeballing us, one hand on her hip. “You two are no fun at all.”
“You have enough fun for the both of us,” I retorted and saw her smile as we turned away.
Déjà vu hit hard as I climbed onto the tan leather seats of Connor’s SUV, and I had to remind myself not to call him schnookums. I suspected he’d appreciate it even less than he used to after our time apart.
Which meant he’d probably want to push me out the moving vehicle.
“How has your leg healed up?” he asked in reference to my previous encounter with a bullet. The question caught me off guard.
In my surprise, I forgot I was mad at his last-minute phone call. “Oh, fine. I mean, I have a scar that’s hard to explain, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. How’s… Maria?” Maria cooked and cleaned for Connor and maybe did more covert duties for him as well. I’d liked her instantly, and not just because she was amazing in the kitchen.
“Good. She told me to bring you this.” He handed me a thermos, and I realized the car smelled like coffee.
Real, espresso coffee, properly extracted.
I wondered if I was having olfactory hallucinations, if there was such a thing, but my eyes confirmed it. Real coffee.
“How?” I asked. It was a thermos, not a disposable takeout cup, and I couldn’t see Maria purchasing an espresso and pouring it into a thermos for me. She had to have made it. But when I’d worked with Connor a few months ago, he’d had a worthless automatic drip machine.
Connor had a thermos too, and he sipped it before answering. “My job is to test out recruits, not be nice to them.”
When we’d met, I’d been fresh out of the Taste Society facility where I’d trained to become a Shade, and as far as I’d known, Connor was my first client. Twenty-four hours in, an urgent case had come up that he needed to investigate, so he’d told me the truth: All Shades have a secret, practical assessment to test their competence before being assigned to a real client. He’d been mine, and he’d passed me. Barely.
Now, it took a second for me to make sense of his words, and when I did, I gaped at him incredulously. “Are you saying you acted like a jerk and made me drink filthy drip coffee to—I don’t even know—test my mettle or something?”
“The jerk part didn’t take much acting.” He took another sip and put the thermos in the center console cup holder. “But drinking all that filter coffee damn near killed me.”
I snatched his thermos and peered inside. It was real coffee. My brain couldn’t come to grips with it. Like trying to unravel a lifetime of being told the world is round, only to find out it’s a stew pot for some intergalactic giant. “Holy guacamole,” I said at last, too shocked to be mad yet. “You really are dedicated to your job.” I let it sink in some more. “No wonder you were such a grump.”
Connor grabbed his thermos back. “Like I said, the jerk part was easy.”
I remembered to sip my own coffee. The liquid was heavenly. I closed my eyes and leaned back in appreciation. “Tell Maria I love her.”
Connor snorted softly.
I gave myself a few minutes of reveling in my espresso before getting down to business. I couldn’t believe he’d forced himself to drink, and by extension forced me to drink, the insipid coffee-flavored dishwater that was filter coffee for our whole assignment. He’d grimaced, actually grimaced, when I’d made him “try” an espresso. Refused to finish it, in fact. What kind of self-control did this man have? Was he even human? Come to think of it, if he were a cyborg, that would explain a lot.
The cyborg idea was Earnest’s influence on me showing through. A sober reminder. “So why am I back on the case?”
“Orders from above. Earnest’s computer hard drives have been wiped clean. We’ve got almost nothing to work with.”
The air went out of me. Earnest’s hard drives had been wiped? The information on his computer was key to cracking the case. It had to be. It was the one place he could’ve interacted with his murderer. Which must be why the murderer destroyed it.
“How did it get wiped?” I asked. Not that the how of it mattered. We had about one in a million odds of even starting to solve the case now.
“The research team came a few minutes after you left yesterday and picked up his computer equipment. All the data was gone when they got there. They’ve been trying to recover some information from it, but whoever did the erasure knew what they were doing.”
I remembered what Humphrey had said about Earnest leaving alone. And the video footage of him purchasing Cheetos Bolitas. Also alone. “It couldn’t have been Earnest, could it?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Connor said. “That’s why you’re back on the case.”
I rubbed my face and thought about it. “Wait, do you mean it was completely erased? Like, all the settings and everything?”
“Yes.”
“Then it wasn’t Earnest.”
“How do you know?”
“Because when I was looking for him yesterday morning, I went to his computer desk, and his custom screensaver was on. It’s a compilation of all his favorite space vessels. No way is that a default setting.” Conviction and anger stirred in my belly. Earnest hadn’t done this to himself. Someone had done this to him.
“If you’re right, it means someone snuck into his apartment and erased the hard drives after you went looking for him at eight thirty and before we came back at eleven.”
“I know,” I said, my brain whirring over the implications. It explained why the mouse was half off its pad too. “And I’m right. I’m sure of it.”
6
Losing Earnest’s computer data was a major blow. Next, I’d find out we had to solve the case blindfolded with our legs tied together.
The main problem with that was I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything but Connor’s leg pressed against mine.
“What do we have to go on then?” I asked.
“Phone records.” Connor handed me a bunch of papers. “And your powers of recall.”
Oh boy. I skimmed the lines of phone numbers and time stamps and wished again for spy training. Plus I wouldn’t mind one of those pens that shoot tranquilizer darts. Especially while Aunt Alice was in town.
I clutched the papers without examining them more closely. What if I did and couldn’t think of anything? I didn’t want to squash our hopes of finding Earnest’s killer. “What else do we have? What about the big whistle-blowing project he was working on for his website? Isn’t that why he hired me?”
“Do you know who he was looking into?”
“No, he didn’t like talking about it until he had all his ducks in a row.”
“Well he didn’t tell us either. He wrote down his website BusiLeaks as the reason he needed protection, without getting any more specific. We have all his past stories of course, but the repercussions for the people and companies he’s already ousted have come and gone. Revenge is a possible motive, but not as good a motive as stopping your secrets being spilled in the first place.”
That was bad. It never occurred to me he wouldn’t have at least told the Taste Society what he was working on.
Connor took a left hand turn. Until now I’d been assuming, without really thinking about it, that we were going to Earnest’s apartment, but the last turn took us off course. “If we have no leads, where are we going?”
“To your psychologist appointment.”
“What?” I may have shrieked a little.
“A source let me know that the LAPD are going to rule Earnest’s death as a murder or homicide and open an investigation, but it’ll be another half day or so before that’s official.”
It’s what my instincts had told me all along, but hearing it still hurt. Someone had done this to him. Cut his life ruthlessly short.
“Until then, I can’t call myself a police consultant, and for the sake of a handful of hours, I’d prefer to introduce myself to suspects as a consultant rather than a PI.”
I remembered we were talking ab
out my psychologist appointment.
“Sure, but—”
“The last person Earnest called at twelve forty-five a.m. was a psychologist by the name of Dr. Kelly. You figured this out and have booked an appointment with her, as Earnest’s grieving girlfriend, to find out why.”
“But—”
“You’ll be wearing a wire, of course.” He opened the glove box and handed me my old faithful ladies’ watch. It was as close to spy equipment as I was going to get. “Eleven o’clock was the only time slot she had available. Why do you think I gave you such short notice?”
Since he’d already told me twice today that being a jerk came naturally to him, I took it as rhetorical question.
Fifteen minutes later, I entered an old double-story brick house that had been converted into offices and knocked on the door that had Dr. Kelly spelled out in neat letters on the opaque glass. It swung open to reveal a smiling woman in her thirties with skin the color of a caramel Frappuccino, quarter-inch-long black hair, and flawless white teeth. She was much younger and more chic than I’d expected.
“Happy holidays, Ms. Avery, please, come in. Can I offer you a refreshment of some kind? Tea, coffee, soda, juice, or water?”
“No, thank you.”
“Are you sure? It’s important you feel comfortable in this session.” Her voice was pitched to that effect, warm and soothing.
“Thanks, but I just had a coffee.” Maybe that’s why I was feeling jittery.
She guided me to a navy armchair and seated herself in the other one. Her red suit jacket contrasted pleasantly against the navy fabric. She clasped her hands in her lap. “Then how can I help you today?”
“I’m not here for psychiatric treatment,” I began.
“Of course not,” she reassured me. “I’m a psychologist, not a psychiatrist.”
“Uh, right.” I fiddled with my watch. “And also, I’m Earnest Dunst’s girlfriend. Or was, I mean.”
“Is something wrong? You seem very nervous.”
I cleared my throat, nervously. “Earnest is dead. You’re the last person he called before he died. I’m trying to find out why.”
The Hunger Pains (An Eat, Pray, Die Humorous Mystery Book 2) Page 6
