The 9 Lives Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Louise Clark

  Aaron didn't mean half the stuff he said. I told you that, babe.

  "Aaron DeBolt meant every word. Haven't you figured that out yet? He sold you drugs. He was your pusher. He didn't care about you! He used you. I found out what he was doing from Gerry Fisher, you know. He came to me, asking me to help get you into rehab, to straighten you out."

  When?

  "Two years before you disappeared. He cared about you, Frank. In their own ways I think all of your trustees cared about you."

  You're wrong. They wanted you to think they cared about me. I was blackmailing Fisher by the time he came to you. He just wanted me put away so I wouldn't bother him anymore.

  "Whatever." Still furious, she flounced into the kitchen, hauled out a can of tuna-flavored cat food, opened it, and set it in front of the cat.

  Ugh! I was talking about real tuna, not this junk.

  "Stormy likes tuna cat food," Christy said sweetly. "Enjoy."

  You're still pissed at me, aren't you? the voice said mournfully, just before Stormy tucked into his tuna surprise lunch.

  Christy laughed and returned to the living room. She re-read the letter. Anger, eased by her quarrel with Frank, simmered again. She'd been good. As little as she'd wanted to, she'd upheld her part of the agreement. She had stayed away from Quinn. She'd ordered the audit stopped. She'd dropped the pretense of seeking a divorce. So why this letter? Why this vicious, untrue accusation?

  They were going to take Noelle away from her.

  The horror of that slammed into her heart and it hurt. It hurt so badly that it stole her breath and shot pangs of anguish through her gut. She dropped the letter and collapsed onto the sofa. She clutched her stomach, holding herself tight as if that feeble comfort could ward off the anguish tearing her apart.

  They were going to take Noelle away from her.

  She rocked back and forth. A silent scream of denial rose in her throat, engulfed her, pounded through her brain. How could they do this? She'd been good. Why would they want to tear Noelle away from her? What had she done wrong? What had Noelle done wrong? She was eight years old. What would a custody battle do to her, hot on the heels of losing her daddy?

  She would be terrified. The whole direction of her life would change. She would be at the mercy of four people who had hated her father. It must not happen. So how was she to make sure that no custody fight marred Noelle's life?

  They want to get rid of you. The cat sauntered into the living room, licking his chops. The voice sounded grumpy. If they control Noelle, they control the cash. She's not going to ask for audits or how they're spending her money.

  Very slowly Christy eased out of that protective hunch and sat up. Frank was right. For the trustees to cover up their embezzlement, they needed control. They had to be able to put their own spin on everything that happened and keep unanswerable questions from being asked. It was possible that one or all of them had already silenced Frank in the most final of ways. Now they planned to stop her by stealing away her daughter. She couldn't bear to think what they might be willing to do to Noelle.

  Outrage swept through Christy, washing away the hurt, chasing away the fear. How dare they? How dare they think they could use her daughter to protect themselves?

  Enough was enough. The deal was off. The investigation was on. She surged to her feet. She hoped that Quinn was home, because she needed to talk to him. Now.

  Deliberately, fueled by fury and determination, she headed for the door. The cat bounded after her. Wait up, babe! I'm coming too!

  * * *

  Quinn scooped coffee into a filter and slipped it into the basket of the coffeemaker. "I tracked down Aaron DeBolt last night."

  Sitting at the kitchen table, Roy paused, his hands poised above the laptop keyboard. "And?"

  "He's not a very cooperative guy." Quinn added water, flicked the switch.

  Roy observed him impatiently. "He's spoiled, self-absorbed, and not very bright either, but that doesn't tell us anything about Frank's murder."

  Quinn grinned. He opened the fridge door and inspected the contents. "He claims there's nothing to tell. According to him, Frank is still alive and living it up in Mexico." Quinn reached for bread, cheese and ham. "Want a sandwich for lunch, Dad?"

  "Sure." Roy saved, then shut down the computer. "Frank remembers Aaron guiding him over to the car then pushing him into the trunk. Even if Aaron wasn't actually there when Frank was killed, he is an accessory."

  Quinn put the lunch fixings on the countertop. "DeBolt was with his friends last night. He wasn't going to admit to anything, but I think I shook him up. I'll catch him on his own and see what I can get out of him." The doorbell rang. Quinn put ham on bread and cocked his head. "Someone selling memberships to the new gym that opened up beside the furniture store?"

  "They've already been," Roy said. "They won't send anyone back for another month or so."

  A sharp, repeated pounding followed the bell. "Not a door-to-door salesman," Quinn said. He made a move.

  Roy waved him back to his sandwich making. "I'll get it."

  Quinn put the top piece of bread over the meat. He wasn't paying much attention to what he was doing so the top slice lay crooked over the bottom and the sliced ham dangled out over the edge of the bread. He listened to the dull murmur of voices from the doorway. He couldn't identify the words, but he thought he heard a woman's voice mixed with his father's deeper one.

  His heart skipped a beat. Christy?

  Hasty footsteps sounded on the stairs. Quinn sliced his sandwich in half as Christy stormed into the kitchen, a simmering cauldron of emotion about ready to overflow. She stopped abruptly in front of him, then slammed an envelope onto the counter beside his plate. "I want to crucify them," she said.

  Quinn blinked. The Christy he knew was moderate, calm in her handling of situations, her emotions always under control. This woman was furious, fierce, even dangerous. His momentary flash of pity for the individuals who were the target of her rage disappeared as quickly as it came. He had a good idea who she was mad at and they deserved whatever she flung at them.

  He picked up the envelope. Raising his brows in question, he waited until she nodded, then he pulled out the letter and quickly read the contents. No wonder Christy was so incensed. "This is crap."

  "I won't let them take her," she said in a low, intense voice that was a promise and a plea at the same time.

  No, she wouldn't. Christy's world was her daughter and from what Quinn could see she was doing an excellent job of raising the kid to be a bright, inquiring, loving person. This was a nuisance suit, the kind of thing unscrupulous lawyers used as a pressure tactic. The trustees represented wealth and respectability. Christy was the wife of a man who could easily be painted as a self-indulgent rich kid who thought nothing of stealing from his own trust fund. A descriptive touch here, a well-chosen phrase there, and Christy would be portrayed as being as dissolute as her husband. In the long run, he'd bet that any suit the trustees brought against her would fail, but she would have to prove herself. The result would be negative publicity and an emotional battering, while Noelle coped with the resulting lack of stability.

  "What's up?" Roy said, entering with the cat. Quinn handed him the letter. He read it quickly. "We've touched a nerve."

  Quinn cut his sandwich into quarters. Taking Christy's hand, he guided her to the table where she perched on a chair, edgy and tense. Sitting down adjacent to her, he put the plate between them, an open invitation to share. Roy sat opposite.

  The cat hopped up on the table and eyeballed the plate.

  "Quit complaining about your lunch, Frank." Christy said, glaring at the cat. "We've got bigger issues to deal with."

  Quinn thought about kicking the cat off the table, then Christy said angrily, "They snowed me!"

  Quinn waited for more. It wasn't forthcoming.

  "Individuals relate to other individuals in different ways," Roy said. "Christy's experience wouldn't have trained her for dealing with
the circles you moved in, Frank."

  They were talking to the damn cat again, leaving him completely out. "Hey, people! Include me in the conversation, please!"

  The cat stared at him. He had an unnerving sense of intelligence behind those wide, green eyes, an intelligence uncomfortably mixed with amused contempt. Then he told himself his imagination was running wild and cats always seemed to have a superior attitude when it came to humans.

  "Frank figures you're un-evolved because you won't allow yourself to hear him," Roy said.

  "Great," Quinn said, taking a sandwich quarter. "I'm being put down by a cat."

  "And my daughter is in jeopardy of being snatched by a bunch of bad guys who don't want to play fair," Christy said. She had the letter in her hand again and waved it angrily. "They told me I had to stop the audit, so I did. They told me I should stay away from you and that I shouldn't divorce Frank, so I agreed, even though... even though I no longer love Frank." She glared at the cat. "And he's disappeared, leaving me destitute. I agreed! I did what they asked. Then this!" She tossed the letter down angrily.

  Quinn looked at the paper. It lay on the table between them like a lethal weapon, a knife blade pointed toward Christy's heart. He hated that letter, the contents of it, the people who had written it. If ripping it into shreds and condemning the authors would do any good he'd have done it in a flash. But it wouldn't. The threat was there. It was real. It was dangerous. It needed to be dealt with.

  He took a bite, then chewed as he fingered the letter meditatively. "I wonder whether Bidwell wrote this on his own or as a representative of the Trust."

  Christy was staring at him curiously. "He was the one who signed it, but it's in all their names."

  "Bidwell's not very bright then, is he?"

  Christy frowned. Roy laughed. He'd caught the inference immediately, probably because he'd been the one who taught Quinn to think outside the box.

  "I'm not sure I'm tracking this," Christy said.

  "The threat worked. You were doing what the trustees wanted, or what they seemed to want. Then someone decided to act on the threat, to pressure you that much more."

  "I'm with you so far, but I still don't understand what this has to do with intelligence."

  "There's a fine art to intimidating someone. You can only force a person to accept so much before the strain becomes unendurable and the individual snaps. They reached your breaking point with this letter."

  "Yes, they did," Christy said.

  Quinn smiled. "Yes, and they didn't have to. What would you have done if this letter hadn't come?"

  She had the grace to look shamefaced. "I would have done nothing."

  "And now what are you going to do?"

  Her jaw set and her eyes flashed. She was gorgeous.

  "I am going to expose the embezzlement. I am going to prove that Frank couldn't have siphoned away half of his trust fund because he was dead before it happened. I am going to replace the Jamieson Trustees and I'm going to sue the bastards who stole Noelle's money. Shut up, Frank, you don't have to be sarcastic."

  Quinn laughed. The cat hissed at him. "See what I mean? They've created a dangerous enemy, one with a strong motivation and not much to lose."

  "And very little time to work with." Christy tapped the letter with her fingertip. "Quinn, I need your help."

  "It's yours," he said. On impulse he caught her hand and lifted it to his lips.

  Christy gasped, but she didn't pull her hand away. She did blush bright red.

  Roy cleared his throat. "The cat says he wishes you well, but would you mind keeping the nooky for when he's not around." He helped himself to one of the sandwich quarters.

  Quinn felt himself go red too. He dropped Christy's hand as if it was a white-hot brand. "For crying out loud," he muttered. The cat settled into a crouch. "You're welcome," Quinn said to it. Christy giggled.

  "Do you think one of the trustees killed Frank?" Roy asked.

  Quinn pushed his chair out and stood. Reaching across the counter, he picked up the coffee beaker and held it aloft in a question. Roy shook his head. Christy nodded. Quinn went for cups. As he poured he looked at Christy. He wondered how much the cat had told her of Frank's last minutes. "It's possible. This letter clearly indicates a desire to keep Christy from looking into trust business, but that may be because of the embezzlement."

  Christy sipped from the pottery mug Quinn placed in front of her. "Frank says that Gerry Fisher was one of the ones he was blackmailing."

  "I can believe that. His company cuts corners in the maintenance of their landfills." Sitting down, Quinn eyeballed the cat, then shifted his gaze to his father and Christy. "So what did Fisher do?"

  "He had affairs," Roy said.

  "Frank was blackmailing him over some affairs?" Quinn picked up another sandwich quarter. "And that's why Fisher was embezzling from the trust? That's not much of a reason for doing a criminal act. There's got to be something more."

  The cat hissed as Roy said, "They weren't normal affairs. You know, two consenting adults looking for an adventure who happen to meet in the course of their work or social lives. Fisher apparently used a service."

  "A service? Like an escort service?" Christy stared at the cat, frowning. "Frank, are you sure? This sounds so un-Gerry."

  "Oh, yeah, he's sure," Roy said. He too was eying the cat, a skeptical expression on his face. "There's more, isn't there, Frank?"

  "He says no." Christy tapped her fingers on the table. "Frank, you've been dishing information to us a little bit at a time. It's not good enough. This is about our daughter. This is important. If you're holding out on us, Frank, I swear..."

  Christy and Roy stared at the cat, the expressions on their faces hostile. The cat's tail swished, its body tense. Evidence of a mental battle between Christy and Roy and the cat? Quinn swallowed hard. The sandwich went down in a painful lump. He was really losing it.

  He chased the sandwich quarter down with a slug of coffee. Coffee helped him think and right now that was important. "Admitting to the use of an escort service can be embarrassing, especially for a guy in Fisher's position, but I wouldn't think it's something worth paying blackmail money over."

  "Remember, though, he wasn't using his own money to pay off Frank's blackmail. He was using the trust's. Maybe he felt the same way Frank did, that the money was rightfully Frank's and so it was okay to give it to him." Roy held up his hands. "Look, don't shoot the messenger! We're brainstorming here. I'm just tossing out ideas. I'm not suggesting they're the answer."

  Quinn decided that he could learn to hate Frank Jamieson, even if he was dead. "Who else was Frank blackmailing?"

  "Bidwell and Macklin."

  Christy's eyes opened wide. "I can't believe this. Frank says Bidwell is a bigamist! When he was at university he went to Mexico with a co-ed. They got drunk and they got married, but they never got a divorce. Instead, they just pretended their marriage hadn't happened. After graduation from law school he got a job at Greenham, McGrath, Johnson."

  "A very conservative firm," Roy said. "Vivien came up against them a few times during her career. They represent the wealthy in this town. And the corporate welfare bums."

  Christy's expression was horrified as she stared at the cat. Clearly she was having a hard time accepting what she was learning. "When he married the daughter of one of his clients, he couldn't afford to let anyone know that he already had a wife."

  "That's a bit of a stretch," Roy said. "He didn't want to let anyone know he was married."

  "And Macklin?" Quinn asked.

  Christy dropped her head in her hands and shook it slowly. "This is unbelievable."

  Roy said, "Macklin is a real winner. He's a partner in a national accounting firm where he's got a squeaky clean reputation. We know better, but you know what? He didn't start his embezzlement career with the Jamieson Trust. He began at university when he had a summer job as an accounting clerk with a small, local company."

  Christy lifted her
head. Her expression was bleak. "Frank says he didn't have much money, and university tuition was expensive. Samuel was brilliant, even then. He stole enough for a year's tuition and fiddled the books."

  "A permanent employee of the firm was accused and convicted of the crime. Macklin never fessed up," Roy said angrily.

  "Nice bunch of people," Quinn said. "What about the last of the trustees, Aunt Ellen?"

  Christy laughed, rather grimly. "Frank says he wouldn't rule her out as a suspect because she's always hated him. She made it clear that she believed that her position as his custodial guardian eliminated her chances to marry." She looked at the cat. "You know, Frank, sometimes I think you're suffering from persecution delusions." She frowned. "Well, that's true, I suppose."

  Sometimes this business of the cat talking to everyone but him was more than irritating. "What did he say?"

  Sighing, Christy said, "Frank pointed out that he is dead, so maybe they aren't delusions at all."

  Quinn hesitated, then said, "I have another suspect to toss into the pool."

  "Who? Brianne Lymbourn?" Christy asked.

  Quinn shot her a level look, wishing he didn't have to say what he was going to. "No. Aaron DeBolt."

  "Aaron? Aaron's a jerk, but murder?"

  "He was there when Frank was killed." Quinn watched Christy whiten and guessed that the cat was filling her in on the details of his final minutes. She swallowed hard. Quinn reached out, caught her hand, and squeezed it. He was rewarded with a smile that was wan, but there just the same. "I had another talk with Aaron, but I didn't get much out of him."

  "When?" Christy demanded.

  "Last night." He waited while she processed that, until he saw the bleakness in her eyes and he knew she understood what he'd guessed earlier. "Yeah, my meeting with Aaron may have been what caused the letter."