by Diane Kelly
The officers collected my statement for their report and called a tow truck to haul Fischer’s car away. Before the tow truck took off with the vehicle, I scurried over to remove Josh’s GPS from the undercarriage.
Then I was all alone in my dark house. I’d have to call an electrician tomorrow to come repair my lines.
I lit a candle downstairs and freed my cats from the pantry. Annie appeared traumatized, though Henry had taken advantage of his time in the lockup to chew through the bag of kitty kibble and help himself to a midnight snack. He’d also peed in my potato bin to punish me. Like I said. Ungrateful brat.
After the night’s events, I was too wound up to sleep. Without electricity, I couldn’t watch TV. Without sufficient light, I couldn’t read a book or even clean up the mess in my bedroom. And without someone here with me, I just might fall to pieces.
I checked my cell phone. The charge was rapidly waning. But there was just enough juice left for one final call.
I called Nick, told him I needed him.
He came right over.
And, there in the dark, on my lumpy guest room bed, he held me tight against him until I finally stopped shaking.
* * *
Amber Hansen’s fury proved more effective than we could have ever imagined.
Over the next few weeks a media circus ensued, the likes of which had not been seen in years. Leah Dodd saw the situation as an opportunity to cash in. In short order, she landed high-dollar gigs on 60 Minutes, The View, and The Jerry Springer Show, not to mention interviews with People magazine and the National Enquirer. If she played her cards right, her days of dancing around a pole could be over.
I’d expected Marissa Fischer to be humiliated and avoid the limelight, but instead she seemed to enjoy the attention she received as the poor, unsuspecting wife. She, too, played her role for all it was worth, landing similar remunerative gigs with tell-all tabloids and television talk shows. Rumor had it she was being considered for a role on a new television show called Do Over, essentially The Bachelorette for divorced women. I had mentioned she’d filed for divorce, right?
Noah Fischer’s burns turned out to be mostly superficial, thanks to my quick action with the pillow. Still, once reports of me broiling Fischer with my improvised flamethrower hit the newspapers, I received a “Revocation of Bounty and Declaration of Trooce” from the Lone Star Nation, the document signed by August Buchmeyer, Jr., who’d succeeded his father as president. The Nation even took up a collection and paid the Buchmeyers’ outstanding tax bill in full. I wouldn’t have to worry about those kooks anymore.
A white-blond hair from Fischer’s comb confirmed him as the father of Amber’s child. The attorneys worked out a settlement of the child support, taking a significant chunk from Fischer’s savings. He pleaded guilty to a variety of charges and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
The parishioners who’d been so quick to defend Fischer were just as quick to turn on him when they learned they’d been duped. Michael Walters took over as head pastor of the Ark and made sweeping changes. Although he moved his family into the parsonage, their doors were always open. As soon as they’d settled in, they hosted a pool party for the youth group and several backyard cookouts for Ark members, invitations extended regardless of the size of their contributions. They opened a wing of the house up to traveling missionaries and those who ministered at inner-city churches unable to provide a livable wage to their pastors.
Walters even extended an olive branch to the IRS, inviting Nick and me out to meet with him and the Ark’s staff, ensuring us he’d run a much tighter ship than Fischer had and would comply with tax requirements. I had no doubt he’d be true to his word. On our way out, Nick left the Bible he’d borrowed on the table in the conference room.
* * *
Forty days and forty nights after Fischer had tried to kill me, it was late September and my life was back to normal.
Brett had returned from Atlanta, the country club’s landscaping completed. Though things between us picked up where they’d left off, at times I found myself feeling a bit restless. Maybe even bored?
I still yearned for Nick. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t completely shake it.
Lu received the green light from her oncologist to return to work. She’d beat the cancer. Boo-yah! Her hair hadn’t yet had time to regrow, so she was still sporting the beehive wig when she stepped off the elevator her first day back. So were the rest of us in Criminal Investigations. I’d stopped by the costume store and purchased two dozen of the wigs, cleaning out their inventory.
Lu found the hallway lined with her agents and administrative staff, all wearing pink beehives and tossing confetti. Overwhelmed by the reception, she began to blubber. One of her false eyelashes broke free and floated on a stream of happy tears down her cheek.
Once she’d received her welcoming hugs, she brushed her tears away and put her hands on her hips. “Get back to work! Those taxes aren’t going to collect themselves!”
I’d never been so glad to have someone barking orders at me.
Lu had replaced her cigarettes with Slim Jims, so it didn’t take long for her pear-shaped rump to return. I supposed we’d have to worry about her developing heart disease next.
With the Lobo back at the office, Eddie was demoted to a mere agent again. No more migraines.
He and I were assigned to partner on a big new case, one involving the CIA, Homeland Security, and a slew of terrorists. But, heck, I was one of God’s chosen people. A few terrorists weren’t going to scare me.
Then I read the file and nearly wet myself.
Read on for an excerpt from
Death, Taxes, and Peach Sangria—
the next Tara Holloway novel from
Diane Kelly and St. Martin’s Paperbacks!
On a Monday morning in late September, Eddie Bardin and I donned our ballistic vests, slid our Glocks into our ankle holsters, and headed out of downtown Dallas in a plain white government-issue sedan that smelled faintly of French fries.
Eddie leaned toward the door and checked himself in the side mirror. “How do I look?”
What my response lacked in decorum it made up for in sincerity. “Like an idiot.”
“Then it’s the perfect disguise.”
With the shiny gold chains, sagging jeans that exposed polka-dot boxers, and untied hi-top tennis shoes, he looked like a hip-hop singer or a wannabe gangster. The disguise was a far cry from Eddie’s usual attire of classic business suits and silk ties. I, too, wore a disguise, though mine was far more subtle. In blue jeans, sneakers, and a Dallas Mavericks T-shirt, I was undercover as a retail sales associate from a sporting goods store at a nearby mall. As a final touch, I’d pulled my chestnut-brown hair into a ponytail and topped it with a Texas Rangers baseball cap. Go team!
We were two IRS special agents on a mission. Today’s mission would be taking down a tax preparer who called herself “the Deduction Diva.” According to her glittery red advertising flyer, she provided clients with massage chairs and a complimentary glass of champagne while their returns were prepared. Hoity toity, huh?
With tax law growing increasingly complex, more people were turning to professional tax preparers. Entrepreneurs looking for a niche figured tax prep would be a good way to cash in on the trend. Unfortunately, too many had jumped on the bandwagon. Tax preparation services had become a crowded market and preparers had resorted to gimmicks to grab the attention of potential clients. But where these people came up with the gimmicks God only knows.
After merging onto the freeway, I glanced over at my partner, slapping his hand away as he attempted to eject my Tim McGraw CD from the stereo and slip in some John Mayer. “Don’t you dare touch that stereo.”
Yep, in many ways Eddie and I were polar opposites. He was tall and black, a father of two who’d grown up and was now raising his family in the affluent north Dallas suburbs. I was a petite white woman, a recovering tomboy who’d grown up climbing trees, shooting BB
guns, and swimming in the muddy creeks of the east Texas piney woods.
Dig a little deeper, though, and you’d find Eddie and I shared quite a few similarities. We’d both kicked academic ass in college, graduating at the top of our classes. We’d both taken jobs as special agents in IRS Criminal Investigations when we’d discovered that sitting at a desk all day didn’t suit us. And we both wanted to see tax cheats get their due. Especially the Deduction Diva. She’d been cheating the government for years. The Diva’s due was long overdue.
Twenty minutes later, I pulled the car into the lot of the suburban office park where the Diva’s business was located and took a spot on the second row. Eddie opened the door and climbed out, a phony W-2 clutched in his hand. I sat in the car, snickering as he shuffled across the parking lot in his saggy jeans, and entered the glass-front office space.
The audit department had referred the Diva’s case to Criminal Investigations after audits of several of her clients revealed a disturbing pattern. Each of their returns showed a significant loss on a vague “consulting” business. Suspiciously, the loss in each case was just enough to offset the client’s actual income, resulting in a refund of all taxes the client had paid in. When questioned by auditors, the clients pointed fingers at their tax preparer, claiming the Deduction Diva had devised the fraudulent scheme.
Though the Diva’s clients were hardly innocent, as long as they made good on the taxes owed we’d let them slide with a stern warning. Criminal Investigations was more interested in nailing the preparer who’d perpetrated the fraud on a wide-scale basis. Besides, we’d need the clients to testify against the Diva should she plead not guilty. But just in case our potential witnesses decided to assert their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, we were here to collect direct evidence of the Diva’s fraud. Catching tax cheats red-handed was always a hoot. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as seeing that oh-shit-they-got-me! look in their eyes.
The Deduction Diva wasn’t the only abusive preparer in the Dallas area. There were dozens of them on the IRS radar—so many, in fact, that the agency had recently enacted a number of measures intended to crack down on preparer fraud, including background checks and competency testing. Whether these new measures would reduce fraud remained to be seen.
Our boss, Lu “the Lobo” Lobozinski, had decided that the most efficient and effective way to deal with these cheats was to do an intense, concentrated sweep. She’d paired up all of the special agents in the office and handed each team a list of preparers to arrest. Eddie and I were halfway through our list. We’d already taken down a moron who called himself “the Weapon of Mass Deductions” and advertised on TV, wearing combat fatigues and army boots in his cheesy commercial. We’d also arrested “the Tax Wizard,” an older man who wore a long white beard and a pointy hat and claimed he could make taxes magically disappear. Clearly, he’d read a little too much Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps he’d been snorting fairy dust.
With the October fifteenth extension deadline rapidly approaching, the summer lull was over. Tax preparers were busy dealing with clients who’d requested more time to file their returns, some because their finances were extensive and complicated, others because they couldn’t get their act together by the April deadline. I suspected most of the Diva’s clients were of the latter variety.
While the Deduction Diva prepared my partner’s tax return, I sat in the car playing Scrabble on my cell phone and tried not to think of the major case Eddie and I had pending. We’d dealt with some pretty nasty people in our investigations, but these guys were by far the nastiest we’d ever faced. They were heartless, cruel, and extremely violent, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, in their attacks, with no thought to the lives they’d ruined, to the innocents maimed and killed as collateral damage.
Terrorists.
Just the thought gave me acid reflux.
A half-hour later, I’d just earned a triple score with the word FUNGUS when Eddie emerged from the Diva’s office, walked around the corner of the building, and sent me a text.
4K refund.
The Diva had done it again. Eddie’d gone into her office with a decoy W-2 showing thirty-five thousand in earnings from a purported job as a DJ at a local nightclub. Given the amount of tax withholding on the W-2, Eddie should have owed $38.76 in additional tax had the Diva properly prepared his return.
Busted.
I tugged on the hem of my jeans to make sure my ankle holster wasn’t exposed, slid my phone into my purse, and headed inside with my false W-2. Mine showed I’d earned twenty-eight grand, with just enough withholding to cover my income taxes. If the Diva prepared my return correctly, I’d be due a whopping fourteen-cent refund.
I pushed open the glass door and stepped inside.
Whoa.
The office looked like a brothel. The walls were painted a deep scarlet. The cushy black velvet massage chairs featured red satin pillows. A pole lamp with a red fringed shade stood between the chairs. Over the gray industrial carpet lay a large, fluffy red rug. A Barry White CD played softly from a boombox in the corner.
A young African-American receptionist sat at a desk chewing on the end of a yellow highlighter, a college textbook open in front of her. Accounting 101, an introductory class. She wouldn’t have learned enough yet to know her boss was up to no good. The girl’s casual coed attire clashed with the seductive office motif, but for ten bucks an hour, who wanted to suffer in heels and panty hose? On the corner of her desk was a silver champagne bucket that contained partially melted ice and a half-empty bottle of champagne.
Behind the receptionist were two doors. The one that read “Diva” in sparkling red paint was closed. The other one, which was unmarked, was cracked open a few inches. Through the open door, I could see a trio of young girls seated at long portable tables, buds in their ears as they input data into computers. The Diva’s production staff, no doubt.
The receptionist removed the highlighter from her mouth. “Can I help you?”
I held up my W-2. “I need to have my tax return prepared.”
“Fifty dollars per form,” the girl recited. “Ten-percent discount if you pay cash.”
“Great. Can it be done while I wait?”
“No problem. It’ll just take a few minutes.” She reached into a small cabinet behind her, retrieved a plastic champagne flute, and poured me a glass of bubbly. “Enjoy.”
“Thanks.” I traded my W-2 for the champagne. As I took a seat in one of the massage chairs, the girl carried my W-2 through the open door.
I looked down at the magazine offerings on the coffee table. Ebony. Essence. Oprah’s magazine O. I picked up the O magazine. I had a lot of respect for Oprah Winfrey. She was a ballsy yet classy broad, fighting for justice and fairness and generally making the world a better place. Though I shared her admirable aspirations, I could never be as classy as Oprah. I find it hard to be consistently well-behaved.
I jabbed the button on the chair control and the entire seat began to vibrate. The movement made it a little difficult to sip the champagne without spilling it on myself, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from enjoying the stuff.
“This is g-g-great,” I told the receptionist, my voice quivering along with the chair.
She smiled. “Sometimes clients fall asleep there.”
I could see why. Between the effects of the champagne and the gentle rocking, I was tempted to take a nap myself. The Diva was definitely onto something here.
I was halfway through an article on the merits of regular colonoscopies when one of the girls from the back room came out of her door with a piece of paper in her hand. A draft of my return. She rapped softly on the other door. A husky woman’s voice called “Come in.”
The coed stepped inside for a moment, then came back out, closing the Diva’s door behind her. She returned to her spot at the portable table.
Not long after, the receptionist’s phone buzzed. A voice came over the speaker. “Miss Henry’s retur
n is ready.”
Yep, my alias was Anne Henry, a combination of the names of my two cats. I’d wanted to go with something more clever like Gwen Down, a veiled take on Going Down, but Eddie’d feared it might be too obvious.
The receptionist slipped into the Diva’s office and returned with my tax return.
I turned off the chair and looked over the paperwork she handed me. The return showed I was due a refund of fourteen cents. Damn. The Diva had computed my taxes correctly. I felt cheated that I hadn’t been cheated. Silly, huh? But it didn’t matter that she’d prepared my return accurately. We had more than enough evidence of her large-scale fraud to take her in.
“That’ll be fifty dollars for the preparation service,” the receptionist said as she slid back into her chair. “We can e-file it for you for another twenty-five.”
“No thanks.”
I stood, pulled out my phone, and texted Eddie. Fourteen cent refund.
He texted back. U want a big refund, u gotta ask for it.
So that’s where I’d gone wrong.
I’m coming in, he added.
The receptionist stared up at me, waiting for me to pay my bill.
“You said fifty dollars, right?” I asked, stalling for time as Eddie returned to the office.
The girl nodded.
I reached into my purse, but instead of removing my wallet I pulled out the leather holder that contained my special agent badge. Eddie opened the door and came back inside, his badge at the ready.
“We’re from the IRS,” I told the receptionist. “We need to see the Diva.”
“Uh … okay.” The girl’s expression was equal parts confused and surprised as we knocked on the Diva’s door.
“Come in,” the woman called.
We opened the door and stepped inside. The Diva’s office was just as gaudy as her foyer. Red wallpaper with thick gold stripes graced the walls, her windows covered with red satin curtains. She sat behind a shiny black lacquer desk in a high-backed red leather chair.
