Granny Undercover (Secret Agent Granny Book 2)

by Harper Lin

  Little known fact—all security companies are required to give an override code to the authorities in case the police need to access a property. That information is restricted, of course, but I had gathered lots of interesting restricted material over the years just in case it came in handy someday. Naturally, the authorities are supposed to have a warrant, which I didn’t have, but I wasn’t about to lose any sleep over that. Laws regarding search warrants were to keep the government from abusing its power, and I support that, but sometimes you had to bend the rules to get the job done. It wasn’t like I was breaking into the home of an honest citizen.

  Once the alarm was off, I closed the door behind me and switched on the light. I stood in a utilitarian back room with bare concrete walls, a couple of desks, a refrigerator, a large cabinet, and a smaller cabinet with a padlock on it. Not much to look at.

  I immediately noticed two things I didn’t get to look at, because they weren’t there—computers or a Wi-Fi router. If these folks were using computers to track their earnings, they were using laptops they took home with them at the end of the day. Also there was no wireless internet. The best way not to get hacked is to stay offline. I wish some of our government officials would learn that lesson.

  First things first—I needed to check the front room to make doubly sure no one was around. A door stood on the opposite wall. I peeked through, gun at the ready, and saw the gaming room, now dark and lonely looking. I’ve always felt a certain sadness in casinos. Perhaps it’s the pervasive desperation of the people there, or perhaps it’s just because I know it’s a loser’s game. But I’d never seen a casino with no people in it before. That made this one look doubly sad. I caught myself wondering if Octavian had started gambling after his wife had died as some sort of coping mechanism.

  I pushed him out of my mind and focused on the job. What was I doing thinking of him when I had a murder to solve?

  Closing the door to the front room, I got to work. A quick search of the desks turned up nothing but some pens and chewing gum, plus various fliers for takeout restaurants. The large cabinet was filled with snacks to sell to the gamblers, and the refrigerator was stuffed with enough booze to knock out an entire college fraternity. Sitting on top of the cabinet was a large first aid kit. Odd. It looked like something more suited to a ranger’s station at a national park rather than a clandestine casino in a sleepy town. Were these folks expecting trouble?

  Now I turned my attention to something more interesting—the locked cabinet. Locks have always intrigued me, because locks mean secrets. Even as a little girl, I was obsessed with finding out secrets. I sneaked peeks at my big sister’s diary, picking the simple clasp lock with a hairpin, and learned things a little girl shouldn’t know about her teenaged big sister. That made me stop looking at her diary, but it sure got me interested in finding out more secrets. I guess that’s why I ended up a CIA agent.

  I brought out my lock picks again, put on my reading—and lock-picking—glasses, and set to work. A couple of minutes later, I popped open the cabinet.

  The laptops weren’t there, but something more intriguing was—an old-fashioned ledger. I didn’t even know people used ledgers in the First World anymore. But then I realized this gang was so worried about cybersecurity that they hadn’t gone digital at all.

  I sat down at one of the desks and leafed through it, impressed one of the thugs actually knew how to do accounting the old fashioned way—with a double column and working out the math on paper. I could see the faint traces of the erased work in pencil on the margins. These people were so paranoid they didn’t even use the calculators on their phones!

  This made me think they were hiding from more than just the police. It takes a lot of work to hack into a phone to the level that you’re not just monitoring calls, but seeing what the apps are doing in real time. That made me think of international crime syndicates, the main customers for top-shelf hackers. Could this place be only the local branch of a much larger gambling empire? Having no phones and no computers would mean even if one branch was caught, there wouldn’t be anything solid to link it to any other branch. I got the feeling the branches probably didn’t even know what other branches existed, the old concept of isolated terrorist cells transferred over to illegal gambling. Clever.

  I looked at the electrical outlet next to the desk and got some more support for my theory. The outlet was dusty and obviously hadn’t been used for a long time. Moving over to the other desk, I saw the same thing. Nobody was plugging in any laptops at either of these desks.

  I went back to studying the ledger. It was mostly sums of the day’s earnings, and some pretty hefty earnings they were, too. Near the back, I found something even more interesting. It was a list of addresses with dollar amounts next to each address. Some of these amounts were in the five figures. Next to these amounts were percentages, generally 25 percent or 50 percent, and a column labelled “Due” had a series of dates for each address.

  Oh dear. They were playing a double game. Not only did they lure people in to gamble, but they also acted as loan sharks. I wonder if they knew one of their gamblers, Gary Milner, was lending out money too. Perhaps that was why he was so picky about who he lent to, because he didn’t want to be discovered.

  I skimmed down the addresses, of which there were a good hundred or so, and was intrigued to find 67 Terrace Lane was not among them.

  Archibald Heaney did not owe money to the loan sharks.

  Did he owe money to Gary?

  I took out my phone and took photos of the address list, noting a few addresses showed due dates that had passed. Those would be the ones to really follow up on. Anyone getting leaned on by loan sharks, especially the nasty predators I’d seen running this place, could be pushed to desperate measures.

  It was interesting that there were no names on this list. The list was long enough that the accountant couldn’t have memorized all the names that went with the addresses, so those names must be linked to a list I wasn’t seeing. Another level of security.

  Not a very good one, however. Even a simple internet search would bring up many of these names. Not all, though. You could keep your address off the online directories with a request. Who might be doing that, and who was on this list that the loan sharks wanted to keep invisible, intrigued me.

  I took a few photos of the accounting then closed the ledger and returned it to the cabinet in the exact same position I had found it. I locked the cabinet and headed out. I’d learned all I could here. On my way out, I cast a nervous glance at the camera. I hadn’t seen a recording device inside the building, so it was obviously a remote model, transmitting its picture to a central database for the company. Generally, there wasn’t someone watching all the monitors all the time, and that appeared to be the case with this one since the police hadn’t shown up to deal with a masked intruder. As long as no one noticed the building had been entered, they would have no reason to review the recording and notice my little visit.

  Good thing for me, because I’d probably need to come back with Octavian to see the front room a few more times. My heart did a little flippy-flop at the thought. Purely because of the potential danger, of course.

  Seven

  My grandson, Martin, couldn’t figure out why he was being punished. He had come bounding out of school to my car, ready for an afternoon of being spoiled by his grandmother, only to find himself at a meeting of the Cheerville Gardening Society. We hadn’t even stopped at his house to get his portable game console, the latest something-or-other that was all the rage and had all his favorite games. He was stuck with me while I puttered about, talking with boring old people—old people so boring that even I found them boring.

  The Cheerville Gardening Society met in the garden of a different member each Thursday. The location was listed in the events section of the Cheerville Gazette, a section of the newspaper I rarely looked at since it was A, so short, and B, so full of things I didn’t want to do.

  Like attend a mee
ting of the Cheerville Gardening Society. Judging from the look of the membership, scattered in little chatting circles on a broad front lawn and a cozy backyard, no one of working age ever did their own gardening in this town. Martin was the youngest person there by a good half century. Even I felt like a spring chicken.

  Despite their age, the membership certainly knew its business. The front lawn was carefully manicured, and next to the house was a lush flower bed in a riot of colors. The party spilled over to the backyard, where more flower beds were arranged in a sort of a maze pattern so you could wander on various routes through the yard, admiring the different plants. Most of them I couldn’t name, but I didn’t need to be a gardening expert to tell our hosts had channeled some serious talent and effort into their work. The conversation between the members was equally esoteric. Every specialty had its own terms and sayings, and it felt like gardeners had their own language.

  Of more direct interest to me than figuring out what words like “hydroponics” meant were a pair of topiary bushes flanking the house, both in the shape of poodles. I’d recently learned what topiary meant, and I knew as far as Cheerville was concerned, the term was associated with murder. The poodles were nicely done. I wondered if our hosts or perhaps Archibald had made them.

  Someone had handed me a brochure for the Cheerville Gardening Society. Besides some nice pictures, it had a list of officers for the club and noted it met every Thursday. The Topiary Society, which was part of the Gardening Society, met every Wednesday. Archibald had been killed on a Wednesday. Poor fellow didn’t get to attend the meeting. There were only two officers listed—Archibald Heaney as president and Tim Harding, my old landlord, as secretary. Interesting.

  “These are nicely done,” I said to a woman in her seventies who was standing alone near one of the leafy poodles with a plate of éclairs. By the way she was systematically chomping through them, I didn’t get the impression she was handing them out. All the éclairs were for her.

  “Oh, yes, so sad,” she mumbled around a mouthful of gooey sweetness.

  “Sad?”

  “Archibald made these. He was friends with Mr. and Mrs. Rutgers.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Rutgers were our hosts. I hadn’t met them yet. There was quite a crowd here, perhaps a hundred people.

  “Did he do a lot of people’s bushes?”

  “Some. I wish I could do it, but my arthritis stops me.”

  “Didn’t Archibald have arthritis too?”

  The woman glanced at me. “Him? Oh no, he was as healthy as your grandson here.”

  So Police Chief Grimal’s talk about Archibald being depressed over his arthritis was just fantasy. I had suspected as much.

  The woman wandered off, perhaps looking for more éclairs.

  We continued to mingle, Martin moping, me looking for people I recognized and not finding anyone. We stopped at the refreshments table, where I managed to get in front of the éclair lady and grab some sweets for Martin.

  “Food’s good here, eh?” I said encouragingly.

  “Can we leave? This is boring.”

  Oh dear. You know you’re in trouble when you can’t cheer up a thirteen-year-old boy with free sugar.

  “I know this is a bit dull for you, but I want to get into gardening. We’re going to make a nice garden for Dandelion.”

  Martin gave me a suspicious look. “What do you mean we?”

  “Oh, I thought you’d like to help since you like Dandelion so much.”

  “Um, I don’t think so. Are we going for hamburgers tonight?”

  “Yes, I think you’ve earned it.”

  “I’ve totally earned it.”

  The host and hostess, Mr. and Mrs. Rutgers, came up just then and cheerfully greeted us in the best Cheerville tradition, with plastered-on smiles and an air of casual wealth. I didn’t ask if they were related to the founders of the famous university. Judging from the size of their house, I could already figure out the answer.

  I didn’t get their first names because that was how they introduced themselves—“Mr. and Mrs. Rutgers.” Bizarre.

  Mrs. Rutgers was leading around a pair of poodles on leashes as she chatted to the guests. The poodles looked like some canine version of topiary. They had a big poof of hair around their heads, shaved forelegs, a ring of hair around their middle, shaved rears, and three poofs of fur on their tails.

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” she said, all cheery as she shook my hand.

  “I’m Barbara Gold. I’m fairly new to Cheerville. I’m just getting into gardening, and I’d love to come to your meetings regularly. I have so much to learn.”

  “We’re always eager to get new members,” Mr. Rutgers said.

  “And what’s your name?” Mrs. Rutgers asked Martin, leaning down and tousling his hair. I took in a sharp breath. No one tousled Martin’s hair—not me, not his parents, not international hit men—no one. To do so was to court death.

  “I’m Martin.” Martin glowered at her. If looks could kill, she’d have turned into a pile of steaming ash that instant. Her and her little dogs too.

  She seemed not to have noticed she had committed a near-fatal error.

  “Do you like gardening, Martin?”

  “No.”

  “But flowers are pretty, aren’t they?”

  “No.”

  “How about dogs? You like dogs, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Ah, the teenage monosyllable. Is there anything more eloquent in its surliness?

  “Would you like to go play with my dogs while your grandmother and I chat?”

  “No.”

  “But I thought you liked dogs.”

  “Those aren’t dogs. They’re Muppets.”

  “Such a witty boy!” Mrs. Rutgers hadn’t skipped a beat. Mr. Rutgers didn’t seem insulted by a thirteen-year-old dismissing his prize poodles, either. Perhaps they hadn’t fully processed what Martin had said.

  People were good at not noticing things they didn’t want to notice. There was an old joke in Washington about President Truman. The story went that he once quipped to a friend that nobody really listened to him at state functions, because no real business ever occurred there, just the usual pleasantries. To prove this, at one Washington reception, he told his friend to follow him as he went around the room greeting people. The two men set out, with Truman shaking everyone’s hand and welcoming them to the reception. Each time someone said, “How do you do, Mr. President?” he responded with, “I strangled my wife this morning.”

  No one made a comment about this startling confession. Some people looked confused, others gave a nervous little laugh, and many more simply smiled and nodded and said something bland in return like, “The economy is looking up, isn’t it?”

  People expect certain events to run according to a script, and they stick with it. It takes a lot to shake them off of the track they’ve sent themselves on.

  Like a pair of senior citizens rolling around the flower beds, punching each other in the face.

  “Cool!” Martin shouted. Suddenly, this whole gardening thing seemed a lot more interesting.

  I found it interesting too, not so much for their poor fighting technique—they obviously had never had combat training—but what they were shouting at each other.

  “Damn it, Ivan. I told you to back off!”

  “It’s your fault, Gary. Your fault he’s dead!”

  The way several people in the crowd glanced at the nearest topiary bush, I knew who Ivan was referring to.

  I recognized the two red-faced senior citizens who were destroying Mr. and Mrs. Rutgers’ flower bed as being from the secret casino.

  They had managed to wreck a good portion of the flower bed, which must be a form of high treason with this crowd, but they hadn’t done much damage to each other. They landed punches, sure, but those were poorly aimed, and they weren’t even clenching their fists properly or connecting in the right way. It didn’t help that their paunches kept them at a fair distance fro
m each other. There’s a proper method to punching someone, even if you’re fighting from long range. I felt like going over and mansplaining this to them.

  A woman of my kill count had earned the right to mansplain, hadn’t she?

  But I didn’t intervene. I was hoping they would shout something that could give me a clue as to what happened to Archibald. It seemed like their energy for shouting had been spent, though, as had most of their energy for fighting. They grunted and smacked at each other a bit more, covered in dirt and fragments of flowers. I started giggling. Call me overly traditional, but there’s something innately funny about men with flowers in their hair, especially old men who were pretending they knew how to fight.

  Martin was giggling too. I put my arm around his shoulders and he leaned in to me. Such moments of bonding were rare and needed to be treasured.

  Sadly, Mr. Rutgers moved in to stop them. He was one of those robust senior citizens who you saw out jogging every morning and who had a fresh, natural tan from some recent beach vacation. He grabbed them both by the collar and pulled them apart. They didn’t put up much of a resistance. They looked too exhausted.

  “Look what you’ve done to my daffodils! Now what’s all this about?”

  Both of them fell silent, glaring at each other with hatred in their eyes.

  “Well?” Mr. Rutgers asked.

  “Nothing,” Ivan muttered.

  They creaked to their feet and brushed themselves off. The crowd whispered to themselves and stared. It didn’t look like either of them was going to talk.

  I found that significant. When people blow up in public, they usually denounce each other, trying to prove to the onlookers they are the one in the right.

  But neither of them did that. I wish I had seen who had started the fight. That one obviously couldn’t control himself at the sight of the other, even though he wanted to hide the reason why.

  Just then, I saw Tim in the crowd, my old landlord and the man who was a fellow topiary expert along with the late, great Archibald Heaney. He was glaring at the two prizefighters with rage shooting out of every pore. I started to move over to him, but he gave me a sharp look and stalked away.