A Gift for Murder

by Capri Montgomery

  Merck jotted something else on his note journal and then patted the pen in his hand on the paper. “What exactly are you opening?”

  Megan shook her head. “What does that have to do with what just happened here? Do you have any suspects on this murder?” Megan realized one question too late that she was asking the wrong thing. She thought back to a murder that was committed in South Hemrock when she was housing in one of the islands helping with disaster relief. A woman had been murdered and the cops, after an entire day didn’t have even one suspect. Lolita Bancroft flipped her raven and dirt blend curls behind her shoulder with a snarl on her face. “Why haven’t the cops made an arrest yet? We, here, have to get up and work. We are trying to give victims of the flood water here.”

  Megan felt her nails press into the palm of her other hand. “First of all, some of us, meaning me, are trying to clean up debris and keep children missing a parent safe. It wasn’t a flood, it was a tsunami. An arrest is a thing that doesn’t just happen overnight. And the cops are working on it.”

  Lolita from south Savannah, Georgia had shrugged her shoulders. “Cops here are still slower than southern American cops.”

  Megan looked at Lolita. She was out of place and only there to put the experience on an application to one of the top five universities in America. “Sure. Cops solve the crime by the end of the show all the time. Doesn’t make sense they can’t do that in the real world. Not.” She was not in the mood to baby a grown woman. It was hot, still damp even though most of the water had receded back into the ocean and she was tired of being countries away from murders only to walk into the tent she was sharing with three other people to find a dead woman missing her eyes in the slot they should have been in her head.

  From the question she had just sat here and curtly asked the detective on the crime that just had been discovered she was starting to think of that same dose of stupid Lolita had tossed out. The difference was that Megan knew she was being flip which unfortunately, in her case, did mean she still had some hostility over the past with Merck and this city too.

  “I am just curious about you right now. The murder I can solve without you so if you came back thinking your past nature here would instantly have you become the queen of having a gift for murder you’re wrong. This is my job so you stay out of it.”

  “I never thought of getting into it. But if you were asking me questions that are relevant to this case then I wouldn’t ask you questions about the case. For the record I am not a queen of solving murders. And they don’t need anybody in Forest Springs to know that that is what everybody thought I was only good for. I want a life away from the crime worlds. I don’t want to have to solve anything in this spa. I don’t think the people here even know the mean jokes people told about me before I disappeared from Forest Springs. Can we keep that between us?”

  Merck chuckled as he sketched something else on his paper. “Noted. You did have a gift for solving things. You cannot deny that.”

  Megan shook her head. “No, that I cannot but I wish I could. I know you didn’t really like me much but if you could just please, for once here, not throw it in my face and tell everybody what I used to be known for being able to do. Nobody seems to recognize me and I’d like to keep it like that. Please?”

  Merck gave her one nod as if he were saying he would try his best not to ruin her life. “I might still consult you to solve this.”

  She shook her head again. “You are like the Sherlock Holmes of crime solving and everybody here knows it. You have been all over this world and people love you. You don’t need my help.”

  Merck winked at her. “So you do know about me; don’t you? That means you have been paying attention to me while you were away.”

  Megan rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I was not checking up on you while I was away. I know about you because everybody talks about your skill quite often. But, to be honest with you I did look up some of the information on the raving words they said about you. It’s amazingly great things floating around about your career. Congratulations. I guess you have the right last name for the detective genius status.”

  The tart tension in his shoulders told Megan and that she had just said the wrong words. “I surely hate when people throw that at me. My last name is not a fictional world. It’s not like my name magically helped me solve crimes. But it did help me figure out how you felt with how they treated you just because you did have this gift for solving things. I guess I never really understood it because you having that gift is really a compliment for you. But after I became a detective I saw of a lot of things different and I started to understand how badly it hurt you the how people only saw that in you. For me it’s a good thing I guess because people think more balanced for me. They think Merck can solve a crime so hire him, assign him to the case and pay him enough to make him want to stay That’s not bad but at the same time you end up with people will think you should be able to solve everything because you were like a modern day Sherlock Holmes and that’s really not who you are. I worked my butt off to solve crimes. So I guess that’s my way of saying to you that I understand why you don’t like people looking at you like you’re some magic mystery solver. As long as people are not recognizing you I won’t mention anything to any of them but I have to say if I keep up with you I’ll at least be able to see what you’re figuring out and maybe I can put in a little less work this time.”

  Megan rolled her eyes again and squinted her eyes at him in anger. “Not in this world, Detective. You’re getting paid to solve this crime and it’s not so bad that you work very hard at it.” She couldn’t say she wouldn’t be interested in the way he solved this thing but she was keeping her nose out of it.

  Merck smiled on a wink. “Good to know, Megan because I am good at my job…probably better than you.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I am sure I am a better cook and artist than you but I am sure you are good at being a detective.” The soft downward turn to his lips gave Megan a sense of victory. Merck was trying to ruffle her feathers and yet she had clearly just blown a storm breeze through his.

  Were they going to have pleasantries in this city or were they going to be glass on naked feet with each other? She would like to say that it was not junior high school or anything like that anymore and that they were both adults so they should be able to be sensible and civil at the same time. He was an established detective to people all around the globe. She was the regular person with regular things on her mind; solving crimes was definitely not a part of it. She was curious about why the body was moved from the freezer to the steam room. While she had many answers for it she wanted the real reason behind it. Obviously they would need to put some more stuff in the freezer, the large freezer not the one attached to the fridge, more often than once or twice a week? She knew about this freezer type because she knew a family that got a really large one for their basement because all of the hunting that the husband had shot, cleaned and got ready for storage. It was too much game for the red kitchen freezer so they had to buy the really big freezer that just opened upward and they could just drop the meat down inside of it without struggle. The spa wasn’t about storing hunting meats. There didn’t really seem to be a need for much space outside frozen fruits and vegetables but more people to give small snacks and spa meals to meant more space would be needed. But there really wasn’t an amount of weekly spa servings that should require a freezer big enough to store animals that had been shot, killed and prepped for cooking but like any other establishments things could always change. If this staff were going to grow larger they might need more vegetable and fruit space for frozen foods. Either which way it went the question was still why move the body unless they were expecting to get more stuff in within the next couple days. But she would guess the question would really be why put the body in the steam room and then turn the steam room on? Of course like any other establishment the steam room could have been on a timer in the first place.

  “Why put the
body into the steam room when it clearly had been in the freezer in the first place?” Megan realized that maybe she should not have been asking questions as it was the detective’s place to ask questions but it was a question she wanted an answer to and he might be the best person to tell her without her having to go around and ask questions on her own. She realized her question might seem like she was taking on the task of crime and that was his job to do, not hers.

  “I would imagine that’s a question for a lot of people right now. I have to do more investigations to figure it out because from what I understand they are not expecting a shipment of frozen foods until the start of next month and that is four weeks away.”

  Being that this month had five weeks and that she understood the they had clearly just had a delivery and knew they wouldn’t need another one for a while so there really was not a reason to go ahead and move the body. On the other hand, could they leave a body in a freezer for month without anybody finding it by accident before they wanted anybody to find it? Yes the body had to be moved, but why to the steam room?

  “What I assess from the move is that they wanted to confuse the time of death more but also the place of death. Think about it, if we had found the body in the freezer we would’ve thought something was going on with the code for anybody else who had access to the freezer area which comes out to be just about every employee in here because they could all go down into that section whenever they wanted to get something out of the regular refrigerator-freezer or to just make themselves a smoothie, a salad or anything like that. Of course they had to bring their own food for that. On the other end of that the question of why they put it in the steam room other than to just confuse the time of death more is a mystery because the steam room is always most used by the people here for spa routines they had booked. It was not likely that anybody other than one of the people paying to be here would really have been going into the spa that much. Of course that’s just something I have to keep investigating to figure out why the move of the body. Of course it really is necessary to figure out who killed him, why they killed him and when they killed him. I have to leave the what they killed him with to the medical examiner. There does not seem to be any signs of what was used to kill him yet. It could be poison. He could’ve been choked to death too. But I didn’t notice any signs that looked like he was choked. Of course the medical examiner will have to tell us what killed the man before I can say for sure what it was. I’m not thinking of getting a definitive time of death though. I wish I could say that I would get a definite time but I won’t bank on getting that, not right now anyway. The constant change of temperature in the body could have completely killed the possibility to get the true time frame. And without a sure time frame the investigation of who did it and when will be more difficult to solve this case. I can’t ask someone where they were at a particular time if I don’t know what that time is. The not so fun joys of being a detective means that not everything is so easily solvable no matter how easy the television shows make it look.”

  Megan understood that the fictional worlds and the reality worlds were not on the same pass of ease. She didn’t envy Merck’s task ahead of him but she was sure he was used to his professional crime solving days enough to sort things out on his own.

  Merck asked her a few more routine questions before moving onto the next person he had to speak with. Lucky for her he let everybody he had spoken with go home. Not so lucky for her was that she had to wait an hour longer because the officers had to go through the storage lockers and her purse pack had been put in one of those lockers. She didn’t want to use it but it was mandatory and it made sense because who would want to take their bag into a steam room with them? She wasn’t there for the steam room so not having to follow spa rules would have been nice.

  Megan was not the only woman back here in the service waiting room waiting to get their bags. They all had keys but they had all been forbidden to go back behind the painted red doors until the officers took them back there and sorted through their things before they were allowed to take it. The entire spa was the crime scene and as such no warrants were needed to assess the things still in the spa. It would be unlikely that the murder happened while the customers were in the spa but a person’s bag, even in a locked locker, was still a possible hiding place for the weapon used to kill with.

  What Megan still needed to figure out was what was behind the blue door. The red door was a connective exit from where the lockers were. The white door was where the owner’s office was and the pink door was for all of the employees to be able to go and leave their bags, eat their food, watch the news or watch the biggest soap on TV at this time. And from what she could understand from some of the ladies who actually worked there when they were talking about their time off they all seemed to be following the most recent soap opera Gone Are The Nights. Megan was not a soap opera viewer herself but she had heard that there was something about a very strong and highly fit man of the gods that women were falling out over his feat for as they watched it. That really wasn’t anything new because even in movies people could find the leading man of interest and want to marry him. But this guy in this soap opera was said to be tall, gorgeously dark and blue eyed handsome. Dark was about his full head of black hair. Why she assumed he probably came off as was a billionaire gorgeous man who like to stay fit with the ladies. And apparently this man was dating somebody’s sister and that somebody apparently hated a man. All the women she heard talking about the TV shows soap opera seemed to love the guy but not necessarily the woman he was with because they would’ve been so much better for the man. The really sad part about listening to the people who watched soap operas was realizing that they really thought that they should’ve been the one that was with the fictional character. The man could be a jerk in the real world but women wanted him. She made a mental note to herself that she should look the soap star up online and see what he actually looks like. She also knew that she should not watch the show because she would get just as addicted as everybody else looking at some hot man who seemed to be at the center of the line for attracting women. Right now she was looking at Merck and he had that very handsome, fit even in a suit with the jacket unbuttoned look. Add good hair groomed perfectly like a man working for MI 6 and the Queen at the same time. Of course the last thing that she needed was to find this detective attractive. He was attractive, yes, but she remembered him from their school years and she also knew that finding him attractive could be trouble for her. With the way that he stared her up and down for no reason other than checking her out she could tell he had an interest in her. No man stared at a woman up and down and then let his eyes go back to her lips so frequently. Every time she spoke it was like his eyes went back to her lips as if he were imagining what it would be like to kiss her lips and taste her sweetness while he held her in his arms. He was a man and men knew what they might and what they want it. But getting involved with him at this stage would be a big mistake. There were other men in the world she could actually date who would not notice much about the mystery of her younger years and what people said about her. And she really did miss Venice, Italy and the life she had there. Still, Regal Detective Merck Holmes was delicious and she couldn’t deny that.

  Megan shut her eyes tight and told herself to put the detective out her mind. She still did not need to develop a crush on him again.

  “Megan, are you okay? Do you need food or anything?”

  Her eyes popped open and she had eye level view of the black rawhide belt securing his pant at the as they should be. That belt buckle looked like a silver steel with an eagle clasping it close with an eye that looked like it could see the truth in anything.

  Megan lifted her head so that her eyes could trace up to his eyes. She gave him a soft smile and shook her head no. “Thank you but I think I am okay.” No way could she say that she actually was thinking of him and about what he was thinking of her.

  The day that she thought would be one hour in the
spa, two at longest, went from uneventful relaxation to crazy cops meet the murderer.

  Going to the spa was something she never did. She was more outdoors in nature or in the kitchen but she won this trip and she figured it could be good to use before she opened her café because she knew once she opened it she was less likely to get a break. She had made the crazy choice to set her schedule in a way that would keep her in the kitchen or in the office managing the books.

  She was okay with the way she worked things out since all her friends were either out of the country or so far out of state that she didn’t get out with them on a daily.

  As she sat there thinking about everything she mentally made record of the room around her and the people who were now suspects sitting there post being already questioned for a few of them and currently being questioned for at least two of them. The detective seemed to be warming them up because Megan knew the officers taking a little information was not the end of the questions in the spa. She wondered if whoever was out in the point of entry room was already gone or if they were going to be questioned at all. For all Megan knew, the other customers might have been on the books for later in the day.

  Right now her focus was on the women in the room. Something did not feel right. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but the room itself did not feel right. She knew two of the women were employees. Madelyn Shanks was a scalp massage genius. She had been sure to tell her to use her win to add a massage to her itinerary for the day. She was strong brew coffee in skin and almond caramel in eyes. She was so skinny straight but she had the voluptuous butt some women would kill for. She also had beautiful afro curls that proofed out thickly but fell a little more loosely down her back. If she could talk to the woman about anything it would be healthy hair and how to make it always look world-class gorgeous no matter where she was. People didn’t know, and probably never would, but her mother actually had two Black American parents. One was Native American with a hint of black but both appeared black. Her mother, however, could pass for straight up white. Megan looked tan but still would be considered white and given that her bio dad was Irish white she would imagine nobody thought anything different of her.