“None taken, Peggy.” Frank was tapping his fingers on the table, not that we could hear them. It took a lot of energy for him to actually move things in physical space. It could happen, but it was difficult. “What I’m wondering is where the girl is. We need to double down on finding her. Linx, try her phone again.”
I sighed and dialed her number, but it went straight to voice mail again. “I’ve called her six times now. She’s not answering.”
Vincent said, “I’m really worried about Gabby. What if—”
My mother blew in through the back door. “Hey, guys! Did you hear all the commotion? Police cars everywhere! I swear, it’s like an episode of CSI or something.” She stopped and shivered. “New spirit?”
I exchanged looks with my grandmother. “Weren’t you in the marina this morning?”
All the police cars had been gone for a couple of hours. Mrs. L’s son had come to take her back to his house for a while. The canals were quiet again.
“Yep. I guess there was some poor girl floating in the marina this morning,” Mom said. “A boat ran over the body and… It was awful. Harbor patrol was everywhere. All the lookie-loos were out. Poor thing.”
If it was possible, Vincent looked even paler. Frank looked just as grim.
I had a feeling we weren’t going to be looking for Gabby much longer. I picked up my phone and called Raul.
3
It Ain’t a Party Unless You Bring the Bolt Cutters
“You’re sick and twisted.”
“But you love me anyway, don’t you?”
Raul sipped his coffee and let the steam cloud the horn-rimmed black glasses he’d worn that morning, then scratched the half beard that hadn’t been there the day before. My friend didn’t have a five-o’clock shadow. It was more like an eleven-a.m. shadow. Raul could grow a full beard in a day. He shaved on his lunch break at the LA County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office because he couldn’t stand the idea of “dead people compounds” being stuck on his face.
Raul was an unusual guy. He was a gorgeous geek. Totally uninterested in women, which didn’t stop him from having a fascination with my boobs. He was also one of my best friends.
And if you needed to find out about a corpse in the greater Los Angeles area, he was the best.
“Freak,” he said.
“Goth boy.”
He lifted the middle finger of his left hand and took another sip of coffee.
“What do you want this time, Linx?”
“You know the body they pulled out of Marina del Rey yesterday?”
He curled his lip. “You do like the messy ones, don’t you?”
“Can I get in to see it?”
Raul shook his head. “Not this time. One, it’s messy. I mean really messy.”
I tried not to notice Vincent’s ghost cringing beside me. We were sitting in a café in Chinatown; Raul had agreed to meet me on his lunch break. My burger was mostly untouched on the plate before me. Talking dead bodies usually put my stomach in the wrong mood. Raul, however, dug into his fried-chicken sandwich with relish.
“And two,” he continued, “the detective on this one is a hard-ass. A damn cute ass, but he would notice a hair out of place. Stay away from this one, Linx.”
A hard-ass, huh? “Would that be Detective Lee?”
Raul lifted one eyebrow. “Do I want to know how you know that?”
“I maybe met him at Mrs. L’s house when that body showed up.”
Raul raised a hand. “Don’t want to know more.” He leaned forward. “But seriously, right? He’s fine.”
“So fine. The arms.”
“The lips.” Raul sighed. “He’s all yours. He dated someone in Records last year, and she’s definitely a she.”
I couldn’t not ask. “Are they still dating?”
Frank said, “Linx…”
Raul said, “A cop? Linx, he’s fine, but he’s so not your type. The first time he had to arrest you for trespassing, the magic would be gone.” Raul pursed his lips. “Or maybe not. I can see him having a dirty side.”
“I haven’t been arrested for trespassing since high school.” I thought for a second. “Or freshman year of college. At the latest.”
Vincent shouted, “Will you shut up about the cop? I want to know about Gabby.”
Frank glared at Vincent so I didn’t have to. Instead, I took a bite of my burger and waited for Raul’s mind to drift back to the dead body.
My bogie understood the score. Most of my life was interrupted by ghost shit. I hadn’t asked for it. I didn’t really want it. Therefore, sometimes I got to act frivolous about death and murder. That was my right. Bogie got that because he’d been a cop. If I spent all my time with dead people, I got to gossip about cute police detectives with my friend over lunch occasionally.
“So the marina girl.” Raul’s interest had been piqued. “She’s mangled, but she was a cutie. Some geek will be crying in his Cheerios when she doesn’t come home.”
“Oh? Why a geek?”
“Gabby had tattoos,” Vincent said. “Ask him about tattoos.”
“Purple hair, manga ink. She had that look, you know?” Raul licked sauce off his fingers. “She was a cosplay hottie for sure.”
“I have a friend,” I said. “Thinks Marina Girl may be a friend of his, but her mom can’t stand him. Won’t answer his calls. He’s worried about her. What were the tattoos?”
“Ghost in the Shell,” he said. “Do you know it?”
I shook my head.
“The main character is a cyborg with these plugs on the back of her neck. The tattoos on Marina Girl—”
“Oh God,” Vincent groaned. “It’s Gabby. It’s Gabby.”
There was something about hearing a ghost cry that raised the hair on my arms.
“—look like sockets. Like the main character has.” Raul shot me a look. “Sound familiar?”
I nodded my head silently, Vincent’s cries audible only to me and Frank. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s her. Her name is Gabby. Don’t know her last name.”
Raul grimaced. “That sucks.”
“Was it murder?”
“I can’t say for sure. But if Detective Lee is assigned, probably. You said it’s connected to that body at Mrs. L’s?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. “They just showed up the same day. Seems weird.”
Raul shrugged. “Life is full of weird, gorgeous. Doesn’t mean there’s a grand conspiracy or anything.”
“Tell that to my nan.”
I sat in the car for about twenty minutes after I finished lunch, waiting for Vincent to speak. His energy had become spiky and dark. It scraped against my skin when he brushed too close. It felt like grief and anger combined. Not a combination I was unfamiliar with, but Frank was better at shielding himself. Feeling Vincent’s raw presence made me glad I hadn’t eaten too much of that burger. I felt queasy and nervous, like I’d drunk too much coffee on an empty stomach.
“Kid, you need to get it together,” Frank said. “This isn’t helping your friend.”
“If I’m here,” Vincent said. “Where’s Gabby?”
He was looking at me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She might be gone already.”
She probably wasn’t. If she’d been murdered, she could very well be hanging around, but I had no idea how to find her or where. She could be attached to whoever had killed her. She could be drifting at the bottom of the Marina del Rey. I wasn’t going to tell Angry Vincent any of that.
“What else can you tell us about your operation?” Frank asked. “If both of you were murdered, it was because of what you were doing together.”
The angry energy spiked harder.
“He’s not saying you got her killed,” I said. “Just that whatever you were doing—”
“We should go to the storage unit,” Vincent said. “Gabby and I were the only ones who knew about it. It’s where we kept our stuff until we could sell it.”
“Where?” I
started the car.
“EZ Storage on North Venice. You know it?”
I backed out of the space in the parking garage. “Padlocks, right?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know how we’re going to get in. Gabby had the key, and I don’t—”
“Don’t worry about that part, kid,” Frank said. “Linx has you covered.”
“She knows how to pick locks?” Vincent said.
Frank said, “Not very well. But it ain’t a party unless you bring the bolt cutters.”
“Wahoo.” I put on my sunglasses as we pulled onto the street. “It’s party time.”
There were several cars in the parking lot when I strolled into EZ Storage carrying a duffel bag with gloves and bolt cutters inside. No one ever suspected the little girl with pink hair had nefarious intent, so though people remembered me, they tended to view me as innocuous. Which worked to my advantage. I walked with purpose and hoped there was no one in the hallway where Vincent and Gabby’s storage room was.
There wasn’t. I dropped the duffel bag, pulled on the gloves, and snapped the padlock in under a minute.
Vincent said, “This isn’t the first time you’ve done that, is it?”
“Nope.”
I slid the corrugated metal door open, and Frank and Vincent drifted ahead of me as I flicked on the single light and yanked the door closed. Vincent’s storage unit was hot, but not overly stuffy. There was no dust hanging in the air and no junk on the floor. If anything, it resembled a library. Metal bookcases lined the walls; they were filled with file boxes, packing material, and padded envelopes. A digital scale sat on top of an old office desk, all the drawers pulled open.
“That’s not right.” Vincent walked toward the desk. “Someone’s been here.”
“Gabby had the key?” I walked to the desk and examined the drawers, still wearing my gloves.
“Yeah.”
Frank was perusing the shelves. “There’re still a lot of comics in these boxes,” he said. “You always keep the lids off?”
“No.” Vincent walked over to Frank. “Gabby was manic about cleaning and organizing stuff from when she worked in the comic shop. Individual volumes were all in their own sealed sleeve. Boxes were covered. Keep the dust off. Keep the mold out. Protect the merchandise. Some stuff we sold right away. Some stuff she wanted to wait because she thought the price would go up. She was smart, you know?”
“What did she keep in the desk?”
“She had a record book of everything we sold, how much we made, all that stuff. Money was in a safe deposit box at the bank.”
“Computer?”
Vincent shook his head. “Paper copy. Some of these guys were hackers. Gabby didn’t trust computers.”
I left the empty drawers open. There wasn’t much to see. It was clear that papers had been removed, but I wasn’t going to interfere with the scene more than I had to. I wandered over to the file boxes and flipped through an open one.
“Anything striking you?” I asked Vincent as he looked over my shoulder.
“The good stuff is gone,” he said. “Whoever went through it knew their comics. This stuff is mostly trash.”
“Why’d you take trash?” Frank asked.
“We took everything,” Vincent said. “I was in charge of stealing the collections. I grabbed everything and Gabby sorted it out. She didn’t throw anything away though. If something was really common, she just filed it. Every collection has common stuff that’s not worth much. Editions with huge print runs, things like that.”
“So that’s what’s left?” I slid the box back, leaving the lid to the side where it had been knocked off.
“Yeah.”
I turned in a circle. “Whoever killed you guys knew their comics. Gabby probably told them about the unit. She had the key. They killed you guys and robbed the unit, maybe looking for their own stuff.” I turned back to Vincent. “And you kept everything here?”
He looked a little uncomfortable. “Mostly everything.”
“What does that mean?”
“There were a few things from a recent job, you know? Not really valuable stuff. Gabby said I could, so I wasn’t cheating her or anything. But my dad’s a huge baseball fan.”
Frank said, “What was the stuff?”
“Baseball cards. It wasn’t even what we broke in for, you know? There was this one set hanging on a wall in the dude’s hall, and it was from the Cubs, which is my dad’s team. His birthday was last week, so I gave it to him. Not really a big deal or anything. That’s the only stuff that wasn’t here. The baseball stuff.”
“What job, Vincent?”
“I told you, the most recent one.”
Frank rolled his eyes. “Which was…?”
“The really rich guy, you know?”
“Who?” I asked. “Leo Caralt?”
“Yeah!”
I felt like spitting. “I thought you told me Gabby was just chatting with him.”
“Yeah, but he’s got a lot of stuff, so I thought we could break in, see how strong his security was. Kind of like a… test break-in. I wanted to know how much time we’d have. If it was easy, we’d go back. And I gotta tell you”—Vincent was looking cocky—“it was a lot easier than I thought.”
I rolled my eyes. “Except you got dead, remember, Vincent? Ever think maybe Leo found out it was you who broke in? Maybe his security wasn’t as soft as you thought?”
He looked confused. “I guess that’s true.”
People who think thieves are smart are generally mistaken. Most criminals aren’t the brightest. They’re just sneaky. There’s a difference between sneaky and smart.
“So you broke into Leo’s house and what? Took baseball cards?”
“And some other stuff. Gabby was in charge of that. She went into the guy’s storage room in back. I just scoped out the rest of the house and saw the cards. Gabby said I could take them because they weren’t that valuable.”
Frank asked, “Linx, you been back in this guy’s storage room?”
I shook my head. “I know the library where I’m working is only part of his collection though. He’s got a lot more, but I never asked about it.”
I heard something outside. I held up a hand to shut up the arguing ghosts and walked to the door. I cracked it open and listened. The voices were echoing and far away, but I recognized the familiar tenor of LA’s finest.
“Shit. We gotta go.” I grabbed my purple duffel bag and yanked the door open, leaving the bolt cutters on the floor. They were bought at Home Depot and didn’t have my prints on them. They were far less incriminating on the floor of the open storage unit than back in my bag. I pulled the door closed and hung the cut deadbolt in the lock before I took off in the opposite direction of the voices.
These storage places could be mazes unless you knew where you were going, but I’d been in this one before. I walked up and down a few aisles until I managed to find my way out to the parking lot. There were a few other patrons hanging around, watching the cops mill around the front. I could see Detective Lee in the front office, a paper in his hand.
He walked out of the office and into the sun.
Damn, he was just so pretty.
I tried to duck behind the other bystanders before he could see me, but I was too late.
“Miss Maxwell?”
I ignored him and walked to my car, popping open the trunk and throwing in the duffel bag as the crowd in the parking lot muttered behind me. I shut the trunk as I heard him shout my name again.
“Miss Maxwell!”
Frank was scowling. “I swear to the Almighty, Linx. Your hormones…”
I slowly turned. “Hey!” I said brightly. “What’s going on?”
Detective Lee crossed his arms and stared at me from behind the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses. Raul was right. His mouth was perfect, especially when it was pursed like that.
He must have caught my perusal, because the bright spots on his cheeks appeared again, and he uncrossed his arms.
“Hi,” I said. “Sorry.” I could feel myself blushing. “You know you’re really handsome, right?”
Apparently Serious Detective Lee could be thrown off his game by a little flattery. Good to know.
“I don’t… What are you doing here, Linx?”
“Putting something in my storage unit. What are you doing here?”
He frowned. “Why do you have a storage unit this close to your house?”
“Because it’s close to my house?”
He rubbed his forehead. “What?”
I kicked my foot out and scrambled for some kind of explanation. “Uh… because I’m a grown woman who’s living with my mom and grandma. And I need some… privacy sometimes. For… stuff. You know.”
The red spots were back. I thought about what I’d just told him and barely managed to keep from slapping my own forehead.
Great. Now cute Detective Lee probably thought I had some kind of sex dungeon at the EZ Storage on North Venice Boulevard.
Fabulous.
4
No Surprise Is Good When It Happens in the Bathroom
“What are you doing here?” Detective Lee asked. “Really?”
“I told you. I’m putting stuff in my storage unit. I share it with a friend of mine. We both had to move back in with our parents after we got out of school. What’s the big deal?” I tried to look concerned. “Does this have to do with the guy this morning?”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
“That’s awful. My mom said there was another body down at the marina. Is it the same—”
“Linx.” He stepped closer and dropped his voice. “I talked to Chuck Morrissey about your family. You know him?”
I nodded. “Yep. He and my nan have been friends for years. I know Officer Morrissey.”
“I happen to have a lot of respect for Chuck, which is why I believed him when he told me your family was… eccentric. But that you were some of the good guys.”
“Eccentric is…” I laughed a little. “…a very kind word for my family. Thanks for using it.”
A Bogie in the Boat Page 3
