Could Reg Taylor have been behind the wheel?
"Mom? Do you still have my phone?"
She retrieved it from her sweatshirt pocket. Her hands trembled violently.
Len noticed, too. "Nona dear, help me get Agnes to the car. I think she's had a touch too much excitement for one night."
"Poor thing. First she fell through that ceiling into Daniel O'Flannigan's office, and then she was almost mowed down in the street. We best get her home." Nona moved to Agnes's other side.
Over the top of her head, I shook my own violently and mouthed the words, Not yet.
"My place is closer." Len picked up my cue. "Best we get her inside as soon as possible."
Nona giggled like a teenage girl. "Now Lennard, if you want to take me back to your place, all you need to do is ask."
"Mom?" I asked, worried about her lack of response.
"I'll be okay." The reply was automatic, but at least she was talking.
I was a terrible daughter. Suspecting one parent of a hit-and-run and abandoning the other after she'd witnessed that same hit-and-run. But I needed to know if Reg Taylor had just tried to commit vehicular homicide on his business rival.
His phone went straight to voicemail. Not a good sign.
"Ma'am, is that your car?" one of the police officers, a different uniform than the one who questioned me, asked.
"Yeah. I was just about to move it."
"We got your info?" He didn't look up from where he was running the crime scene tape between two road signs.
"Yeah."
He waved me off, and I scurried for Helga. I followed the cop's gestures and maneuvered to a side street and then merged with traffic heading north. It thinned out, and on impulse, I swerved into a gas station parking lot. Car still in gear, I pressed my foot down on the brake and then reached for the garbage bag, dumping the contents all over the seat…
…and started to laugh. Roach bait. Stacks and stacks of traps. Of freaking course.
"Why am I not surprised?" I asked.
The black garbage bag full of pest control didn't contribute anything back.
* * *
I woke up faceup on my couch, still wearing my gown and trench coat. Hercules sat on my chest, probably trying to decide if he wanted to eat my face immediately or wait until after I got him breakfast. Snickers had spent the night curled up in the middle of my still sheetless bed. Another miserable night's sleep. The house was too quiet with no Nona or Agnes moving around upstairs, no Mac clicking away at her computer keyboards. Only Hunter's ex the next apartment over and demon cat plotting my demise.
It was hard not to feel sorry for myself. Maybe if I had been a better PI, I wouldn't have spent so much time screwing around with roach bait and fat cats and gay drill instructors and could actually have helped people.
I sat up and ran a hand through my hair. It snagged painfully in the tangles. A good kind of painful, the kind that let me know I was still alive.
Unlike Daniel O'Flannigan.
Len had called me with the news just when I'd gotten home. "He didn't even make it to the hospital. Internal bleeding."
I'd sagged against the front door, key in hand. "How's Mom taking it?"
"She's asleep. Gave her a glass of whiskey when we got here. She knocked it back and then passed out. I haven't told her yet."
I didn't relish him the task. I would never forget the tender care on my mother's face as she patted Daniel O'Flannigan's hair, her fingers monitoring his pulse. Moments earlier, she'd been arguing with him. The news would devastate her.
Demon cat made a rumbling sound in his throat, some sort of kitty threat probably.
"You need to get off me if you want food," I informed him.
He blinked his creepy yellow eyes, and I held my breath. Finally, he rose and, tail in the air, jumped from me to the coffee table, landing on the laptop I'd set down the night before to chase after Mac.
I rose and grimaced down at the grime and cat hair embedded on my dress. Maybe Nona had some sort of Yenta hoodoo stain and cat-hair-lifting trick I could use to help resuscitate the garment. Maybe I was a selfish ass for worrying about a dress when a man and a woman were dead. But fretting over two murders made me want to hyperventilate. Considering how to save my wardrobe felt much more doable.
Meow, Hercules kvetched from beside his empty dish.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get the picture." I shuffled over to the stack of Finicky Feline cat food cans and popped the top to one. "Between you, me, and the wall, you don't look too finicky."
Hercules hunched down, sniffed his tribute, and then stuck his tail up in the air like he was giving me the finger and strutted away.
"Have it your way, cat." I shuffled to the bedroom to let Snickers out. She turned in circles when I opened the door, almost a greeting. I let her outside, slid jeans up under my dress, and then hung it up in the closet. After pulling on a tank top and hoodie, I dished out Snickers' breakfast, setting her food and water bowl in the bathroom. She trotted in through the still cracked back door, tail in the air, wet footprints leaving marks on the oak flooring. She looked first at the dish and then up at me with large dark eyes, as if asking, What gives?
"Better for you to hang out in here until the cat gets relocated."
The dog studied me a moment longer then tucked into her meal.
Animals seen to, I moved on to Mr. Coffee and waited impatiently for him to proffer the magic bean juice that allowed me to pass for human. With no pot to play catch I made it directly into my Celtics mug. "Come on, come on, spit it out already."
Finally, it was ready. The mug was super hot, and the first gulp burned the roof of my mouth, but I didn't care. My stomach made awful noises as the coffee hit it. When was the last time I'd eaten anything solid? The fridge revealed the lasagna of two nights past. I extracted it, cut a wedge onto a plate, and then stuffed the plate into the microwave. Plate in one hand and coffee mug in the other, I returned to the spot on the couch to consume the most important meal of the day.
Sagging into the sofa's cocooning softness, I stuffed my face, focusing on nothing more than the next forkful. Though Hunter's mother was a world-class cook, it tasted like ashes. I only made it halfway through before setting it on the coffee table. Damn, an emotional void even calorie dense food couldn't fill.
I laid my head back and closed my eyes. Mourning. Not for Daniel O'Flannigan or even Lois but for myself. I'd had all these fantastic plans, not just for the holiday but for my life. Here it was, Saturday morning, and I had woken up with two ungrateful animals, a head full of fuzz, no kid, no man, just murder and grimness. This had been Uncle Al's life. Roll out of bed, follow people, research, take pictures, get paid. Love someone who didn't reciprocate. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Was this my existence now? Waking up in yesterday's clothes with a sour stomach and a homicidal feline? Wondering when my kid would call, when my boyfriend would drop by, or if my father was a murderer.
Regardless of the nitty-gritty biology, Reg Taylor was my father, and he was in trouble. I didn't need to like him, but I couldn't turn my back on him, either.
No matter what he'd done.
I sat up just as a message pinged on the computer. Hercules must have knocked it out of sleep mode when he pounced on it.
It was an email from Mac. Subject: New phone.
I reached forward and opened the email to read her message.
Mom, your battery must be dead, again. Been trying to call you all morning. Where did you disappear to last night? And did I see Hunter there with your friend, the congressman? Upgrade your freaking phone already!
"Fat chance of that," I said but got up to retrieve my cell from my coat pocket. It was indeed out of juice. But the sucker was paid for, so until it thrashed in its final death throe, it was staying in service.
I plugged in the phone and then hit Reply on my email. Phone charging. Will text soon. Do me a solid and look into Daniel O's financials and see if he had withdrawn any larg
e sums of cash.
It felt icky to continue investigating him for Lois's death, but as Uncle Al's unpublished manuscript always said, leave no financial stone unturned. If Daniel O'Flannigan had paid someone to off Lois, I needed to find it.
Mac pinged back while I made more coffee, instant because the stupid pot was still up in Nona's apartment. "How the mighty have fallen," I said to Hercules. "At least it isn't decaf."
Fortified, I sat down to read the new message.
So why was Hunter at the Sugar Ball?
Work, or so he said. You said you saw Hunter with Whitmore?
What had Hunter said when he'd warned me to be careful around the congressman? That his sister wasn't the first person close to him to die violently. Surely he wasn't investigating Alan Whitmore. But the congressman had been at the Sugar Ball, and Hunter had been there undercover. At the same place I'd received a message threatening to "tell him the truth."
Lost in thought, I closed out the email browser. The file open on the screen behind it was a handwritten note on what appeared to be a cocktail napkin. Meet me in the office at nine for your punishment. xxoo, Lady L.
Huh? I minimized the screen. The file was scanned onto the flash drive that was still plugged into the computer. So, this note came from one of my many bags of trash.
My brain chugged along, almost out of caffeine. The office. Punishment. Lady L.
L as in Lois?
Was this some sort of kinky game between Lois and Daniel O'Flannigan? More proof of the affair? There was only one person I could think of to ask. And while I was at it, I was going to see if she drove a little black car that happened to have a man-sized dent.
An hour later I discovered that Daniel O'Flannigan's ex-wife was small and dark haired with a serious case of resting bitch face. She drove a new red Audi, an easy car to follow, especially on a gloomy March Saturday through Uptown Boston. I followed her from her townhouse, where she must have left her daughter, to a nearby supermarket and parked opposite her before following her into the store.
She wore skinny jeans and a stylish sweater, one designed to fall a certain way more than it was to keep its inhabitant warm. Ballet flats on her feet. She looked far too delicate to run over her ex-husband. Then again, she didn't seem overly concerned about his death, not the way she squeezed those avocados like they owed her money. Either she hadn't heard, or she was colder than the midnight air in January.
"Wendy O'Flannigan?" I approached her with a friendly smile and a question in my voice.
She didn't bother returning the gesture. "Do I know you?"
"Mackenzie Taylor, PI." I had a card ready to go and offered it to her.
Her hands remained around the produce. "Thanks, but I already have a PI." She set the avocado in her basket then maneuvered her cart around the far side of the produce stand.
I followed. "Is that how you found out about your husband's affair with Lois?"
She stopped and then pivoted slowly to face me. "Ex-husband. And I knew about the affair all along."
"You did?"
She nodded. "We had what's known as an open marriage. He came to me for permission to start seeing Lois."
Didn't see that one coming.
"My PI is for background checks. I run an employment agency." She made another attempt to evade me.
I grabbed hold of her shopping cart. "Let me get this straight. You told your husband it was okay to have sex with other women?"
She tugged on the cart. "Yoko Ono did it for John Lennon."
"M'kay." Unlike her I was having a tough time keeping a neutral expression. "Did Lois understand about your arrangement?"
"That's really not my concern." She moved over to the bananas. "Whatever he said to her was between them. I didn't ask about it."
My mind spun out a dark conjuring of Daniel O'Flannigan having yet another woman in his life, one who wasn't so open. "Was Lois the only person he was involved with?"
She looked at me as though I were the crazy one. "Of course."
"John Lennon was paying prostitutes," I pointed out.
Wendy actually shuddered. "I didn't want to catch some sort of disease."
"So you were still sleeping with him?" The rules of their relationship were so far outside of my understanding as to seem comical.
"We were trying to have another child." She decided against the bananas, choosing navel oranges instead.
"Do you know how long their affair had been going on?"
She bagged the fruit, tying the plastic ends in a neat knot. "On and off since they both worked at O'Flannigans. She gave him what he wanted."
I stepped closer to her, lowering my voice. "And what was that, exactly?"
She raised one perfectly sculpted eyebrow. "Don't tell me you haven't read Fifty Shades."
"I have the audiobook." That plus liters of coffee was all that had gotten me through some mind-numbing stakeouts on an insurance case. "So, Daniel was into BDSM, and you weren't?"
She shuddered. "Not at all. I'm more traditional, and I have a daughter. That kind of thing is fine for women like Lois."
Could she sound more condescending? "Like Lois, how?"
"You know, divorcée, risqué lifestyle. I have better things to do with my time. Daniel does too, but he doesn't see it that way. I figured it was something he needed to get out of his system, a phase. Like playing with that stupid band. But he didn't. And when I told him it was either that or me, he chose that."
She didn't sound bitter, just mystified as to why Daniel had made the choice he had. Didn't fit with what Len had told me about an acrimonious divorce.
"How did the two of you get on after?"
She stared at me for a beat. "I don't see how that's any of your business. Now if you'll excuse me, my daughter has a playdate at noon."
I could always check out the court transcripts to find out what they fought about, but I had the feeling I was barking up the wrong tree here. My instincts told me that while Wendy O'Flannigan might be cold, she wasn't a cold-blooded murderer.
Plus, she was still referring to him in the present tense. She hadn't heard about the accident. I considered telling her but decided it wasn't my place.
My brain snagged on something she'd said. I called out to her before she rounded the corner. "You said the band was a phase. But he's still in the band."
"No, he gave up on it months ago. Now if you'll excuse me…" Her tone sure, she turned her cart into the checkout line before I could ask any more questions.
I wandered through the aisles, thinking about what she'd said. Thinking was hard on an empty stomach, so I bought a bag of trail mix—the good kind with chocolate chips and candied fruit—and a bottle of water and headed back to Helga to consider the possibilities. If I ruled Wendy out, as my gut told me to do, I was left with four possibilities.
Option one. Michael O'Flannigan had hired someone to kill his ex-wife and brother in a jealous fit. Either over their affair or the business or maybe even the treasure. The jury could play mix and match with his mixed bag of motives and pick the one that suited them best. The only reason he hadn't been arrested was because he had alibis. But a man like Alan Whitmore would press the DA to uncover a line of money that couldn't be tracked or someone with a shady background who owed O'Flannigan a favor.
Option two. The deaths were unrelated. Lois had been killed by the note's recipient, assuming she was Lady L. Maybe Daniel. Maybe someone else. It was possible that I hadn't seen anything more than a drunken hit-and-run. Daniel's death might have been an accident. This one didn't hold much potential, being full of coincidence and playing to my being wrong. Not only did two deaths in the proximity to The Shipping Lane occur in one week, but I felt sure the driver had been lying in wait behind me. Had waited for Agnes to move out of the road before striking.
Option three. Daniel had killed Lois, and someone else had taken Daniel out. Someone like Alan Whitmore, who Hunter claimed was dangerous. Or my father, who still wasn't picking up his phone. T
hough the second option didn't hold water, the third made me feel sick inside.
Option four. Some unknown person had killed them both for reasons I hadn't uncovered. I liked option four the best. Not only was it free of coincidence, but it also didn't leave either Reg Taylor or the congressman in the hot seat. I didn't want to be faced with the choice of taking either man down for the sake of smarmy Michael O'Flannigan.
Like a record needle stuck on the same line, my brain kept going over what Wendy said about Daniel giving up the band months ago. I'd seen Daniel playing with Under Irish Skirts on Wednesday. Cute bartender told me that they hadn't played there at all in the six months he'd worked at The Shipping Lane. Was it merely a coincidence that Elijah Hawthorn had pointed me to Daniel's ex? Or had he been trying to throw me off the scent?
The time on the dashboard read ten thirty. Lois's funeral was at noon. I had enough time to stop in and see my buddy Cliff at the park before heading home to change for Lois's funeral and pick up Hercules.
No matter what else happened, I had to come clean with Alan Whitmore today. I wanted to do it publicly, just in case he didn't take the news well.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"It's the knife you don't see that will hurt the most." From The Working Man's Guide to Sleuthing for a Living, an unpublished manuscript by Albert Taylor, PI
Cliff's latest torture session was just breaking up when I arrived at the park. He waved when he saw me. "Hey there, Rash. Was wondering if you'd be back. Your mother mentioned you are a private investigator. How sexy is that?"
"In thought more than in deed," I told him. "I'm sorry about Daniel."
Cliff used a hand towel to wipe sweat from his face, his expression grave. "He was a good friend. I can't help but wonder if it was someone in the bar who had too much to drink. Running the bar was Daniel's dream, and he's run down by some selfish idiot who had one too many then got behind the wheel. How sick would that be?"
I made a sympathetic but noncommittal noise. "I guess the band is SOL now, without Daniel."
Sleuthing for the Weekend Page 16
