Meerkats and Murder Read online

  Betty was quiet. Scary quiet. Rex decided to go back into the office to get a head start on the evidence room, once he found out Susan and Kelly were coming over for the knitting lesson. Maybe he was scared off by the idea of Betty being tempted by pointed sticks.

  Kelly and Susan arrived at the same time, Kelly with her two-year-old daughter, Finn (named after me), and Susan with a large plastic tub. Betty offered to play with Finn while we learned the fine skills of knitting. At least that was something I was comfortable with. Betty was a whiz with little kids.

  Some months ago, we'd attended a Council event, where the administration was shorthanded when it came to the Daisies who attended. Betty, Lauren, and the Kaitlyns took over, organizing the little girls and teaching them games and songs, while the other girls participated in a session on Women in Engineering. My girls did a great job, and Betty didn't attempt to kill anyone.

  "I've never done this before," Kelly said as she tried to tie a slip knot onto one of her needles.

  Susan nodded. "It's never too late to start something new." She gave me a look. "And there have been studies that suggest hobbies like knitting can stave off Alzheimer's."

  "Why are you both looking at me?" I asked as I tied my knot.

  "Because you don't remember things I've said," Kelly offered.

  "Rex said the same thing tonight," I said before realizing I'd just proved her right. I'd never hear the end of that.

  "Merry." Susan looked at my needles. "That's not a slip knot. That's a noose. Something on your mind?"

  I concentrated on another attempt, by some small miracle nailing it the second time. Susan patiently taught us how to cast on. Kelly took to it like a pro. The show-off. I, on the other hand, struggled a bit.

  Philby trotted into the room with Martini. Both cats froze when they spotted the toddler. They looked at me questioningly. Both cats had loved Finn when she was a baby, often curling up and sleeping with her.

  But now that she was mobile, and by that I mean she could chase them on two legs, the cats had become furry dough balls the toddler kneaded and tugged on. They didn't complain and they never bit her, but I knew they didn't like it.

  Finn squealed and ran after the cats. Philby shoved Martini at the girl. Martini never knew what hit her. She was scooped up by the child, who then roughly stroked her fur. Philby, her work done, joined us in the living room, where things were much more interesting because there was yarn that seemed to be alive and needed to be killed.

  My grandmother, Adelaide Wrath, was a tough old bird who ran the family farm and kept a shotgun in the kitchen, and had been a knitter. She'd tried to teach me how to do it, but it didn't take. I didn't have the patience for it. Now I knew why.

  We were knitting with cotton yarn on bamboo needles. Susan said this was so the yarn didn't slip off easily, and with cotton we could make a square washcloth—something useful.

  "The girls will be able to make something they can take home and use right away," the therapist said.

  "I love that!" Kelly cooed, working on her cloth as if she'd been knitting all her life. "They love crafts."

  After several false starts, I began to get the hang of it. Philby attacked my yarn every time it moved, which made things far more difficult, until Susan tied a string to the ceiling fan. Philby watched the string spin in the air, her pupils the size of dinner plates. Her tail began to swish, and she got into striking position.

  With a leap, she caught the yarn in her teeth. Unfortunately, she wouldn't let go. The yarn stopped, which stopped the fan. The appliance made a terrible sound before stopping all together. When Philby let go, the yarn wasn't moving. Thinking she'd made her kill of the night, she climbed onto the back of the couch and waited for Leonard to come in.

  I shut the fan off and went back to my knitting. Kelly finished hers, and Susan was teaching her to bind off. In the other room, Finn was squealing with glee as Leonard licked her little face. Betty smiled. It startled me. I wasn't used to that.

  "Merry?" Susan brought my attention back to the project.

  I held up my cloth, but for some reason the stitches didn't look as nice as Kelly's. There were some holes scattered throughout.

  "What did I do?" I stared through one of the holes at Susan.

  "You dropped stitches." Susan reached for it.

  "You can drop stitches?" I looked on the floor.

  Susan laughed and explained that since I wasn't paying attention, I'd let stitches fall off my needle before I knit them.

  I tried again. This time I focused on each and every stitch. And six hours later…I had a teeny, tiny washcloth. Okay, it wasn't six hours. It just felt like that. Actually, it felt like six months. But I had a washcloth! I don't use them and it was the size of a postage stamp, but now I had one!

  "Do you think we can teach the girls how to do this?" Kelly asked as Susan packed up her things.

  I shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe?"

  My biggest concern was that the girls would use the knitting needles to stab each other. But maybe we'd get lucky and they'd like it.

  "It was fun," Kelly said after Susan had left. "I think I'll take it up as a hobby."

  I didn't respond because my mind was back on murder. Kelly and Finn left, and once I'd wrangled Betty into bed, I sat in the living room trying to figure out what the next step was. The knitting lesson had jogged my brain, and I was now thinking that the key to this whole mystery was Joe Hanson, aka Oleg Tartikov.

  I pulled out my laptop and started looking him up. Rex came home and went to bed, but I barely noticed. Because while I had an impossible time finding Joe Hanson, there were reams of intel on Oleg.

  The man started out in the Soviet military in the 1980s and steadily rose through the ranks to make General only ten years later. Talk about meteoric rise. That seemed unnaturally fast. But the ranks were thin. Back in the day, Stalin was infamous for his bloody purges of the military. And there were rumors that Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko did the same thing (only slightly less murdery).

  Any military leader who survived a purge usually did so by keeping quiet and maintaining a low profile. Ambitiousness was suspicious. That meant Oleg was smart and could play a long game.

  Was that what he was doing now?

  In the 1990s, Oleg played things close to the vest by taking on a more administrative approach. Good with budgets and with an almost maniacal interest in paperwork, Tartikov was able to work behind the scenes invisibly, like a ghost.

  There wasn't much on him—this was probably the phase in which he started working for us as a double agent. Hacking the CIA on that era would be labeled classified, and I'd be noticed poking around.

  In 2000, Oleg came to America and vanished. The Russians sent countless operatives to the US looking for him, but they never found him. At some point, he lived in my house. And four years ago, he vanished into thin air.

  I was angry. I'd had those plans in my hands. Why didn't I run back to Rex's and rip them open there? I was an idiot.

  What was in those plans? Something important, that I knew. It could be anything from nuclear codes (old nuclear codes, but as I mentioned before, sometimes people don't change their passwords) to some sort of biological warfare we didn't know about.

  I'd done a few years in that country and was fluent in the language. You might think that meant I knew everything. To that, I'd say Are you kidding me? Russia is a huge country. The largest in the world, in fact. It has eleven time zones. Think about that. The US only has four. Four!

  In order to have extensive operations there, you'd need tens of thousands of spies in eleven time zones. And since there was always someone going rogue in the Russian Federation, staying abreast of everything that was happening was nearly impossible.

  I closed my laptop and shoved it aside in frustration. Those plans were not far. I just felt it. Did Oleg take them? Lana? The CIA? The FBI? Renegade Martians? It seemed just as likely.

  Tomorrow I was going to dig a little deeper. T
omorrow I was going renegade.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  "Mrs. Wrath?" Betty's voice was in my ear.

  I leaped out of bed before realizing it was just a kid, not a murderous Russian spy in my room.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  Betty didn't seem offended in the least. This kid was getting a bit too comfortable in my house.

  "I had an idea." She climbed up onto the bed.

  I looked over to see that not only was Rex gone, but it was almost ten in the morning.

  "My grandparents are Russian."

  My eyes narrowed. Of course the girl said that. She wanted to stay involved in the investigation.

  "I sincerely doubt it," I said as I slid into my slippers.

  That's when Betty launched into a string of Russian swearing that made my jaw drop. She ranted for at least two whole minutes, saying some very creative things I could do with a penguin and many, many things that, while impressive, were alarming. When she stopped, she smiled.

  "Where did you learn that?" I asked, more impressed than horrified. I tried to paste a responsible leader face on, but it was just too amazing.

  "Grandpa pretty much only speaks in swear words," the girl said. "He's not allowed to speak at all at Thanksgiving dinner…or Christmas, New Year's, Easter, or the Fourth of July. He gets really cussy on the fourth."

  Wouldn't it be awesome if Betty's grandpa turned out to be Oleg Tartikov? I crossed my fingers behind my back and asked his name.

  Betty frowned as she thought. "Aleksander Ritger. Why?"

  "No reason." I got up and put a robe on. "Just curious."

  The girl's eyes went wide. "You thought he was involved!"

  I shook my head. "No I didn't."

  "Yes you did! That would be amazeballs!"

  Not really, because I'd have to have him taken in. But maybe with the moratorium his family gave him on speaking in public, it would be a good thing.

  "Tell you what," I said. "Let's get dressed and meet up downstairs, and you can tell me what your idea was."

  She was out of the room like a rocket. I wondered if I was going to regret that.

  "Grandpa," Betty said ten minutes later as she dove into my stash of chocolate Pop Tarts, "does stuff with other Russians, like, all the time. It's a club, I think. He might know about Oleg." She pronounced the name perfectly, which was unusual. It wasn't Oh-leg. It was Ol-yeg. Most Americans never pronounced it correctly.

  "How did you know about him?" I'd only mentioned Joe Hanson in her presence.

  She rolled her eyes. "You talk in your sleep. Did you know that?" She cocked her head to one side. "Did that hurt your job as a spy?"

  "I don't talk in my sleep!" I grumped, eating a piece of dry toast because someone was eating all my Pop Tarts.

  "You also asked Mister Squid to stop squirting ink on the driveway," she said. "And that Rex is a hottie, and that I'm your favoritest Girl Scout ever.

  "I was thinking," Betty said without missing a beat, "that we could talk to Grandpa. Maybe he'd take us to his club, and we could find Oleg!"

  I stopped thinking about the squid, that, I remembered from my dream, vanished with a gun that squirted perfect cheese cubes. Betty's idea had some merit. Most ethnic groups stranded in Iowa lived in clusters with others of their nationality. Grandpa might even know Oleg.

  "Okay," I said as I took the last Pop Tart before she could grab it. "Let's go see Grandpa."

  Betty's grandfather lived in a suburb of Des Moines that was nicknamed Little Kiev. As we drove around the neighborhood, I wondered why I hadn't thought of this before. Betty really would make an amazing spy.

  We pulled up to a two-story, split-level house with green siding and black shutters.

  "Let me do all the talking," Betty said. "He's suspicious of strangers."

  "What? Why didn't you tell me that?"

  Betty shrugged. "You didn't ask."

  You didn't ask was a phrase I knew well and was almost as accursed as the Pinky Swear. Children, it must be noted, do not tell you everything. They hold some info back for reasons only they and possibly Satan understand. Many are the times I've heard that phrase at least two hours after I needed vital information, like when forgeries went on permission slips and why Betty was carrying a bowie knife.

  We knocked on the door, and it was answered by a tall woman with white hair. She smiled broadly, hugged Betty and, after introductions, invited us inside. She didn't look like a little old granny. She looked like a youngish badass who worked out.

  And she only spoke English, with a perfect Midwestern accent.

  "My name is Penelope. Welcome, Mrs. Wrath! We've heard so much about you?" As she wandered into the kitchen to get us some cookies, I took the opportunity to whisper to Betty.

  "I thought you said your grandparents were Russian?"

  "They are!" the kid said. "But Grandma doesn't want anyone to know that. She wants to be an American."

  I wondered how this couple got on, one old-school Russian and one who didn't want to be Russian.

  "Chocolate chip cookies?" Penelope handed us a platter with the American flag on it.

  As we took the cookies, I took the opportunity to look around. The house was cluttered. It wasn't dirty, but every single surface was covered with Americana, from the butter churns on the floor to various representations of the flag.

  "Am I right"—Penelope sat down—"in thinking your father is Senator Czrygy?"

  I nodded. "Yes, he is."

  She clapped her hands together. "That's wonderful! The daughter of an actual American senator in my house!" She leaned closer, as if about to impart state secrets. "Do you think I could get his autograph?"

  I smiled. "Of course! In fact, next time he's in town, I'll see if we can't get you two together."

  Penelope promptly exploded. With glee. She didn't really explode, but it felt like that. The woman shrieked and pounded the table, causing me to jump in my seat. Betty didn't even flinch, which made me wonder if this was a common occurrence here.

  "Why you out of school?" A grumpy, bent over man with wild white hair usually seen on a physicist pointed at Betty with his cane.

  Ah. This must be Grandpa. As I looked from Aleksander to Penelope, I wondered if they didn't come from opposing rips in the space time continuum.

  Where Penelope was dressed in a very modern pantsuit with artsy jewelry, Aleksander looked like he had a standing appointment at the chess tables in Central Park every afternoon. His old gray cardigan over a dull, off-white shirt and his brown trousers made him look out of place.

  "I'm on a field trip," Betty said confidently, failing to mention that she was actually suspended from school for trying to kill another kid.

  Penelope hugged her granddaughter. "Got to run! I have an apple pie baking class in ten minutes." She barely noticed her husband as she raced out the door.

  "Come into den," Aleksander grouched in a heavy Russian accent. "Too much crap in here. Can't think."

  We followed him down a dark hallway to a room where the walls were covered in bookcases loaded with books. In Russian. He settled into a beat-up wooden chair at a desk overflowing with Russian tchotchkes. A CD player played the Moscow Men's Choir, singing traditional folk songs. How did I know that? I once toured with them. As a man.

  Betty and I sat down on an overstuffed, dingy yellow sofa covered with bright purple and green flowers. It was the ugliest piece of furniture I'd ever seen. And that's coming from a woman who, for one year, had Dora the Explorer sheets as curtains in her living room.

  "What's this field trip?" His bushy white eyebrows went up, revealing scowling brown eyes.

  "We are working on a project for school on Russian immigration," Betty lied as easily as any spy. "We need an expert."

  Who was this girl? Had she worked on this backstory in the car all the way here? How did she do that when the conversation in the car had gone like this:

  Betty: "How many ways can you kill a man?"

  Me: "I don't k
now. Maybe thousands."

  Betty: "Could you kill a man with a llama? Or a banana?"

  Me: "I suppose so. I have no experience with that." Untrue. I once had to kill someone with a banana. It was horrible.

  Betty: "What about a rutabaga? Could you kill someone with that? Or a sparrow?"

  Me: "Shouldn't we be working on our cover story?"

  Betty: "I wonder if you could kill a man with the color yellow."

  And that's pretty much how the whole thirty minutes went. As tempting as it was to tell her all the ways a man could die from a banana, I felt we needed to get our stories straight. It never occurred to me that the girl could do it inside her head while peppering me with bizarre questions.

  Aleksander smiled. "This is good project! How can I help?"

  Betty turned to me and smiled like the angel she wasn't. "Go ahead! Tell him, Mrs. Wrath."

  There is nothing more terrifying to a spy than being put on the spot like that. I knew we should've worked on our stories in the car. Fortunately for her, I was trained to lie easily.

  "We're looking at Russian immigrants in the area," I said with a smile. "Where they hang out, how they've embraced American culture, what problems they face, that kind of thing."

  Aleksander pursed his lips. "You see how my wife embraced your culture. I have not!" He slammed his hand down on the desk.

  This time I didn't jump. I hoped Betty wouldn't inherit this weird way of communicating.

  "We have club down the block. Would you like to go there?" He gave me a sneaky grin. "Is not good for nice ladies to go there. We say what we want."

  Aleksander let fly a swear that involved a rat and a matryoshka doll, in Russian. Then he sat back and waited to see what I could do.

  I responded, in Russian, with what he could do with that matryoshka doll for all I cared.

  Betty's and Aleksander's eyes went wide.

  "Why didn't you tell me you speak Russian?" the girl asked.

  I shrugged. "You never asked."