Maltese Vulture Murder Read online

  Hannah said quickly, "I like that you're not shy and say what you think."

  Things looked up from there as the other girls, emboldened by the examples, came up with various compliments that included things about the girl I wasn't quite sure weren't passive-aggressive. For example, Gwen said she liked that this time, Delaney hadn't attacked first. And Maria said something so quietly that I wasn't sure what it was, but it threw Caterina and Hannah into hysterics. Nothing seemed to phase Delaney, who seemed to like what she was hearing, so I didn't say anything.

  It was Lauren's turn. "I love how you dodged that little caterpillar when Sophie threw you down to the ground. You saved his life!"

  Betty stepped up. "You know, with some practice, you could really mess someone up in a fight."

  I tried not to roll my eyes.

  Sophie was next. Delaney glanced around nervously, probably remembering her own harsh words.

  "I think," Sophie said, "you are smart on your own. Enough that you don't have to hide behind your daddy. You could do big things."

  It wasn't at all what I'd expected. And it was the best thing she could've said. Tammi's mouth dropped open for the three hundredth time today, and Pam beamed at her daughter. Kelly smiled happily at me. This was an amazing moment. Now, maybe, the girls would have fun for the rest of our time here.

  We turned to Delaney, thinking she would be beaming. But instead, the little girl burst into tears and ran from the circle and into the woods.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  "Delaney!" I shouted as I tried to dodge the poison ivy that seemed to be rampant here. This was a city park for crying out loud! Little kids played here! I guess I should talk to the mayor about that. Once I found his kid, that is.

  I cupped my hands around my mouth. "Delaney! Come on back!"

  The girl had gone into the woods and hadn't returned. Tammi had wrung her hands and begged me to go get her. Pam said she wasn't going in because there were animals in there. The girls wanted to form a posse, but for some reason, Kelly volunteered me for the job.

  I didn't mind the woods. I just liked to be prepared with enough Deet to bring down an elephant, something I hadn't thought I'd need for a simple picnic. I slapped a mosquito who'd had the misfortune of alighting on my forearm.

  "Delaney!" I shouted. "If we have to call the police to come find you, your daddy is going to be upset about the added expense!"

  No reply. In hindsight, that was probably the wrong thing to say.

  I'd always thought this was a small copse of trees. Apparently, it was more like unexplored wilderness that went on for miles. Where had that girl gone to—and in a dress, no less?

  "Delaney!" My voice took on a different tone. "You need to stop this and come back! This isn't how a Girl Scout behaves!"

  That didn't work either. I'd tried reason and anger and had begun with pleading, so what was left?

  And why couldn't I see her through the damn trees? She was wearing a white dress! How hard was it to track something like that? And why weren't there any trails in this forest?? The trees seemed to be thicker here, and I could no longer see the end on either side of me. In fact, I couldn't hear the girls back at the shelter anymore.

  She had to be hiding. It was the only explanation. We'd been the only people in the park. No one else was here. Where would a little girl with no experience in the woods hide? I started moving slower, checking inside rotted trees and behind fallen logs. But the woods had gotten larger, and I was zigzagging back and forth. Frankly, it was exhausting.

  "DELANEY!" I screamed.

  A cold lump formed in my stomach, and I realized something was wrong. Maybe she'd fallen and gotten hurt! Or a cougar got her! It wasn't unheard of. For the last two years, Sheriff Carnack had told me there'd been repeated sightings of a mountain lion, a black bear, and Bigfoot.

  I needed a better vantage point than the forest floor. After walking about fifty yards, I spotted an oak tree where the branches were so close it was practically a ladder going straight up. I looked back toward the picnic but was too far to see everyone.

  Kelly would insist I shouldn't climb the tree. I'd once climbed a tree, only to fall out of it, hitting every branch on the way down. My whole body had been one screaming purple bruise for a week.

  But I was running out of options. If I didn't find her soon, Pam and Tammi and their troop might panic. Kelly would be smart enough to call Rex and the sheriff. Maybe I should call her. I reached for my cell in my back pocket, but it wasn't there.

  Great. I'd lost my phone. That was all I needed. This made climbing the tree a little more dubious in that I couldn't call Kelly for help and to let her say I told you so when I fell and broke every bone in my body.

  Oh well. Delaney came first. I could imagine the mayor being unhappy with Rex if his wife hadn't done everything she could to find his daughter. I stood on my tiptoes and reached for the branch.

  And that's when I heard a polite little cough off to my left.

  Mr. Sun was sitting on a log. Mr. Moon stood next to him. The large man wore a hot pink T-shirt with a large tie-dyed question mark on it. His head was totally shaved, and the two giant hoop earrings were gone. The shorter man no longer wore the green goatee and thick glasses. Instead, he had a false hooked nose and a bright blue mohawk. He was also wearing coveralls, like the kind a mechanic might wear, but with the legs cut off above the knee.

  "I don't think I would do that if I were you," Mr. Sun said in a deep, rumbling bass voice.

  They weren't making any threatening movements, but they weren't coming across as overly friendly either. And the question mark on Sun's shirt seemed ominous. Like guess how I'm going to kill you ominous.

  I adopted a stance that would allow me to move quickly if had to, as I wasn't sure who was the fighter in this duo. You never really could judge anyone just by looking at them. I once took down a huge guy disguised as a sumo wrestler (which in hindsight, seemed to have been a bad decision) and was flattened by a four-foot-eight woman weighing about ninety-eight pounds.

  "Where's Delaney?" I asked.

  They both smirked simultaneously.

  "Who?" Mr. Moon squeaked in a high-pitched voice.

  "The little girl." I narrowed my eyes. "In the white dress. What did you do with her?"

  "You know"—Mr. Sun got to his feet, his massive bulk revealed—"I can't believe you were going to do something as stupid as climbing that tree."

  "Well then, you don't know me very well," I snapped. "I do a lot of stupid things without thinking."

  That hadn't come out quite right.

  The men laughed.

  It irked me. "You think you're so smart?" I pointed to their bare legs, brushing up against some reddish vines. "That's poison ivy. You're practically bathing in it."

  The smirks vanished, but they made no move to walk away. Where was Delaney? She couldn't be too far. I was only a few minutes behind her. Did they have her trussed up to a tree? Was she stashed behind a boulder? "I told you to bring the calamine lotion!" Mr. Moon poked his large companion in the chest before reaching down and scratching his legs.

  "I didn't think we'd really need it!" Mr. Sun protested.

  He too was beginning to scratch. I didn't tell them that they were now getting the toxin on their hands. That seemed like a conversation for another time.

  "Boys," I interrupted, "let's stay on topic here. Okay? You have one of my kids, and I want her back."

  Mr. Sun smiled an oily, evil grin. "That's quite the coincidence. Because you have something we want, and we want it now."

  I stared at them. "Nellie Lou. You want my king vulture."

  The two men nodded.

  "Well"—I shrugged—"I don't exactly have it on me. So why not release the girl, and I'll go home and get it for you."

  "No," Mr. Moon squeaked.

  "It doesn't seem like we can make a deal, then. I'll just call my husband, the cop, and my friend, the sheriff, and they'll be here before you can get to that yellow
pickup truck." Okay, so it was a bluff since I didn't have my cell. But they didn't necessarily know that. I threw the truck in just to confuse them.

  Mr. Moon turned to his partner. "I told you that truck was stupid!"

  There was something different in his voice. It wasn't high pitched and squeaky anymore.

  "You're the guys from the morgue last night!" I shouted.

  Both men froze. I guess they didn't know I'd been there at the same time.

  "You guys really need to get it together. Outrageous disguises, fake voices, vehicles that stand out… You suck at this."

  "Oh yeah?" The little guy got to his feet and waded through the poison ivy to come within three feet of me. "What do you know? We're CIA!"

  I laughed. "No. You're not. I know things have gotten a little out of control back at Langley, but they haven't fallen so low as to recruit you two losers."

  "She talks like she knows," Mr. Sun grumbled. "How would she know that?"

  I sighed. Telling these idiots about my past could make them run screaming for the hills…if there were any in this part of Iowa, that was. Or, it removed the idea of the unknown and they wouldn't be likely to underestimate me.

  "Hand over the girl, and I'll get you the bird," I said evenly.

  Mr. Sun produced a pistol. A nice gun, really—a Colt .45 Gold Cup. I used to shoot one. At this range, he wouldn't miss. And they were big bullets. Tear you up inside bullets.

  "Take us to the vulture. Now," he said.

  Unless I could make a matching gun out of some branches and a pinecone, I was in trouble. In fact, I only had two options. Take them both out, which would be difficult because the guy without the gun was closer, meaning Sun could shoot me about seven times before I got to him. Or, I could run. Outrunning these two was definitely possible.

  "Merry!" Kelly's voice came from a distance behind me. "Delaney?"

  Crap. She'd come looking for me. And I knew for a fact that unless she'd been taking survivalist classes, Kelly couldn't make a gun out of a couple of sticks and a pinecone either. Plus, she'd be one more thing Mr. Sun could shoot.

  Mr. Moon grinned. "Maybe we should just wait for your friends to join us. They'd make nice hostages."

  I lunged at Mr. Moon, keeping him between me and the gun. I picked him up, and with a Judo throw I prayed I was capable of, I tossed the little man at Mr. Sun. Sun dropped his gun and prepared to catch his partner. I didn't know if he managed it, because I was running like hell back to Kelly and the girls.

  "Hey!" Sun's voice called out, but I was already well out of range and, if I'd put enough trees between us, sight.

  "Merry!" Kelly looked at me in surprise. "What's happening?"

  "Run!" I wheezed.

  To her credit, she did.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The two of us ran all the way back to the picnic area, where Pam and Tammi surprised us by having everything packed up in the three vans and ready to go. The girls took one look at the expression on my face and jumped into the vehicles.

  "Where's Delaney?" Tammi's voice shook as she looked behind me.

  "You're coming with me," I demanded.

  I brought up the rear, hoping to get a visual on the yellow pickup if it showed up behind me. It never did.

  Betty and Lauren were in my car, which meant that Pam's and Kelly's vans must've had six girls each. Both girls were quiet, not melting in agony or shrieking with fear. They studied me as I tried to figure out what to tell Tammi.

  "Delaney fell into Shadow," Lauren said, her eyes on mine via the rearview mirror.

  "What?" Tammi screamed. "She's dead?"

  I was regretting that Lord of the Rings marathon my troop had at my old house a few weeks ago.

  "No," I insisted, "but I believe she was kidnapped." My foot hit the gas. "I'm sure she's okay," I threw in for good measure.

  "I knew it! I always knew it would come to this!" Tammi wailed, clutching her chest. "Sure, he's not the president or the governor, but mayor is an important political job, and now it's finally happened."

  "What has?" Betty asked.

  She turned to the girl, her eyes wild with fear. "Terrorists! They've kidnapped Delaney to get back at my husband, the mayor!"

  I kind of wanted to tell her she didn't need to tell us who her husband was yet again, but I held my tongue.

  "It's the Catalan Separatists!" Betty slammed her right fist into her left hand. "I knew this day would come!"

  Lauren piped up, "Could be the Basques. You always said they would come too."

  "Mrs. Wrath"—Betty leaned forward from the back seat—"we've gotta stop by my house and get some stuff. You don't want to walk into a showdown unarmed. Not against Catalans or Basque Separatists."

  "Who are the…" Tammi tried to remember what the girls said. "What you said?"

  Betty launched into an amazingly concise and insightful discussion on the two organizations. She was going to make the CIA very happy in eleven or twelve years.

  "They want freedom from Spain and France?" Tammi sounded shocked. "I guess Bill is more important than I thought. What do we do?" she asked the girls.

  I probably should've jumped in here and explained that we didn't have terrorists in Who's There and her husband was nowhere near as important as she believed, unless someone wanted a pothole filled or for the shops to be open an hour later on Sunday.

  But I didn't want her to know I was to blame. Not yet anyway. That, and I found the whole ridiculous premise of foreign terrorists strangely comforting. That was something I'd had experience dealing with.

  Crap. I still didn't know where my phone was. I'd probably left it in one of the boxes. I sent telepathic messages to Kelly to alert Rex to meet us…wherever we were going. Huh. I guess I should've asked.

  We pulled into town, heading for the Sheriff's Department. Smart. It was technically his territory, and he could call the state police for help.

  "And that's why," Betty was explaining to a hypnotized Tammi, "they obviously targeted Delaney."

  Wait! What? I missed the explanation? Seems like I really missed something, because the mayor's wife went quiet, turned in her seat, and said nothing as we pulled up outside the station. As we got out, the woman started running down the block in the other direction.

  "Where's she going?" Lauren asked.

  "To call the FBI." Betty rolled her eyes. "Duh."

  "She's heading to the mayor's office at City Hall," I said as I guided them into the sheriff's office.

  Sheriff Ed Carnack's department wasn't really big enough for fourteen little girls and three adults.

  "You'd better fill me in later," Kelly hissed as she herded everyone out the door. "Let's go to the city park! I'll buy you all ice cream!"

  A rousing cheer rose from the midst of the group, and they all filed out after her.

  I held Betty and Lauren back because I wanted to know what they'd told Tammi. I never got the chance.

  "What's going on here?" The large sheriff joined us. When he saw me, he shook his head sadly. "What's happened now?"

  He knew me too well. I'd spent some time recently, in this very room, because of a kidnapping. The problem was, it was mine. Not an innocent, if mildly bratty, kid.

  I moved quickly. "Delaney, the mayor's daughter, has been kidnapped." I pointed to the door. "At any minute, Tammi Jones is coming through that door with him, and he's probably going to be pretty pissed off."

  Sheriff Carnack blinked. "You somehow managed to get the mayor's daughter kidnapped?"

  "Hey!" Betty stepped forward. "It's not her fault! It's the Catalans!"

  "Or the Basque people," Lauren offered helpfully.

  The sheriff knew my girls, and he wasn't buying it. "Mrs. Ferguson," he said, using my correct name, "what really happened?"

  Rex burst into the room and stood with the sheriff. Both men looked at me.

  "Kelly called," he said. "I didn't miss the explanation this time, did I? What happened?"

  Great. Now I had to tel
l both of them. Oh well. At least I wouldn't have to repeat it later.

  "Delaney Jones was kidnapped during our troop's picnic at Peterson Park."

  "She ran away, into the woods, because Sophie was nice to her in the trust circle," Lauren offered.

  "I went after her. I must've gone a mile or two through those woods. I had no idea they were so deep!"

  "Merry," Rex warned me to focus.

  "Right. I was about to climb this tree, you know, to see where I was, when I ran into Mr. Sun and Mr. Moon—the guys who broke into my house to steal Nellie and who I think are behind the rash of thefts of the penguins and ostriches…"

  If Ed Carnack was surprised by any of this, he kept it to himself.

  "And I think they murdered Norbert Bingley in our garage," I added. "On your side."

  The door banged open, and in walked Mayor Bill Jones, with a teary Tammi trailing behind him.

  "What the hell is going on, Ferguson? My wife says terrorists kidnapped our daughter so that I could free somebody from Spain!"

  "They just want their own homeland," Betty corrected. "They probably won't kill Delaney. Well, unless she starts whining again."

  I gave both girls a look, and they practically flew out of the building.

  Bill Jones pounded on the sheriff's desk. "This is just what I was trying to tell you, Detective! This town is a seething hotbed of criminal activity, and you are responsible for not cleaning that up!"

  Hey! He can't talk to my husband like that!

  "You!" The mayor pointed at me. "I've heard about you! This is all your fault! If you'd never come back here, this wouldn't have happened."

  "I grew up here," I deadpanned. "You're the new guy. And do you really believe she's been kidnapped because you're such a big deal?"

  His face turned an alarming shade of red as he folded his arms over his chest, and Tammi looked confused. "I demand answers! Tell me what happened to Delaney, or I'll throw you in jail and toss the key!"