Movie Night Murder Read online

  That's why Kelly was my best friend. The woman could talk me down from any disaster. Like my hair. Right now.

  "Okay," I said.

  "Okay?"

  I nodded. "I guess I had it coming by falling asleep without a guard posted. On the other hand, maybe they thought they were doing something nice."

  Kelly hugged me, and together we walked back to the gym. The girls looked worried, their eyes darting around in fear. They wanted to know what I thought. They really hadn't meant anything by it.

  "I love it," I said with a grin.

  The girls tackled me in a huge group hug just as the moms were starting to wake up. I hugged them back. After all, it could've been worse.

  "So where's the rest of the dye?" I asked. "We should dispose of it before it stains something important."

  The girls were all staring at me. Something was off.

  "What is it?" I asked, kneeling down to their level. "Did you get it on a carpet? A chair?"

  That wouldn't be good. I'd have to replace whatever it was before we all went home this morning. And I knew nothing about getting stains out of anything.

  The girls began to part before me, making a path. I looked at them, trying to read the situation, but I couldn't.

  Meeeeoooooooow!

  The last two girls stepped aside. And sitting there, wreathed in feline fury, was my cat. A cat who was now bright pink. She looked at me like she wanted to strangle me in my sleep. Kelly gasped loudly, and the mothers came running over.

  "The kittens?" I barely managed. I couldn't take my eyes off of Philby.

  Lauren shook her head. "We didn't have enough dye for them too."

  The other girls lowered their heads as if they'd failed by not turning the three kittens a vibrant pink. Astonishingly, there were no stains on the gym floor, but I did notice that one of Finn's baby blankets—the yellow one I'd given her—was completely pink.

  The damp cat trotted over to me. I picked her up with a sigh and carried her off to the bathroom to be rinsed off.

  She didn't like that, either. I used my sleeping bag to dry off the irritated feline. Philby looked at me for a long moment before running out of the bathroom. I followed her out into the hall to hear the girls cheering. One by one, they walked out of the gym, their bags packed, whooping it up. The mothers did not return my gaze. I noticed that none of them had pink hair.

  "Mrs. Wrath?" Caterina tugged on my shirt.

  "What is it?" I tried to keep my voice light and happy. It wasn't easy.

  "This was the best movie night sleepover ever!" the child screamed before running down the hall to the lobby.

  So, all it took to make these kids happy was cold pizza, a dead body, and a bright pink cat. I'd have to remember that in the future. Mainly so I could check their bags for contraband before letting them in.

  If I ever agreed to do this again.

  Rex came over a few minutes later to help clean up. He grinned when he saw my pink hair. But he laughed hysterically when he saw my pink cat. Philby gave him an icy stare. She didn't seem to be in a forgiving mood.

  The kittens trotted up to my boyfriend and allowed him to pick them up. They purred like little tramps as he scratched their ears. After ten minutes of hauling stuff out to his car and double checking the church for any surprises left behind by the girls (or cats), I climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door.

  "I like it," was the first thing he'd said to me since he'd shown up. "Why didn't you tell me you were going to do that?"

  "Because I didn't know myself until I woke up like this," I said wearily.

  It was about nine in the morning, and I was already exhausted and still wearing the clothes I had on yesterday.

  "I love your troop," Rex muttered with a grin as he started his car.

  Yeah, I thought. Me too.

  "Any news on Evelyn's death?" I'd decided to change the subject.

  Rex shook his head, "Nothing yet. Soo is starting the autopsy today, and Kevin is running her fingerprints through the system."

  Kevin had the ability to run anything through any system? If I wasn't so tired, I'd demand to see it in person. But it was something else Rex said that bothered me.

  I glared at him, "Do you always call her 'Soo'?"

  "Of course. What would you like me to call her?" Rex seemed amused.

  Personally, I'd prefer Someone-I-Work-With-Who-I'm-Not-In-Any-Way-Attracted-To. But I was pretty sure that wasn't going to happen.

  "How about 'Doctor'?" I asked. "It is her official title, isn't it?"

  Rex nodded. "Yes, but you of all people know how informal things are in a small town."

  "Well maybe it should be more formal. Maybe you should call her 'Doctor' out of respect for her profession."

  Rex didn't miss a beat. "In that case, you should always refer to me as 'Detective' when I'm working, and Kevin as 'Officer.'"

  "Alright. I'll call you that in public. But Kevin will always be Kevin. Tacking a title onto a lobotomized goat doesn't change the fact that it's a lobotomized goat."

  Rex slanted his eyes at me. "What is it with you and him?"

  "I knew him in high school," I shuddered. "He was kind of our village bully, then our village idiot, and not much has changed."

  Kevin had distinguished himself in one way back when we were in school—the man could eat anything (and I mean anything—I once watched him eat a live cricket). There was a much longer list of things he couldn't do…such as get any grade over a C-…or breathe through his nose.

  "Has he complained?" I asked.

  Rex shook his head, "No. I'd just like you to respect my colleagues."

  "Fine," I sighed. It was not going to be easy, but for him, I'd try very hard to think about maybe honoring his wishes.

  "So how come you never mentioned Dr. Body before?"

  Rex frowned. "I'm sure I did. I must have."

  I disagreed. "Nope. I'm pretty sure I'd remember a name like that."

  We pulled into my driveway, and my boyfriend shrugged. "Huh. Thought I did."

  "It's just that she made it look like you two have been working together for a while. You helped her find a house. That requires spending time together outside of work…"

  "I'm sorry I never mentioned her before." He leaned across and kissed me. "It really must've slipped my mind."

  I'll bet it did.

  "That's okay," I lied. "Are you coming inside?"

  "I'll help you get the cats inside, but I should head down to the office to see if anything turned up on those fingerprints."

  Hmmm…Rex didn't usually go in on the weekends. And he'd said Dr. Body would be working on the autopsy today…

  "Give me a call if you hear anything," I said as we walked up to the front door. I was soooo going to text him one hundred times.

  Rex came inside and pulled me into his arms. "I will." He kissed me. "I promise."

  I closed the door to see the cats staring at me. So, I led the four beasties to the kitchen where I opened a can of cat food. Philby momentarily forgave me when presented with the tuna blend—her personal favorite. The kittens greedily devoured the rest.

  I took a long, hot shower. I might've shampooed and conditioned my hair thirty or forty times, and although I saw a little color circling the drain, my bangs were still extremely pink when I got out.

  My short, dark blonde, curly hair was impossible. Maybe that's because I never blow dried it. Today was an exception as, armed with a round brush, I dried the hair with an ancient machine that I'd found at Goodwill.

  A smooth bob was my reward, and while I kind of liked the new look, the bangs were still alarming. I guess there was nothing I could do about that. Meanwhile, Philby had decided to do her own bathing in the kitchen with no success. She looked like a huge, Hitler shaped lump of bubblegum. But I decided not to tell her that.

  After a quick lunch of Pizza Rolls and ranch dressing, I sat down in the living room with my laptop and started googling every possible combination of Evel
yn Trout that I could imagine. I'd already done this several times since returning from DC and had never found anything before. But hope springs eternal, and I'd decided to give it one more shot.

  Nothing. There had never been a person on this earth who was named Evelyn Trout. I closed up my laptop and was just about to get a box of Girl Scout Cookies when my cell rang.

  "Hey, Maria."

  Maria Gomez was a close friend of mine back when we were both recruits at the CIA. She still worked there, and I'd just seen her a couple of months before on the DC trip. Maria was also my cookie pimp, blackmailing others at Langley (CIA HQ) into buying an insane amount of Girl Scout Cookies. In a word, she was awesome.

  "Merry," Maria said, "what the hell happened out there?"

  "Um…" I scoured my brain trying to come up with an answer. "I had a movie night sleepover with my girls…Kelly called it a lock-in."

  "Really? I loved those when I was a kid," my friend gushed. But then her tone turned serious. "But that's not what I meant. Our system is lighting up over a fingerprint your boyfriend is running."

  "You'll laugh," I said. "But those prints are from Evelyn Trout."

  I explained the inconvenient appearance of the mystery woman. Maria had helped out on the DC trip, and she knew (or thought she knew) Evelyn.

  "You're joking," she said in a voice that told me this was bad.

  "I'm not."

  You know that squishy feeling you get in your stomach when you know something is wrong? I had that. I didn't like it. If Evelyn's prints were showing up at the CIA, it wasn't good news.

  "Well, then I sort of know who she was," Maria said. "Because Evelyn was a spy."

  I groaned. "Crap."

  I'd had terrible luck with dead spies and terrorists in the last year and a half here in Iowa. More than I'd had in all my years at The Company.

  "Who did she work for?" I asked. "Her accent was flawless. Whoever she was, she'd done a good job of covering up her real identity."

  "You have no idea," Maria said.

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Well, Evelyn was a spy. But she wasn't from any other agency."

  I gasped, "You don't mean…"

  I could hear her nodding on the other side. "That's right. Evelyn didn't work for any other agency because…"

  I finished her sentence for her. "Because, she's one of ours."

  Evelyn Trout was CIA.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "How is this possible?" I asked, almost forgetting that Maria was on the other end of the line.

  "I have no idea."

  "You'd never seen her before when we were in DC?" It was a stupid question, I'll admit. If Maria knew who Evelyn was, she would've told me.

  "Never. Remember, we don't know everyone in the Agency. It's not like we have a yearbook or anything."

  I rubbed my tired eyes. "Okay…so who is she really, then?"

  "I can't tell you that," Maria answered.

  "Seriously? You're going to go all classified on this? With me?"

  "No, you misunderstand," Maria said. "I have no idea who she is. That information is above my security clearance."

  Maria was pretty high up on the totem pole at Langley. Yes, she jockeyed a desk now, but there wasn't much she didn't know or couldn't find out.

  "I'm just calling to give you a heads up," Maria said. "The CIA is going to block the inquiry Rex submitted on her fingerprints."

  That meant that Evelyn Trout was a big time Spook. That wasn't good. Not at all.

  There were about a thousand more questions I wanted to ask Maria, but I knew she couldn't answer them. Besides, she'd get in trouble just for calling me with the heads up.

  "Thanks for letting me know," I said at last.

  "Don't pursue this any further, Merry," Maria warned. "You know that if her identity is locked down like this, you'll get attention you neither want or need."

  "I understand. Thanks for calling." I ended the call and dropped back onto the couch.

  Evelyn was classified. She worked for the CIA. That meant she was either disavowed for some reason, or she was Black Ops, or she was something I had no idea even existed. That would be just like Langley—to come up with something so bizarre no one else would think of it. At any rate, none of these options was good.

  And being one of those things didn't explain why she'd been attached to our troop trip to Washington DC. It just made no sense. The woman had come all the way here, impersonated one of the mothers, and tagged along. Why would she do that? Why would anyone do that? Unless you're a deranged former troop leader who desperately missed traveling with kids, and the odds on that probably are nil, there's no reason to go with us.

  My mind was spinning. What was I going to tell Rex? I had a sneaking suspicion that he wouldn't be satisfied with this explanation. And I couldn't tell him the intel came from Maria, because that phone call we'd just had never happened. Well, it did happen, but in the espionage ether, it didn't.

  I had to shut this case down and do it now. If Rex asked too many questions, he could get into some serious trouble. The CIA would consider a detective from Who's There, Iowa to be nothing more than an irritating fly that needed to be swatted. There was no way I was going to let them do anything to my boyfriend.

  Okay genius, how was I going to manage that? Maybe I should do nothing? In these cases, the Agency usually just placed a call or worse, came in person to end all inquiries. I wasn't sure Rex would agree with that. Because of my misadventures, he didn't really care about poking the CIA.

  Ugh. This was worse than Evelyn being a stalker or weirdo. Which still begged the question—what was she doing hanging with us? Had the Agency assigned her to watch me? I wasn't a problem. Okay, so maybe I was, but I was trying to change my ways.

  That had to be it. They were after me, somehow. It certainly wasn't the girls. Even with my troop, children weren't usually on a watch list. And aside from dying my cat pink, these kids weren't a threat to anyone but me.

  I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the sofa. I definitely had to shut this down.

  But then, I wouldn't know who she was and why she'd been on the trip with us. While I consider myself to be pretty good at self-control, my curiosity was screaming at me to find out what was really going on.

  What do I tell Rex? Do I even give him a heads up? Maybe I should just let the Agency cut him off. That was probably the most prudent thing to do.

  But then I'd be lying to my boyfriend. Okay, maybe not lying exactly, but keeping the truth from him. Rex wouldn't like that if he ever found out. And quite frankly, I didn't want to hide the truth from him. And if I lied to him, he might dump me. And when he dumped me, he'd probably cry on the shoulder of a certain knockout coroner and they'd start dating, get married, have children, and be happy ever after.

  I kind of felt like I wanted to punch Riley in the throat right now. If he knew about this and didn't tell me…

  Riley was a little higher up in the CIA than Maria was. Not by much, but maybe enough to discreetly inquire about Evelyn. Besides, he owed me one. Big time. Calling in that marker wouldn't be hard to do. And after he filled me in, I'd tell Rex and just have to insist that he didn't pursue it any further. That could work, right?

  My cell went off again, and I picked it up.

  "Merry," Rex said. It made me sad, because I liked his voice, and if I never heard it again it would be awful.

  "What's up?" I tried to sound cheerful.

  "Soo Ji…Dr. Body," he corrected. I loved him for that. "She found something. Evelyn had traces of acrylamide in her system. The coroner thinks the poison triggered a heart attack."

  "So, she was murdered," I said.

  "Looks like it," Rex replied.

  "How did she find out so fast? Doesn't an autopsy take a while?"

  "There was red, peeling skin on her feet and a little on her hands. It's a dead giveaway. The toxicology report won't be in for a couple of weeks, but she's seen it before."

 
"So it's not an official cause of death," I said.

  "No. You can't tell anyone else about this until we know for sure," Rex insisted. I imagined him running his fingers through his short dark hair. He looked adorable when he did that.

  "I just thought you'd want to know," he said finally.

  Awww! He was thinking of me.

  "Thanks," I said. "Any word back on those fingerprints?"

  "Nothing yet, but it's the weekend. I figure it will be a while before we know on that account too."

  Oh good. He was stonewalled. I wouldn't have to tell him anything right now.

  "I'm going to be here late tonight, but how about ordering a pizza tomorrow?" Rex sounded hopeful, which was all kinds of awesome. I'm still amazed that a man like him wants a weirdo like me.

  "Sounds great," I responded. We said our goodbyes and hung up.

  That at least bought me a little time. Rex wouldn't get the cease and desist from the Agency for a few days. Maybe I could do a little digging before then.

  My cell rang again. I was certainly popular today. The number was unfamiliar to me.

  "Hello?" I asked. I never gave my name when I answered. Once a spy, always a spy.

  "Mrs. Wrath. It's Lauren's mom."

  "Oh, hello Bo…" I froze and looked at Philby, who'd just come into the room and was staring at me, waiting for me to say it.

  Philby didn't like the name Bob. Every time she heard it, she hissed violently. Somehow, I thought she knew what I was about to say. She was preparing her spit for a massive blowout. We sized each other up, trying to decide who would give. It was the weirdest game of chicken I've ever played.

  "Is everything alright?" I changed tactics, congratulating myself for outsmarting a cat.

  "Everything is fine," the woman answered. "I just found something in Lauren's backpack that probably belongs to one of the other mothers. The girls were just stuffing whatever they found into their bags. She obviously picked it up by mistake."

  This happened all the time. All. The. Time. Nobody ever took home only their own stuff. Usually it was an episode of Sherlock Holmes just to figure out who belonged to what. The worst was dirty underwear. No one ever claimed the underwear. At first, Kelly would wash the panties, but that changed nothing, and we just threw them away. We averaged about six pair of panties each overnight trip. Seventeen after we came back from DC.