Maltese Vulture Murder Read online

  I described Mr. Sun and Mr. Moon. "Their disguises were ridiculous. If that alone isn't a crime, it should be."

  "Those disguises sound terrible," Riley agreed. "But that doesn't sound like the work of the CIA."

  He had a point. But I didn't really care if the two situations were related. I just wanted him to rule out the CIA so I could win the bet…I mean, solve that poor man's murder.

  "Does Rex know you're doing this?" Riley gave me a look. "Technically, you're interfering in an investigation. And you haven't told me how you think this guy is part of the penguin theft."

  I shrugged. "He probably isn't. I just need to rule the Agency out. And since when do you question my instincts?"

  He pushed himself away from his desk. "Look, this might take a while. Why don't you head out, and I'll call you if I find something?"

  "Are you trying to get rid of me?" It wouldn't be the first time. Especially when we were on the job and he had a particularly gorgeous informant to entertain.

  "No, of course not." Riley sighed. "I just don't think you'll like sitting there watching me type." He gave me a wicked grin. "Or maybe you would like that."

  Riley and I had once had a bit of a relationship that lasted a Cairo Minute (which is even shorter than a New York Minute and twice as dirty). He'd been quite the lothario when I moved here, hitting on me relentlessly until Rex showed up in my life.

  Yes, Riley was handsome, charming, and smooth with a kickass bod to boot. But he was also unreliable and untrustworthy and smooth. I didn't like smooth. Rex was every bit as attractive and, with his dark hair, was kind of the yummy yin to Riley's yucky yang. He was also sweet, thoughtful, and smart, and I was smitten.

  Riley bowed out of the picture with the grace of a pack of deranged howler monkeys in a banana warehouse, but over time the men had become friendly, and Rex, who knew of our past, wasn't in the least bit jealous.

  "Fine." I got up and moved toward the door. "I'll check in with you later."

  Riley shook his head. "Remember, if I'm helping you, I'm taking the lead on this."

  I said nothing as I left the building. There was no way that I was conceding leadership to him. But he didn't need to know that.

  Minutes later, as I was pulling into my driveway, I noticed a sunshine yellow pickup truck with tinted windows and purple daisy decals on the sides pulling out of my other driveway across the street. It looked like something Riley's sorority clients might drive. Maybe they didn't like my tone and beat me home for a pout fight, or beer pong challenge to defend Riley's honor. If so, they were too late. At least fifteen years too late.

  I didn't hear any cheering, so it clearly wasn't them. Who was it? A random driver? Had they just been using my drive to turn around? It wasn't that unusual, but something seemed off. I'd never seen that truck in town before. And believe me, in a small town like Who's There, a truck like that would be an affront to almost all manhood, and would be a strong candidate for a good tar and feathering.

  The truck tore off down the street, but instead of following them, I decided to stop at my old house first, because the door was open. That was never a good sign and in my opinion happened unfairly too often for my liking.

  I stood on the stoop, considering what I should do. Normally, I'd never walk into an open house without backup. But then again, I wasn't very smart. So, I stepped into the house, and my blood pressure spiked because of what I saw.

  My living room sofa had been shredded. The cabinet that held my TV had every drawer hanging open like weird tongues. The TV was on and blasting some weird show with a see-through platypus on Cartoon Network.

  I stepped into the kitchen, which was also trashed. The floor was littered with dishes, pots, and pans as the appliances and cupboards hung open. The coat closet had also been defiled, as all of my coats, scarves, and hats were dumped on the floor, leaving empty hangers dangling from the rod.

  Now I was pretty sure that whoever had been in the yellow truck had done this. Why? I hadn't done anything besides stepping on a dead guy in my other garage across the street. This didn't make a lot of sense.

  I ran to the two bedrooms at the end of the hallway, hoping that things weren't this bad there. I wasn't a slob, and I did like things fairly tidy. Occasionally I sprayed glass cleaner in the general direction of the windows, and I was known, on occasion, to strap dusting cloths to my cats and have them chase a little radio-controlled car filled with catnip.

  The bedrooms were fine. Not a thing out of place. I slumped against the doorframe, a little out of breath. Had I interrupted the intruders? Would they be back to finish the job?

  And even worse, did this mean the dead guy was tied to me? That would suck.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I called Rex and gave a description of the car. He told me not to touch anything and hung up. All this wreckage was upsetting, but at least they didn't touch the bedrooms. The guest room had been totally redone last year. The idea of losing that furniture I'd paid a fortune for would've sent me into a murderous rage.

  How could I clean all this up? I thought about the snow shovel in the garage. Maybe I could scoop everything onto the long plastic sled and…

  I needed a drink. I was just reaching for the fridge handle when I stopped. Rex had told me not to touch anything. And while it's unlikely that whoever it was looked inside the fridge, I didn't want to smear or wipe away any prints.

  Taking off my T-shirt, I wrapped my fingers and carefully opened the fridge, pulling a bottle of Chardonnay out without technically messing up fingerprints. I looked around for a glass but thought it better to keep a low profile. I unscrewed the top and began to drink from the bottle. Problem solved.

  I went into the living room and was about to sit down on the sofa when I realized that technically, that would be touching something too. After leaning against the wall and then springing away as if it had bitten me, I started to sink to the carpet, but stopped. What if there were footprints?

  After putting my shirt back on, I settled for sitting on the stoop out front, drinking wine straight out of the bottle. In hindsight I realized that any fingerprints or footprints from me were to be expected — after all, this was my house. I could've picked up a wineglass from the floor to use without getting chastised. But, I was already outside, so I dropped that idea.

  Across the street, Philby and Leonard were staring from the picture window in our house. Philby was yowling, plastered to the glass, as Leonard barked endlessly. I couldn't hear this, but I could see it, and it looked like they were having a complex conversation on something like whether or not it was okay to eat garbage as long as it's only been in the can for ten days…or they were swapping stupid mouse jokes or, considering what Philby thought of Leonard, stupid Scottish deerhound jokes.

  I needed to focus before Rex arrived. Closing my eyes, I tried to picture the truck. The windows were heavily tinted, so I couldn't see inside. There had to be at least one person to drive it. But how did one guy do so much damage? No, my guess was there were at least two people.

  What had they been looking for? I thought about the theft of Poopsie, and the strange guys looking for birdy things at Ferguson Taxidermy. Were they after Nellie Lou? It seemed to make sense. After all, there'd been a dead guy in our garage, and the raptor had been coated with some sort of hallucinogen.

  What could they possibly want with her? Maybe I was overreaching. It was possible that it was just a break-in by a bunch of kids. Kids were more likely to drive a yellow pickup with purple daisies. It could be that they discovered that a crack ex-CIA agent lived there and wanted to steal some weapons.

  When I'd lived in this house, I had my own security system comprised of a hodgepodge of weapons I'd used in my former line of work. I had a pack of gum that had laser beams to detect movement, a pop can that recorded sound at the slightest detection of movement, and a pair of Swahili death masks with cameras and face recognition software.

  Unfortunately, I hadn't utilized any of these options ev
er since I moved across the street. We just didn't have a lot of crime in Who's There. But if this was the work of kids, I was worried. Most of my weapons were stored in a huge maxi pad box in the basement—something I thought was a good enough deterrent. But what if it wasn't?

  I shuddered to think that my collection of guns, knives, and one very sensitive flamethrower could end up in the hands of such kids. I made a mental note to reinstate my security measures once Rex was done with the place.

  My eyes drifted up to the telephone pole on the corner. Until recently, I'd had hidden cameras installed on all the poles on my block, but Rex found out about them and made me take them down, even if they were excellent witnesses. It had something to do with "privacy," which I thought was silly. It wasn't like I was making the images public. I wasn't sure I could reinstate those without Rex noticing. Maybe I could disguise them as squirrels who never, ever moved? That idea had some merit.

  A squad car pulled into my driveway, and Rex got out on the passenger side, followed by Officer Kevin Dooley, who'd driven.

  "Does he even have a license?" I asked my husband as I stood up.

  When he wasn't honing his talent for breathing with his mouth open, Kevin Dooley was eating. This time was no different, as he had a bag of onion rings in one hand, a milkshake in the other. How was he able to drive?

  Rex gave him a look, and the officer went back to the car, returning only with the shake.

  "Still think this isn't related to you?" My husband gave me a wink.

  All evidence implied he was right.

  "No, I don't. This is just a coincidence."

  "This might be a good time to consider selling your old house," he said for the ten thousandth time since we'd gotten married in January.

  I threw my arms into the air. "And let someone else have all the fun? No way!"

  "Fun" might be stretching things a bit, but he had a point. Until I'd employed my unusual safety measures, my house had been broken into several times in the few years I'd lived here. I'd had to replace my deadbolt locks at least five times. That gets annoying, by the way.

  He seemed to agree. "Good point. Your house is probably cursed. I'd hate to have someone move in there and get mistaken for you."

  I nodded. "Exactly."

  My husband spotted the half empty wine bottle. "Did you disturb the crime scene for that?"

  "Of course not!" I lied. "I went back to our house to get it."

  I pointed across the street, where Philby was now smacking Leonard in the face, over and over. The dog ignored the cat because now he saw Rex and began wagging his long, scraggly tail.

  "You decided to sit on your front porch," Rex asked, "and drink directly out of a bottle of wine while you waited for me?"

  "Well, when you say it like that, it sounds kind of stupid…" I grumbled.

  He looked at the label and then at me. "We don't have that Chardonnay at our house."

  I was trying to come up with a witty retort, but Rex didn't wait as he put on some rubber gloves and walked into my house. I followed. Kevin had been told to wait for the forensics team to arrive, so he went and got his onion rings, sat down on my stoop, and continued his snack.

  "They smashed the lock," I pointed out. "Looks like they kicked the door right below the doorknob."

  Rex nodded. "Any idea what they were looking for?"

  "No," I answered. "But they sure tore up the place. I'll have to throw most of this out and get new stuff."

  Rex didn't reply. He still thought it was silly to keep this house when I lived across the street with him. But it had been the first house I'd ever bought, and I loved it. So, I held Girl Scout meetings here. That totally justified it.

  "Who's out looking for the pickup?" I asked.

  "Sheriff Carnack and a couple of deputies," Rex said.

  That made sense. Who's There, small as it was, was the county seat, so the sheriff's office was here. And since the police department was small, the tall, burly, but amiable Ed Carnack was welcome assistance. I really liked the guy. He'd had my back on more than one occasion and didn't mind at all that I tended to intrude in police business.

  "Did you get the fingerprints from Soo Jin?" I left out the fact that I also had a copy. He didn't need to know that.

  "Yes." Rex frowned as he looked closely at a closet door. "I haven't run them yet." He gave me a curious look. "The mayor isn't very happy right now. That's the reason it took me so long to get here. He was lecturing me on the importance of keeping crime down in Who's There."

  "I'm getting a little fed up with that man," I groused. "Who does he think he is? He isn't even from here!" Maybe Betty's idea to kidnap and torture Mayor Jones wasn't such a bad idea after all.

  My husband sighed. "He thinks he's the mayor. And he is. And he's obsessed with what he considers to be a huge crime wave in progress now."

  "Sounds like a man considering a run for higher office to me," I said. "He doesn't know Dad's a senator, does he?"

  Rex shuddered. "No, and I hope he never does. Still, he's an odd one. I had a meeting with him yesterday. His assistant let me go through, but when I got there, Jones was staring into a mirror, asking 'How will I thwart evil today?'"

  My jaw dropped. "Seriously? What evil does he expect to find here?"

  My gaze shifted to Officer Kevin Dooley, who was going through the contents of my fridge while eating a box of Thin Mints I'd stashed in the freezer. I stormed over and tore the box away from him. Completely unfazed, he found a carton of Cool Whip and a spoon and began eating.

  "Maybe he should focus on thwarting stupidity instead," I warned.

  Rex turned away from his examination of the door to the garage. When he spotted Kevin, he gave him the same look he had when they first arrived. Dooley put the Cool Whip back and chucked the spoon into the sink. With a blank stare, he returned to his post on the front stoop.

  "I could leave the mayor an anonymous tip about Kevin," I suggested.

  "Please don't. I have enough trouble. The two officers I just hired have given notice. They got jobs at the casino. When I told the mayor, he said he didn't have it in the budget to hire anyone else. Officer Dooley is all I have."

  "What? You didn't tell me that." In truth, I wasn't entirely surprised. Small-town police jobs only interested the applicants who lived in that particular small town. "Hey! I could be a cop!"

  Rex blanched. "Um, that would probably be a bad idea."

  "I guess you're right. What are you going to do?" I followed him down the hall to the bedrooms.

  "I'm just grateful to have the sheriff and his deputies here." He looked into the bathroom. "Nothing here."

  "The bedrooms are undisturbed too." I wiggled my eyebrows suggestively.

  Rex laughed. "As much as I'd love to take a break right now, the forensics team should be here any moment."

  I shrugged. "Suit yourself."

  Two guys in all white hazmat suits joined us. Rex gave them directions and then ordered me outside. I sat on the stoop next to Kevin. To my complete shock, he offered me an onion ring.

  "Thanks," I said after eating it.

  "Your house was broken into…again," he said in a dull voice.

  Wow. He actually noticed.

  "Yes," I said. "But it wasn't my fault." I rubbed my chin. "At least, I don't think it's tied to me."

  "Nah," he said after a loud slurp. "You're the second one today."

  I sat up a little straighter and snagged another onion ring. "I'm not the first or even the only one?"

  He shook his head. "Nope. That dead animal place was."

  "Dead animal place…you mean Ferguson Taxidermy?"

  To be honest, it was a farm town and dead animal place could mean anything from the butcher shop to the pet cemetery outside of town.

  Kevin nodded before getting up and dumping his paper wrappers on the floor. Normally I'd be furious, but I was completely flummoxed about the break-in at Randi and Ronni's.

  I got to my feet. "Tell Rex I had to ru
n out."

  He nodded. "I'll tell him you're going to his sisters' place."

  I would've argued, but he was right. And that was a thing that didn't happen very often.

  * * *

  "Randi?" I called out as I entered the shop.

  The good twin was sweeping up a small pile of white powder. Crime scene tape peppered the showroom.

  "Merry!" She brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. "Sorry about the mess. Did you hear what happened?"

  "GO AWAY!" Ronni shouted from the back room.

  "Did Rexley tell you?" the woman pressed.

  Rexley was Rex's real name. And only Randi got away with saying it. Their own mother Millie never used the name she'd given him. I used it only when I was irritated. Fortunately, my husband was amazing 99.9% of the time, so I rarely had to deploy it.

  "Um, yeah!" I said. "I'm so sorry. I just got burgled too. Only I don't think they took anything."

  "They took the Vegas showgirl penguins and the ostriches playing soccer." Randi shook her head sadly. "Why take them?" She pointed at a diorama of rats in suits recreating former President Richard Nixon at what looked to be a cabinet meeting. "This piece is far more valuable. The ostriches will be easy to replace, but the penguins will be difficult." She brightened. "Say, you know Dr. Wulf at Obladi Zoo! Can you call her and ask if any of the penguins are sick? We have a man in Bermuda waiting for that work."

  "Oh, okay," I lied. There was no way I was going to ask that. "They just stole those two exhibits?"

  Randi nodded. "Who does something like that?"

  Obviously Las Vegas–penguin fetishists from Bermuda, but I kept that to myself. Then I remembered the sorority.

  "Hey, do you remember doing a penguin for a sorority about ten years ago?"

  Randi shook her head. "I'm a middle-aged woman. I barely remember anything past last week. But the ledger should have it." She set the broom against the wall, and I followed her to the office, just off the showroom.

  Randi pulled out a very thick leather bound book that was tabbed by year. She opened it to exactly ten years earlier. Entries were written in a hand so perfect it looked like a font. I should keep records like this. All of my copies of the girls' registration, permission, and cookie forms were in a pile on my nightstand. As to my handwriting—if it was a font, it would be doctor/serial killer.