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www.millsandboon.co.uk
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER 1
Violet Lassiter passed me the heavy blue-willow plate with a remarkably steady hand for a one-hundred-year-old. “Have a cookie, Miss Skerritt.”
She didn’t have to twist my arm. Fresh from the oven, the cookies smelled heavenly.
“They’re better with nuts,” she added in apology, “but Bessie can’t have ’em, so the rest of us have to suffer.”
“You eat too many sweets, anyway,” her eighty-four-year-old sibling, Bessie, countered.
“What do you think—” Violet accused her with a roll of her eyes “—that I’m going to shorten my life?”
Taking a cookie, I sat on the screened back porch of the modest cement-block home with the two elderly women, who were apparently unfazed by the ninety-degree heat and suffocating humidity of the September morning. Violet, tall and gangly with thick white braids wrapped around her head like a crown, wore a heavy sweater over her cotton housedress. Bessie, short and lean, was also dressed in a cotton shift and a cardigan, plus bright-pink sneakers and heavy flesh-toned nylons rolled just below her knees.
I’d first encountered the Lassiter sisters last June when Bill Malcolm, my fiancé and partner in Pelican Bay Investigations, had done background checks on volunteers for the local historical society. To his dismay, he’d discovered that Bessie had an arrest record for shoplifting. Further digging revealed she’d been stealing food for Violet after their Social Security money had run out before the end of the month. The judge had given Bessie probation, but his lenient ruling hadn’t solved the elderly women’s subsistence problem.
Bill and I had arranged for meals-on-wheels for the pair and had put together a gift basket to tide them over until deliveries began. To save the Lassiters’ pride, we’d fabricated a story that Bessie had won the basket in a grand opening raffle we’d held at our business. We’d presented them the basket of staples and goodies, along with our business card and instructions to call on us if they needed a private investigator, a request we never expected to receive.
Their call came yesterday.
I’d solved many cases during my twenty-three years as a cop and more recently for Pelican Bay Investigations, but I couldn’t guess what dilemma had prompted these elderly sisters to contact me. And I couldn’t get them to stop sniping at one another long enough to find out.
“Get Miss Skerritt more ice,” Violet ordered her sister in a drill-sergeant tone. “Her tea’s getting warm.”
“Just because you’re older doesn’t mean you can boss me around,” Bessie shot back.
“My tea is fine, really,” I said. “Now what—”
“You need to be bossed,” Violet said, ignoring me, “because you act like a child. I hope I live long enough to see you grow up.”
“Ladies.” I spoke loudly and firmly. The situation was spiraling out of control, sweat was soaking through the back of my blouse and all I could think of was how great air-conditioning would feel about now. “Why exactly did you want to see me?”
“We have a man,” Bessie announced with a gleeful expression.
I nodded but didn’t comment, not sure where this was going.
“A tenant,” Violet corrected.
“But he’s not a paying tenant,” Bessie added. “More like a guest.”
I gazed into the tiny house through the open back door but couldn’t spot anyone inside, and I was beginning to wonder if this mysterious tenant wasn’t senility’s equivalent of an imaginary friend.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Over there.” Bessie pointed to a toolshed at the rear of the yard that backed up to the Pinellas Trail, a linear park built on an old railroad bed that ran the length of the county.
I narrowed my eyes, but the shed door was shut, and I caught no flicker of movement inside. With the windows closed and the Florida sun beating on the roof, the interior temperature had to be over a hundred degrees. If their “guest” was in there, he was well done by now.
“Oh…kay,” I said, not wanting to call her crazy to her face.
“He’s not there now, Bessie.” Violet’s condescending older sister voice reminded me of my own sibling, Caroline. “He’s gone out.”
“You have a man living in your garden shed?” I felt like Alice who’d tumbled down the rabbit hole.
Bessie nodded.
“What’s his name?” The investigator in me couldn’t help asking, while the saner part of my nature chided me for encouraging their delusions.
“He doesn’t have a name,” Violet said, “so we call him J.D.”
Curiouser and curiouser. The ladies had obviously lost it.
“J.D. for John Doe,” Bessie said. “He’s a lovely man.”
“Who doesn’t have a name.” An incipient ache flared behind my eyes.
“Well, he had a name at one time—” Violet began.
“—but he can’t remember it,” Bessie finished. “Can’t remember anything. Who he is, where he came from, not even his age, although I’d put him in his early sixties, if I had to guess.” She chomped the last bite of her third cookie, sans nuts.
“He has the nicest manners,” Violet said, “or we wouldn’t tolerate him. Why, for the longest time, we didn’t even know he was there.”
“We wouldn’t have known at all,” Bessie agreed, “if it hadn’t been for the Turk’s Cap bush.”
Violet nodded.
I was beginning to wonder if I were the one losing it. Nothing either of them said made any sense.
“That bush grew so high during the summer rains,” Bessie explained, “that it blocked the view from my bedroom window. So I went to the shed for the clippers.”
“We don’t use the shed much any longer,” Violet said, “since that nice young neighbor—”
“Mr. Moore,” Bessie said.
“Don’t interrupt,” her sister snapped.
“But you’d forgotten his name.”
“I didn’t forget. I hadn’t gotten to it yet.”
“So you don’t use the shed…” I prompted Violet in hopes of ending the bickering.
Bessie answered. “Mr. Moore mows our grass when he does his yard. He’s very thoughtful.”
“Thoughtful, my eye,” Violet said. “He got sick of looking at the jungle over here.”
While Bessie searched for a suitable comeback, I plunged into the void. “What did you find in the shed, Bessie?”
“Come and see for yourself.”
I set aside my glass of tea, pushed to my feet from the ancient metal glider and followed Bessie out the screen door. Violet, amazingly agile for a centenarian, dogged our steps as if afraid she’d miss something.
We followed a path of popcorn stone, set in thick St. Augustine grass, to the shed, constructed of the same concrete block as the house and apparently built at the same time, around 1940. The wooden door showed signs of rot, and several asphalt shingles were missing from the roof. A square of cardboard replaced a missing pane in one of two sash windows visible on the side of the shed that faced the house.
Bessie knocked on the door. “J.D., you home?”
When no one answered, she tugged open the warped door, reached inside and flipped a switch. Light from the bare bulb, which extended from a cord in the center of the ceiling, illuminated the opposite of what I’d expected.
Instead of a jumble of old tools, broken pots and other junk covered in dust and spiderwebs, the space was immaculate. The concrete floor had been recently swept, every surface dusted, the windowpanes sparkled in the sun and tools and garden implements hung in an orderly array on makeshift wall pegs. On an ancient wooden workbench in front of the east window sat rows of healthy green herbs in small pots. Next to the herbs were a single-burner electric hot plate, a battered but clean saucepan and a few cans of beans and franks. Beneath the bench stood a jug of drinking water and an old but sturdy Igloo cooler.
On the opposite side of the shed, under the west windows, a rough bed frame had been constructed from scraps of plywood and old lumber. Several ragged and faded blankets, neatly folded, lay beside a stained pillow. On a peg above the bed hung a heavy army jacket.
Either the Lassiter sisters had staged an elaborate set for their delusion, or the mysterious J.D. wasn’t a figment of their imagination but real flesh and blood.
My concern for the frail and elderly ladies skyrocketed. “Have you called the sheriff’s office?”
“Oh, no,” Bessie said in a horrified tone.
“We wanted to,” Violet said, “but police make J.D. nervous, poor man.”
“So you want me to evict him?” I thought I’d finally gotten a handle on why the sisters had summoned me.
“Evict him?” Bessie’s eyes widened with alarm. “Of course not. That would be inhospitable.”
“We want you to find out who he is,” Violet explained in the same exasperated voice she used on her sister. “He’s such a dear man, we’re sure he has a family somewhere who love him and miss him. In the meantime, we’re happy to have him stay with us.”
“We even offered to share our meals,” Bessie added, “but he didn’t want to impose.”
“How does he support himself?” I asked.
“He doesn’t beg, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Violet said sharply.
The old lady was quick. That J.D. was a panhandler, at best, was exactly what I’d been thinking.
“He’s too proud,” Bessie said. “He’d never take charity. He insists on doing odd jobs around our house to pay his rent. He stopped our faucet from dripping, planed a closet door that always stuck and mended a window screen. He also trims the shrubbery and weeds the flower beds. And as soon as we can afford a new pane, he’s going to repair the shed window.”
“He has an old bicycle,” Violet added. “He rides around town and collects aluminum cans. Then he takes them to the recycling center and sells them.”
“I’m sure J.D. is very…nice.” I was trying to be tactful. “But are you sure he’s not dangerous?”
Violet drew herself to her full height, very imposing since it included six inches of braided coronet.
“Young lady, I didn’t get to be a hundred years old without learning a few things. I am an excellent judge of character. J.D. may have forgotten who he is, but he hasn’t forgotten what he is.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“A kind and gentle man who’s temporarily lost his way,” Violet said. “We asked you here to help him find it.”
“Will you?” Bessie asked. “As much as we like having J.D., we do want him to find his family.”
Faced with the Lassiters’ sincere concern, I didn’t have the heart to tell them that J.D. was most likely one of a vast army of homeless, many of whom, due to mental illness, had chosen life on the streets rather than deal with the strains and stresses of a normal life. I only hoped he wasn’t also the type who suffered bouts of violence because he wasn’t on medication.
“I’ll have to meet J.D. and talk with him,” I said. “Then I’ll see what I can do. Can you call me when he’s here?”
Bessie looked embarrassed.
Violet squared her shoulders and raised her chin. “We had the phone taken out. Never used it, except to answer calls from telemarketers.”
I knew better. The Lassiters’ fixed income hadn’t stretched to include the monthly phone bill.
“Maybe your neighbor, Mr. Moore, will call me?” I suggested.
“That’s a good idea,” Bessie said. “He’s already volunteered to call 9-1-1 if we ever need help. I’m sure he won’t mind calling you.”
I said goodbye, hurried to my ancient Volvo and cranked up the air-conditioning. I hoped J.D. returned soon, so I could meet him and decide whether to call the police, despite the sisters’ objections, for their own safety.
As I drove away, I knew I wouldn’t bill them for my time. As Bill always said, pro bono work was good for the soul.
Especially if it kept two lively old ladies out of harm’s way.
CHAPTER 2
Darcy Wilkins, our receptionist and secretary, greeted me with a distracted wave when I returned to the office. She was eating lunch at her desk and watching the noon news on the small television in the waiting area. Roger, my three-year-old pug, showed more enthusiasm at my arrival and followed me toward my office.
“Look,” Darcy said around a mouthful of yogurt, pointing to the TV with her spoon, “there’s Adler.”
Dave Adler had been my partner during my final months with the Pelican Bay Police Department. When the city had disbanded the PD and the sheriff’s office had taken over, Adler had gone to work as a detective with the Clearwater Department.
I stopped midstride, pivoted and almost tripped over Roger in my haste to view the screen. Young enough to be my son, but already a stellar detective, Adler always evoked a certain maternal pride. Gazing at the screen where the Clearwater PD spokesperson was being interviewed, I could see Adler and his current partner, Ralph Porter, in the background, carrying evidence bags to their car, just as the news segment ended.
“Did you hear what was going on?” I asked Darcy.
“Murder on Sand Key. Some woman was shot when she got out of her car inside the gated lot at her condo.”
My skin prickled at her words. But this homicide was Adler’s problem, not mine, so the hives that usually erupted at the mention of murder remained dormant.
“It’s too soon for the police to announce the victim’s identity,” I said. “Not until next of kin are notified.”
Darcy scraped the bottom of her yogurt cup with her plastic spoon, gave the drooling Roger a lick and tossed the spoon and container into the trash. “No motive yet, either.”
“Anyone see the shooter?”
“Not according to the newscast.”
At one time, the killing would have led the news in Tampa Bay. But with growth in population had come a corresponding increase in crime. Murders were commonplace, and the report of this homicide had been delayed until right before the weather.
I glanced toward Bill’s office and spotted his empty desk through the open door. I hadn’t talked with him since the previous evening. “Any word from Bill?”
Darcy nodded. “He called right after you left for the Lassiters. Said he wouldn’t be in this morning and asked that you meet him at the boat at three this afternoon.”
When we’d parted last night, Bill had said he’d see me at the office this morning, so apparently something had come up. “Did he say where he was?”
Darcy shook her head.
“What he was doing?”
She shrugged. “He seemed distracted, in a hurry. That’s all I know. I’m just the hired help. Nobody tells me anything.”
I suppressed a smile. We usually didn’t have to tell Darcy what was going on. She had the uncanny ability to hear whatever happened in the office, even behind closed doors.
“Any other calls?” I asked.
“No. It’s been like the quiet before the storm.”
“Bite your tongue. That’s a word I don’t want to hear until December.” The first day of that month would mark the end of hurricane season.
I took a seat on the chair nearest Darcy’s desk, faced the television and waited for the weather forecast. Early September is the peak of hurricane season, and for residents of Florida, that meant all eyes were on the tropics, and chief meteorologists Paul Dellegatto of FOX 13 and Steve Jerve of Channel 8 had become our best friends and constant companions.
So far this season, South Florida and the panhandle had been hit hard. Tampa Bay residents were holding their collective breath, wondering if this would be the year of the Big One, when a storm the equivalent of Ivan or Katrina would wreak havoc on an area that had been spared destruction since 1921.
Bill and I always remained alert to the changing weather. Living aboard his cabin cruiser at the Pelican Bay Marina, Bill needed plenty of lead time to secure his boat before evacuating. And my waterfront condo was in a mandatory evacuation zone. Before the multiple hits Florida took in 2004, I’d been more casual about leaving when a storm was forecast. But after viewing pictures of houses near the water that Ivan and Katrina had obliterated, except for the concrete slab foundations, I’d developed a healthier respect for the storms’ potential for damage. Every June when hurricane season began, I packed a large plastic bin with important papers, canned goods, bottled water, battery-powered lanterns, a first aid kit and kibble for Roger and stored it in the hall closet, ready to set in the car and evacuate at a moment’s notice.
On the little TV, the commercial ended and the weather forecast began.
“Damn,” I said.
The icon for a tropical storm had popped up on the weather map south of Jamaica in the Caribbean. The cone of probability for Tropical Storm Harriet stretched five days out and indicated the storm would strengthen in intensity and, pushed by upper air currents, a shifting jet stream and meandering Bermuda High, curve back toward Florida. For now, the state’s west coast, from the Dry Tortugas all the way to Cedar Key, was on alert.
Darcy sighed. “Now we’ll be glued to the television for days.”
“Yeah, praying it misses us and feeling guilty for wishing it on some other part of the country.” I stood up and headed for my office. “Come on, Roger, we have work to do.”
By work, I meant reading the Times and the Tribune and finishing the crossword puzzles, because, except for eventually identifying the Lassiter sisters’ tenant, I had no active cases at the moment. The hiatus didn’t disturb me. I had my police pension and a small trust fund from my father. Bill also had his police pension and a small fortune in real estate in the orange groves his father had left him. Pelican Bay Investigations was more a venture to keep us both busy and sane rather than a needed source of income.
A LITTLE BEFORE THREE, I set aside the completed puzzles, put a leash on Roger, told Darcy I wouldn’t be in again until the next morning and drove a few blocks to the marina. Anvil-shaped clouds towered in the eastern sky and portended evening thunderstorms. In spite of the threatening weather, many of the slips at the marina were empty due to sailors enjoying pleasure cruises and charter boat captains fulfilling the fishing fantasies of tourists in the deep waters of the Gulf.
Bill’s thirty-eight-foot cabin cruiser, Ten-Ninety-Eight, police code for “mission accomplished,” was docked at the end of one of several piers. It appeared closed and deserted, but as Roger and I approached, I could hear the hum of air-conditioning. I’d already spotted Bill’s SUV in the parking lot, so I knew he was aboard. I stepped from the dock to the rear deck and tapped on the sliders that opened onto the lounge, Bill’s tiny but efficient living area.
When he opened the glass door, my heart did a little flip-flop at the sight of him, making me feel like a teenager again instead of a forty-nine-year-old. Even at sixty, Bill was a man who turned women’s heads. Tall, tan and in terrific shape, with thick white hair and blue eyes, he grew more handsome with age. But today those baby blues had no twinkle when they greeted me, and his usual grin had gone AWOL.
“You okay?” I asked.
He pulled me inside, closed the door behind Roger and grabbed me in a brief but fierce hug.
“We have to talk.” His tone was as serious as his expression.
Fear threatened to close my throat. For years, Bill had been pressuring me to marry him. Set in my single ways and commitment-shy, I’d dragged my feet until recently. Last Christmas, we’d set our wedding date for Valentine’s Day, still five months away, to give me time to get used to the idea of marriage, but after we’d solved our last case, I’d recognized my delaying tactics as senseless. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Bill, and we weren’t getting any younger, so what was I waiting for? We’d agreed then that we’d marry as soon as we finished furnishing the house we’d bought together a few months earlier.
Except for a few odds and ends, the house was now move-in ready. Judging by his expression, I worried now that Bill was the one getting cold feet.
I sank onto the love seat on one side of the lounge, and Bill took one of the folding director’s chairs across the room from me. Not a good sign.
“I’m listening,” I said.
Roger curled onto the sofa next to me and placed his head on my lap, as if sensing I needed comfort.
Bill’s face looked pained. “I don’t know how to say this.”
In spite of his tan, his skin had a strange pallor. I prayed he wasn’t ill. I snapped my mind shut against a dozen dire possibilities.
“Just tell me.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled, like a diver getting ready to take a header off the tower. “It’s Trish.”
The years fell away, and I was once again a rookie, fresh out of the academy, with Bill Malcolm as my first partner with the Tampa Police Department. He had a wife the other male officers envied, a gorgeous woman with magnificent red hair, exotic green eyes, a curvaceous figure and a sense of humor that kept everyone around her smiling. Bill and Trish also had a six-year-old daughter, Melanie. The perfect family.
Until the strain of having a husband who put his life on the line every day finally broke Trish’s nerves and their marriage. The end came right after I’d saved Bill from being hacked to death by a machete-wielding wife abuser. I’d had to put three rounds in the guy’s chest to stop him, the only time in my career I’d ever fired my weapon. Bill was safe, but the what-might-have-been had sent Trish over the edge. She filed for divorce, moved to Seattle and took their daughter Melanie with her.
And she’d broken Bill’s heart. He had still loved her and eventually had come to realize that she’d loved him, too, and the only way she could end the marriage that was destroying her emotionally had been to put a continent between them.
At first, Melanie had returned to Tampa for summer visits with her dad, but as she reached adolescence, she had wanted to remain in Seattle with her friends—and her stepfather. Trish’s new husband, an accountant, had a nice safe job where no one would try to kill him, unless he was caught cooking the books by a client with a temper and the means for murder—highly unlikely for the straight-arrow Harvey in his safe suburban practice.
So over the twenty-three years since the divorce, Bill had lost touch with both Trish and Melanie and, to my amazement and delight, had fallen in love with me. Even when Melanie had married and had had children, she hadn’t encouraged her father to participate in their lives, a crying shame since Bill would have been a first-class grandfather.
“What about Trish?” I asked.
My first thought had been that she’d died. She was Bill’s contemporary, after all, and not everyone lived to the ripe old age of the Lassiter sisters.
He spread his hands in a gesture of either appeal or frustration. I couldn’t tell. “She’s back.”
“Back in Tampa?”
He shook his head, looking more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him.
Roger, sensing the tension crackling in the tiny cabin, sat up and looked from me to Bill and back and whined softly.
A devastating second thought hit me. “Trish is back with you?”