With Vics You Get Eggroll (A Mad for Mod Mystery Book 3) (2 page)

TWO

I dropped my glass and wine splashed onto the throw rug. Instead of cleaning it up, I grabbed the remote and turned up the volume. The reporter, initially stunned, regained her composure and took the microphone from the hysterical woman. She thrust it at Chief Washington. “Is there any truth to her accusation, Chief? Do you have evidence linking one of your homicide detectives to the murder of Kate Morrow?”

Chief Washington’s face colored. “This interview is over,” he said to the reporter. He turned away and walked past a row of uniformed officers. The camera followed them to a parking lot filled with royal blue police vehicles. The officers surrounded their chief, but the audio was a recap by the reporter who had conducted the interview moments before.

“Possible new evidence in the abduction and murder of Kate Morrow points to the Lakewood Police Department. Can any of us feel safe? The hunt for the Lakewood Abductor continues. Anyone with information on Kate Morrow, or any of the missing women, is urged to call the number on the screen.” A phone number appeared.

The abductions had started about a month ago. Kate Morrow had been in Dallas visiting her family. She’d rented a car at the airport and driven herself to their house. The visit had been cut short when Kate went out for groceries and didn’t return. Her mother called the police after four hours, but she wasn’t treated as a missing person until twenty more had passed. It took the police a while to connect her to a rental car found abandoned in the Casa Linda Shopping Center, but once they did, there’d been a heightened sense of concern. A store employee came forward and said he’d seen a woman matching Kate’s description leaving the parking lot with a man in uniform. He hadn’t thought much about it until reports of a second missing woman came in, and then a third. Employees of local businesses had been questioned, but no one had seen anything out of the ordinary.

Like other residents of Lakewood, I’d held out hope that the women were alive, though the longer they were missing, the scarier that hope became. If they were alive, where were they? And what was someone doing to them to keep them detained?

Warnings had been issued, general advice to people heading out alone, but the victims had been out-of-towners, people who may not have been tuned to our local news. Kate Morrow’s car was a rental. The next two bore out-of-state plates. They’d found the vehicles abandoned in public parking lots around town, the occupants missing. Nobody knew how the women were being targeted or what was happening to them.

Until now.

Kate Morrow had been wearing the clothes she was last seen in, and according to the police, she’d been dead for less than a day. Marks on her wrists and ankles indicated that she’d been physically restrained wherever it was she’d been held, but her cause of death had been a slit throat.

And now—my stomach churned with nausea at the thought of the mother’s accusation. I went to the kitchen for a towel to mop up the wine and then dropped down on all fours to scrub at the spill, my hand shaking as I pushed the towel back and forth over the wet spot. Did Tex have a history with Kate Morrow? What was his connection to her? When I’d called him from the parking lot outside of Whole Foods, had he known he was a person of interest in these abductions? If so, why hadn’t he said anything?

Wedn

es
  

I was at Crestwood pool by six the next morning. I wore my bathing suit under a white terrycloth dress that zipped up the front. Rocky led me past the locker rooms and the lifeguard’s tower to the benches that lined the pool. I was the youngest of the early morning lap swimmers. I wasn’t much for ageism, but I liked how my fellow swimmers, themselves octogenarians, treated me like a youngster.

I waved at the lifeguard on duty and pulled a bottle of sport strength sunscreen from my tote. Each day it took a healthy amount of SPF 75 on my arms and shoulders to protect my fair skin from the aging rays of the sun.

“Bobby, do you mind keeping an eye on Rocky while I swim?” I asked.

“Hey Madison,” he said. “No problem.”

I looped Rocky’s leash around the base of the lifeguard stand and carried my cap and goggles to the end of the lane. There were only a handful of us today, Mary Elizabeth and her friend Grace at the end lane designated for the slow swimmers, and Carole in the lane next to her. The pool had six lanes, so I was able to have my own. I waved to the ladies, tucked my hair under my cap, and pulled the goggles on top. I ran my toes through the water to check the temperature. It was cool. Still, I jumped in, letting my knees collapse under me until I was completely submerged. When I floated back up to the surface, I pushed off the wall and started swimming.

One of the reasons I like swimming early in the morning was the beauty of the landscape, uninterrupted by the noise of a crowd, the fumes of exhaust, the rudeness of people on their cell phones. Everything faded away and the only thing left was the feeling of my arms slicing through the water, propelling me forward. Two laps was all it took to find that Zen place.

That’s why I didn’t notice Tex until my fifth lap. It wasn’t so much that I saw the lieutenant standing in the shadows of the bleachers, it was that I saw something that interrupted the idyllic scene I’d come to expect every third stroke when I breathed to my right.

I stopped at the deep end of the pool and raised my goggles. My body was just starting to get into a groove, where the water temperature is comfortable and my muscles feel loose. My heart rate was at the point I tried to maintain over the next forty-five minutes, but now that I’d seen Tex hovering to the side of where I’d left my belongings, I didn’t think maintaining my heart rate would be much of a problem.

I let go of the wall and treaded water. Tex hadn’t moved. He wore a white polo shirt with the Lakewood PD logo on it and khaki pants. His arms were crossed, and the sun flashed off his silver Swiss Army watch, shooting a beam of blindness in my direction. At the other end of the pool, Grace and Mary Elizabeth jumped up and down, raising foam noodles over their heads. Carol was in the middle of a lap.

I pulled myself out of the water and walked to the bin of kickboards. Tex rounded the side of the bleachers and met me.

“Swimming again?” he said.

“Swimming again.”

“Trying to get your life back to normal.”

“Trying.”

“So…you heard.”

“I heard.”

I tossed the first two kickboards back into the white metal bin as if they weren’t exactly what I was looking for and reached for a third.

“Night, I didn’t have anything to do with the abductions.”

“You don’t have to defend yourself to me.”

I’d met Lt. Tex Allen about a year ago when I was planning a Doris Day film festival and happened upon some evidence in an unsolved murder. He had been convinced that I was in danger. I hadn’t wanted to believe him. Turned out he was right.

Since then, I’d gotten to know him a little better. What I saw at a glance—bachelor, playboy, flirt, womanizer—turned out all to be true. But he was also insightful, protective, insistent, and honest. Lt. Tex Allen was a lot of things, but a killer? No.

I pulled an orange kickboard from the stack. He grabbed my wrist. I flinched. His grip relaxed. “You’re not going to hear from me for a while. Okay? Don’t call me. Don’t try to find me.”

“After everything we’ve been through, you’re going to start playing hard to get?” I asked, keeping my voice light.

His eyes shifted from my face to the top of my head. I’d forgotten that I was wearing a swim cap. “I would have expected you to wear one of those caps with the big colorful flowers all over it.”

I shook my head. “You are so predictable.”

“Really? You’re standing in front of me in a wet bathing suit and I’m talking about your swim cap. I thought you’d give me points for that.” He dropped my arm and stepped back. “I need to find out what the police know. I’ll be in touch when I can.”

“Let me know if I can help,” I called behind him. I wasn’t really sure what kind of help an interior decorator could offer a police lieutenant suspected of murder even if he did take me up on my offer, which I knew he wouldn’t.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, my mind wandered while I swam and I lost track of the distance I’d logged. Forty-five minutes later, I stopped by the side of the pool. Tex was gone. I pulled off my cap and goggles and climbed out, and then showered and changed into a white shirt, orange vest, and khaki pants.

I first fell in love with the mid-century decorating style through the movies of Doris Day, who shared a birthday with me. From watching those movies over and over, developing an eye for decorating in that sunshiny style, I also became a fan of the way she dressed. A lot of people laughed at the image of the smiling, freckled actress, especially since her most popular movies took place in a time when entertainment was changing from lighthearted fare to more politically driven subjects. Doris Day’s last movie,
With Six You Get Eggroll
, had been in 1968, the same year Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. The world was changing. The look of the late sixties was far from the beginning.

People who weren’t fans of the actress didn’t understand that through much of the sixties, Doris Day played independent women, characters who owned their own businesses, ran households, and often didn’t need a man. The irony was, she usually ended up with a pretty good one: Rock Hudson, James Garner, and Cary Grant, to name a few.

My secret strategy when first starting my own decorating business was to read the obituaries and contact the next of kin of women who’d been in their twilight years. It wasn’t the kind of strategy I fleshed out on the loan application I turned into the bank, but I’d learned that women in their eighties and nineties tended not to renovate with the more current interior decorating trends. Aside from the creepy factor, it worked.

With a little effort and an “early bird gets the worm” mentality, I’d amassed a decent amount of inventory to use in decorating jobs that came into Mad for Mod. The signs of age and wear were easily minimized with TLC and the talents of Hudson James, my most trusted handyman and creator of Rocky’s custom dog bed. More often than not I’d beat the auction houses to the punch and get my pick of an estate.

My studio came with a storage locker behind it, and I filled the space with all sorts of accumulated objects to decorate a room in an authentic manner, instead of going the reproduction route. Fortunately, making an offer on an estate often included the contents of the deceased’s closet. Most baby boomer children had no interest in dealing with a closet of polyester shift dresses and hats with tassels. Score for me.

Recently I’d finished an atomic kitchen for Connie and Ned Duncan, clients who had become friends. I’d outfitted their kitchen with turquoise metal cabinets from 1963 and a set of Starburst by Franciscan dinnerware service for ten that I’d found in a warehouse in Denton, and we’d recessed top of the line appliances below the counter to mimic Rod Taylor’s atomic kitchen in
The Glass Bottom Boat.
We’d even installed an original Sputnik lamp over the dining table—all for five thousand and three dollars. I would have rounded it off, but five grand had become something of a bad omen for me. Connie and Ned had been so happy with the final reveal that they extended a standing Friday night dinner invite, until last week when they took off for a month-long vacation in Palm Springs, California.

After getting dressed, I slathered a tinted sunscreen over my fair skin and applied a rosy lip gloss. I didn’t spend much time on my hair since it would be under a hardhat in a matter of hours, instead finger-combing the snarls out and securing it behind my head in a low ponytail. I collected Rocky from the lifeguard and left.

I drove to Sweetwater Drive with the sound of the air naturally drying my wet hair keeping me from hearing anything else. My vintage Alfa Romeo was my second in five years. The first had been involved in an unfortunate accident, and the insurance company had determined that the cost of repairs outweighed the value. I took their check and put out feelers with every used car dealer in a two hundred mile radius.

After months of waiting, I got a call from a guy in Louisiana who turned up a blue one almost identical to the one that had been totaled. The cost of travelling to Louisiana to get it wiped out any profit I might have made from the insurance check, so I had to pass on the offer of installing a sound system like I did with my last one. Repairs to the broken gas gauge and dashboard clock were going to have to wait too. For now, I wore a watch and topped off the tank every Monday.

I parked in the shade of a pink dogwood tree in front of a rundown ranch house. The property now belonged to Cleo and Dan Tyler, a married couple who owned a movie development studio in Los Angeles. They’d purchased the property for a song thanks to its rundown condition and hired me to make it livable. Despite the condition, I immediately recognized the hallmarks of the original Cliff May, even before they showed me the floor plans they found in the attic.

Rocky circled around in the passenger seat, eager to get out and run. “Ready to play with Daisy?” I asked. Rocky stood up and looked at me like playing with Daisy was the greatest thing in the world. Aside from peanut butter in a rubber toy. Nothing beat that.

“Remember to behave yourself. I have work to do. Okay?” I said to him. He sniffed my hand and charged across the center console to my lap.

I clipped his leash on, and we got out of the car. With my spare hand, I grabbed my milk crate, coveralls, and hardhat. Cleo met us on the front stairs. She wore a gold one-piece bathing suit under a long white robe and held a tiny tan and white Chihuahua.

For the past few weeks I spent Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays here. From the initial conversations we’d had when they hired me, I’d learned that they bought the house sight unseen. After closing escrow, they discovered their mid-century jewel was more of a diamond in the rough thanks to the unfortunate eighties remodel the previous owners had taken on. Enter Mad for Mod and my enviable skills with a chisel, a sledgehammer, and a vision.

“You are a trooper, coming to work on our house every day.”

“This is what I do,” I reminded her. “When you hired me to work on your home, I explained the process of deconstructing the eighties remodel before I could restore the mid-century interiors.”

“I
know
. I just didn’t expect you to be the one doing it yourself. I almost feel bad. It’s so unfeminine.”

The tiny dog wriggled around in her arms and Rocky picked up the pace when he spied his friend.

“Rocky!” I called.