Night of the Living Deb Read online

  Despite my firm conviction that just because she was found in his car trunk and one of his Calloways had been used as the murder weapon didn’t mean he’d done it, convincing the police was something else entirely.

  So would I be releasing him from one prison only to send him to another?

  Dang.

  This whole thing sucked.

  Maybe we could run away, to Brazil or someplace they didn’t have extradition. Only who’d take care of my mother if I slipped away in the dark of night?

  Stephen?

  Yeah, right.

  He might be ex-Navy and ex-IRS, but he had no earthly idea what he was getting into with Cissy Blevins Kendricks. She was about the most high maintenance individual God had ever designed and built. Not only had He broken the mold after He’d made her, but He’d doubtless run up a hefty tab to outfit and shod her properly, not to mention the hair and makeup. Ca-ching!

  How could I disappear with Malone and leave poor Stephen as Mother’s only crutch and still live with myself?

  I couldn’t.

  Okay, so Malone would have to face the music eventually; though I was sure once he told the truth about what had happened—whatever that was—he would set the record straight. He could explain that he was tied up and chained to a radiator while someone borrowed his Acura to trash poor Trayla.

  I had to stop being Debbie Downer.

  Everything would be all right. It would be over soon.

  My head would explode if I let myself think otherwise.

  I decided to go home for a few hours and reconnoitre back at Cissy’s house before beginning my ransom run.

  Patrizio wasn’t far from there, and Stephen had a few things to go over with me first; so I promised them both I’d return by ten o’clock.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a reason the bad guys had picked that spot.

  I’d gone with Malone to Patrizio a couple weeks ago, strangely enough. I wondered if whoever it was had been watching us then, already plotting to snatch my boyfriend, or if Malone had mentioned the place to them as somehow meaningful to us, to send me a message—though I figured I was trying to pull import from thin air at this point.

  Still, what type of kidnappers would start a ransom drop at Patrizio, since it seemed a little upscale for lowlifes?

  More like the kind of spot lowlifes dreamed of going to rub elbows with the prettified crowd. Besides, it closed at eleven on Monday night, or was that the point? To make sure I was there in time and that I didn’t linger, attracting unwanted attention.

  Hmm.

  I wondered if I were allowed to order a medicinal margarita at the Patrizio bar while I killed time waiting for further instructions.

  Or was that not kosher, per the Kidnappers Handbook?

  Mother seemed anxious about my leaving. She offered to feed me dinner, but I wasn’t hungry. What she really wanted, I supposed, was to keep me in arm’s reach; so much so, in fact, that she’d dispatched Sandy and Stephen to retrieve my Jeep and bring it around. She’d hoped that might encourage me to stay put, but I wanted some time alone. So that’s what I did.

  The sun setting to the west, the sky purple above me, I drove home in silence, no radio or CD playing, just my thoughts as company. And I had plenty of them to spare. I kept thinking of all the people in the cars that passed mine and wondering what their lives were like, if the most they were worried about was where to eat tonight or what color to paint the living room or if the babysitter would show up

  on time.

  Were any worried about the life of a loved one? Did a single one of them have to contemplate driving around Dallas in the dark, running down clues from a list of nightspots, all in hopes that counterfeit money in a bag rigged with GPS and dye packs would serve their purpose and set a man free?

  I would have guessed the answer was no, although I couldn’t say for sure in this day and age when crazy things happened all the time. All you had to do was turn on the nightly news and watch for a few minutes in order to learn about one atrocity after another. Like a kid taking a gun to day care in his knapsack and shooting another kid, or a defenseless animal being tortured. How about soldiers dying

  overseas? Or earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes causing massive destruction?

  That stuff usually made me feel fortunate, realizing how relatively untouched my life had been with regard to tragedy.

  Until something like this happened, and it reinforced that bad stuff could happen to anybody.

  Any trace of the sun was long gone by the time I made it to North Dallas and turned off Preston Road into my cozy enclave of town houses and condos. A flock of geese had wandered over from the lake of the nearby country club, and they waddled across my parking lot, squawking and pecking at each other, oblivious to the fact that my Jeep had to idle until they’d safely passed through its headlights.

  Were that I was a goose, I mused.

  All I’d have to worry about was flapping my wings to head south for the winter and avoiding cars and hunters’ bullets.

  That sounded so nice.

  As I angled the Jeep into a spot near my front door, I saw nothing amiss, no media vans lurking, no unmarked police cars containing anyone remotely resembling Starsky and Hutch.

  Home free.

  Or so I thought.

  Until I stepped out onto the sidewalk, and I heard a car door slam followed by the staccato rush of high heels on the pavement behind me.

  I turned as the noise got closer, the glow of my porch lamp illuminating a specter so terrifying I was tempted to run and hide.

  Attila the Blonde.

  Live and in the flesh.

  Well, okay, not flesh exactly. More like an Ann Taylor suit.

  How could I have missed her shiny red Beemer, for Pete’s sake?

  I blamed it on too many distractions.

  “Allie, what do you want?” Friendly, I wasn’t. I didn’t even wait for her answer, merely marched up the porch steps and shoved my key in the dead bolt.

  “What do I want? Let’s just say you’ll definitely want to hear what I’ve found out, Ms. Snippy,” she announced and trotted after me, right into the condo.

  “Were you waiting long?”

  “Not more than five minutes. I was gonna call you if you didn’t show any sooner. I figured you had to come home sometime.”

  “You want a beer?” I asked and dropped bag and keys on the kitchen table. I flipped on lights and headed for the refrigerator to snag one of Malone’s bottled brews. I didn’t drink often, but figured it was as good a time as any for a snort.

  Allie declined, so I popped one open and sat down in a chair, taking a long, hard swallow as she set her briefcase between us, snapped the lid up and withdrew papers, which she shoved across the table.

  “Take a look,” she said, tapping a finger on the topmost sheet. “Tell me, Andy, what do you see?”

  I set my beer aside and leaned forward to scrutinize the page, which looked exactly like a column of names. The letterhead at the top told me even more. “It’s the prosecution’s addendum to your witness list for the Oleksiy case, right?”

  “Right as rain,” she quipped. “But did you notice the one I’ve highlighted?”

  I glanced down again. “Elizabeth Wren,” I read aloud, then looked up at Allie. “Am I supposed to know who that is? Is she famous or something?”

  “Infamous is more like it.” She folded her arms on the table and smiled smugly.

  Let me tell you, there’s little more annoying than a smug blonde in a size two suit. If she’d been a dry erase board, I would’ve wiped the smirk right off her face.

  “Here’s the dope,” Allie McSqueal explained. “Brian’s secretary said he’d mentioned a meeting with Elizabeth Wren sometime on Friday afternoon, though I was too busy with a depo to come along. Guess he figured he’d start tackling the add-ons without me and impress Old Abe with his get-up-and-go, the brown-nosing bastard.�
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  So Brian had initiative? What did that prove?

  “I don’t follow.” I had a feeling Allie liked keeping me in the dark, in the way that mystery novels waited until the very end to reveal the denouement. “Would you spit it out, please, because I haven’t got all day. I have a ransom drop to make tonight, and I haven’t even had a shower, so make

  it snappy.”

  She made a “tsk-tsk” noise that grated on my last nerve.

  “My God, Kendricks, but you’re impatient. If you’d just sit still and listen, I think I may be able to connect the dots between Brian’s vanishing act, Trayla’s murder, and the witness list.”

  Why did her very tone of voice make me want to reach across the table and smack her? But I didn’t. Because I wanted to hear what she’d dug up.

  I yearned to take another deep swig of beer but resisted, planting clasped hands in my lap and paying attention.

  “That’s better,” she said, like a schoolmarm who’s bribed an unruly student into behaving. “Apparently

  before Brian left on Friday he had a brief conversation with his secretary, reminding her that he was off to vet a witness—”

  “You already told me that,” I interrupted.

  “Only he didn’t call her ‘Elizabeth’ that time. He called her ‘Betsy.’ ” She stared at me, as if awaiting some reaction.

  “Don’t you get it? Betsy’s short for Elizabeth.” She sighed. “C’mon, Kendricks, think! When we went to the strip club, remember what Lu said Trayla’s real name was?”

  “Um, give me a sec.” I’d been a wreck, frantic about Malone, hardly able to concentrate on much else. So I scoured my gray matter, tapping my chin, until I coughed up, “Betsy.”

  “Yes, of course, it’s Betsy!” she fairly screamed at me.

  “Can’t you see the obvious?”

  Geez, Louise, but the woman was high-strung.

  I cleared my throat and asked, “What’s this all about, Allie?” I fervently hoped she wasn’t having some kind of nervous breakdown. If so, I figured a Hazmat suit would be in order. “Lots of woman named Elizabeth are called Betsy. What makes you think the Elizabeth Wren on your

  witness list is Trayla Trash?”

  “Oh, it’s no guess,” she said, coy as ever, and pushed several additional pieces of paper at me. “Take a gander at that, Ms. Cynic.”

  I dropped my gaze to the pages and nearly swallowed my tongue when I realized what they were.

  Mug shots and a rap sheet for one Elizabeth “Betsy” Wren, aka Betsy Bangher, Tawni Kitten . . . and, ta-da, Trayla Trash.

  I blinked like an idiot.

  Much as it pained me, I had to give Allie credit for turning over enough rocks to find this big-ass worm.

  She’d strung the dots together like Christmas lights.

  “Wow, but Trayla was a busy girl,” I murmured, noting misdemeanor charges for solicitation, public intoxication, and forgery.

  The murdered stripper had hardly been an upstanding citizen, had she?

  And playing on the wrong side of the law could tend to get a person burned, or worse.

  I gazed at the mug shots, seeing a disheveled blonde who looked older than her recorded age but still exuded an Angelina Jolie pouty-lipped sexuality that burst forth from the Xeroxed pages. Her hair was more a tangled rat’s nest than the funky flip I remembered from the photograph stuck to her dressing room mirror.

  She looked like a gun moll, a modern-day Jean Harlow from that old Hell’s Angels flick. Not a chick to be messed with.

  Though I envisioned her as once having been a nice girl from Peoria who’d come to Big D with dreams of finding herself a Bobby Ewing to call her own.

  Instead, she’d ended up stripped bare and dead in the trunk of Malone’s illegally parked Acura.

  “When I figured Betsy could be Trayla, I called Robby . . . er, my contact at the DPD,” Allie told me. “Although he wouldn’t confirm the two were one and the same. Still, he didn’t deny it either. He said they’re still trying to contact next of kin and aren’t releasing the victim’s name until they do.”

  “But they are the same person,” I said, staring at the rap sheet which stated exactly that in no uncertain terms.

  “This means something, I know it.”

  “Don’t hyperventilate yet, Kendricks, because there’s more.” Allie’s cheeks flushed and her eyes crackled with unsuppressed glee. “I also confirmed that our Betsy moved into a Turtle Creek high rise six months ago, only whoever was providing her rent cut her off a few weeks back. The landlord had been paid in cash by messenger, so he never saw Betsy’s sugar daddy. When the jig was up, the landlord was instructed by phone not to let Little Miss Wren back in, for fear she’d steal something that wasn’t hers.”

  Allie barely paused for breath before she went on, “Then, lo and behold, just last week, the girl turns up on the prosecution’s list of new witnesses who’ll testify against Oleksiy at the trial. What does that say to you, Nancy Drew?”

  My heart sang with hope.

  Excitement shot up my spine, and I sat up straighter. “It could be that her sugar daddy was Oleksiy Petrenko.”

  “Bingo.” Allie nodded. “My theory precisely.”

  “He dumps her, and she decides to get him back by testifying against him?” I suggested, because that’s sure what it sounded like.

  “Won’t be the first time that’s happened,” she said and settled back into her chair. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

  Or a stripper whose sugar daddy has cut off her rent?

  Oh, oh—I wanted to shout, as new theories popped into my head.

  Like, what if Trayla was at The Men’s Club on Saturday night, and Brian saw her, after having met with her earlier that day regarding the Oleksiy case, albeit when she was Elizabeth Wren? No wonder he’d followed her backstage.

  Had he realized one of the prosecution’s new key witnesses was a stripper, working the stage the very night he’d taken Matty for one last wild ride? Had it freaked him out to see her there?

  What if his getting snatched wasn’t premeditated, but a matter of bad timing?

  What if Oleksiy Petrenko, the money laundering dry cleaner, had sent some goons to pick up Trayla and take care of her, only to find Malone in the way?

  I brought that very idea up with Allie, only to have her shoot me down none too graciously.

  “I’d agree with you, Kendricks, except for one thing.”

  “What?”

  “The ransom,” she said. “It makes no sense.”

  “Since when does kidnapping make sense, Allie?” I angrily picked at the label on my Sam Adams, wondering what exactly she was getting at; hating that she was raining on my parade when we seemed so close to . . . something.

  Her shiny gold hair shimmied on either side of her face as she scooted forward in her seat. “Why on God’s green earth would Oleksiy Petrenko call to ask you for money?

  The guy has tens of millions of his own, maybe hundreds of millions if you count his offshore accounts.”

  “Okay, you’re right.” She had me there, because I’d assume a money launderer probably had plenty of the green stuff at his disposal. “But even you said the ransom demand sounded too bizarre to be real. Maybe it’s a distraction, just to throw me off.”

  “To throw you off?” She snorted. “No disrespect, Kendricks, but who cares about you in the scheme of

  things? Oleksiy has much bigger fish to fry. He’s going on trial soon, and the prosecution’s got his own brother testifying against him, not to mention threats to put good ol’ Mrs. Petrenko on the stand, if she gets back before the trial.”

  “Gets back from where?”

  Allie shrugged. “The woman slept with her husband’s brother. Who can blame her for seeking refuge once the shit hit the fan?” She released a slow breath. “We’re gonna have to work like hell to get him off as it is, so it’s better for our side if Mrs. Petrenk
o doesn’t come back to testify.

  Having his brother on the stand is gonna be bad enough. If Oleksiy was sleeping with Trayla and she knew anything about his business—” Allie stopped, as if catching herself saying too much. “Anyway, I can only imagine how he’d want her out of the picture.”

  Instead of making me feel better, she was doing the opposite.

  “You think he wanted Brian out of the picture, too?” I asked, despite my dry mouth. “Only he’s on Oleksiy’s side, so that makes no sense.”

  Her Blondeness tapped a finger on the table. “I figure Malone saw something he shouldn’t have, and Oleksiy had no choice but to make our boy disappear.”

  “So he had him kidnapped?”

  “That’s the part that doesn’t fit,” Allie insisted. “Even if Oleksiy had his goons grab Malone, why would he call you and ask for a ransom? That’s just plain stupid.”

  “Gee, thanks.” I glared at her. “That makes me feel so much better.”

  Rather like a kick in the ribs.

  “I’m not finished, Kendricks.”

  “Oh, yeah, you are,” I cut her off, pushing her papers back across the table. “I’ve heard enough gloom and doom. I can’t take much more of it.”

  Not with such a long night stretching ahead of me.

  I wanted a hot shower, not more conjecture time with Allie. She’d depressed the hell out of me already.

  “I’ll walk you out,” I said, though it was about ten easy paces to the door. I started to rise, but was stopped by her sharp tone.

  “Not so fast, Ms. Cotillion,” she said, jerking her chin to indicate I should sit down again.

  I did.

  “There’s something about the ransom that I figure you’ll want to know.” She didn’t meet my eyes, merely gathered up Trayla’s rather lengthy rap sheet and stashed it back in her briefcase.

  She then removed a single page and set it on the table.

  This time, she looked dead at me. “So, do you want to hear what else I know, or would you like me to leave?”

  The girl was clearly sadistic.

  “I’m listening,” I said, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, well behind kicking her out and finishing my beer in peace.