How to Host a Killer Party (13 page)

A skate around the island was the best way to jostle those loose ends into some sort of cohesive order. When I skated, I did my best thinking. I twisted my hair up and clamped it with a giant clip, put on my Rollerblades, knee and elbow pads, and headed for the running path that circumnavigated the island.

Rarely used except on weekends by a handful of locals, the path was originally created by the navy to keep their enlisted men in shape for war. The scenic trail was another of the best-kept secrets in the San Francisco Bay Area. But all the talk of redevelopment—Indian casinos, exclusive high-rises, film studios, military monuments—loomed over the island like an insidious fog bank.

As the October breeze whipped my hair and goose-pimpled my skin, I found myself drawn to the rocky spot where Ikea’s body had been discovered floating. How had she ended up there? The currents? Maybe one of the windsurfers would know.

Or was it something—or someone—else?

More importantly, how had she ended up dead?

Once again I spotted Duncan Grant just outside the crime scene tape. What was he doing here? When he looked up, I waved and headed over to the rocky edge.

“Hey, Dunk. Find any more bodies?”

He glared at me. “Very funny. I’m just checking one of the caches.” He knelt down and withdrew a box hidden between some jagged rocks. Standing again, he opened it and began picking through the whimsical objects left by geocachers—a Mickey Mouse figurine, a dot-com pen, a snow globe, a decoder ring, a magnifying glass, and an earring shaped like a tiny book.

“Wait!” I said as he started to close the cache. I lifted the earring from the box and turned it over in my hand. There was an inscription in miniature print, almost too small to read. “Hand me that,” I said, indicating the Cracker Jack- sized magnifying glass. He picked it up and passed it to me; I held it over the engraving and read the fine print: TO I.T. LOVE D.G.

Oh my God. The earring belonged to Ikea. I remembered she’d been wearing it at the party.

So how did it end up inside this cache box?

I pocketed the earring.

“What are you doing?” Duncan asked. He looked at me as if I’d just robbed a grave.

Perhaps I had.

I didn’t want him to think I was stealing evidence from a crime scene, but before I could come up with a good lie, he added, “TSLS.”

“What?”

He pointed to the cache. “ ‘Take something, leave something. ’ It’s the rule. If you take something from a cache, you have to leave something in its place.”

“Oh . . . uh . . . sure.” Whew. I searched my pockets for something I could leave in exchange for the earring and pulled out a Killer Parties business card. Talk about an advertising opportunity. You never knew who might find it and suddenly want a party. I set the card in the box.

“That’s pretty lame,” Duncan said, closing the cache box. He set it back in its hiding place between a couple of large jagged rocks.

“Not any lamer than half the things in there,” I said.

But Duncan was no longer paying attention to me. Something in the distance held his gaze. I turned to see a familiar man in a white jumpsuit. He was taking down the crime scene tape left behind by the police techs.

Brad Matthews again.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I called to him, then headed over.

“Doing my job,” he said, rolling up the tape. “I’m a crime scene cleaner, remember? Question is, what are you doing here?”

None of your business
, I thought. “Just getting some exercise.” I pointed to my skates. “And talking with Duncan.”

Brad raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Find anything?”

My hand went to the pocket that held the earring. “Nope. Uh-uh. Nothing. You?”

He eyed me. “Like I said, I’m just here to clean up. SFPD sent me.” He nodded toward Duncan. “Who’s that?”

“He’s the guy who found the body. Duncan Grant. He organizes GPS games.”

“Geocaching, huh?” Brad watched Duncan for a few seconds, then returned to whatever it was he was doing. Looked like he was just puttering around. He got paid for that?

“Not much to clean up, is there?” I asked.

“Nah. A few loose ends.”

Curious, I asked, “Do you ever find anything the cops missed when you’re cleaning up a crime scene?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes, but usually the scene is pretty well picked clean. Cops aren’t as stupid in real life as they are on TV.”

I thought of the earring in my pocket. The sound of a car engine pulled my attention away. I turned to check out the rubbernecker.

Uh-oh.

Detective Melvin. He had just arrived in a white, unmarked, but obviously police-issue car.

“I gotta go,” I said abruptly, and skated down the path before the detective could slap the cuffs on me. When I was just about out of sight, I glanced back to see him engaged in a serious-looking conversation with Brad Matthews.

They were both staring at me.

What was the detective saying to Brad?

And what was Brad telling the detective?

 

By the time I reached the office, I had a plan. Since it was business hours, the office door was unlocked, but at least it wasn’t standing open. I let myself in and skated down the hall, looking through the glass partitions of the other offices for signs of life. I spotted Delicia talking on the phone, Raj hunched over his desk, and Berk staring at his monitor, probably editing the party video.

The only ones missing were Brad Matthews and Rocco.

While the others were occupied, I tried the doorknob to the newly rented office across the hall from mine. Locked. Shit.

Raj. He had a master key.

How unprofessional, even illegal, would it be if I got him to open Brad’s door?

How badly did I want to know more about the crime scene cleaner and his sudden appearance on the island?

If Brad caught me, I could always claim he must have left the door unlocked. People forget to lock their doors all the time. But what would I tell Raj to get him to open it?

My office phone rang, giving me an idea. Letting the call go to the answering machine, I skated down to Raj’s office, the last one before the kitchen. To my surprise, he wasn’t reading a weapons catalog or studying for a cop exam or doing anything that might keep us safe on the island.

He was eating a bagel and reading what looked like a movie script.

“Raj! Hi. Hey, I wondered if you could do me a favor and open the door to the new guy’s office? I think I left my cell phone in there.”

He looked at me as if I’d just said, “Stick ’em up!”

“Oh no, Ms. Presley. Actually, I cannot.”

“But my cell phone—I need it, Raj. I’ve got some business calls to make and my office phone is . . . broken.” Not only was I lying, now I was whining.

“It is going against my ethics, actually. I’m sure Mr. Brad will be back soon. Until then, you can be using my telephone.”

Shit. Shit.

“Never mind,” I said, and pulled the door closed a little too hard.

I skated back to my office to figure out a new plan. Dropping into my chair, I leaned over to untie my skates and noticed my top drawer was open an inch. It must have caught on my stapler when I’d tried to close it earlier. Stupid stapler.

But I hadn’t used my stapler this morning. Or anything else in that drawer today.

Slowly I pulled out the drawer until everything was fully displayed. Instead of being tucked into the back right-hand corner where it belonged, my stapler lay on its side at the front—blocking the drawer from closing.

Not where I kept it. So how did it get there?

I scanned the contents of my drawer. Nothing appeared to be missing.

But on second glance, I noticed my chocolates were not in their usual groups. I always sorted my See’s Candies—dark chocolate raspberries, dark chocolate butters, dark chocolate caramels, and dark chocolate-covered nuts.

One of the dark chocolate-covered nuts was in with the dark chocolate caramels.

So I have a little OCD along with ADHD. Right now I was happy to have the additional disorder, since I now knew someone had been snooping in my drawer.

Brad Matthews?

I popped a chocolate in my mouth as I flashed on those strong hands of his in my drawer—then I froze.

Chocolates
.

I spit the bite-sized candy onto a sheet of paper and wiped the chocolate drool from my mouth with the back of my hand.

What if someone had tampered with my private stash of chocolates too?

I pulled out another chocolate and looked around for something to save it in until I could get it to Detective Melvin. I found a small box among a stack of party gift boxes on a shelf and set the chocolate inside. Returning the stapler to its proper position and place, I slid the drawer closed, then bent over and pulled off my skates, replacing them with pink flip-flops I kept in another drawer. Releasing the clip-pie that held up my hair, I stuffed it in my pocket—and felt the earring.

I pulled it out.

Ikea’s earring.

Where had it come from? And how had it ended up in the cache treasure box?

I set the earring on my desk and got out the sheet of paper with the notes I’d started in the car, hoping I could decode my scribbles. After reviewing them, I drew a line under the who-what-when-where-how-why party questions. Beneath that I wrote a heading, then began making notes on Andi and Ikea’s deaths. Murders.

Or could Ikea Takeda have angered the mayor enough to make him kill her? They say it’s often a loved one who commits a murder. Maybe that wedding was just a setup for his plan. Maybe he knew Ikea would bolt—giving him the opportunity to get rid of her, under the cover of darkness and fog. And maybe the mayor was completely innocent and I thought I was Nancy Drew.

I crossed his name off and wrote down “Motive?” Underneath that I wrote:

I realized I’d just listed five of the seven deadly sins—adultery (lust), jealousy (envy), humiliation (pride), revenge (wrath), and larceny (greed.) The only two missing were gluttony and sloth. Could I make overeating or laziness possible motives too? If so, I could be guilty of both at times.

I didn’t have much to work with, but if the detective planned to follow his course in suspecting me, I had better come up with something more viable than what I had.

I couldn’t interrogate the two major players—they were both dead. I needed to talk to the mayor, but that wasn’t going to be easy, between all the security he had and his busy schedule. Maybe I could have a little chat with the people who knew him—and weren’t dead yet.

Obviously his administrative assistant would know a lot about her boss. But would she share that information with me? Probably not, if she was the loyal secretary type. Still, I would give her a try.

Who else might know something about the mayor and his connection to both women? Without being familiar with his social circle, I didn’t have a large selection. Best to start with the scene of the crime—Alcatraz—and those attending the party. Surely someone there would know a few secrets about our popular mayor.

I pulled out the guest list and underlined the names I recognized. I put stars next to a few of them who stood out:

Those three stood out among the rest of the costumed criminals and crime solvers as having some kind of stake in the mayor’s pending decision. They might just have something interesting to say about him.