My Boss is a Serial Killer

What others are saying about
My Boss is a
Serial Killer

"This story of a burly detective, a spunky
legal secretary, and her obsessive-compulsive boss is wildly
funny."

Foreword Magazine (March/April 2009)

"Paralegal Harlin pulls out all the stops in
this witty, catty and romantic mystery debut . . . Harlin's
memorable, entertaining characters populate a well-crafted mystery
that keeps readers guessing to the end."

Publisher’s Weekly (February 2, 2009)

"Mixing hot suspense, sexy romance, and
wonderfully quirky characters, Harlin's
My Boss is a Serial
Killer
is one for the keeper shelf."

Gemma Halliday, author of the
High Heels
series

"John Grisham and Danielle Steele seemingly
meet head on in Christina Harlin’s wonderfully entertaining debut
novel,
My Boss Is A Serial Killer
.”

Susan Gregg Gilmore, author of
Looking for
Salvatoin at the Dairy Queen

My Boss is a Serial
Killer:

Christina Harlin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Christina Harlin

Visit the author at
http://www.christinaharlin.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this
author.

I worked for Bill Nestor almost three years
before a sexy detective started asking questions about dead
women.

The detective came to our firm on a Wednesday
afternoon. Markitt, Bronk, Simms & Kowalsky, diminutively known
as MBS&K, was only a mid-sized law firm in mid-sized Kansas
City, Missouri. But any person in any office across the nation can
tell you that Wednesday afternoons rival Monday mornings for being
the worst chunk of time all week long. When Lucille paged me, it
had been 2:30 for the last hour and a half.

From the overhead speaker I heard: “Carol
Frank, call the operator please.”

I was doing some work for a pain-in-the-ass
paralegal named Suzanne, typing a deposition summary wherein two
grown men argued for four hundred pages about how many screws it
takes to effectively mount ceiling tiles. You might find it hard to
believe that so much animosity and dispute could arise over the
pattern of screws in a ceiling tile, but believe it you may. Screw,
screw, screw, I typed. Screw this, I had been thinking when my
summons came from above.

“
Carol Frank, call the operator
please!”

Lucille doesn’t like to be ignored. She is
the princess of her little domain. I called her as commanded.

“
There is a Detective Gus Haglund here
to see you.”

“
A cop?” This was surprising. I
wondered if my complaints about our parking arrangements were
finally being acknowledged by someone important. We’d had a rash of
license plate sticker thefts. Having grown tired of hearing the
other staffers complain, I called building security (one guy named
Danny) to see if the police could do something. Our garage security
was a ridiculous affair anyway. They made us employees carry
keycards to get our cars in and out, yet no one paid any attention
to our cars once they were admitted. I suppose the point was to
cause annoying delays to kidnappers transporting victims in their
trunks. At any rate, our license plate stickers were not safe.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover Security Guard
Danny was the one stealing them.

Lucille answered, “Yes, a cop. Oh, and are
you still expecting that call from Bobby Lane?”

This fully caught my attention. Bobby Lane
was office code for “attractive man.” My visitor met with Lucille’s
approval, and she assumed he would also meet with mine.

Encouraging! I hurried toward reception.

A helpful art print hung on the wall just
before the lobby. It was just some modern piece of crap, but it had
a fabulous reflective casing that allowed a woman to check her
appearance for any embarrassing mishaps. So I gave myself a good
once-over before greeting the promise of a Bobby Lane. I was a
thirty-year-old, studious-looking brunette, and sometimes people
(particularly those like my stupid ex-husband) liked to project a
dark bookishness onto me, hoping I would be a mysterious, depressed
dramatic figure, perhaps on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Actually I was a content and undemanding woman, and my mother
always told me I was very pretty when I smiled. That’s not as
exciting as a suicidal beauty with her nose crammed in a book of
philosophy, I’ll admit—but my type is a lot easier to deal with and
less expensive to entertain.

Lucille was happily chatting with an adorable
man. Our receptionist was very good with men. Rumor had it that
twenty-five years ago Lucille had been a beautiful, slutty girl who
had dated many members of the Kansas City Chiefs—often more than
one at a time. She still believed herself to be every bit as
gorgeous as she once was. She had the honeyed accent of rural
Georgia, and it never failed to make men stupid and accommodating.
Half the time when I found her with a new victim, he was inquiring
about where she was from and she was confessing to her Southern
upbringing as if it made her shy.

“…
from Georgia,” was in fact what she
was saying to Detective Adorable. “Not Atlanta but pretty close
nearby.”

“
I’ve been to Atlanta,” he replied,
“and to that town where Jimmy Carter was raised. What was that town
called?”

“
Plains.” Lucille’s eyes shone. Being
the only native Georgian in the office, she still called President
Carter her governor. “Did y’all have some Billy Beer?”

“
I was only eight at the time,” he
said.

“
Now I’ve gone and shown my age.”
Lucille groaned as if miserable. In truth she loved to let everyone
know she was fifty because she looked pretty damned good for
fifty.

“
Hi,” I said, thrusting out my hand.
Left to her own devices Lucille could flirt until Judgment Day and
overshadow mere mortals. “I’m Carol Frank.”

Detective Adorable shook the offered hand.
Touching him made me feel all yummy inside. This was, in large
part, because he was a bright spot on an otherwise endlessly awful
Wednesday afternoon. He could have had a hunchback and an extra
head and probably still elicited some enthusiasm from me, but he
was a cutie-pie. Screw, screw, screw, I thought dizzily. He had a
friendly, innocent blue-eyed look about him, sweet and almost
dopey, with loosely curly, dark blond hair probably worn a little
too long for departmental regulations, and a round and cherubic
face, cheeks and all, with a little bow mouth that could
erupt—alarmingly—into a heart-stopping lopsided grin. He did that
right then, and it almost knocked me over. This was a detective? He
must be either terrible at his job or fabulous at it. Maybe no
suspect could see that grin coming.

“
Oh, hi,” I said. Had I already said
hi? “I’m Carol Frank.” Had I already introduced myself?

He caused further havoc by showing me his
badge, which he pulled out of his inside jacket pocket and flipped
open just like they do in the movies. Augustus Haglund was his full
name, I noticed.

“
Detective Gus Haglund, KCPD,” he said,
raising an eyebrow at me.

“
How can I help you?” I asked, hoping
for an answer that had to do with nudity.

“
You’re Bill Nestor’s
secretary?”

I agreed that I was. We had so much in
common, this detective and myself.

“
I understand that he’s out this
afternoon. I was wondering if I could arrange some time tomorrow to
speak with him about Adrienne Maxwell.”

Oh, yes. Adrienne Maxwell. I might have seen
this coming.

Then came the really shameless part, because
I could have been done with this in four seconds by saying, “Come
by any time from eight to ten tomorrow morning; he’ll see you
then.” Bill trusted me with his calendar and I kept a close eye on
his schedule. Bill wouldn’t mind meeting with a detective about his
recently deceased client. But since I had nothing waiting for me at
my desk but the screw deposition and a big stack of mail to post, I
decided that Augustus Haglund was going to take as much of my
afternoon as was possible for me to give.

“
Lucille,” I said with great
seriousness, “do we have a free conference room where the detective
and I can look at Mr. Nestor’s schedule together?”

“
Conference Room 3 is open,” replied
Lucille helpfully. Her eyes were glinting.

“
Follow me,” I instructed. “Can I get
you a coffee? Coke? Are you allowed to have mind-altering
substances while on duty?”

Detective Haglund said he would like a Coke
very much and so, after offering him a chair at the conference
room’s round table, I sprinted away to get it for him. In our
lunchroom I searched desperately for a clean glass. There was a
power struggle underway between the cleaning staff and the file
room crew over whose responsibility it was to start the dishwasher
and, as a result, we seldom had clean glasses. Giving my new friend
a lipstick-stained glass didn’t leave the impression I wanted, but
washing a glass myself might take extra precious moments of
Detective Adorable Time away from my afternoon.

Like a stealth bomber, Charlene Templeton
materialized at my shoulder, startling me so badly I almost dropped
the glass I’d found. Charlene’s age and size belied her ability to
move silently. She wasn’t fat but she was a big
woman—broad-shouldered, log-legged and built like a cylinder from
top to bottom—and she was well over forty years old. She moved
slowly and complained that she had bad knees, so one expected her
to wheeze and groan when she moved but she was as quiet as a cat
burglar. Though her face was round and apple-cheeked, her auburn
hair was streaked liberally with gray, and she looked a lot like
everybody’s youngish grandmother; she was not a person I’d
recommend tangling with in any capacity. She was a career secretary
and damned serious about it. Working for Aven Fisher, she had to be
brilliant. Divorce attorney Aven Fisher—a decent human being but a
legendary workaholic—demanded an utterly devoted secretary who
could remember hundreds of tasks and details simultaneously, and I
had never known Charlene Templeton to forget anything. Her
steel-trap mind had another advantage: the woman knew absolutely
everything that happened in the office. She’d probably known there
was a cop here to see me before I had.

“
Why are the Kansas City Police
rousting you?” she asked, as soon as I’d regained my wits from the
scare she’d given me.

“
It’s about Adrienne Maxwell.” I
resumed my anxious search for a Coke and the ice machine. Happy
nerves had rendered me almost too giddy to function. I couldn’t
remember the order in which these tasks had to be
performed.

“
Lucille says he’s a Bobby Lane. Oh,
here.” Charlene plucked the glass out of my hand and set about
filling it with ice and soda.

“
He’s a doll,” I declared vehemently.
“And he’s a detective. I feel like I’ve won some kind of
Wednesday-afternoon lottery.”

“
Well, don’t let him bully you into
breaking confidentiality just because he’s cute,” she warned. “You
can’t talk to him about anything to do with our
clients.”

“
Now don’t mother-hen me,” I told her.
Charlene seemed sometimes to think that she was the only one with
an ounce of common sense. “I don't plan to discuss business at all,
if I can help it. I want to hear the story of his life and
hopefully about how he’s never found a woman he could really love
before.”

She granted me one of her rare, flat smiles.
“Maybe you can ask him to catch our food bandit.”

I refrained from doing a double take, and
pretended I didn’t know exactly who the food-bandit was. I said
instead, “Then he can look into our license plate sticker thefts.
With luck, I can keep him here all week long.”

“
Well, let me carry this in for you. I
want to see him up close.”