Marshmallow S'More Murder (Merry Wrath Mysteries Book 3) (6 page)

Following the stairs down two more flights, I finally hit the dead end I was searching for. This door had no sign. Nothing to indicate where I was. Gingerly, I swept my fingers around the edges, trying to find a trigger for an alarm. Nothing. I turned the handle. Damn. It was locked. Of course it was. What did I expect from an evil lair?

I paused for a second to think. It was a keyhole lock, and that shouldn't be a problem—if I'd brought a lock pick kit with me. Which I hadn't. Because I didn't think I'd need it for anything on a fun trip with my Girl Scouts. I'd ignored the sacred spy mantra (which was, ironically, shared by the Girl Scouts) of "Be Prepared
.
"

I looked over my suit. Nothing there. Even the
Visitor
badge had nothing—it was a magnet—which was kind of nice because it didn't put a hole in my suit—but then not so nice because last time I checked, you couldn't pick a lock with a round magnet.

Meanwhile, I was on the clock. I'd have to get back soon before they sent people out to find me. There was no way I was going to destroy Dad's career by getting caught. Dropping my bag to the floor, I tore through it, looking for anything I could use when it hit me.

My pen. I stripped it in seconds and pulled the coiled spring out, straightening the coils as best I could. Using the inkwell, I jabbed both items into the lock and began furiously twisting and turning.

It felt like I was in a black hole, underwater. Beads of sweat broke out on my forehead, but I ignored them. If I didn't get inside, I'd be forced to come back here in the middle of the night, and even though I could manage to get away while the girls were asleep, I wasn't certain I'd get past security. Spy-craft skills would get rusty if you didn't use them.

Click.

I pressed the handle as soon as I heard it, and the door opened. But now I had a different problem. It was pitch dark. I dropped my tote bag and used it as a door jam. I'd get a little light from there. Flicking my thumb across the surface of my cell turned it into a flashlight. Time was running out. I had to move forward now.

There was no musty smell. No smell of anything. It had to be the cleanest embassy/evil lair basement in the universe. In fact, there wasn't anything in there. No boxes of old records…no dusty filing cabinets, not even a chair. I crept forward, lighting the way as I went but found nothing. It was just a huge, dark, empty room.

Moving faster, I raced through to the other end. The room had to be about the half the length of a football field, and it took a few moments…moments I didn't have. Nothing. I started swinging my cell phone wider, casting a broader sweep, but the light wasn't powerful enough. In a few minutes, I'd have to get back upstairs, or we'd be busted for sure.

I took off my shoes and darted back and forth from one end of the room to the other in a zigzag manner, in a final attempt to find something…anything. And that's when I spotted it. A small, black pouch lying against the right sidewall. Without stopping, I swept it up and raced for the door. After closing it quietly behind me and grabbing my tote, I threw the pouch inside and took the stairs two at a time.

As I opened the door to the main floor and entered, I slipped back into my shoes and straightened my clothes, just managing to catch my breath before I heard a sound.

"You must be lost." The stern voice of Ms. Ito spoke behind me. I whirled around.

"Oh thank goodness someone found me!" I breathed. "It's so quiet here that I didn't want to knock on any office doors and bother anyone!"

The woman nodded, but her eyes were skeptical. "We maintain a simple, peaceful working environment here. Let me help you find your group."

My group! How was it possible that they were in the same building with me? I should've been hearing them all along. Quiet was bad as far as they were concerned. I followed, hot on Ms. Ito's heels as we turned a myriad of corners.

I was sweating. All I could think was that everyone was dead, or they'd left…unleashed on the streets of DC. Terrorizing the city. Maybe they'd been irradiated and grew to be giants. I pictured twelve giant girls running around, stomping on memorials.

"They're in here," Ms. Ito opened a door to a dark room and stepped aside. I entered and felt the door shut behind me. That was it. I've been compromised. Now I was a prisoner on Japanese sovereign soil. Great.

I saw a dim light around a corner up ahead and found myself in a theater. The girls were watching a traditional Japanese puppet show. Every little face was fixated on the stage. How did they do that? There was no way I could pull off a puppet show. Not without puppeteers, at least.

My father was sitting with Ambassador Nakano in the front, so I took a seat next to Maria in the back.

"Anything?" Maria asked without taking her eyes off the stage.

"I don't know," I answered. "I'll show you when we get out of here."

The lights suddenly came up, and the silence was split by loud applause as my troop jumped to their feet, cheering loudly.
Wow. I should bring them here every day for the rest of the week.

As the ambassador showed us out, he gave each girl a small, silk bag filled with Japanese candy. Okay, so maybe I didn't like him after all. All that sugar was going to give me a headache later, and I wasn't even eating it.

"Did you get what you needed?" Dad asked once we were outside.

I shook my head. "Not sure. What's your take on the ambassador?"

We entered the house, and I saw that Mom had put out two trays of giant cupcakes. Great. More sugar. Some sort of conspiracy against me was afoot.

"Go change," Dad said as he unwrapped a cupcake. "Your mom doesn't let me have stuff like this."

As I struggled out of my suit and into my original yellow troop T-shirt and shorts, I thought about that. Mom was curtailing what Dad ate now? And he was defying her? Something really was going on with them.

Maybe Dad had health issues I was unaware of, and Mom was keeping him healthy. That could be it. And it made sense. If his cholesterol was bad or if he ran the risk of diabetes, she'd watch what he ate. Wouldn't she?

But it was unlike Mom to want to get a kitten. All of these years she'd gone without a pet because of Dad. So what changed? And her snarky comment by the pool? Health issues didn't explain that.

Maybe I should've been more involved in their lives these last two years. I called at least once a week to chat, but I rarely went to DC for a visit except for holidays. And most of the times they were back in Iowa, Dad was always touring the state on business.

If they'd grown apart, I hadn't seen it. And they were old. Old people didn't get divorced. Did they? This was the first time that I wished I'd had siblings. Someone else to carry the load. To commiserate with. But I didn't, and hoping wouldn't make it a reality. So I had to go it alone.

Where would I even start? I'd asked Dad, and he told me to leave it alone. Ugh! Why did everything happen at once? I wasn't sure I could handle this trip, Riley's kidnapping, and my parents' presumed marital crisis all at once. I was in way over my head here. I'd bet Mr. Fancy Pants never had problems like these.

I finished changing, but before I left the guest room, I transferred the black pouch to my purse. Checking it out here and now wasn't a good idea. Paranoid as it may have seemed, if it had a tracking device, I wasn't going to lead anyone to my parents. They seemed to have enough problems.

I joined the sugar assault already in process. The girls were bouncing off the walls, their lips colored by red and blue frosting. Maria was laughing as she watched them. Evelyn Trout was sullenly banging away on her cell phone. Sadly, Ambassador Nakano's charms didn't reach to the Czrgy household.

"Okay! Everyone thank the Senator for our great trip today!" I shouted.

The girls crushed my dad in a group hug, and he laughed. He didn't even seem to mind the frosting on his suit.

"You girls have fun!" Dad waved them off as Maria and I herded our troop outside and into the van. We were back at the hotel in ten minutes, and I sent the girls to clean themselves up. Evelyn flicked on the TV in the main room, giving me hopeful looks.

"Thank you, Evelyn," I said. "You can take the afternoon off if you want."

The woman was out the door before I finished my sentence. I had no idea where she was going, and I didn't care. I took my purse to the kitchenette counter.

"So what did you find that you didn't want Trout Face to see?" Maria asked with a wicked grin as she joined me.

I laughed. "That's the perfect nickname for her. Let's give her the code name TF. She's the mother of one of the Kaitlins."

Maria looked around cautiously. The girls hadn't come out of the bathroom yet. "Which one?"

I shrugged. "No idea." Whichever girl it was, she wasn't admitting it, and I kind of got that.

Gingerly pulling the pouch out of my bag, I set it on the table for Maria and me to examine. It was just a small, black, leather pouch with a zippered top. About the size of the bags used to make a bank deposit. It had felt as if there was something like a cell phone and some papers inside.

Touching it any more was out of the question until we knew a little more about it. Reaching into a drawer on the counter, I pulled out two forks and, using them as tongs, gently turned the bag over.

Maria studied the zipper. "It looks okay. I don't see any triggers."

I nodded and gently unzipped the bag. We waited for a second or two. You never knew what could happen when you opened a strange package. I've had everything from smoke in Cairo to screeching in Budapest and, in one unfortunate situation, snakes in Belfast. Bitey snakes. And they said St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland. Yeah, right.

"We're clear." Maria nodded.

I dumped the contents of the bag on the table. A small, extraordinarily thin smartphone slid out along with a sheaf of folded papers.

"What's that?" Emily appeared next to me, her hands on the countertop.

"Nothing. It's nothing. Go watch TV for a little bit, please," I said quickly.

The girl shrugged and ran to the couch where she was joined by half of the girls. The TV mumbled in the distance as Maria and I turned our attention back to the counter.

"This is the newest Taki phone!" Maria whistled. "It's not supposed to come out for another year!"

She picked it up and ran her thumbs over the screen. I watched as she pressed a button on the top, and the lock screen came up.

"Not until next year?" I asked as I unfolded the paper bundle.

"Yup." She nodded, clearly enthralled with the phone. "I'm on a waiting list."

"Can you unlock it?" I asked.

"I don't know." She stared at the gadget. "I'll give it a shot."

I turned my attention to the bundle of papers. When it was unfolded, I could see that there were fifteen pages, all in Japanese. This would take a while. I was just starting to decipher the first paragraph when I heard the girls screaming.

"Mrs. Wrath!" Betty and Inez shouted in unison. "Look!"

My eyes followed their fingers to the TV screen. There was a picture of the king vulture we'd seen yesterday. That was weird. His face filled the screen. He looked like a cross between a circus clown and a deranged turkey.

A hush fell over the room as Maria and I moved closer to the TV.

An anchorman with disturbingly glossy hair said, "And in other news, the king vulture at the National Zoo has escaped his enclosure and disappeared."

"Mr. Fancy Pants is loose!" Hannah shouted.

"What?" I asked the screen. It didn't respond. The anchor had moved on to a story about some weird mold found at the Washington Monument.

I whipped around and stared at the girls on the couch. They were strangely quiet.

"What did you do?" I asked.

The girls looked at each other and shrugged. By now, the initial screaming had brought all of the remaining girls into the living room.

"Ladies," I said, trying to control my rising panic, "tell me you didn't let that bird out."

All twelve girls shook their heads.

"How could we have done that?" Betty asked. "You were with us the whole time!"

She had a point. The other girls nodded furiously. They didn't act suspicious.

"She's right," Maria said. "We were with them. I didn't see them do anything."

I narrowed my eyes. I wasn't putting anything past these kids. They'd really liked the vulture. If they'd really wanted to, one of them could've slipped off and done something. But what?

"We can't do anything about it anyway, Merry," Maria added before turning her attention back to the phone.

I looked at the papers in my hand. I needed a little time to translate them.

"I'm hungry!" Inez complained.

"Okay, lunchtime!" I shouted.

"Really? Now?" Maria asked.

I didn't answer, instead dialing the hotel restaurant. When in doubt…order out. That's what my dad used to say. I felt a little sick thinking about their marriage having problems. I pushed those thoughts aside. There was too much to do.

"Yes, I'd like to order takeout lunch for fourteen please," I said into the phone. "Yes, burger baskets are perfect. Thanks." I hung up.

Twenty minutes later, we were picnicking in the park across the street. Maria and I sat under a tree on a bench as the girls sat on the ground and ate. The minute they finished they were off to the playground—which had a weird American history theme. I watched the Kaitlins go one after the other on the George Washington cherry tree slide before I took out the Japanese documents and a pen. It would take me at least half an hour to get the gist of what was written here. I studied the pages, looking up every few minutes to check on the girls. Maria tackled the cell phone.

"It doesn't make sense," I said after I finished a cursory reading. "These are all maintenance documents for the Japanese Embassy. Warranties for the furnace, stuff like that." I shuffled the papers again. There wasn't anything written in the margins, no hastily scribbled coded message…nothing.

"Maybe they were just packed in there to hide the phone?" I mumbled as I turned the pages over in my hands. That had to be it. Why else would they be there? I'd gone over every word, and there was nothing covert there.

"I got in!" Maria whispered excitedly.

The phone's screen came up. It was a picture of cherry blossoms with a bunch of apps. Maria ran through them, but they seemed to be basic—the time, a calendar, a camera…

"Hit the photos," I said.

Maria's thumb hit the photo app, and Riley's face popped up on the screen. I winced. His normally handsome face was bruised and swollen. His left eye was black and closed. The normally golden blond hair was stringy and crusted with blood.

I sucked in a deep breath. "Oh, no."

It wasn't unusual to get beat up in our line of work. I'd actually had my nose broken twice. You couldn't tell. I knew a plastic surgeon in Paraguay who owed me a favor. But you're still never really prepared to see it when it happens to your friends.

"He's still alive," Maria said quietly. "That's something." But from the look on her face I could tell she was worried.

"Go to the album. See if there's anything more," I pleaded, mostly to get the image of Riley's battered face out of my head.

"There's a video," Maria said. "That's it." She hit play.

Riley's face filled the screen—this time he looked fine. He must've made the video before his beating.

"Wrath…" he said to the camera, "if you find this, and I hope you will, the yakuza found some connection between Midori's death and me." He paused to look around himself, before turning his attention back to the camera.

"I don't think they know about you. But they're closing in. If you find this, it means they've got me. No one else in the Agency knows about Ito. You need to get help."

A crash sounded in the background, and Riley turned to his left. "They're here—" Then the screen went black, and the video ended.

Dammit.

I leaned back on the bench, defeated. That was it? The packet just had a phone Riley had left for us so we'd know he was in trouble—something we already knew? I'd hoped the packet had detailed directions to where Riley was being held, complete with timetables as to when his captors would be breaking for dinner or the bathroom. Instead, it was just a video message that told us this was about Midori Ito.

I knew sometimes clues didn't pan out like you'd wanted them to. No matter what you had to do to get them. Like sneaking around the Japanese Embassy. And wanting the clue to be more wouldn't make it so. It was a hazard of the trade.

"So it is the yakuza," Maria said. "And they have him here." She swept the park with her arm. "Somewhere in the area."

"This is not good." I had a talent for stating the obvious. How could Maria and I take on the yakuza alone? They always travelled in large groups. There'd be a lot more than just two of them. And finding their safe house would make the classic idea of a needle in a haystack look like finding an atom on a planet. I wasn't in a good place to deal with this. I had twelve little girls with me, and I didn't work at the CIA anymore.

"This may be a lost cause, Merry," Maria said.

I shook my head. "No. I can't give up." I couldn't figure out how to manage it, but I couldn't quit. "Riley helped me twice in the last year. I can't abandon him now."

We sat there for about ten minutes sightlessly watching the girls play, our minds working on the puzzle. Both Maria and I were trained agents with field experience. That was an advantage. And we had a couple of resources still at Langley we could exploit. That was another advantage.

Riley was here, somewhere. We'd just missed him at the Japanese Embassy. That was something. Now we just needed to find him. But how?

"This isn't Riley's phone," I said, as if that would help. "All of Riley's calls were from his phone. We've tried calling him back, but that doesn't work. I don't even know how he's charging it."

Maria shook her head. "What should we do?"

I sighed. "We're going to have to find out who the new yakuza guys in town are."

To be honest, I knew this might come up. I just hoped it wouldn't.

"You have a contact here?" Maria asked.

"I have a contact. She's not here. She's in Virginia," I said, regretting each word as I spoke it.

Maria stood. "What are we waiting for?"

"A reason not to go," I said. There was no way this would be easy. It was a two-hour drive from the city, and I had no idea what to do with the girls. But if anyone knew which members of the yakuza were in the States, it would be this woman.

"Why not?" Maria asked. "I mean, aside from the girls."

"Because Elvinia Loretta Thigpen is a huge pain in the ass," I said as I stood to join her. "We can't take the girls."

Elvinia. Damn. That woman was what some in the South would call "eccentric," and those in the Deep South would call her "touched
.
" She was completely mad and also meaner than a cornered Chechen terrorist. It didn't help that she lived in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains, running illegal moonshine. Getting to her would not be easy, and talking to her would be even harder.

Still, Elvinia had this weird connection to the yakuza. She'd been stationed in Okinawa back in the 1970s when she'd been in the army and for some strange reason made a lot of friends in the Japanese crime syndicate. In the eighties she'd married into the biggest yakuza family in the Okinawa branch and had a couple of kids before her husband "accidentally" fell on the wrong end of a samurai sword.

The woman was still in Japan when I was stationed there, and we had crossed paths more than once. For some reason, Elvinia took a liking to me. After her husband's unfortunate death, she had relocated to her family homestead in the middle of nowhere, hillbilly Virginia. Her sons stayed in Japan, keeping an eye on the family investments there. If crime bosses came to the States, Elvinia threw them an old-fashioned barbeque complete with blackened possum and her special recipe moonshine. It was considered an honor to be invited.

I'd been invited when I retired. And while it wasn't the media circus Valerie Plame had when she was outed, I still made the news. Elvinia had remembered me from our time in Japan and had invited me down to her homestead. At the time, I couldn't figure out why she'd asked me to visit, and I couldn't figure out a reason not to go.

It didn't take long to find out why she'd invited me. Elvinia tried to fix me up with one of her cousins who was also a nephew and brother. That idiot clung to me all day into the night. Every time he got me a drink, I was afraid it had a date-rape drug in it. It was the single most terrifying night of my life. And I'd hoped I'd never have to go back.

I dialed my cell. "Mom, I know you just had them, but can you take the girls for the afternoon? See if Liam's available?"

To my complete surprise, she said, "Yes
.
"

A few hours later and a dozen girls shy, Maria and I were entering Amherst County, Virginia. We'd changed into jeans and boots. Armed with Glocks and bug spray, I thought we stood a 40/60 chance of survival. I didn't tell Maria because, as a good spy, she already knew that. You'd have to be realistic, if not a bit pessimistic, in this job. It made you feel better when you get through something with no problems. I wish I could've said that was the norm.

I'd turned the pickup truck we'd rented off the main highway about twenty minutes earlier, and we had wound our way through crumbling concrete until I'd found the hidden gravel road that would take us most of the way there.

"What do you mean by most of the way?" Maria asked as she held on to the armrest. Had I said that out loud?

The road, if you could truly call it that, had gotten very bumpy. Deep ruts in the mud from recent rains and erosion made the driving treacherous. It was slow going. So slow that the mosquitos kind of flew alongside us, waiting for their dinner to stop and emerge from the vehicle.

"I hope your insurance is paid up," I said, wincing at another bone-jarring jolt.

"I think my intestines are no longer connected to anything inside me," Maria said grimly.

I stopped the truck. The road had vanished, crossed with a huge, felled tree that had been taken over by kudzu.

"We walk from here," I said, unbuckling my seat belt.

It was even hotter here than it was in DC. Turning the AC off and stepping outside caused my sunglasses to fog over. I threw them into the truck—the woods were so dark and thick I really didn't need them. Instead, I reached for the bug spray and coated myself in a fog of the sticky, smelly stuff. Bio-conscious sprays didn't work here. You needed the full strength only a DEET neurotoxin could supply. Maria winced as she sprayed herself head to toe. Sure, it smelled bad. But the alternative of turning into one human-sized mosquito bite was worse. Way worse.

The walk was straight uphill. I only knew we were heading in the right direction because Elvinia had planted poison ivy along the trail to what she called the "meeting place," where we'd be met by someone who'd take us to her. She had a great sense of humor, that woman. She'd figured only a crazy person would follow a trail of toxic plants. I was starting to think she was right.

"Leaves of three, let it be," I said to Maria.

She gave me a look. "That bug spray has made you crazy."

"That's what we say in Scouts to identify poisonous plants like poison ivy," I replied. "Avoid any plant that has three leaves, or between them and the mosquito bites, you'll want to kill yourself."

"Such a charming place." Maria smirked. "I wonder why more people don't build summer homes here." She swatted away a cloud of mosquitos that were apparently impervious to the toxic poison we'd used on ourselves.

"And watch for ticks too," I added. I probably should've briefed her before we got out of the truck.

"Wonderful." Maria's eyes began darting back and forth now, watching for any tiny bug approaching.

Ticks were bad here. Last time I was at Elvinia's I actually saw a whole herd of them crawling toward me through the grass. There weren't many spy weapons you could use against them. Well, none that worked anyway.

We started walking more slowly as the foliage got thicker. The trail was barely visible. We were almost there.

"Whatever you do, don't scream. And don't pull your pistol first," I said.

Maria gave me a look. "I'm kind of missing my desk job right now."

"Don't worry. We'll probably be okay," I said without a lot of hope.