Mint Cookie Murder (2 page)

The doorbell rang, and I paused with a mouthful of Pizza Rolls. Who could that be? Kelly must've forgotten something. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve, because I'd forgotten napkins again, and made my way toward the door.

I couldn't see anything out of my security peephole in the door. That's weird. Was it a little kid? I took a chance and opened the door.

"Please…" A man lay bleeding on my porch. He reached toward me with bloody fingers. "Help…" His eyes grew wide when he saw my face, just before the light went out of them and he collapsed, lifeless.

I stepped over him and looked around the neighborhood. There was no one there. A long, bloody trail led from a beat-up, orange hatchback in my driveway. This guy hadn't been delivered here by someone else. He drove here. To my house.

I pulled my cell phone out, dialed, and watched until the lights came on in the house directly across the street.

"Hey, Merry!" Rex answered. His deep, sexy voice usually took my breath away, but not this time. Okay…so maybe it did…a little.

"Rex," I said without any pleasantries. "Do you remember hearing about Lenny Smith?"

"The spy who sold all those tech secrets from Silicon Valley to the Chinese? Yeah." His voice was a little more guarded now, which was depressing.

"You might want to come over," I said with a sigh. "He's dead on my front porch."

Rex arrived in under a minute—which I guess makes sense since he lives so close. He'd been shaving and was wiping off the last of the shaving cream as he crossed the street. Why was he doing that? It was seven o'clock at night. Did he have plans? I didn't remember him asking me over…

The local police arrived one minute after that. They swarmed my porch, under Rex's direction, while I stood in the doorway watching. My cell rang.

"Wrath." Riley's measured tones told me he wasn't happy. "What the hell?"

"How did you find out so fast?" I asked, looking around my doorframe. Had he installed cameras or something? Hey! I was mad at him! No calls for weeks, but the minute there's a dead body…

"Kelly called," Riley answered. I looked out and sure enough, Kelly was standing in my front yard, hands on her hips. Damn. That woman should've been in the CIA instead of me.

"Yeah, well the police are handling it," I said a little snippily.

Rex stepped up to me. "I've got to go, Riley," I said as I hung up on him. That felt good.

"Why don't you go sit down by your cat?" Rex said.

I frowned. "I don't have a cat."

He pointed at the couch. "Well, there's one right now, eating your…Pizza Rolls? You're eating Pizza Rolls?"

I turned to see a very, very large black and white cat lapping up the ranch dressing on my plate.

"When did you get a cat? I was just here, and you didn't say anything about a cat!" Kelly yelled from my kitchen. She must've decided to circumvent the porch by coming in the back door. She came around the corner and stopped, jaw open, when she spotted the animal. Apparently, that was more shocking than having a dead man on my porch.

I ran over to the table and tried to shoo the animal away. He looked up at me and sat down on his haunches. Then, ignoring me, he proceeded to clean his paws.

"Scat! Go away!" I even hissed at him. The cat acted like I wasn't even there.

"I like him," Kelly said.

"He must've wandered in somehow," I said, still waving my arms as if that was working—which it wasn't. "Maybe he was with Lenny?" I turned to Kelly, "You ever see him before? In the neighborhood?"

Kelly shook her head. She walked over to the couch and sat down beside the feline intruder, who now seemed to notice her. Kelly scratched between his ears, and he responded by purring louder than a rumbling garbage truck and closing one eye—keeping one yellow eye narrowed at me. Smart cat—never taking his eye off his adversary.

"Well he can't stay here," I said.

Rex joined me. He glanced at the cat, then the table, and then me. "Did you get a table?"

He noticed!

"I did! Kelly took me shopping." Maybe I shouldn't have said that. Maybe a grown-up goes shopping for furniture on her own.

Detective Hottie shook his head. "I can come over later and fix it for you."

Fix it for me?

He continued before I could respond, "I've already gotten your statement so you don't have to go downtown. We'll take the body to the coroner now. We've documented everything, so you can clean up if you like."

I nodded. "Okay. Can you tell me how he died?" I had some suspicions. From the way he fell, the bloody smears on the sidewalk, and the holes in the back of his coat, I knew he'd been shot. Small caliber, definitely. That's why he didn't die immediately. But I wasn't going to say anything because I'd read in my online research that men don't like women upstaging them in their own profession. Which was totally stupid, but I was trying to be a supportive girlfriend.

"Looks like he's been shot." Rex said with a wink. "But I'm sure you knew that already." He squeezed my arm affectionately and headed for the doorway. He smelled good. Too good. And I remembered that he'd been shaving when I called him.

"You smell good," I ventured. "Why were you shaving at seven o'clock at night?"

"Oh yeah." He grinned. "I was getting ready to go out."

"Did we have plans?"
Oh crap.
Had I forgotten? I should probably buy a calendar too.

"No," he said simply. "An old friend is in town, and I was going to meet her for a couple of drinks. I'll have to reschedule now."

Her
? Did he say
her
?

"I've got to get to the office," Rex said as he glanced at his watch. "I'll call you later, okay?" He kissed me on the cheek and headed out the door. I heard a loud, deep
meoooooooooooow
behind me. It sounded like a goat being castrated. And yes, I once had to help castrate goats as part of my cover. That's right. I can castrate a goat, but I can't put a coffee table together. Sad, right?

"Hey, wait!" I called after him. "Aren't you going to take the cat?"

"No," Rex called from the porch. "We don't know that it's the victim's. But keep it around just in case I need to interview him." He was gone before I could respond to that.

"You said you wanted a cat," Kelly said from the couch. I turned and glared at her.

"I was just
thinking
about getting a cat. I didn't mean it."

The beast opened his other eye and gave me his full attention. It was unnerving.

"He's got a Hitler mustache!" I pointed at the perfect, black rectangle below his nose and a dark patch on his head that looked like hair. "I can't keep a Nazi cat! I'm a Girl Scout leader. I need to have standards."

Kelly shook her head and started scratching the cat's chin. He responded by purring again. "He does! How cute! Who's a cute wittle kitty-cat? You are!" Her voice sounded like a creepy little kid's. "He looks kind of like Charlie Chaplin with that hair too."

I looked at the black spot on his head. "No. Chaplin's hair was parted down the middle. This cat's is parted on the side. Just like Hitler."

Kelly hoisted the enormous cat onto her lap and smiled. "It doesn't matter—he's adorable. Not his fault the way his markings are."

"Okay—so
you
take Adolf," I said. "He likes you."

My best friend gave me an exasperated look. "My husband's allergic to cats. You know that." She stood up and put on her coat—a move the cat clearly protested by yowling loudly. "And don't call him Adolf. He doesn't like it. Come on. Let's go to the pet store."

I stared at her. "You can't be serious."

But she was. Ten minutes later we were standing in the feline aisle of the local pet store. I went along because I had no choice. What was I going to do? Throw the animal out? Not in front of Kelly. The truth was, I'd never had a pet before (well, except for a brief stint with a llama named Rooster when I was stationed in the Andes—but that's better left unmentioned). Both parents were allergic to anything with fur, and I wasn't interested in the kind that was hairless. Turtles, snakes, and lizards didn't scare me, but they didn't turn me into a mushy mess who wanted an animal to cuddle.

"Rex is going to have drinks with a woman," I said as I played with a feathery cat toy.

"I heard him say that," Kelly grunted, heaving a huge box of cat litter into the cart. It fell with a thunk to the bottom. Well, if it didn't work out with the cat, I could always tie it to the cat litter box and throw it into the river.

"You don't think that's bad?" I asked, tossing the feather toy into the cart. "It doesn't sound good to me."

Kelly rolled her eyes. "He told you about it, didn't he? He's not hiding anything."

"Oh—he's definitely hiding something," I said. "He only mentioned it because I caught him."

"You are so suspicious. Caught him doing what, exactly?" Kelly asked. "Investigating the dead guy on your porch?"

"That is not my fault. Besides, it's my job to be suspicious. And by the way—why in hell did you call Riley? And since when are you calling Riley?"

She shrugged. "Since he asked me to keep an eye on you. He can help."

"Riley hasn't shown any interest in me lately—until something happened that might embarrass the agency. I don't want his help." I ignored the little twinge of sadness in my gut. Yes, it bothered me that Riley hadn't stuck around. But I was getting over that. Now he'd come barging back into my life, batting those blue eyes at me and kissing me when I least expected it, and I'd end up all confused again.

We pulled up into the driveway with bags of stuff, got out of Kelly's car, and followed Dead Lenny's bloody stain up the sidewalk to the front door.

"You should probably clean that up," Kelly said.

"I want to look at it a little more closely," I responded as we went inside and dropped everything on the kitchen counter.

"Well get out there and do it before the neighborhood starts a petition to run you out," Kelly said as she began to set up the litter box. It had a hood with a hole in the front of it. Like a little kitty hut, but for a giant cat with possible fascist dictator tendencies. I left Kelly to it and went outside.

The police had towed the orange car away to check for evidence. Drops of blood began where the driver's side would've been. About halfway to the front door, he must've collapsed to the ground, because that's where the smearing started. I knew he'd been shot, and from the blood loss he probably had trouble walking. So why come here? Why me? It didn't make any sense.

Kelly appeared with a bucket of bleach and a broom. She watched as I scrubbed the stains out. They didn't disappear completely. But at least it no longer looked like I was butchering people in my driveway. I couldn't imagine the neighbors liked that much. Hmmm…this might negatively impact my Girl Scout Cookie sales.

We went back inside to find the cat sniffing around the litter box. He looked up at us for a moment, and deciding we weren't interesting, wandered inside the box. Only his tail stuck out through the hood. How did he fit his enormous bulk in there?

"You'll have to take him to a vet and get him looked over," Kelly said as she gathered up her things.

"I thought I'd wait, and maybe he'd just, you know, go home." The cat stuck his head out of the box and glared. I think he heard me. I knew nothing about cats. Were they into revenge? I'd have to do some research.

"Don't wait. He could be sick or something," she said. "Call Dr. Rye. I've heard he's excellent."

"Well, he's certainly not anorexic," I mumbled. This cat resembled a basketball that sprouted fur. He wasn't
in
shape. He was
a
shape…round.

"I'll call the local shelter and see if anyone reported him missing. And the vet can scan him for a chip."

"A chip? Like a tracking device? That's pretty cool. Where do they put it? Does it explode if the cat does something unsavory?" The idea of an embedded, exploding tracking device was kind of fun.

Kelly ignored me. "There's no collar, so maybe he did show up with the dead guy. In which case—the cat is probably yours now. You should think of a name."

"How about Kitler?" I suggested.

"Enough with the Nazi references. You'll hurt his feelings." And with that, she walked out the door.

"I'm not going to name a cat that'll be leaving soon," I grumbled as I grabbed my laptop and headed for the couch. The animal had eaten all my pizza rolls and licked up every drop of ranch dressing. Great. My guess was he'd probably be in that litter box for a while. I had some time to look up the bastard who'd inconsiderately died on my front stoop.

Lenny Smith had been busted under the CIA's watch with two other agents. I'd had nothing to do with his capture. He'd been an IT geek who worked at different times for all the big companies in Silicon Valley. No one seemed to notice how much he job-hopped. I guess that was normal in the field. It wasn't until Cy Stern, a colleague of mine who specialized in Asian languages, started noticing a lot of chatter by the Chinese about a mole in the IT industry.

Cy was a great agent. He followed Smith all over Beijing and produced enough intel for the FBI to stage a little welcome home party for Lenny when he flew back to San Francisco. Unfortunately, Cy didn't get the credit because, you know, undercover crap and all. But trust me, he did all the heavy lifting.

When I said Lenny was a geek, I meant it. A little, mousy guy with a beer belly and receding hairline, he wore Google glasses all the time and had a fashion sense lost somewhere in the late '80s. In spite of this, he managed the largest tech heist ever across five of the big companies.

The last I'd heard, he was someone's "girlfriend" in prison. So how was he out and dead here in Iowa? The networks hadn't picked up the story yet. I was pretty sure Rex was keeping this in lockdown. He probably didn't tell anyone who he was.

I should call him.

"Merry?" Rex asked, picking up on the first ring.

"Oh, hey," I tried to sound sheepish. "Sorry for the extra work tonight. Can you talk?"