Read The Sweetheart Racket Online
Authors: Cheryl Ann Smith
The Sweetheart Racket (8 page)
“Shit,” he said.
Taryn bolted for the door. By the time he caught up, she'd dumped half of her stuff onto the backseat of the Olds. And she felt less triumphant than she'd expected after the emotional blast. She'd wanted to warn him off. Not make him think she was a flake. Or emotionally stunted.
Instead he moved up behind her. She froze.
Rick leaned one hand on the roof of the car and bent around to look into her face. The expected panic wasn't there. Rather a mix of anger and concern.
“The maid? That's cold.” He put his other hand on the open door frame and trapped her. His warm scent roiled around in her senses and made her forget almost everything else but him.
She bit her lip. Hell, it looked like he might not flee. Darn. Admitting to her husband cheating was the best ammo she had to scare him off. That meant she'd have to find another way to get a grip on this stupid attraction.
He shifted slightly. He was very close. Too close. “He didn't deserve you.”
She dropped her notebook onto the seat and turned to face him. “You don't know me well enough to make that determination. I was probably a crappy wife.”
“Maybe,” he said, clearly attempting to distract her. “I can't judge. I don't know anything about your marriage, but you still didn't deserve to be cheated on.”
“Um, thanks. I think.” She hadn't been a crappy wife, just a naive one. She had that in common with Rick's mother and Mrs. Clark. Tim was a podiatrist and not a con man, but he'd betrayed her nonetheless. And the betrayal still hurt.
“I thought love and sex and devotion were enough to keep my husband happy,” she said. “He wanted to do other women. How could I compete with that?”
He reached out to touch her face. His rough fingertips scraped her skin, but not in a bad way. Next to him, she felt very feminine.
Images of him using those hands on her naked body crept in. She forced them back out. Lust didn't last. Eventually, she'd fall for him and then he'd move on, or cheat, and she didn't want another Tim in her life.
“You shouldn't have to compete for your own husband,” he said. “That guy's an ass.”
There was no argument to that statement. “I don't want to talk about him anymore. He's Gloria's problem now. They're made for each other.”
“What shall we talk about then?” he said and slid his fingertip along her jaw and his eyes locked onto her mouth. “I know. I'd like to discuss the part where you've been thinking dirty thoughts about me.”
Chapter 7
“I
said you had sexy tattoos. I never said I was having dirty thoughts about you.” He was just ridiculous. And funny. And dangerous. A man couldn't carry himself in the cocky way he did and wear all those tats around without getting into trouble: bar fights, street racing, perhaps even jaywalking. There was no telling what kind of darkness lived inside Rick.
said you had sexy tattoos. I never said I was having dirty thoughts about you.” He was just ridiculous. And funny. And dangerous. A man couldn't carry himself in the cocky way he did and wear all those tats around without getting into trouble: bar fights, street racing, perhaps even jaywalking. There was no telling what kind of darkness lived inside Rick.
“It's okay if you're hot for me,” he said and leaned in to whisper in her ear. His breath tickled her lobe. “Most women are.”
A shiver went down her spine and bloomed into a fireworks display south of her belly button. The man was too damn confident of his charms, even if he was teasing her to get a reaction, which he clearly liked to do. Often.
“Stop making me laugh.” She'd stopped laughing because she couldn't breathe under his overwhelming closeness. His mouth was inches from hers. A slight head turn and they'd be kissing.
“You're my client,” she said, forcing the words past a tightening of her throat. “I'm a professional PI.”
“I see that.” He looked down to where her flattened hand had somehow made its way to his warm, muscled chest.
Surprised, she yanked it back, gulped, and said somewhat breathlessly, “Just get into the car.”
Rick's expression turned from sexy to concerned, as if the danger of following her directive might lead to his death in a fiery car crash.
Lust vanished. “Really? I'm not a bad driver.”
He slowly stepped back, grinning. Released from the circle of his arms, Taryn wanted to grab his shirt with both hands and yank him back. Kiss him. Grab his butt. Kick his ass. Instead, she brushed past him and slipped into the car. The bucket seats would provide a safety zone between them.
He joined her.
“We need to get on the storage locker angle.” She inhaled and exhaled slowly, until her heart calmed. The man was exasperating and all too attractive. Unfortunately, her body wanted to behave badly. All over him. All night. Darn it!
Rick said nothing but she felt his amusement.
Even now, with the console between them, she could catch occasional sniffs of his scent and still felt the brush of his breath on her ear when he'd whispered to her.
Damn. She needed a lobotomy. Or maybe she should bring up Tim again. Or maybe not. That hadn't worked the last time.
Taryn shook her head, jammed the car into drive, and took off in a squawk of brand-new tires, letting the breeze blowing through the open windows cool off her overheated . . . well, everything. She was speeding toward a wall of trouble with Rick and wasn't sure how to avoid the crash.
* * *
Since they were closer to Rick's motel room than the office, Taryn suggested, in a momentary lapse of sanity, that they go there. The space was no more than one decent-sized room split into a bedroom, a small attached kitchenette, and a bathroom. The carpet was a dingy red and orange shag and the bedspread a golden harvest yellow.
The stale odor of old cigarettes and damp permeated the room. “Nice room.”
“I didn't want to waste my money on something fancy, when all I need is a bed and shower.” He scooped up a few discarded clothing items off the bed and shoved them into a dresser drawer. “I didn't expect a guest or I'd have picked up.”
“Then we both should lower our expectations. I didn't think I'd ever be in a motel room with you,” she quipped, without thinking, and immediately wanted to take it back.
He grinned. “Didn't you?”
Instead of answering, she turned sideways and sidestepped past the queen-size bed, went to the particleboard desk, and set up her laptop. The room was so small that pulling out the chair put the wooden legs in contact with the bed. Maybe she should have taken him to the office. The intimacy of this setting made her nervous. Being near a mattress with Rick made her nervous.
Ugh.
“Okay, let's see how many storage facilities are in and around Ann Arbor.” She slipped into work mode. Rick took a seat on the bed to her left. “It looks like there are seven with Ann Arbor addresses, one in Saline, and six more in a ten-mile radius of the city. I'm assuming since Teddy's victim, Honey, was from Ann Arbor, he'd set up nearby.”
Taryn started searching. She didn't have Summer's deep web skills, but she excelled at the basics.
“Are you hacking into computers?” Rick slid closer and looked over her shoulder.
“I wouldn't use that word.” She wanted to put some distance between them but there was no room. Besides, it might clue him in that he affected her and she couldn't do that. The guy was already too confident. “I'm just taking a peek at a few files. If these storage facilities didn't want anyone looking, they'd upgrade their online security.”
Rick snorted but said nothing. It took her almost an hour to realize that Brinkman hadn't rented a storage unit under his name or in any of the aliases they knew. At least not in the Ann Arbor area, and she was almost to the end of their list.
“I thought we had something here.” Disappointed, she moved to close the file on Affordable U-Store. “Another dead end.”
“Wait,” Rick said. “Go back. Scroll up.” She scrolled up. “Look, right there. Comstock. Joey Comstock. That's the name of one of Honey's sons.”
“Are you sure?”
“I'm sure. When I uncovered her as Brinkman's latest wife, I had a friend run her history. Her sons came up. The other one is Ronnie. There is no mention of their father. ”
Returning to feeling hopeful, Taryn clicked open the file. “Let's see. Joey Comstock, age twenty-eight. He paid with a credit card.” She lifted the card number, texted it to Summer, then scanned the rental agreement. “This is odd. He rented the unit a few days after his mother married Brinkman.”
“Maybe with a combined household, they had too much stuff and something had to go.”
“Possibly. But Jane Clark said he came to her with almost nothing but a suitcase. I can't imagine he's turned to schlepping around a living room furniture set in the back of his Pinto.”
“Point taken.”
Her phone pinged. That was quick. “Summer says the credit card was opened up four months ago under Honey's name. But the address traces back to a nail salon that closed up last year.”
“That's probably around the time that Brinkman started romancing Honey.”
She turned her head to meet his eyes. “I'm getting a funny inkling here. Something's not right.”
Rick nodded slowly. “Could Brinkman have opened up the card in her name and rented the unit under Joey's? It seems like whoever managed the facility would check the name on an ID against the card. Brinkman is almost twice Joey's age.”
“That would make sense,” she said. “But not everyone does. Why give up a sale over a detail like a stolen credit card or ID?”
Scanning the page, Taryn suspected the address and phone numbers linked to the card were bogus, too. “Again, why would Brinkman use real names that could be traced to him?” She tapped her fingers on the desk. “He's getting sloppy.”
“Possibly. Or because he knew no one would kick up a fuss, that's why,” he said. “If anyone was hunting him, they'd only be looking for Honey, not her kids. And by the time the credit card company, or Honey, got wind of the scam, he'd be gone.”
“I agree. Or there could be another, darker, reason.” Taryn's stomach tightened, as she stared blankly at the screen. Her thoughts raced to places she hadn't considered earlier in the case. “Honey and her sons might already be in danger.”
* * *
Rick understood where her focus was going. He needed to rein her in, before in her mind she turned Brinkman into a serial killer. “Brinkman has never shown signs of violence. Why would he hurt this wife?” He leaned back to put some distance between them. The scent of her shampoo was spinning around in his head.
“Who knows? He's a sociopath. Maybe he does have dead wives somewhere. We don't know for sure. And if Honey discovered his game, she may have threatened him with arrest. Or she might have made some innocent comment that set him off. I've watched enough murder shows to know that there could be a number of reasons a husband, or wife, can snap. Add a sociopathic personality and Brinkman could explode.”
Yes, she did watch too many murder shows.
“Or he may be living happily somewhere off the proceeds of his thefts,” he countered. Yep, Taryn had molded Brinkman into a serial killer. “Until we find signs that she's been harmed, you shouldn't jump to the conclusion she was murdered. Let's focus on finding them and forget the rest, for now.”
Taryn returned to the screen and sighed. “You're right. I'm letting my imagination run crazy. Why don't we check out this unit and see what we find?”
A quick mobile mapping app gave them directions to the facility. It wasn't far. They also did internet searches for more information on Honey and her sons. Taryn got a hit on Honey, but found nothing on Joey and Ronnie. At least not the Joey and Ronnie Comstocks they were looking for. The Facebook ages and pictures, under both names, didn't match. “Odd. Joey and Ronnie have no online presence.”
“Some people don't use social media,” Rick said.
“True. However, it's unusual for their age group. Even my mom, who's in her sixties, has a Facebook account.”
She pulled up the link to Honey. “She still has an active Match-Mate page, though it shows no recent activity.” Honey was slightly weathered looking, under overly processed blond hair, but her smile was engaging. “No wonder Surfer Chad found her hot. She doesn't look like any mom I know.”
Rick didn't disagree. He leaned in for a better look. “She claims to be forty-three. Unless she had Joey when she was fifteen, she's shaved a few years off her profile,” he said. Ten if he were to guess.
“She likes long walks on the beach and drinking wine in front of a fireplace.” Taryn made a face. “What a cliché.”
“Yes, but she's had over a hundred hits. Something about her profile drew the men in.”
“Her low-cut top, perhaps?” she said.
Rick couldn't argue that one. The picture showed Honey in distressed jeans and a tight white halter top. The top enhanced her surgically modified assets. “Brinkman may have met the love of his life.”
Having spent years hanging with low-life drug dealers and gang-bangers, he'd seen many women with Honey's hard look. Without knowing anything about her, he felt sure that he could make up a fairly accurate profile anyway.
“I suspect the new Mrs. Brinkman has spent some time on a stripper pole. If I'm right, then Brinkman may have gotten in over his head with her. She'd be streetwise and not easily duped.”
“Then we're back to her being in danger.” Taryn closed the laptop. “Let's go and stake out the storage facility. We may get lucky and Brinkman will show up.”
They both knew that was unlikely. Still, it was their best lead so far. At this point, nothing should be dismissed.
They left the motel and stopped for coffee on the way.
The facility consisted of a gated fence to keep undesirables out, a small white office building that sat off to the left side, and four long rows of orange and gray connecting metal units. An open field ran up to the fence on one side and, behind the property, in an upside down L, a community of duplexes sat on the other side.
Although they had the number of Joey's unit, they couldn't get close enough to find the exact location without getting on the property and alerting the owner of the white Ford Fiesta parked outside the office.
“I guess we wait until dark and sneak in,” she said. Taryn pulled the Olds across the street and parked next to a closed furniture store. From there, they could see the entrance of Affordable U-Store, if not much else. “You're about to find out what it's like to watch grass grow.”
Remembering her earlier comment about the boredom of stakeouts, he finished his coffee and settled back for a long couple of hours, as Taryn pulled out and opened up her laptop. From the intense look on her face, he figured she wouldn't be up for another round of twenty get-to-know-you questions, so he leaned his head against the seat and closed his eyes.
* * *
Looking up from her laptop a little while later, to see why Rick was so quiet, Taryn shook her head. “Some PI you are,” she whispered to her sleeping companion. “Five minutes and you're out.”
She glanced back across the street and saw a red pickup leaving the facility, with a bed full of boxes and a rolled-up rug. The man behind the wheel was big and bald with a runaway gray beard. The woman beside him appeared to be in her sixties. Distance kept her from concluding anything more, but either way, they weren't the Comstocks or Brinkman.
Satisfied, she dropped her eyes back to the computer screen.
Another hour of digging around found nothing on the Comstock boys and only one more hit on Honey. She was mentioned in a four-year-old obituary, listed as the wife of the decedent, one Arthur Prinz, of Westland, Michigan.
Forty-seven-year-old Arthur Prinz.
This caught her attention. She scanned the obituary and discovered that Arthur had died in a freak car accident with a runaway cement truck. The couple had only been married for six weeks. Honey Comstock had kept her name. Either that or hadn't had time to change it over. The ink hadn't yet dried on her marriage license before she was widowed.
“From widow to con victim. Poor Honey.” This was consistent with what had happened to several of Brinkman's other wives. They'd all been widowed when he'd duped them. This showed a pattern of familiar behavior he'd used for decades.
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