Vanessa Gray Bartal - Lacy Steele 07 - Icy Grip of Murder (15 page)

“Did you leave the front door
open?” Michael asked as they pulled in.

“Of course not,” Jason said. Part
of his OCD tendencies included vigorously checking locks. “Why?”

“It’s open now.” The car was barely
stopped before they erupted from it and burst into the house. Jason called
Lacy’s name as he ran through the door.

“In here,” she said, her voice
frightened and small. He followed the sound to Len and Linda’s bedroom. The
room was dark. He flipped on the light in time to see Lacy trying to scoot out
from under the bed. She was wrapped in a brown cowhide. He blinked twice. He’d
had dreams like this. Was he awake now? Her hair was dripping and she was
shivering. He knelt to pull her out and wrap her tightly to him, and that was
when he realized the bedroom window was open.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Someone broke in. They found me,
but when you guys arrived he left through the window.”

“Male or female?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see much
and they whispered.”

“Was there only one?”

“I only saw one, I think it was
just one.”

“Why
are you
wearing cow fur
?”

“They’re all the rage in robberies
this season,” Lacy said. “All the best victims are wearing them.”

He let out a relieved laugh and
squeezed her tighter, satisfied that she was all right.

Michael entered the room. “Is she
okay?”

“She’s fine,” Jason said. “He, or
maybe she, went out the window.” Michael went to the window and hopped
out.
 

“Let’s get you dressed. Not that
the wet cowgirl look isn’t a good one for you, but I would like it if you
didn’t get pneumonia,” Jason said. The window was blowing a steady stream of
cold air, and she was freezing.

“I left a puddle under the bed.
From my hair,” she hastened to add, lest he believe she had lost bladder
function during her ordeal. Somehow she had kept it together and now she didn’t
have to go anymore.
Traitor,
she
accused her bladder. Apparently it only threatened desperate action when she
most needed it to be calm.

“I’ll clean it up. You go get
warm,”
Jason
said. He pushed her to a standing
position.

“Why did you come back?” she asked.

“Because we missed our third
musketeer,” he said.

“You’re nice,” she said, leaning
down to give him a kiss.

“Only to people who have never
committed a crime,” he said.

“Actually,” she began, but he
pressed his hand over her mouth.

“Leave it or I’m keeping the rug,”
he said.

She left the room laughing, but by
the time she entered the other bedroom, she was shivering again, this time with
a delayed reaction to fear. That had been a close call. Whoever had been in the
house had meant her harm, she was sure of it. Although he/she had only spoken
five words, they had been menacing, and not just because they were administered
in a creepy whisper.

By the time she was dressed,
Michael had returned and he and Jason had finished searching the house.

“Did you find him?” Lacy asked.

“No,” Michael said. “It’s black out
there; there’s no moon.”

“Plus he was wearing black. Or
she,” Lacy said.

“It was a he,” Michael said.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“By the way the door was picked. It
was done by one of my acolytes.”

“How can you tell?” Jason asked.

“A master knows his students’ work.
I taught each of them how to pick locks and how to hotwire cars. I have my own
signature, and I passed it on to them.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Jason
said.

“Want me to teach you? Could come
in handy,” Michael said.

Jason pressed his hands to his
ears, mashing the flaps on his flannel hat closed. “La, la, la, la. Not
listening.”

“Teach me,” Lacy said.

“No,” Jason said, dropping his
hands.

“I thought you weren’t listening,”
Michael said.

“What if I get locked in somewhere
and have to break out?” Lacy said.

“How often does that happen?” Jason
countered.

“To me? A lot,” Lacy said.

“You have a point,” Jason said.
“Let’s deal with this later. We have bigger fish to fry.”

“Or bigger Bugs to catch,” Lacy
amended.

“How are we handling him?” Jason
asked.

“Actually, I think we should let
Lacy do it,” Michael said.

“I thought you said he could be
dangerous,” Lacy reminded him.

“We’ll make sure he isn’t,” Michael
said.

“Why Lacy?” Jason asked.

“He’s already resentful of me, he
knows you’re a cop, he’s engaged in illegal activity, and he has a soft spot
for the ladies. Plus I think she’s got this. I think she can handle him,”
Michael said.

Jason remained silent, but then he
had watched her try to interrogate people before. It had never gone well.

“What if I mess it up?” Lacy said.

“Then we’ll beat his face in,”
Jason said. “I’m kidding,” he added when Lacy and Michael turned to look at him
in surprise.

“Unless he’s the one who broke into
Len and Linda’s tonight,” Michael said.

“How could he do that if he’s
staying after hours to chop-shop cars?” Lacy asked.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a
way,” Michael said. “Can you handle questioning someone who might have just
broken in on you?”

“Yes, of course. I’m a
professional,” Lacy said.

“A professional what?” Jason asked.

“Nosy busybody,” Lacy said.

“I’m just going to sit here and not
say anything,” Jason said.

“That’s why your relationship
works,” Michael noted.

They arrived at Bug’s workplace and
saw it as well lit and active as it had been earlier in the day.

“If old man Magruder knew any of
this was going on, he’d have a coronary,” Michael said.

“Is he the owner?” Lacy asked.

“Yeah. He’s a good guy. He did a
free repair once on my first car. You know, I never used to think about the
effects of my actions on the people I was stealing from. Now that I own a
store, I see things from another perspective.”

“No more strings, Pinocchio. You’re
a real boy now,” Jason said.

They watched the shop for a while.
A car came in, but instead of being worked on, it was taken apart and
disassembled until almost nothing remained. Lacy was reminded of scavengers
picking over road kill. And it happened
fast.
Whatever they were up to, this wasn’t their first time.

“They’re not even trying to hide
it,” Jason said.

“You’ve seen how well our police
department works. They’re probably still blaming me for all the car thefts
around here, and I’ve been gone forever.”

When they had stripped the car to
its bones, they broke to eat. “I guess that’s our cue,” Jason said. “Are you
sure you want to do this?” he asked Lacy.

“I can do it,” Lacy said. She hated
the way she sounded like a toddler trying to convince her parent she could
navigate the stairs without assistance.
Lacy
do it!
“I mean, you guys will be there, and I’m just going to ask him some
questions. No biggie.”

“All right, let’s get this over
with,” Michael said.

Outside the temperature had dropped
to dangerously cold levels. Lacy had been unable to salvage her hair after
hiding under the bed so long. She had skipped the blow drier. The tips were
still wet, and when they hit the arctic blast outside they immediately froze.
For once she looked enviously at Jason’s flap hat. They let themselves into the
auto shop and all conversation came to a halt.

“What do you want?” a burly
repairman asked. His nametag read, “Tiny.” Guys called Tiny almost never were,
Lacy realized.

“We want to talk to him,” Michael
said, pointing at Bug who stared back like the proverbial deer in headlights. A
piece of lettuce dangled precariously from his slack lower lip.

“Do you have an appointment?” Tiny
asked. Lacy wondered if he was the bouncer. Did chop shops have those?

“No, but he has a badge. Don’t make
us use it,” Michael said, indicating Jason with a nod of his head. To her
pride, Lacy noted that Jason looked as intimidating as Tiny. Even while his hat
flaps were swaying slightly with the breeze coming from the heater, he looked
like he might be there to bust some heads. She wondered if his outfit added to
the intimidation factor by making him look a little deranged and then felt
guilty for thinking he looked a little deranged.

The occupants of the shop regarded
him with a mix of suspicion, resentment, and fear. They had probably sensed he
was a cop as soon as he stepped through the door, the same way that Jason
somehow knew when someone was up to no good. Either there was some chemical
reaction between cops and robbers or they had learned how to read each other’s
unspoken signals.

“Let’s go somewhere private,” Jason
suggested to
Bug
.

Bug turned and led them to a break
room. “Clear out,” he said to a group of guys who were chowing down on
sandwiches and coffee. Though Bug didn’t appear intimidating, at least to Lacy,
the others did as he said, packing up their food and drinks with haste.

“What do you want?” Bug asked,
tossing himself into one of the scarred vinyl chairs. He peeled off his jacket
and Lacy saw two things the heavy canvas had been covering. First, Bug was
ripped. Muscles bulged from his neck to his fingers. That alone would have been
mesmerizing, but each of those muscles was covered in tattoos.
Of ponies.
Not brown and black racehorses, but pink and
lavender animated characters. Beside her, Jason made a choking sound. He could
never understand men who didn’t act like men.

“We don’t want anything,” Michael
assured him. “Lacy wants to talk to you.” He and Jason stationed themselves in
chairs beside the door. Lacy pulled a chair across from Bug and sat down. He
regarded her with suspicion.

“So, you’re a
My Little Pony
fan,” she said. That had nothing to do with
anything, but she was so fascinated with the tattoos that she had to address
them.

“It’s a good show.”

“You’re a
brony
,”
she said. Somehow her brain knew the term for male fans of the show, despite
not having watched it since she was a child.

“What of it?” he asked. He flexed
and the ponies danced.

“Just making conversation,” she
said.

“What do you want?” he asked.

At the moment, what she wanted was
to ask him questions about his tattoos. How did a car-stealing mechanic become
obsessed with a children’s cartoon and live to tell about it? But there were
more pressing issues. She set aside her curiosity about his personal life and
focused on the matter at hand.

“I have some questions about
Jenny,” she said.

“Why? You didn’t know her.”

“I talked to her. We had things in
common,” Lacy said.

“Like what? You look like a good
girl.”

Why was it that when people said
that to her it never sounded like a good thing? How would Bug react if she told
him the thing she and Jenny had in common was the same taste in fancy
underpants? It was better not to find out. “She was a woman, I’m a woman, we
were roughly the same age. Don’t you find it disconcerting when someone similar
to you dies?”

“I
dunno
.
It’s never happened before,” he said. He looked down at the pony on his left
bicep and began absently stroking its mane with his index finger. Lacy wanted
to ask him if he knew it wasn’t real. With difficulty, she kept on task.

“It happened with Jenny. She was
your friend. Doesn’t it bother you that someone killed her?”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes darting to
Michael.

“Michael didn’t do it. He was with
us,” Lacy said.
Did you do it?
That
was the question foremost on her mind, but she couldn’t start there. She had to
lead up to it, to hopefully let him entrap himself.

“He could of found a way,” Bug
said. “If you want to talk to me so bad, why are they sticking around?”

“They’re my good angel and bad
angel, like
Dr. Faustus,
” Lacy said.

“Huh?”

“Christopher Marlowe,” she
elaborated.

“I thought your name was Lacy,” Bug
said.

“Never mind. Let’s call that part
of the conversation, ‘What Happens When You Major in Lit’ and move on,” Lacy
said. There was something wrong with the world when a man knew the names of
every
My Little Pony
character—and
had them inked on his arms—but had never heard of Christopher Marlowe.

“I still don’t see why we need them
in here. I think the conversation could go a lot better with just you and me,”
Bug said.

It was always disconcerting to be
creepily leered at, but with her boyfriend lurking protectively a few feet
away, and the guy who was leering at her touching his pony, she felt extra
repulsed. Maybe he simply wanted to play ponies. Either way, she didn’t want to
know what was in his head. “They’re staying,” she said firmly before Jason
could intervene and say something worse.

“Suit yourself,” Bug said. He might
as well have said, “Your loss.”

Lacy wiped her hands on her jeans,
resisting the impulse to go wash them. The sooner she got this over with, the
better. “When was the last time you saw Jenny?”

“A few years ago before Cockroach
killed her the first time,” Bug said.

“We know that’s not true. You knew
she was alive. You knew she was hiding out.”

“Who says?” Bug asked.

“Evidence and a witness,” Lacy
said, trying to keep her voice from wobbling. She was a terrible liar.

Bug stared at her. She forced
herself to meet him head on and not blink. “So what?” he said at last.

“So you have this nice little
operation going on here, and I’m guessing that Jenny was a part of it,” Lacy
said.