Chapter 14
14
2:15 p.m. Friday, November 1
G riffin’s assistant was ghostly pale when he opened the front door. His hair was messier than usual, and his staff shirt had fresh stains down the front. Riley had a feeling it was barf. He managed to point a trembling finger toward the backyard, but it wasn’t necessary considering they could just follow the sound of the screaming.
“You know how quiet my life was before I met you?” Nick said to her as he took the lead.
“I could say the same, except for my roommate situation.”
They walked straight through the house, out the open French doors, and onto the patio. Riley could hear the far-off wail of a siren. It was becoming the soundtrack of her life.
They found the source of the screaming on the back patio. “OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod!” Griffin screeched with his hands on his face, Home Alone –style, as he ran in tiny circles. Bella was howling while shaking her hands like she was trying to dry her nails.
“Christ,” Nick said, staring up at the twelve-foot-tall aroused Griffin statue.
“Focus, Santiago.” Riley pointed to Mrs. Penny, who was in a flower bed next to a bushy rhododendron and a pair of legs wearing men’s loafers.
“Yo!” Mrs. Penny called, waving her cane in the air.
They stepped off the patio and headed in her direction.
Bella’s dog sniffed the dead guy’s shoe, then resumed barking. Mrs. Penny poked the facedown body with the tip of her cane. “Yep. He’s definitely dead.”
Bella’s screaming went up an octave, and Riley plugged her ears with her fingers.
“Stop poking the body,” Nick ordered. “Thorn, take care of these two. Duct-tape their mouths shut if you have to.”
Riley picked up the dog and returned to the screaming couple.
“Hey, guys. Let’s go sit down for a minute,” she shouted over the noise, pointing toward the seating area next to the hideous statue.
Still screaming, Griffin abruptly changed direction and ran face-first into the statue’s erection. He fell backward to the grass, dazed and blinking.
“That’s gonna leave another mark,” Riley guessed.
Bella took the dog from Riley’s arms and continued howling as she jogged toward the patio furniture.
“Bella, you have to save your voice for TV, right?” Riley asked.
“TV?” Griffin repeated dazedly, still staring up at the statue’s penis.
Bella hiccupped. “Oh my goodness! I was so upset I forgot I was on TV.”
“You have the morning show, and someone’s probably going to want to interview you about this, so that’s even more screen time,” Riley said. The siren was getting closer. “You two stay here and try not to scream,” she told them.
Riley returned to Nick and tried not to look at the body.
“Do we know who he is?” she asked.
“How the hell should I know?” Mrs. Penny said, whacking the rhododendron out of the way with the cane.
“Can you stop fucking up the crime scene, Penny?” Nick said. He was crouched down a few feet from the legs. There was a wooden block in the grass and a long pair of bolt cutters in the mulch.
“What exactly happened, Mrs. Penny?” Riley asked.
“We were inside watching The Price Is Right reruns, and Griffin wouldn’t shut up about how much better a host he’d be when bam! The power went out. These yahoos didn’t know what to do, so I came out here to investigate and bam! Dead guy.”
The electrical meter mounted on the wall above the corpse was still intact, but the tubing around the wires had been cut.
“Who puked?” Nick asked, eyeing a chunky-looking puddle of fluid.
“The assistant. Everyone acts like they’ve never seen a dead body before,” Mrs. Penny complained.
The siren blared into the cul-de-sac.
“I’ll go find Griffin’s assistant and let the cops in,” Riley volunteered.
“Thanks.”
She found the assistant rocking back and forth on the kitchen floor. “You okay?” she asked tentatively.
There was no response.
She walked up to him and clapped her hands in his face. “Staff!”
He fell over on the tile and curled in a ball. “I don’t want to die!”
“I’m not here to kill you. We just need to let the cops in,” Riley explained.
On cue, there was a pounding at the front door. “Harrisburg PD. Open up.”
Detective Kellen Weber and Sergeant Mabel Jones marched through the door when Riley opened it. To his credit, Weber barely bothered to roll his eyes when he saw her. “I should have known,” he muttered.
“Hey, girl,” Mabel said. “I take it Santiago’s here too?”
“He’s out back,” Riley said. “Follow me.”
She led them through the house and out onto the patio. Weber approached Griffin, who was still lying like a starfish on the ground.
“What in the ever-loving hell is that?” Mabel asked, wide-eyed as she took in the scene.
“That’s not the dead guy,” Riley told them. “Griffin’s just stunned. He ran into his statue’s erection. The body’s over there.”
Riley watched from the kitchen as a uniformed cop unspooled the yellow crime scene tape in the backyard and the coroner’s gurney wheeled into view.
“I was just saying how I would be an excellent game show host because I’m so handsome and charming when the power went out,” Griffin explained to the officer. He and Bella were sitting at the glass and chrome kitchen table. He held an ice pack to his forehead, and Bella was delicately sipping on one of her creepy placenta smoothies.
“And I was doing my facial exercises so I don’t get wrinkles,” Bella added, demonstrating by scrunching her face like a prune.
“Okaaaaay,” Mabel said.
“Here we are again. You, me, and another dead body. I’m starting to think we’re cursed,” Riley whispered to Nick as he helped himself to a cup of coffee.
“Are you kidding? Thorn, if that DB turns out to be who I think it is, we just scored. Big time.”
She frowned. “Who is it?”
“I can’t be sure, but the back of his head looks a hell of a lot like Gentry.”
Riley instinctively looked out the window toward the fence. “Lyle Larstein?”
“Looks to me like the neighborhood sleep-deprived weirdo was cutting the power and managed to electrocute himself.”
“Hence the block of wood and the bolt cutter thingies,” Riley said.
“Exactly. He was at the top of our list of suspects, and he just did us the favor of taking himself out. This is what we call an open-and-shut case. You and I are gonna celebrate by hooking up that TV tonight, installing a dead bolt on our bedroom door, having sex, and then watching movies.”
“That sounds perfect. Maybe we could add paying some bills in there somewhere?” Riley suggested.
Weber stepped inside from the backyard, his no-nonsense footsteps echoing on the tile. He removed his latex gloves and pointed at them. “You two, with me,” he ordered.
“You two, with me,” Nick mimicked under his breath.
“Play nice,” Riley hissed.
“I don’t know how.”
They followed the detective out the glass doors and onto the patio.
“Why do I keep finding you at my crime scenes, Santiago?” Weber demanded, gesturing for them to sit down at the slate-topped table.
“If you were better at your job, maybe I wouldn’t get there first every time,” Nick shot back, pulling out a chair for Riley.
“Hey, maybe we could save the habitual pissing contest for later,” she suggested as she sat.
Nick took the chair next to her.
Weber took a look around them at the manicured lawn, the stone patio, and the unmissable twelve-foot-tall Griffin. Someone had taken the initiative to drape a blue tarp over the statue’s nether regions. He shook his head and pulled out a third chair.
“All right, you two. How do you just so happen to be on the scene of another unattended death?”
“Just lucky I guess,” Nick said.
“Do you want me to haul you down to an interrogation room?”
“Mrs. Penny was here with Griffin. She called us,” Riley said.
“What was an eighty-year-old troublemaker doing here, and why did she call you?”
“Don’t blame us for doing our jobs,” Nick snarled. “Gentry went to the cops first, and your boys in blue dismissed the threats.”
“The threat at the time was”—Weber paused to consult his notes—“a ‘mean note’ in his bedroom and a chest-waxing accident.”
“Well, maybe if you had taken it seriously, we wouldn’t be standing over a dead fucking body,” Nick said.
“ I didn’t take the report. I’m homicide.”
“Right, because what’s the fun in preventing murders when you can investigate them?”
They both came halfway out of their chairs. Riley waved her hands between them. “I really can’t tell how much of this is actual animosity and how much is old habit. But we’re in the middle of a crime scene, so let’s at least pretend to be professionals.”
“Who the hell is the DB?” Weber demanded.
Riley opened her mouth, but Nick beat her to it. “How the hell should we know? That’s your job.”
“Did you disturb the body or the scene in any way?”
“I stopped four feet away and didn’t touch anything. You’ll find my size thirteen prints next to the block of wood. The orthopedic size eights and cane prints in the mulch are Penny. Who the hell knows what Gentry and his girlfriend did before we got here? They were running around like headless fucking poultry when we arrived. Thorn got them under control and corralled them away from the scene. The puke is from the assistant who came outside before we got here. I don’t have a gun on me. I didn’t witness anything except the aftermath. Now get the fuck out of my face before I decide to throw caution to the wind and rearrange yours for you.”
“Fuck off, Nicky,” Weber shot back after Nick’s recitation of mostly the facts.
“You two about done? We’d like to roll the body,” the coroner called from the flower bed.
Weber glared at Nick. “Don’t leave town.”
“‘Don’t leave town,’” Nick mimicked.
“We’ll just get out of your way, Kellen,” Riley said, grabbing Nick by the arm. “Come on. Let’s go get Mrs. Penny a snack. You know how hungry she gets at crime scenes.”
“Have fun playing detective,” Nick called over his shoulder as Riley towed him toward the door.
“Okay. Why aren’t we telling Kellen we might know who the dead guy is?” she asked under her breath.
“We’re not gonna do his job for him. Besides, if we tell him we think we know him, he’ll want to know how we know him, which will involve a much longer interview, and we have a TV to hang and an old lady to feed.”
“You sure you aren’t just being unhelpful to see if Kellen comes to the same conclusion or gets it wrong?”
“That too, Thorn. That too,” he said, slinging his arm around her.
They found Griffin, Bella, and Mrs. Penny in the kitchen. Griffin and Bella were gargling what smelled like a concoction of hot vinegar and honey. Mrs. Penny was drinking bourbon straight from the bottle.
“Well? What happened? Who is it?” Mrs. Penny asked and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
“Was it the bad guy?” Griffin demanded in a whisper.
“Why are you whispering?” Nick asked. “He’s dead.”
“The nice lady in the backyard told us we should save our voices,” Bella squeaked.
“That was me. I was the nice lady,” Riley said.
Bella cocked her head. “Hmm, you don’t look familiar.”
“I honestly don’t know why I bother,” Riley muttered.
“Look, Griffin. In my professional opinion, the threat has been mitigated,” Nick said.
“Mimigated?” Griffin repeated in a whisper.
“Threat go bye-bye. No more bad guy,” Nick said. “So I’ll take that check now.”
Griffin got that cagey look in his eyes. “Check? What check?”
“The one you owe me for hiring Santiago Investigations.”
“Ohhhh, that check. I just assumed that you would enjoy working for me so much you wouldn’t need to be paid.”
“You assumed wrong. I regret every second I spend with you, and if you don’t cough up the cash?—”
“We’ll get you an invoice and an itemized receipt,” Mrs. Penny interrupted, hefting herself out of the kitchen chair with an audible fart.
“I’ll be back tomorrow for the money,” Nick said.
“We might be busy tomorrow with national news interviews about our harrowing experience,” Bella warned.
“Let’s go. I need some prime rib,” Mrs. Penny announced.
They headed for the front door. In the study, the uniformed officer was interviewing Griffin’s assistant. “Okay, Staff, what’s your full name? Stafford? Staffington?”
The nervous assistant looked like he was about to puke again. “I can’t take it anymore. I confess.”
Riley, Nick, and Mrs. Penny stopped in their tracks.
“My name isn’t Staff. It’s Henry. Henry Wu. Does that count as an alias? Am I in trouble?”
Riley rolled her eyes. Nick snorted.
“Last time you’ll ever have to see the inside of this house,” Nick said.
“Let’s go celebrate being twenty Gs richer,” Mrs. Penny suggested.
As Riley followed them out, something tickled at the back of her subconscious, and once again, she saw a fuzzy vision of Griffin’s bare legs.
Mrs. Penny tripped over one of the porch urns. The urn toppled off the porch, shattering on a landscaping boulder below. Nick caught Mrs. Penny by the elastic waistband and pulled her back from the edge.
“That thing came out of nowhere,” she barked, stomping over the carnage on the steps.
Riley gripped her purple-haired roommate’s arm and brushed away the tickle in her head. Nick was right. Griffin was no longer her problem. She had a life of her own now. With a TV to hang and an old lady to feed.