Chasing Can Be Murder (26 page)

What sort of a fishy story was that?

I met his dark eyes across the room. No. Scuzz was with me when Erin went missing. Although, on second thoughts, he could have arranged for an accomplice to do his dirty work. And then I remembered his kindness, his fierce protective snarl when he thought an intruder was out to attack me.

Evidently unaware of the way my mind was defaming his character, Scuzz smiled at me, his gentle eyes showing concern. “Don’t worry, Katrina,” he said. “We’ll find your friend’s daughter. Even if we have to examine every inch of mud in every piggery listed in this telephone book.”

Out of the blue I remembered his hot, unexpected, stomach-clenching kiss and returned his smile.

Ben might be the handsome yummy one—but hey—it was Scuzz the Biker who actually cared enough to notice me.

25

It was nine o’clock the following night. Darkness had come early. No great hunk of a full moon guided our steps. Nope. Just a sliver of a first cousin, so skinny, it may as well have stayed home in bed.

As I crept on hands and knees through the last pen of the last piggery on our list, I felt a tug on the waistband of my jeans and jerked to a stop.
Oh no!
There was a sucking squelching sound as I plucked my silver Nokia from the bog and held it up for inspection.

Damn. Damn. And double damn
.

Now it too stunk of pig shit. Just like the rest of me. I sighed in exasperation as I rammed the phone back into the waistband of my jeans and cringed when the cold grainy slime slid across my bare skin. After a day spent creeping through pig sties searching for Erin, I figured it would take at least half a bottle of coconut shower gel to make me smell human again. Even my favorite jeans would be relegated to the trash can after today’s adventure. No amount of scrubbing would remove that toe-curling stink from the denim.

There was a low oomph from behind me, and a soft,
Get away from me, you bitch!
I turned my head, and in the darkness could just make out the shape of my partner in crime sprawled in the mud, a fat mamma sow spread-eagled on top of him.

“No time for games, Pig Boy,” I told Ben. “It’s an hour to Lofty’s race and we still haven’t found Erin. Tell Doris you’ll come back and play with her tomorrow.”

There was another grunt, not sure whether it was Doris or Ben, so I switched on my torch. The face illuminated beneath the Akubra hat was streaked with mud and thoroughly pissed off.

“Pig Boy?” growled the muddy apparition with an indignant snort. “You’ll keep.” He let out another oomph followed by an anatomically impossible curse as the pig bunted him in the face. “Hey, McKinley,” he hissed. “For God’s sake get these bloody pigs off me before I turn them into bacon sandwiches.”

Squelching on hands and knees towards him, I struggled to hide a grin. By now six baby piglets had joined their mamma. They were having more fun climbing on and sliding off Ben than toddlers on a slippery dip.

Between Ben flailing his hat and me
shooing
and pushing, we eventually convinced the pigs that Ben wasn’t their new best friend. Doris, annoyed at the rejection, head-butted Ben in the groin before gathering her family around her. Then, with one last disgruntled grunt she waddled off in a huff to snuffle around in the feed trough.

It was time to regroup. After climbing over the sty fence, I peered suspiciously at a cottage huddled near the end of the driveway. No lights shone through the windows. No car parked out front. “What do you reckon?” I asked. “Are they asleep or have they gone out?”

Ben adjusted his hat and wiped at his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “Only one way to find out—but either way, mate, it looks like we’ve struck out again. If the kidnapper had stashed Erin here wouldn’t you reckon he’d leave at least one goon to guard her?”

A cold chill swirled in my stomach and settled like a lump of indigestible porridge in my chest. “What if that one goon is lying in wait for us? What if he has his night-scope binoculars trained on us right now? What if—”

Ben snorted, stopping me in mid-rant and effectively switching off the panic button. “Night-scope binoculars? Jesus, McKinley, you’ve been watching too many
CSI
shows.”

“Hey, don’t knoc
Crime Scene Investigation
, Benjamin. You learn more about solving crimes from watching that program than reading any dry-as-dust textbooks from the library.” I glanced down at the muddy tire iron in his hand. “All I’m saying is keep your weapon ready. Okay? You never know when you might need it.”

I’d brought along my own weapons of choice stashed in a side pocket of my back-pack. A can of heavy-duty hair spray to blind my opponent and a cute little knuckle duster I’d picked up for five bucks at the local church fete. Tongue in cheek, Ben pointed out there was only one hitch—both weapons necessitated I get within “hair-combing distance” to use them. But as I told him, it’s almost impossible to buy a designer gun or a Samurai sword at a church fete these days.

Anyway, my words of warning must have hit paydirt because Ben took a firmer grip on his tire iron before turning toward the cottage. “Ready?”

“Ready when you are.”

“If Erin’s not here it means we’re stuffed,” Ben admitted. “No one else had any luck and this godforsaken hole is the last piggery on our list.”

“Plus we’re running out of time.”

The night before, after a brainstorming session on how to stop Lofty from winning if we couldn’t find Erin, we’d come up with two options that didn’t entail injections or pills. The first included unobtrusively smearing Vaseline from human palm to dog’s eyes before placing him in the starting boxes. The second entailed lifting one paw on the pretence of checking a pad and inconspicuously swapping a wad of chewing gum from human mouth to canine toes.

We’d settled for the chewing gum.

My dude helper, Jake, had the unenviable task of handling Lofty at the track. His instructions were clear. If he received three rings and a hang-up on his mobile before the steward called handlers to the kennel-house, Lofty ran on his merits. If not—Jake would shove the contents of two packets of bubblegum into his mouth and discreetly transfer the results to Lofty’s paws while lining up at the boxes.

I pressed the button on my watch to illuminate the dial. Twenty minutes to kenneling. Twenty minutes left to find Erin.

Both the front and back doors of the cottage were locked, so we shone our torches through the first window. With no blinds or curtains to block our view, we could see dirty dishes and empty beer cans completely covering a scarred wooden table and spilling over into the sink. One plate on a table near the window had green mould sprouting from a leftover chop and I bet if examined at close quarters, livestock would already be in residence.

The next window revealed a bedroom. A single unmade bed and two sleeping bags on the floor suggesting three people lived in the cottage. The only other item of furniture in the room was a large built-in wardrobe. Could they have tied Erin up and stashed her in there?

Flashing our torch through the next window we discovered a space double the size of the other two rooms. It was furnished with a clapped-out sofa, several armchairs and a battered table, all looking like they’d been rescued from a local dumpster. Incongruous amongst the mismatched furniture was a huge state-of-the-art plasma television that took up most of the back wall.

Either locked or gummed up with dirt, the only way in through the windows was to smash the glass. Not a wise move if the owners of the cottage were merely innocent pig farmers.

“What now?” I asked as we scurried around the corner to the rear of the cottage. Whatever happened to that lovely principle where people trusted their neighbors? The back door was locked.

And then I noticed Ben’s shrewd eyes assessing me.

“What?”

Oh no, he seemed to be comparing me to the size of a small open window high up on the wall at the back of the cottage and measuring me as a suitable breaking-in tool.

“Uh! Oh! No way, Benny boy! I am
not
climbing through there.”

“Come on, mate,” he cajoled. “I reckon you’re skinny enough.”

I took another step away from him. “And I reckon you’re nuts.”

“It’s not like I won’t be doing
my
share of the work,” he said, his voice put-upon. Even petulant. “I’m the one who’ll be pushing you through from this end.”

“As I said—you’re nuts,” I told him, studying the width of the window and then the width of my hips. “The only way I’d fit through that window would be if I stripped naked and covered my body with Vaseline.”

His only answer was a choking sound and I swear something moved in the crutch of his jeans.

Pushing that interesting tidbit aside for later perusal, I shone my torch on the window, checked my watch again. “Okay, I’ll give it a go—but only because we’re running out of time.” I drew in a deep breath. This was such a bad idea. “You’ll have to give me a bunk up because Spiderwoman I’m not.”

To keep my mind off the fact that I was breaking and entering, while Ben elevated me toward the open window I focused on the image of me all slippery and naked and Ben in the same condition. And I didn’t lose this delightful fantasy until I poked the torch and my head through the open window.

“Get a wriggle on, Kat. We haven’t got all night, you know.”

“Okay for you, Taylor,” I hissed back at him. “You’re down there. I’m up here.
And
suspended head first over a toilet bowl.”

“As long as the lid’s down, it’ll be a cinch,” he assured me, a definite chuckle behind his words.

“Well, it’s
not
down,” I snarled back at him. “And the smell’s making me gag.” I choked as another wave hit me. I turned my head away, tried to hold my breath.

“Mate, I promise on my brother’s life, I won’t let you go of your legs until you give me the signal. So there’s no way you’ll end up falling in.”

“Some promise. You’re always fighting with Nick.”

“Just hurry up!”

Hesitantly, reluctant to entrust Ben with my bottom end, I eased both shoulders through the opening, turned side on and wriggled forward a few inches.

That’s when my imagination took over….

What if I got stuck?

What if the police found me like this?

How could I explain to DI Adams that I wasn’t really breaking in—I was only looking for Erin?

And when I finally blanked out that embarrassing scenario, an even more heart-stopping picture popped into my head. What if the owner of the piggery returned home? What if he was the murderer? What if he had a gun? Stuck in the window, unable to move, I’d be toast. Hell, he could shoot me right between the eyes and all I could do was watch him take aim and hope the bullet didn’t disfigure my face so much my mother wouldn’t recognize me when they called her into the morgue to identify my body.

Suddenly I felt Ben’s warm hands move on my legs, distracting me, which was lucky, because my imagination had been scaring the hell out of me.

“Ready?” he whispered.

I gulped and cleared my throat. “Okay, knock yourself out.”

One hand strayed from my upper leg and slid to my rear end. “Hey, I hadn’t noticed before, but you’ve got a really cute butt, McKinley.”

“Ben, will you keep your hands where they’ll do the most good and push me through this damn window before I turn chicken? I’m not really cut out for this break-and-enter caper.”

“Spoil sport.” I could hear the grin in his voice and bit my bottom lip.

Why wasn’t this dialogue taking place in a nice safe environment? Like at home. Where I could grab his back-handed compliment of having a cute butt and run with it. Preferably—at a gallop—to the nearest bedroom.

My mind in bed with Ben, still naked and slippery, I popped through the window. It happened so quickly I didn’t even have time to scream. And so much for Ben’s brother’s life—my one-man support team let go of my feet and I only saved myself from drowning in Black Plague sewerage by twisting in midair and landing head first on a pile of dirty laundry.

“Sorry. Fingers slipped,” whispered Ben from outside the house. “You okay?”

I stood up gingerly, feeling for broken bones. Except for my pride, everything seemed intact and still in working order. “No thanks to you.”

“Your cute butt sort of distracted me. Sorry.”

“So now you’re saying it’s
my
fault?”

“Stop being a drama queen and open the back door,” growled Ben, cutting short my tirade. “We have fifteen minutes to kenneling.”

By the time we’d unsuccessfully searched the inside of the house, kenneling time had been whittled down to ten minutes.

“What say we check out the sheds and the barn and if she’s not there, we ring DI Adams?”

I nodded in agreement.

“You know, Kat,” Ben said tapping the tire iron against the side of his leg as he spoke, “if anything happens to Erin, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” I told him. “I’m the one who’s been playing at amateur sleuth. I’m the one who coerced you into helping me in the first place.”

Ben tramped to the back door and slipped through. I trailed after him. “Yeah, but I was the one who insisted we leave the police out of it,” he insisted. “If the police had been informed from the start, perhaps Erin would have been found by now.”

“That’s rubbish and you know it. The moment the kidnapper got a whiff of the cops, he’d have killed Erin, dumped the body and fled. We had no other option but to keep Detective Inspector Adams in the dark.”

The property housed a large barn plus two smaller sheds the size of average household garages. Both sheds were locked, and when Ben hoisted me up to peer through the windows, all I could see was sacks of pig feed in one and a tractor or some such farm machinery in the other.

Please. Let Erin be locked in the barn
, I prayed as, keeping to the shadows, Ben rattled the barn door, only to find it unlocked. We’d failed. No one would imprison a hostage in an unlocked barn. Now all we could hope for was that when Lofty lost the race, the kidnapper would collect his money then keep his promise and let Erin free. Some hope.