Murder.com (27 page)

"I'm glad I could help too," Ginny
added.

"Miss Whitehall—"

"Call me Ginny," Imogen
interrupted.

Carrington smiled. "Ginny, I never
meant to make you second fiddle. You and Max were a team. An equal
team, and because of you two, we figured out this mess. Sure, my
team and I and the NYPD did most of the work, but without you guys
we wouldn't have cracked this nut."

I blushed. And, simultaneously, resented the crack
about his team and the NYPD. Just a little.

"So, now that this whole mess is
over, what's the plan?" John asked.

"Not sure yet. Ginny and I are
sort of taking things day by day."

"I'll tell you this. If you guys
ever want to get into the private investigator business, I would
certainly hire you both as consultants."

I laughed. Ginny laughed.

"Private investigating." I
continued to laugh. "I don't think so."

"Think about it. You guys are
pretty good at it."

Ginny was still laughing.

"We'll think about it, John."
Still laughing, I shook his hand, and Imogen gave him two air
kisses. We all exchanged some pleasantries as our meeting wrapped
up.

"Take care guys, and seriously,
think about it. I'd love your help. Hell, we all would."

With that, Ginny and I walked out
of John's office.

* * *

We strolled down the stairs of the brick police
station and back toward my car.

"So, what do you think?" I
asked.

"About what?"

"Becoming private
investigators."

"You serious?"

"Deadly," I answered. My attempt
at a bad joke.

Imogen didn't laugh. "You want to
be a private investigator? What about your business?"

"Sell it. Maybe Mike will buy it.
I've got enough money. And so do you, by the way."

"I know, but really, you want to
do that?"

"Let's live a little," I said.
"Start a new life. One that's exciting."

"I'm all for excitement," Imogen
said, "but running around solving crimes?"

"Solving a whole bunch of things,"
I said.

Ginny thought for a moment, both
of us standing in the middle of the police station parking lot. "If
you're game. I'm in. I don't really care what we do, as long as we
do it together."

"Then it's settled. Once we're
married, we're opening up the Slade & Associates Detective
Agency."

"Maybe we can work on the name,"
Imogen suggested.

"Whatever you say, my
love."

* * * * *

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David Deutsch is an author, sarcasm guru, and wannabe rock
star, not necessarily in that order. He is the author of romantic
comedies, crime fiction, mystery
, and suspense novels. He's thrilled to be the only
guy among the ladies of GHP. When he's not busy writing you can
often find him chasing the sun. He lives in warm weather with his
wife and children.

To learn more about David, visit him on
Facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/daviddeutschwrites

* * * * *

Max Slade Thrillers
:

Murder.com

Other works:

Sh*t Falls Up

Life In Super 8

* * * * *

If you enjoyed this Max Slade Thriller, check
out this sneak peek of another exciting novel from
Gemma Halliday
Publishing
:

It's not every day you find al-Qaeda's
number four operative dead in a Girl Scout camp in Iowa.

The body was twisted unnaturally in the rope
course's spiderweb element that consisted of a large wood frame
crisscrossed with elastic bungee cords. Sadly, it was my troop's
favorite thing to do at camp. Now I had to disappoint them. I hated
disappointing them.

A man hung there. He
had been
in his
twenties and of Middle Eastern descent. The neck was clearly broken
before he'd been placed into the ropes at Camp Singing Bird. He
looked surprised to find himself here. I'm sure the irony would be
lost on him that in death, he really was surrounded by seventy-two
virgins. Did it matter that they were grade-schoolers, I wondered?
Maybe that was just splitting hairs.

I would've been surprised too, had I not
been through this kind of thing before. But I'd seen this stuff in
Syria and Uzbekistan—not in the placid, wooded hills of eastern
Iowa.

And my second grade troop was due at any
minute. I was pretty sure I couldn't pass this off as something
adorable—like I had with the bats in Tinder Trails Cabin or the
mice in the latrines. Troop Leader's Helpful Hint Number One—if
your Girl Scouts freak out upon meeting a bat/mouse/wolf spider for
the first time—tell them it's just a
baby
bat/mouse/wolf
spider. Little girls are suckers for that, and soon what was scary
is
adorbs!
—whatever that means.

I bent to take his pulse, just to make sure.
Yup. He was dead. His glassy eyes were opened wide, and his mouth
hung open. Dammit. I needed this like I needed wet work in the
slums of Rio.

The sounds of giggles and singing came from
the trees just around the corner. Any minute the fourteen seven-
and eight-year-old girls who called me their leader would appear. I
was pretty sure I couldn't convince them that this dead terrorist
was a cute, dead
baby
terrorist. I pulled the parachute I
was going to use for games later out of my backpack and threw it
over the spiderweb.

"Mrs. Wrath!" The girls squealed in unison
before tackling me in a sticky group hug. Kelly, my co-leader,
smirked at me. She could get away with smirking at me because she's
known me since
we
were six-year-old Scouts.

"Girls!" I gently pushed them away. "How
many times do I need to tell you—it's
Ms.
Wrath. I'm not
married." Of course, I knew the answer to this question. Ad
infinitum. Meaning, they'd always call me
Mrs.
Any woman
over the age of twenty-one in Iowa was
Mrs.
Clearly
it was
me
who didn't get it.

"Mrs. Wrath?" the third Katelynn asked. Or
was it Kaitlin the Fourth? They all looked the same to me. And each
one of them spelled her name a completely different way. Spy work
had
not
prepared me for that.

"It's
Ms.
Wrath, Katelynn," I said
with a smile. Troop Leader's Helpful Hint Number Two—when talking
to little girls, always smile. They cry if you don't. I'm not
kidding. You don't know real terror until you've stared at the
watery eyes and rubbery bottom lip of a cute kid.

The second-grader looked confused for a
moment, which was to be expected. "Okay. Mrs. Wrath?" she asked
again.

I sighed. "Yes, Katelynn?"

"Why is the parachute over the spiderweb?
And why is it all lumpy?"

Kelly squinted at the parachute, eyebrows
knit together. She'd probably figure it out, being a nurse and
all.

"The spiderweb is out of commission, girls,"
I announced, stepping between them and the dead man.

A chorus of complaints came from the little
girls, and I held up my right hand in the universal Girl Scout
symbol for silence. They quieted down immediately. I once again
really wished I'd known about this trick when I was surrounded by
FARC rebels in Colombia.

"Head on over to the Peanut Butter Pass—I
think you're old enough for that one now," I said in a nice save
worthy of someone of my caliber.

"Yay!"
The girls exploded in shrieks
and raced off to that element, leaving me in the dust.

Kelly narrowed her eyes. "They aren't old
enough for the Peanut Butter Pass."

"You'd better get after them before they
start scaling the rope, then. I'll be there in a second." I shoved
her in the direction of the squealing herd before she could
respond. "We can't leave them alone for a minute, you know."

Kelly gave me a weird look but took off
after the troop. I turned back to the dead man in the parachute. It
kind of looked like he was cocooned in the web—as if a giant spider
had caught him, poisoned him, and wrapped him to save for later. If
only that was what had really happened. No way I could get that
lucky.

With a heavy sigh, I took out my cell phone
to call the ranger. This was going to suck. You think the CIA is
bad with paperwork? Langley (CIA headquarters near DC) has
nothing
on the Girl Scouts of the USA when it comes to
filling out forms and accident reports in triplicate. Nothing.

My name is Fionnaghuala Merrygold Wrath
Czrygy. And I'm a Girl Scout leader. Well, I used to be a covert
operative in the CIA—a career that has remarkably prepared me well
to lead Troop 0348. (And yes, you have to have a zero at the
beginning—it's very important for some reason that no one can
explain.) I was a CIA agent, that is, until I was unceremoniously
and allegedly "mistakenly" outed by the vice president of the
United States' chief of staff.

That's right. I was outed. My name and photo
were leaked to
The New York Times
"inadvertently." This is a
fancy way to say that the vice president was pissed off at my
father, who was the head of the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations, because he didn't back the veep's reelection campaign (a
fact even more curious because the VP was a Republican, and my dad
was a Democrat). So, my name got leaked, and the chief of staff
took the fall and was fired the next day just before going to
prison (and of course, pardoned later by the president).

I, however, was not in a cozy corner office
in the White House with a nice view, like he was when my name and
face were broadcast live worldwide. I happened to be in Chechnya
where—to my surprise—the rebels in the bar I frequented had
internet and were devoted followers of
The
New York
Times'
online edition. (They also read
Cosmo,
but that's
a story for another day.) It took me forty-two hours, two
gunfights, a strange encounter with an armed chicken, calling in
fifteen favors that I'd been saving, and a rather dicey drive to
Estonia in the back of a jeep with no shocks to get out of that
mess.

Back in DC I testified before Congress, got
a nice fat check from my boss at the CIA, along with a short letter
explaining why I couldn't work there anymore, and just like that, I
was out of a job and internationally infamous.

It was Dad's idea for me to change my
appearance, use my middle name, take on my mother's maiden name,
and move to my hometown in Iowa. Dad's name was Czrygy. So
brunette, brown-eyed Finella (the true pronunciation of my name)
Czrygy became blonde, blue-eyed (you have to love what they do with
contact lenses these days) Merry Wrath.

The sheriff and a few deputies arrived at
camp half an hour after I'd called. I'd managed to get my troop
back to the cabins without them seeing the dead guy, staunching
their protests with promises that Kelly would make them endless
s'mores in the middle of the day—something that would probably bite
me in the ass later. The ranger—Bob Williamson—sat with me as we
waited. He wasn't very happy to find a dead man tangled in his
newly refurbished ropes course. That meant a lot of paperwork for
him too.

"Huh," the sheriff said as he poked the dead
body with his finger. He stood up and tried to tug his belt up over
his beer belly with little success.

"So, what happened here?" he asked Bob.

I tried not to roll my eyes. We'd already
told the sheriff that I'd been the one to find the body. But this
old, redneck sheriff was only interested in what a man had to
say.

Bob pointed at me. "Ask her. She found
it."

I once again told the sheriff about how I'd
found the body. I once again suggested that they comb the camp for
whoever did this, since they were probably still around. And once
again, the sheriff looked to Bob for answers.

"Is that right?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "And now, if you'll excuse
me, I have my troop to get back to." I left before I could see
their responses. If the sheriff was going to write me off, I was
done with him. Besides, this wasn't my problem anymore. I couldn't
care less what happened to the dead guy. I was off the clock
permanently these days.

Back at our campsite, fourteen girls were
bouncing off the walls after mainlining a
lot
of sugar.
Kelly gave me a glare that said I owed her big time.

With the possibility of a murderer running
around camp, I decided our trip was over. Kelly and I packed up and
called the other moms to help us carpool the thirty minute drive
back home. The girls were too keyed up to even notice it was over
until we arrived in my driveway. But by then, they had parents
there ready to wrangle them into waiting cars.

Kelly and I watched and let out a very
visible breath as the last girl was picked up.