Scottsdale Heat: a romantic light-hearted murder mystery (Laura Black Mysteries Book 1) (13 page)

Danica went around to the back, but didn’t seem in a hurry to open the lid. I was climbing out of the car, when I saw a yellow CD case on the floor between the passenger seat and the door. There wasn’t any writing on the case. I opened the case and took the disk out. I turned it over, but there were no labels or writing anywhere on it. I couldn’t tell if it was a CD, a DVD, or even a Blu-Ray. It appeared to be a homemade recording.

“Danica,” I asked. “Does Alex have a CD or DVD burner?”

“No, but I know he wants one. I think he wants it to copy some of my old CDs. He loves music, he just doesn’t like paying for it.”

I shoved the disk into my coat pocket. I then walked around to the back of the car. Danica was just looking down at the trunk lid. I knew what she was thinking. Alex could be in there. And if he was, he was probably dead.

I took a deep breath and opened the trunk. No dead body, nothing. Clean as a whistle.

~~~~

We poked around the car for another five minutes but didn’t find anything useful. When we were done with the search, I turned to walk back to the Porsche.

“We can’t leave his car here,” Danica said. “Wherever Alex is, he’ll get upset if somebody steals his car. This isn’t the best neighborhood.”

My first instinct was to leave the car here and call the police. Moving the car would destroy any evidence that hadn’t already been compromised by our noising around the interior. But Danica was right. If we took off now, the car wouldn’t be here for long. I was amazed it hadn’t been stolen already. As Danica had said, even considering this was Scottsdale, it wasn’t the best neighborhood.

“One of us will have to drive it back to his apartment,” I said.

“I’ll do it,” Danica said. “I’ve driven it before and he doesn’t mind. Besides, if anything happens, he won’t get as mad if I’m the one who did it.”

She took the Porsche key off her key ring and handed it to me.

“Be careful, the brakes are sensitive.” She then turned, climbed into the Jaguar, and closed the door.

Smiling, just a bit, I climbed into the Porsche and started it up, cursing the bad luck that Alex’s apartment was only three miles away.

Two and a half minutes later, we both pulled into the parking lot of Alex’s complex.

~~~~

We walked up the stairs to Alex’s apartment. Danica rang the doorbell, while I tried to look through the kitchen window. The lights were off and I couldn’t make out any interior details. Danica opened the door with her key and we went in. I found the light switch and flipped it on.

Crazy as it sounds, it took two or three seconds for us to see something was wrong. Then it hit us both like we’d been slapped.

The entire apartment had been trashed. The couch had been flipped and gutted. Shredded books littered the floor in front of an overturned bookshelf. Chairs were overturned and torn apart. The lamps and TV were smashed. Even the stereo speakers had been knocked over and ripped apart.

In stunned silence, we walked into the kitchen. Every drawer had been pulled out of the cabinets. Loose stacks of utensils littered the floor. The refrigerator and the cupboards were standing open. Boxes of cereal, pancake mix, rice, French fries, and frozen corn had been dumped out in a pile in the center of the floor.

We heard a noise, a soft scraping sound that seemed to come from the back of the apartment. It wasn’t loud, but we both jumped. I pulled my Baby Glock out of my bag and loaded a round into the chamber.

I looked over at Danica. Her eyes were bugging out, staring at the Glock.

“Stay here,” I whispered. “I mean it. Don’t move.”

~~~~

I inched my way into the living room, then down the hall toward the bedroom. I mentally thumped my head for not checking the entire apartment when we first came in. Whoever trashed the apartment could still be here. Gina wouldn’t make a mistake like that. I guess the sight of the destruction threw me for a few minutes.

The first door in the hallway was to the bathroom. It was open and I peered in. There didn’t appear to be anyone there, but the door to the shower was closed. I didn’t see a dark shape hiding behind it, but you never know. Crouching low, I pulled open the shower door. Nothing.

I crept farther down the hall to the bedroom. Here the door was closed. I listened, but the sound had stopped. I again crouched down low and turned the handle. I gave a light push and the door opened smoothly, without a squeak. I looked inside, the Glock following the movement of my eyes.

Sitting on the bed was a man with his back resting against the wall. I noticed two troubling things about him. First, it wasn’t Alex. Second, there was a large bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. His mouth was contorted open in a silent scream. His milky eyes were staring into nothingness. As I slowly stood up, I saw both of his hands were gone, hacked off at the wrists. So OK, make that three troubling things about him.

“Oh my God!”
a panicked voice behind me cried out.

I jumped and there was a loud
Boom!
I looked down to see smoke coming from the end of my gun.

“Don’t do that!”
I yelled, turning to Danica, my voice rising almost to panic level as well.

“There’s a dead guy on Alex’s bed,” Danica said, her voice coming out more as a high squeak than anything else. “
Oh my God
, he doesn’t have any hands. That is
so gross
.”

The world started to spin and nausea knotted in my stomach. Black and white dots danced in front of my face and I went down to one knee to keep from passing out. After a minute of breathing deeply, I was able to stand and scan the rest of the room.

A set of mini-blinds were hanging in front of an open window. As I watched, small gust of wind blew into the room, causing the mini-blinds to softly bang against the window frame. This was causing the noise we’d heard.

I then searched to see where my bullet had gone. I didn’t see any holes in the wall. The ceiling was unmarked. The floor looked OK too. I looked over at the bed and saw a hole in the dead guy’s shirt. I didn’t remember it being there before.

Jeez, the paperwork on this is going to take all night.

“Don’t touch anything,” I said. “I’m going to have to call this in.”

I opened my cell phone and called 911. Danica and I went into the living room. I knew, from previous experience, it would take about ten minutes for the first blue & white to show. I used the time to look around the shattered apartment, being careful not to disturb anything.

I didn’t find anything useful, but one thing was obvious. The destruction in the apartment hadn’t been random. Whoever was here had been searching for something specific. I wondered what they were looking for and whether they had found it or not.

I went back into the living room to wait for the police. I looked over and saw that Danica was staring into space and shaking. She looked like she was about to lose it.

“Are you doing OK?” I asked.

“Who could have done this?” she asked, her voice shaky and distant. “What did they do with Alex? He has no enemies. Do you think it was the same men who were following him?”

“I don’t know. But I promise I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

Outside, we heard the first police car pull up, just below the apartment.

“Listen to me for a minute.” I said, taking both of her hands in mine. “There’s going to be a ton of police here in a few minutes. They’ll ask a bunch of questions, most of them pointless and repetitive. Try not to get angry with them. Just answer all of the questions as truthfully and completely as you can. I know you don’t think you know anything about this, but maybe one of their questions will jog your memory into giving them something useful. We still don’t know if this has anything to do with Alex’s disappearance. He may be in partying in Vegas for all we know.”

Danica nodded her head, went outside, and stood on the small porch. Although I was trying to be brave for the both of us, the truth was I had a very bad feeling about what had happened to Alex. I didn’t know how I was going to tell Lenny, or Muffy, about this.

~~~~

The police came up the stairs and then into the apartment. I recognized them both. The senior officer was Chugger McIntyre. I had gone to school with Chugger, both of us having grown up in the Granite Reef section of south Scottsdale. Chugger was six foot four and easily weighed two-hundred and fifty pounds. His short cropped red hair and freckles showed his Irish heritage. Living in Scottsdale had given him a year round sunburn.

His partner was Arnulfo Montoya, better known as Arny. Arny was originally from Mexico, but had become an American citizen a few years ago. Although not nearly as tall as Chugger, Arny was solid. He had short curly black hair and a full black moustache. When Chugger saw me, he began to laugh.

“Hey Arny,” Chugger said, a happy grin on his beefy face. “Didn’t I tell you last week Laura Black was due for another dead body soon? Hey Laura, how long has it been? Two, three months?”

“Hey Chugger,” I said. “He’s in the bedroom. He was dead when we got here, but I sorta, accidentally, shot him.”

Chugger’s grin broadened.

“You shot a dead guy? No shit? Really? Oh man, they’ll never believe this down at the station.”

Arny stayed to keep an eye on us while Chugger went into the back of the apartment. He didn’t stay long. When he came back his face was pale and his smile was gone.

“Wooah,” Chugger said. “That guy’s hands were chopped off. Not a lot of blood though, he was probably killed elsewhere and brought up here. What kind of sick fuck does that?”

I went out with Danica. Arny had his clipboard out and was taking Danica’s initial statement. Chugger called in the report on his walkie-talkie and then walked over to me.

“Let’s clear the apartment,” he said. The M.E. and forensics team will be here in about half an hour, same with the homicide detectives. Expect everybody to be in a bad mood. Nobody likes getting up this time of night.”

Chugger was right about the bad moods. Fortunately, they kept it relatively short.

By 4:30 am I was back at my apartment. Marlowe was asleep on the bed. When I turned on the light he opened an eye, stretched, and yawned. He rolled over with all four feet in the air. I rubbed his tummy for a minute, then pulled off my clothes and collapsed next to him on the bed.

~~~~

It was a beautiful warm day and I was driving Danica’s Porsche in the wide Arizona desert between Gila Bend and Yuma. The road was flat, clear, and there wasn’t another car in sight.

My hands gripped the leather wrapped steering wheel tightly as I jammed the Porsche into high gear and floored it. The car shot forward like a bullet from a gun. Faster and faster I drove until the dashed lane-dividing stripe blurred into a solid yellow line. My foot was pegged to the floor and the car kept going faster. The roar of the motor sounded like a jet engine running full out. It felt like the car was flying.

I felt the warm sensation of a hand touching the inside of my leg. Looking over, sitting next to me was Maximilian, the gangster from the office who had almost given me an orgasm with just a kiss.

The car motor briefly sputtered, but then caught again. He smiled a beautiful smile and blew me a kiss. A wave of lust and desire washed over me as he gently ran his hand up my thigh.

The motor sputtered again, sounding almost like my cell phone. That’s weird, I thought, Porsches don’t usually sound like cell phones, especially cell phones with Sophie’s ringtone.

The engine smoothed out for a second, but then cell phone ringtone sound happened again.

What?

By the fourth time it happened, I knew what the sound was. Both the Porsche and Maximilian faded as I felt around blindly on the nightstand. I found my phone and managed to pick it up without dropping it.

“Hello,” I muttered into the phone, as always hoping it was a prank call so I could go back to sleep.

“Hey Laura. Wow, you really sound terrible. How late did they keep you up last night?”

“Sophie? I’m sorry, but I’m not awake right now and this phone call isn’t likely to wake me up any time soon. Maybe you should call me back around lunch time?”

“Did you really shoot a dead guy? They’re saying you found a dead guy in Alexander Sternwood’s apartment and then you shot him. Didn’t you know he was already dead and you didn’t need to shoot him again? Or was he coming after you, even though you knew he was already dead, like a zombie? You know, if he was a zombie, you’d have to shoot ‘em in the brain. The brain’s the only place you can kill a zombie, unless he was a vampire. But you know, lead bullets wouldn’t have stopped him if he was a vampire, even if you shot ‘em in the brain. You’d need a silver bullet for that.”

“Sophie, I think that’s werewolves and why are you calling me?”

“I’m pretty sure silver bullets work for both vampires and werewolves.”

“Sophie?”

“Sorry, Lenny’s in a panic. He says he wants you down here right away. He got your voice mail from last night. You know you sounded terrible then too, by the way. He’s been on the phone with the police for the last twenty minutes. He has an appointment set up with Mrs. Sternwood at one o’clock. I think he wants to hear what happened from you first. Lenny’s really stressing over this.”