Crazy in the Blood (Latter-Day Olympians) (3 page)

Something dark—my inner adrenaline junkie maybe—screamed at me to pursue, but I fought it down. There was no guarantee he’d been the only intruder. If I gave chase it left his partner free to ransack the office.

Besides, I didn’t trust my compulsion to pursue. The fight had been over way too quickly, and it bothered me that I felt like that was a bad thing. Fighting had always been a means to an end—fitness, primarily—never something I craved.
 

I forced my mind to turn down more productive pathways and began by taking stock of the damage. Jesus’s desk was no longer obsessively neat. A first smile of the day teased at me when I imagined his upcoming hissy fit. I peered into Christos’s office and found the personal mail we’d been saving for him scattered to the four winds, the contents of his desk drawers littering the floor…

Definitely time to give Armani a call.
 

What I didn’t expect was his barked response—“Call property crimes”—and subsequent hang-up. I was still staring in shock at the phone when the one on the desk rang. My heart twisted, knowing it wasn’t Nick ringing back to apologize but hoping all the same.
 

I was too curious to worry about destroying evidence like prints. But I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t use my shirt to pick up the receiver, exposing the bottom of my bra to anyone who might have stuck around, and nearly giving myself a Charlie horse as I contorted to make it work.

“Karacis Investigations,” I answered.

“Tori, thank God I caught you.” It was a woman’s voice. Husky, familiar, but I couldn’t immediately place it. “It’s Beverly Simon—uh, Detective Simon. I’ve heard from Christos.”

Detective Beverly Simon
, Christos’s poker buddy…and, I suspected, something more. Not that he’d ever said as much.

“Speak of the devil! Do you know where he is? Tell me he’s all right.”

My heart sank at her hesitation. “I’m not so sure. I’d like to come by and talk to you.”

“Well, that’s a coincidence. I was about to call you. We’ve had a break-in here, and it seems the perp was pretty interested in Christos’s office.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” she said.

“Neither do I.”

“Don’t touch anything. I’ll be right over.”

A click indicated the line had gone dead.

She probably expected me to step outside the office, close the door behind me and leave well enough alone until she arrived, but… I was only (mostly) human after all. Snooping was like a siren’s song I was powerless to resist. Besides, I needed to be sure the intruder hadn’t started a fire somewhere or set a bomb to cover his tracks. The fact that I didn’t smell anything burning in the first case and didn’t know what I could do in the second didn’t stop me Logic was just a tool—twisty as a garden hose.

Which sent my brain off on one of the tangents it’d been so fond of lately. The hose put me in mind of snakes, maybe the poisonous kind that could be left to lie in wait. Other scenarios played out in my head—deadly spiders, anthrax, Barry Manilow mix tapes. I tried to reel in the paranoia, but the fear had taken on a life of its own. I needed a reality check. I needed—gods help me—Jesus.

I yanked my cell phone from its belt holster and hit speed dial. At my retelling of events, Jesus gasped in horror—probably at the idea of disarray rather than at my brush with danger—and promised to be right over. My dark thoughts seemed to melt away. With Jesus assuming all of the drama, it was hard to maintain it myself. Begin with
Monk
, the obsessive-compulsive detective, pass
Top Model
on the way to diva, take a left turn at Albuquerque, and you might hit Jesus. Maybe. If he wasn’t feeling ornery. I was calmer already.

Now there was nothing to do but wait, a four-letter word if ever there was one. Mentally, I ran back over the details of the break-in, so I’d have them straight for Detective Beverly. What I kept coming back to was the contradiction of the intruder himself. I mean, basic black head to toe to break into a place in downtown L.A. on a beautiful morning when most people were in tank tops and sandals? Not that any kind of affectation was exactly unheard of in La La Land. Everything had happened so quickly that I couldn’t remember if the guy had been wearing gloves or not. It seemed likely, though, especially since he’d taken the B&E cliché to a whole new level, which screamed amateur. On the other hand, he certainly knew how to fight, jump a kick and take a punch, which said he wasn’t completely without experience.
 

If only I’d gotten a decent look at the guy’s face, I might not only have a good description for the police, but the man himself, frozen in his tracks by my gorgon glare. As it was, I’d seen only enough to mark him young, twenties at the latest. Medium brown hair, medium height, average build. Helluva description.
 

The sound of a key rattling in the office door derailed that train of thought, and a millisecond later Jesus breezed through, breathing as if he’d power-walked the five blocks from his apartment. He air-kissed the space beside my cheek as he brushed past me, headed toward my office. He looked like a man on a mission.

“We’re not supposed to touch anything!” I called after him.

He waved me off with a fluttering hand over his shoulder. I followed behind him like a puppy and watched as he used his pinky to pull open a side drawer of my desk. He gingerly removed two sets of the cheap sandwich bag type gloves we kept around for handling evidence we intended to turn over to the police.

“Now why didn’t I think of that?” I asked, taking the pair he held out to me.

Jesus straightened and raked his gaze over me. “Because you are shaken up. Literally.
Chica
, how much caffeine did you
have
?”

I smiled, the Jesus effect. “Too much. The intruder was in Christos’s office when I caught him. Let’s start there.”

Jesus went right for the files, so I squatted on the floor to look over the debris scattered there. Paperclips, staples, sticky-notes, pens, pencils, lightly-used napkins, binder clips—the usual desk drawer detritus—lay among fliers, credit card offers and the occasional piece of personal mail. I didn’t want to touch anything, so I just stared, first taking note of each individual piece and then trying to see some kind of pattern—what was missing, what had been flung farthest afield. I knew there was something…

“Jesus?”

“Yeah.”

“I think our visitor made off with Uncle Christos’s bank statements.”

The sound of flipping folders halted. “Qué?”

“Well, unless you’ve been filing or forwarding them, they seem to be missing. I haven’t been paying attention to what’s been coming in, so I can’t account for every piece of junk mail he’s received, but the accounting statements are pretty noticeable in their absence.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense. It’s easy enough to request new ones.”

“Maybe the intruder wasn’t trying to keep
us
in the dark so much as access the information for himself.”

Jesus sniffed. “Must be why you’re the highly paid detective, while I’m a lowly office clerk. You’re the one with the theories.”

I wasn’t touching that with a ten-foot pole.

The intercom chirped. Jesus’s gloves disappeared into a pocket, but I kept mine on to buzz up Detective Beverly.

“Been investigating on your own?” she asked, looking pointedly at my hands as she stepped through the doorway.

Jesus leaned casually against his desk, one butt cheek propped on the edge. “Not quite on her own,” he answered.

Great
, an admission of sorts. I shot him a look, which he ignored.

Beverly’s lips thinned, but she wisely saved her breath on the admonishment. “Guess you’ll be able to save me a little time then. Tell me what’s missing.”

“My phone message pad,” Jesus said, surprising me. “And bank statements.”

“Anything else?”

“Not that we’ve noticed so far, but when you see Christos’s office, you’ll know why we can’t be sure yet,” I answered.

Something flashed behind Beverly’s eyes, a mixture of anger and determination, and she went to see for herself.

“Check the computer files yet?” she asked from the entrance to Christos’s office.
 

Jesus and I exchanged a look. We hadn’t gotten that far.

“The monitor light is blinking, like someone did an incomplete shut down,” she explained in the face of our silence.
 

Then she took a harder look at me. “You feeling all right?”
 

I let my lip curl just a bit. I’d always hated that question. By the time anyone asked it, it was usually pretty clear that you weren’t. Either that or you were holding it together just fine and resenting the hell out of the implied criticism.

“Fine,” I said, hiding my hands out of sight behind my back. “Still a little jittery with adrenaline overload, but I’ll live.”
 

She gave me that
cop
look, the one that said she could see right through me, but she let it go. “The crime scene techs should be right behind me. They were just wrapping up another scene when I called.” She glanced at Jesus, “I need to talk to Tori, get her description of the intruder, but there’s no reason for you to stick around on a beautiful day like today.”

Jesus bristled at the clear dismissal, and I jumped in to head off the collision I could see coming between my drama king of an assistant and the detective who’d dare to muck up his kingdom with her fingerprint powder.
 

“Jesus will be as good as gold. Won’t you?” I asked him pointedly. To Beverly, “He’s an aspiring actor. I’m sure he’d just like to get a firsthand look at the way things are done, in case it’s ever useful to him.”

“I’m sure we could arrange a ride along or something later in the week,” she countered. “For now, I need him out.”

Jesus huffed in response and shot me a martyred look. “Fine. I am going. But,” he said, still looking at me, “do not expect
me
to clean up the mess.”

Heaven forbid.

Chapter Two

“If at first you don’t succeed, pry, pry again.”

—Christos Karacis, on perseverance, the #1 tenet of PI work

Detective Armani—Nick—called as I was on my way to the storage unit where Uncle Christos had socked away his stuff when he’d decided to go walkabout. “Where are you?” he asked without preamble.

I told him, biting off the words, stung by his earlier brusqueness.

“I’ll meet you there,” he said.

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him not to bother, but he didn’t give me the chance.

I sighed. Fine; if there was another intruder at the storage site, Armani was welcome to him. But based on the fact that the key had still rested in the top drawer of Christos’s desk, under a probably fossilized pack of gum, I didn’t think it was on the intruder’s radar. The computer, however, had been another matter. Detective Beverly had been right about that blinking monitor. I should have caught it myself. The hard drive had been shut down, but I must have interrupted the intruder before he finished covering his tracks. Whether the computer files or the financials gave it away, it was only a matter of time before the storage unit came to light. If there was anything interesting inside, I wanted to be the one to find it.

My hands shook on the steering wheel of my shiny red Camaro. When the car seemed to be shaking too—or lurching, more like—I realized my foot was bouncing up and down on the gas pedal like it was bopping to a beat I couldn’t hear.

Maybe I needed more caffeine—or less. Or maybe even food.
Ambrosia
, a soft voice whispered through my head. I swatted the radio on to drown out the voice and was blasted by Green Day, which was a much better soundtrack than the one playing in my head.
 

I distracted myself further by guessing at what I might find in the storage locker. I’d lived long enough in the circus with my family of folk and in L.A. with its
Twilight Zone
feel not to take for granted that I’d discover nothing more than neatly labeled boxes peaceably collecting dust.

All the way from my office to my Camaro I’d felt an itch between my shoulder blades, as if someone had painted a target on my back in…in really itchy ink. It was weird. Not the tingly sensation that warned me of imminent danger, but an ice pick of unease. I looked around the crowded street, especially behind me where I’d felt the stare, but this was downtown L.A., a far cry from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood Boulevard. The streets teemed not with tourists, but the people who truly lived and worked and kept L.A. going. If anyone was out of place or paying me particular attention, aside from those people who stepped around me, annoyed that I’d stopped mid-sidewalk, I certainly couldn’t tell.
 

I did my best to shrug it off and continued on to the parking garage where my car, Cammi—yes, I’d named her—sat waiting for me.

The drive took me to an especially unattractive part of the city, an industrial section, nearly deserted on a Saturday. I slid Cammi into a space across the street from the storage place, really nothing more than a cement bunker inset with inmate-orange garage doors. Nothing and no one suspiciously pulled to a stop behind me. A sedan blocked the entrance to an open unit on the other end of the facility. Beyond that, all was quiet on the western front. So in all likelihood no one was watching me. I hadn’t been followed. The target I felt on my back was just more paranoia. From withdrawal? Oh yeah, that was
much
more comforting.