End Me a Tenor (30 page)

My phone buzzed. A text message from Devlyn asking if I wanted company. In its infinite wisdom, the school board had declared a half-day of school today. The thought was that teachers needed time to catch up on paperwork and meetings before the upcoming winter break. Most teachers I knew were using the time to finish their holiday shopping. An example of education at its finest.

My heart did a happy skip as I sent a “Join me at Millie’s” text back. This was the guy I wanted to date. Devlyn was kind, fun, and understood theater and music. Not to mention the fact that he was sexy as hell. What more could a girl want?

The doorbell rang, and my heart skipped again. Devlyn couldn’t have gotten here that fast, and I wasn’t expecting anyone else. Clutching Millie’s gun, I slowly walked to the door and peered through the peephole in time to watch the FedEx truck drive off.

I opened the door and smiled at the enormous box on the stoop. More Christmas presents. Millie didn’t have kids or grandkids of her own, so she sent gifts to all of my cousins’ families. In return, they sent her boxes of homemade fudge, cookies, brownies, and the occasional unfortunate fruitcake. The boxes had been arriving all week with instructions to open before Christmas.

Hoping for homemade caramels, I dropped the box on the kitchen table, opened the flaps, and fished through the packing peanuts for the tin of sweets. I froze as my fingers touched something sticky and wet. Ewww. A jar must have broken. Pulling my hand out, I almost fainted. The red substance on my fingers looked very much like blood.

To my credit I didn’t lose consciousness, and while on the inside I was screaming bloody murder, not a squeak passed my lips. Possibly I was just too terrified to make a sound. Or maybe I’d seen so many horrible things that I’d hit my saturation point. Hard to tell.

Since I wasn’t in the mood to flip out, I took a closer look at the substance on my hand. It was red and gloppy and smelled like . . . ketchup.

Curiosity warred with caution as I took a step back and stared at the present. Curiosity won, and I pulled fistfuls of packing peanuts out of the box. Inside was a note and three items: a water bottle, a rope, and the source of the red substance—a satin gown-wearing Barbie stained with ketchup. Minus her head.

A water bottle had been used to poison David.

A rope had been used to kill Bill.

I could only guess that the headless Barbie represented whatever was planned for me.

Okay,
now
I was creeped out.

My fingers were unsteady as I reached into the envelope, pulled out the note, and gave myself a paper cut. Ow. Sucking on my index finger, I fumbled with the paper and read:
You’re next.

The bloody Barbie was juvenile, but I gave the killer points for brevity. And as silly as the gift from hell was, it had scored a direct hit. I was freaked. The killer had tailed me here, called the house, and now sent a direct threat to Millie’s front door. According to Mike, Detective Frewen and company weren’t planning on making an arrest anytime soon. Call me crazy, but I didn’t want the killer to complete the Barbie portion of his little project. I wanted the lunatic caught—now.

First things first—I put the Barbie, noose, and water bottle back in the box and then got a Band-Aid and antibiotic ointment for my paper cut. The way things were going, an untreated cut would lead to the bubonic plague or worse.

Infection avoided, I grabbed my phone and tapped out a text to Mike.
Killer sent package to house via FedEx. Do you want to take a look?
I hit send and congratulated myself on how well I was handling all of this. That’s when the sound of the doorbell made me jump. The phone crashed to the ground, sending the cover in one direction and the battery in another.

The doorbell rang again as I collected the pieces of my phone. Crap.

Killer started barking his head off, which for the first and probably only time made me happy. If the murderer was at the door, he’d think twice about coming in.

Fumbling to put my phone back together, I dodged a still-barking Killer and checked the peephole. Devlyn.

He walked through the door, took one look at my face, and opened his arms. I stepped into them and began to shake. Okay, maybe I wasn’t taking the whole Barbie doll thing as well as I thought.

When the shaking subsided, Devlyn put his hands on my shoulders and asked, “What’s wrong?”

Words wouldn’t do the situation justice. I dragged Devlyn into the kitchen for show-and-tell and stopped in my tracks. Lying in the middle of the kitchen floor next to the overturned box was Killer. A smudge of ketchup was on his snout and a wet, slobbered-on Barbie rested in between his feet. Barbie had gone from American icon to headless rawhide in no time flat. Barbie was having a bad day.

Devlyn put the box back on the table, read the note, and took several deep breaths. “I really hate to ask this, but have you called Detective Kaiser?”

“I sent a text before I dropped my phone.” I slid the pieces back together and waited for the phone to boot. When it did, a return text was waiting.

Out on a call. Will come by in a couple hours. Stay home. Don’t do anything stupid.

Charming.

I flipped the phone shut. “Mike will be by later.”

“And you’re going to wait around for him to deal with this?”

That had been my plan until I got his most recent message. Mike’s dictates made my common sense fly out the window. If he said stop, I felt morally obliged to hit the gas. But in this case, I still might have followed his instructions had the murderers’ gift not given me a new lead.

After today, I was fairly certain Mark Krauss was one of the two people behind last night’s attack. Since he and Jonathan were close friends, I’d assumed Jonathan was the other half of the murderous duo. Chew-toy Barbie had me rethinking that deduction. Jonathan’s bio said he had two sons who lived with their mother somewhere in the burbs. And Mark had all boys in his house. I saw trucks and trains and action figures scattered around the living room. No Barbies.

While the feminist movement wanted Barbie to lose the unrealistic proportions and become a gender-neutral toy, Barbie was always going to be something mothers bought for their daughters. Girls understood Barbie. Boys—not so much. With male progeny, Mark or Jonathan wouldn’t exactly have Barbie on his radar.

Put that information together with LaVon’s description of the photograph buyer and I was almost certain Mark’s partner was a woman. Since my gut eliminated Magdalena from the suspect list, I was left with two possible choices: Vanessa Moulton or Ruth Jordan.

Turning to Devlyn, I asked, “Do you think I should wait for the cops to figure out who’s behind this?”

“Would you wait if I asked you to?”

Good question. I bit my lip as I considered the answer.

Devlyn laughed. “If I believed for one second that telling you to wait for the professionals to do their jobs would help, I would. But I know you. I figure the best I can do is make sure you don’t get killed while doing whatever it is you’re going to do.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I have you to keep me safe.”

The light tone made it easier to ignore that we were both deadly serious. Good thing my goal was to avoid anything dangerous or illegal. I just needed to find information for the cops so I could step back and let them do the heavy lifting.

“So, what’s the plan?” Devlyn asked as he put his arm around my shoulders.

“We’re going on a scavenger hunt,” I said. “For Barbie’s head.”

Devlyn removed Barbie from Killer’s clutches, and I returned the doll to the box and placed it on top of the fridge where the dog couldn’t reach it. Then we headed for the first stop on my scavenger hunt. A stop that was totally safe—my bedroom. I fired up the computer and took a seat at the desk while Devlyn perched on my bed.

First things first, I ran a search on the FedEx tracking number I’d copied off the top of the box. If I was lucky, the killer had shipped the box from a place down the street from her house.

Drat. The shipping location was right around the corner from the theater. Every one of my suspects had cause to be in that location. The tracking number was a bust.

On to the next search.

Before Killer had sharpened his teeth on Barbie’s body, she’d been wearing a shiny hot pink dress with a lighter pink ruffle around the waist and hips. The look wasn’t one of Barbie’s better choices even without the ketchup stains. I clicked on the Barbie website and scrolled through the dolls until I found the one that matched Killer’s snack. The doll was brand-new this holiday season, which meant the toy had to be a recent purchase.

A few keystrokes later and I had printouts of both women’s photos as well as the names and addresses of the toy stores closest to Ruth’s and Vanessa’s apartments. I was betting neither woman was the type to overexert herself by shopping outside her known territory. If not—well, there was no way I could scope out all the toy stores in the Chicagoland area. I would visit these stores, flash Ruth’s and Vanessa’s photos at the sales clerks, and hope someone would remember one of them buying the doll. Was I smart or what?

I turned to reveal my brilliance to Devlyn, but the words died on my lips. Devlyn was stretched out on the bed. His eyes were filled with concern, which for some reason I found to be a huge turn on. Maybe the bedroom wasn’t a safe place after all.

For a moment, I considered ditching the great Barbie hunt for some extracurricular getting-to-know-you time, but Devlyn was up and off the bed before I had a chance to put my plan into action. Which was good. Things were confused enough without adding an extra complication, no matter how desirable, to the mix.

“So,” Devlyn asked, “where to?”

In a Hollywood action flick, the answer to that question would probably involve a darkened parking garage or a prison armed with snipers and barbed wire. My answer was, “Toys ‘R’ Us.”

We took Devlyn’s car. He drove while I made phone calls to the specialty toy stores in Vanessa’s neighborhood. By the time we’d turned into the parking lot of the Toys ‘R’ Us closest to Ruth’s address, I knew where I could purchase “Learn to dress” Kitty and “Fishes to Loaves” Jesus action figures. No Barbies were stocked at either specialty location. That meant Devlyn and I were currently walking into the Barbie-selling toy store closest to both Ruth and Vanessa. If they shopped at Target or Walmart, well, I was screwed.

I pulled the two women’s headshots from my purse as we walked through the automated doors.

Devlyn dodged a woman with a blue shopping cart. “You do realize that even if Vanessa or Ruth bought the Barbie doll here, the chances of an employee recognizing them from a photo is slim to none, right?”

Devlyn was right. With Christmas less than two weeks away, the place had to be a zoo. My only hope was that the perp had bought Barbie sometime this week. And that, if the perp was Ruth or Vanessa, her artistic personality had made her stick out despite the sea of holiday shoppers.