The Reed Ferguson Mystery series Box Set 3 Read online

  “They knew I had the key.”

  “Yeah?” Her tone said she was trying to follow my thinking.

  “So I did hear someone upstairs,” I said. “They heard us in Jude’s office and knew we had the key.”

  “Who was it? Everyone was gone and I locked the front door.”

  “Who has keys to the building?”

  “Jude, Wes, Heath, Carlo, Ivy and me.”

  “So practically everybody.”

  “No, Bill, Pete and some other part-timers don’t have one.”

  I sighed. “Okay. All but a few of Blue Light’s employees have keys to the building. Or someone could’ve broken in.”

  I stood up and tested my balance. Not too bad, a throb that would soon become a hammering headache, but not much else. “Let’s check the back.”

  She followed me past a half dozen plants that I’d toppled over.

  “We’ve got to take care of these,” she said.

  “It can wait.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Are you kidding? Do you know how much money that is?”

  “All right.” I held up a hand in surrender. “Let me look around and then we’ll take care of them.”

  “No! They need to be taken care of right now or –”

  I glared at her and she shut her mouth. We went to the back door and I opened it, wary of who might be outside. She was behind me, breathing in short, anxious gasps.

  “Is anyone there?” she whispered.

  I shook my head. “Stay here.”

  I stepped into the alley and she held open the door. The sun had set, and dark shadows enveloped me. I glanced around but saw no one.

  “Is there a flashlight handy?”

  “Not here,” she said. “Up in the front.”

  I let my eyes rove around, looking for anything that might give me a clue to whom I’d seen. Nothing.

  “Whoever it was, they’re gone,” she said.

  “Unless they’re still in the building.”

  “I thought you said they left.” Her voice shook.

  “I thought they did. But what if I was wrong. Then…” I didn’t finish the sentence. “Was the alarm set?”

  “No. Usually the last one out sets it.”

  “That would be us.”

  She nodded.

  “Let’s check inside,” I said.

  I took one final look around, then came back inside. I examined the lock and door carefully. It didn’t look like either had been tampered with. Satisfied that I’d discovered nothing, I shut the door tightly and Jodie locked it, and then we canvassed the entire building twice. Unless someone was playing dodge with us, we were the only two there. We ended up where we’d started, in the back of the warehouse.

  “Can we please take care of them now?” she asked, waving at the distressed plants.

  “Yes,” I said, drawing out the word.

  We spent a half hour getting the plants set upright and the dirt back inside the pots. Then she worked on the soil, performing some tests and adding nutrients, and sent me to get the broom to sweep up. When I came back, she was kneeling in front of one of the plants and…she was singing.

  I watched her for a minute. She was oblivious to my presence. “Are you high?” I finally asked.

  She blushed. “I took one hit before I came downstairs.”

  I threw the broom down. “That’s it, I’m finished.”

  “No, wait! I’m sorry.” She scrambled to her feet. “I’m fine, okay? It’s no big deal.”

  I lost my temper. “Whatever’s going on here, these people mean business,” I snarled. “You’ve got to stay sharp. Don’t you want to find Jude’s killer?”

  “I do. I will. I promise,” she said in quick succession.

  I looked at her. And I believed her. Or maybe I was too woozy to know for sure.

  She picked up the broom. “I’ll finish here. You go home.”

  “No way.” I took the broom back. “If someone attacked me, they might come after you. I’ll wait until you’re ready to go, and I’ll walk you to your car. Then I’m going to check the shed at Jude’s house.”

  She shivered. Fear flitted across her face, then a somber expression settled in as the weight of everything bore down on her. She was suddenly sober. “Okay,” she said without a fight. “But I’m going with you to Jude’s. You can’t be sneaking around there at night. Someone could call the cops.”

  Good point.

  We finished cleaning up, made sure the back door was locked, even though I knew it was, and left through the store. The last thing Jodie did was set the alarm, located in the hallway near the stairs. I walked her to her car, then she drove me to mine and I followed her to Jude’s house.

  The house was dark when we parked in the driveway.

  “I still can’t believe he’s gone,” she said as she unlocked the front door.

  It was cool inside, the air conditioner running quietly. Otherwise, there was deathly stillness.

  She looked around forlornly. “At some point, I’m going to have to take care of all this.”

  My head was beginning to pound, and I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t as sympathetic as I should’ve been. “Your friend from Pueblo can help, right?”

  She nodded.

  I nudged her toward the kitchen. “Let’s take a look in the shed.”

  I really wanted to see what was so important in that shed that Jude had hidden the key and that someone had stolen it from me. Then I wanted to go home, take some aspirin, and sleep off my headache.

  She flipped on lights as we made our way through the house.

  “Is there a flashlight?” I asked.

  She shrugged, so we searched the drawers in the kitchen.

  “Here’s one.” She pulled a long black flashlight from a drawer full of tools, paper and other junk.

  “How are we going to get in without the key?”

  “Oh, right.” She stared at me blankly. “I don’t know.”

  “Is there a sledgehammer somewhere?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to break the lock.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” I asked.

  She didn’t respond and I headed for the garage. I couldn’t find a sledgehammer, but I did find an axe, so I grabbed it, trudged back through the kitchen and into the yard.

  “You can’t chop through the door,” she said, trotting to keep up with me.

  “I’m not going in like Paul Bunyan. I’m going to use the blunt side as a hammer.”

  “Be quiet, okay?” Jodie said in a hushed tone as we crossed the yard. “I don’t want the neighbors calling the police because you’re making a racket breaking down the door.”

  Turns out I didn’t need to make any noise. As I neared the shed, I noticed the door stood slightly ajar. I stopped abruptly and she slammed into me.

  “Hey!”

  “Sh.” I put up a hand to stop her.

  She looked over my shoulder. “They were here!” she hissed.

  I nodded, listening. No sound came from inside the shed, so I stepped forward, brandishing the flashlight in one hand, the axe in the other. What a sight that must’ve been.

  “They didn’t wait long,” I murmured. Something important was in that shed.

  I got within ten feet of the door, shone the light inside, and waited. After a minute, I was sure no one was lurking inside. I tiptoed up and kicked the door open wider, then waited for a reaction. Getting beaned on the head keeps you from taking more chances, at least in the same night.

  “It’s clear,” I finally said, and I crept inside. I swept the flashlight around. “Does it normally look like this?”

  “Not when I’ve been here,” she said from the doorway.

  Someone had been here before us…and they’d left a mess.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jude had set up the shed as a lab. A long, rectangular table took up the entire back wall. A folding chair sat in front of it. A microscop
e, two small lamps, baby food jars filled with weed, a three-ring binder and fertilizers in small bottles were spread across it. In one corner, small plastic pots with marijuana in various growth stages sat near a small but powerful light. However, the bulb had been broken and pieces of it were scattered in the pots and on the wood floor. The plants had been upset, some toppled over, some pulled from the soil, and a few looked as if leaves had been torn off. A fan in the corner was on its side. A trash can next to the table had been emptied, paper and a couple of fast food wrappers strewn on the floor.

  “I wonder if they found what they were looking for,” I said as I surveyed the mess.

  Jodie moved around me, into the shadows, and started righting the plants.

  I rolled my eyes. “Really?”

  She knelt down and picked up one of the pots. “I just hate to see them die, especially if they’re needed for the experiments.”

  I rubbed a hand over my face, willing away both the pounding in my head, and the temptation to kick the plants out the door. I let her mess with them, and I stepped up to the table, flipped open the binder and used the flashlight to read it. Sections had been marked: Growing stages, experiments, types of lighting and, if I remembered my high school chemistry, some formulas. The notebook fit with Jude’s personality – neat and orderly.

  “Hey, I can’t see to take care of these plants,” she said.

  “Tough.” I got to the back of the binder. Jude had scrawled on blank paper, his notes haphazard and unorganized. Here and there were lists, and doodles adorned every page. Some things were crossed out, other sections starred. It was like this was his thinking area, but none of it meant anything to me.

  “Come here,” I said.

  She actually left the plants and sidled up next to me. “What?”

  “Have you seen this before?”

  She took the notebook and turned to the front. “No.” She checked more pages. “I can tell this is some notes on the new process, but it’s not complete.” She studied it some more. “He sometimes brought in loose pages that he’d take into the lab at Blue Light. He must’ve been working on stuff here and then he compared notes to what Carlo and Pete were doing, and when he figured something out, he transferred that to the computer.”

  “You don’t know if anything is missing?”

  Her lips formed into a tight line. “Not a clue. But from what I can tell, nothing here is complete.”

  “That may be why whoever broke in here didn’t take it. They knew it wouldn’t do any good.” And who would know that? Someone who knew what the notes meant. Ivy?

  I thumbed through it again, noting the sections. “Hold on.” I looked more closely. “Look here, there’s a section missing.”

  The binder sections were divided and labeled with those colored plastic tabs that run vertically down the right side of the notebook. If the tabs were all there, they should line up one above the other. But it was clear that a section in the middle was missing.

  “Did Jude do that?” she asked.

  “From what little I’ve seen, he’s meticulously organized,” I said. “I think someone took a section out.”

  “It wouldn’t do them any good. I can tell the correct process notes are not in the notebook.”

  “Unless the notes were in the missing section.”

  “I guess that’s possible, but then why was he so insistent about the computer at work? Why would he tell me it’s all stored there where it’s protected?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. “Or someone stole what they thought were the notes on the new process and it wasn’t.”

  Her faced twisted up in a pensive look.

  I shone the light around the rest of the shed, but didn’t see anything else that seemed important.

  “We’re not going to find more in the dark,” I said. I picked up the binder. “Can I take this home?”

  “I guess.” I again got a look like she thought I might steal the idea.

  “I want to look at it more closely, when I don’t have a splitting headache.”

  “Oh, sure.” That seemed to satisfy her.

  She glanced back at the plants. “They’ll have to wait, huh?”

  “Yes.” I prodded her out the door.

  “Should we lock it?” she asked.

  “How’re you going to get back in?”

  “Good point.” She furrowed her brow. “But what if someone tries to get in?”

  “They already did.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Whoever got in here has the key, so there’s not much we can do now,” I said as I pulled the door closed. “Everyone else will leave it alone until tomorrow. You can call a locksmith and have them change the lock, and install something more formidable.”

  We strode back into the house, turned off the lights and locked up. Then I followed Jodie to her house and made sure she was safely inside, I met her friend Liza, who had come to help her and arrange Jude’s funeral, and then I drove home.

  It was almost eleven when I walked into the condo. Willie was in the kitchen, still in her teal scrubs, working on her laptop.

  “Hey,” I said as I set the weed-laced energy drinks on the table, then stood behind her and began to massage her shoulders.

  “Hey, yourself. Oh, that feels so good.” She glanced up at me, smiled and went back to typing. “I just got home and was checking emails.”

  “Anything exciting?”

  “One from your mother.”

  I stopped the massage, leaned forward, and stared at the screen, aghast. “How’d she get your email?”

  “Thanks to you, she has it.”

  “Huh?” I stared at her, puzzled.

  “Remember that email you sent to both her and me? About Christmas presents?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t think she would figure out your email from that.” My mother was technically challenged…but apparently not as much as I thought.

  “It’s no big deal. We’re finalizing some things to do while they’re here. And,” she looked around, “we need to talk about this place.”

  “What about it?”

  “It needs a good cleaning, and I don’t have time to do much.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I protested.

  “Yeah, it really does, Reed. But not tonight.” She sighed, closed the laptop, then noticed the bottles on the table. “What’re these?” She picked one up, read the label, and raised an eyebrow at me. “Are you going to drink these?”

  “Maybe in my youth. They gave me the samples and I needed to keep up the ruse of being an interested employee, so I brought them home. I’ll return them when the case is over. Unless you want one?”

  “Maybe in my youth,” she mimicked me. Then she added, “I’ve seen way too many people in the ER who’ve used this kind of stuff. No, thank you.” Then she added, “Just make sure they’re gone before your mom and dad arrive. Can you imagine all her worst fears realized?” Then her eyes narrowed and she studied me more closely. “You’ve got a bruise on your cheek.”

  I touched it gingerly. “Yeah.”

  “Oh my gosh, Reed, what happened?”

  I told her about my day. In general, Willie was becoming more accepting of my profession, ever since I’d helped her find who had torched her house. The look she gave me was mostly concern, but still tinged with the familiar fear. When I got to the part about getting hit on the head, she stood up and turned around, and began to examine my head.

  “Yes, you’ve got a bump, but it doesn’t look too bad. Does it hurt?”

  “No, I just have a horrible headache.”

  “I’ll bet you do.” Then she took my face in her hands, gently kissed my forehead and hugged me to her. After a quiet moment, she turned and got ibuprofen from the cupboard, filled a glass of water and handed them to me.

  “Thanks,” I said gratefully. I swallowed the pills and stood up.

  “You should get some sleep. Come to bed.”

  “I need to talk to Cal and then I’ll be righ
t there.”

  “More work?”

  “I’ve got a killer to find.”

  “Okay.” She kissed the cheek without the bruise. “I’m going to take a shower and go to bed. I’m working the swing shift tomorrow. I guess we can talk about your parents’ visit later.”

  I groaned as she left the room, then smiled, feeling a warmth course through me, better than any shot of whiskey. We’d reached a new comfort level with each other, but with it came some complications. I hated that she worried about me, and that many times, like my mother, she wished I’d chosen a different profession. I loved being a detective, even if it meant I was occasionally put in dangerous situations. But now, I realized I also loved coming home to someone who cared about me. I really couldn’t imagine life without Willie at this point. I did not want to lose her, but could our relationship survive the tension my profession brought? I pictured Jodie, losing her brother, the closest person in her world. It was easy to take someone for granted until they were gone.

  I pushed those thoughts aside, reluctantly went into my office, logged onto the internet and called Cal while I checked my own email.

  “What’s up, O Great Detective?” he said.

  “Hard at it,” I said. I knew he’d be up, working long hours as usual. “I need another favor.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Look up Ivy Ackerman,” I instructed. “She went to Stanford. Can you find out what degree she got?”

  “Sure, hold on.” The clatter of his fingers on the keyboard rattled through the phone. “She got a bachelor of science. Looks like she focused on chemistry.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Why?”

  I explained what was going on.

  “So she has the knowledge to understand the experiments that Jude is conducting,” he said when I finished.

  “Sure looks that way. And she has access to the store. She could get in after hours, turn off the security system.”

  “But not if the lab is locked.”

  “It wouldn’t be that hard to steal a key so she could get in,” I said. “If she’s desperate enough, she could.”

  “True. She’s twenty-six, never married. Her record’s clean. Hm.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “She has a lot of student loan debt.”