Riley Thorn and the Corpse in the Closet by Lucy Score
3
2:27 p.m., Wednesday, August 12
The temporary offices of Santiago Investigations were crammed into the music room on the first floor of the crumbling Bogdanovich mansion on Front Street.
Sure. There was a kick-ass view of the Susquehanna River through the front windows. And yeah, Nick was saving a shitload on rent. Plus, it kept his commute to the two minutes he’d been accustomed to when he’d lived in the apartment above his previous office. Before the whole arson thing. It wasn’t good manners to look a gift office in the mouth. But the place had its “quirks” too.
For one, the music room smelled like mothballs and old cardboard. It was stuffed to the ceiling with dusty flea market artifacts and heavy pieces of ugly furniture. It looked as if no one had stepped foot across the threshold in two decades. Given the fact that the Bogdanovich twins were in their eighties, there was a good chance they’d forgotten the room existed.
Lily Bogdanovich had spent the first few days of office setup opening old boxes and drawers then exclaiming over random finds.
“I haven’t seen this meat cleaver in years.”
“So that’s where my erotic fire poker set got to.”
The bigger issue—besides dusty penis-shaped fire pokers—was the fact that the space wasn’t handicap accessible yet. Which meant his cousin Brian couldn’t get his wheelchair inside. This led to its own set of problems. When Nick offered to foot the bill for a ramp, landlord Fred Bogdanovich and another tenant, Mr. Willicott, had volunteered to build it themselves.
Since Brian was more than happy working from home, and since toupeed Fred and the elderly Denzel Washington doppelgänger Willicott were only charging him for materials, Nick stupidly agreed.
They’d been hammering away for a week and a half, pausing only to yell incoherent questions and answers at each other.
As far as he could tell, neither man had ever successfully constructed anything more complicated than a sandwich. Each afternoon they submitted their receipts to him for items including hammers, nails, wood, meatball subs, and matching stools on which they ate their meatball subs. Every day after they called it quits, Nick went outside to inspect their work and found the same thing: a disaster that resembled nothing close to a ramp.
But all of that paled in comparison to the biggest issue with his temporary digs.
He could no longer hide behind closed doors when he was pissed off at an employee or vice versa. Which meant he was getting the full force of his new office manager’s displeasure. Riley was doing her best to ignore him since the completely legitimate concerns he’d raised that morning.
He didn’t like being ignored. He’d prefer it if she just stood up and called him a stupid asshole. Santiagos understood yelling. But this simmering silence gave him entirely too much time to begin doubting his stance.
He scooted the ancient brocade armchair away from the marble-top parlor table he used as a desk and stared at her. She’d commandeered a scarred library table near the fireplace and had set up a tidy little workstation with a scanner, laptop, and printer. Her office supplies were organized in matching desktop accessories. Neat rows of paperwork were labeled with sticky notes.
Update.
Scan.
Shred.
File.
She frowned at the computer screen, glanced at the documents in her hand, then efficiently stuffed them into the shredder at her feet.
It was exactly what she’d done to his heart when he’d found her submerged in that fucking fountain. The fountain he hadn’t been able to drive by since.
When he’d met Thorn a few months prior, he’d absolutely taken note of those big brown eyes, those full lips, and the temptation of curves. But it had been the whole package that had him falling face-first in lo—ike. Like. Her snarky wit. Her self-deprecating humor. The vulnerability that made him want to stand up and promise to keep her safe for the rest of her life. Though he’d very nearly let her down in that area. It still gave him nightmares.
She was calm in situations that called for hysteria. For instance, getting shot and nearly strangled and drowned by a deranged asshole. She hid junk food from her mother. Played reluctant tech support and chauffeur to her elderly neighbors. She had a habit of leaving her vehicle at crime scenes. And she stole a dog while accidentally breaking up a dog-fighting ring.
The caveman bachelor in him hadn’t stood a chance.
And the stubborn, independent, delusional, I-can-take-care-of-myself woman in her didn’t either.
She needed him to look out for her. And he was going to take care of her whether she wanted him to or not.
“I can feel you staring at me,” she said without looking up from her screen where she was probably organizing his life into spreadsheets.
“I’m trying to decide how mad I am at you,” Nick announced, kicking back and putting his feet up.
“No, you’re not. You got over it an hour ago,” she shot back blandly, clicking a pen and scribbling something on a sticky note.
Dating a psychic had its upsides. He didn’t have to talk about his feelings because his girlfriend already knew what they were.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Scanning last week’s paperwork into the server and shredding the ones that don’t require physical copies.”
It turned him on when she organized shit for him. One of the reasons his office had burnt to the ground so quickly was the fact that he’d been sitting on two year’s worth of paperwork that he never got around to filing.
He stood and wound his way through ottomans and boxes labeled “Doll Heads” and “Goose Figurines” to get to her.
He leaned against the corner of her desk and stretched his legs out.
“I don’t like you getting involved in another case,” he said.
She looked at him. Finally. And his heart did that idiotic little tap dance it always did when those big, brown eyes locked on to him.
“Really? Gee. Why didn’t you say something when I was clinging to your back trying to pull you off your friend?”
The tone of her voice had his blood racing south well above the legal speed limit. The woman made sarcasm sexy.
“Weber’s not my friend,” he insisted stubbornly.
“He saved both our lives,” she reminded him.
“He didn’t save our lives. He aided in our continued survival,” he hedged.
“Look, I’m not excited about the idea of getting involved either—”
“Good. Don’t. Let’s go have sex.”
She rolled her eyes, but he didn’t miss the way her gaze skimmed over his crotch.
“I’m not excited about it,” she continued. “But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do something. A woman is dead.”
“And you’re alive. I’d like to keep it that way.”
She sighed and pushed away from her computer, coming to stand between his outstretched legs. He liked when she came close enough for him to reach out and grab her, to reassure himself she was real and breathing and his.
Nick reeled her in so she was standing between his thighs.
The pulse at the base of her throat fluttered temptingly.
“Thorn, I almost lost you.” His fingers slipped under the hem of her shirt and traced the round, pink scar that still starred in his nightmares.
She bit her lip, then looped her arms around his neck. “Refresh my memory. Do all of your investigations go that way?”
He ran his hand through her thick brown hair, brushing it back from her face.
“No.”
“Then there’s no reason to think that Kellen’s case will either,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the incessant hammering.
“You don’t even want to do it. Why the hell are you even considering it?” he demanded.
Nick Santiago lived his life according to a succinct code of conduct.
Rule #1: Rules are meant to be broken.
Rule #2: Don’t date members of the same generation in the same family (e.g. sisters or cousins) within three years of each other.
Rule #3: Don’t do shit you don’t want to do.
Riley, on the other hand, had been born a good girl. She wanted to make other people happy by doing what they asked. And while the whole good girl thing was a major turn-on for him, he didn’t like how other people could use it to take advantage of her.
“I’m an adult,” she told him. “Adults do things they don’t want to do all the time.”
“Yeah, like right now. We should be having sex on that dusty-ass couch over there. Instead, you’re pretending you have a choice when you know there’s no way in hell I’m letting you investigate a homicide.”
“I think it’s called a divan,” she said.
He stood and walked her backwards until her legs hit the hideous brocade upholstery and she sank down onto the cushion. He followed her, covering her body with his.
Her breath caught, and her fingers dug into his shoulders.
“We’re at work,” she whispered.
“I’m the boss, remember?” He trailed his mouth over her jawline, nipping at the skin of her neck.
She shivered against him. “I think you’re taking the boss routine a little too seriously.”
The hammering outside stopped abruptly. “Look at that, Willicott. I think we built it backwards,” Fred shouted.
“What?” Willicott yelled back.
“I said, ‘I THINK WE BUILT IT BACKWARDS!’”
“How the hell should I know which way is starboard?”
“For the love of God,” Riley muttered under him.
“Ignore them. They’re adults,” Nick said, shifting his hips against her to add weight to his argument.
Her legs parted, and he settled between her thighs. She was wearing a pair of running shorts that were cut high on the leg. He liked them on her—but not as much as he was going to like seeing them on the floor.
“I don’t think we settled anything,” she reminded him as his mouth hovered over hers.
He looked into those eyes under their heavy lids and thick lashes and felt himself physically ache for her. He’d never had this before. Never wanted a woman with this prolonged kind of intensity. It scared the hell out of him and added to the thrill of it.
If something scared Nick Santiago, he preferred to run right up to it and slap it in the face. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
“We’ll settle things later when you’re too dizzy from orgasms to argue.”
She gave a breathy laugh, and everything was right in the world. He had his tongue in her mouth and his hand on his fly when the pocket doors flew open.
“Whoops! Well, since you’re not naked yet.” Mrs. Penny—their purple-haired, glasses-wearing roommate—sauntered into the room, shoving things out of her way with her cane. She was dressed in wrinkled cargo pants, Birkenstocks, and a WINK 104 visor. She had a bullhorn in her free hand.
Riley groaned and shoved at Nick’s chest. “Get off.”
“I was trying to,” he shot back.
“What do you want, Mrs. Penny?” Riley asked, wriggling under him. It didn’t help his state of arousal. “And why do you have a bullhorn?”
“I was protesting whales over on Woodbine Street. Don’t worry about it. You got a new client, Santiago,” she said, kicking a rolled-up rug out of the way. A puff of dust rose up from it.
“Who?” he asked, feeling depressed as Riley adjusted her tank top to cover up her great rack.
“Whales?” Riley repeated.
“Dunno. Younger gal,” Mrs. Penny said, ignoring Riley.
“Younger” didn’t help, seeing as how Mrs. Penny was eighty years old. That made a large chunk of the earth’s population “younger.”
“She’s waiting across the hall. Didn’t want to bring her in in case you two were already naked.”
As Mrs. Penny bellowed this information, Nick guessed the client had just learned how unprofessional her new PI was.
He dropped his forehead to Riley’s. “We need a new office with a lock on the door.”
She gave him a friendly peck on the mouth and squeezed his ass through his jeans. “Behave. We’ll revisit this later in addition to our fight.”
On a low growl, he let her up and tried not to think about how much he couldn’t wait until later. It was one thing to get caught mauling a sexy brown-eyed employee. It was another thing to meet a new client with an obvious hard-on. He’d never placed much importance on professionalism, but now that his offices were temporarily housed in a three-ring circus, he felt some pressure to deliver a reasonably professional experience.
“Fine. Come with me. You can start a case file if she doesn’t get scared off by our roommates.”
Riley perked up. He’d promised to show her the ins and outs of being an investigator but had been putting it off. It was a hell of a lot harder to get hurt or almost murdered by doing paperwork. So far, she hadn’t complained, but Nick knew the clock was ticking.
They followed Mrs. Penny across the hall and found Lily Bogdanovich plying the woman with tea and cucumber sandwiches. Lily was newly obsessed with the show The Crown and now insisted on serving tea every day in 1950s-style dresses.
Tea usually bled into Mrs. Penny’s happy hour. Most residents didn’t make it to dinner, being too drunk and too full of tiny, weird sandwiches.
The client was tall and attractive, with her dark hair worn in a short puff above a colorful headband. She was in a killer business suit and hot pink stilettos. The purse she’d slung over her shoulder was the size of a Shetland pony. She paced back and forth in front of the bar as she snapped orders into her phone.
“Yeah. I gotta go. I’ll be back in time for the meeting. Uh-huh. I don’t care. Deal with it.” She disconnected the call and slid her phone into the gigantic bag.
“Hi. I’m Nick Santiago,” he said, offering his hand.
“Shelley Rupley,” she said. Her grip was brisk and firm as if she spent a lot of time shaking hands.
“Shelley, this is my office manager, Riley.”
“Hi.” Riley gave a little wave as she set up her laptop on the round parlor table near the organ.
“Nice to meet you,” Shelley said, glancing at her smart watch.
“I’ll just leave these teeny-tiny cucumber sandwiches here in case anyone gets peckish,” Lily trilled.
“Thanks, Lil,” Nick said.
Lily gave a curtsy and a toothy grin before backing out of the room.
“What can I do for you, Shelley?” he asked as they settled themselves around the table.
“My ex-husband, Larry, is missing,” Shelley said, interlacing her fingers on the table. The face of her watch lit up, and she glanced down at it. Riley started diligently taking notes, and Nick decided to spend time later fantasizing about a sexy secretary role play game.
“When is the last time you saw him?” he asked.
“A week ago. I picked up the kids at his place. We have three. Kids, that is,” she said, glancing down as her watch lit up again.
“How long has he been missing?”
Shelley shrugged. “I don’t know. I saw him last Wednesday. But he hasn’t responded to any of the kids’ texts since Saturday. Not even Ellen’s. She’s the good one,” she said to Riley.
Riley made a note that Ellen was the good one.
“So he hasn’t been heard from since…”
“I think he left a voice mail for Kyle—he’s the troublemaker—Saturday morning,” Shelley said as her watch lit up yet again. “I need you to find him,” she said, leaning across the table, a dangerous gleam in her eyes.
Nick recognized it as one his own mother had displayed during his harrowing teen years.
“You see this?” She pointed at the watch. “These are appointment reminders, emails, messages from my kids. My oldest is packing for college. Another one needs a ride home from some student government summer camp thing this afternoon. And I’ve been ducking the soccer coaches calls all day on the third one because he can’t respect the authority of the whistle.”
Riley’s fingers flew over the keys.
“In the meantime,” Shelley continued, “I’ve got a meeting with marketing in an hour, and then I have to fire someone by the end of the day. I don’t have time for a missing ex-husband.”
“That’s a lot to handle,” he observed.
“It is. I need you to find my ex-husband so I can go to the beach in ten days with my girlfriends. No kids. No men. No work. Just wine and pizza and books. I. Need. This.” She stabbed the table with a sharp fingernail. “I’ve got my Kindle right here. I’ve been reading the same book for six months because every time my ass hits a chair, a kid needs something. Or work calls. Or someone is bleeding. Or there’s another fire in the microwave. He owes me this. I haven’t gone to court over all the child support he hasn’t paid. The absolute least he can do is take his own damn kids for a long weekend.”
Nick knew a woman on the edge when he saw one. “Have you talked to the cops?”
She rolled her eyes and let out a humorless laugh. “Of course I did. After Larry’s work said he hadn’t been in, I called the police. They made me wait forty-eight hours before they were even willing to go knock on his door.”
“And?” he prompted.
“And nothing. He didn’t answer. They said they’d look into it. They seem to think that just because he’s disappeared before means this is more of the same.”
“He’s disappeared before?” Riley looked up from her screen.
“We had our first kid at twenty. That man was not ready to get married, much less raise four kids. Once we started having kids, every once in a while he’d go out for drinks with the boys and not come home for two days. He was clinging to his youth. Drinking too much. Staying up all night playing video games.”
“Four?” Nick repeated. “I thought you said three.”
Shelley grimaced. “Damn it. Alice is the quiet one. I forget about her sometimes since she’s the low-maintenance one. Anyway, this is much longer than any previous quest to recapture his youth or escape his life. So since the cops aren’t worried, I’m going to pay you to worry. Worry and find him and bring him back so I can go to the damn beach and read my damn book!”
The woman looked down at her watch again, and Nick felt the frustration simmering beneath her surface.
“I’m happy to take the case, Shelley,” he said. “Let me take this off your plate so you can focus on your job and your kids.”
Her eyes filled with tears, kicking Nick into panic mode. He thrust a box of tissues in her direction. He hated when women cried in front of him. Nothing made him feel more useless.
“No one said being a parent was going to require every second of my day for the rest of my life. No one told me that once kids get just a little bit independent, then the real worrying starts. And no one sure as hell told me to marry a guy who could do dishes and drive kids to basketball practice instead of the cute one I met in seventh grade. Not all seventh graders grow up to be men.”
Riley was nodding sympathetically, and Nick could only guess how big of a seventh grader her ex-husband, Griffin Gentry, had been.
“I need this weekend. My sanity needs this weekend,” Shelley said.
He cleared his throat. “How about you give me some details about your ex-husband, and I’ll get started right away. I’ve got a fee sheet that explains—”
“I don’t care if it costs me every dime in the kids’ college fund. Half of them probably won’t go anyway. I’ll pay you whatever you want. Just find my ex and have him back here by next weekend.”
“Do you have a recent picture?” he asked.
She reached into her cavernous bag and pulled out her phone. “I’ll text you a couple.”
In the first, Larry Rupley stood in the center of four kids looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. He was a pudgy white guy who’d gone bald on top and soft in the middle. He looked bored and checked out in each of the photos Shelley forwarded.
“Where does Larry work?” Riley asked.
“He was a billing representative for United Alpha Dental Insurance.”
“Was?” Nick noted the past tense.
“When I spoke to his supervisor on Monday, she said if he bothered showing up again at the office, he was fired,” she explained. “Larry always had a problem with being told what to do. Especially if he didn’t feel like doing it, and he never felt like doing it.”
Nick was familiar with the type. Passive-aggressive little shits who would do the bare minimum and do it badly just to weasel out of any further responsibility.
“Is there a possibility he disappeared so he wouldn’t have to take the kids for your beach trip?” he asked.
Her expression darkened. “If that’s the reason why he worried me and my kids, then he’s going to be in a world of hurt when I find him.”
The faint song of a power saw erupted from outside. Riley’s nose twitched, and her face drained of color.
“Excuse me,” she said, jumping up from her chair and racing for the front door.
One second later, there was a shout and the saw cut off abruptly.
Nick waited a beat, and when no one started yelling for 911, he resumed the meeting.
“Shelley, I’m going to need as much information on your ex-husband as you can give me.”
“I’ll tell you whatever you want. Birth date, social security number, favorite food, shoe size.”
“Sounds as if you know him well,” he ventured.
“That’s what you do in a relationship. Well, unless you’re Larry. After twenty-plus years together, he still didn’t know when my birthday was or remember that I’m allergic to almonds. I knew him well enough to know that we couldn’t stay married. Some guys just never grow up. And eventually a woman needs a man who’s willing to put down the game controller and pick up the damn dry cleaning without being asked six times.”
Nick felt a little warm under the collar. He made a mental note to ask Riley if she needed anything dry cleaned.
“Let’s start with hobbies and friends.”
“He doesn’t have a lot of friends. The kids said he did just start jogging. Apparently getting a divorce reminds a man that he needs to put a little effort into his appearance.” She huffed out a breath. “He’ll just fix himself up for the next woman, and once he gets comfortable, it’ll all go to hell again.”
He made another mental note to go to the gym.
Riley came back inside carrying a circular saw. Neither she nor the saw was covered in blood. Nick considered that a victory.
“Great. Last question. Is there someone who will let me in to look around his place?” he asked.
Shelley reached into her luggage-sized purse and produced a key ring. “Help yourself.”
“We’ll take a look and see what we can find,” he promised.
