“I had some time now.”
Tom sat in the wingback chair that had belonged to her third-great-grandmother. Madison treasured the chair as a memento of a woman who’d come from Ireland during the potato famine; starving to death, unable to speak English or write her name, she made it six weeks in steerage to a new country and raised a daughter who became a teacher. Madison walked the earth because of the brave women who’d come before her. Seeing Tom in the chair was jarring.
Tom had long legs that he crossed as he sat, but he still managed to look stocky; something about the overbuilding of upper bodies in the gym that cops and criminals tended to favor. His dark hair was slicked back. He loosened his tie slightly and tugged at his crisp white shirt: the uniform of a homicide detective.
“Make yourself at home,” she said.
Madison walked over and sat down in the office chair at her desk; she swiveled to face him. There was a moment where they just stared at each other. There had always been electricity; it made the air around them crackle. Early on in their relationship, when they were just a PI and the cop assigned to her case, she’d accidentally touched his hand, and it had felt like her body was set on fire. The fact that it had never gone any further had something to do with timing and everything to do with … complications.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said.
More silence.
“How’s the wife?” she asked.
“Is that how we’re going to start?”
“I don’t know, Tom,” she said. “How should we start? What is the proper way to reacquaint ourselves? I seem to have misplaced my guidebook.” Madison got up and went to the kitchen just to have something to do. She got a glass out of the cabinet, filled it with water from the dispenser, and brought it back to Tom.
“How is work? Any good cases?” she asked.
“Work is fine.” He took the water with his huge hand. “And the wife and I are working it out. She has forgiven … a lot.”
Madison looked out the window.
“So anyway, where is this note?” he asked.
Madison handed him the paper bag along with a pair of gloves she’d set out for him. He put the gloves on and then pulled the note out of the bag. He stared at the note.
“Okay. So. You’re sure this isn’t someone playing a joke on you? What about the surfer?”
Madison picked up his empty glass and took it into the kitchen.
“Dave doesn’t have a printer,” she said. “And anyway, that’s not his style. He wouldn’t want to scare me.”
That statement hung in the air over them for a minute. She stayed in the kitchen until it had dissipated.
“Okay, I’ll take it in and process it,” Tom said as he stood. Madison walked into the living room and faced him.
He continued: “You have to promise to let me handle this, though, okay, Maddie? Don’t start some investigation of your own.”
“Have you met me?” She laughed. “I can’t promise that.”
He stared at her mouth while she laughed. He was about six feet two inches tall; she had to tilt her head back slightly to look at him. Her laugh faded to a smile. He looked at her forehead, then her mouth again, and then into her eyes. “I’ll let you know what I find,” he said, and turned and walked out.
Chapter Four
Madison watched Tom walk out the door, wondering if she’d just made a huge mistake. Should she be bringing him back into her life so soon? Or at all? Well, it was done now.
She turned on the podcast again as she stared at the copy of the note she’d made before giving it to Tom. The note was just so plain and ordinary that she didn’t see how it could be traced to anything. Now that she thought about it, she doubted the person had allowed fingerprints. With all of the crime TV shows, it seemed unlikely anyone would do something nefarious without wearing gloves these days.
But who had so much animosity against her? Madison knew that sticks and stones could break her bones but words would never hurt her, but tell that to someone staring at a threat of death. To Madison, it felt like the words hurt. She looked again at the note, peering at it from different angles. There was nothing unusual about the words used. The No police was sort of a cliché, but they also probably meant it. Could she decide that the person was for sure an English speaker, as in English as their first language? Not enough to go on. The sentence was simple enough that even someone who spoke English as a second language could have written it.
It couldn’t be someone playing a joke. She didn’t know that many people, and the people she did know would have known she wouldn’t think this was funny. Plus, it wasn’t funny. It had to be exactly what it appeared: someone thought she was investigating them and wanted her to stop.
She suddenly remembered a private investigator that she had royally pissed off one time and he had sworn to get even with her. Could he be behind this note? She’d made friends with his partner at the time, Ted, and so she decided to give him a call. She paused the podcast and dialed Ted’s number while looking out the window at her view of the ocean. During the summer it was always cloudy in the mornings at the beach, but by the afternoon the sun came out, as it had now. She looked at a blue ocean and cloudless blue sky that blended together so you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. It felt timeless.
“Hey, Ted,” she said when he answered. “Long time no talk.”
“I got a new phone and you’re not in it. Who’s speaking?”
“Oh, sorry. It’s Madison Kelly. You remember, I helped you with surveillance on a truck driver who said he was injured but was playing soccer on the weekends? We ended up tailing him all the way to Nevada?”
There was a pause. And then a huge barrel laugh. “Oh shit, Madison, how ya doin’? Did you ever get the sand out of your ears after crawling through the desert with your video camera?”
Madison laughed in return. “I did finally, yes. Listen. A weird thing happened.”
She explained about the note and the fact that she had no current investigations ongoing.
“So I was just wondering if that guy you worked with … what was his name? Would he be behind this?”
Madison had replaced the investigator after the company fired him. He was furious and thought Madison had done something to get him fired, and there had been a confrontation. She had done nothing to deserve his wrath except do a good job on the case.
“You’re not working right now? Must be nice to live a life of leisure,” he said. “But no, I don’t think that guy would be after you. His name was John something. I think that was a momentary lapse of judgment on his part. But I could call him and feel it out if you wanted me to?”
“That would be great,” Madison said. “Get back to me on this number?”
“Will do.”
Ted was a good enough investigator, Madison knew, that she didn’t have to tell him not to mention her phone call to the other PI. Ted would bring the conversation around to her name and see how the guy reacted.
It was nice to be able to call Ted. Investigators tended to be loners: sitting in darkened cars, working from home, alone except for witnesses and subjects. On the rare occasion when a “two-man” investigation was called for, it was nice to feel like she had a compatriot.