Tutu Deadly Page 5

  I turned to leave, deciding my brief career as a detective was over, when I caught another glimpse of flashing light in the room just beyond the kitchen.

  My curiosity pulled me forward instead of out the door—which my common sense told me I should be exiting through right now. Oh well. I was a redhead. Blame it on poor impulse control. I slowly walked toward the place where I had seen the flashing light, when I was suddenly blinded by a powerful beam.

  In that one brilliant moment, it was all horribly—and dangerously—clear.

  Someone was inside this house with a flashlight. Someone who, like me, had no business being in this house.

  Someone who was most likely a killer.

  I turned to run but was stopped cold by a sudden sharp pain in my head.

  SIX

  I awoke to a light that hurt my eyes, and some sort of metal pointed directly at my head. When I could get my eyes to focus, I saw that the metal was attached to the hand of an extremely attractive, very tall, very angry man wearing a nicely tailored dark blue suit. The metal was also a gun.

  I allowed myself a brief moment of panic and sheer terror, and then forced myself back to reality. Come on, criminals were not this good looking. Only in movies. In real life, criminals were ugly, stupid, and usually, kind of stinky. Often they were drunk, and sometimes they had even forgotten their collective mothers had potty-trained them years before. Crime does not pay. Rather, it sucks the little intelligence you might have out of your brain. One of the big reasons I taught dance instead of robbing banks for a living. That and the fact I looked awful in the brighter shades on the color wheel.

  This guy was not your average criminal. In fact, he looked a lot like a cop, although not one I’d ever met. His dark green eyes shot daggers at me and I could see the hint of a dimple on each cheek, above his square, strong jaw.

  “What have you done with her?” he asked in a commanding, but surprisingly silky voice.

  “Done with who? And why the hell did you hit me?”

  I was starting to get cranky. Lack of a good meal and jonesing for potato salad will do that to you, even when a gun was pointed at your head—a head that throbbed with every pulse of blood flowing through my veins. For a second, a brief flash of joy ran through my veins—joy that I wasn’t twelve feet under. I could be dead, but the pain reminded me I was not. I was, however, in a bit of a pickle.

  “I didn’t hit you. Why are you trespassing on a crime scene?” he asked, changing tacks, the gun still aimed at me.

  Crime scene. Yeah, he was a cop. Probably. Until I knew for sure, I was proceeding with caution. At least as much caution as I was capable of. “Who are you? Why are you here? I’m Sandra’s friend, and Taylee’s dance teacher. I was trying to find out why Taylee didn’t come to dance.” That was a big fat lie, and just another mark against me in God’s black book.

  “Taylee’s dance teacher? As in the prime suspect in her mother’s murder?”

  Ooops. Guess I should have thought that one through. It was that poor impulse control again.

  “I did not kill anybody. But someone is doing an awfully good job of trying to convince the police I did.”

  “And you came here to prove your innocence? Or perhaps to hide some evidence?”

  Man, this was just like television, and everyone knew that when your criminal case was proceeding like it did on television, you were in deep doo-doo. I decided to be honest. Lying had never gotten me anywhere. But before I proceeded, I wanted to know exactly who this man was.

  “Who are you?” I asked him again. If he said something like, “I am your worst nightmare,” I was going to pee my pants. It would not be pretty.

  He finally dropped the gun to his side, but did not holster it.

  “You’re Jenny Partridge, aren’t you?” He was still avoiding answering my question. “Why did you come here? Tell me the truth.” The look he gave me made me want to confess every sin I’d ever committed, in mind-numbing detail. Except I still wasn’t exactly sure what I was dealing with, even though I was fairly certain he was a cop. I just couldn’t put a finger on his connection with the case. So I fudged a little. Just a little.

  “I actually came to find Emma Anderson. She lives across the street. I gave her the cookie dough to deliver to Sandra, and she told the police I didn’t. I came to find out why she lied. But she’s gone. Her house is locked up tight. And then I looked over here and saw something flashing, so I came in to investigate. But why did you have to hit me?”

  “I didn’t hit you,” Mystery Man said, finally holstering the gun. Further proof he was a cop. Criminals tucked their guns in the waistbands of their dirty jeans. “Do you need medical attention?”

  “No, I’m fine,” I said weakly, reaching up to touch the back of my head and growing dizzy when I pulled my fingers back and could see they were covered with blood. “Or maybe I’m not.”

  The world started spinning then, and he eased me back down onto Sandra’s dirty floor, while images of germ spores crawling into my wound danced through my head—no sugarplums to be found in this disaster of a kitchen. “This floor is not clean. This cannot be sanitary,” I muttered as I tried to get my vision to clear and the world to stop rotating.

  He moved out of my vision for a moment and came back with a semiclean couch pillow, in a horrid shade of puce. He lifted my head up gently, then put the pillow beneath it and lowered me back down onto the pillow, and talked in his cell phone all at the same time.

  He was multitalented, as well as being incredibly handsome.

  “Who are you?” I asked Mystery Man again.

  He didn’t get a chance to answer before the troops arrived.

  “OUCH,” I complained to the paramedic who dabbed at the back of my head with some sort of antiseptic cloth.

  Mystery Man was chatting with a local uniformed police officer over on the other side of the messy kitchen. They’d been the first to arrive on the scene, apparently called before I woke up on the floor of Sandra’s trashed house. I saw no sign of Detective Wilson, but I imagined he’d show up any time now. After all, this was his case. But if that was true, who was tall, dark, and handsome?

  “Well, you should be okay, and don’t need stitches, but I really think you should get an MRI or something, Jenny,” the paramedic told me. His name was Bones. Really. Well, that was his nickname. It occurred to me that I had no idea what his real name was. I also did not know why that was occurring to me right now, when it had no relevance whatsoever to my situation.

  I’d been on ride-alongs with him before I bailed on my dispatch job, so I knew him fairly well. The other cops and medics called him Bones for two reasons. One, from time to time he was called to pick up the “bag of bones” that used to be a person. And two, because he was so skinny there wasn’t any meat at all on him. I could loan him some of mine. There was another possible reason they called him Bones, but I was not going there. Cops were great for giving nicknames. Everybody who worked at the Weber County Sheriff’s Department ended up with one. For example, the sluttiest dispatcher was called “McDonald’s” because of all the officers she had “served.”

  I was lucky I’d quit the job when I did, before I could end up with a nickname like “Cheetos,” both because I liked to eat junk food and because I had red hair.

  I assured Bones I would be fine, and he helped me sit up slowly. Every light in the Epstein house was now blazing, where before it had been dark.

  It was also filled with people, along with a ton of junk. Man, Sandra Epstein had been a serious pack rat. Mystery Man was done talking to the uniform, and he headed toward me purposefully, his stride long and strong, and I found myself drawn to him, with his square, strong shoulders, full head of dark hair, and long legs.

  When the side door opened and Detective Tate Wilson walked in, I stopped my perusal of Mystery Man. Now I was in deep shit. He was either here to arrest me or to beat me to death because I was checking out another cop. Hmm, that bonk on the head must have done m
ore damage than I realized . . .

  He reached me about the same time the hunky stranger did. “Lucy, you got some ’splainin’ to do,” Wilson said to me as he waggled a finger at me.

  I burst out laughing at his comment. Wilson was familiar with I Love Lucy, which had been popular long before both of us had been any sort of twinkle in our parents’ eyes. Be still my immature heart.

  One side of his mouth quirked up in that half grin I found so irresistible and I remembered that was exactly the look on his face when I’d been naked before him on the bearskin rug—in my dream. Well, not completely naked. I think I probably had a diamond anklet on, too. But nothing else. I could live in my dreams.

  “United States Marshal Andrew Fallon,” Wilson drawled, pointing to me, “meet dance teacher Jenny Partridge.” Marshal? Get the heck outta Dodge!

  “Jenny, are you okay?” I looked up to see that Alissa had arrived, still in her uniform from work. She was everything I was not—tall, willowy, brunette, and long legged like a runway model. I should hate her. She even made the ugly dispatch uniform look good. I didn’t miss the looks Marshal Fallon and Detective Wilson gave her. I was used to it.

  She ignored them. “I got the call and the supervisor let me come and make sure you were okay,” she said. Alissa was the one tie I had left with the sheriff ’s department, other than my passing acquaintance with all sorts of law enforcement personnel. We had bonded over lattes and man trouble, and had become fast friends, even though I was jealous of her personal assets. Alissa was the rare person who truly was just as beautiful inside as she was on the outside. Ugh. I sounded like a Hallmark card.

  “I’m okay. Sore. But okay.”

  “I’m taking you home,” she said, pulling me to my feet unceremoniously, while the paramedics and the police officers all watched her with their mouths open. Disgusting. Why didn’t I have that kind of power with men?

  “Wait just a minute,” Wilson said, finally closing his mouth to quit drooling and then opening it to speak. I fought off the twinge of jealousy. I’d met this man only by the unfortunate circumstances that were my life. It’s not like I owned him. I barely knew him. So he got kind of slack jawed and Neanderthal-like at the sight of Alissa. Men always did. I should be used to it. “We need to talk to Jenny.”

  My cell phone, which I had stuck into my pocket just before I got out of my car, chose that opportune moment to ring. Saved by the bell!

  “Hello?”

  “Jenny, it’s Amber. We’ve got a major problem here. Monica’s had a meltdown. She showed up here at the studio about ten minutes ago raving about the ostrich feathers on the Sugar Plum Fairy costume. Now she’s locked herself in the bathroom and won’t come out until you agree to let her use fake feathers.”

  Monica Finch was my costume designer, sometime friend—when she wasn’t going off the deep end—and a creative genius when it came to sewing. Unfortunately, a little too much genius also led her to be very flighty and more than a little unbalanced. It goes without saying that I understood her, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t irritate the living hell out of me.

  “Oh my hell. Doesn’t she understand that the fake feathers look fake? Only ostrich flows the right way, and when the dancers are doing their jetés . . .”

  “Ostrich feathers?” Marshal Fallon asked, an eyebrow raised.

  Detective Wilson rolled his eyes and said, “You don’t want to know. It’s always something.”

  “Hey,” I interjected, “don’t make fun. This is serious business. I have a reputation to uphold.”

  “I’m not making fun, Jenn, but did you remember this afternoon is the Golden Age Center’s aerobics class?” Amber asked, not realizing I was talking to someone else.

  Crikey, I had forgotten. Since I didn’t teach dance on Saturdays and Sundays, I allowed Amber to teach aerobics in exchange for a slight rental fee. The Golden Agers, most of whom were in their late seventies, spent more than half their time in the bathroom, as they had reached an age when continence was somewhat unreliable.

  “Good Lord. This is bad. Really bad. There’ll be rivers of pee.”

  “Yup,” Amber answered. I looked up to see about six pairs of eyes watching me. It was going to be hard to explain that “rivers of pee” comment. I probably wouldn’t try.

  “Um, Amber, try and talk her out, okay. I’ll be there in a minute.” I clicked disconnect on my cell phone, and faced my audience. “Gotta go guys. Sorry, it’s an emergency.”

  “You can’t go. We need to talk to you,” Wilson said, a scowl marring his handsome face, taking some of the twinkle out of those dark blue eyes.

  “Is she under arrest?” Alissa asked Wilson.

  “She could be,” he answered unhelpfully.

  “Trespassing, maybe?” That helpful suggestion came from Marshal Fallon. Great. Now I had two men who wanted to see me incarcerated. My life was really looking up.

  “Oh, please,” Alissa said, rolling her eyes, and glaring at Detective Wilson. “You know as well as I do that everything she told you is exactly what happened. You are so annoying, Tate.”

  Tate? Did my best friend just call the man who wanted to see me dressed in prison garb—and the one I kinda wanted to see in absolutely nothing—by his first name? Figures. Lovely Alissa, with all her assets, would appeal to a man like Detective Tate Wilson. Why, she even looked good in orange.

  “There’re lives at stake here,” Fallon said, and I turned my attention to his dark green eyes.

  “There’s an already warped wood dance floor at stake here, and my life’s business down the not-so-proverbial toilet, such as it is. I have to go. Er, I mean I have to get to the studio now!”

  “We’ll go with you,” Wilson announced cheerily.

  “We will?” Fallon answered, a quizzical look crossing his face.

  “Yeah, you’ll enjoy it. Nothing is ever dull around Jenny.”

  “Okay, cool,” Fallon said, and they both crossed their arms and watched as Alissa shepherded me out of Sandra Epstein’s pigsty. I turned, and sure enough they were following, talking about something that sounded like sports scores. My head was still pounding, and seeing them all buddy-buddy was not helping.

  Weren’t federal agents and local police personnel supposed to hate each other? And furthermore, when did I become the local entertainment? The situation did not look good for me. A chill shot through me, and Alissa asked if I was okay, just as Detective Wilson sped up his pace and pulled me in the direction of his car, holding firmly on to my elbow.

  “I’ll drop you back to get your car later,” he said, his voice a deep timbre with a hint of what I could swear was amusement. He was enjoying this. Was it possible he didn’t really suspect me, and was hanging around for another reason?

  “You aren’t taking her anywhere,” Alissa said, her voice full of commanding order.

  “You don’t run the show here, chickie,” Wilson said, a comment that immediately dropped him down in my esteem. Chickie? How could Alissa stand for that? She was fire and brimstone, and do-it-my-way-or-the-highway. Chickie?

  “You, Wilson, are an annoying little peasant with no social skills and even less education. I could mop the floor with you, you are so low and so very, very pedantic. Please.”

  With that, she turned and walked away. What the hell did “pedantic” mean? And, given the derisive manner in which she had delivered her tirade, what did that say for my taste, since I thought Tate Wilson was pretty damn hot?

  My boring life had gotten a lot more interesting in the last few days. Not that I was courting this kind of interesting. This was the kind of stuff that made a girl run for cover.

  “Nice, Alissa, really nice,” Wilson said, anger and something else crossing his handsome features. “But I’m not playing your game. I won’t be the jerk you want me to be. Sorry. And Jenny is riding with me.”

  Apparently, whatever it was they had going was still going, or something. And I was riding with Wilson, so I rushed up to meet Alissa’s l
ong stride and asked her, “What does ‘pedantic’ mean? Just so I don’t look dumb. And what the hell is up with you two, anyway?”

  “ ‘Pedantic’ means he is caught up in all the rules and is boring the hell out of me, and you should stay away from him.” Her long strides soon saw us beside her car. “Outside of this whole mess you are caught up in, anyway. And I’ll meet you at the studio. I’m not throwing you to these particular two wolves. See you there.”

  With that, she opened her car door, got inside, and fired up the engine.

  These two wolves? Did she know Marshal Fallon, too? Where the hell was I when all these hot girl genes were being handed out? Life was not fair.

  Wilson stepped up quickly behind me and grabbed my elbow, guiding me into the front seat of his Ford Taurus, as Fallon headed to another sedate blue sedan parked behind Wilson’s police car.

  I sighed heavily as the door slammed shut, and Wilson walked around to the driver’s side of the vehicle.

  My future? Not looking good.

  SEVEN

  MY studio was located on Ogden’s historic 25th Street, in the top half of a building originally built in the early 1900s. It should have been way out of my price range, as far as paying rent went, since 25th Street was the happening place to be in Ogden. But since it was located above a store that was closed more than it was open, due to the impressive vacationing schedule of the owners, I got a great deal. It was easy for me to keep an eye on things since I almost always had students going in and out of the building, and that was part of the bargain. Of course, what I would do if I was ever faced with an intruder remained to be seen. Even though our street had a lot of homeless people, and some criminal element, due to its proximity to the Union Railroad Station, it also had a pretty impressive police presence.