Dating Can Be Deadly Read online

  The corners of his mouth twitched into a lopsided grin. “Sure.”

  I quickly headed to the drink dispenser. Maybe he didn’t recognize me? Sure we saw each other every day, when he walked into the office, but I did have a forgettable face. Not like his blond girlfriend.

  Returning to the counter with his order, I rang up the total. I offered two dollars in change to him and he reached across and held my hand while he took the bills and stated, “Your secret is safe with me.”

  When I looked at my hand I expected melted flesh where he’d touched me. Then he leaned in, and for a split second I actually thought he was going to kiss me, when instead, he whispered, “By the way, you have some popcorn, uh—” His gaze moved down to my chest then back up to my face. I could feel my cheeks becoming red.

  I noticed there were a few popcorn kernels balanced precariously in my cleavage. When I looked up again he was gone.

  The rest of the shift was quieter, but I was relieved when it finally ended just before midnight. Lara linked her arm in mine as we stepped out of the theatre and into the chilly night air.

  “He said he’d keep it a secret, right? So what are you so worried about?”

  “I dunno,” I replied glumly, as we cut across the parking lot.

  “Oh. I get it.” Lara nudged me with her elbow. “This is the suit you’ve been drooling over for years, huh? Mr. Sexy Lawyer at your firm.”

  I began to protest, then relented. “I was surprised he even recognized me.”

  “Why wouldn’t he? You’ve been working at that firm for what? Two years?”

  “Yeah, but did you get a load of his girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, I see your point.”

  We continued our walk. My apartment was less than a block from the movie theatre but I was accompanying Lara across the street to her bus stop.

  “You don’t have to wait with me,” Lara said. “The bus will be here in less than five minutes. Go on home. You look beat.”

  “I am beat. It’s just that…” My eyes were drawn to the old building behind us. It looked like it had been a store at one point, but now it was boarded up with posted signs indicating it was zoned for demolition. My heart was jackhammering painfully inside my chest.

  “Oh, my God! You’re doing that thing with your eyes!” Lara grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me roughly. “What is it?” She looked around wildly.

  “I’ve got a real bad feeling about that place.” I looked up the road and nodded with my chin. “There’s another bus stop a block up. I’ll walk you over there.”

  She shook her head. “No way.” She pointed to the building behind us. “Besides, there’s nobody in there, it’s pitch-dark.”

  “Yeah, but still…” My palms were beginning to sweat and I had more than a bad feeling now—I had an image of a woman flash in my mind. A very dead woman. “Oh jeez.” I rubbed at my eyes. “Come on!” I yanked Lara by the elbow and tried pulling her up the road.

  She tugged her arm free and studied my face. “You’re really scared. Is this another cat thing? I don’t spook easily but you are making me so curious.” She headed for the main entrance to the vacant building.

  My stomach was churning as I followed her. There wasn’t much to see. It was a dilapidated gray stucco building with Keep Out signs hammered to the front door and a cement lot that circled the structure. Lara walked determinedly around the perimeter of the building. At the back, where a board had fallen away, she paused before peering inside the abandoned structure.

  “Nothing!” She let out a disgusted breath. “I’m telling you, Tabitha, after everything Jenny’s told me about this psychic thing you’ve got going on, I’m kinda disappointed.”

  “Yeah, well, Jenny does tend to exaggerate.” I glanced around and sighed with relief that no bogeymen were lurking in the parking lot behind us either. “Guess my feeling was off.” I didn’t want to think about the image that had flashed through my mind. “Let’s go.”

  “Hey, what’s that?” Lara asked before we’d taken a step.

  “What?”

  “Painted on that Dumpster.” She nodded to the corner of the parking lot with her chin. “Could that be…” She began walking toward it. “Oh, my God, it is! It’s a pentagram! You said there was one at the cemetery, too, right?!”

  My feet froze to the pavement. A streetlight in the corner of the lot angled a dim yellow sheen bathing the Dumpster in an eerie glow. Spray-painted over the words, Pacific Refuse Inc., was a black pentagram. That real bad feeling I’d had earlier returned. Lara walked closer to the bin and was now only a couple of feet away.

  “Don’t,” I said weakly.

  “It’s just a Dumpster.” She looked over her shoulder at me and made clucking noises. “Unless you’re thinking there’s something in here besides trash, like maybe another mutilated cat or something.”

  “It’s the or something that bothers me and I’m not hanging around to find out.” I stomped away hoping that Lara would follow, but after a dozen steps I looked over my shoulder and saw that she was not behind me. She’d done the exact opposite—she’d shimmied up the side of the Dumpster.

  “You know what?” Her voice echoed loudly inside the container. She shoved herself off, landed on her feet and wiped her hands on her jacket with a look of revulsion.

  “What?”

  “The Dumpster’s empty but there’s a puddle of something inside there. It looks like it could be blood. Of course, it’s hard to tell in the dark.”

  My throat tightened. “I’m guessing there’s a lot more blood than would come from a cat, right?”

  “Yep. A lot more.”

  I wanted to run. Run far. Run fast. Lara, on the other hand, did the exact opposite, again. She called the cops.

  Twenty minutes later I was sitting curbside with a good view of one of Seattle’s finest shining his flashlight into the Dumpster. He pushed himself off it in much the same manner as Lara had and then his partner climbed up and did a similar look-see inside with his flashlight. Lara was pacing nonstop in front of me, her face bright with excitement.

  After a few minutes, the cops strode over. One was a fiftyish Hispanic guy with a thick mustache. The other was a younger cop who was built like a refrigerator with stringy blond hair.

  Refrigerator Cop spoke first, addressing Lara. “You’re right that it looks like blood but, obviously, we can’t tell just by looking at it that it’s from a human. Probably somebody just dumped some meat.”

  I let out a snort from my place at the curb and Refrigerator Cop turned and narrowed his eyes at me. “Tell me again what brought you around the building to look in the Dumpster.”

  “Hey, I didn’t look in there,” I protested. “I was just following her.” I indicated Lara with my chin.

  “Yeah, and she wanted to check because you had a psychic vision or something,” Mustache Cop said sarcastically and he and his partner shared identical smirks.

  I got to my feet and clapped my hands together. “Well, looks like you guys have everything under control, so I’m going to go home to bed.”

  “We’ve got the crime lab guys on their way and they’ll check out the Dumpster to be sure,” said Mustache Cop. “And we’ve got your information, so we’ll be in touch if anything further comes up.”

  The look on his face said that he didn’t believe anything further would come up. He believed the pentagram on the side of the Dumpster was teenage graffiti and that the gooey stuff in the Dumpster was not human blood. I slid my gaze to the Dumpster and fear made my nerves ping.

  Lara caught her bus and I ran the rest of the way to my apartment. I spent the better part of the night not able to sleep because of an unending slide show of morbid snapshots that flashed behind my eyelids. It began with the poor mutilated kitty in the graveyard, then that picture faded and the image of a woman’s bloody torso took its place. In the final slide, I saw the inside of a dimly lit building where someone was lighting a large black candle. I could almost smell the wax at this point. That’s when I would wake up in a cold sweat. Needless to say, fighting the dreams meant that sleep eluded me until I finally helped it along at three-thirty in the morning with tequila—kept for medicinal use only.

  Since my car was sick I’d set my alarm for 6:00 a.m. It was an hour earlier than usual, but it would give me plenty of time to catch a bus and get to the office promptly. However, tequila-induced sleep does what it’s supposed to do. I slammed my fist on the snooze button no less than a dozen times. When I finally did roll out of bed—groggily at that—it was after eight.

  “Holy shit!” I yelped and stumbled into the shower.

  My apartment was described in the ad as a cozy, metropolitan unit with a parklike view. Actually, it was a dumpy basement studio with narrow, dirty windows, one of which looked out onto the parking lot and some sparse shrubs. The pipes grumbled before spewing hot water for my five-minute shower, then I wrestled my eyelids to remain open long enough for me to impale them with contact lenses. I was hopping into pumps and running out the door a couple minutes later.

  As usual, my neighbor, Mrs. Sumner, opened her door a crack and peered at me. Also, as usual, Mrs. Sumner, a stale fiftyish woman, had her hair in curlers, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth and sported a ratty pink housecoat. The only time I ever saw poor Mr. Sumner, a meek whipped form of a man, was when he was sneaking out the door and tiptoeing down the hall.

  “Mornin’, Mrs. Sumner.” I nodded as I passed.

  “If you’re gonna be comin’ in late and leavin’ early don’t always be slammin’ your door!” she shouted after me.

  “Bye, Mrs. Sumner,” I shouted back and ran as fast as I could.

  The prestigious law firm of McAuley and Malcolm practiced family and criminal law a
t its location on the twelfth floor of the Bay Tower. It blended with similar glass office buildings downtown that hugged the shores of Elliott Bay. The good news was that there was a bus stop directly in front of the gleaming office tower. The bad news was that I fell asleep on the bus and woke up six blocks past my stop and had to jog back.

  In the elevator I attempted to compose myself. I smoothed down my frazzled hair, straightened my skirt and took deep calming breaths. At the twelfth floor, the elevator doors whooshed open onto the reception area. A large mahogany desk, in the shape of a horseshoe, stood front and center. It was my duty to sit behind it and answer telephones. Since I was now an hour late, Jenny was there instead. She looked up at me, her eyebrows raised in amusement.

  “You look like shit,” she said, getting to her feet so that I could slip behind the desk.

  “I also feel like shit.”

  “First morning taking the bus didn’t go well?”

  “I’ve discovered a fascinating fact about morning transit commuters,” I announced, depositing my purse into the bottom desk drawer. “Most people who take the bus do not bathe and those that do, choose to do so in loathsome perfumes.”

  A call came in and I put on my office voice and sang, “Good morning, McAuley and Malcolm. How may I direct your call?” I managed to transfer the call without cutting the person off.

  “I thought maybe you looked like shit because of the whole pentagram and bloody Dumpster thing,” Jenny put in.

  “Oh, that. I guess Lara told you.”

  Jenny grinned. “She woke me out of a dead sleep to tell me every detail.” She leaned in. “Do you really think somebody was killed and tossed in that Dumpster?”

  Before I could reply, the elevator doors opened and Clay Sanderson stepped out along with senior partner Ted McAuley. They appeared to be engrossed in a serious discussion as they passed through the reception area with barely a nod in my direction, but suddenly Clay stopped.

  “Do you smell that?” he asked.

  Old Ted McAuley sniffed loudly. “Huh? What? I don’t smell anything.”

  Clay shrugged. “Odd. For a second I was sure I smelled popcorn.” He glanced over at me, behind Ted’s back, and winked before they continued on their way.

  “Oh, my God,” Jenny breathed. “He actually winked at you!”

  “Yeah. Every time he points his baby blues in my direction I almost have an orgasm.”

  Jenny laughed. “Lara told me he saw you working the theater last night but he agreed to keep it a secret.”

  “I guess I’m pretty lucky. If word got around the firm that I was dishing up popcorn at night I’d be a laughingstock and I’d never be considered worthy of anything above receptionist.”

  The day trudged on as it usually did. I answered calls, transferred most, lost some and muscled the word processor into producing a couple of interoffice memos. Jenny and I went to the deli next door for lunch where she interrogated me further on Lara’s Dumpster diving and I filled her in on the details of my nightmares.

  The day picked up speed after lunch and the staff made their usual dash for the elevator at five.

  Jenny paused while she slipped her arms inside her coat. “How come you didn’t sneak out with the FedEx guy?”

  I shook my head. “Can’t today. I don’t have enough time to go home before I need to be at the Megaplex. I might as well hang around here for a half hour. Maybe I’ll get caught up on my typing.”

  Jenny blinked at me and frowned. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”

  I assured her I was, even though bobbing aimlessly inside my head were bleary images of a bloodstained Dumpster and a woman’s mutilated remains. If I had my way those images would be forcibly tucked away into the furthest reaches of my gray matter.

  “Okay,” she said, eyeing me skeptically. “But if you need to talk just call me on my cell. I’m having dinner with Jed.”

  “Jed? Is he the guy from last week, the one from the meat packing plant?”

  “No that was Ed. Jed’s the guy from that doughnut shop in North Queen Anne.”

  “I thought that was Fred.”

  She shook her head. “Fred was the guy I faked orgasms with. The one who was into scented candles.”

  “Oh.” Between the butcher, the baker and the candle-sex-faker it was getting harder and harder to distinguish Jenny’s dates from one another.

  After Jenny left, the partners began filing out of their offices. Clay Sanderson was the last to appear. He pushed the call button for the elevator then sauntered casually back to my desk and stood smiling rakishly.

  Feeling as though I should say something, I blurted, “Thanks for last night.” I nibbled my lower lip. “I mean, thanks for not saying anything about seeing me last night, working at the Megaplex.”

  His eyes sparked and he leaned a hip against my desk then reached over and playfully tugged at a strand of my hair. “Lucky for you I have a weakness for a woman who smells of melted butter.”

  Oh, boy.

  Clay picked up his briefcase and strode back toward the elevator, which was taking an eternity to arrive. Suddenly, the doors did open and out stepped a stocky middle-aged man with skin the color of espresso. He wore a rumpled overcoat, a worn tweed suit and a dour expression.

  The sight of him triggered another premonition, and fear tripped up my spine like a lover’s knowing touch.

  Chapter Two

  “Tabitha Emery?” the man asked, his feet eating up the floor between the elevator and my desk.

  “Yes?” I gulped.

  Reaching into a pocket he pulled out his identification. “Detective Jackson.” He tilted his head. “Is there something wrong with your eyes?”

  “No.” I tried to control the flutter of my eyelids that came with a premonition, stress or after eating bad clams. My fluttering eyes noted that Clay Sanderson’s hand was holding the elevator door open, but he had yet to step inside.

  “I’d like to talk to you about last night,” Detective Jackson announced.

  “Yeah, well, I’m kinda busy right now.”

  He frowned at his Timex. “You only work until five and it’s presently five-o-three. I think you can spare me a few minutes.”

  Clay gave up on the elevator and let it leave without him. He walked directly toward me.

  “Is there something that I can help you with, officer?”

  Detective Jackson flicked a gaze in Clay’s direction. “And you are…?”

  “Miss Emery’s attorney, if she needs one.”

  My eyelids popped wide open. Aw geez! I did not need Clay Sanderson wading right into the cesspool section of my life.

  “It’s okay!” I announced to Clay with a smile before turning to the detective. “I’ll answer your questions, but I don’t have lots of time because I have to get to my other job.”

  Clay put his briefcase down and his eyes leveled with mine. “Tabitha, if you’re having a discussion with the police, don’t you think it would be helpful to have an attorney present?”

  “I don’t need a lawyer. This is nothing.”

  The detective merely shrugged. “I wouldn’t exactly call murder nothing.”

  “Murder?” Clay and I chorused.

  Clay’s voice was hard and clipped. “My office. Now.”

  Clay Sanderson’s office had a large rectangular desk in golden oak and I’d often visualized him tossing files to the floor and taking me next to his inbox. There was also a large window that had a stunning view of Elliot Bay. A row of pigeons sat glaring at me from the ledge like feathered jurors. In the corner of the office there was a small round glass table circled by four chairs where Clay headed and parked his rather fine ass. The detective, who definitely did not have a fine ass, followed and sat across from Clay, and I took the chair between the two.

  “What’s this about? From the beginning,” Clay barked.

  “Well, after we finished work at the movie theater,” I began.

  “I want to hear it from him,” Clay snapped.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “And don’t roll your eyes,” he added.

  Sheesh!

  “Well, sir—” Detective Jackson leaned back in his chair and pulled a small notebook from his pocket “—shortly after midnight Miss Emery called in a situation and—”