Dial M for Mischief

“Jermayne Johnson.” Jade looked at Sam. “Sam, maybe you remember this one. Terrell Johnson? The high school basketball player who was found shot on a city playground about ten years ago?”

“Yes, I think I remember that. He was just about to sign a letter of intent with one of the top Division One schools and then he was gone.” He shook his head. “A real waste of a good kid. Scholar-athlete, wasn’t he?”

“He was going to use his talent to get his grandmother and brother out of the city—that’s what the grandmother told Teddy. So Teddy got them out. He wiped out more than half of his savings doing it, but that’s Teddy.” Jade shrugged her shoulders, sighed. “That was Teddy…”

“Were the Johnsons at the funeral?” Jolie asked, as long as they were all descending into the maudlin again.

“Mrs. Johnson passed away sometime last year,” Jade told them. “But, you know, I don’t think I saw Jermayne. Not that that means anything. I really wasn’t looking around, counting noses.”

“It wouldn’t have taken you long,” Jolie muttered, and Sam covered her hand with his. She didn’t pull away. The man was offering her comfort and she was grateful for the gesture. But that didn’t mean she was going to make any more mistakes. In two weeks, no matter what happened here, she would be back in Hollywood for the premiere and then off to Ireland to film a new movie two weeks after that. That’s just the way life was for her now, for both of them.

“All right,” Jessica said, still holding up a page of Teddy’s precise notes. “This could be interesting. Teddy has notations on two of the four strangling victims, made in the last three weeks. A Tarin White and a Kayla Morrison. Are either of these two the one with the daughter?”

“Kayla Morrison. Her daughter’s name is Keely. Now put that away because we’re not finished yet.”

“The warden has spoken,” Sam whispered to Jolie, and once again she had to bite her bottom lip to keep from smiling. What a strange day she was having. Tears, yes, and also laughter. And a mistake…

“Case number three,” Jade said, pulling another manila envelope onto her lap. She opened it, frowned. “Oh, this one. Another catchy headline. This one was called the case of the vanishing bride.”

“Jolie and I will take that one,” Sam volunteered much too quickly, and Jolie pulled her hand out from beneath his as if his skin had just turned white-hot. “You could say I’ve got experience.”

“Not funny, Sam,” Jolie said, absently rubbing at the ring finger of her left hand until she realized what she was doing and stopped. “Not even remotely funny.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Jolie,” Jessica said, finally closing the folder she’d been paging through for the past several minutes. “Jade? Was the bride one of Teddy’s cases or someone else he just took a shine to?”

“It was his case. But as to why it haunted him?” Jade turned a few pages and pulled out an eight-by-ten photograph, turning it so everyone could see it. “You tell me.”

Jolie’s jaw dropped slightly as she looked at the photograph. “That could almost be Jess, just with shorter hair,” she said, her stomach knotting. “How old is that picture?”

“About twelve years,” Jade said. “Our Jessica was still in junior high when the bride disappeared, I think. But it’s amazing, isn’t it? Cathleen Hanson was about as old as Jess is now when this photograph was taken, and the resemblance can’t be denied.”

Jolie felt tears threatening again. Something about this one touched her, the fact that her father had seen his own daughter in the vanished bride. “All right. Sam and I will take this one.”

“Deal,” Jade said, closing the folder and replacing it on the table. “And I’ll take Terrell Johnson. Leaving us with the fourth and last case. I don’t think we have to concern ourselves too much about it, either, because this is one cold case that gets worked every year. These others? The cops assigned to them after the primary has retired must pull the cases out once a year, look them over…and that’s about all they do with most of them. And since a homicide was never proved, the vanishing-bride case doesn’t get looked at at all. She’s just one more missing person. But it’s different with this fourth case. In fact, this one was just on the news again last month.”

“Let me guess,” Sam said, actually raising his hand as if hoping to be called upon to answer. If Jade wanted to give up her job as warden, she’d be a great high school principal. “The baby in the Dumpster. A real heartbreaker.”

“You’ve got it right in one,” Jade said, grabbing the thickest folder. “This one hurt everyone, not just Teddy, who happened to catch it late one rainy night. He isn’t—wasn’t—the only active or retired cop who kept a personal file on the Dumpster case. A baby, only a few months old, thrown away like garbage. It hit everyone—bad. The skull was kept, forensic artists update what the boy would have looked like if he’d lived, there’s DNA just waiting to be matched to someone out there. But nothing. Back when he was still on the job, Teddy would get reporters calling him every year on the anniversary of discovering the body. Which, by the way, were the only times I ever saw Teddy drunk. That he was drunk the night he died just screams to me that he’d discovered something he really didn’t want to know.”

“Which is why we’re going to work these cases,” Jolie said firmly, getting to her feet. “Is anyone hungry? I seem to have missed lunch.”

“Most of it, anyway,” Sam said, also getting to his feet. “We’ll be in the kitchen.”

“Why are you following me?” Jolie asked him once they were out of earshot. “I remember where the fridge is, you know.” God, she was a bundle of screaming nerves, ready to explode. Didn’t he know that? Surely she couldn’t be that good an actress.

“True, and I don’t think you’re planning to pocket any of the silverware,” he said, moving ahead of her to push open the service door to the kitchen. “We need to talk.”

“No, we don’t. What happened upstairs was a mistake. You know it, I know it. It was…it bordered on disgusting, frankly. I attacked you. I have no excuses, but I will say I’m sorry. But that’s it. Discussion over.”

“Agreed.”

Jolie whirled around to goggle at him. “Agreed? You agree with what? That the discussion is over? That I should have apologized? Or that it was disgusting?”

Sam held up his hands, making a T, signaling time-out. “I agree it was a bad start, probably due to a bad ending five years ago. I also apologize and don’t think we’ll gain anything by having a postmortem, okay? Although I will say it’s nice to know we’re both so limber five years later—uh-uh, no hitting.”

“Then stop tempting me,” Jolie said, sure her cheeks were growing pink.

“If I might continue? I do not, however, agree that it was disgusting. If anything, it was a little like old times…at least some of the old times. Now, white bread or rye?”

“Neither, thank you,” Jolie said quietly, feeling she’d been rightly chastened. They may not have actually swung from those chandeliers in the dining room that long-ago night, but it had been a close-run thing. And then there was the night they’d discovered the joys and varied interesting applications of the nifty pulsating hose sprayer on the kitchen sink just behind her. They’d nearly flooded the place. And that time she’d come straight to Sam’s from dress rehearsal at the local theater, still in full makeup and wearing her black wig and Velma Kelly costume from the final scene of Chicago, and Sam had taken one look at her and…

“You don’t want any bread at all?”

“Huh?” Jolie snapped herself back from the movie reel of bordering-on-the-lascivious memories. “No. I’ll just make up a small plate of ham and cheese. They practically had to sew me into my gown for the premiere at my last fitting. If I gain an ounce anywhere, I could sneeze and end up with the seams exploding in front of a million cameras.”

“Film at eleven,” Sam said, smiling.

“Yes, and the cover of every trash magazine out there,” Jolie told him as she grabbed a plastic bag filled with ham slices from the meat drawer of the industrial-size stainless-steel refrigerator. “Where’s the cheese? I really need something that wasn’t free-range-bred or organically grown or certified to be healthy for you while only tasting a little bit like soggy cardboard.”

Sam reached past her to retrieve the package and then retired to one of the stools placed at the large granite-topped breakfast bar that might, Jolie had once remarked, be used to land a 747. He turned over the package and squinted at the fine print. “Let’s see, how many calories in a slice of cheese? Hmm, how about that? More than I thought. You may have one slice, Ms. Sunshine, no more. Break it into little pieces—it’ll last longer. I always wondered what the big time felt like. Now I know. Slow starvation. You know, Jolie, you get famous enough and you could just disappear altogether.”

“Funny man.” She grabbed the package from him and pulled out a single wrapped slice. Then she thought about that for a moment and extracted a second one. Near-constant dieting was one of her least favorite things about the movie industry, and wasn’t it just like him to zero in on that fact. “You know, Sam, if you’re just going to take shots at me, we can end this right now. Jade and Jessica shouldn’t have come here, and it wasn’t my smartest move either, when you get right down to it.”

“You want to go home now, run that gauntlet of reporters again? Be my guest.”

“And don’t dare me!” Jolie turned away from him, pinching at the bridge of her nose as she mentally counted to ten, trying to calm her temper. “I haven’t slept in days. I hate staying in that house. Jade had some disaster-recovery company come in, promise to make things right again, and I guess they did—as much as they could, at least. Jade stays there with no problem. Jessica is back in her old room, surrounded by cheerleading trophies, stuffed animals and that frilly lace canopy over her bed. The princess back in residence, as if she’d never left. But I still know what happened in Teddy’s study, right below my bedroom, and whenever I walk past that closed door I—”

“That settles it, Jolie. You’re staying here with me. No more talk of leaving. And I won’t pressure you for anything else, I promise. I won’t turn you down if you offer. I’m not a monk, Jolie. But there will be no pressure, I promise. And no more arguing, either. I just want to make things easier for you.”

“You know,” Jolie said, slowly turning back to face him once more, “we never used to fight. I thought it was strange, actually, how well we…how well we got along. Slightly crazy but compatible. What happened to us, Sam?”

“We could only remain stagnant for so long before we came to a fork in the road? We got to it and I wanted to go one way, you wanted to go another. I lost. And,” he ended on a wry smile, “it turns out I’m pretty damn lousy at losing.”

“Oh, Sam,” she said, collapsing onto the stool next to his. “I had to try, I had to know if I was good enough. If I hadn’t…”

“It would have come back to bite me in the ass, I know. The road not taken, the wondering what might have been. You’d have grown to hate me, or at least resent the hell out of me. You left, you did what you had to do and now you know.You’re wonderful, Jolie. Looks, talent, the camera loves you—the whole package, I think it’s called. For a while there,” he added, grinning, “I was wishing you’d been born with a big wart on the end of your nose.”

Jolie laughed and the tension was broken. “My first agent wanted me to get my nose fixed—shorten it, thin it out a bit. And get implants, teeth caps, liposuction. I look back on that now and wonder if I would have done what he said, if I’d had the money. Now I’m the sexy but wholesome girl next door, so it’s a good thing I didn’t have that money.”

Sam reached out to run his index finger down the side of her nose. “I’m crazy about that nose. And what you’re saying is that if you’d agreed to let me bankroll you, that nose might be only a fond memory?”

“Yeah, but think about this one, Sam—the boobs would have been spectacular,” she teased, grinning at him before filling her mouth with a big bite of rolled-up boiled ham.

“Have I ever complained about that area?”

Jolie coughed, and a bit of ham stuck in her throat. She grabbed the glass he’d brought with him into the kitchen, taking a huge gulp. She shivered, a full-body shiver, and quickly put down the glass. “Eeww, how can you drink this stuff?”

“You have the palate of a plebeian, Jolie Sunshine,” he told her, pulling a glass from the cabinet beside the sink and filling it with tap water. “Real wine isn’t supposed to taste like some sweet, fizzy kids’ drink.”