Vice and Verdict Read online

  Vice and Verdict

  Saffron Diffley 2

  Nic Saint

  Puss in Print Publications

  Contents

  Vice and Verdict

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Final Ride (Charleneland 2)

  About Nic

  Also by Nic Saint

  Vice and Verdict

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  When popular vlogger and geocacher Kandace Slaker is found dead, Saffron and Lucien Diffley, local karma agents, are on the case. Kandace turns out to have made quite a few enemies in Happy Bays, and the investigation soon gets bogged down by a lack of evidence and an abundance of alibis. Add to that the fact that Logan Munroe, detective in charge of the case, has decided to ban the Diffleys from the investigation, and Saffron has her work cut out for her.

  Meanwhile, Rodrick Diffley is on a good deed quest—though unfortunately the people on the receiving end of the little rascal’s streak are less than thrilled with his enthusiasm. Even worse, Diffley Manor is falling apart and Saffron’s brothers, not blessed with the handyman gene, quickly cause more harm than good. And then there’s Lucien, who’s developed a crush on Detective Munroe, which only serves to make matters more complicated than they already are.

  Will Saffron be able to restore the balance of karma in her small town? Will Rodrick’s relentless string of good deeds antagonize the entire community against the Diffleys? And will the romance between Saffron and Logan finally be rekindled? Find out in Vice & Verdict, the second installment in the Saffron Diffley series. Expect an intriguing mystery, a dash of the paranormal, a whiff of romance, and an abundance of laughs.

  Prologue

  Frank ‘The Tank’ Jackson was trudging through the undergrowth, his breathing labored, his brow bedewed with perspiration, his mood a few degrees below zero. Frank wasn’t actually built like a tank. Far from it. With his spindly legs and scrawny frame he looked more like a grasshopper. Which was why his friends thought it hilarious to nickname him ‘The Tank.’ Frank didn’t think this was funny at all, but then he didn’t have a say in the matter. The poor bastards on the receiving end of a nickname rarely do.

  Frank halted his progress to take a breather. Leaning against a particularly gnarled tree, he checked his phone. The app indicated he was closing in on his target, the geocache he’d been trying to locate for the past two hours. According to the pulsating dot on the screen, all he had to do was proceed for another few clicks north and he’d be right on top of the target. Unfortunately, a few clicks on the map meant a few hundred yards in the real world, right up a steep hill and through some pretty rugged terrain—more rugged than he’d anticipated finding in this hilly part of Long Island.

  He sighed deeply and decided to trudge on. Since he already was one of his club’s least successful geocachers, he’d be damned if he was going home empty-handed.

  So he put his foot on the trail again, slipped on a tree root, and fell face-down in the muck. When he’d finally picked himself up and dusted himself off, his mood had dropped a few more degrees. It didn’t help that all around him he could hear his fellow geocachers scurrying along, eager to reach their destination before he did.

  Frank gritted his teeth, balled his fingers into fists, and moved along.

  It took him another forty-five minutes to reach his final destination, and when he did, he was relieved to find he was the first one on the scene. He knelt down next to the hollowed-out tree, stuck his hand in, and discovered that the box he’d been so eager to find was right where the app had told him it would be.

  He pulled it out and saw that it was a standard black plastic box. The sticker indicated this was an official geocache, appropriately labeled by governing site geocaching.com.

  A wide smile spread across his narrow features and he plucked a leaf from his ratty beard and a bit of moss from behind his ear. He’d done it! He’d found the prize!

  With a flourish, he opened the box, eager to discover its contents. And it was at this point that things got a little weird. For inside the box a hand had been placed, wrapped in plastic. He frowned at the hand, then picked up the hand, and turned the hand over in his hand. Why would anyone put a rubber hand in a geocache?

  Humming the classic Friends tune ‘This hand is your hand, this hand is my hand. Oh wait, that’s your hand. No wait, that’s my hand,’ he studied the mysterious hand closely. It looked so real. Almost like an actual human hand. He nodded appreciatively. He had to hand it to whoever had created the hand. They’d done a great job.

  He squeezed the hand. It felt soft and squishy. Some kind of liquid squirted from the appendage and gave him pause. And that’s when he realized that this hand wasn’t just some silly prop. This hand was a real hand!

  Frank The Tank dropped the hand from his hands and screamed.

  Chapter 1

  When I came downstairs, still wiping the sleep from my eyes, a pungent odor assaulted my nostrils and I frowned. When next smoke drifted into the hallway and made my eyes water, I gasped.

  “Fire!” I yelled. “The house is on fire!”

  I hurried into the kitchen, where the conflagration seemed to originate, and found myself confronted with a frenzied scene. My grandmother was frantically slapping at a metal object, my little brother Rodrick trying to stop her. Acrid black smoke was wafting from the oven, the thick fumes filling the kitchen and taking my breath away.

  What the hell?

  “Open the door!” Grandma yelled.

  I quickly moved over to the kitchen door and swung it open, allowing some much-needed air inside.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, joining Grandma.

  “I was just trying to do you a favor,” Rodrick replied sullenly.

  “A favor!” Grandma cried. “You set fire to the kitchen!”

  “That was an accident. I didn’t mean to set fire to the kitchen.”

  I now saw that the object Grandma had been slapping with the kitchen towel was a baking plate. On it, the charred and sad remnants of Rodrick’s baking experiment.

  Grandma coughed and took the baking plate outside, then dumped its contents into the garbage bin and replaced the lid with a resounding clanking sound.

  “My cookies!” Rodrick yelled. “What have you done with my cookies!”

  “Your cookies are dead,” I told Rodrick grimly.

  “That’s impossible! I followed the recipe!”

  Grandma returned, carrying the baking plate. “Never—ever!—let me catch you baking again, you little rascal,” she admonished Rodrick.

  “But it’s my good deed! I have to do my good deed for the day!”

  “Go and do your good d
eed someplace else,” she said. “Not in my kitchen!”

  The little tyke stomped from the room, then stomped up the stairs, stomped across the landing, and finally stomped into his room, slamming the door.

  “And don’t slam the door!” Grandma shouted at the top of her voice.

  Just then, a piece of plaster dropped down from the ceiling and landed squarely in the middle of the butcher block, into the bowl of batter Rodrick had prepared. It made a squelchy sound as it sunk beneath the surface.

  Both Grandma and I looked up at the spot. The hole that had been created when Dalton dropped one of his dumbbells through the floor of his room was still there. The big lug had promised to fix it but so far had done a pretty lousy job.

  As if on cue, my brothers came into the kitchen: Calvin, Brice, Lucien, and Dalton.

  “Something’s burning,” said Calvin, the brainy one.

  “Did you burn something?” asked Brice, the handsome one.

  “Something’s on fire!” cried Lucien, the scrawny one.

  “What’s for breakfast?” asked Dalton, the muscular one.

  Yes, my brothers wouldn’t look out of place in the next Smurfs movie.

  Calvin is Bookish Diffley, Brice is Fun Diffley, Lucien Posh Diffley, and Dalton Sporty Diffley.

  I’m Saffron, by the way, the only girl in my family. My brothers call me Spunky Diffley. No idea why, exactly. Probably because I don’t take crap from them. Or anyone. Which is one advantage of growing up with five brothers who are all older than me. Except for Rodrick, of course. Apparently he was some kind of afterthought for my parents. Their last hurrah before they shuffled off this mortal coil and left us in the care of our maternal grandmother.

  “Your brother was trying to bake cookies,” Grandma explained as she plunked down on a chair and wiped her brow.

  “Cookies?” asked Dalton eagerly. “Where are they?”

  “In the trash. At least what’s left of them. They were burnt to a crisp. Cremated.”

  “Too bad,” said Calvin, walking over to the bowl of batter. “I could have done with a few cookies.”

  He poked at the remnants of Rodrick’s great baking experiment with a wooden spoon and was surprised when a chunk of plaster came floating to the surface.

  “Oh, and one other thing,” said Grandma, observing the chunk with a gimlet eye. She swung the eye on Dalton. “When are you finally going to fix the ceiling?”

  Dalton’s own eye swiveled up. “I did fix it. I nailed a two-by-four where the hole was.”

  “I mean really fix it. Plaster up the hole. Replace the floorboards.”

  Dalton shrugged. “I’m not a carpenter. Why don’t you call in a specialist?”

  “If we were swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck maybe I would. But since we’re not, I want you boys to fix it instead. And while you’re at it, take a look at the roof. That last storm blew off a whole bunch of shingles that need replacing. And the front door squeaks. And the plumbing in the bathroom is making that gurgling sound again.”

  My brothers exchanged anxious glances. Since the family business is in the insurance trade, they’re not that accustomed to fixing stuff around the house. Then again, since Grandma is pretty much the boss around here, they weren’t going to start an argument.

  “I’ll do it,” Lucien offered bravely.

  “No, you won’t,” said Grandma. “I want Calvin, Dalton and Brice to do it. You and Saffron have other business to take care of.”

  “What business?” I asked, curious. I’d only recently started working for Diffley Insurance, the family firm, and was only a minor player—the lowest one on the totem pole, in fact.

  Grandma’s coarse features morphed into a smile. “You’ll see.”

  “But I have other stuff to do,” said Calvin. “Insurance claims to investigate. Clients to meet. People to see.”

  “That can wait,” said Grandma. She directed a look at the ceiling, where another piece of plaster was now precariously dangling, ready to take the plunge. “Diffley Manor cannot.”

  As if to add credence to her words, Jerome, the family French Mastiff, came waddling into the kitchen. The aged dog directed a glance up at the ceiling and uttered a plaintive lament. Then he darted a cheerless look at a blackened cookie that had fallen to the floor, swallowed it whole, heaved a satisfied burp, and placed his head on his legs and promptly dozed off.

  Just then, there was a loud rattling sound in the pneumatic pipe system that runs through the house. We all looked up, knowing exactly what this meant. The rattle increased in intensity and suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a small canister came rumbling down the tube into the kitchen and dropped down into the receiving station, landing with a dull clanking sound.

  With a glance at my brothers, I moved over and picked out the canister, then opened it.

  “Well? What does it say?” asked Brice eagerly.

  I took out the piece of parchment it contained and smoothed it out on the kitchen table. My brothers gathered around me and stared down at the neat calligraphic lettering, spelling out four words: ‘Kandace Slaker. Dead Person.’ It also contained a date—the date the woman was murdered.

  Chapter 2

  I glanced up and noticed a smartphone pointing at me. I rolled my eyes. “Lucien, will you stop filming, please? This isn’t a reality show.”

  “No, this is my vlog,” he said, licking his lips. Then he panned from me to the piece of parchment.

  “You do realize that this is strictly Karma Corps business, don’t you?” asked Calvin. “And you cannot put any of this stuff on your website.”

  “My vlog,” Lucien corrected him, then seemed to realize what his brother was saying. He lowered the smartphone. “I’ll delete this part.”

  “You better,” said Grandma. “If anyone finds out who you’re really working for, you’ll all be in a big old heap of trouble.”

  Jerome barked a tired bark, as if to confirm these words.

  I probably should have mentioned this, but my brothers and I are all part of Karma Corps, the organization tasked with maintaining the balance of karma in our world. You know the drill: whenever someone does something bad, effectively disturbing the karmic equilibrium, a karma agent steps in to make sure that the balance is restored and the culprit is appropriately penalized.

  Usually the police and justice system are pretty good at dealing with this kind of stuff, but things still slip through the cracks, and that’s where us Diffleys come in. As karma agents we try to figure out who did what to whom when, why and how, and then mete out the commensurate punishment.

  Mind you, I’m not exactly a specialist. Like I said, I only joined Diffley Insurance a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t mind telling you there is a steep learning curve to this karma stuff. What I do know is that our mission is not one we should post about online, like Lucien seemed eager to do.

  “So who are the agents tasked with this case?” asked Calvin eagerly.

  Calvin loves solving Karma Corps cases. He’s one eager little beaver, and then there’s the competitive aspect, of course. There’s some good-natured competition going on between Karma Corps agencies around the country, all trying to put their cases to bed as quickly as possible. There’s even a prize attached to the agent with the best clearance rate. A little like the Oscars.

  I stared down at the paper. And when I saw my name and Lucien’s, I gave a squeak of pleasure.

  “It’s me!” I said, doing a little dance. “I get to handle my second case!”

  “That’s great, sis,” said Calvin warmly. “And don’t worry. I won’t stop until I’ve taught you everything there is to know about the karma business.”

  “But you’re not my partner this time, Calvin.”

  “I’m not?” he asked, frowning. He picked up the parchment, and when he saw the name of the other agent, his face sagged. Then he dropped the parchment down on the table and walked out of the kitchen in a huff.

  “Who is it?” asked Dalton eagerly. “Is it
me? It’s me, right? I haven’t had a case in ages. Almost as if Karma Corps doesn’t trust me to handle their cases.”

  “It’s… me,” said Lucien, reading from the document. He looked surprised. Then his face lit up with a smile. “What do you know? They’ve given me a case!”

  “And why wouldn’t they?” asked Grandma, patting him on the back. ‘You’re a fine agent, Lucien. A very fine agent indeed. As are all of you, of course,” she quickly added before anyone could accuse her of favoritism.

  “How did you know?” asked Brice, staring at Grandma.

  “How did I know what?” asked the old lady innocently.

  “How did you know that Saffron and Lucien were going to get this case?”

  She shrugged. “I get hunches. It’s one of the disadvantages of old age.” She gestured at her head. “Lots of squirrels running around upstairs.” She clapped her hands. “Now how about a little breakfast?” She glanced at the mess Rodrick had created. “But first I think we’re going to have to clean up.”

  I stared down at the document. No matter how excited I was that I was going to be able to tackle another case and progress my abilities as a karma agent, I wasn’t blind to the fact that this also meant that a person had lost their life, something that wasn’t exactly cause for joy or festivities.