A Game of Dons Read online

  Chapter 13

  Pete Gladiola was working on his Ducati when the call came. He had half a mind to tell the person on the other end that he was busy, but the ringtone—a nice digital rendition of Bad to the Bone—told him that ignoring this particular call was not an option.

  He didn’t even have to speak, simply listen. When the call ended, he gave a grunt of approval, although even that wasn’t strictly necessary. Acceptance was a given. The alternative was another call being placed to another person, just like himself, and since he quite enjoyed his life, that wasn’t something he was willing to risk.

  He went back to checking the oil gauge on his bike, and when the ding finally came, he knew the file was in. He didn’t have strong feelings for or against the job he’d just been tasked. To him it was just that: a job. And since he quite enjoyed living in style, this was the life he’d chosen, and there was this to be said for his employer: he paid well. Very, very well.

  Pete meticulously soaped his hands in the deep sink in a corner of his garage, then rinsed and dried them just as meticulously. Then he picked up his phone and took a seat on his bike. He liked to feel the Ducati’s power between his legs and couldn’t wait to ride out of here and start his mission. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is… He hummed the tune of Mission Impossible as he skimmed through the file. Huh. Weird. He’d never been tasked with the retrieval of a body before. Usually he was the one who made people dead and then made their bodies disappear. When he saw who the body belonged to, he whistled, showing, perhaps for the first time since he’d gotten the call, a flicker of emotion.

  He rubbed his goatee. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  The BMW dealership on Stark Street always did brisk business this time of year. Lots of tourists to check out the latest models, and a lot of them were buyers, too. Ethan Hussey stood, his hands behind his back, surveying the milling crowds on the sidewalk. Other business owners would will them to enter their place of business but not Ethan. He’d been reading Zen and the Art of BMW Maintenance—an unauthorized sequel to that perennial bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—and ever since he’d stopped trying to will the world to his ways, he’d been much more relaxed. More Zen. It certainly helped to keep his blood pressure under control, and he’d noticed his bottom line hadn’t suffered either. On the contrary, he’d sold more cars last month than the same month last year.

  The door swung open and the most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen came striding in. Or gliding was perhaps the more apt description for her mode of movement. She was a blonde with the face of an angel. So he plastered his best smile on his face and moved in.

  “Hi, there,” he said suavely. “Can I help you?”

  “Just looking,” said the woman as she let a perfectly manicured finger trail along the sleek lines of a powder blue G29 Z4.

  “Have you ever driven a BMW before?” asked Ethan, knowing that the trick was to get the potential customer in the vehicle. BMWs didn’t have to be sold. They were the superior automotive experience and didn’t need a salesman to claim their virtues.

  He opened the car door and, after a moment’s hesitation, the beautiful angel woman allowed herself to descend into the white leather seat. She placed her perfect hands on the wheel, and breathed that delicious new-car smell deeply into her—no doubt equally perfect—lungs.

  “I’ll take it,” she said suddenly, looking up at him with a dazzling smile.

  He was dazzled, too, and shocked to the core. Not once in his long career as a BMW sales representative had anyone ever bought a car this fast. He almost felt cheated out of his usual sales spiel and would have asked, ‘Are you sure?’ if his professionalism hadn’t kicked in—and his Zen attitude—and instead said, “Excellent choice, Miss. You won’t regret it.”

  And then he did.

  “The thing is… this particular model has already been sold to another customer. But I can order you the exact same one—and you can pick it up in…” he made a few quick calculations. “… November.”

  The woman lowered her sunglasses. “Relax, my friend. It’s me. Gertrude Grabarski.”

  “Oh!” he said, relief flooding him. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Miss Grabarski. I hadn’t recognized you there.” Phew. That was a close call. “When your dad reserved this car for you he didn’t tell me you were coming in personally to pick it up.”

  She shrugged. “I happened to be in the neighborhood, so…”

  “This is great,” he said, clasping his hands together. They were sweaty. Erhard Grabarski was a very important customer—not the man who took failure or lack of service lightly. “This is so, so great. Um, will you be taking the car home right now, Miss Grabarski?”

  “Yes, I will. I’m driving this little sucker right on out of here.”

  “So nice,” he breathed. “So great. You go on ahead. Enjoy!”

  She cocked an eyebrow at him. “What, just like that?”

  “Just like that! I’ll deal with the paperwork later.”

  He watched as she drove the car out of the showroom, expertly navigating the other models on display, and sighed with relief. Oh, dear. He’d almost made a bit of a bloomer!

  Chapter 14

  Alice, Fee, Rick and Reece surveyed the scene. Bianca had opted to stay home. She wasn’t all that used to locating dead bodies, and she had the bakery to take care of.

  They were standing in the weed-infested backyard of a seriously dilapidated house in the rundown part of Happy Bays, staring at what clearly was a grave. Only the hole was left now, though, not a trace of the person it had once contained.

  “Nice hole, Virgil,” said Reece. “Did you dig that all by yourself?”

  Virgil nodded. He looked a little worse for wear. Returning to the scene of the crime hadn’t done him a lot of good.

  “Standard-issue shovel, I presume?” asked Reece, keeping the one-sided conversation going. “Square, pointed or round? I find the square-point shovel offers the best results. Traction, if you know what I mean.”

  “There’s the shovel,” said Virgil listlessly, pointing at a discarded shovel.

  “Mh,” said Reece, crouching down next to it with a thoughtful expression on his face. “Gardening spade. I should have known.”

  “Oh, who cares what shovel he used?” Rick burst out. “What matters is that someone dug the poor bastard up again and absconded with the body!”

  “Just paying attention to the details, Ricky,” said Reece, twirling an imaginary mustache for some reason. Then Fee remembered. He was getting in character to play Hercule Poirot. In which case this missing person thing was right up his alley.

  “So let’s figure out who moved the body,” said Alice. “And where they took it.”

  Fee knelt down next to the grave and stared at the disturbed soil hard. “If only you could talk,” she said quietly, addressing a cut-down blade of grass. There was the pit, there was the pile of dirt, and there was the shovel—or spade. No other clues to go on. Tricky. Very tricky. She wondered briefly about CCTV, but out here in Grimey Hill there was no CCTV. There weren’t even any neighbors to provide that much-lauded social control.

  “Someone must have seen something, right?” said Alice.

  “Even if someone saw something, we can’t ask them, Alice,” Fee reminded her friend. “If we tell them we’re looking for gravediggers they might point to Virgil and we’re sunk.”

  “You’re right. We have to keep this on the down-low.”

  Down low looked like what Virgil had just hit, judging from his hangdog expression.

  “What on earth got into him?” asked Alice. “Why commit a crime just to help this woman? Granted, she got him out of a jam years ago, but this is not in the same league.”

  “She did save his life from being hunted down and killed by that mobster,” said Fee.

  “Still. I think we should talk to this Deanna. There’s something off about this thing.”

  “Of course there’s something off. She kille
d the son of a well-known mobster.”

  “That’s just it: why did she kill him? Was it self-defense? Did she lure him here with the intent to kill? And if so, why? There’s so much we don’t know that could shed light on this case that it drives me crazy that Virgil can just sit there and defend this woman.”

  They both glanced at Virgil, who glanced up at the house, a puzzled look on his face.

  “Penny for your thoughts, Virgil!” Alice shouted.

  “I was just wondering who lives here—or lived here,” he said.

  “Place looks like it’s been sitting empty for years,” said Rick, walking out of the house at that exact moment. He grimaced. “Pretty gruesome crime scene, though.”

  “Crime scene?” said Virgil. “But we cleaned it all up!”

  “Oh, there’s plenty left.”

  “Oh, God,” said Virgil, hanging his head. “I’m the worst…”

  “Criminal? Yes, you are,” said Alice. “And that’s because you’re not a criminal, Virgil. You’re a cop, and a good one, and cops were never meant to clean up after nasty killers.”

  “Deanna isn’t a nasty—”

  “What did he look like?” asked Fee, deciding to get the investigation back on track. She’d called up Victor Grabarski’s feed. It looked like one of those Rich Kids of Instagram feeds, full of fast cars, wild pool parties, fake-boobed women and expensive yachts. He didn’t call himself Victor, though, but Vic. Or @HotVic.

  “Um… just like in his profile picture, only slightly bigger. Vic had gained a lot of weight since his Instagram picture was taken.”

  “I don’t mean what did he look like, I mean, what did he look like?”

  Virgil stared at her, looking frazzled. “Um…”

  “His wounds!”

  “Oh, right. His wounds. Well, um… like I told you at the bakery, he had a hatchet sticking out of his throat. I didn’t want to remove it, so I buried him with ax and all.”

  “Ax and all,” Rick echoed, jotting down a few notes for a potential article.

  “I did wipe it for fingerprints,” Virgil said. “Just in case someone found the body.”

  “Just in case someone found the body,” Rick said, scribbling furiously.

  Meanwhile, Reece was snapping pictures of the area on his phone.

  “What are you doing, Reece?” asked Alice.

  “Collecting some background information for my file,” said the actor. “Can you show me that gruesome crime scene, Ricky? This is so great.” He followed Rick into the house.

  “He’s not seriously thinking about turning this into one of his movies, is he?” asked Fee.

  “I guess he is,” said Alice. “Just like Rick seems to want to get an article out of it.”

  “But they can’t! This story can never come out—not in print or in the cinema or as an HBO special. This has to stay between us.”

  “I’ll tell Reece if you tell Rick,” Alice said.

  “Oh, no,” said Virgil suddenly.

  They both looked up. “What’s wrong?” asked Alice.

  Instead of replying, he held up his phone. A picture of a dead man was visible, or, if he wasn’t dead, giving a very good impression of being dead. He was buried up to his neck in sand, only his head sticking out. And in the background, clearly visible… was the water well.

  “But that’s your guy!” said Fee.

  “Not my guy,” said Virgil. “But you’re right. That’s Victor.”

  “HotVic.”

  “And this picture was clearly taken right here.”

  “Who sent this to you?” asked Alice.

  “No one. It’s on Instagram. A new profile has just been created, and this is the first picture they’ve posted.” He scrolled down to the caption. It read ‘Vic Grabarski. RIP. Or is he? #thekingofinstagramisdead #catchmeifyoucan #easterhuntison #areyouhavingfunyet. #Hotvicisnotfeelingsohot’ He looked up. “This is crazy. Who would post something like this?”

  “Whoever stole your body is who,” said Fee grimly. “Looks like your secret is out, Virgil.”

  Chapter 15

  “Take this down! Take it down now!”

  Pamela’s screaming was so loud Erhard Grabarski—Eddy to his friends—was afraid it could be heard all along the coast. At least the household staff could hear it, for already he could hear murmurs in the hallway, and the stomping of feet as people flocked to listen at the door.

  “Keep your voice down!” he hissed. “Do you want the whole world to know?”

  “Wake up, Eddy!” his wife cried. “The whole world already knows!” She was waving her phone, where Vic’s picture was portrayed in the most horrible way possible. “I want this Instagram taken down—it’s going to ruin Heike’s birthday!”

  “I don’t think Heike cares a hoot about what happened to Vic,” said Eddy, gnashing his teeth at the thought of so much callousness, both on behalf of Pamela and her son. Then again, Vic being Eddy’s son from a previous marriage, Pamela had never cared for him and nor had her own two kids.

  Pamela, a spreading woman in her early forties, had once been beautiful—the most beautiful woman in the world, in fact, or at least the great state of Minnesota. Crowned Miss Minnesota in the year of our Lord 1981, she’d gone on to marry and divorce a night club owner, mothering two kids, before falling for ‘bad boy’ Eddy, twenty years her senior.

  “Why would he? Vic never liked us—always calling Heike and Gertrude the devil’s spawn—as if I were the devil! So as far as I’m concerned: good riddance!”

  “Don’t you dare speak like that about my firstborn!” he roared.

  “He got what was coming to him! He was a nasty little brute, Eddy—admit it!”

  It was true that Vic had a nasty streak, but he was still his son—and now someone had killed him and was using his dead body to garner more likes and follows!

  “Look, nobody cares about this Instagram thing,” he said placatingly.

  “Everybody cares! I’ve been getting messages from all over the place!”

  Eddy, a chunky man with a lot of dark body hair—except on top of his head—frowned darkly. In his world nobody used Instagram, or at least not for the business side of things. To post pictures of their kids and grandkids, sure, but not for this kind of stuff. This was business. This was one of his enemies who’d whacked his eldest out of spite and was now taunting him—rubbing his face in it. Oh, curse these social media sites. Couldn’t they do things the old-fashioned way and send him a picture in the mail? No, they had to go and post it on a platform that potentially could reach millions—maybe even billions!

  His jaw worked as he tried to tamp down his fury. His eldest. His crown prince. Dead. He took another look at the picture, as it had appeared on his own phone half an hour ago. An anonymous source had sent him the link. The moment he’d clicked on it, he’d known this was no joke. Vic was dead—dead! Throat cut, by the looks of things. A hit by one of his competitors, obviously. But who? Who?!!!

  “You need to take care of this, Eddy,” said Pamela, waving her phone in his face. “I’m not going to let this ruin Heike’s twenty-first.”

  “We should probably cancel. It’s not right.”

  “We’re not canceling anything! My son is only turning twenty-one once.”

  “My boy is dead! Don’t you think it’s a little disrespectful to celebrate now?!”

  She shrugged. “Vic’s been dead to me ever since we got married.”

  “Well, not to me!”

  “Deal with this, Eddy. Make it go away,” said Pamela icily, and stalked off.

  “Oh, I’m dealing with it,” he muttered. He planted himself in front of the floor-to-ceiling window offering a stunning view of the Atlantic. When Pete was through with whoever was responsible for his son’s death, they’d be sorry they ever laid a hand on him.

  Farmer Fred Decker was working the field, disking and preparing the soil to plant a second crop of potatoes. It was a tough job but someone had to do it. He sat back on his tractor, his
straw hat low on his head, his phone playing an old classic tune. He was singing along, his trusty border collie Boomer next to him, while he let the powerful machine do the work. Suddenly, Boomer started barking like mad, then hopped off the tractor. What the…

  “What’s wrong, boy?” asked Fred, craning his neck to keep track of the dog.

  He cut the tractor engine and climbed down to see what was going on. Boomer had stopped at a scarecrow planted about fifty yards ahead of where the tractor was headed.

  A puzzled look on his face, Fred walked up to the scarecrow. Kids, probably, playing some kind of silly game. Good thing Boomer had seen it or he might have mowed it down.

  It was only when he came closer that he saw it was a very lifelike scarecrow. In fact so lifelike it almost looked like… a real man.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered, and spat a wad of spit on the ground.

  He studied the object up close. Yup. Looked like a real man, all right.

  Strung up on a wooden framework, the dude had his eyes open, a nasty wound where his throat used to be. He was kinda portly, too, or maybe that was just plain bloat.

  Fred took out his phone and snapped a couple of pictures, posting them on his Instagram. Then, since Boomer wouldn’t stop yapping and jumping up and down, he made a little video featuring Boomer, the dead dude, and his rig in the background. He hit Share.

  “Let the hits come,” he said, chuckling lightly. Fred and his brother Ned, who owned the next farm, had been engaged in a friendly little competition as to who could garner the most likes and followers on the Instagram they shared. Ned & Fred’s Feed, it was called, not all that original. Farmer influencers, they called themselves. According to Ned if they hit a particular number of followers, the endorsements would start coming in hard and fast, and they could potentially clean up, just like the Kardashians or that JiffPom.

  Fred had expressed his reservations, and so had Mrs. Fred. Whatever his qualities, he was no Kim Kardashian, and Boomer was no JiffPom. But Ned had been adamant: why should they miss out on this influencer gold rush? Darn it—if JiffPom could do it, so could they!