Finders Keepers Losers Die

  Finders Keepers Losers Die

  Title Page

  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

  EPILOGUE

  About The Author

  CHAPTER 1

  FINDERS KEEPERS LOSERS DIE

  Cat Sinclair Mystery #1

  Carolyn Scott

  Copyright 2013 Carolyn Scott

  Visit Carolyn at http://carolynscottbooks.com

  Smashwords edition

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  About This Book

  Murder, mayhem, and more shady characters than she found in Hollywood are turning bit-part actress Cat Sinclair from a crappy secretary into a powerhouse in the P.I. business. If only someone would inform her boss.

  When Will Knight refuses to take the case of a jilted wife who's only after what's rightfully hers, Cat decides to help her on the side. But when the ex-husband turns out to be a mobster, and dead, Cat needs all her acting skills to keep her stressed-out but sexy boss from learning of her involvement. And to keep the killer from coming after her.

  CHAPTER 1

  "Cat." The voice seemed to come from everywhere, surrounding me. "Cat? Are you asleep again?"

  "Huh?" I squinted up at the handsome man standing at my desk. Not as Calvin Klein-model gorgeous as the man in my dream but still good looking with excellent bone structure, bright blue eyes and sandy hair that was long enough to reveal its natural curl but not so long that I wanted to take the scissors to it.

  Carl Fortune shook his head and smiled. "You better not let Will catch you sleeping again."

  "Is he here?" I looked past Carl to the front door of the small office. Nothing but the busy mid-morning traffic of High Street beyond. I breathed out slowly and slumped back in my swivel chair. Saved. Last time my boss had woken me up, he'd gone ballistic. I thought he'd fire me. Carl thought he'd fire me. Gina, my best friend who ran the florist shop next door and heard the entire argument through the paper-thin walls, thought he'd fire me.

  Thank God he hadn't. If I could afford to be unemployed I wouldn't have taken this crappy job. As office manager for Knight Investigations—a P.I. firm located in a multicultural suburb of Renford—I paid the bills, filed and answered the phone, when I wasn't chatting to Gina, browsing the Internet, or napping.

  Yeah, yeah, I should work harder. I tried that once, when I started. But six months later, I was so bored. Besides, it's not like anyone really cared about my work. I mean, so what if the occasional phone call went through to the answering machine? And no one even noticed when I filed a client's case notes under H for Hot Guy.

  At least I was there in case a potential client walked in off the street. What more could Will ask for on the pittance he paid me?

  The door swung open and the warm breeze peeled off the top layer of papers stacked in my In tray. Will Knight stepped in and shut the door on the humming traffic. He flicked through a file in his hand, his dark brown hair flopping over his face so I couldn't make out his mood. Unlike his fellow investigator, Will's hair hadn't seen a pair of scissors, nor a comb probably, for months. I'd once told him to get it cut but he'd grumbled about being too busy.

  "Any messages?" It came out as a grunt. Definitely a bad sign. He'd been with our most lucrative and most irritating client, Frank Waterstone, all day so no wonder he was in a grumpy mood.

  "Um." I scanned my desk. There was a message somewhere. I remembered taking it. Where the hell had it gone? I checked under the keyboard, on the floor, in the waste basket. Nowhere.

  "Well?" Will looked up. The crease between his dark eyes deepened.

  I knew that look. He was going to blast me. It took all the acting skills I'd learned in L.A. to fake nonchalance.

  He stepped closer and peered at me from under his fringe. Really looked at me. Suddenly the crease disappeared and he did something I hadn't seen him do in a long time. He smiled. Sort of. Just a little twitch of the lips, but definitely a smile.

  What the hell for? I checked the corners of my mouth for sleeping drool but everything seemed dry. Something green hanging from my nose? I swiped. Nope.

  "What?" I cried. "What is it?"

  "Why do you have a post-it note stuck to the side of your face?"

  I grabbed at my cheek and tore off the yellow sticky note. Bingo! Mystery solved. "It's a message," I said, trying hard to sound cool and unflustered.

  "Go on."

  Illegible scrawl spelled a person's name and phone number on the yellow sticky note. "Someone called you." I turned the note upside down and around trying to decipher my own hieroglyphics.

  "Who?"

  I squinted but the letters just didn't look like English. "Stan?"

  "Who?"

  "Sam?"

  "You can't read your own writing, can you?" The smile vanished, replaced by the familiar scowl. Poor guy. Sometimes I felt sorry for him having me as an office manager.

  Then again, maybe not. He was a bastard. He deserved me.

  "I wrote it with my left hand because I was typing with my right." That seemed to appease him so I didn't tell him I was composing an email to my mother.

  He heaved a weary sigh. "Give me a look." He snatched the note out of my hand.

  "Hey, you only had to ask."

  "Slim."

  "Slim? What kind of name is that anyway?"

  "The name of our new biggest client. He signed up yesterday." He rubbed a hand through his hair and massaged his neck. "Jeez, Cat, why didn't you call me on my cell when he rang?"

  I stood and folded my arms. I was still about a foot shorter than Will but it made me feel a little less at a disadvantage. "Because you never asked me to. And I didn't realize he'd replaced Waterstone on the butt-kissing ladder. What am I, a mind reader?"

  That earned me another scowl. "Why me?" he muttered, arms outstretched.

  I wanted to say, "Because you're a cranky bastard," but he'd already shifted his focus to Carl who stood with barely feigned amusement in his office doorway.

  "Did you call your DMV contact?" Will asked Carl, striding past him into the room beyond.

  "Just got off the phone now. You were right. The car is registered—" They shut the door, muffling the rest of the conversation.

  That's right. Shut me out from the real work. Again.

  My computer bleeped and I clicked on the email message. It was from my mother. A year earlier, when Dad died, she discovered life and technology. She became the proud owner of an iPad, surround sound, and a Macbook. Most days she surfed the Net and emailed me interesting but useless stuff she'd Googled. Of course I had to check them all out and send her my opinion.

  The email linked to a site voting for the sexiest actors under forty. My mouse hovered between Chris Hemsworth and Henry Cavill when the door to Carl's office behind me opened and Will stalked out. I quickly clicked on the minimize button but I knew with a sickening feeling in my stomach that he'd seen ever
ything.

  "Research," I said quickly. "The agency should have a website so I was just checking out some popular ones for ideas."

  "If I find a picture of myself on the Internet, you're fired." He turned to Carl. "Find that car by the end of today. We need this one. And you." He paused at the front door and fixed me with a glare that could wither entire plantations. "Try to do something useful while I'm gone, like file those reports, pay the bills, or…something!"

  "Where are you going?"

  He opened the front door. "Meeting with Slim."

  "Can't I come with you? I could write the minutes."

  He barked out a laugh. "You've never written minutes in your life, why start now?" He left.

  I was still seething over that comment when a woman walked in, her head slightly bowed. It wasn't easy to determine her age, somewhere between late twenties and early forties maybe. She had a youngish face, with big brown eyes and high cheekbones, but her skin looked like it belonged to a woman from a harsher century. She was deathly pale and so skinny I wanted to cook her a decent meal. She tried to hide her bony frame with a black dress made for a woman twice her size. It hung like a sack from her shoulders to below her knees. Her long black hair trailed down her back, shapeless and dull. The whole effect was cadaverous.

  I held out my hand. "Cat Sinclair, Office Manager."

  "Roberta Scarletti," she said. "Jilted Wife."

  All righty then. That answered my first question. It seemed every second person through Knight Investigations' door wanted us to spy on their spouse. We could make a fortune from all the cheating husbands and lying wives but Will had a strict No Domestics policy. He didn't want to get involved in people's personal lives, preferring to stick to the corporate clients with their employee background checks, insurance claims, and security audits.

  "We don't do spouse surveillance," he told me after he turned away the CEO of a national retail chain who suspected his wife had a secret lover. When I asked why, he said, "We just don't," and that was that.

  "I'm sorry," I said to Roberta, "I'm afraid Mr. Knight doesn't take on domestic cases."

  Roberta's shoulders drooped and her face sagged like a bloodhound's. "But, but you haven't heard what I want yet." Her voice was so soft I had to lean forward to hear her.

  I thought she was going to cry so I perched on the edge of my desk and nodded attentively. "Okay. Go on."

  "Well." She blew out a shaky breath. "We've been married fifteen years. Two weeks ago he arrived home and says he's leaving me. He's found someone else, he says, someone who…" She sniffed. "…makes him happy."

  Oh boy, she was going to cry. I steered her to a chair and she sat with her knees together and arms to her sides as if holding herself in.

  "But if you already know he's with another woman, why do you want to employ us?"

  She placed her fingertips to her lips. "Because," she said in hushed tones, "I want to find where he hid something."

  "And what would that be?"

  She glanced around the office, her big eyes darting to the front door, up the hall and back to me. "My grandmother's family were quite well off in Sicily," she whispered. "They did business, if you know what I mean. They would never have left if it wasn't for an altercation with their rivals. Most of the male members of my grandmother's family were wiped out, so the survivors decided to come to America to start again. They brought as much as they could carry with them, including jewelry worth thousands. It was all passed to my grandmother, then my mother and then to me on her death." Her bottom lip quivered but she managed to still it with her teeth. "But that lying son of a—" She put up a hand to stop herself. Apparently swearing was a boo-boo for Roberta no matter how bad things got.

  Me, I'd have let it rip if my husband of fifteen years cheated on me.

  "Anyway, he stole them from me before he cleared out with that woman." Her eyes flashed and I cheered inwardly at the show of venom. I wanted to see more of it.

  "How awful," I said. "Have you gone to the police?"

  "He denies stealing them. He says they're lost." She blinked back tears.

  "I'm sorry, but—"

  "Please, don't turn me away." She drew her thick black brows together and implored me with puppy dog eyes. "I've been replaced by a younger woman and I've lost everything valuable to me." Her face crumpled and I handed her a box of tissues.

  "I want to take your case, I really do, but…" God, I felt awful. She looked so weary and deflated. Her husband had trodden over her, life had kicked her, and I was going to turn her away. "There are other detective agencies," I offered.

  "But their fees are too high." Her lip wobbled and my heart lurched. "It's your agency or none."

  I felt like the biggest bitch in the world for saying so, just because my stupid boss didn't do domestics.

  Then again, finding stolen jewelry wasn't strictly domestic, it was more…lost and found. "Maybe we can work something out," I said.

  "Oh?" She smiled tentatively. "Oh, thank you, Cat, thank you." She clutched my hand with a firm grip, totally at odds with her frail frame. "You're an angel. An angel."

  I sat in my chair and turned to my computer. "I'll take down your details and everything you know about the stolen jewelry."

  She smiled. "Yes, of course. Thank you so much."

  "So how did you hear about us?"

  Roberta leaned forward. "I found your agency's card in Lou's things. He must have used you in the past." She pointed at the computer. "He's probably on file."

  I tapped Lou Scarletti into our system and a weird déjà vu feeling made me look at his name twice. It sounded familiar. I looked again at Roberta but I'd remember that sad face anywhere. I clicked the Search button but there were no matches. "The computer records only go back a few years. Maybe it was earlier."

  She nodded. "He was in jail for most of the last twelve."

  "Jail!"

  "Armed robbery."

  "Armed robbery! Why didn't you tell me?"

  "Oh, is it relevant?"

  "It could be." Will might be more inclined to take up the case if he knew he was after a real criminal. Don't get me wrong, white-collar crime is a huge problem in America, but I just didn't get a buzz out of monitoring the number of cigarette breaks taken by staff. I don't think Carl did either. The jury was still out on Will.

  "Was he a jewel thief?" I asked.

  "Bank robber. He held up two banks before getting caught." She shook her head. "I had no idea at the time that he was involved with some shady characters."

  Again, that creepy feeling. I shook it off, trying to concentrate on the here and now. "When did he get out?"

  "Three months ago." Her eyes lowered to her lap. "That's when he took off."

  Poor thing. "Don't worry, we'll get some retribution for you."

  "Yes." She smiled. "I believe you will. I can feel it in my bones."

  "You can?"

  She nodded. "My bones are never wrong."

  Useful. "But Will Knight will be taking your case," I said. "I'm not an investigator."

  "You're not? But you seem so…" She waved her hand round in little circles. "…competent."

  "Really?" Maybe I should get that in writing. "Thanks." I took her details and Roberta got up to leave. "Mr. Knight will be in touch."

  "Oh, I noticed the name of the agency has changed from the one on the card," she said. "Sinclair Investigations? Didn't you say that was your name?"

  I nodded. "My dad used to own this agency with Will Knight but he sold his share to his junior partner five years ago after a stroke. Will changed the name."

  "I see." She nodded, thoughtful. "That's nice. To have his old partner's daughter work here, I mean."

  Yeah, peachy. And probably the reason he didn't fire me. He sure as hell wasn't keeping me on for my work ethic.

  "But you're not an investigator, like your father?"

  "Not yet." One day maybe, if Will ever let me tag along to learn.

  Roberta left, looking a l
ot happier than when she arrived.

  "Is it safe?" Carl's blond head popped around his door. When he saw the coast was clear he stepped out.

  "What are you afraid of?" I asked. "Roberta? Do you know her?"

  "No, she just looked ghostly."

  "Poor woman. Her husband cheated on her and stole her family's jewelry."

  "We don't do domestics."

  I finished keying in the details of Roberta's story into our client tracking system, saying nothing.

  Carl sat on the edge of my desk and studied the screen. "Will's going to love this. Not."

  "It's not a domestic case. It's a lost and found."

  "Lost and found? What's that?"

  A new category I made up. "She wants to employ us, Carl, and that means money. Will has to take her on."

  He snorted. "You're insane. But," he sighed theatrically, "that's part of your girlish charm." He batted his eyelids at me and I shoved him off my desk.

  "Stop being an idiot and go do some work."

  "I will if you will."

  "I am working!"

  Some time later, the door opened and Will stalked in looking hot, bothered and in need of a shower. I pretended to be working. Carl stayed in his office. Coward.

  "Hi," I said chirpily.

  He took the mail without any comment and strode past my desk.

  "Um, Will?"

  "What is it? I'm very busy."

  "I got us a new client."

  That got his attention. "Really? How? Who?"

  I brought up Roberta's details on the computer. "It's all on here already."

  He stood behind me and leaned over my shoulder. He smelled sweaty but it wasn't unpleasant, just sort of manly.

  Ugh, I must have been desperate to get laid if I was thinking of my boss as a man. Usually I thought of him as a bastard.

  I tried to inch the chair forward away from him but he had a death grip on the back and I couldn't move. He leaned even further in to use the keyboard and the back of my head bumped his chest. A really nice solid, broad chest. The sort of chest a girl would love to curl up to on a warm summer night and run her fingers down.