Second Grave on the Left Read Free Page A

with a guy nobody could see but me. After a few hefty gulps of some of the best coffee I’d ever had—Norma wasn’t kidding—I turned to Cookie. “Let’s look around a bit.”
    She almost choked on her java. “Of course. I didn’t even think of that. Looking around. I knew I brought you for a reason.” She jumped off her stool and, well, looked around. It took every ounce of strength I had not to giggle.
    “How about we try the restroom, Magnum,” I suggested before my willpower waned.
    “Right,” she said, making a beeline for the storeroom. Oh well, we could start there.
    A few moments later, we entered the women’s restroom. Thankfully, Norma had only raised her brows when we began searching the place. Some people might’ve gotten annoyed, especially when we checked out the men’s room, it being primarily for men, but Norma was a trouper. She kept busy filling sugar jars and watching us out of the corner of her eye. But after a thorough check of the entire place, we realized Elvis just wasn’t in the building. Nor was Cookie’s friend Mimi.
    “Why isn’t she here?” Cookie asked. “What do you think happened?” She was starting to panic again.
    “Look at the writing on the wall.”
    “I can’t!” she yelled in full-blown panic mode.
    “Use your inside voice.”
    “I’m not like you. I don’t think like you or have your abilities,” she said, her arms flailing. “I couldn’t investigate publicly, much less privately. My friend is asking for my help, and I can’t even follow her one simple direction, I can’t … Blah, blah, blah.”
    I considered slapping her as I studied the crisp, fresh letters decorating one wall of the women’s restroom, but she was on a roll. I hated to interrupt.
    After a moment, she stopped on her own and glanced at the wall herself. “Oh,” she said, her tone sheepish, “you meant that literally.”
    “Do you know who Janelle York is?” I asked.
    That name was written in a hand much too nice to belong to a teen intent on defacing public property. Underneath it were the letters HANA L2-S3-R27 written in the same crisp style. It was not graffiti. It was a message. I tore off a paper towel and borrowed a pen from Cookie to write down the info.
    “No, I don’t know a Janelle,” she said. “Do you think Mimi wrote this?”
    I looked in the trash can and brought out a recently opened permanent marker package. “I’d say there’s a better-than-average chance.”
    “But why would she tell me to meet her here if she was just going to leave a message on a wall? Why not just text it to me?”
    “I don’t know, hon.” I grabbed another paper towel to search the garbage again but found nothing of interest. “I suspect she had every intention of being here and something or someone changed her mind.”
    “Oh my gosh. So what should we do now?” Cookie asked, her panic rising again. “What should we do now?”
    “First,” I said, washing my hands, “we are going to stop repeating ourselves. We sound ridiculous.”
    “Right.” She nodded her head in agreement. “Sorry.”
    “Next, you are going to find out as much as you can about the company Mimi works for. Owners. Board. CEOs. Blueprints of the building … just in case. And check out that name,” I said, pointing over my shoulder to the name on the wall.
    Her gaze darted along the floor in thought, and I could almost see the wheels spinning in her head, her mind going in a thousand different directions as she slid her purse onto her shoulder.
    “I’ll call Uncle Bob when he gets in and find out who has been assigned to Mimi’s case.” Uncle Bob was my dad’s brother and a detective for the Albuquerque Police Department, just as my dad was, and my work with him as a consultant for APD accounted for a large part of my income. I’d solved many a case for that man, as I had for my dad before him. It was easier to solve crimes when you could ask the departed who did them in. “I’m not sure who