A concerned uncle. A concerning nephew. A whole lot of suspects. And… murder?
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Gina Beaufort Kelly didn’t try to kill her stepson. She wants that on the record.
Eighteen years of putdowns, pranks, and one unforgettable incident involving a live slug in her handbag have left Gina with zero affection for Kenny Kelly, the spoiled, charming, thoroughly insufferable son of her late (and serially unfaithful) husband. She wouldn’t actually do anything about it, of course. But when somebody else starts targeting him, Gina’s first instinct isn’t alarm. It’s mild satisfaction.
However, Kenny’s uncle and business partner Daniel is genuinely worried. And when Daniel worries, Gina’s office manager (and Daniel’s girlfriend) Rachel worries. And when Rachel worries, Gina—owner of Fidelity Investigations, Nashville’s newest and least-busy PI firm—finds herself doing the one thing she swore she’d never do: try to keep her stepson alive.
And as the ‘accidents’ escalate from humiliating to genuinely dangerous, Gina has to set aside almost two decades of well-earned dislike and figure out who wants Kenny dead badly enough to do something about it—before the wrong person ends up paying the price for Kenny’s many, many sins.
Chapter One
“Someone tried to kill Kenny,” Rachel said.
“It wasn’t me,” I answered.
There was a pause while Rachel, Zachary, and Edwina all turned to stare at me, and while I met their gazes with a determined expression of bland stupidity.
Rachel is my office manager, my business partner, and—dare I say it?—my friend. And for my sins, she is also dating my former brother-in-law, Daniel Kelly, my late husband David’s brother.
As for Kenny—Kenneth Kelly—he’s my stepson. Or was, while his father was alive. David died the day before our divorce was finalized, so Kenny never got the chance to become my ex-anything. (Quite the blow for him. He wasn’t happy when I inherited half of David’s fortune while he had to settle for sharing the second half with his uncle Daniel and his sister Krystal.)
Zachary and Edwina, just to complete the introductions, are my office assistant and my Boston Terrier, respectively. The latter was upside-down in the former’s lap, emitting small breathy grunts while having her belly scratched, and the four of us were gathered in the front room of the Fidelity Investigations office on Music Row in Nashville, one morning just after the new year.
The holidays had been quiet, professionally speaking, anyway. Our most recent case had wrapped up just before Christmas, when Zachary had photographed our client’s husband, one Gerald Hoffmeister of Indianapolis, ducking into a female colleague’s hotel room at eleven-thirty at night. Gerald’s wife Ellen had been unhappy but unsurprised by the photographic evidence we’d submitted, and the check she’d mailed out before Christmas had arrived that very morning. Rachel had just finished slicing open the envelope when she made her announcement.
I reached over and took the check from her. It was quite a satisfying amount, especially for how little work we’d had to do to earn it. Just two days of trailing behind Gerald as he moved from the conference center to the hotel bar to his room and back. We hadn’t even had to brave the January cold.
“I didn’t think it was you,” Rachel said, as she dropped the empty envelope into the circular file. “I just thought you’d like to know.”
“Why on earth would you think that?” I handed the check back so she could fill out a deposit slip for it. “I despise Kenny. You know that.”
He had been eight when I married his father—Krystal had been eleven, and I had been all of twenty-two—and the two of them had made my life a living hell from then on. And though it was now eighteen years later, and Kenny was almost twenty-seven, he didn’t like me any better than he used to. In fact, I was pretty sure, without being able to prove it, that he had vandalized my front door with a gallon of red paint just a month or two ago.
“You don’t want him dead,” Rachel said.
“That’s what you think,” I answered. “I wouldn’t care if he was dead as long as I didn’t get blamed for it.”
Zachary snickered, but didn’t comment.
“That’s awful,” Rachel said.
I shrugged. “He was a horrible child. I couldn’t say that when he was little—you can’t talk that way about children, especially your husband’s—but now that he’s an adult, I don’t have to hold back. As far as I’m concerned, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. I’m just sorry they failed.”
Rachel sniffed. “Well, that was the second time. Daniel is very upset. But I guess you don’t care.”
I didn’t. But it was obvious that she did, and I do care about Rachel, so in the end I found myself saying, resignedly, “You’d better just tell me.”
I didn’t think I misread the quick gleam of triumph in her eyes, although it was gone almost as soon as it appeared. “So you know Kenny quit his job.”
I did know that. Last fall, Kenny and Daniel had decided to pool their money and put it toward a shared business. A month or so before Christmas, they had signed a long-term lease for a commercial space at Five Points in East Nashville, and had gone to work turning it into Kelly’s Bar. Kenny had spent the past couple of years bartending elsewhere, thumbing his nose at the hundreds of thousands of dollars David had spent on putting him through college, but once the space for Kelly’s came into their hands, he quit. Rachel had told me all about it.
“He and Daniel have been over there every day,” Rachel continued. “They’ve got a construction crew for the heavy work, but you know Kenny.”
I did know Kenny, to my detriment. He liked to be in the thick of things.
“So a little over a week ago,” Rachel said, “someone put an envelope through the mail slot at the bar. Kenny’s name was written on the front of it, but it hadn’t gone through the post office. There was no stamp, and no return address. And inside—”
“Yes?”
“Inside was a powder. Whitish, or maybe kind of yellowish. I didn’t see it, but that’s what Daniel said. He said it smelled like something had died.”
Zachary made a face.
“At least it wasn’t anthrax,” I said, since, to the best of my knowledge, anthrax is odorless.
Rachel shook her head. “No. It was asafoetida.”
I blinked. “Gesundheit?”
“Asafoetida,” Rachel repeated. “Hing. No?”
I shook my head.
“It’s an Indian spice. Very pungent. A good substitute for garlic or onion for people with allergies. They call it Devil’s Dung because of the smell. It isn’t dangerous at all, although it can certainly clear a room.”
“And did, I assume?”
She nodded. “They had to shut down work for the day. Sent everyone home.”
“But it wasn’t dangerous, you said. So… someone wanted to scare Kenny?”
“That’s what it looked like,” Rachel agreed. “Unless they just wanted to hold up the work for a day or two. If that was it, they failed, because everyone went back to work the next day. Kenny said it was probably a prank, maybe some friend of his being funny.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said, since I could remember only too well the sorts of friends Kenny used to have. White powder was right up their alley, although it was more likely to be cocaine or heroin than hing.
“Well, that’s what we thought. Or that’s what Kenny said and what Daniel believed. But then, two nights ago—”
“Yes?”
“Two nights ago,” Rachel said, “Kenny was leaving the bar late. It was just him. Daniel had left to have dinner with me, and the crew had gone home at the normal time. Kenny told Daniel that he wanted to stay to finish something. So he was alone, and he was walking out to his car in the dark—he was parked in a lot half a block away; do you know it?—and a car came out of nowhere and nearly mowed him down when he stepped off the curb.”
“Nearly,” I repeated.
“He had to jump back. He said if he hadn’t, it would have hit him.”
I opened my mouth, but she held up a hand before I could speak. “I know. It was dark. Kenny might have misjudged. And he said the car was driving with its lights off.”
I opened my mouth, and she waved me down. “Yes, Gina. I know. Even that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. People forget their lights sometimes, and that would explain why Kenny didn’t see him, or her or it, coming. But combined with the envelope—”
“Daniel is worried,” I finished.
She nodded. “And when Daniel worries, I worry. It’s not as if he does it a lot.”
No, Daniel had never been a worrier. David had been the conscientious one in the family. The successful one. Daniel was the one who went to California straight out of high school, and had spent the next thirty-five years surfing and sunning and failing at one business venture after the other. If Daniel was worried, there might actually be reason to worry.
I sighed. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“You’re a private investigator,” Rachel answered. “I want you to investigate.”
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