Finders Keepers Losers Die

Copyright 2013 Carolyn Scott

Visit Carolyn at
http://carolynscottbooks.com

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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 everything.

"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."