Chapter 3

It was about a week after that jaunt up to the rural setting of the target in the client’s requested investigation that I just happened to hear the tail-end of a report on a triple murder in that same region and it caught my attention like the scent of freshly killed skunk on a country highway.

The fact that it involved a church-going, middle-aged female and two eighteen year old boys with no prior record made my hackles stand up and I started looking over my shoulder almost immediately.

I put everything down and called the district supervisor to see if there was any connection between our assignment and the current nasty developments.

“Connection?

What do you mean ... connection?”

Ziggy sounded confused and totally disinterested.

I suddenly realized that the agency didn’t have any pony in this race.

I decided to do some investigating of my own and discovered our “client” was one of those generic lawyer fronts with an empty lot in the industrial zone as their only anchor to actual existence. Suddenly, I had a premonition that our little trace operation was just a finding mission to locate a target for some very bad people.

The fact that I had only recently been in bed with not only the mother, but also the two twin, eighteen year old sons tended to make me a witness in this case and I hated being a witness to anything because I had too many secrets of my own to keep well out of the eyes of officialdom whenever possible.

For those of you that don’t exactly remember me, my name is Felicia Smothers and I am a registered P.I. (Private Investigator) for the Pringleton Detective Agency with reciprocal certifications in several other states. I usually stay away from any cases that might have dangerous interactions because I was once raped and beaten up in an urban basement just trying to run down a dead beat desertion case for the department of social services. I had happened when I first started out in the business, but I never forgot the days in the hospital and the unwanted two months at home without any steady income because in this line of work, you only get paid when a case is closed.

My uncle Jimmy took care of those two jerks in a way that I thoroughly approved of, but had to pretend I had no prior knowledge of the bloody circumstances in order to stay out of prison myself. Jimmy was sort of the “black sheep” of the family and generally stayed “out of sight and out of mind” completely off the grid and never fingerprinted or photographed for any reason whatsoever. I had two cousins that claimed he didn’t exist mainly because they had never seen him and they had no interest in making further inquiries of the older members of the family for additional information.

The next day, I found myself sitting inside my beaten-up Volkswagen outside the police headquarters near the jerk-water town on the Jersey shore. I nervously smoked a cigarette that I had hidden in the glove compartment because I had “quit” last month in a flurry of good intentions.

I dreaded making a statement on the case because I knew I would come off a suspect because I had bonked not only the deceased mother, but also the two twin sons, both proud possessors of oversized cocks that made them the pride of their mother’s eye.

It was an affair that was “spur of the moment” and had nothing to do with the case.

It was supposedly just a simple beneficiary trace job with a minimal reward for verifying the identity of the target beneficiary. At least, that was the concept and it all seemed plausible until the targets all suddenly became deceased and it was definitely not suicide or an accident.

I knew from past experience how my connection would sound to the cops and that I would be an unfortunate thread that would be on their radar until the case was brought to a satisfactory conclusion. That was not good for the Agency, it was not good for me and it certainly was not good for any hope I had of finding Mister Right.

The grinding out the last inch of that cigarette with my six-inch heel was like double-tapping a pervert with no witnesses to be wagging their tongues to the authorities. Not like I was into that sort of thing like my Uncle Jimmy and his faceless associates. I watched the boys in blue buzzing around the station like bees looking for honey.

At least, our cops had handguns to defend themselves with, not like the unfortunate British cops with only their ID cards to wave showing their authority. I never could understand that reluctance to arm a cop just because some pricks in authority were too conscious of “feelings” to blow away some perps with mean-spirited aggressiveness baked into their psyche by drugs and a need to victimize a defenseless public.

The main lobby was sheer chaos.

“Felicia Smothers to see Detective O’Malley.”

The overly calm desk sergeant barely looked up and pointed to the hallway at the side of elevators. I walked down the dimly lit corridor to a door that said, “Homicide Investigations” and went inside to find a much better organized group of men and women that all seemed to have a fairly good idea of what they were doing. It was quite a change from the confusion of the outer lobby.

“Can I help you, ma am?”

The young plainclothes detective was young enough to make me feel like I was robbing the cradle just to consider spreading my legs to allow him to take liberties with my personal privacy. I had always had a weakness for teenaged boys and I attributed it to my desire to have a boy of my own. I just didn’t want it to be someone like my dissolute husband Karl with his fetish stained heart that made a mockery of my love. I didn’t mind the lads being a bit rough or rude providing they delivered the goods without much unnecessary conversation that did nothing for me in the “getting laid” process.

I approached the desk titled “A.J. O’Malley, Detective Sergeant, Homicide Division” with my heart beating a trifle on the rapid side knowing that first impressions are lasting.

“Excuse me, Detective O’Malley, my name is Felicia Smothers and I am here to talk about the triple murder up north that has the press all in an uproar about crime being so rampant that it is out of control in our jurisdiction.”