Anonymous Read online

  Anonymous

  A Madison Kelly Mystery

  ELIZABETH BRECK

  For my mother and father and Analise

  Chapter One

  It was speared to her front door with a rusty nail she recognized as coming from the banister of the landing on which she stood; she unconsciously leaned her weight forward to avoid resting against the railing. It was a piece of white paper, 8 ½" by 11". The kind you buy in reams from the office supply store for $6.99. Her hair was up in a bun from her run, and the ocean breeze whispered across the roofs of the houses behind her and tickled the back of her neck as if there were someone standing there, on the five-foot square of wood at the top of the stairs, bleached from a hundred years in the sun and serving as the entrance to her apartment. She whipped her head to one side and then back again, expanding her peripheral vision down the stairs to her right and toward the alley to her left. Silence, except for seagulls calling to one another overhead and the sound of waves crashing behind her. The message on the paper was meant for her. More to the point, the person clearly knew where she lived, since it was nailed to her front door. It had only one line, typed with Arial 12-point font:

  Stop investigating me or I will hunt you down and kill you. BITCH. No police.

  Between the nail and the piece of paper was a strand of long blonde hair, pierced with precision and gently waving in the breeze.

  The note and the hair would’ve been alarming enough, but the main issue, and the one that caused Madison Kelly to stand unmoving on her doorstep for several minutes, was that she had no open cases at the moment. She was investigating no one and nothing. Having closed her first murder case a few months before, she hadn’t gone back to insurance fraud investigations. She was at a crossroads. Stop investigating me. Huh. The thing was … she wasn’t.

  Chapter Two

  Madison turned and looked over the railing to the alley below. No unusual cars, and there was no one in sight. She glanced down the stairs into the courtyard garden. Her apartment was built above the garage of a 1929 beach cottage in the Windansea section of La Jolla, California, one block from the beach. A famous surf spot that rose to fame in the 1960s, Windansea still had its small-beach-town charm—despite the gentrification that seemed inevitable when hidden gems became known to the world. Her garden sat quiet and serene, unaware of the march of progress around it. She pivoted again and looked at the ocean over the tops of the houses.

  As she stared at a summer storm brewing far out over the ocean, she felt the note burning a hole in her back. The thing about being a private investigator was that she liked to investigate things. Madison had never been able to interpret whether she liked mysteries or she hated them; all she knew was that she was compelled to solve them. So the appearance of a threatening note made her want to drop everything and figure out who had left it. And yet, she’d promised herself she would take time off from investigating to figure out what to do with her life. She had to expand out of the insurance field, or she would go hungry while the big Walmart-type investigations firms took all of her work. Insurance companies wanted quantity over quality these days, and Madison’s assignments had been getting fewer and farther between. However, bigger investigations—murders—were very different from insurance investigations.

  She enjoyed watching ex-cops stumble and fall when they thought they could retire from the police department and go into PI work with “all of their experience”—which was zero when it came to insurance work. And yet, here she was imagining doing the same thing: moving into a line of work for which she had almost no experience.

  Madison turned back to the note. How could she stop investigating someone she wasn’t investigating? Since she didn’t know what she was doing to make this person think she was investigating them, she couldn’t stop. In fact, she might accidentally continue, and what would they do next? What came after a threat to kill you?

  Actually killing you.

  Madison started to get scared, an emotion she wasn’t used to. Her fear quickly turned into anger. No, she wouldn’t let someone threaten her like this. She reached up to tear the note down but stopped just before she touched it. She saw in a flash what her life would become: constantly looking over her shoulder, checking cars in her rearview mirror, suspicious of everyone, looking out her windows at night to see if someone was watching her; always wondering: was this the note leaver, here to make good on his threat? It didn’t matter that she was in the middle of a mini existential crisis. The only way to prevent a life lived in fear was to do exactly what the note was telling her not to do: investigate—but that could also get an escalation of threatening behavior. Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.

  She knew that if she turned the note over to the police, she would get a cursory investigation at best. This threat would be a big deal only to her; to the police it would be just one of the many small investigations they had on any given day—if they investigated it at all. The note was terrifying only if it was your blonde hair stabbed to your front door. And anyway, the note said no police.

  Madison looked down at her sneakers, covered in wet sand from her run on the beach. She kicked them off and pushed them to the side. It was times like these that she wished she still had her father to advise her. He wouldn’t tell her what to do—he would ask questions that allowed her to come to her own decision about the best course of action. She didn’t have anyone else she trusted to help her. She was on her own. To be or not to be? To fight or to flight? What was the right thing to do?

  “There might be fingerprints on that note,” Madison said aloud. She went inside to get a pair of gloves.

  Chapter Three

  Madison went into her apartment, careful not to brush the note on the door as she walked past. She walked gingerly on the hardwood floor, as if she were hiding from someone and trying not to make noise. Even though she wasn’t sure what she was going to do about this note, there was no point in contaminating the evidence. She grabbed a pair of surgical gloves from the built-in cabinet along the wall to the left. Her five-foot-eleven frame took her back to the door in five strides. She put the gloves on and then realized she had nothing to store the note in.

  Her apartment was a studio, with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase separating the main living area from her bed. She remembered she had a paper bag from Warwick’s Bookstore stuffed in the bookcase. It had held a large greeting card, so it would fit the note without bending it. She snatched the bag, returned to the door, and stopped; she should take a photo first. It had taken some skill to pierce her blonde hair just right, not to mention the whim of finding one of her hairs—her strands tended to cling to things—and using it to bring imagery to the threat. It certainly was effective. She went back inside, grabbed her phone, and came back and took several photos.

  Setting the phone down, she pulled on the nail; it wouldn’t budge. Had the person brought a hammer with them? The use of material from the scene—the nail from the landing, the hair—indicated they hadn’t come prepared to place the note on the door, or at least had decided once they got there that those items made a better statement. She put her foot on the bottom of the door to hold it in place and pulled as hard as she could on the nail. She worked out with weights regularly and was no weakling, but this nail was deep in the door. She pulled again, harder. Her pec muscles screamed where they’d been sliced and had healed erratically three years before. She stopped and stared at the nail. She didn’t want to use the back of a claw hammer to pry the nail out, because that would leave a mark on the paper. She thought of calling Dave, but he was probably still in the water for a morning surf session. And anyway, she’d rather not rely on a guy to solve her problems for her.

  Madison turned and went back into the apartment, bounding to the kitchen. Sh
e opened a drawer and grabbed a sterling-silver fork. Returning to the door, she placed the head of the nail between two of the prongs from the fork, careful not to touch the paper, and pried the nail out.

  She touched the paper by the edges with her gloved hands and placed it into the Warwick’s bag. Setting the bag on the large oak dining table that she used as a desk, she sat down in her office chair with a sigh. She knew what she had to do next, but she didn’t want to. She stared at her phone, willing herself to make the first move: a phone call asking for help was a good way to get past awkwardness that had caused months of silence despite a long friendship.

  Madison grabbed the phone and dialed before she could change her mind.

  “Well, well, well. They always come crying back,” he said.

  “Hi, Tom.”

  Thomas Clark, decorated San Diego Police Department homicide detective. Madison hadn’t spoken to him in two months. She was suddenly tongue-tied, and the silence went on too long.

  “So, how’ve you been? Busy?” he asked. He was uncomfortable too.

  “Can’t you see from your spot in the alley?” she said, and regretted it immediately. She’d meant it to sound funny and flippant and like she didn’t care anymore—water under the bridge, they’d both moved on, let bygones be bygones—but it came out mean. Well, frankly, maybe she’d meant to be a little mean.

  There was steely silence on the other end of the line.

  “I’m only kidding, Tom,” she said. “I don’t care, really.”

  “What do you need, Madison?”

  “I need your help,” she said.

  Tom laughed. “You need my help? Oh how the mighty have fallen.”

  Madison started pacing. She didn’t really want to get Tom involved, but she didn’t see any other way right now. And now she had messed up the phone call. He was highly regarded in the police department, having closed some of the most high-profile cases. He could get things done quickly—and quietly. And no matter what had gone on between them, they’d known each other for ten years and she knew that Tom cared about her and respected her as an investigator. The fact that a couple of months before she’d caught him watching her apartment at night meant their relationship was strained now, sure. But he was still a good cop.

  “Someone left a note on my door. A threatening note.”

  “What sort of threat? What did it say?”

  Madison read him the note. “And the thing is, I’m not investigating anybody right now.”

  “No one?” he asked. “Not some poor guy with a jealous girlfriend?”

  “Funny. I don’t do domestic investigations and you know it. They’re all batshit crazy.”

  “Okay,” he said, and was silent. Madison could tell he was doing the same thing she’d done before she picked up the phone to call him: weighing the pros and cons. Finally he spoke.

  “I can have the note processed. Is that what you want?”

  It was exactly what she wanted. “Yes, that would be great.”

  “I can come by at noon on my lunch. Where should I park?”

  Madison started to answer but then realized he was joking. He knew all the places around her apartment to park. If he could joke about it, maybe they would be okay after all.

  * * *

  Madison decided to walk to Busy Bee’s Bagels; she was starving after jogging on an empty stomach and then all of the excitement. She put on a lightweight hoodie so she would have pockets and put her wallet, keys, and phone in them and walked out her front door.

  She put in her headphones and turned on her favorite podcast, Crawlspace, to listen to the latest real-life mystery that Tim and Lance were discussing. She liked these kinds of shows and followed several podcasts covering true crime. It kept her faculties sharp. But she had to admit she was obsessed with Crawlspace: she often did further research on the mysteries they discussed, especially a San Diego mystery they were currently covering, and she tweeted the hosts constantly. Too much time on my hands, Madison thought.

  She turned right onto Nautilus, walking away from the ocean. The bagel place was only two blocks away. She stepped over the broken sidewalk where the roots of the huge trees lining Nautilus had busted through. The morning gloom was clearing, and the street was dappled with sunlight coming through the trees.

  She knew she would continue to work in investigations; she just didn’t know what kind. She had a knack for figuring things out, for getting people to tell her things they had withheld from others, for being lucky when luck was all an investigator had left. It always made her laugh when someone said to her, “You don’t look like a PI.” She would reply, “Isn’t that sort of the point?” She could follow someone for days and never get spotted; she could go undercover in a flash and get information out of someone who would clam up the minute they saw a “cop” type of person. It was rewarding to be good at something. But the freelance insurance investigator was a dying breed. And she didn’t know if she could stomach murder investigations.

  As she approached La Jolla Boulevard, Tim and Lance started discussing the San Diego mystery that fascinated her. Two young women had disappeared after leaving bars in the Gaslamp District of San Diego. Tim and Lance used their podcast to bring attention to the case and to discuss theories: Was it a serial killer who had gotten both girls, or was it a coincidence? Their bodies hadn’t been found, so were they not dead at all? Madison liked Crawlspace because, although the hosts weren’t professional investigators, they were thorough and methodical in their approach to true-crime cases.

  She paused the podcast and walked into Busy Bee’s. She ordered a toasted bagel with sesame seeds and cream cheese. She hadn’t even had the one cup of coffee she allowed herself each morning, so she ordered that with cream. She ate and drank her coffee as she walked back home, listening to the podcast. Halfway down Nautilus, the ocean could be seen framed underneath the two huge trees that met over the top of the street. It was like a 3D image of the most beautiful landscape painting you could imagine. The water in the image was so beautiful that a color had been named after it: Pacific blue for the Pacific Ocean. Madison took a deep breath of ocean air and turned into her alley. She paused the podcast again and took her earphones out; she wanted all of her senses working as she got closer to home.

  She looked around as she crossed over to her building and walked around to her stairs. No suspicious cars or people.

  She walked up the stairs to her apartment and used her key to get in. The note was still there in its bag on the desk. She stared at it like it might move on its own. She threw away the trash from her breakfast and sat in her office chair. Was she going to investigate this? And if so, where to begin?

  Suddenly there was a pounding at the door, and she jumped out of her chair; she made it to the door in three large steps and looked through the peephole. Tom thought he was being funny by doing a cop knock.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” she said as she opened the door.

  “Good. Need to keep you on your toes,” he said, walking in. “I see the place hasn’t gotten any bigger.”

  Madison stepped out of the way so as not to get run over. “I thought you were coming at lunch.”

  “I had some time now.”

  Tom sat in the wingback chair that had belonged to her third-great-grandmother. Madison treasured the chair as a memento of a woman who’d come from Ireland during the potato famine; starving to death, unable to speak English or write her name, she made it six weeks in steerage to a new country and raised a daughter who became a teacher. Madison walked the earth because of the brave women who’d come before her. Seeing Tom in the chair was jarring.

  Tom had long legs that he crossed as he sat, but he still managed to look stocky; something about the overbuilding of upper bodies in the gym that cops and criminals tended to favor. His dark hair was slicked back. He loosened his tie slightly and tugged at his crisp white shirt: the uniform of a homicide detective.

  “Make yourself at home,” she said.
r />   Madison walked over and sat down in the office chair at her desk; she swiveled to face him. There was a moment where they just stared at each other. There had always been electricity; it made the air around them crackle. Early on in their relationship, when they were just a PI and the cop assigned to her case, she’d accidentally touched his hand, and it had felt like her body was set on fire. The fact that it had never gone any further had something to do with timing and everything to do with … complications.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said.

  More silence.

  “How’s the wife?” she asked.

  “Is that how we’re going to start?”

  “I don’t know, Tom,” she said. “How should we start? What is the proper way to reacquaint ourselves? I seem to have misplaced my guidebook.” Madison got up and went to the kitchen just to have something to do. She got a glass out of the cabinet, filled it with water from the dispenser, and brought it back to Tom.

  “How is work? Any good cases?” she asked.

  “Work is fine.” He took the water with his huge hand. “And the wife and I are working it out. She has forgiven … a lot.”

  Madison looked out the window.

  “So anyway, where is this note?” he asked.

  Madison handed him the paper bag along with a pair of gloves she’d set out for him. He put the gloves on and then pulled the note out of the bag. He stared at the note.

  “Okay. So. You’re sure this isn’t someone playing a joke on you? What about the surfer?”

  Madison picked up his empty glass and took it into the kitchen.

  “Dave doesn’t have a printer,” she said. “And anyway, that’s not his style. He wouldn’t want to scare me.”

  That statement hung in the air over them for a minute. She stayed in the kitchen until it had dissipated.

  “Okay, I’ll take it in and process it,” Tom said as he stood. Madison walked into the living room and faced him.