Toffee Apple Killer: Book 11 in The INNcredibly Sweet Series Read online

  “Me too,” Thomas raised his mug and she clinked hers against it.

  “So, forgive me for saying so, but… you don’t really seem like an accountant.”

  Thomas laughed. “Yeah, I get that a lot. I like numbers, and I knew going in that there was a tremendous amount of job security involved in being an accountant, so… there it is. My motives were to succeed to a degree that I’d be able to do the things that I like to do without having to worry about the financial aspects,” he shrugged.

  “Very pragmatic,” Izzy observed.

  “Like I said, middle kid from the Midwest. Let me guess, you’re either the youngest child in your family, or the only child.”

  “Only child. Was it that obvious?” she was intrigued.

  “Nah. People who pursue creative vocations just tend to be either the youngest or the only. They’re more willing to take risks and dare to follow their passion.”

  “Took some psychology classes along with all those numbers in college?” Izzy teased.

  “A few,” Thomas chuckled. “So, you said you’re impulsive… want to take a spur of the moment sail after this?” he asked, taking a long drink from his mug.

  Izzy wasn’t prepared for the question and sat staring at him for a moment before forming a reply.

  “Oh! Uh… I… can’t,” she stammered.

  “Really? Why? Prior engagement?”

  “No. No, I just… I made rules about how I was going to handle things when I signed up for the dating site, and one of my rules is that the first meeting can only be an hour, and that I would go home and think about things before I decided whether or not I actually wanted to go out on a second date,” she explained.

  She hadn’t thought that he would ask why, and found it to be a bit off-putting that she had to explain herself to someone whom she’d only known for a few minutes.

  “Well, that doesn’t sound very impulsive,” Thomas laughed.

  “There’s a difference between impulsive and hasty,” Izzy replied quietly, no longer feeling quite as friendly as she had before.

  “Why? Do I seem like the boogeyman or something?” he persisted, amused.

  “No. It has nothing to do with you. My rules are my rules, whether it’s you or someone else.”

  “Okay, I can respect that. But, if you change your mind, I’m going to be heading to the marina after this.”

  Thankfully, before Izzy could respond, her text tone went off. It was Missy, checking in with her.

  “Everything going well, darlin?”

  “Excuse me, one of my friends isn’t feeling well. I’m just going to text her back really quickly,” Izzy told Thomas.

  “No problem,” he eyed her pensively.

  “Started out nicely… now, I’m not sure.”

  “You can always make an excuse and cut it short.

  “It’s up to you, honey. Don’t take any unnecessary chances.”

  Izzy looked up from her phone to see Thomas watching her while she texted, and made a decision.

  “I hate to cut this short, but I really need to go and…”

  “Help your sick friend,” he finished her sentence for her, clearly offended. “Sorry, but that’s the oldest excuse in the book. If you didn’t like how things were going, you could have just been honest about it. That’s what adults do.”

  “How rude!” Izzy exclaimed, her cheeks burning partly with anger, and partly because she was embarrassed that he had seen right through her ruse.

  “You’re lying to me after only knowing me for a few minutes and you’re saying that I’m the one who’s being rude?” he asked mildly, leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head. “All I wanted was to enjoy a cup of coffee with someone new. If you can’t handle that, that’s fine. Go along and, “Help your friend,” he said, using his fingers as air quotes.

  “Wow. I’m really glad that you showed me who you really are early on,” Izzy grabbed her purse and stood.

  “Guess that means you don’t want a second date, huh?” Thomas grinned sarcastically.

  “Not in this lifetime,” she shook her head at the insufferable man and made her way to the door.

  “Hey, what about your flower?” he called after her, waving the rose in the air.

  “Put it somewhere really special,” she suggested, and walked out the door.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  Fiona McCammish pulled her car to the curb in front of her boss’s house and glared at the little unkempt ranch home two doors down. Steve, her deceased sister’s ex-husband, lived in the grungy place, doing goodness-knows-what to goodness-knows-whom. She’d heard that he had a girlfriend again, and couldn’t begin to fathom what kind of woman would elect to keep company with such a degenerate. Fiona and Steve had been at odds with one another from the moment that her sister had first brought him home. He considered her to be the meddling little brat who called him out on his failings, and she saw him as the loser who took her sister off the market when she could’ve done much better.

  Shifting her focus to Timothy Eckels’s pathologically neat house and yard, she took a deep breath and got out of the car. Her boss had been impossible since the accident that had left him temporarily confined to his house and a wheelchair. He’d demanded that she come get him out of the house today so that he could check the work that she’d done on a recent body. He rarely allowed her to assist when he was working with the deceased, and now she’d gone solo without even his supervision. He’d made her put him on speakerphone while she prepared the body, and she’d had to narrate her every move, with him butting in to ask procedural questions every other minute. It had been an ordeal, but she’d been ecstatic to have had the opportunity.

  “Hey, boss man,” she called out, letting herself in the front door with the key that he’d given her two days prior.

  “It’s about time,” Tim groused from his wheelchair, looking at his watch.

  The mortician’s appearance was more pitiful than usual. His thick, horn-rimmed spectacles had survived—Fiona surmised that they would likely survive a nuclear holocaust—and they magnified the purpling under his eyes. He had quite a goose egg, along with superficial gash on his left temple, where his head had hit the driver’s side window, shattering it. His left arm was in a sling, and his legs, which mercifully couldn’t be seen, were black and blue from toes to groin. It hurt him to sit, stand, lie down, or even breathe, but no bones had been broken, despite the fact that he’d been cut out of his car after it crushed around him.

  “I’m on time,” Fiona sighed. “It’s seven o’clock.”

  “It is three minutes after seven,” he snipped. “Therefore, you are late.”

  “I could leave you here, you know.”

  “I’ll fire you.”

  “Then who’ll run the business?” the sassy assistant shot back.

  “Just take me to the mortuary,” Tim muttered, knowing that she thrived on their little spats.

  Fiona grinned. “You got it, boss,” she replied triumphantly.

  She wheeled him carefully out the door and onto the tidy porch.

  “Make sure the door is locked and deadbolted. There are nefarious types in this neighborhood,” he instructed.

  “I won’t argue with you on that one,” Fiona glanced with contempt toward Steve’s house, just in time to see him and his current flavor of the month spilling out onto his porch, clearly intoxicated.

  Steve recognized Fiona’s car and looked around, mouth hanging open, until he spotted her with Tim.

  “Fifi?” he hollered. She had always hated when he called her that. Like she was some kind of French poodle or something. “Fifi? What the heck you doin’ with that stiff?” his voice echoed through the quiet neighborhood. “That what you’re into now? Old guys with four eyes?” he snickered at his own lame joke and his scantily-clad girlfriend guffawed.

  After locking Tim’s house up tight, Fiona turned and made a gesture at her ex-brother-in-law that drew a gasp of dismay from her bo
ss.

  “Do not engage that… man,” he ordered. “We have work to do, and he is a pox on the very fabric of decent society.”

  “Gotta agree with you again, boss man,” she said, staring at Steve, and shaking her head as the couple was overcome by a loud fit of giggles as they staggered toward the side patio.

  Tim insisted on climbing into the passenger seat of his assistant’s car without any help whatsoever, despite the fact that he was in a significant amount of pain. The emergency room doctor had prescribed pain killers, but the mortician only took them when the pain utterly incapacitated him. Fiona had to look away, blinking rapidly, while her boss struggled to ease himself into the car. Once he was seated, she folded up his wheelchair and placed it in the trunk, all the while trying to get her emotions under control.

  “If I knew you liked older guys, I’d have gone after you rather than your sister,” Steve taunted from across the lawn.

  Fiona stood, with one foot in the car, contemplating her next move.

  “Don’t give him the satisfaction of responding,” Tim commanded quietly from the passenger seat. “He is beneath you, maintain your dignity,” her boss spoke, staring straight ahead.

  The lovely young woman set her jaw, kept her gaze away from the vile man lounging in a lawn chair, and got into the car.

  “Walk me through everything you’ve done with Mr. Nussbaum,” Tim directed after they were on the road, referring to her first solo preparation.

  “I’ve already done that… twice,” she murmured, her hands gripped so tightly around the steering wheel that her knuckles went white.

  “Do it again,” was the mild, yet uncompromising reply.

  Fiona smiled a bit, knowing what her boss was up to, and once more began to recount her first preparation.

  ***

  Tim stood up, got out of his wheelchair, and supported himself on the edge of the cold metal table while he examined Fiona’s work critically, looking for any slight misstep. He was delighted, but not surprised to find that her work had been flawless.

  “Not a bad first attempt,” he muttered, after examining her stitching, gluing, and sculpting techniques.

  “I learned from the best,” Fiona shrugged.

  She’d been taking online classes to further her knowledge about the funeral business, and had observed Tim, a master of his craft, whenever possible. He opened his mouth to reply in what would almost certainly be a pithy manner, when Fiona was spared by the sudden ringing of the office phone. Picking up the basement extension, she answered the call. She took a notepad out of her lab coat and quickly jotted some notes on it, nodding and frowning, while she listened to the caller.

  “What was that all about?” Tim asked, seeing his assistant in an entirely new light after having seen the precise, meticulous nature of her work.

  “We’re going to have to get really creative about how we’re going to do this,” she mused. “We’ve got a homicide.”

  “Get the car ready, put my bag in it, and take me to the scene,” he ordered, focusing immediately on the task at hand. “You can tell me what you know when we’re on the way.”

  ***

  The once-attractive young woman’s body looked like a broken doll: her arms and legs were splayed, and her neck was at a painfully wrong angle. Silken golden hair pooled over her shoulders and partially obscured her face.

  “He was mad,” Tim commented, peering at the body through coke-bottle thick lenses.

  “Eckels?” Detective Chas Beckett expressed his surprise at seeing the coroner present. “I thought you were out of commission for a while. That was a pretty nasty accident.”

  “I’m capable of working from the confines of this chair until the major contusions in my legs have healed,” Tim replied, leaning toward the deceased to get a better look.

  “So, what makes you think that our perp was angry? Or did you mean mad in the clinical sense?” Chas looked at the unassuming coroner with humor and appreciation. Timothy Eckels might be nerdy, but apparently he was pretty tough too, and had an almost fanatical dedication to his work.

  “Angry, he was angry. You can tell by the way her hair fanned out, she didn’t fall, she was pushed. There are also red marks above each of the places where bones were broken, which makes it look as though he broke them with his bare hands. Look above the back of her left elbow, you can almost make out distinct imprints of the killer’s fingers,” Tim pointed his pen in the direction that he referenced.

  “That was my thought too,” Chas nodded. “Whoever did this was careful though, which is odd. Typically, when we’re investigating a heat-of-the-moment crime, there’s forensic evidence all over the place. So far, we haven’t come up with much on this scene.”

  “We’ll get some photos of the body, then we’ll turn her over. The deceased will often tell the tale of their demise,” Tim murmured, pointing to a perspective that he wanted Fiona to photograph.

  He always did all of the crime scene photography, but since he was currently unable to, he planned to micromanage Fiona as she took the shots.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” the detective nodded. “I’ve got neighbors to talk to.”

  Fiona performed her task admirably, taking each photo from exactly the vantage point that Tim indicated, doing close-ups, and taking care not to disturb the position of the body or the contents of the crime scene.

  “Okay,” her boss nodded, about an hour later. “Get one of the techs over here to help you move the body. We need to turn her face up.”

  Fiona approached a pair of forensics techs, who seemed to be extracting all possible hairs and fibers from a patch of carpet that was near the body.

  “Hey guys, can one of you help me for a moment over here? I need an extra set of hands,” she asked, snapping on a pair of blue nitrile gloves.

  “Is that a proposition?” one of them asked, glancing at the other to see if his humor had struck a funny bone.

  “Very funny. Come on, I need help moving a body,” Fiona rolled her eyes and placed her gloved hands on her hips, tapping her foot impatiently.

  “How about I…?” the smart-aleck tech began.

  “If you finish that sentence, chances are pretty good that you’ll live to regret it,” she warned coolly.

  “Briggs, go help her out,” Chas called from a short distance away.

  “That’s not on my task list, Detective,” the tech named Briggs challenged.

  “Is going to court for the sexual harassment that you just committed on your task list?” the detective fired back, eyebrow raised.

  Briggs glowered, sighed dramatically, and put down his tweezers, coming to stand at Fiona’s side.

  “Fine, let’s do this. I have real work to do when you’re done asking me to do your job,” he muttered.

  “Don’t push your luck, buddy. The detective would take you to court for what you did, but I prefer to handle people who get in my way in a much more personal manner,” she warned, her look dark.

  “In my wildest dreams.”

  “No, in your scariest nightmares, nerdboy.”

  Tim was watching the interchange impatiently. He had no room in his life for human interaction, whether negative or positive, when there was a body to deal with.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” he called out crossly as Fiona and Briggs approached.

  “We’re on it, boss man,” his assistant replied, while her unwilling helper merely gave him a dirty look.

  Fiona instructed the tech as to how to take hold of the broken corpse and turn it carefully, preserving as much of the original condition as possible.

  “Wow,” Fiona mused, seeing what was underneath the body.

  “Don’t touch it,” Tim commanded. “You,” he pointed at the tech. “Go get the detective.”

  “You corpse cops giving me orders is getting more than a little bit old,” the tech snipped. “Last time I checked, I wasn’t in your department.”

  “Oh, give it a rest already and go get the detective,�
�� Fiona snapped.

  The tech turned on his heel and went back to the area of carpet where his coworker was now using a vacuum.

  “What a jerk!” Fiona exclaimed in disbelief, rising to her feet and heading over to Chas herself.

  She brought him back to the body and he took in the scene, nodding.

  “Interesting,” he mused, squatting beside the body for a closer look. “Looks like the killer had romantic leanings.”

  “Which could help explain, in some way, why he was so angry when he committed this atrocity,” Tim suggested.

  “Nothing like a little romance to drive people to kill each other,” Fiona commented dryly.

  “So much cynicism for one so young,” Chas remarked.

  “I’m not a cynic, I’m a realist. Most of the horrific stuff in the world happens because of romance gone wrong. Isn’t it true that most homicide is committed by someone that the victim knows?”

  “Someone has been doing her homework,” the detective smiled.

  “I don’t have much of a social life,” she responded with a shrug.

  Chas reached for an evidence bag.

  “I’ll just bag this up and have the lab take a look at it. You never know what they might find. Let me know if there are any other objects that you encounter,” he directed.

  “Will do.”

  Fiona took more pictures before the detective removed what might be the only clue that the killer left behind, then finished up the rest of the pictures. She and another, much more pleasant tech, zipped the young woman who’d met a painful early death into a body bag, loaded her onto a gurney, and stashed her safely inside the county hearse for a trip to the morgue, where Tim would perform a full autopsy with Fiona’s help.

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  Izzy’s phone buzzed with an incoming text and she stared at it where it sat on the arm of her easy chair, where she was curled up outlining her latest plot. Thomas Blevins had somehow discovered her phone number, had attempted to call twice, and had texted multiple times. Apparently he was very sorry for his behavior, and couldn’t take her silence as a hint. She’d received a few emails from other men on the dating site that she had joined, and was leery of even responding after her first unpleasant encounter.