Merry Wrath Series - Book 9
From USA Today bestselling author, Leslie Langtry comes one former assassin turned suburbanite, a wedding in hilarious peril, and a very dead body...
Wedding Traditions as good as gold…Let’s start out with Something Old…
When this creepy message is found with an elderly, murdered florist in the first pew of a church the day before Merry Wrath's wedding, her hopes wilt like day old, discount flowers. And when the groom, Rex, vanishes into thin air, she can only assume the worst—and she’s not talking about the ugly, Vegas showgirl-like flower girl dresses her Girl Scout troop have picked out.
Weddings make a family of two…Let’s add in Something New…
The clues come with diabolically difficult puzzles, so Merry enlists the help of her former 4th grade teacher—a champion puzzler—while she turns the town upside down, in a frantic search for her fiancé. Once a surprising past is revealed, it doesn’t take long for the investigation to spin out of control faster than ten fourth-graders high on Pixy Stix on a merry-go-round.
With many suspects, few leads, and the clock ticking, will Merry find her groom in time for a happily ever after?
Chapter One
"What do you mean, there's a body in the front pew?" I asked my best friend and matron of honor. (BTW, that title has nothing to do with prison or knights in shining armor. I checked.)
My wedding was set for tomorrow, December 28. With the rehearsal dinner later tonight, Kelly and I thought we'd get a jump on decorating the church—which meant she was decorating and telling me I was doing it wrong. We'd only been there one hour before she sprung this on me.
Kelly's face had gone a little green, which was odd, considering the fact that she was a nurse. "I think it's the florist."
"The florist is dead?" That didn't seem like good news. "Did he drop off the flowers first?"
Kelly's jaw dropped. "Merry!"
"What? We paid a fortune for those flowers!"
Okay, maybe she had a point and I was being a tad insensitive, but I was running on wedding stress—a stress I found strangely similar to armed-showdown-in-an-Estonian-alley stress or hand-over-the-photos-to-a-dwarf-dressed-as-an-astronaut-with-a-flamethrower-while-standing-on-the-edge-of-a-cliff-in-Peru stress.
My to-do list was ridiculous. I followed Kelly to the front of the church, and there was elderly Lewis Spitz, my florist, lying there, with a knife sticking out of his chest.
"Another murder in my vicinity." With a heavy sigh, I took out my cell.
My fiancé was also the town detective. He was wrapping up a few loose ends at work before the wedding tomorrow. Now he'd have a murder to deal with.
Officer Kevin Dooley, a mouth breather and paste eater I'd known since kindergarten, arrived alone, with his arm elbow deep in a bag of pork rinds.
I looked behind Kevin and asked, "Where's Rex?"
The officer's expression resembled a lobotomized amoeba. "He's not at the station. We've tried to get hold of him. He's missing."
I hadn't heard anything more than grunts from this guy for three years. He finally strung more than one word together, and it was to say my fiancé had gone missing? I pulled out my cell and called Rex. After five rings it went into voicemail.
"He's here somewhere," I said as I turned on a tracking app I'd recently installed on our phones.
And, no, it's not Find My iPhone (although that is useful). It's a special CIA app I'd hacked that takes things to a whole new level. It can tell you where someone is, what they're wearing, and what they're eating—an unfortunate addition, as Rex has discovered I like to eat Oreos in the parking lot of one of the local grocery stores.
In this case, however, the app was a bust. There was no signal at all. Nothing indicating Rex's location or even his existence. I called his twin sisters and his parents next. Nobody had seen or heard from him today.
When had I seen him last? Last night when we had pizza at my house—a quiet moment for just the two of us, his dog, and my cats before the chaos to come. I tried calling him once more without luck.
Fortunately, my dress for the rehearsal was hanging in the dressing room. I was still wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and boots—which would be better for running around in the snow. Why we picked December for a wedding was beyond me.
"Where are you going?" Kelly called out.
"I'll be right back," I shouted over my shoulder as I tore up the aisle.
This had to be some sort of miscommunication. Maybe Rex was working on a surprise for me. I did love a good surprise. So why were my spy-dy senses tingling as I drove to his house a few blocks away?
By the way, everything in Who's There, Iowa, was a few blocks away. In fact, the town motto for decades has been You can go anywhere in Who's There in five minutes. Inspiring stuff that never convinced anyone to move or locate their business here.
As for Rex, until I knew more, I was going to keep a lid on my fears. Fears that included the idea that he'd gotten cold feet and run off…or that he'd been held up by some last-minute detail.
Leonard, the Scottish deerhound, greeted me at Rex's house with a confused look and excited tail wag that cleared the coffee table.
"Rex!" I shouted as I ran through the home.
His car was in the garage, but he wasn't. I kept calling his name. There was no answer after a very thorough search that included the cupboard under the sink and the bathroom medicine cabinet. Why? You can never be too sure. Once, in Japan, I found a man living in the bathroom wall. He wasn't a spy but a weirdo with a medicine cabinet fetish. His name was Ted.
I ran across the street to my house as I called his cell for the fifth time. This time, it skipped the rings and went straight to voicemail. Which meant he was either "declining" my calls or his phone was switched off.
The cats looked suspiciously at me as if to say whatever was wrong must be my fault. They didn't even help me look, which made me wonder if they were covering for him. They weren't. Rex wasn't at my house either.
I called Kelly, but she told me that Rex hadn't checked in or shown up. In fact, his sisters, Randi and Ronni, and his parents were there and worried.
"Get back here soon!" Kelly whispered into the phone. "Randi is setting up a dead otter nativity! Between that and the dead body in the first pew, Pastor Brown is not happy!"
Randi and her twin sister, Ronni, were taxidermists here in town. Since I'd met them last spring, I'd been the doubtful recipient of many dead animals in bizarre dioramas. The two short, plump women created anthropomorphic taxidermy—animals posed like humans, doing human things. It was disturbing at first, but over the last several months I'd become numb to the absurdity of it all. Pastor Brown, on the other hand, would be new to this.
"Have Mom handle it," I told her. "I've got to find Rex."
She agreed and hung up before I could respond. My mother, Judith Czrygy, was a senator's wife and was the only one who could say no to the twins in a way that seemed like an overwhelmingly enthusiastic "yes."
For the next twenty minutes, I drove past every parking lot, business, and home in Who's There, Iowa. I checked every store and restaurant we'd ever been too. Kelly texted that no one at the hospital had seen him. My fiancé had simply disappeared.
Where was he? Now the fears started creeping into my head. Rex wasn't the type to get cold feet and run off. I knew that, and yet it shot to the top of my anxiety list. No, he wouldn't do that. Rex was a responsible adult. If he'd wanted to call it off, he wouldn't have waited until the day before. We would have discussed it a while ago. My fiancé was thoughtful, smart, and mature, and he didn't hide from his concerns.
Which meant he was either lost or abducted. And since Who's There is a small town of maybe eight thousand people, getting lost wasn't an option. Granted, he could've gotten lost in the maze of gravel roads and cornfields that surrounded us in every direction. One time, when I was in high school and detassling corn for the summer, they bussed in some kids from Des Moines. In spite of just having to walk from one end to the other of a row of corn, they got lost and were missing for five hours. We found them in the next county in an unfortunate town called Pig Belly, at the also unfortunately named Tastee Dog. They were dazed and had no idea where they were but had filled up on soft-serve ice cream and corn dogs instead of calling anyone.
Which left one alternative. Rex had been kidnapped or worse. Most small-town cops didn't just disappear. But this police detective had a problem…me.
I had enemies. Up until three years ago, I'd been a spy—a field agent with the CIA. I'd infiltrated drug cartels in Cartagena, spied on the Yakuza in Tokyo, and fought off the FSB in a dark alley in Moscow. So, when the vice president "accidentally" outed me to get back at my dad, a powerful player in the Senate, I changed my name from Fionnaghuala Merrygold Wrath Czrygy to Merry Wrath and moved back to my hometown in Iowa to hide out until I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
Most of the people I'd spied on were in prison or dead now. But it was possible that someone had found out who and where I was…and wanted revenge. Bile rose in my throat as I broke out in a sweat. Was that what happened?
I shook my head to clear it. Get ahold of yourself, Wrath! This wasn't an international conspiracy! Rex always said that most abductions were by someone the victim knew (and then there were always aliens). But who would that be? And then it occurred to me.
I had one more place I could check. And it was the last place I wanted to go.
* * *
"Where is he?" I demanded as I stormed into the office in the strip mall.
Riley looked up from his computer. "Where's who?"
I folded my arms over my chest and narrowed my eyes. "Rex. Where is he?"
My former CIA handler grinned smugly. "You don't know where your intended is? Aren't you getting married tomorrow?"
"What did you do with Rex?" I asked in clipped tones so he'd know I meant business.
He held up his hands defensively. All smartassery gone. "What are you talking about?"
My spy-dar told me he was genuinely confused. Riley Andrews was telling the truth. I slumped into a chair and told him everything, from the body in the pew to my search. He listened and even had the grace to look concerned. Riley had been jockeying for my affections over the past three years. When he retired to open a private investigation firm in my hometown, I'd decided to avoid him like a Russian figure skater with leprosy and a spitting problem.
He'd even offered me a job.
I'd turned him down.
"I have no idea where he is, Merry." Riley held up his hands defensively. "I swear."
Riley seemed genuine. His blue eyes were wrinkled with concern as he ran his hands through his wavy blond hair. He was so different from Rex. Where Riley messed with my head, Rex respected me. While Riley was a womanizer, Rex was a one-woman man. The two men couldn't be more different.
I threw my hands up. "Then where is he?"
"Are you sure he's missing?" my former partner asked. "Maybe he told you he was running to Des Moines for something and you forgot?"
I thought about getting indignant, but Riley had a point. In my retirement, I'd become forgetful at times. Had Rex said something about an errand today? I ran through our conversation last night but came up empty, mostly because we'd been talking about my favorite subject—junk food.
"He left his car in his garage," I said. "And he doesn't have a squad car. Which means he didn't go to Des Moines."
"I don't think the police will consider him missing until he's gone twenty-four hours," Riley quipped.
"Did you read that in the private investigator's playbook?" I snapped.
"No," he said, ignoring my tone. "But I did work for the FBI. Remember?"
By now my head was splitting. "I'd better get back to the church." I got to my feet. "But if you know something and aren't telling me, I'll disembowel you with a drinking straw. You know what I mean. Remember Tashkent?" With one more threatening glance, I rushed out of his place and got back into my car.
By the time I walked back into the church, there was a sea of worried faces on our family and friends. Well, except for his sister, Ronni. But then, she always looked angry. Rex's parents were huddled with the twins, Randi and Ronni, talking softly. Did they know something? That seemed unlikely. As much as Ronni despised me, the others seemed to really like me.
Oh, crap. In my insane rush through town, I'd forgotten about Lewis Spitz. Considering the dead florist in the first pew being examined by the coroner who was also my bridesmaid, it was difficult to say what upset folks more. I nodded at Dr. Soo Jin Body, who returned the nod and went back to work.
There was another possibility for Rex's disappearance…
"Kevin," I demanded of the policeman who was almost asleep in a back pew. "Go arrest Juliette Dowd for kidnapping!"
He got to his feet and was about to walk out the door when Kelly stopped him. Hey, I was impressed he'd listened to me. Too bad my best friend wouldn't let him slap the cuffs on Rex's childhood sweetheart—an overly obsessive Girl Scout employee who raged at me on a regular basis.
"I don't think Miss Dowd kidnapped Rex." Kelly shook her head. "There has to be a reasonable explanation."
"Detective Ferguson is missing?" Soo Jin was standing next to me.
We turned to watch as the body of my florist was being carried out on a stretcher by two paramedics.
"Yes," I said, my eyes on the dead man. "Have you heard from him?"
The coroner shook her head slowly. She was incredibly beautiful doing it, with her large sad eyes and silky black bob. The woman could ugly cry and it would be the loveliest thing mankind had ever seen. She was a friend after a rough probationary period, but I still felt a little insecure around someone who was so beautiful that it hurt to look at her.
Officer Dooley stood there, looking around as if he knew he was supposed to do something but had no idea what. What would he do without Rex? The man couldn't tie his shoes without direction. For a nanosecond, I felt a tiny bit of pity for the Neanderthal.
Dr. Body sighed. "I'll accompany Mr. Spitz to the morgue, and then I'll be back for the rehearsal."
Kevin nodded silently and then spotted a plate of cookies that Kelly had brought for us to snack on. They were gone in seconds.
Riley strode through the door, looking worried. Which was a surprise since he'd been barred from the festivities. I thought having a former flame at my wedding would be a tad indiscreet.
I began issuing commands. "Call in satellite imagery. I need visuals of all routes in and out of town."
We'd likely find nothing because there was no CCTV in the US. I'd seen a documentary on it recently, but no amount of arguing could convince Rex that we needed it here in town. In fact, he'd suggested that it would be more prudent to fit me with body cams—considering all the corpses that showed up around me on a regular basis.
"Surely you don't think he did a runner," Riley protested.
I shook my head. "No. But we have a dead florist. Rex's disappearance is suspicious."
I looked over at Kevin, who had managed to get hopelessly tangled up in a pew bow. It was the night before my wedding day, and my groom was missing. This was definitely going to throw a damper on the rehearsal dinner.
I turned to Riley and said something I never thought I'd say to him.
"I think I need your help."