Smith's Monthly #27 Read online

  And the temperature was set at a comfortable seventy degrees on the thermostat on the wall. Outside, the July day was a hot one for Portland, Oregon, one of those ninety-plus days the weather people liked to proclaim as dangerous. Just walking from his limo to the apartment building had forced him to break out into a sweat under his dress shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes.

  The room around him had more of an antiseptic hospital smell than a crime scene, but Pilgrim was pretty convinced he was standing in a crime scene. He had seen his share over the years helping police with varied investigations.

  This might be someone really sick who did this.

  As a private detective who helped the police on cases, he was usually called to a crime scene long after a body was removed, however. This time he was the one calling the police to a body. Actually, his assistant Donna Marks was doing the calling just outside the door.

  He had ended up a private eye through a series of strange events. First, three years of law school and a failed first marriage while working for a corporate law firm had convinced him he wasn’t a normal lawyer.

  Or a decent standard husband either.

  Then his grandmother had died and left him more money than he could imagine, which sent him on a year of traveling and drinking, which also eventually got boring.

  So he went back to school to become a private detective, but soon learned, after he hung out his shingle, that being a private eye wasn’t what the books described. It was all computer work and long boring hours of nothingness trying to watch someone.

  At that point, he had finally figured out that he bored easily and needed some excitement and challenges in his life. So with some of his grandmother’s money, he set up Hugh and Associates, a combination law firm and private investigative firm. Then he had hired a couple great associates who took all the boring cases and made the firm lots of money and they hired even more associates that he had no desire to meet who also made him lots and lots of money.

  And he bought apartments around the town that also made him money, so his grandmother’s fortune had gotten bigger even with his best efforts to spend it all.

  He had then offered his investigative state-of-the-art services for free to all the surrounding police forces. After a few years, he had solved a bunch of cases and was now called regularly. Interesting stuff.

  Seldom boring.

  For the first two years on being a private eye, his best friend from school, Carrie, had been his assistant, but she had fallen in love with the law side of the firm, gone back to law school, and now worked on the floor below his office doing law stuff that seemed boring to him, but that she seemed to thrive on.

  Before she left, Carrie had trained Donna Marks to be his special assistant. At times he had to admit, Donna was better at her job being his assistant than Carrie had been.

  At the moment, he could hear Donna’s voice in the hallway outside the apartment. From the sounds of it, the Portland Police would be here shortly.

  He looked at the apartment key in his hand. Nothing unusual about it at all. It had come to his office by Priority Mail with a simple typed note that read: Go here at noon for the most puzzling crime of your career.

  Then the address of the apartment, no signature.

  Had the person who murdered this woman sent the note?

  Or had the woman even been murdered?

  No clues in the note at all, just the reference to crime and all printed out on standard white paper. He had all of it in his limo to give the police.

  This was puzzling. The note was right about that much.

  He took a slow walk around the small studio apartment, looking for any clues or anything that seemed odd besides the fact that everything was scrubbed to an inch of its paint job. Even the small bathroom shone like a bad commercial.

  Whoever had cleaned this place had done a great job of it.

  He went back to the dead woman and just stared at her.

  The blue woman in the white dress lay in the middle of the hardwood floor, her feet together and aimed toward the door into the hallway. Her hands were grasped over her stomach, as if resting. Her eyes were closed.

  He moved closer and bent down carefully to not touch anything.

  She had on makeup, but not too much. There was just enough to accent her face, even with the shade of blue of her skin. Her bright red hair was combed back and arranged around her face on the floor. She almost seemed to be smiling.

  The blue skin color was clearly covering every inch of visible skin and from the blue tint coming through the sheer white dress, all of her body.

  She had no obvious signs of trauma, but he sure wasn’t going to move her to look for any. However, he did carefully, using one knuckle, touch her skin on the side of her arm.

  Room temperature. And she had no smell at all.

  None.

  He had been in rooms after murder victims were taken away and the smell of death always remained.

  No smell of life or death with this woman.

  He stood and stepped back toward the apartment door as Donna came in. She was wearing white shorts that fit like a glove, a brown tank top, and tennis shoes. She had short brown hair and wide brown eyes and when smiling, she could light up a room.

  She was divorced, thirty, and an expert on computers, high-speed driving, and weapons. So far he had only needed her for the computers, thankfully.

  “You would think blue lady there would smell,” Donna said. “And I don’t see any blood anywhere.”

  “More than likely it would have been blue,” Pilgrim said.

  “Are we going down that blue road?” she asked.

  “Not until the men in blue get here,” he said.

  She moaned and turned for the hallway. “I’m calling a blue moratorium on bad jokes until we get this solved.”

  “Deal,” he said.

  Over her shoulder she said, “I’m going back to the limo to do some research on how skin can become that shade and exactly who this woman used to be.”

  “The police will want the letter,” he said.

  “Already have it in a bag,” she said without looking back.

  He shook his head and went back to staring at the redhead with the blue skin resting peacefully on the floor.

  The letter writer had been correct. It was a crime for someone so beautiful and young to be dead, no matter how it happened.

  TWO

  Pilgrim Hugh heard the police before he saw them as they thundered up the stairs and then along the hallway toward the apartment door. This apartment was on the second floor and since there was a park across the street, the only thing that could look in the windows were the birds in the far trees.

  Since Donna had told the police there was a body, more than likely the first to arrive would be the closest patrol officers to secure the scene. The detectives would follow in their own sweet time.

  “Sir,” a policeman said, “please turn around.”

  Pilgrim did as he was told, arms away from his body. Then he smiled.

  “Officer Daniels,” he said. “Great seeing you again.”

  Daniels had been the officer on scene on a number of Pilgrim’s strange cases over the years. He looked like the perfect image of a college quarterback, with strong shoulders, dark hair, a jutting chin, and a wide smile. He and Carrie had flirted a great deal at times, but as far as Pilgrim knew, nothing had come of it.

  “Mr. Hugh,” Daniels said, smiling and stepping forward and shaking Pilgrim’s hand.

  “Wow, a blue woman,” the other office said from beside Daniels.

  “Yeah, real blue,” Daniels said, looking past Pilgrim at the body. “And she was a looker before she got the dye job.”

  “Dye job?” Pilgrim asked. “Something I’m missing these days in the newest trend.”

  “Don’t get me started,” the other officer said, moving back into the hallway to stand beside the door.

  “Some kids have moved past tattoos into full-body dye jobs,” Daniels sa
id, shaking his head. “The green ones are just flat disgusting and some of the dyes glow in the dark. Damn creepy if you ask me.”

  “You’re kidding?” Pilgrim had no idea how he had missed this recent fad. He really needed to get out of that office at the top of the building a little more. It didn’t help that his apartment was the penthouse above his office.

  Daniels just shook his head. “Wish I was.”

  Pilgrim handed Daniels the key to the apartment. “This was sent to me with a note. Donna has the note and the envelope in the limo outside when the detectives want it. That’s where I’ll be waiting as well.”

  “Carrie not with you today?” Daniels asked.

  “Working back at the firm,” Hugh said. “But if you haven’t met Donna yet, you’ll love her.”

  “Looking forward to it,” Daniels said, smiling.

  Pilgrim took one last look at the blue woman and headed out.

  Puzzling, yes.

  Crime, maybe.

  Solution, nothing yet.

  THREE

  “The blue woman used to be the renter of record on the apartment,” Donna said as Pilgrim Hugh climbed into the limo.

  This stretch limo was far more than just a nice ride around town. It had state of the art computer stations that folded down into hidden compartments and many other features.

  The cool air in the limo felt good after the short walk from the front of the apartment building through the hot July afternoon. Donna handed him a bottle of cold water from the fridge near her station in the center of the limo compartment and then went back to her screens.

  Pilgrim took a drink as he got into his seat and punched a button so that his computer station would come up and wrap around him.

  “Incoming,” Donna said.

  She had sent him the image of the redheaded woman. The photo was a glamour shot with her standing with a white dress in a snowstorm of something white. Even with the images slightly blurred from the art work, it was clearly the blue woman.

  “Her name is Deirdre Blue,” Donna said. “But it seems she went by the first name of Deep and I am not kidding about the last name. Both parents dead, no siblings.”

  “Deep Blue?” he asked, staring at his screen.

  “Deep Blue,” Donna said. “And I’m sticking to the moratorium on the jokes.”

  “Think that name might be a reason she ended up the way she did?” he asked.

  Donna laughed. “Wouldn’t bet against it.”

  Pilgrim had his computer screens up and Donna was giving him all the data she had found about Deep Blue. She had worked at a downtown clothing store until a month ago, and also as a professional clothing model. She had been twenty-six and single, and had a degree in design and business. Not a dumb woman by any means and clearly successful in a hard field.

  “So what happened a month ago at her job?” he asked.

  Donna shook her head. “I hacked into the store employment records to save time and it only shows that she quit with standard notice. No reason given.”

  Pilgrim ignored the hacked part and nodded. Clearly Deep had no criminal record, had worked as a model at times and at the clothing store and had lived in a small studio apartment. It all seemed so standard.

  He dug deeper into the records for the apartment and found that she had given notice at the first of the month and moved out, paying for a professional cleaning service to clean everything and give all her furnishings to charities. The apartment was still paid for until the end of the month.

  “What the hell was this woman planning?” Donna asked, staring at her screen. “Quit her job, gave up her apartment, and then dyed herself blue to match her name.”

  “I’m not sure she did that to herself,” Pilgrim said. “And I want to figure out who would kill her and then take her back to her own apartment, one that she had already moved out of. And then why write us to find her?”

  Donna looked over at him. “It’s the writing us that is the key to all this.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “Who and why?” That was the part that made no sense to him at all.

  “The package came priority mail,” Donna said. “At least a full day, maybe two. She would have had a pretty ripe odor after two days on that floor.”

  Pilgrim knew exactly what Donna was thinking.

  “Any cameras around this building on the street or the alley behind the building near the garbage bins?”

  Donna’s fingers were flying over the keys of her computer. After a moment images of traffic cams started appearing on his screen.

  “I figured the person who staged her would make sure we got the mail first,” Donna said, “then stage her right ahead of us getting there, so I’m checking traffic cams from an hour or so ago going backward in time.”

  “Doing that would show a respect for Deep,” he said. “Not that she was killed.”

  Donna glanced at him and nodded, then turned back to her screens.

  “I got another idea as well,” he said. “How much you want to bet this person is still watching in some fashion.”

  “No bet in a blue moon,” Donna said.

  He shook his head.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Slipped out.”

  “Can you scan that building around the apartment for any stray signals. I didn’t see any hidden cams in that apartment, but doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”

  As Donna’s fingers sort of danced a happy dance on her computer keyboard, he started through the videos. It didn’t take him long since Donna had narrowed the choices down so much. A mortuary van had turned onto the street where the three-story apartment building was situated just thirty minutes before they got here.

  Stanton Mortuary.

  Deep Blue had been embalmed and the marks covered. No wonder her skin felt room temperature.

  He suddenly knew that even though the body didn’t smell, he was getting a distinct odor of fish in all this.

  He quickly hacked into the Stanton Mortuary files to find the records of a Deep Blue who died five days ago from a massive brain tumor. She had spent most of the last month in hospice care. Her service had been yesterday.

  As he looked quickly through the photos of family and friends, he ran across one photo of five girls in college. And with one look at the photo, he knew exactly what had happened.

  “Got it,” Donna said. “Camera signal from the apartment to a nearby source.”

  He pointed to the hidden computer area that Carrie used when with them. “Check her computer and I think you’ll find the signal.”

  Donna looked really puzzled, but did as he suggested and ten seconds later Donna nodded. “The signal is being transferred from here. But how, these systems are guarded better than any system I have ever seen. I know, I set up most of the walls.”

  “Break into the signal and tell Carrie we solved it.”

  “Of course,” Donna said, smiling.

  He glanced at the clock on his computer screen. “Tell her it only took twenty-one minutes. Tell her to send in the mortuary van again to pick up Deep. And ask her how her dates with Officer Daniels have gone.”

  Donna just frowned at the date part, but did as she was told.

  Pilgrim clicked off his computer and let it retract back into its hiding spot, then sat back with his cold bottle of water and waited.

  It took exactly fifty seconds for a knock to come to the side door of the limo.

  “Get the chief a cold bottle of water,” he said to Donna, who opened the door for the chief to climb in and then handed him a bottle of water from the fridge.

  “Man, that was fast,” Chief Craig said as he sat across from Pilgrim with a sigh. The chief was a thin man, who seemed to dominate every room he was in with his combination stern look and smile. He had worked up through the ranks and was a popular chief, both with his officers and with the city government, a hard trick to pull off.

  “How did Carrie get you to allow this stunt?” Pilgrim asked as Donna let her computer screens vanish back
into their home so she could turn and join the conversation.

  “It wasn’t Carrie,” the chief said. “Carrie just helped. I was friends of the family with the Blues and before they died, I promised them I would watch over Deep.”

  “But then she got the inoperable brain tumor,” Pilgrim said.

  The chief nodded, clearly sad. “She had heard so much about you from Carrie at their girls’ nights out, that she wanted to use her death to test you, for the fun of it. Sort of a last request.”

  “You tried to talk her out of it, I presume,” Donna said.

  “We all did,” the chief said, laughing. “Deep was really strong-willed when she wanted to be, even right down to the end.”

  “And beyond, it seems,” Pilgrim said. “But I have a hunch there was more to this than just a last wish.”

  The chief laughed and then nodded. “Deep had a lot of money from insurance after her parents died. She wanted it to go to good causes, but couldn’t decide which cause to give it to or how to divide it up.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Donna said. “Us solving this will result in some charities getting money and others not so much.”

  The chief nodded. “All the charities get some,” the chief said, “including a few police funds, but with you solving it in twenty-one minutes, the large share goes to a fund to help the fisheries on the Columbia.”

  Pilgrim was just shaking his head. Only his best friend Carrie could have come up with such a strange test. But he had to admit, it had kept him entertained for a bit.

  “We were going to pull the plug at one hour,” the chief said.

  “Did Carrie say it would never take us that long,” Donna asked.

  “Actually,” the chief said, “she wasn’t sure.”

  “How much money is the top charity getting?” Pilgrim asked.

  “Quarter of a million.”

  “And how many charities were standing to gain from this?”

  “Five total.”

  Pilgrim smiled. “I’ll toss in enough so that all the charities get the same quarter million, as long as it all comes in under Deep Blue’s name.”