No Offense Page 5

  Molly had stayed up even later than usual the night before—without having had to, as there were no late check-ins expected at the Lazy Parrot—and logged on to the Little Bridge Island Facebook community page, where she carefully corrected all the miscommunications about the baby who had been found.

  As the person who’d discovered the baby, Molly felt she was the one most qualified to attest not only to the infant’s correct sex, but also to the exact manner in which she had been found.

  So she posted that it was most definitely a little girl, not a boy, who’d been found on the toilet—in a box, not a bag—and that she was a lovely little thing who deserved to be kept in everyone’s thoughts, and not referred to as a trash-bag baby.

  Furthermore, Molly wrote, rising to flights of fancy that might not have occurred to her had she not finished off the better part of the bottle of wine Joanne had opened, it struck me as if this beautiful baby girl were rising from the waters of Little Bridge much in the way that the Roman goddess of love, Aphrodite, rose from the waves of the sea. Thus I believe that we should call this sweet little baby Aphrodite, because not only did she rise from the sea, but as residents of this island paradise, don’t we all wish her nothing but love? Yours very sincerely, Molly Montgomery, Children’s Library Specialist

  Sitting back after posting this, Molly watched in satisfaction as the likes began to pour in, slowly at first, then more and more quickly.

  Perfect. Her job was done. The baby’s new name—and a fine one it was; she’d have to thank Mr. Filmore later for the inspiration—was fixed. Aphrodite it would be from now on. A little highfalutin for a tiny baby, but much better than Trash Bag!

  As she crawled wearily into her huge four-poster bed—all the beds at the Lazy Parrot were four-posters, just as all the rooms came with enormous Jacuzzi tubs and their own coffee makers and mini fridges—she hoped she hadn’t done anything that might jeopardize the sheriff’s case. He hadn’t explicitly told her not to give out the details about how she’d found the baby (in a trash-bag box, etc.).

  Then again, he clearly needed her help. He couldn’t even crack the case of the High School Thief, which to her looked as if it might be one of the simplest crimes in the world to solve. Was Molly seriously supposed to believe that out of the six—or was it seven?—burglaries so far, there hadn’t been a single image of the thief captured on home-security footage? Surely at least one of the homes possessed a video doorbell camera.

  And what about fingerprints? Or footprints? Had no one thought of looking for these? Or for stray hairs (that did not, of course, belong to any of the homeowners or their friends) to run through the national criminal DNA database?

  Oh, well, she thought tiredly, turning out her light and snuggling down with Fluffy, the large ginger cat that lived at the Larsons’ hotel, yet did not belong to them. He had just shown up one day, begging for food, and so they’d begun feeding him, and now he slept every night with whichever of the hotel occupants allowed him inside their room first, which more often than not was Molly.

  Everything would be all right if I were in charge, Molly thought to herself. One day the sheriff will realize this and thank me.

  For the first time in as long as she could remember, she didn’t check Ashley’s Instagram, or switch on the television to watch her true crime shows, but instead fell fast asleep, Fluffy curled into a tight, contented ball beside her.

  The next morning, it appeared as if she might have been correct: everything seemed as if it were going to be all right. She was able to grab a quick breakfast from the buffet—without running into the Filmores, who’d slept in—before rushing off to the walk-through of the new library with its donor, Mrs. Tifton.

  To Molly, Mrs. Tifton consulting her on nearly every decision having to do with the new library’s children’s wing was like a dream come true. According to Phyllis, Mrs. Tifton had always been a voracious reader, and had frequently mentioned to anyone who’d listen that she found Little Bridge’s small public library lacking in adequate shelving space for romance, Mrs. Tifton’s favorite choice of reading material.

  So when Mrs. Tifton’s husband of thirty-nine years passed away from a heart attack and turned out to have left her more than one hundred million dollars in cash, annuities, life insurance, and real estate holdings—a fortune no one in Little Bridge, least of all his wife, ever suspected he possessed—no one was too surprised when she donated a large portion of her sudden fortune to the construction of a new library.

  The library board agreed to purchase the building—a beautiful though rundown example of classic revival architecture—which had once been the Little Bridge High School. A new, modern high school had been built years earlier after the discovery of asbestos in the halls of the old one, which had sat empty and decaying for more than fifty years until Mrs. Tifton and her fortune came along.

  The new Norman J. Tifton Public Library, though not quite finished, had already been restored to its former nineteenth-century glory, but with all the modern amenities: multiple media/movie rooms; plenty of free parking; two auditoriums; a children’s and teens’ wing; cheerfully lit reading rooms with large, comfortable chairs; a café; meeting rooms; study carrels; digital facilities; and of course enough shelving for all manner of genre fiction.

  Sometimes Molly couldn’t believe her good luck—especially now, going on a walk-through of the new building with Mrs. Tifton. They were accompanied by Richard Chang, the building’s architect; the district’s councilwoman, Janet Rivera; Meschelle Davies, a reporter from Little Bridge’s local newspaper, The Gazette; and of course Mrs. Tifton’s toy poodle, Daisy.

  But Molly still felt special. It seemed too good to be true.

  Which meant, of course, that it was.

  It wasn’t until they reached the second floor of the twelve-thousand-square-foot building that Molly realized something was wrong.

  “What’s that smell?” Janet asked.

  “Oh, that,” Mrs. Tifton said, waving a small hand dismissively. “I know, isn’t it awful? All that drying paint.”

  “That isn’t paint,” Molly said. She loved eating and knew her food smells. “It’s pizza.”

  “That’s impossible.” Richard Chang was looking down at his phone. Richard never went anywhere without his overly large phone in his hand and his overly small glasses on his face. “Nobody’s been here since last week. All the work is done. We’re just waiting on the final inspections and certificates.”

  Meschelle, the reporter, dutifully jotted this down.

  “But.” Molly realized the smell was coming from the new children’s media room, the double doors to which were both closed. “It really smells like pizza.”

  “Oh, well,” Mrs. Tifton said, brightly. “Maybe the crew had pizza last week.”

  “And didn’t properly dispose of the leftovers?” Richard scowled behind his artistically framed eyeglasses. “That’s not like them. They’re normally very—”

  He broke off as Molly pushed open the doors to the media room.

  As soon as she stepped inside, she saw that she’d made a massive mistake. She ought never to have gone in there—at least, not while being followed by the donor and a reporter from the local paper. Quickly, she moved to shut the doors behind her, but it was too late. Daisy, Mrs. Tifton’s little dog, darted between Molly’s legs, making an eager beeline for the source of the odor.

  “Daisy, no!”

  There was nothing else Molly could do. She slammed the doors closed, shutting Daisy up inside the media room with all the boxes of leftover pizza someone—or more likely, quite a lot of someones—had left behind, then leaned against them, blocking Mrs. Tifton’s—and Meschelle’s—view into the room through the glass panes.

  “Let’s go back downstairs,” she said, plastering a fake smile on her face. “I just remembered I forgot my bag.”

  “What?” Mrs. Tifton smiled up at her. The widow was quite small in stature but made up for it by being pleasantly curved, often remin
ding Molly of a bouncing ball because of her seemingly boundless energy. “No, you didn’t, silly girl, it’s on your shoulder. What’s in there that you don’t want us to see?”

  “N-nothing,” Molly said, quickly. “I just—I—”

  Molly didn’t normally stammer, but what was behind the media room doors wasn’t something that a sweet woman like Mrs. Tifton—let alone a reporter, who would doubtlessly blast it all over the front page—ought to see. Molly wished she hadn’t seen it herself.

  Fortunately, Janet Rivera had also seen what Molly had seen, and hurried to help.

  “Mrs. Tifton, I don’t think the paint in that room is dry,” Janet said. “Why don’t we let Richard show us the meditation garden downstairs instead? We can check to see if they got that powderpuff tree you asked for.”

  “Oh, the powderpuff!” Mrs. Tifton’s voice rose in delight as the councilwoman took her by the arm and steered her back toward the stairs. “I do hope they found a pink one. Let’s go a take a look.” She glanced back at Molly. “You’ll follow along, won’t you? And bring that naughty little dog of mine?”

  “Of course, Mrs. T,” Molly said. “I’ll bring Daisy right down to you.”

  Mrs. Tifton nodded, smiling. “Thank you.” As she followed an ashen-faced Richard to the stairs—because he, too, had seen what Molly and Janet had seen—Molly could hear the older woman murmuring, “I don’t know what’s gotten into that silly dog.”

  Molly knew exactly what had gotten into the dog. She also knew exactly who she was going to have to call about it.

  And she wasn’t looking forward to it.

  Chapter Six

  John

  John stood in the doorway taking in the wreck of what was apparently going to have been some kind of children’s room in the new library.

  The place was now being used as a teenagers’ party den.

  John knew it was teenagers because there were empty pizza boxes and mini bottles of cinnamon-flavored whiskey strewn across the room, in addition to dirty sleeping bags, piles of clothing, and—oddly enough—numerous books from the Little Bridge Public Library.

  It was the empty bottles of syrupy-sweet flavored whisky—the preferred alcoholic beverage, John knew, of the young and inexperienced drinker—that gave away the age of the trespassers, but the phone chargers plugged into the wall outlets and the fact that most of the books appeared to be from the library’s young adult section helped. John recognized them as some of the favorites from his youth—Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and even Sternberg’s Wilderness Survival Handbook (updated edition).

  It was odd that the kids had checked out—or, more likely, stolen—so many books on wilderness survival, then chosen to camp out inside an unoccupied building that had air-conditioning, electricity, and working restrooms.

  But that wasn’t what bothered him the most. What really bothered him was the graffiti: red, black, and purple slashes across the once virginal white walls. This wasn’t the ordinary, occasionally even beautiful, graffiti he found over by the new high school or under the bridges and viaducts—kids’ names, lovers’ initials entwined in hearts, goofy doodles, or other attempts at immortality by aspiring artists.

  This was something different, something ugly, something someone—or several someones—had sprayed simply to desecrate and destroy.

  It was the graffiti that gave it away and caused his heart to sink.

  Sunshine Kids. The damned Sunshine Kids were back.

  But the graffiti wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was the girl the kids had left behind, curled in a sleeping bag on the floor, for Molly Montgomery to find along with the rest of their mess.

  “At first I thought she was dead,” Molly explained to him when he returned to the neighboring room in which she’d been asked to wait until she could be questioned.

  By him, of course. He wasn’t going to allow any of the nitwits who worked for him—except for Martinez, who was shaping up to be more than competent and would be due for a promotion to corporal soon, and Marguerite, who was excellent—anywhere near her.

  “I see.” John was careful not to look her in the eye. He didn’t want her to see the rage he was having such a difficult time suppressing. Damned kids. “Well, I can’t blame you. She looked awful rough.”

  “But Mrs. Tifton’s dog kept licking her face,” Molly went on. “And she kept pushing the dog away. So I knew she was alive.”

  John grunted. He didn’t trust himself to say anything more. He couldn’t believe that this had happened—again—in his own town, right under his very nose, and he’d been completely unaware of it. He must have driven by this building a hundred times in the past week, canvasing the neighborhood for the knucklehead who’d committed all those burglaries, and he hadn’t noticed a thing. The kids had to have been keeping the lights on at night in order to have their pizza-and-cinnamon-flavored-whiskey-fueled graffiti parties.

  How could he—or anyone—not have noticed?

  “That’s when I saw the blood,” Molly went on.

  The blood. There was blood, all right. Not a lot. Not like the crime scenes he used to see almost nightly in Miami.

  But enough to have seeped through the sleeping bag in which the girl had been curled, and into the new gray industrial carpeting.

  The stain would probably come out.

  But John’s anger over what those self-entitled little ass clowns had done wouldn’t as easily be washed away.

  “So I just sat by her until the EMTs got here, holding her hand, telling her everything was going to be okay . . . except, of course, I wasn’t sure everything was going to be okay.”

  This was too much. He knew he was supposed to stay impartial. He knew he was supposed to stay detached. He wasn’t supposed to refer to packs of privileged teenage vandals as “ass clowns,” or to assure any citizen with whom he worked of any kind of outcome regarding a case, because no officer of the law could ever be sure what was going to happen.

  But the Sunshine Kids were different. Molly Montgomery was different.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” he heard himself say, meeting Molly’s gaze for the first time.

  This was a mistake. Her dark eyes were as large as ever, and they met his with what felt, to him, like a shock from one of the Tasers he and his deputies carried.

  Except that the shock from Molly Montgomery’s eyes felt much, much more startling.

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “Because,” he said, “Marina—that’s one of the EMTs—said the girl’s vitals were good. She’s got a little bit of a fever, but that’s only to be expected after—” He caught himself and went mum.

  But it was too late.

  “After giving birth?” She reached out and grasped his arm, her fingers even more of a shock than her gaze, her skin cool on his. He suddenly felt as if he’d burst into flame. But that was ridiculous, of course. “So you think it might be her—the baby’s mother? She has to be, right? When the EMTs got here, I heard one of them say she wasn’t shot or stabbed. All that blood has to be from giving birth.”

  He’d put his foot in it now. He’d been so careful, too, separating her from the crime scene as soon as he’d arrived. Molly was the one who’d been with the girl the whole time. The feverish teenager had been barely conscious, not saying much, asking only for water—which Molly had just happened to have with her, in a rose-gold reusable bottle, of course, because, like his daughter, the librarian was environmentally conscious and would probably never dream of using a disposable plastic container or single-use straw.

  But no. John wasn’t going to let what happened yesterday happen again. He wasn’t going to allow the pretty librarian to suck him into another one of her conversations where she played amateur sleuth. No way. No matter how nice she looked in today’s outfit, which happened to be a tight skirt paired with a white blouse under a cardigan.

  A cardigan, on a tropical island!

  No. He was a prof
essional lawman. He would not stand for it. He was going to solve his own crimes. He’d already solved this one. He knew who was behind this gross atrocity, and he was going to make sure they were punished to the fullest extent of the law.

  And quite possibly tased, if the opportunity arose.

  “Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait until she’s in good enough shape for us to ask.”

  There. That sounded very professional. Exactly what a sheriff would say to someone in whom he had absolutely no romantic or sexual interest whatsoever.

  “She’s just so young, though.” Molly had stopped touching him and was hugging herself instead. He guessed he understood what the cardigan was for. It was quite chilly inside the building, what with the air-conditioning. No wonder those ass clowns liked it there so much. “She can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen. Surely, if she’s the mother, you wouldn’t press charges against her for what happened to the baby. She can’t have been the one who left it at my library. I doubt she’d have had the strength to walk to the window, let alone two blocks away. Someone else must have done it. Whoever did that”—she nodded her head toward the wreck in the room next door—“probably.”

  He wasn’t going to admit it—at least, not to her—but it was looking more and more as if she was right.

  “Well,” he said. “We’ll just have to see.” He began walking toward the door, indicating that the interview was over. He was relieved when she followed. At least he was going to get out of this without having made too big a fool of himself. “In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep all this to yourself.”

  Molly gave him a look that he recognized. It was the same look his daughter gave him whenever he said something about a popular celebrity that was wrong—crushing disappointment.

  “Of course! The privacy of my patrons is one of my highest priorities. And even though these people are not exactly my patrons—I’m fairly certain they stole all of those books—they were still in my library, so it’s not in my best interest to go blabbing to the press about them.”