Chapter 3

Chapter

Three

T he part of the story where we go undercover sniffing around where we don’t belong, hunting for clues and looking like dingdongs while we do it…

“This is so damn dumb, Marty. Why can’t we just go as ourselves?” I complained, swiping at my eye.

She swatted at my hand, the wind nipping at her long blonde hair. “Stop doing that, Nina! You’ll mess up your mascara!”

“As if she needs mascara. I almost forget how utterly gorgeous you are even without makeup, until you put some on and I’m reminded there’s nothing anyone can do to dull your level of beauty, young lady,” Wanda said, licking her thumb to wipe at the corner of my mouth. “Now stop moving your lips and start walking up those steps.”

She pointed to the long set of steel stairs to the second level of the apartments, leading to Owen Barker’s place.

The place he lived in alone .

It turned out, Owen and his wife were separated and he was bunking by himself. It was easy enough to find out once I’d found the real Owen’s page and done some digging around on his wife’s page—digging Brenda had avoided doing, so her love bubble wouldn’t pop and bleed all over her fantasy, I guess.

If she had, she’d have probably realized Owen’s cloned page wasn’t connected to anything but more fake profiles…but his real Facebook page provided a shit ton of insight—like his wife’s name.

I threw up my hands to keep from smudging anything else on my face. “I feel ridiculous, Wanda.” I couldn’t actually say because I can’t see my reflection, but I’m still pretty sure I looked ridiculous. “Did you have to put so much crap on my face?”

Wanda smoothed the edges of her classy dark green trench coat as the December wind fought to ruffle it against her knees. “Not that you needed it, but we have to look the part, Nina. We’re cosmetics saleswomen, for Pete’s sake. You have to advertise the product you’re hawking, silly. You know that.”

She held up the bane of my existence. An old Bobbie-Sue Cosmetics sales kit. The round, sky-blue suitcase contained everything you needed to present to the world the best you possible .

So sayeth Marty. That was the spiel she used to use to sell the stuff while I trailed behind her, stomping my feet in loud reluctance. In the cold. In the rain. In a heat wave. One time in a flippin’ blizzard.

Marty had been hell-bent on getting to the level of sky blue on the rung of Bobbie-Sue success and she’d dragged us along with her. Well, me anyway.

At that time in my life, I was jobless, close to homeless, and desperate to make some cash. Wanda, on the other hand, had been a gazillion times better at it than me. But if you only knew how much I hated that damn case full of colored garbage, you’d know why I’m draggin’ ass.

Not that it didn’t eventually add an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle to my life and bring me everything I have now, or at least played a significant part in giving me my current life.

But like I said, it came from a time when shit had gone sideways for me personally and selling cosmetics door to door was the only job I could get, even though I sucked hard—and I do mean hard —at it.

But Marty had made a very successful life from selling Bobbie-Sue, and eventually owning the company. It wasn’t all bad. Her products were honest, no animal testing (duh), and all organic. It just wasn’t my schtick.

And when they made me put on a skirt and heels I can barely walk in after slapping this goop all over my face that left me itchy and annoyed, it confirmed this wasn’t my deal.

But here I was, in a skirt, blazer and heels with a pound of slop all over my face, right back where I started with these two quintessential specimens of femininity I loved to fucking infinity and beyond.

That’s the only reason I’d relive this nightmare.

Avoiding touching my face again, I propped my hands on my hips. “So what the fuck are we doing here again?”

“We’re snooping around. The crime scene is still fresh. Maybe we’ll see something the human ,” she whispered the word, “police didn’t. Maybe we’ll smell something they didn’t. We do have keen senses, right? That’s got to help in an investigation. So let’s use them.”

Wanda nodded, the tip of her nose red from the cold. “What Marty said. Also, we’re going to talk to some neighbors. See if they saw anything. And we do have ears. You can bet your bippy everyone’s talking about their neighbor being murdered. So we do a little eavesdropping at doors. Bobbie-Sue is the perfect cover.”

“Except, Marty put an end to door-to-door sales a long time ago, Wanda. Because the world is a scarier place than when we first sold this junk. No one even does this shit anymore.” I plucked at my blue skirt and clicked my heels together. “It’s gonna look more like we’re scammin’. Besides, did you forget how people would hide from us? Remember that one lady we saw standing on her porch, mindin’ her own damn business, and when Marty got a glimpse of her from the corner of her eye, she went in for the kill? That poor lady ran the fuck inside and pretended Marty wasn’t pounding on her door with her fist while her dogs barked their tiny heads off?”

Wanda began to giggle, covering her mouth. “Do you remember how Marty spun it?” Wanda batted her eyes, letting her eyelashes flutter to her cheeks. “‘Oh, it’s fine. She’s just afraid of unlocking her true potential. Everyone’s a little scared to be their absolute best and outshine everyone around them,’” she squealed, in a pretty damn good imitation of Marty.

We’d been in tons of humiliating situations during our Bobbie-Sue time, once at an IHop, but Marty had always turned that baloney into a positive. No matter how awful people were to us.

Marty swatted the air with a frown, tucking her scarf tighter around her neck with a wrinkle of her nose. “I do not sound like that, Wanda Jefferson.”

I barked a laugh. “Ya do too , Marty Flaherty, and it’s a badass quality to have when you’re tryin’ to foist your shit off on some unsuspecting schlub. But I get it. Your ass was desperate to make it to sky blue and get that convertible. Totally worth selling your soul for while you hunted your prey, right?” I teased.

Back in the day, becoming a sky-blue saleswoman was the ultimate level of success on the Bobbie-Sue ladder. It meant you got a sky-blue convertible for the most sales and the worship of all your underlings. It rarely happened because the stakes were nearly unreachable, but Marty had done it.

When I met Marty, she’d been determined to scale the walls of Bobbie-Sue victory no matter the cost. She’d been deep in the cult of the Color Wheel—that was the infamous opening line to every sales pitch, by the way.

What’s in your color wheel?

Am I ever glad when she inherited the company, she put the kibosh on all that shit after we finally managed to make her see it for what it really was. A kooky makeup cult with ridiculous sales expectations nigh-on unobtainable.

But a lot has changed since the days when Marty became a werewolf—mostly for the better of all of us and her zillion employees. Marty was a smart business woman and a good boss.

Wanda sighed a long-winded sound of exasperation as she scanned the parking lot around us, the cars of the apartment’s tenants covered in a light dusting of snow.

“You have any better ideas, Dark Lord? We have to start somewhere. We can’t keep Brenda hidden in the murder basement forever, and we certainly don’t want the clan to find her before we figure this out and prove her innocent.”

While we’d gotten into disguise and Marty had put foundation on me with a trowel, we’d spent some time getting to know Brenda while we asked questions about who she thought could have killed Owen. But because she’d been catfished, she didn’t know a whole lot about the real people in his life.

Regardless, Brenda was a nice, if not na?ve lady who’d gotten in too deep. She was smart and even a little funny when she chilled the hell out.

I didn’t want to see the clan eradicate her. I liked her. And if I’m honest, I sure as hell didn’t want the clan to find out we were harboring a fugitive, because it’d be just as fucking ugly for us as it would be for Brenda if we got caught.

I shook my Bobbie-Sue bag at her as snow began to fall and the day became grayer. ”Fine. Let’s get this shit over with then. We goin’ together, or splittin’ up to cover more territory?”

Marty shivered, probably with nervous excitement, if I knew her. This revisit to her glory days was her dream come true. “Let’s do the first couple together so we can warm up. It’s been a long time since I did this and I’m freaking out a little about revisiting my cosmetic past.”

“As if the sales chick in you isn’t alive and well, dying to bust out and torture some poor, unsuspecting woman with blush colors. Please,” I scoffed.

Marty made a face at me. “Together. Please .”

I motioned for them to head up the stairs ahead of me, mostly because I can’t get a handle on these damn heels and if I fall on ’em, I don’t want them crying about how I ruined their makeup and hair. “After you, chickenshit.”

I made chicken noises at her, clucking the whole way up the stairs to the tune of Wanda’s laughter.

Just like the old days. Good times, good times.

“Hi! I’m Marty Flaherty! Do you know what’s in your color wheel?”

I fought a groan when the guy who answered the door—scratching his bare belly, no less, beer in hand—gave us the finger and slammed it in our faces.

“Asshole!” I crowed. “Can’t a girl try and make a living anymore?”

Marty deflated a little, but I poked her between her shoulder blades, swallowing a cackle. “Maybe look before you leap, test the waters and all, Ms. Color Wheel.”

She stomped her foot, kicking up some snow. “How rude was he?”

“That was just a warm up, Marty…uh, practice.” Wanda stabbed her finger in the air for emphasis. “Forget him and knock on the next door,” she soothed with encouragement, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “You never let a closed door stop you before.”

My head fell back on my shoulders in irritation. I’ll admit, I felt whiny AF. I have zero patience for tea and sympathy. Call me a dick, but that’s my truth. I wanted to get the show on the road.

“For the love of Canada, why can’t we just sneak into Owen’s dumpy apartment and snoop around instead of playing these stupid fucking games? Why do we have to be undercover?”

Wanda made a face. “Because we need information, Nina! Who knows if someone saw something. We can’t just show up and ask people to tell strangers if they saw or heard something surrounding Owen’s death.”

My eyes bulged. “Isn’t that what private investigator’s fucking do, Wanda?”

Wanda’s lips thinned. “Yes, Nina. That’s what they do, but in this particular case, we have to be extra careful. Owen was a human, with human neighbors. If the police come asking questions, we don’t need them telling the authorities some private investigators were snooping around. With human police involved, we can’t have it lead back to us. We need to carefully ask questions, and selling Bobbie-Sue is the perfect opener. Now put a sock in it and move along.”

Much like back in the day, I trudged reluctantly behind them as they stopped at the apartment two doors down from Owen’s—one with a dilapidated Christmas wreath and a crooked bow.

The moment the door popped open, a middle-aged lady with yellow-blonde hair and enough perfume to choke a horse poked her head out, a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

Fighting a gag from the thick scent of whatever she’d doused herself with, I watched as Marty held up her Bobbie-Sue bag, her smile bright while she flapped a hand at the puff of smoke. “Hi there! I’m Marty Flaherty. Do you know what’s in your color wheel?”

The woman blew a ring of smoke at us, making Marty cough. The lines around her mouth from her bad habit deepened as she frowned, eating up the garish red lipstick on her mouth.

She wrinkled her wide nose. “What the hell’s a color wheel?”

Marty tapped the bag with her sparkling saleslady smile. “It’s all right here in this cosmetics bag. I’d be happy to show you, if you’d like.”

She flicked her cigarette out over the balcony with a sour expression, her forehead wrinkling in a suspicious frown. “Is it gonna make me look like her?” She pointed at me, which I found ridiculous. I was the most awkward of the three of us, for Christ’s sake. Who’d want to look like me?

But I nodded and grinned the best grin I knew how to grin. The one that would hurt my face if I could still feel it.

“Just like me,” I assured her with a sweet tone. If I’ve done nothing these past years, I’ve watched and learned from my friends how to appease, how to persuade. Marty and Wanda turned their back to her for a moment and gave me their “what the fuck?” eyes. But I shooed them toward her with a wink and a nudge of their shoulders. “Go on and work your magic, ladies. Do it for the team! While you do that, I just remembered something that would be perfect for… What’s your name, ma’am?”

She blinked, tucking her old, pilling sweater into the waistband of her rumpled jeans. “Sonja…” she said with obvious hesitance.

“Sonja,” I repeated. I lifted my shoulders in that cute way Marty and Wanda do when they’re playing coy, and grinned again. “I’ve got the perfect lip stain just for you, but I forgot it in the car. Be back in a jiff!”

I scurried off before my nutty friends could stop me. I was gonna go snoop around at Owen’s place while they tiptoed through a bunch of bullshit about makeup just to try and get some miniscule bit of information from Sonja.

As I made my way back toward where we’d started, Owen’s place wasn’t hard to find. It was cordoned off by a bunch of yellow police tape.

The welcome mat in front of his door was ratty, scuffed by time, the door crisscrossed with crime scene tape.

I don’t know what I thought I was gonna uncover, but it couldn’t hurt to poke around and it beat talking about shit I knew next to nothing about.

Peering over my shoulder to make sure no one was around, I gripped the door handle and gave it a quick pop, trying not to leave any damage behind before looking at my hands and realizing I’d forgotten to put on the plastic gloves Marty had given me, along with some paper shoe covers.

Shit. I wiped it with the edge of my blazer before I pushed at the door. It opened easily enough, the stench of death instantly assaulting my nose.

I slipped under the crime scene tape and took my first step inside, closing the door behind me, making sure it was locked.

Christ, it was dismal in here. The walls, painted a dull gray, were slightly warped, but there was a poster of Paw Patrol, reminding me he had children who were young.

Then I saw a picture of Owen, his wife and his kids, and my chest got tight. It hung lopsided on the wall, above the couch. I eyed it from across the room and the pit in my stomach grew. His kids were dark like him, cute little munchkins who now had no father. Owen and his wife sat behind them, smiling for the camera, their hands on each of the kids’ shoulders.

I had to look away and focus on what I was here to do before the sadness rooted me to the spot.

For a bachelor, he was mostly clean. No empty pizza boxes and beer cans strewn across the floor or on his Ikea coffee table. There was a well-used plaid couch, with the cushions opened up and tossed, obviously from a search by the cops, but it wasn’t exactly a Home and Garden photo shoot, either.

I pulled the plastic gloves from the pocket of my uncomfortable blazer and put them on. I don’t know if I still have fingerprints as a vampire, it wouldn’t be the first thing I no longer had since I’d been turned, but better safe than sorry.

Heading to the kitchen, I was grateful for my vampiric vision, because Jesus and some Swedish fish, it was dark in there. I began pulling open his crooked, creaky cabinets to find a minimal number of dishes and cooking utensils.

Lots and lots of boxed macaroni and cheese and instant potatoes. Even when I could eat, I didn’t eat shit like that, but I’d probably choke a bitch out for a chicken wing. His fridge held some juice boxes, half a gallon of milk, and a six-pack of non-alcoholic beer. All mostly unremarkable.

My phone buzzed then to the tune of “I Like Big Butts,” Marty’s ringtone. I dug it out of my pocket and answered, “Yeah?”

“ What are you doing ?” she hissed into the phone, the crackle of her voice grating against my ear.

“Getting my prostate checked. What are you doing?”

I heard her rasp a sigh, meaning my work here was done. “Shut up, meaniebutt. Stop being a jerk and tell me where you are. You were supposed to be getting lip stain!”

I peered in a drawer in the kitchen, where I found coloring books and some crayons, and jiggled them around to make it sound like I was digging through stuff in the car. “I’m still looking for it. It’s the puuurfect color for Sonja. If you taught me nothing, you taught me flippin’ color wheels. Am I making you proud, sensei?”

“You are not either in the car, Nina Statleon! I can see it from Sonja’s bathroom window. But you are a liar-liar-pants-on-fire!”

“Why are you in her damn bathroom, Marty? I thought the Bobbie-Sue rule was no using a potential client’s private facilities no matter how bad you have to go? Remember Hackensack, where Wanda almost peed herself?”

“I make the rules now, Nina! Now get your butt back here before Wanda has a nervous breakdown trying to make Sonja look like you. I only have so much magic, and while Sonja is perfectly lovely, she’s never going to look like you!”

“Then as the great RuPaul says, you bettah werk! Gotta go. Bye!” I clicked the phone off before she could protest.

I decided to give up on the kitchen. So far, I was batting a thousand because there was nothing to see in here but the sad life of a bachelor dad just tryin’ to get by.

Bedrooms were up next, there were two of them.

When I poked my head around the corner of the first one, I was surprised. He’d decked this out for his kids with hanging lights and a tent.

One half of the room had a bunch of superhero posters and the other half was covered in Barbie. The tiny, pink single bed had some frilly pillows Wanda and Marty would snatch up before you could blink.

The boy’s bed had a comforter of the solar system and some red and blue pillows. There was a train track on the floor beside his bed, and a big Barbie playhouse by his daughter’s.

All tossed by the cops.

If nothing else, Owen had been trying for the sake of his kids, which left me feeling kinda shitty for him. It also made me wonder what was up with his marriage and his wife. Could she be a suspect?

What if she’d found the fake account the catfish had set up and saw all those private messages between him and Brenda, and thought he was cheating? I wondered if she’d talk to us. Maybe I could smell if she was lying.

Jealousy, according to Marty and her true crime shows, was one of the top five motives for murder.

While I considered what undercover crazy Marty might come up with to get Owen’s wife to talk to us, I moseyed to his bedroom, where I found he’d def poured his heart only into his kids’ room.

His room was a depressing disaster of rumpled bed sheets and comforter, and a scarred wood nightstand with all the drawers yanked open. But when I sniffed, I discovered it was also where he’d been strangled. I stood in the spot where his essence had been drained from him.

Damn, damn, damn. My throat tightened up. I think I’ve said I can’t cry, but I can get choked up, and I was choked up. I got the sense this separation had been hard on Owen and his kids. His misery lingered.

But that’s also when I saw it.

Our first legit clue.

If the forensic people had been in here and done their jobs, I don’t know how they could’ve missed it. Or maybe it was just my vampiric eyesight. But there it was, stuck to the backside of the nightstand with only the very tip sticking out.

A fake nail, just like the ones Marty and Wanda wore.

A red one with a white tip.

Just like the ones Brenda wore…