Deadly Vision (PI Assistant Extraordinaire Book 3)

  DEADLY VISION

  PI ASSISTANT EXTRAORDINAIRE MYSTERY BOOK 3

  By LOTTA SMITH

  Deadly Vision Copyright

  © 2016 by Lotta Smith. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without express written permission from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents and places are the products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real. None of the characters in this book is based on an actual person. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and an unintentional.

  Written by Lotta Smith

  Edited by Hot Tree Editing

  Cover created by Cheeky Covers

  Table of Contents

  DEADLY VISION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  Recipe #1: Japanese-Style Sweet Scrambled Eggs and Kyoto-Style Open Sandwiches

  Recipe #2: Hatcho Miso flavored Minestrone

  Don’t Miss Other Books by Lotta Smith

  About the author

  DEADLY VISION

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  CHAPTER 1

  There’s a first time for everything.

  I was engaged in a tight lip-lock with Michael Archangel, a Virginia-based private investigator and my employer.

  There should have been a sequence of events that led to the incident, but I couldn’t recall anything at all. And for full disclosure, I was way too preoccupied with the current action to care about how I ended up in a hot kiss with him.

  Just like in cartoons, the angel part of me was sitting on my right shoulder, screaming things like “Hello! What’s happened to your professionalism? Don’t you have anything like work ethics?” And the devil part of me was hooting, jumping, and cheering me from on my other shoulder. “Go, Kelly, go! Think about it, you’re not getting any younger!” She was a really naughty devil.

  As a professional woman with work ethics and dignity, I didn’t listen to the devil and started listening to the angel, and…no, that’s a lie. I didn’t listen to the angel. Call me an unethical slut, but I was falling for the devil’s words.

  For a brief moment, our lips parted. I opened my eyes. His baby blues were staring at me so intensely, they seemed a shade or two darker than usual.

  He cupped my face in his hands.

  “Are you ready?” he whispered. His voice sounded oh-so-sweet on my ears. Then he brushed away my hair and planted a light peck on my forehead.

  I mumbled something that meant nothing and everything. Then I realized he was shirtless and I was only one slutty Agent Provocateur bra and a thong away from…gulp! the bedroom.

  Breathing hard and admiring his Greek god-like physique, I struggled with his belt buckle, which didn’t unbuckle easily. I shivered as Archangel unhooked my bra with just a snap of his fingers.

  I closed my eyes. He was reaching south, and then…

  Rrrrrrrriiiiiinnnnnngggg!

  My alarm clock snatched me back to the not-at-all-sexy reality.

  “Oh crap, it was a dream…” Disabling the alarm clock, I moaned and looked around my surroundings.

  Unlike what was happening in the dream, the bed I was lying on was the one at the apartment I occupied all by myself, and not the one in Michael Archangel’s bedroom. There was an unsexy nightstand, and the walls were painted in lavender. I finally understood how I had gotten myself in sexy undergarments that I didn’t even own. I was relieved and disappointed at the same time.

  I was relieved for the part that whatever happened in my dream didn’t happen in reality, so things wouldn’t get any more awkward with my employer slash temporary housemate for the past two months. And I was disappointed for the most part because I suspected that whatever was happening in my dream could have happened in reality, if only I had stayed at Archangel’s house even after his leg had healed. After all, his residence slash office was my workplace, and living with him would have spared me the three-block walk each day.

  Okay, so I knew there was no guarantee that whatever was about to happen in my dream would have happened in reality, even if I had stayed at his place.

  But at least, I could have had extra fifteen minutes of sleep if I was still staying at his place. And with an additional fifteen minutes of sleep, I could have gone through everything that was about to happen in my dream.

  Hell, I should never have moved out of his place.

  Talk about crying over spilled milk!

  *

  The killer looked down at the dead woman lying on the ground.

  I did everything I could do…

  The woman wasn’t breathing.

  She was dead.

  She looked innocent and sleeping, though…

  CHAPTER 2

  She was in her early twenties. With blonde hair and alabaster skin, she was attractive. She could have passed as Sleeping Beauty waiting for Prince Charming to come and wake her up with a kiss, if only she was alive, but she wasn’t.

  She was lying on the ground of a condo construction site near Anacostia, Washington D.C.

  The five-story building was almost complete and just awaiting interior decoration and the finishing touches. The perimeter was still surrounded by soundproof barriers and scaffolds. So it seemed like a handy place to leave a corpse or two, but this place here was not the area where a young woman in a summer dress hung out at night. The construction site itself was a part of the waterfront area going through a massive facelift, but once work hours were over and the construction workers left, the deserted area attracted questionable characters, such as drug dealers, rapists, and murderers.

  In addition, a thin string was clinging to her delicate neck a la strangulation. It was never easy to strangle yourself to death, and I didn’t see anything around her dead body that would have helped her kill herself. I was no expert in criminology or forensic sciences, but I knew she was murdered.

  I took off my sunglasses. It was a sunny, early June morning, which called for a pair of shades with a good UV protection. But once inside the perimeter, it was dark. Maybe it was the dead body that made the place seem darker than it really was. Having dead bodies lying around often had that effect on a place. In addition, it always felt five to seven degrees colder around dead bodies.

  The victim’s long, silky, golden-brown hair spread out around her heart-shaped face like a halo. She was wearing a mint-colored maxi dress. Somehow, it looked familiar, but at the same time, something didn’t fit right. I couldn’t figure out why.

  Michael Archangel was observing the crime scene by walking around the corpse in circles. Sometimes he stopped and squatted for a closer look. His gait was steady, smooth, and didn’t show that he was wearing a leg cast until about a week ago.

  He was a former FBI Special Agent turned a PI, and now known as the It detective to call whenever dealing with tricky, difficult, and even the most impossible cases.

  He was looking sharp, masculine, and totally dashing in a light-blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a pair of black jeans, and a pair of black high-top basketball shoes. His attire didn’t show even the slightest hint that he used to be a transvestite until just a couple of months ago.

  I still remembered his cross-dressing days oh-so-vividly. He used to wear his auburn hair long like Rapunzel. Heavy makeup, women’s dresses in br
ight colors, and fuck-me-if-you-can sky-high heels used to be his standard getup wherever he went, including but not limited to crime scenes he got summoned to as a consulting detective. He had gone through quite a makeover—or rather, a makeunder—when forced by a leg injury to give up on high heels.

  “What do we know about the victim?” he asked.

  “Not much.” Richard Henderson, FBI Supervisory Special Agent, grunted. “She’s a Caucasian in her early-twenties. Dead since around 11:00 PM last night. No ID, no purse, no nothing.”

  “She’s missing her shoes.” Archangel pointed at the victim’s bare feet.

  “Yeah. According to CSI, she was killed somewhere else before her body was dumped here. So the killer might have taken the shoes or they just slipped off.”

  “I see.” Archangel nodded and turned back to me. “Kelly?”

  “Yes?”

  “She’s supposed to have a belt with this dress, isn’t she?”

  “Well…” I took a look at the dead woman’s dress, especially around the waistline. Then came the lightbulb moment. I had seen her dress recently at a local Macy’s. I had even tried it on in a different color, but the one in coral pink didn’t bode well with me.

  “Yes, this dress comes with a belt. But of course, you can ditch the belt, or mix and match it with a different belt. But her silhouette would be sharper with the belt on, I suppose.”

  “Having that said, we can consider the killer took the belt, as well as other items,” he said.

  “Other items, such as her purse and cell phone, like I said?” Henderson said.

  “Yes,” Archangel agreed, “and something more personal.”

  Then, without a warning, he cupped my face in his hands.

  I gasped. “Mr. Archangel…isn’t it a little bit…?” I meant to say “inappropriate,” but I stopped short in midsentence. His face was oh-so-close to mine. With his baby blues staring at my own brown eyes intensely, I felt my cheeks burn.

  I closed my eyes and parted my lips in a sultry yet not too needy manner.

  I was ready for a kiss.

  Okay, so it was terribly unprofessional to make out at a crime scene, especially with your employer. Then again, I didn’t mind if he kissed me. The last time I remembered, he was a good kisser. I was more than happy to have something more. Recently, it almost happened, if only some wacko hadn’t killed five people to interrupt whatever was happening. The case itself wasn’t that hard and Archangel closed it within three days, but it also killed off the momentum between us, as well as the murder victims. A few days after closing the case, that special something more almost happened again, but another homicide also happened. Long story short, dead bodies kept turning up as if on que whenever things got intimate between the two of us. Just one more reason I hate murderers.

  So, in order to save potential murder victims from getting killed, I moved out of his mansion and went back to my apartment. After all, staying at Archangel’s was just a temporary thing to help him with daily tasks until he had recovered from a broken and badly sprained ankle. And now that his leg had healed and he didn’t need help with getting around, I couldn’t find a plausible reason, other than saving commute minutes, to keep staying at his place.

  Anyway, I was waiting for his lips to start caressing mine, while thinking about the sensual dream I’d had this morning, assuming it might have been a prophetic dream. At the same time, I had a bit of suspicion that I might be experiencing another erotic dream. But even if it was a dream, I was determined to go through everything this time.

  Except that didn’t happen.

  “Kelly, what are you doing?” Archangel’s voice yanked me back to reality. Even with my eyes closed, I could see one raised eyebrow in my mind’s eyes. I also envisioned a lopsided grin spreading across his face—as if he was trying hard not to burst out laughing.

  He continued. “Maybe you want to open your eyes and close your mouth so that people don’t remember you as that PI’s assistant who couldn’t keep her mouth closed?”

  I opened my eyes, shut my mouth, and hurriedly, I put on a poker face, as if nothing out of ordinary had happened. I even chuckled lightly, saying, “What? Oh…I guess I zoned out a little. Ha ha…” I shivered and stopped laughing when I caught a glimpse of the dead woman lying there. It had been more than six months since I had started working as a personal assistant to Archangel, but I still couldn’t help getting the willies whenever I saw dead people.

  As reality sank in, I felt hot with an embarrassment. Lots of it. Henderson, a regular client of my employer’s, was nice enough to look away from me, pretending he didn’t see what had just happened. But the feds agents, local police detectives, and officers in uniforms were giving me glances that said “Nice try, pal. So you were waiting for a kiss?”

  Now let me tell you a little bit about myself before I drop and die of humiliation. My name is Kelly Kinki. I’m a twenty-nine-year-old, female, Italian-English-Japanese American. Just like any brilliant detectives in fiction, Archangel has a personal assistant, and I happen to be the one.

  Unlike the assistants of fictional detectives, I’m not a former police officer, ex-soldier, or budding medical professional. Cooking and chauffeuring around my employer are my main tasks. Occasionally, I offer my insight about his cases so he can dis my theory as a piece of crap. But that does help him take a glimpse of a lay person’s perspectives and perceptions. Speaking of perceptions, it would be totally cool if I had extrasensory perceptions and I could do things like talk to dead people. But unfortunately, I have no such skill. Speaking of skills, I can breathe fire, but I’m not so sure if that’s a skill I can brag about.

  I’m a petite woman with a body shape that people wouldn’t describe as stick thin. When Archangel was a cross-dresser, it often drove me crazy when total strangers whispered about “That supermodel and her assistant who’s a little bit on the chubby side” behind my back. But as soon as he cracked a huge case involving the eyeball-snatching serial killer, cut his hair, and started wearing men’s fashion, people suddenly realized that Michael Archangel actually looks hot. As in hotter than Hell.

  Recently, a certain local gossip paper elected him as Mr. Number Seven of D.C.’s Most Eligible Bachelors, and I had mixed feelings about that. Perhaps it might be because this particular paper was the one that called him “a skirt-wearing freak” in the online edition before his big break. Talk about back-pedaling. Or maybe it was because of the increasing phone calls we were getting, asking for his services, such as finding Mr. William the feline who hadn’t returned home for three days. As the person with the responsibility to politely decline taking such cases since Michael Archangel is not Ace Ventura the Pet Detective, I happened to be the one called a heartless bitch by the person on the other line, which was very, very bothering.

  Anyway, back to the crime scene.

  “The victim used to wear eyeglasses regularly.” Talking to Henderson, Archangel gestured him to look at my face. “This is a person who only occasionally wears shades. Her shades come with nose pads, so she has slight marks on the bridge of her nose. Now let’s take a look at the victim’s nose. She has more distinct marks than Kelly’s nose, right?”

  “Right,” Henderson agreed. “The killer took away practically everything. What’s your take on this case? Do you think it’s a robbery gone wrong, or the case zero of a serial murder?”

  “Negative to both scenarios. Look at the crime scene. It’s tidy. No blood spattering, no dismemberment, and no ritualistic message. So the killer took items from the victim, but the part seems more like—”

  “Some kind of a cover-up method, right?” One of the men hanging around the crime scene chimed in. He was a lanky guy in his mid-twenties, wearing a dark suit, and a white, starched shirt that screamed, “Newbie FBI agent!” He reminded me of a golden retriever. I was a little tempted to throw a stick or something to see if he would go running and fetch it back. Without knowing my thoughts, he continued proudly. “The killer took th
ose items so he could cover-up what he really had to take, right?”

  Archangel, who was cut off in midsentence, did his signature one-eyebrow raise. “Thanks for pointing out the obvious,” he said. Though he kept a poker face, he wasn’t very happy about this guy’s interruption. “What dismisses the possibility that this could be a robbery gone wrong is the lack of signs of a struggle.”

  “I see.” Henderson nodded. Then he introduced the guy to us. “Archangel, Ms. K, this is Probationary Agent Scott Blitze. He’s a new guy in our office, fresh from Quantico. Scott, as you know, this is Michael Archangel.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’ve heard and read a lot about you,” he said excitedly, extending his hand.

  Archangel shook the young agent’s hand, somewhat reluctantly. “How do you do, Agent Blitze?”

  “Call me Scott.” Blitze beamed. “Can I call you Michael?” I was looking at the newbie agent’s imaginary tail wagging.

  “No.” Archangel smiled. His was wearing plastic gloves, but I could almost see his knuckle whiten from the bulging of his forearm muscles.

  “Oh…” Blitze started to say something, but he fell silent. The corner of his mouth tightened. “Understood,” he managed to say.

  “This is Ms. Kelly Kinki, Archangel’s associate,” Henderson introduced me to Blitze.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Kinky—”

  “It’s Kinki, K-I-N-K-I,” I corrected.

  “Oh, really? Yeah, I thought Kinky was a little bit too…you know, kinky. Funny, huh?” Blitze chuckled.

  I felt like punching him in the face, but as a professional, I said, “Please call me Kelly, Agent Blitze.” As I shook his hand, Blitze flinched at my grip. Archangel must have crushed his hand pretty badly.

  “So it’s a single homicide committed by someone she knew, right?” Henderson cleared his throat.

  “Sir, it’s an easy case. The victim’s strangulated to death. So the killer must be a man—a boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend. It’s a crime of passion.”