to me that we’ll be seeing this venue with my mother exactly two weeks after my divorce was finalized. Now, you and I and most rational human beings know that these things take a while because of paperwork and the snail-like pace of the government. But my mother…I guarantee you she’s hanging on to this little bit of information, just waiting to spring it on me at a very bad time.”
“You know, you’re supposed to make me want to meet this woman,” Mackenzie said.
“I know. And she’s lovely most of the time. But she can be…well, a bitch when she wants to be.”
Mackenzie got up and wrapped her arms around him. “That’s her right as a woman. We all have it, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” he said with a smile and kissed her on the lips. “So…you ready for this?”
“I’ve put away killers. I’ve been in some high-octane chases and have stared down the barrels of countless guns. So…no. No, I’m not ready. This scares me.”
“Then we’ll be scared together.”
They left the apartment in the casual way they had been doing ever since they had moved in together. For all intents and purposes, Mackenzie already felt like she was married to the man. She knew everything about him. She had gotten used to his light snoring and even his tendency toward ’80s glam metal. She was starting to truly love the little touches of gray he was already getting along the base of his temples.
She’d been through hell with Ellington, encountering some of her tougher cases with him by her side. So surely they’d be able to tackle marriage together—temperamental in-laws and all.
“I have to ask,” Mackenzie said as they got into his car. “Do you feel any lighter now that the divorce is final? Can you feel the space where that monkey used to be on your back?”
“It does feel lighter,” he said. “But that was a pretty heavy monkey.”
“Should we have invited her to the wedding? Seems your mom might have appreciated that.”
“One of these days, I’ll find you funny. I promise.”
“I hope so,” Mackenzie said. “It’ll be a long life together if you keep missing my comedic genius.”
He reached out and took her hand, beaming at her as if they were a couple who had just fallen in love. He drove them toward the venue where she was pretty sure they were getting married, both of them so happy that they could practically see the future, bright and shining just ahead of them.
Chapter Two
Quinn Tuck had one simple dream: to sell the contents of some of these abandoned storage units to some schmuck like the ones he saw on that show Storage Wars. There was decent money in what he did; he brought home almost six grand every month on the storage units he maintained. And after knocking the mortgage on his house out last year, he’d been able to save just enough to be able to take his wife to Paris—something she hadn’t shut up about since they’d started dating twenty-five years ago.
Really, he’d love to sell the whole place and just move away somewhere. Maybe somewhere in Wyoming, a place no one ever yearned for but was still fairly scenic and inexpensive. But his wife would never go for that—although she’d probably be happy if he got out of the storage unit business.
First of all, most of the clients were pretentious dicks. They were, after all, the types of people who had so many belongings that they had to rent extra space to store it all in. And second of all, she wouldn’t miss the random calls on a Saturday from finicky unit owners, complaining of some of the dumbest things. This morning’s call had come from an older woman who rented two units. She’d been taking things out of one of her units and claimed to have smelled something awful coming from one of the units near hers.
Usually, Quinn would say he’d check it out but do nothing. But this was a tricky situation. He’d had a similar complaint two years ago. He waited three days to check it out only to find that a raccoon had somehow managed to get into one of the units but not get back out. When Quinn found it, it had bloated and swollen up, dead for at least a week.
And that’s why he was pulling his truck into the lot of his primary unit space on a Saturday morning instead of sleeping in and trying to coax some mid-morning sex out of his wife with promises of that Paris trip. This storage unit complex was his smaller one. It was an outdoor complex with fifty-four units in all. The rent for these was on the lower end and all but nine of them were rented out.
Quinn got out of his truck and walked out among the units. Each square of units contained six storage spaces, all the same size. He walked to the third block of units and realized that the woman who had called this morning had not been overdramatic. He could smell something wretched as well and the storage unit in question was still two whole units away. He took out his keyring and started cycling through them all until he came to the one for Unit 35.
By the time he got to the door of the unit, he was nearly afraid to open it. Something smell bad. He started to wonder if someone, somehow, had accidentally trapped their dog inside without knowing it. And somehow, no one had heard it barking and whimpering to get out. It was an image that stripped away all of Quinn’s thoughts of getting freaky with his wife on a Saturday morning.
Wincing from the smell, Quinn inserted the key into the lock of Unit 35. When the lock popped open, Quinn removed it from the latch and then rolled the accordion-style door up.
The odor hit him so strongly that he took two heavy steps back, fearing he might actually puke. He held his hand to his mouth and nose, taking one small step forward.
But that’s the only step he took. He saw what the smell was coming from by simply standing outside of the unit.
There was a body on the floor of the unit. It was up close to the front, a few feet away from the stacked things in the back—small lockers, cardboard boxes, and milk crates filled with a little of everything.
The body was a woman who looked to be in her early twenties. Quinn could not see any clear wounds on her, but there was a fair amount of blood puddled around her. It had gone beyond wet or sticky, having dried on the concrete floor.
She was pale as a sheet and her eyes were wide and unblinking. For a moment, Quinn thought she was staring right at him.
He felt a little cry rise up in his throat. Backing away before it could escape, Quinn dug his phone out of his pocket and called 911. He wasn’t even sure if that was who you called for something like this but it was all he could think to do.
As the phone rang and the dispatcher answered, Quinn tried to back away but found himself unable to take his eyes off of the grisly sight, his gaze locked with that of the dead woman in the unit.
Chapter Three
Neither Mackenzie nor Ellington wanted a big wedding. Ellington claimed he had gotten all of the wedding nonsense out of his system with his first marriage but wanted to make sure Mackenzie got everything she wanted. Her own tastes were simple. She would have been perfectly happy in a basic church. No bells, no whistles, no fabricated elegance.
But then Ellington’s father had called them shortly after they had gotten engaged. His father, who had never really been part of Ellington’s life, congratulated him but also informed him that he’d be unable to attend any wedding that Ellington’s mother was at. He did, however, compensate for his future absence by connecting with a very wealthy friend in DC and booking the Meridian House for them. It was an almost obscene gift but it had also put an end to the question of when to marry. As it turned out, that answer was four months after the engagement, thanks to Ellington’s father booking a particular date: September 5th.
And while that day was still two and a half months away, it felt much closer than that when Mackenzie stood in the gardens adjacent to the Meridian House. The day was perfect and everything about the place seemed to have been recently touched up and landscaped.
I’d marry him right here tomorrow if I could, she thought. As a rule, Mackenzie typically didn’t give in to overly girly impulses but something about the idea