A Killer Cup of Joe Read online

  A Killer Cup of Joe

  By Jennifer Templeman

  Copyright © 2013 by Jennifer Templeman

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Amy Malkoff / www.amymalkoff.com

  Book design by Jennifer Templeman

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jennifer Templeman

  Produced in the United States of America

  First Printing: September, 2013

  Idyllwood Press

  ISBN-13 978-0-9715045-2-3

  Acknowledgements

  This book would not have been completed without the support and encouragement of many people.

  To Dina, Christi, Fredda, and Marianne, thank you for reviewing the chapters I sent your way and for letting me know the story deserved to be finished.

  To the group at BCRS, your regular messages to check on my progress and insistence that I not give up motivated me to keep working until this project was complete. Hopefully this will be worth the wait.

  To Jenny, there is no way to thank you for your patient corrections, instruction and suggestions as my beta, proofreader and friend.

  To Amy Malkoff, seeing you bring the cover to life was exciting. Thank you for your willingness to take on this project.

  To Beverly, thank you for being the real life inspiration for Anne. We’re due a cake of our own very soon.

  To my boys: Graham, Andrew and David, watching you grow and dream inspired me to try something new and dream myself.

  And most importantly, to Mark, without whom this project would never have been completed. From the moment I mentioned writing a book you believed I could do it. Your unwavering faith in me allowed me to begin. Thank you for giving up night after night to listen to me read chapters and ramble about plot ideas. We shared this book as we share our lives, and for that I am most thankful.

  To my boys ~ Graham, Andrew and David. May you always find joy in everything you do, and never stop chasing your dreams.

  To Mark ~ You inspire me every day. Thank you for your example, your music and your unending love.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue............................................................................................................................... 6

  Chapter One........................................................................................................................ 8

  Chapter Two..................................................................................................................... 17

  Chapter Three.................................................................................................................... 23

  Chapter Four..................................................................................................................... 30

  Chapter Five...................................................................................................................... 38

  Chapter Six........................................................................................................................ 45

  Chapter Seven.................................................................................................................... 52

  Chapter Eight..................................................................................................................... 58

  Chapter Nine..................................................................................................................... 64

  Chapter Ten....................................................................................................................... 71

  Chapter Eleven.................................................................................................................. 79

  Chapter Twelve................................................................................................................. 85

  Chapter Thirteen............................................................................................................... 94

  Chapter Fourteen............................................................................................................. 101

  Chapter Fifteen................................................................................................................ 108

  Chapter Sixteen................................................................................................................ 118

  Chapter Seventeen........................................................................................................... 124

  Chapter Eighteen............................................................................................................. 131

  Chapter Nineteen............................................................................................................. 137

  Chapter Twenty.............................................................................................................. 145

  Chapter Twenty-One...................................................................................................... 151

  Chapter Twenty-Two..................................................................................................... 159

  Epilogue........................................................................................................................... 167

  About the Author............................................................................................................ 170

  Prologue

  “Proceed to the end the hall and await my signal to move.”

  “Which door is it?” he asked, confused that the end of the hall had two options side by side.

  “The one with the animal sticker on it,” she answered, relaying the information as it had been given to them in the quick briefing before they’d moved into position.

  “They both have animal stickers,” he pointed out. “Which one do we hit?”

  “They said forest animals,” she recalled, wishing now she’d looked at the picture more closely.

  “Let’s go with the one on the right,” he suggested. “Bear over bird for the forest, right?”

  She didn’t respond, too busy trying to recall anything else the leader had said that could help them. There’d be the devil to pay if they were wrong.

  “Move!”

  The order was given, and she followed where her partner led. He kicked in the door, but before he could move forward, a shotgun blast sounded just as he fired his Glock. With echoes still sounding, the man who’d been in front of her crumpled to the floor.

  Without regard for her own safety, she knelt beside him, picking up his head to position it on her leg. “You’re going to be okay,” she said, repeating it several times, as if to reassure them both, while she brushed the blond hair away from his face. He needed a haircut. When all this was over, she would remind him that he was in the FBI, not on the beach somewhere. He needed to keep his hair short, like they suggested at the academy.

  “Michaels.” He was struggling to breathe, and there was a rasp that wasn’t part of his usual voice.

  “Shhh,” she soothed, trying to comfort him. She figured he needed his strength, so keeping him quiet was a priority. He was wearing a vest, which may have protected his heart, but the blood dripping onto her jeans was coming from his nec
k too fast for her to stop it.

  He made a weak attempt to shake his head to disagree, but he didn’t seem able to move it much. “Should have paid better attention, right?” He smiled, as though he’d made a joke of some sort.

  “I’m so sorry,” she began to apologize, knowing he was the one running point and her job was to get all the information to keep them on target. She’d failed, and he was trying to point it out gently.

  “Not your fault,” he argued, coughing, and she noticed the skin around his lips had small speckles of red coloring it. “The devil…” Another cough cut off what he was about to say.

  “Stop,” she attempted to console him again. “EMTs will get you taken care of, and then we can debate the devil all you’d like.”

  “…He’s in the details.” With that final comment, his chest rose once more and then stopped.

  No matter how hard she stared at him, he didn’t take another breath.

  Agents moved in and pulled her away, reminding her they had a job to do. She was unable to help them as the scene was cleared and the gunman in the room they’d moved in on was hauled off strapped to a stretcher.

  She’d been tired and distracted by her personal life. She’d failed to do her job, and her partner had died while she worried over the length of his hair.

  The devil hadn’t done this—she had. Still, his warning would be heeded; she owed him that much. It almost seemed poetic to think that to fulfill this pledge, she must never miss a detail ever again.

  Since this night, on top of the last two weeks, all but guaranteed her life would be a living hell, it made sense that she and the devil would be keeping close company.

  Chapter One

  …15…16…17…It didn’t matter how hard Ellie Michaels tried to ignore it, every morning when she finished her run and climbed the steps to her second floor apartment, she couldn’t stop herself from counting the stairs. And each day, she was struck anew at the inconsistency that every building in this complex had two floors with fifteen steps separating them. Every building except hers, which had seventeen.

  The complex, located on the edge of Richmond, Virginia’s West End, was built in the early eighties, a fact proven by the cookie cutter design of the two-story brick rectangle buildings. It was perfectly located with the security and convenience the more affluent neighborhood provided, but still gave her the ability to be in her office downtown in less than twenty minutes. The fact there was a slight abnormality in her residence probably escaped most people, but it was like a grain of sand in her brain. Small inconsistencies were the details she specialized in, and if she’d learned anything in her thirty-two years, it was that when something seemed out of place, it was. The little clues that most people overlooked or discounted as too small to matter were what she’d made a career out of, and she simply couldn’t let this go.

  Ellie worked as a desk agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She’d gone to the academy and graduated near the top of her class. Currently, she carried a badge, a high security clearance, and at least one gun. The badge stayed at the bottom of her purse near an old tube of Burt’s Beeswax lip balm and a fuzzy peppermint of questionable age. The gun was dutifully worn in its holster until she arrived at the office each day, when it would be secured in a locked drawer until she left. The weapon was on her as a requirement of the job, nothing more. She had no aversion to guns, but it wasn’t as though it were necessary for her to succeed in her current position – paperclips and Word files rarely required deadly force.

  She worked with a small group of people, most of whom assumed a pocket protector and heavily-framed glasses were necessities for every outfit, in the basement of the FBI branch office building in downtown Richmond. They were given files to review because cases were stalling or there was a suspicion something had been mishandled. Their skills in interpreting large amounts of data to filter it to relevant facts, along with keen eyes to pick up the details so fine they had been overlooked, made them adept at reviving cases that had been assumed to be unsolvable. It wasn’t glamorous, but it allowed her to use her perception in a way that celebrated it, instead of ruling her out as a nerd or borderline obsessive-compulsive.

  Ellie had friends outside the Bureau who thought she was a computer geek and acquaintances within the agency who considered the fact that she sat behind a desk all day reviewing the paperwork of the agents who were out in the field bringing down the hard core criminals to be a waste of talent. They thought any agent worth their salt should want to be on the streets, looking evil in the eye and bringing it to justice. The truth was, Ellie had seen enough evil already, and looking something like that in the eye made her want to blink, not lead the charge. She was good at what she did and was happy doing it. In her own way, she made a difference, and most days, that was good enough.

  A few people recognized her gift for what it was. Ellie’s boss, Phil, knew he could trust her to keep a file until she came up with something that would make a difference. A few of the field agents who’d been forced to submit their files to her for review had come to realize she wasn’t out for the glory or credit; she just wanted to help. They were the ones that would brave the basement from time to time to beg her to look at a crime scene photo or read an interrogation transcript in the hope she could pick up on something they’d missed.

  And then there were the agents who had no business in the field but refused to surrender their badge. Those files were the ones she hated to touch. The cases that had been mishandled, screwed up, and botched because of laziness, lack of proper protocol, or intentional oversight. Ellie visibly cringed every time she got a file in a red folder, because she knew they wanted her to find out what the agent had done wrong—not to bring the perpetrator to justice, but to bring down the agent who’d failed to do so. Fortunately, she was rarely tapped to pull a desk review on those cases anymore. There were plenty that needed to be solved, and their department was more focused on getting criminals off the street than slapping an agent on the wrist.

  After finishing her run, Ellie stepped into her apartment and allowed the simple uncluttered space to settle her adrenaline. The colors were minimalistic, nothing was out of place, and the pictures on the wall were straight, just the way she liked it. Once the quick review of her home was complete, she went back through her mental list of possibilities for why her apartment building would have two additional steps. It was something to keep her mind busy while she showered. She had plenty of vacation time accumulated because she rarely missed work. Perhaps she could take a day and make plans to go to city hall and requisition the blueprints for this complex. There might be an engineering reason for the proportions of this building to be different from all the others. She took a deep breath and forced herself to let it go—for the moment.

  This morning, she pulled on the standard pants suit with a crisp ironed shirt—ivory today versus the taupe, beige, eggshell, and white that she used to add variety to the dark trousers and jacket. Ellie resented the lack of imagination in what one could consider a uniform, and she smiled, knowing the weekend was coming, when she could wear any color she wanted. It was getting late, and she needed to be sure there was time to pick up a large coffee on the way to the office. So, she pulled her shoulder-length brown hair back in a ponytail and threw on some lip gloss before grabbing her glasses, purse, and gun and heading for the door.

  Having caught every green traffic light, Ellie made it to Mocha Joe’s in four and a half minutes and pulled up in the only space available in the parking lot. In an attempt to remind herself she was a professional, she mumbled, “Once I’ve geared up, I represent the U.S. government, rolling my eyes and acting as though waiting in line is an inconvenience would not be proper behavior.” But after listening to the people in front of her complain that the trainee was struggling to work quickly, she gave up any attempt of making the FBI proud and just blew out a huff of air. The drive-thru at Dunkin' Donuts across the street would have to give her the required caffeine fix for th
e morning. She was the first to admit that she should learn to brew a decent pot of coffee for herself. Not only would it save her a fortune, but then she wouldn’t have to add time into her morning routine for these stops.

  That was the biggest failure she would admit to so far in her life. She couldn’t make a good cup of coffee, despite measuring everything as exactly as was physically possible. It seemed to be missing something, and since coffee was the only addiction she had, Ellie refused to lower herself to drinking substandard brews. There were other things that had turned out poorly in her life, but she never spoke of those. There were some skeletons better left in the closet.

  Arriving before everyone else on her team was just the way she liked it. It gave her the chance to turn on the lights, and watch as the slightly yellowed fixtures flickered to life. Their department was comprised of a common copier and printing room and a dozen small windowless offices. At one point the walls had been painted white, but without sunlight, there was little else that could be done to truly brighten the space up.

  Continuing her review of their area, Ellie would load the copier with paper, verify the printer had a green light, and do a quick check on the desktops of all her co-workers. She was careful to never look at their files; she just liked to scope out the area to see if the department had received any uninvited guests during the night trying to figure out what they were working on.

  The department wasn’t a mystery within the bureau, and since everyone knew what happened down here, they tended to be regarded with professional courtesy and gratefulness for doing a job no one else wanted to, or the complete opposite, and they were sneered at with contempt. There was rarely any middle ground in the FBI. It was the last reaction that made her double check that no one had been snooping.