Charlotte Douglas - Holidays Are Murder

I sighed. Bill knew me too well. “I’ve never been a big fan of Christmas, not even as a kid.”

“That’s hard to believe. What kid doesn’t like Christmas?”

“My mother always hijacked the holiday.”

“Your family didn’t celebrate?”

“We celebrated all right, in my family’s own inimitable way.”

Bill pulled me toward him and tipped my chin with his finger until our eyes met. “You don’t have to do this—” he nodded toward the box with my Mrs. Claus costume “—if you don’t want to.”

I hesitated. Part of me wanted to take the out he’d given me and run.

“You’ve been telling me I need to lighten up and have some fun. So I’ll give it my best shot,” I said, determined to enjoy myself.

Even if it killed me.

USA TODAY bestselling author Charlotte Douglas, a versatile writer who has produced over twenty-five books, including romances, suspense, gothics and even a Star Trek novel, has now created a mystery series featuring Maggie Skerritt, a witty and irreverent homicide detective in a small fictional town on Florida’s central west coast.

Douglas’s life has been as varied as her writings. Born in North Carolina and raised in Florida, she earned her degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended graduate school at the University of South Florida in Tampa. She has worked as an actor, a journalist and a church musician and taught English and speech at the secondary and college level for almost two decades. For several summers while newly married and still in college, she even manned a U.S. Forest Service lookout in northwest Montana with her husband.

Married to her high school sweetheart for over four decades, Douglas now writes full-time. With her husband and their two cairn terriers, she divides her year between their home on Florida’s central west coast—a place not unlike Pelican Bay—and their mountaintop retreat in the Great Smokies of North Carolina.

She enjoys hearing from readers, who can contact her at charlottedouglas1@juno.com.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dear Reader,

Christmas in west central Florida isn’t exactly a Currier and Ives event. We still celebrate with family and friends, but we make our snow angels in white sugar sand instead of the frozen white stuff. Poinsettias grow in the landscape as well as sprouting in pots in the produce aisle and at the florist’s. And we’ve been known to crank up the air-conditioning in order to roast our chestnuts on an open fire. Floridians, as Bill Malcolm will show you, adapt creatively to Yuletide celebrations in the land of palm trees, sunshine and surf.

Like many of us, Maggie Skerritt has a lot on her plate for the holidays. I hope you’ll enjoy her at her best—and worst—in Holidays Are Murder, and that you’ll return to Pelican Bay in March 2006 for Spring Break, when Maggie matches wits with murderers again.

Happy reading, and happy holidays!

Charlotte Douglas

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

The phone rang at 12:30 a.m., awakening me from a deep sleep.

“Give me a break, Darcy,” I complained to the night dispatcher who’d called. “I’m still on vacation.”

“Sorry, Maggie. According to the chief, you’re back on the clock as of midnight.”

George Shelton, Pelican Bay’s chief of police and certifiable closet redneck, had been the bane of my existence for the past fifteen years, so his attitude didn’t surprise me. I scribbled the address Darcy gave me and hurried to dress.

Ten minutes later, with a bad case of bedhead and my body screaming for caffeine, I drove east along Main Street, deserted except for the crowded parking lot at the Blue Jay Sports Bar.

Pelican Bay, a picture-postcard retirement town and tourist mecca on Florida’s central west coast, is populated primarily by retirees and snowbirds from the northern States and Canada, and few are night owls. Once the sun sets and television enters prime time, you might as well roll up the sidewalks, because no one ventures out—aside from a few of the younger folks and the occasional criminals.

The criminals are where I come in. I’ve been a cop for over twenty-two years and a detective with the Pelican Bay Police Department for the past fifteen, and being hauled out of bed after midnight was making early retirement seem more alluring by the minute.

The address Darcy had given me turned out to be a pizza place in a strip mall a few miles west of U.S. Highway 19, the main artery that bisected the county from Tarpon Springs at the north to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge at the mouth of Tampa Bay. All of the strip stores were dark except the center one, Mama Mia’s Pizzeria. Lights blazed from the large plate-glass windows and illuminated a scattering of bistro tables and chairs in what was primarily a take-out joint.

I parked my twelve-year-old Volvo in a diagonal parking space between a Pelican Bay Police Department cruiser and the sheriff’s crime scene unit van, clipped my shield to the pocket of my blazer and climbed out.

A crescent moon hung high in the east and palm fronds rustled above the parking median’s lush floral landscaping, but a chill wind, compliments of a late November cold front, dispersed any semitropical illusions. I hurried into the pizzeria, as much to escape the cold as from any burning desire to fight crime.

Dave Adler, who’d been assigned as my partner at the beginning of the weight-loss clinic murders six weeks ago, met me at the door. Looking rested, bright-eyed and young enough to be my son, he greeted me with a grin. “How was your vacation, Detective Skerritt?”

At least I’d finally broken him of the habit of calling me “ma’am.”

“Terrific,” I lied.

During the past two weeks I’d spent several pleasant hours on the beaches of Caladesi Island and the deck of a cabin cruiser owned by Bill Malcolm, my former partner when I first became a cop with the Tampa P.D. twenty-two years ago. But for the remainder of my vacation, I’d been bored out of my gourd. Accustomed to working 24/7 in our understaffed CID—Criminal Investigation Department—for a decade and a half, I’d forgotten how to relax and enjoy myself. Without new or cold cases to occupy my mind, I had wandered my waterfront condo, restless and unable to concentrate, even on the popular novels I was so fond of.

“New hairdo?” Adler asked.

I resisted the urge to wipe the teasing grin off his too young, too handsome face. “What have we got?”

“Armed robbery.”

“Anyone hurt?”

Adler shook his head. “The owner’s shook up. She was the only one here.”

“Mama Mia?”

He nodded, then jerked his head toward a door behind him. “She’s back there.”

I crossed the room, heavy with the smell of onions and Italian spices, rounded the take-out counter and entered the office at the back.

Steve Johnson, the patrolman who had responded to the 911 call, stood beside a woman who huddled in a desk chair and was trying to light a cigarette with trembling fingers. Johnson, big and beefy with a paunch that didn’t need supplementing, stuffed the last of a slice of cold pizza into his mouth. “Hey, Maggie. Thith ith Maria Ridoletthi, th’owner.”

“Maria Ridoletti?” I clarified. Johnson’s full mouth had made me guess at the correct pronunciation.

Johnson swallowed hard. “Yeah. I’ll be out front if you need me.”

“Keep your hands in your pockets and your mouth closed. For all I know, you just consumed evidence.” I smiled to take the bite out of my criticism. Johnson wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but his heart was in the right place. However, with the department under siege by a city council lobbying to shut us down and save taxpayer money by contracting with the county sheriff to take over policing Pelican Bay, we couldn’t afford any screw-ups.

His pudgy face flushed with embarrassment, Johnson slid past me to the door and left me alone with Mama Mia.

“You want to tell me what happened?” I asked.

Maria Ridoletti was far from my image of an Italian mother. Midthirties, rake thin with stringy dark hair, narrow face and a body that looked as if she’d never eaten pizza or much of anything else, she stared up at me with dazed, black-lined eyes. “I was robbed.”

“By a customer?”

She shook her head. “I’d already closed and locked up for the night. I was just beginning to count the day’s receipts for the night deposit when I looked up and found him standing right where you are now. When he saw me, he jumped, like he hadn’t expected anyone to be here.”

“Was he someone you recognized?”

Maria nodded.

I dug deep for patience and asked, “Who was he?”

“Bill Clinton.”

“Who?” Somewhere in my sleep-deprived brain, Bill Clinton’s appearance at a pizza parlor made perfect sense. Especially since Mickey D’s had closed for the night.

“You know,” Maria said. “Bill Clinton, the former president.”

I was about to call the CSU tech to bag what she was smoking when she explained.

“It was a mask, like on Halloween.”

“A big man?”

She shook her head. “A runt, no bigger than me. But he kept one hand in his pocket and acted like he had a gun. So I didn’t argue when he ordered me to hand over the cash.”

“You’re sure it was a man?”

She closed her eyes a moment, as if trying to remember, then nodded. “Yeah. No boobs, no butt. Scrawny neck with a big Adam’s apple.”

“Deep voice?”

“No, sort of squeaky.”

“As if he was trying to disguise it?”

Maria shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Did you see any identifying marks? Scars? Tattoos?”

“Except for his neck, he was pretty much covered up. Even wore gloves.”

“What else was he wearing?”

“Jeans. A Buccaneer ball cap and sweatshirt. Black Nikes.”

I couldn’t help sighing. She’d just described the wardrobe of choice of almost half the men in the Tampa Bay area. “You said you locked the front door. Was the back locked, too?”

She nodded. “I always double check the doors before I count the money.”

“So how did Mr. Clinton get in? You have any employees with keys?”

“No way. I can’t pay much, so the turnover here’s pretty high. Don’t have anyone I’d trust with keys.” She took a long pull on her cigarette and exhaled.

I waved away the smoke. “Security system?”

She grimaced. “Never thought I needed one till now.”

“How much did Clinton steal?”

“I hadn’t finished counting. Most of our business is credit cards, but we sell a lot of pizza during Sunday football games. Had to be somewhere between six hundred and a thousand dollars.” Her black-lined eyes misted with tears. “Times are tight, Detective. Will I get it back?”

Probably not. “We’ll do our best.”

“Detective Skerritt.” Adler stood in the doorway. “Come look at this.”