Explosive Eighteen: A Stephanie Plum Novel (Stephanie Plum Novels)

icing down his privates. I’d made a good connection. Imagine what sort of damage I could inflict if I actually knew what I was doing.
    I gave Rex part of a cookie, went to my computer, and searched around until I found a news story on the man murdered at LAX. His name was Richard Crick. Age fifty-six. Surgeon. Had an office in Princeton. He’d been in Hawaii attending a professional conference. Police were speculating it was a random robbery gone bad.
    I suspected different. Crick had something valuable … the photograph. For whatever reason, he slipped the photograph of the man into my bag while I was sleeping. And then either he fingered me before he died, or else a bunch of people figured it out. I had no clue as to the significance of the photograph, and didn’t especially want to know.
    I tapped Crick into one of the bonds office background search programs and watched the information scroll down. He’d been an army doctor for ten years. Three were in Afghanistan. Three in Germany. The rest Stateside. He’d gone into private practice when he left the army. Divorced. Two adult sons.One living in Michigan, and one in North Carolina. Squeaky clean until a year and a half ago, when he was hit with a wrongful death malpractice claim. So far as I could see, the claim was still pending. He owned a home in Mill Town. The latest appraisal was $350,000. He owed $175,000 on his mortgage. He drove a two-year-old Accord. No other litigation. No liens. No reports of bad credit. All in all, a pretty boring guy.
    No point to sneaking into his house and his office and looking around. I was coming to this game late. The fake FBI, the legitimate FBI, local police, employees, and relatives would already have combed through everything.
    I remoted the television on and surfed around, finally settling on the Food Channel. I fell asleep halfway through a
Food Truck
special and didn’t wake up until eleven-thirty. I checked my phone for messages, found none, and went to bed.

FIVE
     
    I AWOKE DISORIENTED. The room was dark. An alarm was going off. I was next to a warm body. Morelli. He reached across me and shut the alarm off. The alarm had been coming from his cell phone.
    “What the heck?” I said. “What time is it?”
    “It’s five o’clock. Gotta go. Early briefing. And I need to go home and feed Bob before I leave for work.”
    “When did you get here?”
    “Around midnight. You were asleep.”
    “So you just crawled under the covers? I thought we were having issues.”
    He slipped out of bed. “I was tired. This was easy.”
    “Easy?” I was up on an elbow. “Excuse me? Easy?”
    “Yeah, I didn’t have to talk to you.” He kicked around inthe dark, picking clothes off the floor. “These boxers are mine, right?”
    “Who else would they belong to?”
    “Could be anyone’s,” Morelli said.
    I rolled my eyes and switched the bedside light on. “Does this help?”
    He tugged his jeans on. “Thanks.”
    Now that the room was partially lit, I could see the Band-Aid across Morelli’s nose, and his black eye. The fight in Hawaii had been violent but short, terrifying to witness and infuriating to remember. Ranger had needed seven stitches to close the cut under his eye, and he’d cracked a bone in his hand rearranging Morelli’s face.
    “How’s your nose?” I asked Morelli.
    “Better. The swelling’s down.”
    “That fight was
horrible
!”
    “I’ve been in worse.”
    I knew this to be true. Morelli’d had some wild years.
    I sat up and hugged the quilt to my chest. “I was afraid you were going to kill each other.”
    “I was trying,” Morelli said, sitting in my chair, pulling on socks. “Remember, you’re talking to Berger this morning. And don’t mess with him. He can make trouble for you if he wants.” He came to the bedside and gave me a fast kiss. “I’ll try to get away earlier tonight.”
    “I might have plans with Lula.”
    He took his gun off the nightstand and clipped it to hisbelt. “Don’t mess with me, either. I’m running with a short fuse these days.”
    Jeez Louise.
    I thrashed around in bed for a couple hours, trying to get back to sleep and having no luck. I finally rolled out of bed around eight and out of the apartment around nine. My plan was to stop in at the bonds bus before heading off to the FBI.
    Traffic was slow on Hamilton, and I saw the reason for the gridlock when I was half a block from the bus. The bus was no more. A couple orange traffic cones