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

photograph
was
Tom Cruise,” Lula said.
    I shook my head. “He wasn’t Tom Cruise, but I think there were similarities. His hair and the shape of his face.”
    “I say we go proactive,” Lula said. “What we gotta do is root out the bad guys. We gotta get to the bottom of this. This is like one of them intrigue things. If we just knew what this story was, I bet it could be a television show. They’re always looking for good shit like this.”
    “I don’t want to be a television show,” I said.
    “Okay, but you don’t want to be dead, either. I don’t see those FBI idiots doing anything for you. I say we take charge and figure out what’s going on. WHAM! And then if you don’t want to sell it to television, we could sell it to one of them book publishers. We could even write the book ourself. How hard could it be?”
    I had mixed feelings about going proactive. On the one hand, I was in my take-charge mode, and Lula was right about the FBI not doing a lot for me. On the
other
hand, I hated to get more involved. I was really hoping that if I just stuck to my story, eventually everyone would leave me alone. And from a purely practical point of view, I wasn’t making money when I chased down the people looking for the photograph.
    “We could start by checking out Brenda,” Lula said. “She works at one of them strip malls before you get to Princeton. And we could look for Magpie on the way.”
    Good compromise, I thought. There were two cemeteries off Route 1. He’d been known to hunker down in both of them. And on the way back to Trenton, I could take an early exit and head for the farmer’s market and flea market. There were acres of woods around the markets, and the woods werelaced with single-lane dirt roads used for romance, and drugs, and, in Magpie’s case, camping. Magpie drove and lived in an ancient Crown Vic. In its glory years, the Crown Vic had been a black-and-white police car, but it had been sold at auction, and eventually found its way to Magpie. Magpie had hand-painted black over the white, but the car was still a bashed-in, rusted-out, retired cop car.
    I drove one exit on Route 1 and turned off into the newer and smaller of the two cemeteries. For the most part, it was all flat ground, broken by an occasional tree. All grave markers were the same. Small granite slabs sunk into the grass. Easy maintenance. You could probably get the tractor up to about 40 mph and be done with the whole deal in an hour.
    I took the loop around the cemetery, circled the little chapel and crematorium, and headed out, finding no indicators that Magpie had recently squatted here. No blackened splotch from a campfire. No stains from leaking transmission oil. No bag of discarded garbage. No ribbons of toilet tissue floating across the landscape.
    The second cemetery was ten miles down the highway. It was a real monster, with rolling hills, lush landscaping, and elaborate tombstones. I methodically worked my way through the maze of feeder roads curling over and around hill and dale. Again, no sign of Magpie, so I returned to Route 1.
    Lula had The Hair Barn plugged into the GPS app on her cell phone. “It’s on the left,” she said. “Take the next light.”
    The Hair Barn was located in a complex that included somelight industrial businesses, a budget hotel, two fairly large office buildings, and an outdoor shopping mall. The shopping mall was anchored at one end by a Kohl’s and a Target at the other. The Hair Barn was in the middle of the mall. The Scion was parked at the outer perimeter of the lot with what I assumed were a few other employee cars.
    I found a space close to Kohl’s, and Lula and I walked to the cluster of stucco-faced buildings. We stood outside The Hair Barn and watched Brenda fiddle with an older woman’s hair, teasing it up and smoothing it out.
    “That’s not good,” Lula said. “That woman looks like Donald Trump on a bad day. And he don’t look all that good on a good day.”
    Brenda finished, the woman tottered to the desk, and Brenda took a moment to clean up her station. Lula stayed outside, and I went in to talk to Brenda.
    Brenda got steely-eyed when she saw me. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Did you wise up and bring me the photograph?”
    “No. I want some answers.”
    She looked through the front window at Lula. “I see you left your muscle outside. Isn’t that risky?”
    “Lula isn’t my muscle.”
    “Well then, what is she?”
    Good