The Lola Cruz Christmas Story Read online

toward me. “The girls think Rochelle leaving and the letters are related. They came to me—”

  Lance cleared his throat again.

  “—to us,” Victoria added. “We’ve tried to find out who’s behind them, but—”

  “No luck,” Lance interrupted. “So I said we needed to hire someone to stop whoever’s messing with our girls. Their work is starting to suffer.”

  “Okay,” I said, as if I understood what he meant, but all I could come up with was that the dancers’ feet were tangling during a grapevine or they were dropping their pompoms mid-cheer.

  Victoria grimaced.

  I was an expert at reading facial expressions. Twenty-nine years living with Magdalena Falcón Cruz had its perks. “You’d rather handle it yourself?” I asked her.

  “Of course. The girls are a tight group. These letters have rattled them, understandably, but my job is to keep them focused on their job. An outsider poking around is going to mean disruption—”

  “But we can’t afford to lose another girl,” Lance said.

  So I knew why they hadn’t called the police. I had a bit of experience with the local police department in my previous cases. An image of Detective Seavers—not my biggest fan—and his comb-over popped into my head. Him lumbering around a bunch of nubile cheerleaders at a basketball game would be muy disruptive.

  “The letters are anonymous,” Victoria continued. She brushed a hand over her taut hair before continuing. “Jennifer and Selma have each received one. No one seems to know who’s writing them or what they’re about.”

  She shifted in her chair, stretching her long neck to gaze up at Manny. He met her eyes, tilting his head slightly. I watched in utter amazement as his expression seemed to soften almost imperceptibly. Victoria was striking, in a scary dancer kind of way, and I’d bet a year’s worth of lunches at Szechwan House, my all-time favorite restaurant (sacrilege if my family ever found that out, considering they owned Abuelita’s), that Manny was wishing she wasn’t married.

  But as far as I knew, right now he was dating Tomb Raider Girl, aka Isabel. Surely he wouldn’t dump his model girlfriend for a married woman? Or maybe her marriage didn’t matter. I didn’t actually know what direction Manny’s moral compass pointed to on adultery.

  I’d always thought he’d keep business and pleasure separate, but then again, I knew something had gone on between him and Sadie. I just didn’t know what.

  I slouched in my chair, feeling like I was slipping farther down the rabbit hole, but then the attack from Sadie finally came, setting everything right again. “I’m the undercover expert,” she said, nearly spitting her words across the table. “If Dolores isn’t up for the assignment, I can certainly take it.”

  The surveillance camera zipped, as if in laughter, and I knew Neil had caught the double entendre. He knew something had gone on between the boss and Sadie, too. He probably knew what, for that matter.

  Victoria frowned. “The Courtside Dancers have a certain, er, image. No.” The force of her shaking head threatened to undo her bun. “You’re not right for the team.”

  Sadie balked, but then she started to get up. “I can do the routine.”

  “No.” My voice was firm. I might not want to be ogled by sports fans or dance in an arena, but there was no way Sadie was taking an assignment from me. “It’s my case.”

  I doubted anyone else noticed, but she shot daggers at me, which I boldly dodged with imaginary shields. She could thank me later when she realized how I’d saved her from her own desperate humiliation.

  Victoria’s lips curved up like the cat that swallowed the canary, only it felt like I was the canary. She motioned toward me but spoke to Manny. “She needs coaching.”

  I cringed, indignant. Sure, I may waffle between size 8 and 10, but I was in prime physical shape. A black belt in kung fu. A yogi wannabe. A salsa fanatic.

  “She’ll do whatever it takes,” Sadie said, her voice dripping with disdain.

  So apparently she didn’t like my boundary lines. Which was ridiculous, since I didn’t even know what my boundaries were and I hadn’t done anything during my career, so far, that I regretted.

  “What do the letters say?” I asked, getting back to the case. I reached inside my purse for my handy latex gloves, but Manny had his on before I’d even found mine. Super detective. He was my role model.

  He snapped the latex at the wrists before picking up the first envelope. He carefully pulled out the paper inside, flipped it open, and examined it. It was thin and I could see it only contained two typed lines.

  “They’re all the same?” Manny asked as he slid the letter over to me.

  “Not identical, but all similar,” Victoria said.

  With my gloves on, I picked up the letter and silently read: “I know what you’re doing. Stop while you still can.”

  “Stop what?” I asked.

  Silencio.

  Sadie turned to the dancers. “None of you knows what it’s about? Not even an inkling of an idea?”

  The women shook their heads in unison.

  “No idea,” Jennifer finally said.

  Ha! So one of them could speak!

  If I were going undercover, I might as well take the lead in the investigation right now. Show Sadie what I was made of. I’d spent the last couple of years proving myself worthy of being a lead detective. Now I felt like puffing out my chest, preening. I was beginning to really walk the walk.

  “When did the letters start?” I asked Jennifer and Selma.

  Selma threw back her slim shoulders, but her voice was soft and tentative. “I got the first one about two weeks ago, but Jennifer got one before that—”

  “They started about three weeks ago,” Victoria interrupted. “Rochelle was the first.” She darted a glance at her dancers. “She was seeing one of the players.”

  Muy interesante. “And you think it’s related?”

  Selma pulled at the neckline of her tank top, shifting in her chair. “The letters keep coming, so it can’t be about Rochelle and Michael.”

  Lance shook his head, disgusted. “Everyone knows about them?” he said to Victoria with a hiss.

  Más silencio.

  Jennifer and Selma shot a quick glance at each other before dropping their gazes.

  Victoria leveled her steely eyes at her husband. “Yes, Lance, everyone knows. Even Michael’s wife. There are no secrets with the team.”

  I reached across the table, laid a flattened hand on the file folder Sadie had been guarding, and drew it toward me. “You’re Jennifer—?”

  “Wallace,” the tall blonde said. “I’m the team captain.”

  I wrote this down on a blank sheet of paper inside the folder.

  Victoria cleared her throat, taking over. “The letters have been arriving at every home game, like I said. Jen’s received three. Selma one. Carrie, another dancer, received two letters. Some of the rest of the girls have gotten one.”

  I jotted this down, shifting my attention from Victoria to Lance to Jennifer to Selma. “So you want us to find out who’s writing the notes—”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Lance said, coming to stand behind Victoria.

  “—and what happened to Rochelle?” I finished.

  “Rochelle is gone. I don’t want her back.” Victoria shook her head, and I could almost picture her stomping her foot with finality. “You don’t shirk your responsibilities. You don’t quit a team that depends on you. You don’t break the rules. No, Rochelle is out.”

  “It’s not like she’s the only one,” Selma muttered under her breath. I made a mental note to ask her about that at some point.

  “Just find out who’s sending the letters and why,” Lance said. “And stop them. That’s it.”

  I knew my mission, but my nerves were on high alert in the pit of my stomach. Every eye was on me. This was my first undercover case. I couldn’t blow it. I quickly opened the other plain white envelopes and found Victoria had been correct. They
were all basically the same. Typed and printed on ordinary printer paper. There was no blackmail attempt in any of them.

  So if blackmail wasn’t the letter writer’s motive, what was? The most obvious conclusion I could draw was that it was some unbalanced person who wasn’t targeting anyone in particular. Unless Rochelle and her affair had been the main target and the rest of the letters were just a distraction. But then why hadn’t they stopped since Rochelle was gone?

  “Have the letters been read by all of you?” Manny asked Jennifer and Selma, snapping off his gloves.

  “Passed around,” Jennifer said. “They’ve had us pretty freaked.”

  His lips drew into a thin line. A thousand fingerprints had already contaminated the evidence. There’d be no discovery there, even if we did alert the police. Which, considering no crime had been committed—that we knew of—seemed premature, and against our client’s wishes.

  “Next time one of you gets a letter,” Manny said, “try not to touch it. Getting decent prints could help.”

  They nodded in perfect Stepford unison. No more muttering under their breath. No more thinking the letters didn’t mean anything. Maybe they didn’t, but until we proved that, it was better to assume that they did.

  “When do I start?” I asked, getting back to business. Going undercover was expected as a detective. And I was down with it. So far I hadn’t come across anything I wasn’t willing to do, even being a Courtside Dancer. Beautiful people didn’t scare me and I had a job to do. So what if, at five-foot-six and three-quarters, I was a couple of inches shorter than the women here before me? So