Double Take: A Madison Kelly Mystery, Book 2

by Elizabeth Breck

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

It's a perfect San Diego fall - cool and crisp with bright blue skies. But not everything is right in the sunny idyll dubbed America's Finest City. 

Young journalist Barrett Brown has been missing for a week, and her boyfriend hires private investigator Madison Kelly to find her. Right away, Barrett reminds Madison of a younger version of herself: smart, ambitious, and a loner. As she launches her investigation, Madison realizes that Barrett's disappearance is connected to a big story she's been chasing - and she sets out to walk in Barrett's footsteps to trace her whereabouts. 

As the trail grows colder, things begin to heat up between Madison and Barrett's boyfriend. But he doesn't seem to be telling everything he knows, and Madison gets the feeling that her every move is being watched. What dirty secrets lie at the heart of Barrett's big lead?

Release date: October 12, 2021

Publisher: Crooked Lane Books

Sample

 

Chapter One

Monday 1:05 PM

The girl was fifteen, but she looked twelve.

“Step over here next to me,” Madison said.

The girl stared at Madison with huge brown eyes that were filling with tears. When she tipped her head back to look up at the man standing next to her, a fat tear escaped and rolled down her chin, onto a T-shirt that was too tight and low cut for a teenager. The man was smirking at Madison, confident. The girl looked back at Madison and almost imperceptibly shook her head. No.

Madison ignored her response. “Don’t look at him. Just walk over here next to me.” Madison stood easy, her five-foot-eleven frame balanced evenly on her Doc Martens, her purse hanging from the crook of her arm. She took slow, deep breaths.

The man’s deep voice boomed in the quiet neighborhood. “She better look at me. And you better mind your own business.”

Madison glanced around. October in Idaho was freezing. Colder than a Southern California girl thought a place could be. Her lungs felt like they were bleeding. She’d been tracking Alicia and her boyfriend for the past month. Well, Alicia probably thought he was her boyfriend. But boyfriends don’t take you away from your parents in California and drive you to another state, hiding your whereabouts so that your parents have to hire a private investigator to find you. And boyfriends don’t make you do things for money, things which no fifteen-year-old should even know about. But sex traffickers did.

The tableau Madison found herself in had as its backdrop the University of Idaho on-campus apartments, and there wasn’t a soul around. All of the students were in classes in the middle of the day. The couple had moved in with actual students, something the university wouldn’t have allowed had it known. Madison didn’t think the student residents even knew what had moved in. It was a great place to hide in plain sight. Madison had found them anyway. Now it was a secluded place for a confrontation that favored the bad guy. Madison was on her own with a very large man and a very scared girl.

“Your mom is worried about you. She misses her little girl,” Madison said.

“You need to stop talking,” the man said.

The tears started flowing again at the mention of Alicia’s mother. This girl wants to go home, Madison thought. She has wanted to go home for a while.

“We’re leaving,” he said. He turned and started to walk, and Alicia pivoted like she was attached to him with an invisible piece of rebar. But suddenly she stopped, frozen like the ground on which she stood.

Madison still had a chance. “Come back, Alicia.” Madison spoke quietly, encouraging Alicia to do what she wanted to do. Alicia turned toward Madison’s voice.

“What are you doin’?” The man grabbed Alicia’s arm and yanked. She made a whimpering sound and crouched low, as if to avoid a fist. How many times has that happened? Madison wondered. Alicia tried to pry his hand off her arm; his fingers were digging into her flesh and would certainly leave a bruise. His height gave him leverage, and he pulled her close and started to drag her down the sidewalk.

“Stop walking.” Madison said it with authority, as if she had a gun trained on his central mass. Which she did.

He turned, saw the gun, and stopped. Slight surprise registered on his face, like he hadn’t thought Madison had it in her. “You gonna shoot me out in the open like this?”

Madison knew that her concealed carry permit from California was recognized in the state of Idaho, but she didn’t think the university would appreciate her having a gun on campus grounds. But she was a private investigator hired to find a kidnapped girl, and she wasn’t leaving without her.

“You’ve already committed a federal crime: ‘transporting a minor across state lines with the intent to engage in prostitution or any sexual activity for which a person could be charged with a criminal offense.’ But let me dumb it down for you: she’s jail bait and you took her across state lines. And now you’re kidnapping her right in front of me. Hell yeah I’ll shoot you. I’ll get a fucking medal. People will volunteer to come clean your blood off the sidewalk. Now walk away before I have to waste a hollow-point pink-tipped .38 bullet on you.”

The guy appraised Madison, using his experience and limited IQ to decide if she would really shoot him. She figured he knew bullets, and so he would know she’d just named one that would kill him with one shot, piercing his leather jacket and then expanding and exploding inside his chest, destroying every major organ, while staying inside his body so as to avoid collateral damage to the people around him. He couldn’t know that she was a crack shot, but the way she was holding the gun probably gave him an idea. Madison could hear the wheels grinding in his tiny little mind.

“Shit, she ain’t worth this. Beat it, bitch.” He shoved Alicia, hard, and she flew to her left and went down. She started sobbing out loud. Because he’s dumping her?Madison wondered. The girl started to crawl on her hands and knees toward Madison. No, because she’s relieved.

Madison waited until he’d walked away, far enough to no longer be a threat. She put her gun back in her purse and went over to Alicia. “Get up, honey, and let’s go call your mom.”

 

Chapter Two

Monday 6:12 PM

Madison looked at Balboa Park from nine hundred feet above. The cars and people looked like little toys, weaving through the landscape on a beautiful San Diego evening. With seventeen museums and one of the largest zoos in the world, Balboa Park was bigger than New York’s Central Park. The architecture in the park was spectacular: the California Tower looked majestic, with its colorful tile visible even from Madison’s airplane seat. She gripped the arm rests. For someone who didn’t like flying, she sure did it a lot.

Alicia was back with her mom, the campus police had taken the kidnapper into custody before he’d gotten away (thanks to Madison disabling his vehicle beforehand), and Madison was on her way home. She took a deep breath and let it out, resting her head against the plane seat. The last few months had been a whirlwind of activity. In the beginning she’d enjoyed the interviews and speaking engagements, and so many requests for her services that she’d had to turn down work—a first for her. But then it had started to wear on her. Madison was an introvert. She’d learned she had a limit to how many people she could talk to in a day. Yes, she had pulled off an amazing feat with her last investigation, and it was great that it looked like she would be able to have her pick of lucrative assignments. But she could never shake the feeling, likely because it was true, that she was only as good as her last assignment. When she used to do insurance fraud investigations exclusively, she’d had the problem of having to keep the client happy or it would be her last assignment. But working in her new specialty was worse: not only did she have to keep the client happy, now if she made a mistake someone might die. These cases involved people whose lives were dependent on Madison’s luck and skill—she wasn’t just protecting an insurance company’s money. The pressure got to be too much. Finally she had put a vacation message on her email, turned off her phone, and spent a month doing yoga, running on the beach by her apartment, and spending time with Dave, the surfer who was her on-again, off-again boyfriend and all-the-time love of her life.

The trip to Idaho had been her first assignment back. She was frugal in her living, but not working for a month had put her in a pinch. Even though she needed money, she wanted to pick cases based on what value she could give to the world—getting a teenager away from a trafficker and back home was valuable. Sure, the stress of knowing she could be responsible for a death was immense. However, she wanted to make a difference, and she’d decided to only pick cases where she could. Her father, whom she missed every day—does the pain ever go away?—used to say, Everything in life is a trade-off. She could do small jobs whose outcome wouldn’t matter in a hundred years and thereby have no stress, or she could do something that would change lives, and deal with the stress that came with it.

Madison closed her eyes as the plane touched down. As soon as the plane was safely on the ground, she grabbed her phone out of the seat pocket in front of her. The flight had been two hours and forty minutes, and in that time she’d received ten voicemail and fifteen text messages. As she glanced through the texts, one of them caught her eye:

I’ve left you a few messages, sorry to blow up your phone. My girlfriend has been missing for five days. The police aren’t taking it seriously. Can you help me?

Five days was an eternity with a missing person; forty-eight or even seventy-two hours was the cut-off for a good chance of finding the person alive. But five days was still something to work with. Madison could help bring another person safely home. Finding someone who was kidnapped or lost or just needed help to get home was so fulfilling, it was like having a life’s purpose she’d never known she’d been without.

She didn’t believe that the police weren’t taking it seriously—a lot of times loved ones didn’t understand that just because the police were being tight-lipped, it didn’t mean they weren’t doing anything. But Madison could help. After all, she’d gotten her reputation by solving crimes that the police had been unable to solve. A combination of skill and good luck had been Madison’s winning combination, and maybe it could be used to find another missing girl.

Madison’s attention went back to her phone, and she read a few of the voicemail messages that had been converted to text. One of them she’d been waiting for, but also dreading:

Hi, it’s Megan from Dr. Schultz’s office. Dr. Schultz got your message and would like you to come in as soon as possible. Give us a call so we can schedule you.

The flight attendants opened the cabin door, and Madison stood. She had to stay slouched under the overhead compartments while she waited for the aisle to clear of passengers. The woman in the seat next to her was able to stand up to her full height under the compartment, and they smiled at each other ruefully as Madison leaned over the seat, trying to rest her back from the strain. Finally a man paused to let Madison into the aisle, and she stood up and grabbed her carry-on from above, pulled out the handle, and wheeled it toward the airplane door. As she joined the throng of passengers in the jetway, she could feel her phone vibrating in her pocket as another call came in.