A Quarter for a Kiss by Mindy Starns Clark

Author:Mindy Starns Clark [Clark, Mindy Starns]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Romance
ISBN: 9780786272709
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 2004-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Six

The “big guns” were actually quite tiny: Twelve little low-frequency disks that would serve as undetectable bugs. The hard part was getting them inside the house—and, once that was done, placing the corresponding transmitter box near enough to pick up their signal and then send it out to the boat.

For now, we could still hear through the dog bone, though mostly we were getting silence with the occasional bird twitter or dog bark. It seemed the bone had been tossed into the garden and forgotten.

Things were getting so stuffy inside our little cabin that we turned up the volume and moved to the back deck. We sat in the fishing chairs, enjoying the cool breeze. For almost an hour, we tossed around ideas for how to get the little bugs into Dianne’s house—from having Tom knock on the door posing as a salesman to sending her some bugged flowers. Almost every idea we threw out could have worked with the average person. But for someone as careful—and protected—as Dianne, we knew anything out of the ordinary would be seen as suspect.

In the end we went back through the Windward Investigations report that Eli had had done, reviewing every element of this woman’s security system, looking for weaknesses.

“It’s no wonder Eli couldn’t get anywhere with all of this,” I said. “That place is a fortress!”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way, my grandma used to say.”

“Yeah,” I replied, getting up to go down to the galley to fix us an early lunch. “Your grandma wasn’t a security expert by any chance, was she?”

“Nah,” he replied. “Though considering how well she guarded her recipe for crawfish étouffée, she should have been!”

Lunch for us was a simple ham sandwich with a side of chips and a soda. I smiled at Jodi’s choices from the grocery store, realizing she was probably still young enough to be able to eat whatever she wanted and not worry about her figure. I would have to get to the store myself soon and stock up on some more healthful fare.

My mind went from making a mental grocery list to thinking about Eli’s notes regarding grocery delivery. I called to Tom, and he came down and joined me.

“What if we went in through the groceries?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Dianne receives a weekly grocery delivery. If we can get hold of it, we can plant bugs in some of her groceries.”

“You mean like inside the packaging, where they wouldn’t show?”

“Yeah.”

“Won’t we just end up bugging the kitchen?”

“Not necessarily. There’s always soap or toilet paper or boxes of tissue, things like that. There’s a wild chance that a few of the items could get moved farther into the house. We have at least twelve of the little bugs to work with, so our odds are pretty good.”

“How do you zero in on the bug you want when they’re all over the house?”

I thought about that and finally shook my head.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not exactly an expert in this stuff.

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