10It was after closing time when she knocked on my door. Three precise knocks, and then she opened the door and strode in. My feet were on the desk, my mouth was full of hamburger, and I had just dripped mustard onto the front of my shirt.
She was in a neatly-tailored blue dress suit, standing primly on heels that pushed the boundaries of human endurance, with red hair curled neatly over her shoulders.
Strawberry blonde, I corrected myself, just before I leaned too far back on my chair and toppled into a pile on the floor.
"Detective Stilinski," she said, a note of impatience in her voice as she watched me struggle to extricate myself from my chair, "You seem otherwise occupied, but my business is really quite urgent."
"Oh - no," I gasped, levering myself to my feet and surreptitiously wiping the remains of my hamburger onto some papers strewn on the desk. "Not busy at all. I was waiting, in fact."
Her eyebrows rose and she gazed around the office. "Waiting?" She seemed to take in every detail, from the water-stained ceiling to the wall where I had outlined every case with pictures, facts, and string (red is unsolved, and there's lots of that). Her eyes returned to me, and she tilted her head slightly. "Well, I won't take up much of your time."
"I meant to say, I was waiting for a gorgeous gal like yourself to walk in," I replied, daring a wink.
Her response was to toss a crumpled paper on my desk. I tore my gaze away from her lips long enough to smooth it out and take in the blackly scrawled note it bears:
I'M COMING FOR YOU
"I was told that you're the best in the business," she said, crossing her arms and indicating her mounting disbelief with her eyebrows. "Perhaps you could try a little detective work to help save my life."
Details leaped out at me from the note – the sickly-sweet odor emanating from the paper (surely a girl like this would never wear perfume that cheap), the polished handwriting, even the quality of the graphite – and I reached for my coat and hat while my brain whirred along at 200MPH.
"Let's go," I said, pulling on my coat while simultaneously trying to put on my hat and also scan my case wall. She followed my gaze and spoke impatiently.
"Aren't you going to ask me any questions?" she asked. I headed for the door, stepping close to her on my way and taking in a deep sniff. Yes, that delicate perfume was much more like it. She backed away hastily, clearly reassessing my mental condition. Well, she wouldn't be the first.
"We'll talk as we walk," I said, courteously holding open the door. "But first, to make sure, I do have the pleasure of addressing Miss Lydia Martin, the second-best lawyer in Beacon Hills? And this note is from none other than Peter Hale, notorious mass murderer, who escaped from Eichen House two days ago, on the third anniversary of the day your brilliant lawyering (is that a word?) put him behind bars."
She hesitated, eyeing me with suddenly narrowed eyes. Then she stepped past me with her chin lifted high and sailed out into the hallway, calling back, "Second -best? You should check your sources, Detective Stilinski. We'll take my car."
"Please," I muttered with a grin as I locked the door, "Call me Stiles." Then I raced down the hallway after her.