Vegas, Lies, and Murder

  Praise for the Amber Fox Mysteries…

  "If you like Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum I think you will really like Amber Fox - I know I do." ~ Martha's Bookshelf

  "Amber Fox is a modern, career-driven woman who seems to be a cross between Kinsey Milhone and Gracie Hart (Miss Congeniality). I enjoyed the great mixture of action adventure and slapstick. I found myself chuckling out loud and on one occasion snorting water out my nose." ~ Coffee Time Romance & More

  "Amber Fox was hilarious with her tough as nails outer persona and her hysterical one-liners that were frequently laugh out loud funny. I definately recommend picking this book up!!" ~ The Caffeinated Diva reads...

  "Amber Fox is the kind of strong lead female character with a great sarcastic wit that I love to read." ~ To Read, Perchance to Dream

  "WARNING: I don't do the book justice go read it for yourself - it's worth it! Left me speechless. Love the character, story line, everything" ~ Jagged Edge Reviews

  "I was hooked in this book from beginning to end. This is a very well written book that has humour and romance." ~ Geeky Girl Books

  Chapter 1

  Vegas. Flashing lights, themed hotels, casinos galore. Ching, ching, bling-bling. Tacky and trashy with a dose of glitz and glamour thrown in. Excess, excitement, and craziness around every corner. Yep—Vegas had something for everyone, and it would be impossible to get bored there. I was on my first holiday in a very long time and definitely planning not to get bored. Actually, it wasn’t just a holiday. It was my wedding and honeymoon rolled into one. Brad and I had previously booked a trip to Sin City to tie the knot, but we’d had to reschedule because circumstances had conspired against us—namely, a maniac was trying to bump me off. I got that a lot in my job as an insurance investigator for Brad’s company, Hi-Tec Insurance. I was a maniac magnet for some reason. Lucky me.

  Still, I was there now, sitting on the plane, staring out the window at the Vegas Strip down below us. I could make out the pyramid of the Luxor hotel and the Stratosphere Tower. Oh, yes—bring it on!

  Mum was busy flicking through the in-flight Vegas guide. She sat opposite me on the next aisle in our business-class seats. Business class! That was a surprise courtesy of my hubby-to-be. Brad had told me he’d booked Economy Plus, the little devil. I wondered what other surprises he had planned to make the holiday extra special.

  ‘I want to go to the Mob Exhibition,’ Mum said.

  Ever since I’d roped Mum into helping me on a recent case, she’d been having a blast. She thought she was the new Catwoman. My dad was an ex-police officer, and in the past, Mum had been a police widow, staying at home while he worked all hours to get criminals off the streets. After he retired, she was looking forward to spending some quality time with him, but he’d become bored and depressed and had established a neighbourhood watch group and become as tied up with that as he’d been with his job. But since Mum now had a taste of catching the bad guys herself, she’d become obsessed with it and thought she and Dad could form a crime-fighting duo to rival Batman and Robin.

  ‘And then I could do the CSI Experience!’ Mum’s eyes lit up with excitement. ‘I bet I could solve the crime easily. I’ve been getting lots of tips.’

  ‘Who from?’ Dad asked.

  He was wedged in between Mum and my sister Suzy, who was watching a comedy with a narrow-eyed, suspicious expression. I didn’t know why she’d chosen a comedy out of the two hundred films on board. She was the straightest, squarest person I knew, and the last time I’d heard her laugh was when she broke all the legs off my toy farmyard animals when I was about seven. She was much more suited to a horror film. Suzy was a psychiatrist with a tendency to try to overanalyse Dad and me. Suzy thought we were nuts, which was probably an accurate diagnosis, but I thought she was, too. Maybe spending time with all those patients had rubbed off on her. I secretly named her the Ice Queen. I was hoping the desert heat might thaw her out a bit because eight days with her was going to stretch my patience—and my ability to be nice—to the limit. I would probably need a psychiatrist myself at the end of it. You know what they say: you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family, and all that.

  ‘I’ve been learning from Columbo,’ Mum said. She’d been on a 007 fest recently. Then, when the boxed set of DVDs ran out, she’d turned to Miss Marple; Murder, She Wrote; Father Dowling; and The Avengers. She was currently going through a Columbo phase.

  I rolled my eyes at Brad, who was sitting next to me. He just raised his eyebrows. He was used to my crazy family by now. Sadly, Brad didn’t have any relatives left. He was an orphan and had been adopted as a young boy in Australia by an Aborigine, who’d taught him about nature and survival skills. His adopted father had died years before, but Mum and Dad loved Brad like their own son.

  ‘Er, Mum… you do know Columbo isn’t actually real?’ I said.

  Her eyes widened. ‘Wash your mouth out, Amber Fox! Columbo is a super crime fighter. He always gets his man. Or woman. I don’t want to be sexist.’

  ‘OK, whatever.’ I did the eye-rolling thing again although Mum was too engrossed in the magazine to notice. ‘Anyway, we’re not fighting any crime. We’re on holiday!’ I sighed wistfully and rested my head on Brad’s shoulder. We had eight days of no cases to investigate. No criminals trying to kill me. No stress. Eight days of fun, laughter, relaxation, and lots of mind-blowingly delicious honeymoon sex.

  I glanced up at Brad and felt a ball of excitement detonate in my chest. He was ex-SAS and had been all over the world on secret and dangerous military missions, so people would probably expect the roughty-toughty, sexy, bad-boy exterior. What they might not expect was the kind and compassionate interior, or the blue-grey eyes that were looking at me with such tenderness and love.

  ‘Only one more day, and you’ll be Mrs Beckett.’ Brad kissed my forehead. ‘I can’t wait. And I’ve got my own plans for what we’re going to do in Vegas,’ he drawled in his Australian accent.

  I slid my hand through his, my girlie bits hotting up. I knew Brad’s plans because we’d discussed them intensely. They involved seeing a great deal of the hotel bedroom and room service and a lot of nakedness. We’d even practised trying out a few new moves. It had been a rocky road for us to get to this point, and now that we were finally there, I couldn’t wait. It didn’t seem real yet. Maybe it wouldn’t really hit me until we’d actually said ‘I do’.

  ‘You can’t spend all the time in your hotel room.’ Hacker twisted around in the seat in front of me. He was originally from Haiti and had been in Brad’s SAS unit. When they’d both left, Hacker had gone to work for Brad at Hi-Tec. As his nickname suggested, he was the office’s super-duper stealer of information. Anything held on a computer system in the whole universe was not safe from Hacker’s slippery little typing fingers. He was a tall, skinny black man with a gold front tooth. His hair was woven into little plaits that often stood up from his head as if he had antennas attached to his brain, which maybe he did. Maybe that was why he was so good at hacking. He was the spitting image of the rapper Snoop Dogg and had a penchant for wearing hoodies with weird messages written on them. He currently wore one that said ‘Keep Calm and Listen to Gangsta Rap.’

  ‘This is Vegas!’ Hacker carried on. ‘We’ve got to see everything we can while we’re here. I want to go on a helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon.’

  ‘They can do whatever they want.’ Tia, my friend and our office receptionist, poked her head around her headrest next to him. Tia was fragile looking and perky. She had insanely bright fashion sense, probably due to her dad being the famous American fashion designer Umberto Fandango. He’d been involved in a case I was working on for Hi-Tec, which was how I’d met them both and how Tia had s
tarted working with us. Umberto owed me a favour, and he’d insisted on making my amazing designer wedding dress free of charge. How cool was that? It was a stunning creation that flattered my body and made me look like a princess.

  Tia had been going through a pink phase lately, which fortunately seemed to be over. Today she wore lime-green leggings, a lime-green off-the-shoulder T-shirt, yellow wedges, and a yellow flower in her blonde ringlets. She looked a bit like a radioactive zucchini. Tia was also a crime-fighter wannabe. Her alter ego during our last case was Penelope Pitstop. ‘I want to jump off the Stratosphere!’ she said.

  ‘Ew.’ That made my excited girlie bits contract with fear. I didn’t particularly like heights. And jumping off a building that was three hundred and fifty metres high was just… well, the only words I could think of were straitjacket material. And people called me the crazy one! I snuggled against Brad’s neck. ‘Well, apart from seeing lots of the bedroom, of course, I want to go on a Grand Canyon Rim Tour in a Hummer. Oooh, and I saw that Snow Patrol and Ed Sheeran are playing at the Cosmopolitan while we’re there. Maybe we could get tickets. And look at all these spas!’ I gazed at the guidebook open on my lap. ‘I’m definitely going to get a treatment done. Should I have an anti-ageing facial or a hot stone massage?’

  ‘I want to go to the Titanic exhibition at the Luxor,’ Dad said, reading Mum’s magazine over her shoulder.

  ‘What about the “Marriage Can Be Murder” show?’ Mum asked. ‘You get a murder mystery show, dinner, and drinks included. Or… look at that…’ She held up the magazine, which showed half-naked, very toned guys. ‘The Chippendale show!’

  ‘I want to see the “O, Cirque du Soleil” show’ Tia said.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ I asked Brad. ‘Apart from the obvious.’ I wiggled my eyebrows suggestively at him.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind trying to get tickets to the Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather fight at the MGM on Saturday night if there are any left. It’s going to be huge—the greatest boxing match of all time.’

  ‘Nuh-uh. No more boxing!’ I shook my head. We’d recently been involved in a case with the British heavyweight champion Levi Carter, which had, as usual, involved people being killed and me being the bad guy’s number-one target. ‘I’ve had enough of boxing to last a lifetime.’

  He pointed to an ad for a topless burlesque show. ‘How about that,’ he whispered, leaning in close, his breath tickling my ear.

  ‘Hmmm… the only boobs I want you checking out this holiday are mine,’ I whispered back.

  ‘Well, you did ask.’

  ‘You have to pick something that doesn’t include boxing or boobs.’

  ‘How about drinking?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Drinking is definitely on the menu. In fact, I think it’s a crime if you don’t actually get drunk in Vegas.’

  ‘How about a medieval banquet?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Why not?’ Mum shrugged.

  ‘Oh, we’re coming in to land!’ I pointed out the window, squeezing Brad’s hand, as we descended into McCarran Airport. ‘I’m so excited!’ I squealed, which was odd for me. I wasn’t a squealy kind of girl. I was more of a tomboy, arse-kicking kind of girl. Still, this was my wedding and VEGAS we were talking about. I was entitled to squeal.

  We disembarked and made our way through the long passport-security queue and into the baggage area. We found the right carousel for our flight and watched the suitcases going around and around. Tia and Hacker got theirs first. Mum’s, Dad’s, and Suzy’s followed a short while after. Next, Brad’s appeared.

  ‘Where’s mine?’ I asked, watching as the revolving luggage got sparser and sparser. ‘It can’t have got lost. At least I bloody hope not. It’s got my wedding dress in it.’

  Over the tannoy, a woman said, ‘Would Amber Fox please come to the Transport Security Administration desk in the baggage arrival hall.’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ I said. ‘They have lost it, haven’t they?’

  ‘Let’s find out.’ Brad took my hand and wheeled his case behind him as we all trundled off to find the security desk.

  A man and woman in blue-grey uniforms were at the desk. I explained that someone had just called for me.

  ‘Please tell me you haven’t lost my case,’ I said breathlessly.

  ‘No, ma’am,’ the guy said. ‘But it’s been the subject of a security check on the runway.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘When the luggage handlers removed your case from the hold, it was making a strange noise,’ the woman said.

  ‘What kind of strange noise?’ Brad asked.

  ‘It was buzzing,’ the guy said.

  ‘Buzzing?’ I frowned.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ the guy said. ‘The noise alerted our security officers, and we were concerned there could be some kind of explosive device inside. It’s standard procedure for our bomb-detection dog to check out anything of that nature, and it gave the handler a signal that there could indeed be something suspicious inside.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘There was nothing that—’ Uh-oh. I suddenly remembered the vibrator in there. I must’ve forgotten to take the batteries out, and the push button must’ve somehow turned itself on. ‘Oh, God. It was my, um… electrical massager.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ the guy said, not looking me in the eye.

  ‘Oh,’ I squeaked.

  Dad’s eyes widened.

  I cringed inside.

  ‘Ooopsie,’ Tia said. ‘You need to take the batteries out when you travel.’

  ‘Yes, I realise that now,’ I said to her, then turned back to the security personnel, my mouth dry, my heart rate kicking up a notch because I could guess what was coming. ‘You’re going to tell me the sniffer dog has slobbered all over my clothes, aren’t you?’ I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting to hear the bad news that my wedding dress was now covered in doggy drool and was completely ruined.

  ‘Not quite,’ the woman said. ‘As the detection dog indicated that there could be some kind of explosive material inside the case, we had to do a controlled explosion on it.’

  ‘What?’ I shrieked. ‘What do you mean? Of course there wasn’t anything explosive in there. It was a vibrator!’

  ‘Yes.’ The woman looked at me sheepishly then. ‘We realise that now. But we have to be very cautious since 9/11. We can’t take any risks with suspected terrorism.’

  ‘How could the dog have indicated explosives?’ Mum asked. ‘Aren’t they supposed to be really accurate?’

  ‘Er…’ the guy said. ‘Unfortunately, it was a new dog sent to us straight from the training academy because our experienced dog, Semtex, died suddenly last week.’

  ‘Is that an appropriate name to call a dog working in airport security?’ Suzy asked.

  ‘Well, we used to call it Tex for short,’ the guy said.

  ‘I take it there’s not much left of the suitcase,’ Brad said, putting an arm around my shoulder.

  The woman reached under the counter and put a charred plastic handle on top of it, pushing it towards me. ‘There’s this.’

  My hands flew to my mouth as I stared at the handle, tears pricking behind my eyes.

  ‘And also this.’ She put one chargrilled flip-flop on the counter. ‘And your electric toothbrush is still salvageable.’

  ‘I didn’t have an electric toothbrush.’

  She pulled out a melted mess, which was my regular toothbrush now welded onto part of the vibrator, and handed it to me.

  ‘My lovely Umberto Fandango dress! What am I going to do now?’ I turned to Brad. ‘We’re getting married tomorrow!’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Brad squeezed me tight. ‘We’ll get you another dress. There must be loads of places that sell them here. It’s the wedding capital of the world. People get hitched at short notice all the time.’

  ‘But I loved that dress,’ I cried.

  ‘I’m very sorry, ma’am,’ the security guy said, still avoiding my gaze.
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br />   An elderly woman walked up the counter next to us and said to the security guy, ‘I was called over the tannoy to come here. My suitcase hasn’t come off the carousel yet. Is there a problem with it?’

  ‘Good luck with that!’ I said to her as we all stepped away.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Tia said. ‘What a big, fat bummer. But Brad’s right. Don’t panic! You can always borrow some of my clothes if we can’t find something. We’re the same size. But I’ll phone Dad, and he can hopefully tell me somewhere we can get a nice dress in a hurry. I’ll call him now.’ She whipped her mobile phone out of her luminous green handbag and dialled before speaking into it.

  ‘But what if I can’t find one?’ I wailed.

  ‘You could get married in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, and I wouldn’t care,’ Brad said.

  I had a really horrific vision of having to get married in one of Tia’s neon outfits and one flip-flop.

  ‘Honestly, you’ll find something,’ Brad said. ‘Let’s just get to the hotel, dump our stuff off, and you can go dress shopping.’

  ‘And I had my lucky knickers in that case, too!’ I’d bought a cute pair especially for the trip. They were cheeky black ones with a picture of four aces on the front and Lucky Pants written on them. They obviously hadn’t been working their magic, though, since they’d just exploded. I was seriously thinking of suing the manufacturer under the Trade Descriptions Act when I got home.

  ‘Well, they weren’t exactly lucky, were they?’ Suzy said.

  ‘Yes, I’m aware of that, thank you,’ I replied through gritted teeth, frustration making my jaw clench tight.

  ‘Did you seriously think a pair of knickers could be lucky?’ Suzy wouldn’t let it go. ‘I think we need to talk about your grip on reality. You have some serious behavioural issues we should address.’

  ‘Ha, you can talk!’

  ‘I’m only trying to help.’