Read Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) for Free Online Page A

and a jeweler’s loupe. Harry spent his days as a county prosecutor unknotting the complications of an underfunded county justice system; there was a certain satisfaction in knotting something up instead.
    Harry had gotten a frantic telephone call at 4:17 PM. It was Tom, asking if he had heard from me. Aunt Marge had called to see if I was coming to Sunday supper, but I had not answered my phone, and she had called him to find out if I’d gone running off on some sort of police business. When Harry informed Tom that he’d not heard from me since the previous Thursday, Tom said he was already on his way to my place, and hung up. Harry got a feeling this was going to go badly, and left at speed. He got to Crazy some forty minutes later to find my front door open, my driveway yellow-taped, and my two human deputies in a frenzy. Tom had scratches all over his hands from his encounter with my frantic cat, whom he’d thrown in the back of his cruiser out of sheer desperation. The house looked like a small wrestling tournament had been held there, and there was no sign of me, though my keys and coat and shoes were more or less in place, along with my car and my cruiser.
    It’s a perk of my job that I get the new cruiser to myself.
    Aunt Marge and Roger joined the circus at this point, not long before Bobbi and Raj came at Tom’s request to get Boris. By now, the town was buzzing. So was Littlepage Road, since half the town seemed to have chosen to come by in person to gawk at the spectacle. Punk finally erected a barricade, earning the wrath of the Littlepage Inc. employees who maintained the Littlepage estate up the way from my place.
    The chaos had started to quiet down a bit when my uncle Eller arrived. Since they’d been trying to reach Cousin Jack, Tom and Punk were understandably confused. Everyone in town knew the Ellers loathed me, and I had as little use for them. Avoidance had escalated into dislike a few years ago, when I was left three million dollars in a trust set up by my late grandfather’s attorney. When Grandfather Eller said he wanted each grandchild to get one, he had forgotten to specify I didn’t count, and the lawyers had set one up for me, too. I’d tossed the money to Aunt Marge, who built the animal shelter. The Ellers had disliked me enough for getting the money. My giving it away sealed the deal. Hence all the surprise at Uncle Eller’s appearance.
    Things didn’t get much clearer when Uncle Eller announced he’d had a telephone call demanding ten million dollars be delivered within 24 hours or he’d have a dead niece.
    I halted Harry there. “They know his number but they don’t know he can’t stand me?”
    Harry grinned wickedly. “The thought had occurred to us, as well.”
    I grumbled to myself and waved for him to continue.
    Of course these criminals had not called on the private line, Uncle Eller seethed with all that saturnine dignity of his. They had called the headquarters of the company, using the publicly listed number, and the bizarre nature of the call had prompted someone to wisely pass it on to him. Since commerce didn’t sleep, neither did Eller Enterprises, so that at least made sense.
    Uncle Eller intended to ignore the demand, but the housekeeping staff had heard I was indeed missing, and so he had come to present this information to the authorities, and let them make of it what they would. As for himself, he was uncertain what to do. As Harry described it, Uncle Eller refused to deal with terrorists, but on the other hand, a refusal could get him, and by extension his business, bad PR.
    When people say the rich are different, they don’t know the half of it.
    Consternation reigned. Should they call the state police and FBI? I’d only been gone a few hours, not even long enough for anyone to file an official missing persons report. Yet the ransom call seemed a good indication I hadn’t just skipped town with a beau for a quick romp in a hotel that rented rooms by