Blind Dates Can Be Murder by Mindy Starns Clark

questioning the employees a few minutes before Jo’s class was scheduled to begin, and after he gave a warm but professional farewell to Ms. Green, he walked with Jo to the parking lot.
    “So what do you think?” she asked as they went. “Did you learn anything important?”
    He shrugged.
    “Their system seems pretty cut and dried, Jo. I don’t have any reason to suspect that Frank Malone tracked you down through Dates&Mates.”
    “So how did he know, then?” she pressed. “He timed the whole thing to be there when my date arrived, to lure him away and take his place. That absolutely gives me the creeps.”
    They reached the chief’s car, and he stood with his hand on the door handle.
    “I think it comes down to you or Brock Dentyne. One of you must have told someone the time and place of your date. Are you sure you didn’t talk about it in the grocery store or share it with a group of girlfriends at the beauty parlor or something?”
    Jo gasped, her face quickly flushing with heat. No, she hadn’t talked about the time and place of their date in the grocery store, where a few measly people might have overheard. She had put the information on her blog, where millions of people had free access to it at any time.
    “I know how he knew!” she cried, feeling like an idiot. She tried to think through her blog entry, to remember what details she had supplied. From what she could recall, there was something on there about her having a blind date at “six o’clock at the local steakhouse.” She had never made any secret of the fact that she lived in Mulberry Glen, Pennsylvania. There was only one steakhouse in town, so for anyone who perused her website carefully, it would have been easy to make an educated guess. “I’m such a fool,” she whispered, and then she went on to describe to the chief what she had done.
    “Well, that answers one question,” he said dryly when she was finished. “How he knew when and where to find you. But it still doesn’t tell us who Frank Malone really was—or why he took your real date’s place.”

    Lettie sat in her parked car, looking up at the sign for “Swingers,” Mickey’s strip club. “Where the Elite Meet & Greet” proclaimed the slogan in smaller letters underneath.
    Yeah, right
, she thought.
More like, “Where the Scum Go to Slum
.”
    Lettie hated the place, hated going in there and meeting with Mickey and passing off the discs. Somehow, on the job, she never felt too bad about stealing people’s data. But once there she was always nearly overwhelmed by her own guilt and shame. The place was so dirty; it made her feel dirty. She couldn’t wait until she didn’t have to do this anymore.
    Mickey had told Lettie to show up between 9:00 and 9:30 AM , so as the minute hand on her watch clicked into place, she slipped the discs in her pocket and climbed from the car. The sooner she went in, the sooner she’d be out of there.
    Graffiti was on the door, unintelligible lettering that had been sprayed ages ago in a purple swath across the black paint. Pushing her way past it, she stepped into the dim, smoke-filled back room of the strip club. It felt odd to be there in the morning, without the heavy thump of music in the background—or the steady buzz of voices or the clink of glasses.
    Instead, the place was silent. Lettie knew it wasn’t empty, however, because of the smoke. Somewhere, Mickey was there, evidently puffing on a cigar.
    “Mickey?” she called, her voice sounding thin and reedy to her own ears. “You here?”
    There was no response, so she walked toward the small room he used as an office. She tapped on the half-closed door and pushed it slightly open, to spot him at his desk, talking into the phone. He raised his hand to silence her, and for a moment she was a mere child, the sudden image of her stepfather filling her mind, raising a hand to strike her. The moment passed, however, and she was back in Mickey’s office, waiting as he continued