The following story is a work of fiction that features characters developed by Janet Evanovich. No money has been earned through writing this story. Any similarities to real events or persons are entirely coincidental.

Toxic 30, although a stand-alone, builds upon the previous books in my series. The first one is a bit cupcake-y, but the rest are pure babes and develop the relationships between the characters. For maximum enjoyment, I suggest that you read them in the following order:

22 Caliber

Trigger Happy 23

Morelli's Argument 23.5

Ranger 23.75

Threatening 24

Fixation 25

Security 26

Sneaky 27

Date Night at the Movies 27.1

Meeting Maria 27.2

The Intervention 27.3

Envious 28

Dickie's Demise 28.1

Mob Matters 28.2

Altercation at Giovichinni's 28.3

Numbskull 29

In recognition of the fact that I'm a binge reader and don't personally like to wait for updates, I will post at a minimum on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule (or a Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday schedule, depending upon where you live in the world), barring unseen life events. However, in the past I have periodically posted extra chapters to celebrate achieving some personal milestone – or just because I like the way the sun is shining that day – so you might want to watch for those. Since I do that relatively frequently, if you are enjoying the story you might want to follow it rather than continually check back.

Reviews, as always, are greatly appreciated. I have a few people who regularly review for me, and I'd like to thank you for that. Your reviews have given me confidence to write another story. In appreciation for people taking the time to leave a review, for every 25 reviews I post an extra chapter. Note that this means that sometimes I post twice in a day, and I apologize if that is too frequent for you. I appreciate all reviews and try to respond to each and every one. Please note that I cannot respond to reviews that have been posted by guests.

Thank you for reading my story. I hope you enjoy it!

~ Sarah ~

Chapter One

I ran another name through the search engines and sighed. Ranger was out training PMC staff and I missed him immensely. He wasn't due home for another three days and I could hardly wait.

My name is Stephanie Plum, and I'm the researcher for Rangeman, Ranger's ultra-elite security company. Ricardo Carlos Manoso, known by his staff and good friends as Ranger, was my boyfriend. He was the yin to my yang. If we were drinks, I'd be a vanilla milkshake. There would be nothing complicated about me. Of Hungarian and Italian descent, I looked more Hungarian than Italian. I had inherited the shoulder-length brown curly hair and blue eyes and cute nose from my grandmother on my mother's side, and had inherited nothing other than my name and a number of rude hand gestures from my father's. Ranger would be a caramel macchiato, deep, dark and full-bodied. Ranger was Cuban-American with the perma-tan and warm brown eyes and hair to prove it. He had the sort of physique that made women drool as he passed by, both to my joy since I was one of the women who drooled and to my dismay since I wanted to claw out the eyes of all those other women. He was known as Mr. Mysterio amongst my friends, and I could see why. He played his cards close to his chest.

I had been friends with him for years, but although we had a close emotional connection that, when the stars aligned, had delved into a physical connection, we hadn't formally dated one another. Part of that reason was because I had been in an on-again, off-again relationship with Joe Morelli, Trenton's finest detective in the Crimes Against Persons division. About five months ago I had finally broken it off with Joe, this time permanently. The other reason we hadn't dated was because Ranger didn't want to commit to anyone. He had been married in a past life for about ten minutes, a union that had resulted in his thirteen year-old daughter Julie. I had always assumed that his wish to avoid commitment was based on his desire to not repeat the experience of holy matrimony.

I was wrong. His desire to avoid commitment was to protect his loved ones. Ranger, in addition to owning Rangeman, was a trainer and occasional team lead on special missions for the covert PMC – Private Military Contractors – and with PMC's mandate of going into other countries on behalf of the CIA, DEA, FBI and other alphabet agencies to provide privately contracted military support, he had gotten in the bad books with a lot of scary people. Ranger had kept himself separate from his family and friends so that involvement didn't spill over onto them.

Ranger's role in PMC was a closely guarded secret, and only two people outside PMC knew of his involvement. One was his best friend, Tank, who was second-in-command at Rangeman and had backed up Ranger both professionally and personally since Ranger had left the army, and the other was me. Again, that was for the protection of those people who loved him.

So, in the world of secrets that Ranger inhabited, he entrusted me with the knowledge of his covert work with PMC. He told me for a reason. While he knew it would be safer for me to not be involved with him, he said he was too selfish not to want to explore the potential of a relationship with me.

I was happy that he was being selfish. I'd done a lot of soul-searching when I broke up with Morelli. After telling me of his work with PMC, Ranger had left the decision as to whether we'd get together up to me. After all, because of his PMC connection, there were a number of security considerations that I'd have to adopt to keep myself safe. One of those was to wear a watch that had a tracking device in it. It made sense. I had hated it at first, but after a bit of time to get used to the concept I liked being monitored like that. While that was for Ranger's peace of mind, I had been kidnapped enough in the past that it worked for my peace of mind as well. As Ranger said, it wasn't just for me. He had a tracker in his watch as well. But unlike Ranger, I'd had to use mine.

Another concession to keeping me safe was to drive one of the Rangeman cars so that I looked like the other cars on the road. Any car that I could afford was typically rusty and dented, and in the land of leased and new vehicles, my cars stuck out like a sore thumb.

Like my cars, I had to conduct my life in a way where I blended in with those around me. So, no identifying characteristics like tattoos, piercings or wildly-unique hair colors. Since I was a fairly traditional woman whose style tended towards the classic, this wasn't a problem for me.

While all those safety measures were fairly innocuous on their own, they all added up to a scary package that needed to be considered carefully, but after much deliberation I decided that I wanted to pursue a relationship with Ranger. So we started to date. Then we started to spend nights together regularly. He invited me to meet his family. And one and a half weeks ago I moved into Ranger's apartment.

While Ranger had his reasons for avoiding commitment, so did I. Mine weren't as noble as being part of a covert group which worked to right the wrongs in this world. Mine were because I also had been married, but for me I'd been married for three months to Dickie Orr, a philandering jackass of a man who had emotionally and physically abused me. I had learned, through him, that men changed from being charismatic and loving before being married to complete assholes afterwards. Over time, Ranger's steady support and unconditional love had chipped away the fear that he'd change like Dickie had. Ranger was such a protective person that I couldn't imagine him doing anything willingly to hurt me, and he was so thoughtful, caring and honorable that I couldn't imagine him doing anything unwillingly either. In short, I trusted him.

Ranger was more than just my boyfriend and cohabitation partner. He was also my part-time boss. Housed in a non-descript seven-story brick building in the heart of Trenton with only a small brass plaque identifying its occupant, Rangeman offered a variety of services, from contracted security staff to bodyguarding to skip tracing to security system installation and monitoring. They specialized in corporate accounts but had been known to delve into the installation and monitoring of wealthy private clients. They were proof that you got what you paid for – their services weren't cheap, but they were known as the best of the best security experts around. Their head office was in Trenton, but they also had a satellite office in Miami.

When a corporate client was signed up, a standard procedure would follow. The company itself would have been investigated prior to Rangeman signing the contract. Rangeman wouldn't take on any client that was unethical. As Ranger said, it just wasn't worth it. We ran a clean organization and we wanted our clients to be clean as well. As the researcher, I would do that investigative work. When Ranger had approved the client, went over their security needs, made recommendations and signed the contracts, Ranger would install any security changes and I would research each person in the company to look for security leaks. On an ongoing basis, my role would be one where I was responsible for investigating potential employees for our clients, those employees who had passed the first interview and who the company was interested in having back for a second one. Other people in Operations looked after the other components of their security program.

The company I was currently researching was Bordin, a manufacturing company that made whatchamacallits for computers. I didn't really care what they did and just needed to know that they made computer parts. We had just signed them on as a contract, so I had the unenviable job of researching all two hundred and thirteen employees. I had one hundred and four left to go.

I would have completed more if it wasn't for the fact that working at Rangeman wasn't my only job. I also worked for Vincent Plum Bail Bonds as a fugitive apprehension agent or, most commonly known as, a bounty hunter. When people were arrested, most of the time they were awarded bail. When one posted bail, they gave a sum of money to the courts and, in return, were allowed to spend their time outside jail while they waited for their hearing date. When the accused showed up at their hearing, the bail was returned to them.

However, the accused frequently didn't have the money to post bail. That's where a bail bonds company came in. For fifteen percent of the price of the bond and the donation of some collateral, the bonds office ponied up the money to let the accused roam free. When the accused showed up for their court date, they got the collateral back. The bonds office, however, kept the fifteen percent.

Sometimes the accused didn't show up for court though, and that created a problem for the bail bondsman. Without that bail returned from the courts, the bondsman couldn't lend the money to another felon and therefore couldn't earn another fifteen percent. That was where I came in. When the accused missed their court date, I was sent to retrieve them and bring them back into the courts again. For this, I got two-thirds of that fifteen percent. Good deal for me, until you realized that there was no base pay.

For years, I kept myself afloat by just doing skip tracing. Some months were lean. Hell, what am I saying? Most months were lean. But now that I had started working at Rangeman I had the stability of the research job while still having the variety and excitement of the bounty hunter job. I had been unsure about it at first – after all, research put my feet to sleep – but the two jobs were working for me. For the first time ever I was looking at the potential of putting some money aside for the future, and didn't that make me feel good about myself?

When I did skip tracing, I often used the file clerk from the bail bonds office as my backup. Lula was a former 'ho who'd had her share of experiences in the court system. If I was a vanilla milkshake and Ranger was caramel macchiato, Lula was an extra-large hot chocolate with whipped cream and peppermint sprinkles. She was particularly useless as a bounty hunter and was even worse as a file clerk. Her only noticeable skill was to tackle felons in an attempt to capture them. It sometimes even worked. Together, we had been called the Lucy and Ethyl team of bounty hunters, but even though we were bumblers, we did eventually, usually, get the job done. And when we failed in our mission despite our best efforts, we always had the choice to hand the file over to Rangeman. While there were a few times that I'd had to rely on them, it wasn't something I willingly chose to do, partly because by doing so I would lose sixty percent of my capture fee, but also partly because it seemed like cheating to me.

Ranger had been my mentor in the business. I had been an out-of-work lingerie buyer who had blackmailed my way into the job as a bounty hunter. My boss, Vincent Plum, had a perverted sex life with partners ranging from a variety of creatures with two or four legs, and as his cousin not only did I know that, but I also knew his wife was ignorant of the fact. So I blackmailed my way into the position, an action that Vinnie luckily didn't hold against me. It would have made family reunions difficult.

Vinnie had given me a few files and left me to it. I don't know who was more surprised when I captured the felons, Vinnie or me. Since I'd had some success – and I still had that very juicy dirt on my cousin – Vinnie let me continue in the role. The job suited me. I didn't have to wear nylons or heels to the office, I didn't have to work standard nine-to-five hours and, best of all, it allowed me regular runs to the Tasty Pastry for coffee and doughnuts.

Both my research job and my skip tracing job used the same skills – primarily a tendency to try to prove my convictions right. That characteristic had gotten me into trouble in the past. It was what convinced me to prove that I could be Wonder Woman to all the neighborhood kids by jumping off the roof of the house while wearing a pillowcase tied around my neck like a cape. (I wasn't and landed in a pile of doggie doo-doo.) It was what convinced me that I could become a baton twirler in high school, despite having no sense of either rhythm or coordination. (I lost control of the baton and it flew into the tuba.) It was what convinced me that I could be the next genius that graduated college. (I graduated in the ninety-eighth percentile.) I had never thought of that sort of stubbornness as a good quality, but it was my most-used personal characteristic in my professional life. Ranger said that it was one of the things he admired most about me. Go figure. Most people say it was the personal trait they liked the least.

I finished the report. Ranger and I had changed the way we were doing reporting. Previously, we had printed off reams of paper and I had gone through the paper with a fine-toothed comb and my trusty highlighter. That had worked for the longest time, but Ranger and I had been unhappy with the number of trees we were killing with each corporate overview. Each employee would go through a minimum of four searches, which resulted in a minimum of four pieces of paper – and more frequently resulted in an average of twelve. The most extensive search that I had completed was fifty-six pages long. Most of the information presented in the searches was unimportant, but I had to sift through the different search results to be able to highlight any concerns, and I had to produce a summary report that condensed those search results into an easy-to-follow document. So if there was an average of twelve sheets per employee, the Bordin files would be over four reams of paper. That was a lot of paper talking about very little that was interesting.

So Ranger and I developed a template to use for each of the employee reports. Each employee had their own electronic file under the company file, and in each employee file was a downloaded copy of each of the search engine results as well as a report that summarized all the data. This meant that I had at least four searches to do for each employee, or almost nine hundred for the company. Just shoot me now.

The job as researcher was better than it used to be. When I first started, I would use the search engines to print off the search results. There was no analysis involved in the job. But I kept falling asleep – literally – on the job, so Ranger decided to make the job more interesting to me. He said that I had good instincts, so he encouraged me to go through the reports to separate the chaff from the wheat. Ranger was happy because he said I was catching more things than he would have caught if he had to read all of the supporting documentation himself, and I was happy because it kept it more interesting for me.

I found, with doing the analysis, that my search was more focused and more detailed. I often could identify issues on my first run-through of the search engines and, based on that information, could investigate more closely the issues that I pinpointed. This involved some non-search engine investigation – some of which was legal. Ranger had set me up with his best hacker, and Leonardo had taught me a lot. I had worked with him for three days, and Leo told me that I took to information gathering like a duck took to water. I found this type of information gathering fun and, for those accounts that required getting past firewalls – something I didn't have the computer know-how to do – I could still use Leo's services to help me. In short, investigating people suited my nosy tendencies and appeased my curiosity.

This information helped Ranger when he set up the corporate accounts. It was rare that a corporate account didn't have any issues to flag. In fact, in the six months that I had been doing the analysis, there hadn't been a corporate account yet that I hadn't found at least one concern on.

In this account, I had investigated just over half of the employees and I had identified three that were questionable. Nothing too serious. One had a sealed juvie record. One was caught for shoplifting when she was nineteen. And the third, which was more concerning, was someone who had been arrested for selling stolen parts. Why it was an especial concern was because he seemed to specialize in stolen computer parts. I didn't know if he was interested in computer whatchamacallits, but I personally didn't think the company really wanted to find that out.

Normally, I didn't mind doing research. However, I didn't like setting up new companies. Ranger never put pressure on me to get the research done, but I expected me to do it all yesterday. However, with a large file like Bordin's, the research took time. At half an hour, on average, per employee, there were roughly one hundred hours of research to do. I'd been working on the file for the last week and a half and still had about fifty hours left to complete.

I'd been working more hours with Ranger gone. There just seemed to be little point in going back to the apartment when he wasn't there. Ranger had left Sunday morning. I had cleaned my hamster's cage that afternoon and then, with all my chores completed, I came down to my office and tried to knock off some of the searches.

Ranger's apartment was on the top floor of the Rangeman building. This drastically cut down the time to commute in the morning, and it let me work late in the evening. The apartment was maintained by Ranger's housekeeper, Ella. She was a whiz in the kitchen and, unlike me, was a natural homemaker. Ranger and I both were grateful that she was in our lives.

I stretched and rubbed my eyes, then shut down the computer and closed up my office for the night. As I walked to the elevator, I approached Tank's office. His door was open and I could hear Morelli talking to him, and he was saying something about one of our search engines, In-Spect. It was our most comprehensive and invasive search engine that we had, the most comprehensive and invasive search engine that existed. It had been designed by Leo and was one of the reasons Rangeman was known as the place to go for security needs. We used all the standard ones that the police used as well, the DMV database and the Border Security database and the IAFIS database and the databases used by the health insurance companies and so on. But In-Spect could do everything that the standard searches could do and more. Much more. I had become somewhat of an expert in using it in the last six months.

Since In-Spect was an in-house designed program, it meant that we often had more information than the police. In the spirit of cooperation, Rangeman had periodically shared this information with the TPD on specific cases.

I popped my head into Tank's office. "I heard the words 'In-Spect' which means you are talking about my area of specialty. What do you need done, Joe?"

Joe looked at me with an 'oh, shit' expression on his face, then looked at Tank. He looked back at me and said, "I didn't know that you'd still be in the office."

"I was just trying to get caught up on my searches", I said. "We had a big corporate account come in last week, and I'm doing my part of the set up."

"Stephanie is our most accomplished researcher. If she can't find out anything", said Tank, "then it isn't there to find out. She has saved our bacon several times."

"Do you have something you want me to research?" I looked at Tank, and he looked at Joe.

"No. I want you far, far away from this", said Morelli.

"Joe", I said in my best conciliatory fashion, "there is no risk to me for just doing research. In-Spect is invasive, but there are no traces that are left of my search. There is no way that the person I am researching would know that I was looking for them."

"The people Rangeman are researching for me are people who have a tendency to make their enemies disappear. I have already run their names through the police databases, and they are clean. I asked Ranger to run them through your database, but he said that he did the best that he could."

"I can do better than Ranger. He is good on doing research, but that's my job. I do it all the time, whereas he has to feel his way through it."

"That's what I was telling Morelli", said Tank. Joe glared at Tank, and Tank smiled. "She really is the best researcher that we've ever had."

"Aw, thanks, Tank. You say the nicest things", I said with a grin.

Joe looked at me, his head cocked to the side as he considered me. He sighed, and I smiled. I knew I had won. "Okay", he said. "I've been working with Terry Gilman on a case." My eyes got squinty, and Joe smiled. He knew how jealous I got of Terry and, even though Joe and I weren't dating anymore, I still was jealous of Terry. She was perfect for Joe and I had always known that. She was beautiful and intelligent and athletic and nice. She was the head cheerleader, the top of the honor roll, the homecoming queen, the one voted most popular in the school. Compared to her, I felt inferior and worthless.

The one real problem, the only real problem with Terry, was that she was a member of the mob. Her uncle, Vito Grizoli, was well-connected within the local branch of the Mafia and Terry had been working for her uncle for years. She had, at times, worked with Joe when there were issues to iron out between the mob and the police. I knew that she wanted to make that collaboration more formal.

I was happy that Morelli was starting to date again, and I was even happier that it wasn't Terry that he was seeing. He had told me a week ago that he had started seeing a woman named Becky. I didn't know her, but I looked forward to meeting her. I hoped to set up a dinner between Becky, Joe, Ranger and myself in the near future. It would be one of the weirdest double dates that I had ever gone on, but I wanted to make sure that she was good enough for Joe. I might not be going out with him any longer, but I still cared deeply about him. He still was one of my closest friends.

"What did Terry have to say?" I said. I was proud for how unaffected my voice was. Inside, I was screaming and swearing.

"There are two branches of the Mafia that are warring in Trenton right now. The old branch is headed by Vito. They are the Mafia, but they have lost a lot of their teeth in recent years. They spend more time talking about their glory days than they do raising a ruckus. The old branch and the police have declared a truce and we are good at working with each other, or we are as much as possible considering they are the mob. A new branch is now trying to take over. They are infiltrating the area and, according to Terry, are picking off the members of the old mob, one at a time. But although we know that, we don't have any proof."

"Are there any particular people that you have identified as potential members of this new group?"

"Terry has identified a couple but we don't have the kingpin. The two she has identified she thinks are the enforcers for the mob and might be near or at the top of the food chain. Ranger was looking into them for me. He worked on it for a while, but he said that you could find out more than he could."

"Who are they?"

"Lorenzo and Luigi Vistonni. They own a waste management company called Garbrec that offers both garbage and recycling services. They also own a paper plant and, interestingly, a bagel-making facility. However, Ranger couldn't find a single landfill weigh scale ticket for their waste management services above and beyond what would normally be used in their offices, which is one problem with the company. The other potential difficulty is that Ranger found receipts for large quantities of lye. The sodium hydroxide could be used to dissolve road kill for their waste management business, but they are buying it in tanker sizes, which is far more than is needed for the destruction of road kill. It could, I guess, be used in the production of their paper. I don't know that much about their processes, but what I do know is that caustic soda, or sodium hydroxide, also known as lye, can be used to dissolve bodies."

"The members of the mob that are disappearing…have they been found at all? Or could they have been disintegrated?" I said. I shuddered. Being dissolved would be a difficult way to go, and I immediately thought about my grandmother. She had an unholy fascination with dead bodies and frequently went to the funeral home to get her fix. If the deceased had chosen to have a closed casket at their funeral, she would often pry the lid open to see the body. The local funeral home had taken to nailing the caskets shut in an effort to thwart her. She had responded to this practice by carrying a pry bar in her purse when she went to viewings. She would be devastated to know that the bodies had been dissolved into a slurry.

I started to think about the pink slime that they put into meat to make it look appetizing at the grocery store. I wondered if that would be what a dissolved body was like. Then I decided that I'd better not think about that any longer, or I would never eat meat again. It was bad enough thinking that Frederico could have been dissolved into the caustic soda used to make paper products. After all, what do you say? I read Fred this morning? I shuddered again.

"They haven't been found, so that could mean that they had been treated to a lye bath. We don't know a lot at the moment. What we do know, however, is that lye had been found in a river close to the waste management facility. The Water and Wastewater branch of the municipality discovered it and reported it. Unfortunately, the newspapers picked it up before the EPA could discover the source. When it was reported in the paper, the illegal dumping of the lye stopped. There is no way of tracing the pollution back to the source now."

"So you need the company, and in particular Luigi and Lorenzo, investigated."

"Yes. If you do the work, I want you to keep this very quiet. I don't want there to be any link between the cases and you, cupcake. I couldn't cope if you became a slurry."

"Neither could my grandmother", I said. "Instead of a casket I'd have to be presented at the viewings in a barrel. Knowing my grandmother, she'd purposely tip the barrel over to see what color the slurry would be."