Two for the Dough (stephanie Plum, #2)

The second novel in Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series follows Stephanie, a bounty hunter working for her cousin Vincent Plum's bail bond company in Trenton, New Jersey, as she pursues a dangerous bail jumper whose case proves far more complicated than it first appears.

Stephanie and her partner Ranger, a skilled Cuban-American bounty hunter who mentors her, stake out the home of Julia Cenetta, girlfriend of Kenny Mancuso. Kenny is a 21-year-old recently discharged army veteran charged with shooting his former best friend, a gas station attendant named Moogey Bues, in the knee. He posted a $50,000 bond and disappeared before his preliminary hearing. When a truck arrives at Julia's house, the door is answered not by Kenny but by Joe Morelli, a Trenton plainclothes detective and Stephanie's complicated romantic interest from the burg, their shared blue-collar neighborhood. Morelli claims he is looking for Kenny as a favor to the Mancuso family, to whom he is related.

The next morning, Stephanie learns that Moogey has been found shot dead at the gas station, three rounds to the face. She and Morelli begin working the case in an uneasy partnership. They visit Morelli's cousin Leo, whose father reveals that Kenny borrowed Leo's car and never returned it. Julia admits that Kenny came by the previous night, said unspecified people were after him, and left. Stephanie works through Kenny's contact list, copied during an earlier unauthorized visit to his apartment, and steals his mail. The phone bill shows calls to Mexico and El Salvador, and his credit card reveals nearly $2,000 in recent purchases. Morelli identifies the phone numbers through a contact but grows evasive, then walks off with the phone bill.

At a viewing at Stiva's Mortuary, the burg's premier funeral home, Spiro Stiva, the stepson of hospitalized owner Constantine Stiva, pulls Stephanie aside. He offers her $1,000 to find 24 caskets that have vanished from a rented storage locker. The caskets turn out to be plain pine surplus boxes purchased from the army's disposal office at Fort Braddock, the same base where Kenny was stationed.

Kenny's campaign of intimidation escalates. A threatening note in silver paste-on letters appears under Stephanie's door. Her apartment is vandalized, with a silver letter on the wall pointing to Kenny. At the funeral home, Kenny sneaks in and slices the finger off a deceased man named George Mayer, replacing it with a wax copy. Grandma Mazur, Stephanie's 72-year-old grandmother who treats viewings as social events, discovers the swap when she examines the dead man's ring.

Morelli reveals the true scope of the case. He has been working an interagency investigation into stolen military munitions from Fort Braddock. Armor-piercing bullets from the base killed a police officer in Philadelphia, a LAW (Light Anti-Tank Weapon) rocket destroyed a car in Newark, and the gun Kenny used to shoot Moogey was traced back to Braddock. Kenny was a shipping clerk with access to the base's warehouse and munitions compound. His sudden wealth after discharge, along with Moogey's unexplained red BMW, suggests he orchestrated the theft. Stephanie theorizes that Kenny used Spiro's surplus caskets to smuggle the weapons off the base. Morelli confirms that Braddock sold the 24 caskets to Stiva's six months earlier and that Kenny would have known which ones were designated for Spiro.

Kenny grows bolder. He ambushes Stephanie at a mall, slashing her sleeve with a knife and slipping Mayer's embalmed finger into her jacket pocket. Morelli warns that Kenny is a genuine sociopath who, as a child, set fire to his dog without remorse and deliberately cut off the tip of his own pinky. Kenny attacks Grandma Mazur outside a bakery, stabbing her hand with an ice pick, and slashes Spiro's arm at the funeral home. Stephanie moves back into her parents' house with Rex, her pet hamster, to protect her grandmother. Kenny later amputates the penis of another deceased man at Stiva's and mails it to Stephanie. She opens the package in her parents' front hall in front of her family and Morelli.

Morelli stations Andy Roche, a Treasury agent on the interagency case, inside Stiva's posing as a grieving mourner, and wires the building with listening devices. Spiro, fearing Kenny's attacks, hires Stephanie at $100 per night to escort him home after closing. She accepts, recognizing the chance to stay close to the investigation. Through phone numbers found during an illegal search of Spiro's apartment, Stephanie locates Kenny at a motel, but he spots her distinctive Buick and flees. She also notices a white truck belonging to Macko Furniture parked at Delio's Exxon station. Morelli confirms through service invoices that the truck was in the garage on a day when only Moogey and Perry Sandeman, a hostile mechanic, were working. Roberta, the storage facility manager, identifies it as the truck she saw near Spiro's locker. The stolen caskets eventually surface at an abandoned factory, torched beyond use.

Sandeman's body turns up in the river. Kenny extracted a confession before killing him: Sandeman overheard Moogey and Spiro discussing the weapons, duplicated a locker key, stole everything using the Macko truck, and then killed Moogey to cover his tracks. Sandeman had been selling the weapons from his pickup. Kenny places Sandeman's severed foot in Stephanie's refrigerator; when she finds it, she faints. Spiro then fires Stephanie from her bodyguard role, claiming things have quieted down. Stephanie suspects Kenny has recovered the weapons and that the two men are working together again.

One night during a stakeout, Stephanie and Morelli begin a romantic encounter in the Buick's backseat. Stephanie discovers Morelli has planted a tracking transmitter in her pocketbook. Furious, she locks him out of the car in his shirt and socks and drives away.

The crisis comes to a head at Stiva's. During evening viewing hours, Grandma Mazur enters the funeral home but never appears among the mourners. Stephanie searches the building with growing alarm. In the basement, Kenny ambushes her with a knife at her neck. Spiro descends, and their conversation reveals they have been partners all along: Kenny planned the theft, Spiro provided the caskets, and they have been using the funeral home's hearse, driven by Kenny disguised as the regular assistant, to move the recovered weapons through the back entrance, undetected by the surveillance team. Kenny has locked Grandma Mazur in a refrigerated body drawer after she spotted him and confronted him. When the drawer is opened, Grandma lies motionless, then stirs. As Kenny orders the drawer closed, Grandma produces a borrowed .45 from beneath her coat and fires. Her shots miss both men but strike an ammunition case, triggering explosions and fire. Stephanie drags Grandma out the back door. Kenny staggers through the smoke, and Stephanie tackles him. They fight until Morelli, Ranger, and Roche arrive and subdue Kenny.

Kenny is jailed without bail. Spiro escapes and goes underground. Morelli fills in the final details: Each conspirator had a locker key, Kenny had an overseas buyer and received an advance he had already spent, and when he returned to retrieve the weapons for shipment, Sandeman had already stolen them. Stephanie moves back to her apartment with Rex. When Morelli visits and calls her the worst bounty hunter in history for burning down Stiva's and destroying government property, she slams the door in his face.