An Imitation of Murder (Sky High Pies Cozy Mysteries Book 9) (4 page)

CHAPTER
8

Zack was on a weeklong trip to Santa
Fe for a freelance photography assignment. Besides shooting dozens of images
for a turquoise jewelry catalog, the trip involved a deluxe casita at the Four
Seasons, chilled bottles of bubbly delivered to his room every afternoon and
incredible views of the surrounding mountains.

“You’d hate it here, sweetheart,”
he’d joked the first night. “The bathroom has a heated floor and huge soaking
tub, there’s a kiva fireplace and I just ordered dinner from the most
incredible room service menu you can imagine.”

Although I was going to miss him
terribly and felt a smidge envious, I’d decided to use the time to catch up
with friends, clean my apartment and work on a couple of new cupcake recipes.
But after the unsettling afternoon at Vito Marclay’s, my original plan to dust
and vacuum seemed a little too lonesome. Instead, I’d invited my neighbor to
join me for tacos and a margarita at Cactus Moon, a small restaurant that had
opened the same year my grandmother launched Sky High Pies.

“This is
such
a good idea,”
Viveca gushed, sliding into the booth across from me. “Holt has his weekly
poker game tonight, so I’d been trying to decide between a can of tomato soup
or microwave popcorn.”

When I moved back to Crescent Creek
after a dozen years in Chicago, Viveca England was the first person that I met.
She’d recently started dating a guy named Holt Crosby, so our regular chats now
included updates on our respective romances as well as news about the fledgling
interior design business that she’d decided to launch from her home office.

“I’m glad we could do this,” I
said, sipping the glass of chardonnay that I’d ordered before she arrived. “It
was a crazy afternoon and I didn’t really want to clean my apartment tonight.”

She rolled her eyes and giggled.
“Talk about crazy,” she said. “I spent an hour on the phone with my
ex-husband.”

“What’s going on with him?”

She laughed again. “That’s the
problem. He hit a brick wall and expects me to help him figure out how to put
the pieces back together again.”

I’d heard enough from Viv to know
that she and her ex had a turbulent marriage. But it had been months since
she’d mentioned him. In recent weeks, she’d been happy and content with her new
relationship and the prospects of her business venture.

“You know what?” she said. “I don’t
want to talk about my stuff. Why was your day so crazy?”

I took a quick sip of wine before
asking if she knew Pia Lincoln.

“The caterer?”

I nodded.

“I met her once,” Viv said. “At a
fundraiser for the pet shelter.”

“Well, she called me earlier from
her fiancé’s house,” I said. “There had been some kind of…well, it looked like
someone had been gravelly wounded or possibly killed, and—”

“
What
?” Viv’s eyes were wide
and her mouth hung open.

“I know,” I said. “It’s disturbing,
very,
very
disturbing. She called me in shock and asked me to come
over.”

Viv nodded. “And I can tell from
the look on your face that you did.”

“Right,” I said. “She walked into
something that none of us should ever see.”

“Was her fiancé…” Viv gulped in a
breath. “…dead?”

I shook my head. “No, he wasn’t
even there. The house was empty.”

Viv frowned slightly. “Wait a sec.
Pia found…what? The aftermath of something bad?”

“Yes, there was a great deal of
blood,” I said. “And there was evidence of a struggle—an overturned chair in
the dining room, a broken vase in the entryway and a painting on the wall that
had been punctured or torn.”

“Where did you say this happened?”
Viv asked in a hushed voice. “And who was involved?”

“Pia’s fiancé is Vito Marclay. It
happened at his place on Balsam Drive. As for who was involved, there’s no way
to know at this point. The house was empty when Pia arrived.”

“Do you know him?” Viv asked.

“No, I haven’t met him. Have you?”

Before she could answer, the
restaurant’s owner approached our table. He was a middle-aged man with a bushy
beard and thinning hair named Bryce Endicott. His parents had opened Cactus
Moon shortly before Bryce was born. He’d worked at the restaurant for the past
few years, preparing for the moment his mother and father decided they were
ready to trade chips and salsa for AARP cards and a condo in Scottsdale.

“Good evening, ladies,” he said.
“How are we tonight?”

Viv smiled. “I’ll be a little bit
better if I can get something to drink.”

Bryce frowned. “Oh, I’m so sorry.
We’ve got a couple of new employees tonight. Have you been waiting long?”

Viv laughed brightly. “Not at all.
And I completely understand.”

“What can I bring you?” he asked.

“I’ll have a glass of whatever
Katie’s drinking,” Viv said.

Bryce bowed slightly and headed for
the bar.

“I didn’t mean to make him feel
bad,” she whispered.

“It’s fine,” I assured her with a
wave of one hand. “He had two people quit last week, so things are a little
bumpy at the moment.”

“Do you know what happened?”

I smiled. “Boy meets girl,” I said.
“Girl quits job. Boy and girl leave town to find their happily ever after on a
tropical island.”

Viv laughed again. “Are you talking
about the cute little blonde and the bartender with all the tattoos?”

I nodded.

“Oh! I knew it! Holt and I came
here for dinner a couple of weeks ago. The bartender told us he was new in
town, and she was making eyes at him the whole night.”

“Candy and Wendell,” I said. “Love
at first sight. And a shared dream to live in Hawaii.”

Bryce returned with Viv’s wine and
apologized again for the delay.

“It’s okay,” she said. “We’ve all
been there before.”

He made a face. “I suppose so, but
there seems to be a scarcity of good employees these days.”

I glanced over at the new
bartender. She was carefully pouring vodka into a shot glass. Her hands were
shaking so badly that some of the liquor splashed onto the bar.

“She’ll get the hang of it,” Bryce
said confidently. “Otherwise, we’ll be heading for divorce court.”

I did a double take. “Is that…” I
narrowed my gaze to study the woman’s face. “Oh, my goodness! It
is
Molly, isn’t it?”

Bryce’s face lit up with a proud
smile. “Doesn’t she look fantastic? As of last Monday, she’s lost one-hundred
and sixteen pounds.”

“Well, she looks even more stunning
than before,” I said. “I’ll stop over and chat after a bit.”

“She’d like that,” Bryce said.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check on the kitchen. We also have a
new line cook, and he’s having a hard time remembering the difference between
taquitos and tostadas.”

CHAPTER
9

An hour later, Viv was sipping her
second glass of wine and I was trying to decide if a third sopapilla was worth
the calories.

“Go for it!” my mischievous
neighbor cheered. “You only live once!”

I decided she was right and took a
bite of the puffy fried tortilla coated with sugar and honey.

“Hmmm,” I purred. “These are
addicting!”

“I know,” Viv said, tapping her
half-eaten dessert with a spoon. “Why do you think I ordered the flan? It’s too
rich for me to finish, so I feel a lot less guilty.”

While I savored the rest of my
sopapilla, Viv asked me to loop back to the story I’d started before we ordered
dinner.

“About Pia?” I asked, licking a
drop of honey from my fingers.

She nodded. “What’s the latest?”

“I haven’t heard anything since I
left Vito Marclay’s,” I answered. “I’ll probably give Trent a call when I get
home.”

“Where’s Pia now?”

“I imagine she’s still at the
station talking to Dina Kincaid.”

Viv frowned as she leaned closer.
“Do you think she…killed him?” Her voice was low and cautious. “I mean, you
said there was a lot of blood, right?”

“I can’t say for certain. I never
went inside. But from what Pia told me and what Trent talked about later, it
looked like someone had been badly injured.”

“Or killed,” Viv said, cupping one
hand to her mouth. “Maybe it was a lovers’ quarrel.” She leaned back and drank
more wine. “Or a crime of passion. I saw a
Dateline
the other night that
was all about this husband who strangled his wife to death after she flirted
with their chauffeur.”

I listened as Viveca recounted the
television program in its entirety. She told me about the resentment and
duplicity that had simmered below the surface for months before the man lashed
out at his wife in a jealous rage. She described the murder and resulting
investigation. And then she summarized the husband’s defense strategy.

“Sleepwalking?” I said
incredulously when she finished. “Did it work?”

Viv smiled. “Like a dream! They did
tests on his brain while he was asleep, like the kind where they attach all
those little doodads to your head. When he woke up the next day, the doctors
determined that he had a really bad case of a sleep disorder called
parasomnia.”

“Well, I don’t know if that’s
involved with whatever happened at Vito Marclay’s,” I said. “But I do know that
I’ve never seen Pia quite so distraught.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Viv said.
“I mean, if I walked into someone’s house and found blood everywhere, I don’t
think I could even dial the phone to call the police.”

“No doubt,” I said. “That’s why she
called me. She was able to get her phone out of her purse, but the best she
could do was hit the redial button.”

“Which was you?”

I nodded.

“And so you called 911?” Viv asked,
picking up her spoon for another bite of flan.

“Yep. I did. And so did someone
named Eva King.”

Viv’s eyes shot up from the dessert.
“Did you say Eva King?”

The whiplash reaction was
surprising, but I didn’t have to wait long for an explanation. Before I could
respond to her query, Viv blurted a few follow-up details that justified her
words as well as the incredulous expression on her face.

“I was in the hardware store
earlier,” she said. “And I heard two women whispering about someone by that
name.”

“They were talking about Eva King?”

She shook her head. “
Whispering
,”
she said again. “Not talking. And that’s part of the reason I noticed them in
the first place.”

“Because they were talking softly?”

“Yes,” Viv said. “And please don’t
judge; it’s human nature to try and hear when other people are whispering.”

I smiled. “Especially in a place
like Crescent Creek.”

“You got that right,” Viv agreed.
“And as I listened to them murmuring, the one thing I distinctly remember was
they both seemed to think it was funny that a dead person had called 911.”
Viveca’s eyes sparked with contempt. “I mean, how perfectly awful is that? To
make jokes about someone who’s passed away?”

I felt my breath catch in my
throat.

“Can you say that again?” I asked.

“Which part?” she said. “I was in
the hardware—”

“Just the last thing,” I
interrupted. “About the 911 call.”

“Okay, sure. The two women were
talking about how funny it was that someone named Eva King had called 911
because she’d been dead for decades.”

I let the words echo for a moment
in my mind before I thanked Viv for sharing the story about the overheard
conversation.

“No problem,” she said. “I just thought
it was totally bizarre that you mentioned the name because I just heard it
earlier in the day.”

“Did you see who it was?” I asked. “The
two women talking about Eva King?”

Viv shook her head. “Sorry, but I
didn’t. By the time I walked down the aisle and around the corner, there was
nobody in the area.”

“Anything you remember about their
voices?” I asked. “Maybe a distinctive accent or a particular phrase?”

She bit her lower lip, considering
the question as she replayed the incident in her mind.

Viv shrugged. “No, I didn’t notice
anything special,” she said. “But I remember that the louder of the two said,
‘We’re going to do whatever it takes to sell those portraits and teach him a
lesson.’”

“Those portraits?” I said. “As in
more than one?”

“I guess so,” Viv answered. “Then
she added something about it being another reason the police would focus on
Oscar.”

“Really? They actually said that?”

Viv nodded. “Yes,” she told me.
“But after that, Leroy Bosch and his kids came into the store, so you can
imagine how hard it was to eavesdrop on what was being said in the next aisle.”

Leroy Bosch and his wife were the
proud parents of three young boys under the age of nine. Whenever they came to
Sky High Pies for breakfast or lunch, Harper always joked that she deserved
special wages to clean up after the Bosch kids.

“They’re experts at using maple
syrup as glue,” she’d told me during their most recent visit. “I found a knife
and fork attached to the bottom of the table about an hour after they left.”

I was smiling about the memory when
I heard Viveca tapping a spoon on her water glass.

“Oh, sorry!” I apologized. “Your
comment about Leroy and Ellen’s band of bruisers reminded me of something that
happened at Sky High.”

She smiled. “Yeah, they’re pretty
darn memorable alright. That’s part of the reason I got out of the hardware
store as soon as I could.”

“Smart move,” I said.

“And one that I will probably make
again and again,” Viv added. “Until the youngest Bosch boy is, oh, I don’t
know, maybe twenty-five.”

CHAPTER
10

When Trent answered the phone that
night, his voice made it clear that he wasn’t overjoyed to hear from me.

“Do you know what time it is,
Katie?”

I glanced at the clock on the
microwave in my kitchen.

“It’s a few minutes after ten,” I
said. “Are you already in bed?”

“No, I’m watching the news. Channel
4 came up from Denver to cover the Vito Marclay case. I guess the guy really is
kind of famous.”

“Seriously? They’ve got it on the
news?”

“Can I call you back? It’s getting
ready to—”

There was a sharp
click
before Trent was replaced by silence. I smiled, shook my head and left the
phone on the counter while I went into the living room to turn on the
television. A split second later, I heard Dina Kincaid’s voice as the screen
filled with a static shot of an ambulance, two patrol cars and Trent’s SUV in
the driveway at Vito’s house.

“At this point,” Dina was saying,
“we’re treating it as a suspicious disappearance. We obviously can’t release
details of our investigation, but we are asking the public to call our tip line
if they saw anything in the vicinity this afternoon or have information about
Mr. Marclay that will help us find him.”

The reporter asked about witnesses,
but Dina repeated her comment about the sensitivity of ongoing investigations.
When the fresh-faced broadcaster attempted to ask his question in a slightly
different manner, Dina smiled and thanked him for his interest before stepping
away from the camera.

During the rest of the report from
Crescent Creek, the television screen filled with picturesque shots of the
downtown business district, the gazebo in Aurora Ridge Park and a montage of
local landmarks that included a nice glimpse of Sky High Pies. As the montage
ended and the reporter reappeared, my phone chirped in the kitchen.

“Hey,” Trent said when I answered.
“Did you see the report by any chance?”

“I did. Dina looked great.”

“Yeah, she did. But the guy was a
bonehead.”

“He was just doing his job,” I
said.

Trent grunted. “I suppose, but I’ll
never understand why they keep asking the same thing over and over once they’re
told that it’s an ongoing investigation.”

“Because they’re persistent and
intrepid,” I suggested.

“More like stubborn and entitled,” Trent
said.

I waited while he delivered his
standard diatribe about the media before he asked why I’d called earlier.

“Probably just so I could hear your
cheerful, upbeat voice,” I joked.

He muttered and cursed before
threatening to hang up.

“No, wait! Hang on, big guy. I
wanted to talk to you.”

“Okay,” he said. “What’s on your
mind?”

“I was curious about something,” I
said. “Did Pia mention any details about the car that was in the driveway when
she arrived?”

“The silver sports car?” he asked.

“Yes. You said it was on her
Instagram, but she didn’t say a word about it to me.”

“Probably the shock,” Trent
speculated. “Pia told Dina later that she heard a door slam and a car screech
away when she was still standing in Vito’s living room staring at the blood.
Since we found his BMW in the garage, she must’ve heard the Aston Martin
leaving. But there’s obviously no way to know who was behind the wheel.”

“Okay,” I said. “There was also
something I wanted to share with you about Eva King.”

“What about her?” he said.

“My neighbor overheard a couple
of—”

“Viveca England?” Trent
interrupted.

“Yes, that’s the one. She was in
the hardware store and heard two people talking about Eva King.”

“How did that come up with Viv?”

“We met for dinner at Cactus Moon
and I told her about what happened at Vito Marclay’s place.”

“You guys have a nice evening?” Trent
asked.

“I suppose. We talked about her new
business, and I was—”

“What else did she say about Eva
King?”

“That was it,” I said. “She heard a
couple of people mention the same name. Has anyone else reported that? Since
the buzz about Eva is going around town, I thought maybe someone else heard the
same conversation.”

“Haven’t heard anything yet,” Trent
answered. “But this is already sounding like a strange case. Between what Pia
told Dina in the interrogation room and someone giving the name of a dead girl
on a 911 call, this thing doesn’t sound like a simple crime of passion.”

“Why not?”

He scoffed. “That’s for me to
know,” he said. “And for you to find out.”

I waited.

“Because I can’t discuss it with
you,” Trent continued a moment later. “Conflict of interest and all that.”

“I get it,” I said. “But I’d like
to help my friend.”

“Which one?” he asked.

“Pia Lincoln, of course. Who else
would I be talking about?”

“How should I know, Katie. You’re
friends with everybody in town.”

“Well, we were…” I decided it
wasn’t worth pursuing. Trent was in a grouchy mood and it was late. “Anyway,
thanks for calling back. I hope you—”

“That’s it?” he said sharply.
“You’re just going to throw in the towel?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You usually keep digging, Katie.
Asking questions and snooping around and trying to figure out the whole
whodunit thing.”

“Who’s to say that I won’t?” I
snickered softly. “It’s still early days here, right?”

He mumbled something off-color.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m sorry, Katie. I just…” There
was something different in his voice, a faint sorrow that didn’t fit with his
gruff declarations a moment before. “Never mind, okay? I should get some sleep.
It’s been a long day.”

“Wait,” I said. “What’s wrong? You
sound pretty down all of a sudden.”

He cleared his throat, but didn’t
respond.

“Trent?”

Again, nothing.

“Is Deputy Chief Walsh
grumpy-wumpy?” I said, doing my best to sound like Miss Piggy after too much
coffee.

“What’s wrong with your voice?” he
asked.

“I was trying to make you laugh,” I
said quietly. “What’s going on?”

“Eh, it’s nothing,” he mumbled.

“That’s a bunch of bull hockey,” I
said. “We’ve been friends for, like, a million years. I know when you’re up, Trent.
And I definitely know when you’re down.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And right now,” I continued, “you’re
down. Tell me everything, big guy. Why do you suddenly sound so morose?”

“I don’t know what that is, Katie.”

“Morose? It’s you right now—glum,
gloomy, depressed.”

“I’m not depressed,” he said after
a few moments of silence. “It’s just that…well, every now and then, when we’re
talking or laughing or whatever, I feel bad about what I did back in high
school.”

I’d heard the confession before,
usually when he was exhausted from a series of sleepless nights or snockered
from one too many beers.

“Is that all?” I said, trying to
sound fizzy and cheerful. “You don’t have to keep apologizing, Trent. We were
kids. You fell out of love with me and into love with Dina. It’s what can
happen at wild parties fueled by booze and hormones.”

“Yeah, but I still feel bad,” he
grumbled. “I was a jerk back then.”

“You won’t hear me arguing
differently,” I said. “But it’s in the past, okay? You need to let it go and
move on.”

“I guess you’re right, Katie.”

I chuckled. “I
know
that I’m
right,” I said. “Now, you should get some shuteye. Sleep well, Deputy Chief
Walsh.”

“You, too,” he said, sounding a bit
less mournful. “I’ll talk to you later.”