Chapter 24
A
T 10:00
P.M.
I drove home, feeling fuller than a stuffed pigeon. Katie had insisted we make double chocolate soufflés with warm fudge sauce using a recipe she’d found in a magazine; a week ago, Bailey had suggested we stock a few foodie magazines like
Taste of Home
and
Simple & Delicious
. Our customers were reliably adding those to their purchases. Brilliant.
As I maneuvered the roads, theories skittered through my brain like pinballs, each one hitting a target and plunging toward the game’s drain, only to be batted back into the field by mental flippers. I used to love playing pinball. My father was a pinball-machine collector; he had packed his den with game units. I remembered when he purchased Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure
.
Though I was primarily a reader, a girl needed silly downtime, too, and the gold and black colors and the
slam-bang-ping
sounds of the pinball machine hooked me. It didn’t hurt that, throughout the game, hunky Indiana Jones was staring straight at
me,
a gawky, boy-crazed preteen.
Ping
. Who had killed Natalie? In my mind, Mitzi was the prime suspect. She had motive, opportunity, and she was loony enough to have killed on impulse.
Ping
.
Ping
.
Had Mitzi killed Willie? She could have donned Ellen’s coat. The lipstick in the pocket was a clue.
Ping.
Ping
. Score.
It dawned on me that maybe the Mumford family ought to fear other attacks. Did Mitzi intend to do away with the whole clan?
Ping
.
Ping
. Drain. Start over.
A mile from home, Tigger mewed in his travel cage. I said, “Almost there, buddy. Be patient.”
Seconds later, my telephone chimed. I had received a text. At the first stoplight I reached, I glimpsed the phone, which was lying faceup on the passenger seat. Bailey had arrived home safely. I would never text while driving, so a response would have to wait, but I was relieved. My pal, a lightweight when it came to drinking, had imbibed an extra glass of wine while we cleaned and put away the dishes at the café.
A half mile later, something niggled at the edge of my mind. I eyed the cell phone again, and a new thought struck me. Bailey remembered hearing a
ping
sound right before the break at the first Grill Fest. She said Natalie glanced at her cell phone, even though Natalie was in cooking-combat mode, ready to defend her title and defeat the other contestants. What had she received: text, e-mail, or voice mail? Who would have dared interrupt her? On more than one occasion, Mitzi had caught Sam texting Natalie. She’d worried that Sam was having an affair with Natalie. He swore that his texts were about business, but what if they weren’t?
I conjured up a possible scenario for the day of the murder. Sam texted Natalie to say he would hook up with her in the alley outside the café’s kitchen. Natalie, who I was certain had interest in Sam, given the girlish albeit snappish behavior she had exhibited that day on The Pier, would have gotten a thrill out of duping Mitzi. Except Sam had not been in town at the time of the murder. He had attended a money-management conference. Or had he? What if he hadn’t gone? I recalled the conversation with Flora at Home Sweet Home. She claimed to have seen Mitzi spying on Sam at the bank late on the afternoon of the murder. What if Sam had returned to town during the Grill Fest? Maybe he never left Crystal Cove in the first place.
I fashioned a new scenario with Sam, not Mitzi, as the murderer. He was a detail-oriented guy. He purchased a spot at the money management conference to establish an alibi, but he didn’t go. Then he texted—
No, he wouldn’t have needed to text Natalie. He knew her well. He would have known she would sneak away to have a cigarette. He could have laid in wait.
But what if he
had
texted her? What might he have written? That he was ready to throw aside Mitzi for Natalie, and he was coming back to town to see her. If Mitzi caught sight of the text, she would have gone berserk and—
On the other hand, what if Sam texted something entirely different? What if he wrote that he didn’t want anything to do with Natalie? He begged her to steer clear of him, saying he didn’t want to jeopardize his marriage. Natalie was the one who lost control. She saw the discarded panini grill and was ready when Sam showed up, but Sam surprised her and gained control. Sam struck Natalie. The fire alarm would have muted any screams. He disappeared down the alley and reemerged at the bank later that day.
Ping. Ping.
The motive was weak. No score
.
Drain. Start over.
Sam’s appearance at the bank on the afternoon after the murder still niggled at me. Needing to know more about his exact whereabouts, I sped home and raced with Tigger into the cottage. After I released him from his traveling crate and refreshed his water, I revved up my laptop computer, which sat on the kitchen table.
Online I found a site about the money-management conference in San Jose. The acronym was MONEY. Very subtle. The conference, a one-day event starting at 7:00
A.M.
and running until 7:00
P.M.
, breakfast and lunch included, involved multiple tracks of seminars. Though the conference had concluded, I sent an e-mail to the coordinator. I knew from having conducted similar events for my former company that the coordinator wouldn’t wrap up her work for months. Refunds, complaints, and tips regarding next year’s event were expected. I asked whether Sam Sykes had attended the conference.
To my surprise, despite the late hour, I received a response almost instantaneously. Ten days ago, Sam had begged for a spot. Thanks to last-minute cancellations, the coordinator had been able to grant Sam’s late request. That information supported my theory that Sam might have used the conference as an alibi.
I sent a follow-up e-mail asking whether the coordinator had any way of knowing whether Sam had really attended. Again, the coordinator responded quickly. She knew Sam personally and had seen him check in.
Rats. I sent off another e-mail:
Was he there for the whole day?
The speed of the Internet never failed to astonish me. Seconds later, a reply arrived. The coordinator wrote that over one thousand people had attended the conference. Who didn’t want to learn how to make a buck? she joked. She remembered seeing Sam around 10:00
A.M.
and then again around 1:00
P.M.
; however, there were at least three hundred individuals at each session. Sam wouldn’t have been missed if he had left and returned.
Would Sam have driven to Crystal Cove and back a couple of times? San Jose was a good hour’s drive from town. Even if I could check Sam’s car for mileage, I wouldn’t learn a thing. I wouldn’t have a clue what the odometer had read before Sam left town. Would Mitzi know? She had tracked him down at the bank. When Flora told me that, I had wondered whether Mitzi had put a GPS device on Sam’s car. How else would she have discovered his early return?
I refocused on jealous-beyond-all-get-out Mitzi. Though Mitzi acted impulsively now, pre-Sam, she had reigned in the business world. She had managed a corporation. Who knew what kind of manipulator she had been in her previous life? What if she had texted Natalie, claiming she was Sam using Mitzi’s cell phone? Screwy, but possible. As Sam, she wrote that he had stolen into town. He needed to see her. Would Natalie have been naïve enough to buy that?
I paced the cottage, thinking of my comment earlier to Bailey and Katie about not obsessing over the murders. Why was I so focused on them? We had a strong police force. Cinnamon was a vital leader. I ogled the Lucky Cat and realized that the puzzle David had left me was the reason I was fixated. The more I concentrated on someone else’s problem, the easier it was for me to avoid mine.
Back to Natalie. Who had wanted her dead?
What about Norah? What was her story? Maybe she was avoiding problems of her own. Maybe she had escaped an abusive relationship. Was that why she was so dead set on helping her sister exit hers? Perhaps Norah considered herself her sister’s savior. Both Willie and Natalie had been overbearing. Ellen had been at risk.
I spun on my heel. “Why?”
Tigger, who apparently thought I was targeting him, darted beneath a chair.
“Cool it, buster. I’m not yelling. Boy, are you jumpy.”
Like mother, like cat.
I scooped him up and scruffed his head. “Sorry, fella.” He rumbled his thanks and burrowed into me.
As we paced the length of the cottage, my phone chimed again, and I realized I hadn’t responded to Bailey. I set Tigger on the floor, punched in a quick text telling Bailey to sleep tight, and hit Send. As the message whooshed through the stratosphere, I thought again about the message to Natalie. Would the text, e-mail, or voice mail still exist on Natalie’s cell phone? Was the killer clever enough to have erased it? Even if he or she had, I would bet a skilled technician could find it. I couldn’t count how many times I had asked Taylor & Squibb’s geek department to recover a deleted e-mail. As my father would say:
Fast fingers make for regrettable computer errors
. I had superfast fingers. Good for playing the Minute Waltz on the piano, not so good for business correspondence.
I spied the Lucky Cat that was once filled with gold coins and wondered whether there could be something hidden inside Natalie’s cell phone, like a SIM card or backup recovery data solution. Could our police department tech geeks—if we had tech geeks; maybe we relied on the county for technical support—recover the information?
My cell phone dinged again. Bailey had written a response:
Don’t let the bedbugs bite,
our standard phrase after that fateful week we had spent at summer camp when, indeed, bedbugs had plagued us. Gag.
As I considered a response, a game of mental pinball started up again inside my head.
Ping
.
Ping
. I flashed on the call I had received from Willie the night he died. Sam had suggested it was a pocket call. What if Willie hadn’t called me? What if the murderer dialed my number to make it seem like Willie was alive at 10:00
P.M.
? The coroner guessed that Willie died around 9:00
P.M.
What if he’d died even earlier than that? Ellen’s alibi covered her from 7:30
P.M.
to midnight, but Norah’s alibi wouldn’t hold up. What if my original theory about Norah’s actions that night was correct? She’d left her ailing niece in the car, slipped into the motel, killed Willie, called me using Willie’s cell phone, and fled.
Sam and Mitzi claimed to have been home for the night, but could I trust their accounts? According to Sam, Mitzi was involved with her nightly ritual. If she was primping, would she have noticed if Sam left the house?
No, I was wrong. The motel maid saw a woman visitor, not a man, in a black coat. Ellen found a tube of bright red lipstick in her coat pocket. I reworked the theory to fit Mitzi. What if Sam, who was making phone calls to locate Willie, hadn’t noticed when Mitzi stole out the back of the house? The Sykes lived in an elegant one-level home. A path along the side of the house led to the rear patio. Mitzi could have sneaked away, done the deed, and tiptoed back in without Sam spotting her.
Were there other suspects I was neglecting to consider? The former chef who had fled to Las Vegas or Rosie the mnemonic waitress? What about Flora? She wasn’t in the competition any longer, but she had been my first source of intel on Mitzi and Sam. Why would she have killed Willie? The two murders had to be related.
I plopped onto a chair in the kitchen and ran my finger along the Lucky Cat statue as if that would help me focus.
Bailey suspected that Willie had learned something and blackmailed the killer. What evidence could Willie have drummed up? Had he overheard something? Seen something? He’d cleaned out his account. He’d planned to run away.
I thought back to Willie’s meeting with the bank teller. He had yelled at her. He had stabbed something that appeared to be a passbook. If only I knew the details of that conversation. Would Manga Girl talk to me now that Willie was dead?
