Nightmares Can Be Murder (A Dream Club Mystery) (31 page)

“What? Oh, the inhaler. No, I have allergies,” she said, just as Barney and Scout walked toward us, tails held high. They like to wander around the shop and greet the customers. “You have cats!” she said in dismay. “I can’t stand to be around them. My throat closes up and I become severely congested.” She gave a delicate sneeze and thrust the money at me. “Please hurry with the candy, I have to leave immediately.”

“Of course,” I said soothingly. “Sorry about the cats. I brush them every day but the dander gets in the air. When people are really allergic, it’s hard to escape it.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” she said, grabbing the bag of candy. She sneezed again, zipped her purse shut, and headed for the door. “Glad you’re okay, I’ll be sure to tell the councilman.”

“What was that all about?” Ali said, the moment Amber was out the door.

“That was a woman who’s allergic to cats.” Ali continued to stare at me, but I didn’t offer any other explanation. Gina, Jennifer, Thomas, and Amber. They all had a motive for killing Chico, but did they have the means and the opportunity? I had some serious thinking to do.

35

“I don’t understand,” Ali said later that afternoon. “How did Amber know about the break-in? It couldn’t have made the papers so fast, could it?”

“I don’t know. She said that Councilman Walton ‘has ears everywhere,’ whatever that means.”

“It sounds kind of sinister,” Ali said. “Almost threatening.”

“I agree.” I didn’t tell Ali about Amber sneezing. It could have been entirely a coincidence that the intruder had sneezed in the kitchen.

Noah called just after three. “Feeling okay?” Ever since I’d been bopped on the head, Noah felt obliged to inquire about my health.

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “What’s up?”

“There’s an interesting development,” he said. I recognized the excitement in his voice. “Not exactly a break in the case, but it’s moving in a different direction.” I could hear the sound of paper rustling as he flipped through his notes. “Does the name Nick Hayden mean anything to you?”

“No, should it?” I mouthed the name to Ali, who shook her head.

“Nick Hayden is a grad student from England doing a teaching assistantship at the university. I found out that he’s one of the few people in Savannah who has access to potassium cyanide.”
Potassium cyanide
.
The chemical that killed Chico.
“His boss is doing a big research study on it. It’s not easy to buy the stuff, you know. The cops got an anonymous tip that Nick ordered a batch of it from a lab outside town. They ran a computer search of recent sales and his name came up.”

“But what does Nick Hayden have to do with Chico?”

“Maybe nothing,” Noah admitted. “The cops tried to talk to him, but he’d already left the country, headed back to the UK. And Nick’s boss is away at his cabin in Maine for a month, and there’s no way to get in touch with him. “

“So it’s a dead end?”
Nick Hayden, Nick Hayden
, why was that name familiar to me?

“Not necessarily. I was hoping we could link him to someone involved in the case, but so far, I’m drawing a blank.” He paused. “Taylor, I’m just passing along this information because I promised to keep you in the loop. I don’t want you doing any more investigating, remember?”

“I remember,” I said, my mind racing. “I’ll stay on the sidelines and let you do the heavy lifting.”

“I wish I could believe you,” he said after a moment. I smiled to myself. I knew how to pick up on the trail of Nick Hayden if I could just get one more piece of information out of Noah.

“This lab,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Is it Atkins Pharmaceutical in Charleston?”

“No, it’s Northern Georgia Tech Supplies, right outside of town. Why?”

“I was just curious. Someone had mentioned Atkins to me, that’s all.” Nothing like throwing a little red herring in Noah’s path. “So what’s the next step?” I asked.

“The trail is cold for the moment, unless the police can figure out how to find Nick Hayden. Or figure out who he is.”

I grinned. Things were moving in a totally different direction than I’d anticipated, and it was exciting. We ended the conversation a few minutes later, and I grabbed my purse. “Going out on an errand,” I called to Ali, who was cooking a pan of Kahlúa brownies. “Can I borrow your car? I’ll be back soon.”

“Yes, of course, but be careful,” she said, adding a hefty swig of Kahlúa to the mixing bowl.

“I always am.” I grabbed Ali’s car keys and a map. I was fairly certain I could get to Northern Georgia before they closed for the day. It was barely four o’clock and it looked like it was only a few miles outside town. And I was pretty sure I knew who Nick Hayden was and how he played into all this. Nick Hayden was Amber’s boyfriend, the young man standing next to her in the campaign brochure on Denise’s desk in Walton’s office. Things were falling into place, and all I needed now was proof. It was just a matter of connecting the dots.

The guy behind the counter at the tech company had a good memory, it seems. When I asked him about a recent sale of potassium cyanide to the university for Nick Hayden, he remembered it.

“You must have a steel trap mind,” I joked.

“Nah, I sat through my daughter’s piano recital that day and she played Hayden. That’s why the name stuck in my head when he called it in,” he said with a grin. He brought up the shipment on the computer and glanced at the entry. “But he didn’t pick it up,” he said. My hopes crashed but then he added, “Someone else did. It looks like it was a cash sale, and we don’t get too many of those.”

“Really?” I couldn’t believe my luck. “Do you have a signed invoice?” He flipped open a ledger and passed it across the counter to me.

“Here it is, two weeks ago. It’s really hard to read the signature, though.”

The signature looked like a chicken scrawl; it was indecipherable. “Someone has really bad handwriting,” I muttered.

“Yeah.” He laughed. “But my friend Joe said she sure was a pretty girl, though.”

“Joe?”

“The other guy who works the front counter. She told him she worked with Nick at the university. Anyway she had strawberry blond hair and was really a looker.” He glanced at his watch. “Joe will be here in an hour or so if you want to talk to him.”

Amber Locke. It had to be. “I can’t wait,” I said, “but could you do me a favor? Could you ask him if she looked like this and give me a call?” I pulled the brochure from Walton’s office out of my purse and scribbled my name and phone number on the front. Amber Locke was smiling out at me.

The moment I was out the door, I pulled out my cell and called Sam Stiles at the station house. This was the kind of news that couldn’t wait. After being put on hold for a full three minutes, a dispatcher told me that Sam was out investigating a homicide and would return my call later that day. I thanked her and jumped back in the car, eager to get home. I thought of calling Noah, but that would mean explaining how I’d happened to go to Northern Georgia. I powered back toward town; there would be plenty of time to tell Noah tonight.

*   *   *

Ali called me
when I was ten minutes away from home. “Taylor, thank God I got you,” Ali said, her voice racing over the wire. “The most awful thing has happened.” I pulled over to the shoulder and turned off the ignition.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, my pulse hammering. “Are you okay?”

“I’m all right, but Gina Santiago is dead. Someone killed her late last night.”

“Gina Santiago?” I hadn’t seen this one coming. “What happened to her?” I thought of Chico’s fiery-haired assistant, so vibrant and full of life. I felt a guilty pang remembering that I’d recently considered her a likely suspect in Chico’s murder.

“One of her relatives found her this morning. She didn’t show up at a family breakfast, and she didn’t answer her phone.” Her voice wobbled a little. “Poor Gina. First Chico and now this.”

“I’m coming right home. I can be there in a few minutes,” I said soothingly.

“There’s no need to rush,” Ali said. “I gave Dana the rest of the day off, and I’m closing the shop. I’m too rattled to think straight. I just finished talking to the members of the Dream Club. Everyone is so upset.”

“It’s very sad,” I agreed.
And baffling. Who would want to kill Gina?

“I’m heading over to Gina’s apartment with Dorien and Lucinda right now,” Ali went on. “There’s probably not much we can do, but I want to talk to Gina’s aunt and her niece. They’re the ones who called it in, and they’re still at her apartment. Sam Stiles is over there, taking their statement.”
Sam Stiles. That was the homicide she was rushing to.
“The whole thing is tragic, and the least we can do is show our support. I feel so helpless,” Ali went on.

“I know. Everyone does at a time like this. I’ll stop by the house and then come on over to Gina’s.”

*   *   *

The closed sign
was hanging in the front window, and the shop looked dark and unwelcoming with the shades drawn. It was nearly dusk. The street was bare, except for a few tourists sitting at Luigi’s outdoor tables. I let myself in with my key, still thinking about Gina. Who had killed her and why? Her murder must be connected to Chico’s death, I told myself, but I couldn’t figure out how the two crimes were connected.

As soon as I opened the front door, I felt something was different. But what? There were no cats to greet me, but that wasn’t unusual—they were probably snoozing upstairs. Still, I felt a strange feeling of foreboding slip over me. I paused at the bottom of the stairs leading to the apartment, sure that I heard a faint rustling noise upstairs. I hesitated, counted to ten, and then shook my head at my foolishness.

There was nothing to fear; the place was empty and still. The words “as still as the grave” went through my mind, but I brushed them away. Gina’s death had clearly unnerved me, I decided. Coming on the heels of Chico’s murder, it was enough to unsettle anyone.

As I climbed the stairs, I heard a scuffle in the kitchen. Was it a chair scraping on the kitchen floor? No, it was probably Barney and Scout, vying for face time with the catnip mouse. I reached the landing, surprised to see neither cat in sight.

An even bigger surprise was in store for me. Amber Locke was sitting at the kitchen table, calmly smoking a cigarette. “I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said airily, blowing a puff of smoke my way. “The shop seemed to be closed, but luckily the back door was open.”

I staggered backward in shock, mentally kicking myself for forgetting to lock the downstairs door leading to the garden. One stupid mistake and I was face to face with someone who could easily be a murderer.
This is how Chico and Gina must have felt.

“Amber,” I said in a hoarse voice, “what are you doing up here?” The fight-or-flight instinct stabbed into my brain. I wondered if I could make a run back down the stairs and decided against it. Amber was wearing a sleeveless top with shorts, and I noticed how muscular her upper arms and calves were. She could have been the ninja whose powerful punch had connected with my head the other night.

“We need to talk,” she said bluntly. “Why don’t you come over and sit down.” It was clearly a command, not a request. It seemed odd, being ordered around in my own house, but this wasn’t the time to discuss etiquette. I had to wriggle my way out of this one.

“You’ve been asking a lot of questions,” she continued. There was a hard, glittery light in her eyes that I’d never noticed before, and I wondered if she was becoming unhinged. Or maybe she’d always been unbalanced and I’d never noticed it. She didn’t look like the sweet, idealistic political staffer I’d met at the Waltons’ dinner party. Her eyes shone with a kind of evil delight.

“Is that what’s troubling you?” I asked, stalling for time. I figured Ali might wonder what happened to me and come back to the house, or even call Noah. I had to keep Amber talking, though. “I guess I’ve always been a curious person.”

“You know what they say about curiosity,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “It kills cats and it kills people, too.” She glared at me. “I thought I told you to sit down.”

I let out a long, slow breath and tried to compose my features into a friendly look. I pulled out a chair and sat across the table from her. “Would you like something to drink? We have iced tea, lemonade, and cider.”

“You sound like a flight attendant!” she said with a hoot.

“Sorry.” I cast my eyes downward as if I were embarrassed. “What do you really want, Amber?”

“Information,” she snapped. “You’ve got it and I want it.” She stubbed out her cigarette on a wooden coaster.

“I don’t think I can tell you anything.”

She reached into her Prada bag and pulled out a shiny black gun. “This Beretta says you will.” She stared at me without blinking. The kitchen was silent except the cat’s tail swishing back and forth on the wall clock. She gave me a quick, appraising glance, and my heart rammed inside my chest. “Where did you go today? That’s a good place to start. I started to follow you out of town and then I got sidetracked.”

“I went for a little ride in the country.”

“Really?” She gave a dismissive little gesture of her hand. “You’re lying through your teeth. I think you were up to something.”

“No,” I said vehemently, “I didn’t go anywhere important. I just wanted to drive around and look at the scenery.” It sounded like a lame excuse even to my own ears. I was trying to think of how to distract her so I could slip downstairs when the phone rang. The ringer was set on high, and the shrill noise pierced the quiet room.