Paper Bullets (16 page)

I found it fascinating what Stacy remembered about people. Not so much their physical features but what kind of impression their overall appearance made on other people. My overall appearance probably screamed frumpy. I decided I didn’t want to hear what she’d remember about me.

She turned her head to look back at the gym. Probably checking to see if anyone was coming out to tell her that her little unscheduled break was over. Pretty soon she was going to tell me she had to get back to work, and I still didn’t have everything I needed.

“Does the gym keep records of who uses the passes?” I asked. “Anything that would have this guy’s name on it?”

“You think he had something to do with what happened?”

Now it was my turn to shrug. “I don’t think anything yet.”

Which wasn’t exactly true, but most of what I thought I knew were unconnected pieces and random coincidences, nothing that formed a concrete pattern I could point to and say “that’s the guy, not Ryan.”

“Most of what I do involves asking questions,” I said. “Sometimes the answers lead nowhere. Sometimes they lead to the next question, and if I’m lucky, somewhere down the line, I’ll stumble on the right question and get the right answer.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “That sounds...” She hesitated while she searched for the right word. “Frustrating.”

“Serving court papers is easier,” I said. “Unless the guy I’m trying to serve knows I’m coming and tries to duck me. Then it gets interesting.”

Her cell phone chirped at her. She took it out of a pocket I hadn’t noticed in her short-shorts and frowned at it. “I have to get back,” she said. “Cici has a client coming in.”

“About that name?” I asked.

“I’ll look through the sign-in sheets, see if I can remember when he came in, but I can’t guarantee anything. If I find something, I’ll text you.”

I gave her my cell phone number and watched while she typed it into her phone, her thumbs moving faster than I could type on my keyboard with two hands.

She was just about to the door when I remembered I hadn’t asked the one question I really wanted an answer to. “Anybody ever send Melody flowers at work?” I said.

She paused with one hand on the door handle. “Besides Ryan?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

“Red roses,” I said. “A single rose a day for a week.”

A frown creased her forehead. “She would have told me about that, or I would have heard from Cici. Unless they came from Ryan, but she still would have...” She shook her head again. “No. I’m sure she would have told me.”

She disappeared inside the gym, leaving me with an even bigger question than the one I’d had to start out with.

CHAPTER 20

IF STACY HAD TOLD ME the truth, Melody had lied to Ryan about the roses. She didn’t get them at work.

I’d given in to the need for a super-sized iced tea from the gas station/mini-mart. I sat in my hot car in the parking lot with all the windows rolled down and tried to figure out where to go from here.

The roses were a dead end. The only people who knew where Melody got the roses and who they were from were Melody and the person who’d given them to her.

I didn’t know why she’d lied to Ryan about the roses in the first place. Based on my own experience, people in a relationship lied to either spare the other person’s feelings or to hide something they were ashamed of. If she’d wanted to spare Ryan’s feelings, she wouldn’t have told him about the roses in the first place.

Did that mean she’d lied to hide something she was ashamed of? Like what?

Stacy was convinced Melody hadn’t cheated on Ryan, and from what Melody had shared with the world on Facebook, it looked like Stacy was her best friend. So if she hadn’t been cheating, what had she been ashamed of?

And why tell a lie that Ryan could have discovered on his own? I doubted Ryan was a stranger to the gym, and Stacy clearly knew him enough to be at least a little protective of her best friend’s relationship with him. All Ryan had to do was mention the roses in casual conversation with someone at the gym and Melody’s lie would fall apart.

Unless she’d wanted it to fall apart. Unless she was doing something she was so ashamed of that she subconsciously wanted Ryan to find out so that he’d make her stop, and the lie about the roses was an attempt at self-sabotage.

Okay, I was psychoanalyzing without a license. I was hot and tired and frustrated and making stuff up because I still couldn’t see how all the puzzle pieces fit together.

I guzzled down a third of my iced tea, concentrating on nothing but the slightly bitter taste and how good it felt to hold the cold cup in my hands.

I’d given up using any kind of sweetener in my tea about the same time Samantha had started seriously counting calories. The stuff in the blue packets I used to add to my tea wasn’t good for me, Samantha had informed me, and she wished I’d stop using artificial sweeteners at all. I told her that was fine, but she’d have to give up soda because that wasn’t good for her, either. She’d said fine, and we’d struck a deal.

I wasn’t sure what had been worse—her caffeine withdrawals or me getting used to the bitter taste of unsweetened iced tea. At least I didn’t get headaches quite as often, so maybe it was a good thing after all.

After the iced tea helped me turned my inner Dr. Phil off, I thought about the information I had learned.

I knew more now than I had before about Lewis Richards and Justin Sewell. According to Stacy, both men had been interested in Melody, but her interest had been strictly business, even if part of that business was to sell the sex appeal of a well-toned body.

With Richards, Melody had been his personal trainer. I wondered for how long. Kyle had told me that Richards had been suspended for the last six months so he could get his life in shape. Apparently he’d taken that literally. Had he substituted one addiction for another? Maybe. Addicts could be unpredictable people, and she’d had confrontations with him about the best way to achieve the results he wanted.

But why had he been waiting for her outside the cafe? That couldn’t have had anything to do with a disagreement over a workout routine. Richards had invaded her personal life, just like a stalker. Had his addiction to getting his body in shape morphed into an unhealthy obsession with his personal trainer?

I tried to remember whether I’d seen the white SUV earlier in the day when I’d been following Melody all over town so I could try to catch a glimpse of her stalker. I certainly didn’t remember a white SUV taking off after her like Richards had when she’d left the cafe. I couldn’t be sure if I’d seen him at any other time.

Richards had clearly seen Sewell come out of the cafe after Melody just like I had, and he’d probably had a better vantage point to see her turn around and give Sewell a flirty little come-hither grin. Richards had certainly pulled away from the curb in a hurry to follow her as she headed back to work, and he’d been upset enough that he’d had the angry conversation with her I’d witnessed over an hour later.

But was he angry enough to kill her? He hadn’t seemed angry when he’d taken my picture with his cell phone outside of the gym. He’d seemed self-satisfied, somehow.

I didn’t have enough information to take any of my suspicions about Richards to the cops. I had a few facts, a few observations, but most of what I had was speculation, and it was going to take more than speculation to turn the detectives’ interest away from Ryan and onto Richards.

And what if Richards wasn’t the right guy? Justin Sewell was still waiting in the wings.

I was pretty sure Sewell was the banker Stacy had been talking about. A well-off middle class guy who’d wheedled an extra free trip to the gym out of a woman he was flirting with. Why had she agreed to have lunch with him? He didn’t sound like a guy who would spring for lunch if he wasn’t getting something in return.

I needed more information on Sewell. I could talk to his neighbors, but a guy who moved every six months was a guy who didn’t make close ties to anyone in his neighborhood. He’d moved from branch to branch within his own bank. The people he worked with might know more about him, but if I had to guess, I imagined that while he might be the subject of company-wide gossip, I doubted any of his co-workers actually knew very little about the real him.

I studied my reflection in the rearview mirror. My nose and cheeks were a little on the pink side, but any real sunburn wouldn’t come out until after I showered.

Before I’d left the house, I’d changed out of the shorts I’d worn that morning and put on a pair of jeans. Not designer jeans by any stretch of the imagination, but new enough that they’d be acceptable in a casual work environment.

My light-weight tee shirt was a little too casual, but I had a white cotton button-front blouse in the backseat I could throw on like an over-shirt, the summer equivalent of a suit jacket. I didn’t have strappy sandals in the car—I wasn’t sure I had a pair of strappy sandals in my closet either—so my tennis shoes would have to do.

I could pull my hair back into a ponytail, wipe the sweat off my face with a little of the bottled water I always had in the car, and presto-chango—instant businesswoman off to meet with her brand new personal banker.

I just hoped he hadn’t taken the day off.

CHAPTER 21

JUSTIN SEWELL STILL OCCUPIED the same desk at the bank where I’d seen him yesterday, but today his desk had a nameplate with his name on it along with a business card holder completely filled with his business cards.

Sewell was talking to another customer when I got there, so I sat in one of the uncomfortable chairs the bank reserved for people who had to wait to give the bank their money. While I waited, I took the opportunity to observe Sewell in his natural habitat.

His customer was an elderly woman with long white hair that hung nearly to her waist and looked far thicker than mine. Her eyes were bright with amusement as he chatted with her like she was his best friend. He leaned forward in his seat to catch something she said, his interest riveted on her, and when he chuckled in response, the woman actually blushed.

Unlike a lot of people in service positions who had to deal with the elderly, Sewell seemed in no hurry to rush this woman. I sat waiting for twenty minutes while the two of them talked. Sewell occasionally typed something into his computer, and at one point the women took a card of some type out of her purse and showed it to him.

As they neared the end of the conversation, Sewell printed out forms for the woman to sign, and she handed over a wad of cash from her purse that made me lift my eyebrows. She’d either won big at one of the casinos or cleaned out the stash she’d been keeping under her mattress for the last forty years.

Sewell had to walk by me to take the cash to one of the teller windows. He spotted me waiting, and the smile he’d had for the elderly woman dialed up a notch.

“Hello, there!” he said to me. “Great to see you again.”

I smiled back. If he didn’t remember me, he was doing a good job of faking it. Then again, how many women had tracked him down just to ask if he’d dropped twenty dollars on the street? I’d only done that the day before.

“Are you waiting for me?” he asked.

“If you’ve got a minute.”

My answer pleased him. “For you? I’ve got two,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.” And then he was off to the teller line to deposit his customer’s cash.

It took another five minutes for him to finish up with the elderly woman. Sewell actually walked her halfway to the glass doors in the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that opened from the bank into the office building’s lobby. She left all smiles with a hint of a blush still staining her cheeks.

“Now, what can I help you with today?” he asked as I sat down in one of his client chairs.

I’d had plenty of time to study the brochures outlining the various accounts the bank offered. “I’m interested in one of your business checking accounts.” I wasn’t really, but I could fake it.

“Great!”

He went into a short spiel about the types of accounts the bank offered. He talked with the same charm and enthusiasm I’d seen him display with the elderly lady.

I had to admit, being the focus of all that charisma dialed up to about nine was a little disconcerting. I had to remind myself that this man had been interested in my ex-husband’s fiancé and I was only here because I was investigating her death.

A death he didn’t seem particularly upset about.

If he’d shed any tears over Melody, I could see no evidence of puffy eyes or the same type of stress I’d noticed in Stacy when I’d met with her at the gym. Did he even know that Melody had died, or would she simply be someone he never heard from again?

After he was done reviewing the accounts his bank offered for small businesses, I settled on a low-cost checking account that I planned to keep open only as long as I absolutely had to. If he was disappointed that I hadn’t picked an account with a bunch of bells and whistles and a high monthly service fee, he didn’t let it show.

He opened a new screen on his computer and began asking me questions about what type of business I had. I handed him the copy of my private investigator’s license that I kept in my wallet.

“You’ll find all the information you need on here,” I said.

He took the license and peered at it. “Abby Maxon,” he said, reading my name printed on the license. “You’re really a private investigator?”

“Sounds more glamorous than it is,” I said.

“You mean it’s not like on television?”

“Most of the time I sit around and wait for people to show up so I can serve them with papers they’d rather not get. Although every now and then...” I lifted an eyebrow and deliberately let the sentence trail off to see whether he’d bite.

He bit.

“You get something interesting?”

I shrugged. “Something like that.”