Sweets Forgotten (Samantha Sweet Mysteries Book 10) (15 page)

“Oh my god, I know, right?” A
trilling giggle escaped a teenage girl who apparently had something stronger
than soda in her plastic cup.

From across the room Chandler
Lane noticed Beau and shot the girl a strong warning look. Zack’s business
partner strode over and plucked the cup from her grasp, setting it on Amber’s
desk and signaling to someone else, a woman apparently responsible for the
girl’s attendance.

“Sorry about that,” Lane said to
Beau. “Believe me, we do not condone underage drinking. Jamie will see that she
gets home safely.”

“Jamie Phillips?” Beau asked. One
of the two company sales reps who had recently returned from the Las Vegas
trade show.

“Yes,” said the woman who
approached. She had the build of a waif, with spiky black hair and huge blue
eyes. Certainly, she did not appear old enough to be the mother of the teen.
She took the girl’s hand with a grip that cautioned her to stay quiet. “I
apologize for my sister’s behavior.”

“I wouldn’t want to see either of
you get in trouble for doing anything illegal,” Beau said. His expression
remained friendly in a no-nonsense way. “Meanwhile, Ms. Phillips, I’ve been
wanting to speak with you. Privately, if possible. It’s about the day Zack
died.”

“Really, Sheriff—” Chandler Lane
sputtered a little.

“I realize this is a social
occasion,” Beau said, eyeing the conference room where a large table was loaded
with food and a credenza served as a bar. “But please understand that my
department is trying to figure out what happened. To your boss.” This last with
firm eye contact toward Jamie Phillips.

“We can go into Ed’s and my
office,” she said, smiling at Chandler and steering her young sister into the
company of Helen Melrose, the bookkeeper.

Jamie hit the wall switch and
bright fluorescents came on overhead.

“What a week,” she said, ushering
Beau and Sam into the large office she shared with the other sales rep. She
shuffled a couple of empty easels aside and found chairs, which she pulled up
to a table stacked with poster-board flats. “I just got in from Vegas last
night. I apologize that the place is so disorganized.”

“Completely understandable,” Sam
said.

“Chandler told me you were
bringing out a new game?”

“Yeah—Star Fighter Hotties. It’s
a companion product to Infinite Star Fighter. It’s testing really well in the
girls’ ten-to-fourteen market. It’s why I’ve brought Cass here—my little
sister. She’s given us some decent ideas on how to bring the sixteen-and-up
girls into the fold. Basically, we’re going for a game that’s interactive with
the one the boys are so crazy about. You know, girls and boys … get them
talking about something other than sex and drugs at that age.”

Sam couldn’t exactly picture how
a game called Hotties was about anything except sex, but who knew?

“Chandler told me Zack had been
pretty hard on you and Ed, really pushing to get the ad campaign done?”

“No kidding. He’s like a tyrant—I
mean yeah, he was ... a … very
driven
man, at times.”

“To the point of becoming
abusive?”

She shook her head and the dark
spikes of hair didn’t budge. “Zack could get loud. He was willing to work 24/7
to get a thing done and he couldn’t see why everyone else wouldn’t do the same.
The argument ‘some of us have a life’ absolutely did not matter to him.”

“So, somebody around here might
have gotten sick of his behavior and thought the company would be better off
without him?”

Jamie held both hands up. “I
didn’t say that at all. ChanZack pays well—
really
well when you consider the bonuses and retirement contributions. With that nice
paycheck comes the knowledge that you’ll have to put up with some extra shit.
That’s all.”

“Fair enough. But there might
have been someone who didn’t look at the situation as practically as you do.
Maybe Zack crossed the line with somebody else in the office?”

Her mouth did a little twisty
move as she considered the question. “Sorry, I really can’t think of anyone who
would have taken it that far.”

Beau knew an almost-rehearsed
answer when he heard one. He waited, not letting up with his eye contact.

“Well, J.B. has been stomping
around for weeks because Zack rode his case pretty hard.”

One friend goes under the bus.

“But, really, I’d look most
closely at Amber. There’s no such thing as a purely friendly failed romance, is
there?”

Chapter
16

Beau dismissed Jamie, asking her
not to discuss their chat and to send in Ed Archuleta, the other sales rep. Sam
busied herself by flipping through the poster boards on the table, wondering
how ads that depicted cartoonish avatars with breasts that bulged from their
shiny skin-tight suits could possibly make either boys or girls think of
anything other than sex.

“I’m definitely getting old,” she
said, showing one of the Star Fighter Hotties posters to Beau.

Ed Archuleta looked like the male
version of Jamie Phillips—young, trendy clothes, bed-head hair.

Beau posed the same questions and
Ed essentially gave the same assurances as Jamie. Yes, Zack was hard on them.
He was hard on everyone. You didn’t take it personally.

Sam noticed despite his salesman
smile and all the right words, a twitching muscle in his jaw revealed a lot of
tension beneath it all. She mentioned it to Beau after Ed left.

“Yeah, the guy was definitely
selling me on an idea he didn’t fully believe in, wasn’t he?”

“What about Jamie’s statement
about Amber?”

“The receptionist. Yeah, but I’ve
seen Amber and Chandler in the same room. He’s the one on her list now. My
guess is that there was probably a little fling with Zack but being married he
was too complicated to stay with. Chandler, on the other hand, could be prime
husband material and she’ll want to reel him in before he has presence of mind
to suggest a pre-nup. She wouldn’t need to get rid of Zack to reach her goal.”

They left the empty office behind
and went to rejoin the party, noticing the crowd was about half the previous
size.

Chandler Lane met them near the
reception desk. “Sorry about that little thing with Cass earlier. None of us
realized she’d spiked her Coke. Jamie’s taking her home.”

Beau waved it off. “As long as
she’s not driving, she’s the least of my worries right now.”

“Yeah, mine too, actually,”
Chandler said. “Can I offer you guys a drink? Something to eat? We have tons of
food in there.”

Beau shook his head, scanning the
remaining crowd with an eye toward whom he could talk to next. Sam edged to the
food table and found herself next to a man who was loading his plate with
sliced deli meats, cheeses and pickles. Judging by his girth, he probably
should have stuck with the cucumbers and carrot sticks.

“Could have knocked me over with
a feather when Jo showed up today,” said a woman across the table from him.

“Me too,” said the chubby guy. “I
really thought she’d finally had the good sense to get out of this town.”

“Really?” The woman had come to
the cookie platter and didn’t seem inclined to leave it. “You know, I always
thought she loved Taos, although she did become a little uppity once they moved
into that big house.”

“Me, I was surprised to see her
go there.” The man had eaten half the goodies on his tiny plate and was
stacking it high again.

Chandler Lane walked into the
conference room, Beau beside him. “Go where?” Chandler asked.

The chubby man suddenly had a
mouthful and wagged his head back and forth with an I-can’t-talk-right-now
movement.

Chandler turned to Beau. “Meet
Will Valmora, Zack’s golfing buddy.”

Valmora swallowed hugely, wiped
his hand on his napkin and extended it. “Sheriff. I recognize you from your
last election campaign.”

“Sheriff Cardwell is working with
the Albuquerque police to figure out what happened to Zack,” Chandler said.

“Yeah, wow, what a shocker this
was,” said Valmora.

“You knew Zack pretty well,
then?”

“Golf once or twice a week. Now
and then we’d bring the wives. Mine loves golf. Not so sure Jo did, though.”

“A minute ago you said something
about being surprised Jo hadn’t left him,” Sam said, stepping to Beau’s side in
an attempt to look more sheriff-wifely than bystander-ish.

Will gave her a second look,
realizing his earlier conversation had probably revealed too much, considering
he didn’t know who he was standing next to.

“Well, yeah …” he said. “I just
meant, you know, I felt for her. Zack could be kind of hard on her.”

Kind of? From Jo’s version of the
story, Sam knew it was downright abusive.

“I imagine the game can get
pretty tense,” Beau said. “I never got very good at golf myself, so I sort of
understand the pressure.”

“Oh, it does. Picture a whole bag
of clubs being pitched into the pond. Hers. Jo stood there red-faced and didn’t
say a word.”

Public humiliation. Did this move
Jo back to the top of Beau’s suspect list? Sam wondered as she picked up a
sugar cookie.

“After that, my wife refused to
golf with the pair of them. I considered cutting Zack off and finding another
partner but he and I were so evenly matched, it was what made the game fun.
When I went on playing with Zack, my wife joined a ladies group.”

Maybe Valmora had caught a lot of
flack at home, but still, golf surely wasn’t a vital enough reason for either
Will Valmora or his wife to have tracked Zack down and murdered him. Sam
nibbled at the edges of the heavy sugar cookie, privately thinking her own were
much better, while she mulled over the possible suspects in what she hoped was
the same way Beau would do.

Valmora’s eyes kept edging toward
the platters of food and he had just spooned up a big scoop of crab dip when
Beau’s phone rang. Sam saw the name Lisa on the screen. Beau excused himself
and walked out to the corridor to take it. Less than a minute later, he made
eye contact and gave a nod that he needed to leave. She excused herself and
offered condolences all around before joining him.

“Lisa’s at the Robinet house,
gathering evidence from Jo’s car. She wants me to come out there and see
something.”

A knot of dread crept into Sam’s
gut. Or maybe it was just the sugar cookie.

Fifteen minutes later they pulled
up outside the Robinet home. Lisa’s department vehicle was parked at one of the
garage doors.

“Sheriff, I wanted you to see this
for yourself, not that you wouldn’t believe my report,” Lisa said when she met
them at the open door.

“I trust you.” The tech was young
but very good at her job. He’d never found fault with her thoroughness.

“But still … It’s evidence that
will come out in court, so two sets of eyes are better than one.”

He nodded. Sam stayed near the
rear of the parked Lexus while Beau followed Lisa to the open driver’s door and
shined her high beam flashlight inside.

“There are no prints. At all.”
Lisa said “You can see where I’ve dusted. Steering wheel, clear. Gearshift,
clear. Dashboard, clear. I even did the edges of the leather seats, where a lot
of people touch as they’re getting situated inside a car. There’s nothing.”

“The whole car’s been wiped
down.”

“Exactly.”

Sam piped up. “If Jo had been in
accident she wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to do all that.”

“No,” Beau agreed. “She
wouldn’t.”

He walked around the car, pulling
out his own flashlight to check it. “But this car shows no sign of being bashed
or scraped. Even the most minor contact would show up on a paint job like this
one. There are suitcases in the back, just like she said.”

“How does this fit with what she
told us?” Sam asked.

“Maybe she packed her stuff
intending to leave. Went to Albuquerque and got rid of Zack. Maybe something he
did that day set her off.”

“She could have packed the car,”
Lisa said, “then changed her mind.”

Sam felt her blood pressure
rising. “It doesn’t fit. She was ready to leave an abusive man. She had him
fixed up with another woman as a distraction. She would have gotten as far away
from here as she could. She said she intended to go to the east coast where she
has relatives. If her story about Ray Belatoni running her off the road isn’t
true, why didn’t she just follow through and get out of New Mexico?”

“Good point. But if it
is
true, why isn’t the car damaged and
why aren’t her prints inside it?”

Lisa had gotten down on the
floor, shining her flashlight into the wheel wells of the car. She scooted
around from the front of the vehicle to the back, lying down to face the
undercarriage as she reached the rear bumper.

“I may have something here,
boss.”

Beau got down, craning his neck
to see where the light pointed. Sam watched his good pants become instantly
covered in dust.

“Here,” said Lisa, “and there.
Those are new parts. There’s no wear on the axle and barely a thin layer of
dust inside this panel. The one on the other side has some erosion and flecks
of mud.”

“We had a lot of rain in August
and it takes a very thorough undercarriage wash to get rid of all the mud.”

“Exactly.”

“This car has been repaired, very
recently,” Beau said.

Sam’s pulse quickened. “Here’s a
possible scenario. Ray Belatoni runs Jo off the road and she takes off running.
When he can’t catch her he goes back to her car and figures he can cover his
tracks somehow.”

“By enlisting the help of his
buddy, Donny Vargas,” Beau said. “The dealership could get replacement parts
and make the repairs in just a few days’ time. Vargas and Belatoni are sharp
enough to know that they want to erase any trace of their own involvement with
this car, so one of them drives it here, puts it in the garage using Jo’s
opener, and they wipe down the car completely.”

“Don’t dealerships have to report
extensive damage repairs?” Lisa asked.

“They usually do, for insurance
purposes. But Vargas could have possibly worked on this one after hours, or he
fudged the records by making up a story about the owner not having insurance or
not wanting the wreck on her driving record. He’s seen it all, believe me. He
could come up with something.”

Lisa had her camera out,
capturing photos of all the details under the car.

“Beau, what do you think?” Sam
asked. “Did those two men simply want to cover up a traffic accident, or could
this be part of a plan where one of them killed Zack and they decided to frame
Jo for the murder?”

“If Jo’s story is true, Ray
Belatoni’s motive was blackmail.” Beau had pulled out a notebook and was
tapping his pen against it as he voiced his thoughts. “Vargas, of course, had
been angry enough at Zack to do almost anything. His rage might have built
until he actually killed Zack. But I can’t quite see how Vargas killing Zack
connects to Belatoni running Jo off the road. I need to think about this.”

Lisa scooted out from under the
car and began snapping photos of the interior with the hatch open, getting
shots of the suitcases inside.

“Let’s have this towed to the
department garage,” Beau suggested. “I’ll get you some extra help and you can
go through it inch by inch.”

Lisa sent him a grateful look and
began packing her kit. Sam realized she hadn’t checked in with the bakery in
awhile, so she plucked her phone from her pack. It had been on silent mode
during the funeral and wake and she discovered she had messages from both Kelly
and Zoë.

Kelly didn’t answer her phone.
Zoë suggested a glass of wine together if Sam happened to be out and about.

“I’m with Beau on a forensic
scene right now,” Sam said. She glanced at the time and asked Beau when he thought
he would be free.

“Not until late,” he told her.
“If I can’t round up another forensic person to help Lisa I should go along to
process this car. I’ll drop you at home first.”

“How about the bakery instead?”
It was closer and she could pick up her van. She gave Zoë an estimate of an
hour before she could be there.

“Stay for dinner then,” Zoë
suggested. “I heard Beau say he would be busy and I’ve got a pot of my green
chile stew on the stove.”

No one in her right mind would
turn down Zoë’s green chile stew. Sam agreed without hesitation.

*
* *

The tow truck driver couldn’t
possibly be any slower, Beau thought as he waited in his cruiser at the
department’s inadequate impound garage. With no luck at finding someone with
more than minimal forensics training to assist Lisa in processing the Lexus,
he’d been forced to take that task himself. After dropping Sam at her vehicle
he’d come here, expecting the truck and Lisa’s department Suburban to already
be here. No matter—he could use the time to return Kent Taylor’s call, which
he’d missed.

“Just got back to Albuquerque,”
Kent said, “and I’ve been reviewing the security tapes from the Kingston Arms.
Our guys narrowed down the hours of the day for me. Now we’re trying to figure
out exactly what we’re seeing.”

“Anyone we know?”

“Well, not Josephine Robinet, if
that’s what you mean. I’m looking at the footage for the entire afternoon and
evening.” He murmured something as he apparently forwarded the tape. “Here’s
Zack and Krystal walking down the hall together and going into a room.
Unfortunately, his room was at the far end of the hall away from the camera.
There are these little alcoves up and down the hall and each one leads to two
rooms. So it’s impossible to know if, say, a person stepping out of our sight went
into room 933 or room 935.”

Beau tried to fix an image in his
head that fit Taylor’s description.

“The ninth floor has the pricier,
deluxe rooms and a couple of small suites, so there wasn’t a lot of traffic.
I’ve got a couple of businessmen arriving and never leaving their own rooms.
Another one who comes and goes. Krystal is pretty identifiable—the only female
with that fluffy hairdo. She leaves and comes back at pretty much the intervals
she described to us. Even has the pizza box when she comes back. And it’s not
but a couple minutes before she bolts from the room and runs to the elevator
with a wad of clothing bunched up in her arms.”