The Azalea Assault (22 page)

“We came back for our stuff; they wouldn’t let us take it last night in case there was…”

“Evidence?”

Hannah looked down, half a nod of agreement. “They don’t want us to leave town until the weekend, in case there are more questions, but we’ll go back to the hotel.”

“That’s understandable. Ian was murdered in the servant’s house. I certainly wouldn’t want to stay there.”

“Yeah, a policeman is checking everything before it gets packed. He said it would take a while with Tom, so I could go until it was my turn.”

The whole idea was gruesome to Cam, but still fascinating.

“What do they think they’ll find?”

“I think they hope the memory card from the camera will show up. I guess it wasn’t in the camera when they found it, so they’re scouring in case it just fell out.”

“I’ll bet whoever killed Ian took it. You heard about the break-in last night?”

“Break-in? I didn’t hear about that,” Hannah said. “But
it’s also possible they were looking for this.” She held out what looked like a cigar box. She covered her fingers with the tips of her sleeves to open it—it was full of cash.

“Hannah!”

“Ian asked me to hide it in my bag—I had it at the party. He said it was a surprise. I thought maybe it was a present for Tom or something. I didn’t open it until we got to the hotel last night.”

“Holy cow! Did you count it?”

“No. I didn’t want to touch it. I’m going to turn it in when it’s my turn.”

Money was a huge alarm bell, and she was glad to know that both Hannah and Tom were honest enough to turn it over. Cam wondered what the heck it was about. The talk of the memory card, though, reminded her of something else from the night before: the pictures downloaded onto her own laptop. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten in the chaos of the arrest that she’d been meant to copy them and then share them with the police.

She made her excuses and sprinted around the house to Annie’s car. She sped away fast enough to make Annie proud.

A
t home she opened her laptop and pulled up the pictures. They looked like normal party shots—some people hamming for the camera, others trying to escape it. She was surprised, in fact, to see adults behaving so much like her friends had in high school.

She decided to go through the pictures one at a time, enlarged enough to fill her screen, as viewing them in the smaller format hadn’t revealed any real detail. There had certainly been no people obviously sneaking in or out. Besides, she thought Madeline was right: everybody had left the party at some point, and pictures couldn’t really give an accurate view of who was gone for an extended time—long enough to get to the servant’s house and back.

The first time through the enlarged photos, she looked at food shots, wondering if some of the brownies had actually been poisoned—or some other food, for that matter. The trouble was, it was impossible to prove poisoning based on a photo, short of catching the actual act, which she doubted she would.

Cam refocused her attention on the faces in the photos. In a number of shots taken well before dessert, Joseph looked a little sickly. In fact, Cam noticed, he was flushed before the arrival of guests. Perspiration was visible on his forehead in a photo of he and Samantha taken just a bit later; Annie had captured them in the midst of an argument. Cam almost wondered if someone had put something in Joseph’s drink, though she was sure Joseph would have claimed it was Annie.

Then Cam spotted something even odder. It was a shot of the Roanoke Garden Society Board, taken about twenty minutes after the argument, according to the time stamp. Samantha was flanked by Neil Patrick on one side and Joseph on the other. It was a close-up, and they filled the foreground, Joseph still sweating slightly but looking a little happier. Cam wished she could remember what time the brownie incident had happened. She was sure this was prior, as Neil Patrick still had on his bib. Behind the trio the photograph was meant to capture, Benny, whom Cam couldn’t remember seeing at the party at all, had his head close to Ian’s, as if they were sharing some secret. She wondered what could have brought Benny to such an event. His father wasn’t even present.

Cam frowned and enlarged that corner. Annie’s camera was good enough that the image’s background details were readily visible once magnified. Ian was handing Benny something that looked an awful lot like money.

She remembered Jean-Jacques and Benny owing money to the same bookie and wondered if maybe the three of them, Ian included, were entangled with the same criminals. Maybe the money Ian had asked Hannah to hang on to was more proof of that. It would sure save a lot of grief if that were the case. But what kind of crime? Pornography came to mind,
given the pictures of Evangeline, though for pornography, the shots were pretty mild. Whatever the case, money connected Benny to both of the dead men. It seemed ominous.

She burned all the pictures onto a disc and decided to take them to Jake after she had lunch with Rob.

C
am called Jake to see if he would be around that afternoon for her to bring in the new find. Jake acted singularly uninterested.

“How do I know you haven’t tampered with the photos?” he asked smugly.

“I don’t have the skill to tamper with them, and if I were going to frame somebody, I’d go with Evangeline at the moment, over those pictures of her and… well that’s who I’d go with. She had plenty of reason to kill Jean-Jacques!”

Jake didn’t respond. She wondered if he’d even seen the photos from the camera she’d given to Officer Doug earlier. Probably not, or he would have lectured her for looking.

Jake’s recent evasiveness was wearing on her. She realized, though, he’d paused too long. “What?” she asked.

“It wasn’t Jean-Jacques’s camera.”

“Whose, then?”

“Look, Cam, this is not your investigation, and you have a vested interest in us not convicting either of the top suspects. I need to go.”

“I’m pretty darned sure the prints didn’t belong to Nick or Annie!”

“Good-bye, Cam.”

“Okay, if Annie’s the killer, why do you still have Nick?”

“Because Nick didn’t have the money to meet bail, and they still have evidence implicating him in the first murder.”

“But they couldn’t both do it!” She knew there was a better legal argument than that and cursed herself for not doing a little research so she had it at the tip of her tongue.

“There are two bodies and a money trail.”

“So you claim Nick killed Jean-Jacques and Annie killed
Ian? Un-freaking-believable!” She clicked her phone shut, totally annoyed it wasn’t a landline she could slam down.

“Y
ou look ticked. Not at me, I hope?” Rob handed her a bag from Subway as if it were a peace offering.

Cam growled and then apologized. “No, not at the moment. I found some good evidence for a different suspect and Jake won’t even look at it!”

She led him through her apartment and out the back door, where a blanket had been laid under a blooming crab apple.

“It’s not you; he’s annoyed the evidence is leading him on a wild-goose chase.”

“So he’s not interested in new information? Seriously?”

Rob described Jake ranting about Annie’s record and feeling guilty about not taking Ian’s accusations seriously.

“I mean, the guy wound up dead. Jake feels like he killed him by not listening.”

“But Annie didn’t do it. I can’t believe he even looked her up over dumping a stupid garbage bag! Seems like an abuse of his position to me.”

“I agree, but… there was a threatening note at the servant’s house. It sounded like Annie wrote it… something like, ‘Lay off or you’ll be sorry.’”

She turned and stared. “So someone really is trying to frame Annie?”

Rob nodded grimly. She was glad to see he was on her side this time.

“It was done on computer, not handwritten. If we could find the printer it was printed on… Jake said it was a dot matrix. You don’t see those too often anymore.”

“Certainly not hooked to Annie’s computer; her stuff is high-end,” Cam mumbled. “You know… Evangeline suggested I look for who might want to frame Annie. Sounds pretty smart to me. Especially with this note thing.”

“With the stuff you found, it sounds like maybe Evangeline would have a reason to frame her.”

“Why, then, would she suggest something that would implicate herself? Still, it is a more likely scenario than Nick framing Annie from jail.”

Rob frowned. “I guess you have a point there, but what if the two murders aren’t related? Jake thinks Nick was hired.”

“By whom?” This was the first Cam had heard as to what a money trail meant.

“I don’t know, but that’s why they’re holding him as long as they can. I think they hope he will give up the person who hired him.”

Cam thought it sounded like a lot of excuses. “Rob, do you want to hear my new evidence or not?”

His eyes popped open as if he’d forgotten all about the point that had started their conversation.

“Of course I do. Shoot.”

“Well first, I learned from Giselle this morning that Jean-Jacques came to the door and rang the bell the morning he died.”

Rob nodded.

“You knew that?”

“Yeah, then he drove away, but only far enough to park and walk back.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m sorry—it sort of got dropped when they found all the connections to Nick. There was an address in the car, too.”

“Address?”

“Little house somewhere in the Blue Mountains—Patricks own it.”

Cam growled. She couldn’t believe she’d been so desperate for non-Nick evidence and Rob had withheld this. “So there maybe was an affair or something?” she shouted.

“No, Cam—it didn’t pan out. The caretaker up there says nobody has been there for years. Jake thinks Mr. Patrick might have been helping Samantha out by offering Jean-Jacques a place to stay that was free, but out of her hair.”

“But nobody’s asked them? After Mr. Patrick was so mad?”

“Look, you’re right—especially after the murder last night—Nick isn’t the killer, so they should look into it again. I’ll remind Jake.”

“I thought this was your investigation, too.” Cam felt a little better after reading Rob the riot act. She then explained about the money exchange between Ian and Benny that she’d seen in Annie’s photos as well as about the box of cash Hannah had showed her, and began describing all the angles that had blossomed as a result.

Rob interrupted, which annoyed her, until she realized his input was useful.

“What is money ever exchanged over? Porn is one, but you’re right, those pictures don’t sound much like porn—tabloid stuff maybe, but there’s not much money in that unless the person is a big celebrity or cheating on their spouse. Then there’s drugs, gambling, crime…”

“So if we can connect Benny to one, that might be it. And there’s that camera from the greenhouse…”

“With his fingerprints.”

“His? Are you sure?”

Rob looked guilty. “I think that was secret.”

“I’m not doing a press release. I just wish Jake would get over himself.”

“I know, but they don’t want anyone to know because they hope someone might trip up.”

“I won’t tell! You could trust me a little bit—that would help, too.” She felt her neck heat up and knew her face would soon be red. Not her most attractive look. She had to make an effort to calm herself, because it wasn’t really Rob she was mad at anymore.

“Do you have anyone you could talk to? About Benny, I mean…” Rob asked.

“You forgot love.”

“What?”

“As a motive.”

Rob rolled his eyes. “Didn’t sound to me like Ian loved anyone but himself. And how could paying Benny be about love?”

“That’s true. Maybe Benny was selling something. Ian sure had a lot of cash, though—he had to be planning something bigger. Maybe that money to Benny was a down payment for something.”

“Like?” Rob said.

“I’m going back to talk to Samantha again after I drop off this disc to Jake. I’ve already talked to Evangeline enough today, but Samantha had to cut me short. Plus, there were a few pictures I wanted to ask her about. Samantha and Evangeline are the only ones I feel comfortable with—picking their brains and all.”

Cam half expected Rob to make a zombie gesture. Brain picking usually got that—a grunt and a grab, stiff-armed and monster-mouthed. Rob hated the term. In fact, he hated most slang and mocked it where possible, but he stayed serious, concerned, even.

“Two women who might be suspects, and there’s something fishy about that tea with sleeping pills. Be careful.”

“Fishy? Like what?”

“I don’t know yet. Jake just said forensics wanted to do a bunch more tests.”

Cam pondered that, but she didn’t want Rob to worry. “I’m always careful. I know how to talk to Samantha and Evangeline, trust me. Besides, I don’t think Evangeline is really a suspect.”

“Why not?”

Cam couldn’t answer. She hadn’t revealed even a third of what she’d learned about Nick from Evangeline. She didn’t want Jake hearing it if it wasn’t necessary and wasn’t sure if Rob might spill it in trade if she told him. Besides, Rob would take it the wrong way—as evidence of Nick’s guilt. And truthfully, Evangeline’s support of Nick had earned her a lot of slack in Cam’s estimation, even if there was evidence giving Evangeline a pretty strong motive.

Rob eyed her sternly. “Because she’s nice? It’s an old trick, Cam. Just be careful.”

She rolled her eyes and opened the door for him, not wanting to admit to the possibility she would need caution.

“Meet me for supper, okay? So I know you’re fine? Six?”

Cam agreed and then went inside to examine the pictures again. She searched the Internet for information on azalea symbolism while she was at it—“fragile passion” seemed the only potentially relevant meaning she found, but at least she was fully armed before handing the disc and summary over to Jake.

C
am drove toward downtown, not feeling overly optimistic about Jake after their morning conversation. His disinterest in the pictures of Evangeline had been discouraging, so she felt a lot of weight resting on the exchanged money angle.