By Cook or by Crook (A Five-Ingredient Mystery) (23 page)

Maybe the notes would make more sense if she isolated the information. She copied the eight dates with highlighted addresses on a blank recipe card.

Granddad poked his head in the room. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out what certain dates have in common.” She handed him the card. “See if anything strikes you about them.”

He sat on the sofa in the study and adjusted his reading glasses. “They start when the blue crab season starts, and the baseball season.”

“People watch baseball and go crabbing on a lot more days than those listed there. Anything peculiar to just those dates?”

He rubbed his chin. “Nothing that fits all of them. The ones in early April and early June are around basketball finals—the NCAA and the NBA. The May dates are right before the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness in midmonth. The Belmont, the third Triple Crown race, is in early June.”

“Same time as the French Open tennis tournament.” Nadia would have followed tennis, but Val had never heard her mention other sports. “Can you think of anything besides sports?”

“Two big World War II anniversaries—VE-Day on May 8 and D-Day on June 6. Nothing big like that in April.” He looked up from the paper and shrugged. “These dates look random to me.”

The hall phone rang, and the caller ID announced the Bayport Police. Val rushed to answer it.

“I have news for you.” Chief Yardley’s voice sounded flat with no hint of whether he had good or bad news. “We’re not announcing this yet. We’ve just notified the next-of-kin.”

Her stomach clenched. Bad news. Another murder?

Chapter 25

Val clutched the phone so tightly she hit buttons and heard tones of protest. “Chief, you still there? Who’s dead?”

“Darwin. Facedown in the river. Lucky his body snagged on some roots. If he floated into the bay, we wouldn’t have found him that fast.”

The knot in Val’s gut loosened a little, but didn’t totally unwind. “Was he murdered?”

“Hard to tell with a drowning. Could be accident, suicide, or murder. We have to wait for the autopsy. Even then we might not know for sure.”

Ramirez, Nadia, and now Darwin. Three suspicious deaths. “Did you find anything connecting Darwin to the arson attempt here or the hit-and-run?”

“Nothing definite. His SUV had recent body work, consistent with damages from running someone down.”

“Maybe Nadia found out that Darwin—”

“No new theories on Nadia’s death. Not ’til we figure out what happened to Darwin. By the way, we found Darwin’s fingerprints on your car— evidence that he tampered with your brakes. You don’t have to worry about him coming after you again. You’re safe.”

“Safe from Darwin.” Safe from arson and sabotage, though Monique wasn’t yet safe from a murder charge. “Thanks for letting me know, Chief.”

Val put the phone down and sprawled on the sofa in the sitting room.

Granddad sat in his recliner, his feet propped up. “What’s the latest?”

She filled him in on her conversations with Gunnar and Chief Yardley that morning and told him how the manhunt for Darwin had ended. While she talked, the room darkened. She looked through the window at the sky. Thick clouds had descended, blocking the sun.

Granddad nodded off. She was too keyed up to nap. Her relief that Darwin could no longer harm her gave way to worry about what his death meant. An hour ago she would have bet on him as Nadia’s murderer. Now the odds had changed. She ticked off the possibilities. One: Darwin killed Nadia, and then died by accident or suicide. Convenient, but improbable. Two: Nadia’s death and Darwin’s had no connection to each other. A coincidence, but possible. The hit-and-run victim, a known drug dealer, might have had friends who retaliated against Darwin. Three: Nadia’s murderer also killed Darwin, remained at large, and might strike again. The likeliest scenario.

Bits of conversations from the last two days echoed in Val’s mind.

Sherlock Holmes could solve a mystery with fragments like that, whereas she would mix them together like cake ingredients, pop them in the oven, and pull out a half-baked theory about the murder. Maybe she lacked a key ingredient. Sherlock tuned into silence as well as words. In “Silver Blaze,” the dog that didn’t bark in the night spoke volumes to him. Had she missed a telling silence, words not spoken?

She tiptoed to her desk in the study and opened the spiral notebook to her list of suspects. She reviewed her conversations with each of them since the murder. All but one of them had asked how Nadia had died. Besides already knowing the answer, what would keep someone from posing the obvious question? Shock, distraction, the assumption that Val didn’t know the answer. Too many possibilities for the chief to accept the “question not asked” as a sign of guilt. By itself, it proved nothing. Did any other clue point in the same direction?

Gunnar’s words about the weapon drifted through her mind.
Darwin would be stupid to commit a murder with a racket.

But someone who had nothing to do with tennis would be smart to commit a murder with a racket. For the last five days, Val had asked herself why the killer used a racket. She finally grasped the logic behind it. The weapon made sense if the murderer wanted the police to focus their investigation on tennis players instead of where they might otherwise look.

Val glanced at the names she’d written in the spiral notebook. Removing the tennis players left her with only two suspects, Irene and Luke. Yet she couldn’t eliminate Chatty or Bigby. Either could have made a duplicate of the burned racket to frame the person who’d set it on fire. That left Monique as the only one who wouldn’t want to frame the racket burner. Didn’t that make her the least likely suspect? The chief would reject this reasoning, though, because it presumed a logical murderer, not one crazed by jealousy, anger, or another strong emotion.

No point in contacting Chief No-New-Theories Yardley yet. Val still couldn’t come up with a full explanation of who had murdered Nadia and why.

She needed to clear her mind, stop obsessing about the suspect list, and do something else. She hadn’t yet written the article about Nadia for the newsletter, but at least she had a theme for it—how Nadia mentored young people. She’d done that with Bethany on the tennis court, even though Bethany didn’t give her credit for it. Nadia had also helped Kimberly, the young real estate agent, and Jeremy.

Jeremy. Val smacked her forehead. She was supposed to talk to him about Nadia this afternoon. She swiveled the desk chair toward the front window. No rain yet, but dark as dusk. If she hurried, she might beat the storm. She took Nadia’s spiral notebook on the off chance that Jeremy would recognize the addresses or know why Nadia had borrowed cars. Val scrawled a note to her grandfather telling him where she was going.

Ten minutes later, she turned into the Cove Acres development just outside the town limits. Some mailboxes had addresses on them, others only names. She cruised by several neo-colonials before spotting L. Forsa and J. Pritchard on the mailbox. Luke’s house had a detached garage with windows on the second story, an air conditioner protruding from one of them. Jeremy’s apartment. Nice that he had a place of his own and some privacy, even if he lived above a garage.

Val checked both sides of the street. If she’d seen any cars parked nearby, she’d have gone back home without talking to Jeremy. She wouldn’t want to knock on his door while one of her suspects, his mother, was visiting.

Val parked the yellow hatchback in the driveway, blocking the door to the double garage. She peered in the garage window. Enough room for two cars, but only Jeremy’s delivery van was parked inside, not Luke’s BMW. No need to worry about another of her suspects interrupting her talk with Jeremy.

The breezeway between the garage and the house gave her a view of the cove beyond the backyard. The gunmetal gray water reflected the ominous sky. She wouldn’t beat the storm after all. She climbed the outdoor staircase to the garage apartment and rapped on the wood door. While she waited for an answer to her knock, fat raindrops splashed on her and splattered on the wood stairs.

Jeremy inched the door open. He bit his lip. “Um, hi.” He looked as if he didn’t know what to do with someone standing on his threshold.

She smiled. “Hi, Jeremy. Can I come in?”

He pushed his dark-rimmed glasses up his nose and opened the door wider.

She stepped inside the efficiency apartment. Any male between fifteen and twenty-five would feel at home here. Posters of sports cars and rock stars covered the available wall space. A wood bench made an altar for audio and video equipment.

“Wow. This is a neat place.”

“Thanks.” Jeremy stole a look at the baseball game on the TV and then muted the sound. He perched on the edge of a brown vinyl lounge chair.

She sat on a sagging plaid sofa, reminded him she was writing about Nadia’s life for the club newsletter, and asked about his happiest memories of Nadia.

“She used to read to me and act out the story. She made me laugh. And she stayed with me when Mom and Dad went away on vacation. One time, she climbed a ladder to rescue my cat from a tree limb.” He took off his thick glasses. “I loved Nadia. She was good to me.”

“The other day you told me she asked you to do something. What was it?”

Staccato raindrops beat down on the roof. Jeremy stared at the ceiling. “She wanted me to stop working at the diner and get a better job. She said clearing tables and making deliveries was boring, but I don’t mind. I like working there.”

So Jeremy’s father had told the truth about Nadia’s campaign. Val leaned forward. “What did your mom and dad think about Nadia’s idea?”

“They said I didn’t have to listen to her. She could be a busybody. I told her that, and now she’s dead.” He buried his face in his hands.

He looked so forlorn that Val wanted to hug him. But how would he react to a hug? No way to know. Best to leave him alone and give him a minute to compose himself. She walked to the window.

Rainwater streamed on the driveway.

Jeremy came up behind her. “Have you been following me?”

His loud voice, inches from her ear, startled Val. The kid sounded paranoid. She sidestepped away from him. “What do you mean?”

“In that car.” He pointed to Monique’s yellow hatchback.

Val chose her words carefully. “It’s not mine. I borrowed it from someone. You’ve seen it before?”

“When I was making deliveries. It was right behind me, everywhere I went.” He squinted at her. “But you weren’t driving it. The lady behind the wheel had long, black hair.”

That sounded like the wig Nadia had worn while driving a borrowed car last Monday. Maybe she’d disguised herself and driven various cars because Jeremy would have recognized her and her Lexus in his rearview mirror.

Val returned to the sofa. “Come sit next to me, Jeremy. I want to show you something.” She reached into her tote bag for Nadia’s spiral notebook, opened it to the page dated the day of the murder, and passed it to Jeremy. “Take a look at these addresses. Do they mean anything to you?”

Jeremy frowned briefly and then his eyes lit up. “I made deliveries to these places one day last week. That’s the route I took.”

Val flipped the notebook to a page with four highlighted addresses on it. Jeremy recognized those addresses, saying he made frequent deliveries to them. Nadia had followed his delivery van occasionally, tracked the addresses of the diner’s regular customers, and highlighted them. The busybody who’d sent Chatty’s lotion for chemical analysis wouldn’t hesitate to pry into Jeremy’s work. Something must have aroused Nadia’s curiosity about the deliveries.

Val took a stab. “You were very close to Nadia, Jeremy. I bet you told her things you never told anyone else. Did you talk to her about your deliveries?”

Jeremy’s fingers writhed like worms. “About the money. I never open the envelopes, but some coffee spilled. I took the money out to dry. It was a bunch of hundred-dollar bills. I asked her if I should take the money back to the house where I made the delivery.”

“What did she say?”

“To put it in the envelope and give it to Luke.” Jeremy crossed his arms and hunched, hugging himself as if he wanted to shrink away. “She said not to tell him I opened the envelope.”

A few more details and Val would have what she needed for the chief. “Do you use envelopes for all your deliveries?”

Jeremy nodded. “Luke staples a bill and an envelope to each delivery sack. People put their money in the envelope. One time, before we used envelopes, someone didn’t pay enough, but I didn’t know who. Now I don’t have to keep track of how much I get at each stop.”

Transporting envelopes filled with big bucks made Jeremy a possible robbery target.
Nadia kept at him to quit his job
. When she couldn’t convince him to give up his job, she must have decided to tackle the problem from the other end. Armed with a list of the diner’s regular customers, she could threaten Luke with exposure unless he stopped using Jeremy as a courier.

A courier for what? Drugs? Nadia wouldn’t have let a drug dealer into her house, especially one she was going to threaten. She must have suspected a less serious crime.

Maverick can’t go to a funeral without consulting his bookie.
Monique had said that while watching her husband talk to Luke and Darwin.

Gambling. Granddad had hit on the common thread among the highlighted dates in Nadia’s notebook. Jeremy’s deliveries to frequent customers had peaked in the days surrounding major sporting events. Nadia could have figured that out too, or Maverick might have told her Luke was his bookie. Yet illegal gambling was such a minor crime that Luke wouldn’t have committed a murder to cover it up. As a teenager, he’d run a poker game. Maybe he ran a high-stakes one now, the game Maverick had given up a month ago. Something else had happened a month ago—the hit-and-run. Hmm.

Jeremy squirmed in his chair. “Do you want something to drink?”

Val stood up. “No, I’m going to leave. I don’t want to block the driveway any longer, in case Luke wants to park in the garage.”

“He’s already home.”

“His BMW wasn’t in the garage when I came.” She looked out the window. “And it’s not parked on the street.”

“He has a garage behind the house where he keeps the BMW. This garage is for the diner van and for his cabin cruiser in the winter. In the spring he hauls it to a riverfront lot he owns. He has a dock there.”

“Is that his only boat?”

“He has a canoe he uses on the cove.”

That canoe could have come in handy the night of the murder. The cove was part of the creek that ran behind Nadia’s house.

Val opened the door of Jeremy’s apartment and watched the rain come down in sheets. At least she wouldn’t have to fumble with the keys. Monique had been right about the car locks not working.

Jeremy handed her a shabby umbrella. “Take this. It’s bad out there.”

Val dashed to the car. She managed to close the umbrella and stow it in the backseat without getting more than a few drops on her. She buckled up.

The door opened on the passenger side. First she saw the gun and then the face of Nadia’s murderer.