Deadly Overtures: A Music Lover's Mystery (19 page)

“Like I said—”

He cut me off before I could say more. “Don’t give me that crap. You’re not looking to buy a bracelet. You’re sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. First I find you snooping through my phone and now you’re asking strange questions. I don’t like people who don’t mind their own business.”

He took a step toward me and the warning whistle in my head shot up an octave and cranked up the volume. This time I took a step back, suddenly all too aware of how easily he could grab me.

“Everything all right here?”

I jumped at the sound of the voice behind me, and then nearly stumbled back as a wave of relief hit me. Harold Dempsey had come along the corridor without me or Jeb noticing. He waited for a response, his eyes going from me to his fellow judge.

“Everything’s just fine,” Jeb drawled. He flashed a smile at me, but didn’t bother trying to infuse it with any sincerity. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things to attend to.” He nodded at Harold. “Dempsey. I’ll see you upstairs.”

Without another word, he took the stairs at an unhurried pace, disappearing seconds later into the second-floor hallway.

“Are you really all right?” Harold asked me.

“Yes, fine,” I said quickly. “Thank you.”

My heart still dancing frantically in my chest, I hurried down the corridor, sensing Harold’s eyes on me until I was able to escape around the corner and out of his line of sight.

Chapter Twenty-One

I
DECIDED
I needed a few minutes to calm down before leaving the theater and getting mixed up in the evening traffic. The last thing I needed was to get in a car accident because of my swirling thoughts and frazzled nerves. Digging a key out of my shoulder bag, I unlocked the door to the musicians’ lounge and flicked on the overhead lights. Once I had the door shut behind me, I dropped my bag onto the nearest couch and flopped down next to it.

My encounter with Jeb had left me so flustered and uneasy that I couldn’t seem to collect my thoughts. They’d scattered like sheets of music caught by a gust of wind, and it took me several minutes of sitting quietly on the couch to gather them up and shift them into order.

For the second time, I was lucky Harold had appeared to defuse the situation. If he hadn’t arrived on the scene, I no doubt would have discovered just how violent Jeb’s temper could be. I was more convinced than ever that Jeb belonged at the top of my suspect list along with Ethan. Behind his fake accent and cowboy façade, he was a frightening man.

Once my heart had given up its wild dance and had slowed to a more sedate pace, I considered the information I’d gleaned from the judge. Pavlina had received the bracelet from her late best friend and had worn it constantly. But if the bracelet was a gift from Tiffany Alphonse, what had the killer wanted with it?

I reminded myself that I didn’t know for certain that the killer had taken the charm bracelet. It wasn’t as if Detective Van den Broek had confirmed my theory. Still, I had an inkling that the police hadn’t found the bracelet under Pavlina’s body or anywhere else near the scene of the crime. So unless it had fallen off her wrist earlier that evening—after staying in place for at least three years since it was given to her—someone had removed it from her body.

While it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that somebody had stumbled upon Pavlina before me and Mikayla and had decided to steal the bracelet, I highly doubted that was how things had played out. Some of Pavlina’s rings and necklaces had appeared far more expensive than the bracelet, so why take the one item and leave the others?

No, I decided. The killer was the most likely person to have taken the piece of jewelry.

The problem was that I still had no idea why.

I let out a sigh and shook my head. I wasn’t sure my conversation with Jeb had been worth it. The information he’d given me didn’t seem to have moved me forward with my investigation, and I knew for a fact that I’d made an enemy of the judge. At any rate, I decided I’d calmed down enough to drive home. I got up from the couch and opened the lounge door carefully, desperately hoping that Jeb was still upstairs. Running into him again was the last thing I wanted to do.

When I poked my head out the door, my heart nearly broke into an encore performance of its earlier wild dance. There was someone out in the hallway. Almost as soon as I’d realized that, relief replaced my burgeoning panic. The person I’d spotted was Sasha rather than Jeb.

He was heading my way, a file folder stuffed with papers in one hand and his phone in the other. A plan popping into my head, I grabbed my phone and quickly snapped a picture of him. Fortunately, he didn’t notice, his attention focused on his own device. As I switched off the light and locked the door to the musicians’ lounge, Sasha disappeared up the stairs to the second floor, never giving a sign that he’d noticed me.

The sight of Olivia’s assistant had reminded me of the fact that he and his boss were still murder suspects. Jeb and Ethan were likelier suspects in my mind, but that didn’t mean I could ignore the other possibilities. Sasha had claimed that he’d been away from the theater during the time when Pavlina was killed. That meant he couldn’t provide Olivia with an alibi for that time period, but did it really provide
him
with an alibi?

At the moment I only had his word that he’d been delayed at Starbucks by a long line of caffeine-craving customers. It was possible that he’d gone to the coffee shop and quickly fetched coffee for Olivia, leaving time for him to kill Pavlina either before he left or when he returned. I still couldn’t come up with a reason for him to want Pavlina dead, especially since he’d claimed he didn’t know her prior to the competition, but that didn’t mean no motive existed.

I checked the time on my phone. It was only seven in the evening. My stomach was rumbling, demanding dinner, but that wasn’t a problem. With the plan I’d recently formed, I could assuage my hunger while checking out Sasha’s alibi at the same time.

Glancing over my shoulder to make sure Jeb was still nowhere in sight, I left the theater and stepped out into the night. Instead of heading for my car, I turned the opposite way and struck out on foot for the Starbucks located half a block away from the theater.

The trip only took a minute or two and warm air greeted me when I stepped inside the coffee shop. Letting the door fall shut behind me, I pulled off my gloves and tucked them in my coat pockets while surveying my surroundings. Fortunately, the place wasn’t crowded and there was only one person at the counter ahead of me. I hoped that meant the two baristas on duty would be willing to chat with me.

When it was my turn to order, I asked for a tall vanilla steamed milk and a chocolate chip cookie. Not exactly the healthiest dinner, but I told myself I’d eat some fruit when I got home to balance it out at least a little bit.

“Were you here on Friday night two weeks ago?” I asked as I handed a ten-dollar bill to the twenty-something woman behind the counter.

“Sure,” she said as she counted out my change. “I’m usually here on Friday evenings.”

Once I’d accepted my change from her, I pulled up the picture of Sasha on my phone and showed it to her. “Do you remember if this guy came in?”

She squinted at the photo. “No, sorry. I don’t recognize him.”

Disappointment weighed down my shoulders.

“What about you, Kelsey?” she asked her coworker, who was on her way by. “Do you recognize this guy?”

Kelsey leaned over her coworker’s shoulder for a closer look at the photo. “Sure, I remember him. He’s been coming in a lot lately.”

A spark of optimism replaced my disappointment. “Was he here two weeks ago, on Friday night?” I asked, hoping Kelsey had been working at that time.

She thought for a second. “Yes, he was here that night. I remember because we chatted about the hockey game that was on at the time.”

“So he stayed for a while?” I asked.

“Nah. We only talked for a minute, if that.”

“But was it busy that night? Did he have to wait in line?”

“No, it was pretty quiet. I don’t think there was a line at all when he came in.”

“Lying boyfriend?” Kelsey’s coworker guessed as she slid my drink and cookie across the counter toward me.

“Something like that,” I said, slipping my phone into my bag. I picked up my order. “Thanks.”

When I turned around, I nearly froze. Sasha had just entered the coffee shop. Flashing him a quick smile, I hurried out onto the sidewalk, hoping the baristas wouldn’t mention that I’d been asking questions about him.

Walking briskly, I nibbled on my cookie as I headed back toward the theater. Kelsey’s memory of Sasha seemed quite clear, and her account of his visit to the coffee shop on the night of Pavlina’s death didn’t match his. If he’d been in and out of Starbucks within a few minutes, he would have had plenty of time to kill Pavlina either before or after his coffee run.

I frowned as I continued along the street. I couldn’t think of any reason why Sasha would have lied to me if not to cover up his involvement in Pavlina’s death. But although he’d apparently had an opportunity to commit the crime, I still couldn’t figure out his motive.

Maybe he’d also lied to me when he’d said he didn’t know Pavlina before the competition. That was a possibility, but at the moment it was purely speculative. I’d have to ask around to find out if that really was the case. But even if it wasn’t, and they did have history of some sort, would anyone else know about it?

Not necessarily.

Reaching the theater, I turned down the side alley that would take me to the back parking lot. Once settled in my car, I finished off my cookie, too hungry to drive home without something in my stomach. After I’d polished off the last crumb, I took a long sip of my steamed milk, thinking. Maybe I wasn’t ready to leave the theater after all. If I went back into the building, there was a chance that I might be able to talk to Olivia Hutchcraft. She was the most likely person to know some details about Sasha. Perhaps she’d heard or witnessed something that would expose his claim of not knowing Pavlina as a lie. A long shot, yes, but that was all I had to go on at the moment.

I couldn’t seem to find any definitive evidence to point to one single person as the culprit, and that frustrated me to no end. While there was a chance that Olivia wouldn’t want to talk to me, I’d give it a go and see what happened. Of course, the trick would be to catch her alone, without Sasha hovering nearby, since it was likely he’d returned from Starbucks while I was enjoying my makeshift supper. If he was the killer, I didn’t want him to know I’d disproved his alibi. That might tempt him to silence me, which wasn’t a pleasant thought. It was bad enough that I’d already angered one of my top suspects. I didn’t need to be in Sasha’s bad books too.

Hoping desperately that I wouldn’t run into Jeb—at least not without anyone else present—I got out of my car, taking my steamed milk along with me. Once inside the theater, I made my way along the corridor toward the staircase. I paused at the bottom of the steps, my attention caught by a low murmur of voices.

“You really thought I wouldn’t recognize you?”

The voice belonged to Ethan. I was certain of that.

A quieter voice said something in return, but I couldn’t make out the words. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman talking.

Ethan laughed scornfully. The voices were coming from farther down the hall and out of sight, perhaps near the washrooms.

I decided to tiptoe closer to see if I could hear more of the conversation. As suspicious as I was of Sasha and his lies, Ethan was still one of my top suspects and I didn’t want to pass up the chance to gather potential clues.

I turned away from the stairs, but movement flickered in my peripheral vision and a thud pulled my attention back to the stairway.

“Oh no!” Olivia exclaimed.

She was one stair from the top, on her way down, but she’d dropped her phone and a sheaf of papers. Her phone had hit the carpeted stair below her and remained there, but the papers were still floating down the stairway, landing all over the place. As she stooped down to grab her phone and the nearest papers, I hurried up the steps to lend a hand.

“Here, let me help,” I said as I gathered up several papers.

“Thank you,” she said as I handed the papers over. “I can’t believe I was so clumsy.”

“How’s your phone?” I asked.

She activated the screen and it came to life without a problem.

“It looks all right, thank goodness.” She shook her head. “Sorry about that.”

“Not a problem,” I assured her.

She continued past me down the stairs and I followed her.

“Ms. Hutchcraft?”

“Yes?” She paused at the bottom of the stairs, but her attention was directed more toward her phone than to me as she tapped out a text message.

“Your assistant, Sasha, was friends with Pavlina, right?” I asked.

She glanced up briefly, a crease between her eyebrows. “No, I don’t believe so. I don’t think they knew each other at all before Sasha started this job.”

“Oh,” I said. “My mistake.”

She nodded, distracted by her text messaging again, and set off down the corridor.

So Sasha hadn’t lied about not knowing Pavlina?

I took a sip of my cooling steamed milk, continuing to think things over. Why Sasha would want to kill someone he’d only known for a couple of weeks, I didn’t know. But I also didn’t know why he would have lied about his trip to the coffee shop if he wasn’t trying to cover something up.

Maybe I could find Olivia’s assistant and ask him a few more questions. Although if he knew I’d been asking about him at the coffee shop, he might not be too receptive to chatting with me. It was unusual that he wasn’t following Olivia around, but maybe he’d lingered at Starbucks or was up in the meeting room. I decided to go upstairs and take a look, but I didn’t get farther than the first step before a shrill scream shattered the quiet of the theater’s main floor.

Startled, I glanced down the hallway in the direction Olivia had taken. A split second later she stumbled into view from around a corner, her eyes wide and her face pale.

“Help!” she cried before bursting into tears.

I rushed her way and she pointed around the corner with a trembling finger.

Apprehension plucking at my taut nerves, I took another step so I could see what had upset her.

Ethan was lying on the floor, unmoving, the front of his shirt soaked with blood.

The killer had struck again.