Jennifer L. Hart - Southern Pasta Shop 02 - Murder À La Flambé (19 page)

"It's a long story."

"Does it have anything to do with my murder investigation?"

I winced. "Maybe?"

Darryl gripped my arm. "You and your boyfriend are gonna be the death of me. I swear you are."

Resigned to another long interview, I could only hope that wasn't how this would all play out.

Italian Chicken And Sausage Sauté

You'll need:

6 chicken breasts, skinned and boned, salt and pepper

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 Italian sausage link—crumbled and cooked

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

3/4 cup chicken broth

1/2 cup flour

2 medium zucchinis, sliced 1/2 inch thick

1 tablespoon margarine

3/4 cup dry white wine

2 large cloves garlic, minced

1 (7 oz) jar roasted red peppers, drained and sliced

1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped

1 teaspoon dried oregano, crushed

Cut chicken into bite-size chunks. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roll in flour to coat. Set aside.

In a 12-inch skillet, heat oil. Add zucchini; cook and stir over medium-high heat for1 to 2 minutes or until slightly browned. Remove zucchini with a slotted spoon, and set aside. Add margarine to skillet, and melt. Add cayenne pepper. Add chicken, and cook until no longer pink. Add wine, and heat to boiling. Boil uncovered 2 minutes. Add Italian sausage, red peppers, garlic, oregano, and basil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes. Add zucchini, and simmer 2 minutes more. Serve over pasta; garnish with parsley to serve.

"Malcolm?" I called out as I let myself into Jones's place.

"Be up in a minute." His voice floated up from the basement.

"I'm hitting your wine rack with a vengeance," I replied. He didn't respond, so I assumed he was cool with my plan. And if not, well, too bad.

I moved around the kitchen with a familiar ease, extracting the electric corkscrew gizmo from its charger and picking out my vintage. It seemed to be a merlot kind of day, and I checked the pantry to see if he had any food in stock that would go with my selection.

"Now this is nice," Jones said a few minutes later when he found me sautéing sausage and onion, "to find you back here, cooking for me."

"Don't get too excited—it's nothing fancy. Your fridge is severely understocked, and I'm beat, so we're having a whatever-you've-got breakfast casserole to help sop up the insane amounts of alcohol I intend to consume. Would you dice those peppers, please?"

He did, but not before giving me a searing kiss.

We prepared the meal in a companionable silence. Tucked away from the rest of the craziness and insulated from the disasters, it was easy to see how I'd fallen into such a comforting pattern. Jones was easy to be with, regardless of the baggage he brought to the table.

"Penny for your thoughts?" Jones asked as I put the casserole in the oven to bake.

"I was thinking how effortless it would be to just be here with you all the time. I've been more relaxed here in your kitchen than I have anywhere else in the past few weeks. Why do we let other things overcomplicate us?"

Jones set my wineglass down and took my hands in his. "It would be rather remarkable to insulate ourselves from the rest of the town."

"Don't stop at the town. The whole world's gone nuts. A gang in Beaverton, I never thought I'd see the day. Those kids caused a lot of trouble and hurt a lot of people."

"Will Kaylee be all right?" Jones asked.

"I think so. Kyle said the DA is making noise about trying some of the older boys as adults. That'll mean hard time, especially if they are charged with manslaughter or even murder in the second degree. Kaylee is too young, and she has an alibi for both of the arsons, so the most they can charge her with is conspiracy. That'll probably mean some fines and community service. And of course Aunt Cecily will be keeping a very close eye on her from now on, which is a whole different level of punishment." I shook my head. "Why do smart girls get stupid over boys?"

Jones smiled. "Are you talking about Kaylee or yourself?"

I shrugged "Six of one, half dozen of the other. That child is her mother's daughter."

"Well at least you know one good thing that came out of all this. Your theory about the arsons being unrelated to Rochelle's death was correct."

I hopped up onto the island counter. "What happened during your interview with Detective Brown, by the way?"

Jones pushed some hair out of my face, then sighed. "Nothing much. I haven't been cleared as a suspect yet. I don't have an alibi for the time of death, but since I proved I filed for an annulment earlier in the week, that takes motive off the table."

"Rats, so we're back to square one?"

"Not exactly. How long have we got until that casserole's done?"

I peeked in the oven. "About another fifteen minutes. Why?"

"I want to show you something." Jones took my hand and led me downstairs.

His laptop screen saver was up, a black-and-white picture of me from last Thanksgiving. I cringed every time I saw it. I was so not-photogenic. Charisma didn't usually come across in stills. That particular shot wasn't too hideous. He'd captured me in profile, a glass of wine in my hand and a soft smile tugging up my lips. I wondered what I'd been thinking about in the shot.

Him most likely, or Kaylee, from before I'd actually had her in my life again. Then again, it might have been contemplation of dinner—I did go a little gaga over eggplant parm.

Jones tapped the screen, and a document appeared. I frowned as I sat in the desk chair, Jones standing behind me. Dates and times, names, the occasional "see attached" file. "What's this?"

"The police have Rochelle's computer, but I got to thinking about it. What do you do when you're done transcribing recipes?"

"Save them," I responded immediately.

One dark eyebrow went up. "To where?"

"The cloud." Then it hit me, and I looked back at the screen. "Oh? So this stuff was in Rochelle's cloud drive?"

Jones nodded. "I still had access to it, since our investigative company e-mail address was linked with a free-mail account. And most of those come with cloud storage anymore. Rochelle was horrible about passwords. She never changed them. Claimed she couldn't remember the new ones."

"Did you tell Detective Brown about that?" I asked, settling myself in the desk chair.

Jones shook his head. "Not about the cloud. I didn't know until now that she even used it."

I worried my lower lip. "But if the police find out you're accessing this stuff…"

His hands landed on my shoulders, thumbs kneading the knots in my neck. "Relax, Andrea. I know how to cover my tracks."

The massage felt good but didn't do much for my anxiety. "You like living dangerously, don't you? Tempting fate at every opportunity."

His hands stilled. "Don't fret, love. I don't do anything illegal."

"But the cops won't be happy—"

His hand covered my mouth as he leaned down to whisper in my ear. "It's not my job to make them happy. It's my job to uncover the truth."

The warmth of his breath made me shiver. "Just promise me you'll be careful. It's not just the cops. If whatever information Rochelle was killed over is in these files, and whoever wants it hidden knows you have them, you could be putting a big old bull's-eye on your back."

Jones turned the chair until I faced him. "Better me than you. I know how to handle myself."

I huffed out a breath. Stubborn man. "Okay, let's do dinner, and then we'll get to work."

"We?" Jones asked, both eyebrows going up.

I nodded. "Yes, we. If you insist on doing something not quiet illegal but foolhardy, you need someone watching your back. Rochelle didn't have that, and I'll be damned if I let you try to handle all this on your own."

"What about the pasta shop?"

I shook my head. "I can't think about that right now. Once this killer is unmasked, then I can focus on getting my business back on track."

Upstairs, the timer went off, and I pushed up from the chair, heading for the kitchen.

A hand snagged my arm. Jones wore a pained expression. "Andrea. It's your dream. You've been working so hard on that new menu. What about the other restaurants you were talking about? You need to keep making forward progress. Besides, you said you were exhausted."

The screen saver came back on with my picture. That was how Jones saw me, and someday I wished that could be me. "I've got my priorities in order. Come on—food first, then we're going to catch a killer."

*   *   *

Catching a killer wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. Not that I'd really expected it to be all cut and dried, but Rochelle's documents made no sense to me.

"This all sounds the same to me." I blinked as I looked away from the laptop to where Jones was studying some of the pictures he'd printed out. "How am I supposed to know what's important? Half the time she doesn't even use names. Just says the client or the suspect."

"Look for buzzwords." Jones was frowning down at a color shot of people on a busy street.

I came to stand beside him. "Buzzwords?"

He nodded. "Missing persons, suspicious activity, fraud. Child custody cases. Things that would drive people to kill. Or would kill to protect."

I thought about it for a beat. "So not necessarily someone from Beaverton then. What are you looking for there?"

Jones was still frowning at the same photograph. "This man." He tapped the picture. "Does he look familiar to you?"

I blinked and stared down at him. "Maybe. I'm not sure. He might just have one of those faces."

"Perhaps. Are his eyes green or blue?" Jones was color-blind and had a hard time with blues and greens. Which to me made his skill with photography even more impressive.

"It's kinda hard to tell from the angle. Is he in another shot?"

Jones shuffled through the photos, then handed me one. "Here."

I didn't see the man at first, but I recognized the location. "Hey, that's the coffee shop I used to hit every morning when I lived in Atlanta. It's about a block from my old apartment. That might explain why the man's familiar."

"His eyes, Andrea." Jones took my spot at the computer and opened up a new window. He did some quick typing and then turned back to me.

I studied the photo. The new shot had the man getting out of a car, looking slightly away. "Blue, definitely blue. And you're right—he seems very familiar. Is it possible we both know him?"

"If that's the case, where do you think we know him from?" Jones took the photo and continued to type.

In Atlanta, there could only be one connection that both Jones and I would recognize. "You interviewed several of the audience members after the debut, right? Do you think he was in the audience, maybe someone you questioned?"

"I think it's likely, though I'll have to dig through the case notes to be sure." Jones punched a few more keys and then sucked in a sharp breath.

"What, what is it?"

"I input his license plate number at the DMV database. Look at the registration."

I looked and was filled with excitement. "Jacob Griffin. That's him. That's the man who hired Rochelle."

Jones shut down the laptop and collected the scattered photographs. "I'm going to Atlanta."

"Now?" I gaped at him. "It's like two AM."

"I'm not tired." Jones was a man on a mission, one headed for the stairs at a dead run.

"I'm coming with you." I followed him up to the first floor.

Jones stopped and set the laptop bag down on the kitchen counter. "You can't."

My chin went up in classic defiant Buckland style. "Watch me."

He looked pained. "Andrea, from what we know, this is the man who hired Rochelle. He lives in Atlanta and might have been in the audience and might have a serious grudge against you. Enough of a grudge to kill Rochelle and set you up for murder. What do you think will happen if you show up on his doorstep?"

I folded my arms across my chest. "Then we should turn it over to Detective Brown. If you try to leave without me, I'll go right to him and tell him what we found, and he'll have the Atlanta cops at Griffin's door before you hit the county line."

Jones set his jaw. "You're being exceedingly stubborn about this."

"I believe in playing to my strengths. Either we both go, or neither of us go. You decide."

Jones huffed out a breath. "Famous last words. All right, you can come. But I'm driving. You had too much wine."

"Fair enough." I knew a win when I heard one. After slinging on my coat, I rushed for Jones's SUV, lamenting that there wasn't enough time to make a thermos of coffee.

The drive between Beaverton and Atlanta took about six hours. For the first two, I was too pumped to sleep and peppered Jones with nonstop questions about what he planned to do when we found Griffin. His standard answer of "We'll have to see" got old real fast.

When the sun finally came up, I started texting my friends back home. First was to Donna, to let her know I hadn't been abducted. Then to Mimi, asking her to call Aunt Cecily and Pops at a decent hour and let them know I was seeing to some out-of-town business. Let them read into that what they would.

I thought about it for a beat and then asked Jones, "Do you want me to let Lizzy know where we're going?"
Jones shook his head. "I don't want to get her hopes up until we know more."

I nodded and then shot Lizzy a
Talk to you soon
text.

She didn't respond, not that I'd expected her to, though I had hoped.

"Thank you for trying with my sister," Jones said quietly.

"It's the least I can do for you," I said, meaning it. "Although if you told me a year ago that Lizzy and I would be chumming around together, I wouldn't have believed it."

"I think she and Kyle are going to, what's that American phrase, call it quits?"

I'd been drinking from a bottle of water and choked when he said that. "You mean break up? Why?"

Jones shrugged. "She wouldn't tell me."

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. No way was I actually feeling guilt over my role in their relationship's demise. "Well, Kyle has been doing some pretty idiotic stuff lately. But I know he loves her to the point of insanity. Can you talk her out of it?"
Jones made a half-strangled noise, as if I'd ask him to tear one of his arms out of the socket. "You're not serious."