Sugar Coated Sins (6 page)

“So far we have: Lisa Port Smith,
the victim’s sister; Hilda Fremont, from the Boxcar Grill; and Judge Hurley,”
Jake explained.

Phillip whistled softly.
 
“That’s quite an eclectic selection of
suspects,” he said.
 
“I’m dying to hear
their motives.”

Jake nodded at me, and I
spoke.
 
“Lisa inherited Benjamin’s
estate, supposedly Hilda was a scorned lover, and we still haven’t determined
the judge’s motives yet.
 
Gabby’s would
most likely be jealousy, but again, we need to dig deeper into her real
relationship with him as well.”

“It’s not exactly clear cut, and
the fact that this murder happened fifteen years ago isn’t helping our cause
any.
 
When I think about the advances in
forensics alone, it makes me shudder.
 
We
don’t even have a cause of death,” Phillip said wearily.

“I’m still guessing that it was
poison, though I seriously doubt that it was from the canned chicken,” Jake
said.
 
“The symptoms still seem to fit,
unless Doc Nance is completely incompetent.”

“He might have realized too late
that it wasn’t an accident, but I’m willing to vouch for his ability.
 
You can take the fact that it was poison as
rock solid,” the former sheriff said.

“The real question, then, is who
gave the poison to him, and why did they write that note afterward?” I
asked.
 
“Is remorse enough to motivate
someone to confess like that?”

“Remember, the killer never
believed that the note would be discovered in their lifetime,” Phillip said.

“Well, we’re not going to solve it
sitting around here,” Jake said as he began to stuff the contents of the time
capsule back into the container.
 
“Phillip, how soon can you get started on your research?”

“I’m already on it,” he said with
a grin as he stood.
 
“I’ll let you know
what I find.”

“Thanks,” Jake said, and after he
was gone, I asked my husband, “What do the two of us do now?”

My husband shrugged.
 
“I don’t know about you, but I’m calling
Stephen Grant in here so I can explain what we’ve been up to.
 
After that, he and I are going to start
digging into Benjamin Port’s life a little harder.”

“That sounds like a good plan, but
where does that leave Grace and me?”

“I don’t suppose there’s the
slightest chance that you two will just leave this to me and my investigators,
is there?” Jake asked me with a grin.

“Do I really even need to bother
answering that question?” I asked with a hint of laughter in my voice.

“Probably not.
 
Tell you what.
 
If you and Grace could stay out on the edges
of this case and look for things that my people and I might miss, that would be
great.”

“You’re not just asking me to do
that to keep me safe, are you?”

“Would it be all that wrong if I
were?” Jake asked me.

“I’ve done this before, remember?”

“Not on my watch, you haven’t,” he
answered.

I knew that my husband had a lot
more to worry about than me.
 
Was I being
selfish insisting on digging into Benjamin Port’s murder, too?
 
Maybe, but I couldn’t help myself.
 
I’d been involved since the beginning, and
there was no way I could just bow out now.
 
“I’ll tell you what I am willing to do.
 
I’ll be careful, and so will Grace.”

“Good.”

As I started to leave, Jake caught
Stephen Grant’s attention, which wasn’t hard to do, since the officer was
hovering around outside the office.
 
As
Stephen headed for the door, I left, giving my husband one last smile before I
was gone.

It was time to find Grace and see
what we could uncover about the murder victim.
 
The trail was the coldest we’d ever tackled, but between the two of us,
I had a hunch that we’d be able to come up with something that would help track
down a killer.

Chapter
8

“Hey, partner.
 
Are you up for a little digging?” I asked Grace
after she let me in through her front door.

“I’m raring to go,” she said.
 
“How did things go with Gabby?”

“How do you think?”

“Did she make you beg for
information?
 
I hate when she does that,”
Grace said as she grabbed her house key.

“As a matter of fact, she couldn’t
wait to tell me all about Benjamin Port,” I said as we walked outside.

“How did you manage that?”
 
Grace looked suitably impressed, but I wasn’t
going to spoil it with facts.

“Let me have a few secrets of my
own,” I said with a grin.

“If you’re willing to tackle that
woman head on, you’re entitled to whatever you want.
 
What did she tell you?”

“As far as Gabby could come up
with, there were three people who might have wanted to see Benjamin dead, but
after I left, I had four people on my list.”

“Are you including Gabby herself?”
Grace asked.
 
“If you haven’t, we have to
at least consider her a potential killer, no matter how unlikely it might feel
to us.”

I tried to hide my
disappointment.
 
“I feel the exact same
way.
 
Are we both brilliant, or do we
just think along the same lines?”

“Why can’t it be both?
 
I’ve been around you a lot when you’ve been
investigating murder, so it makes sense that great minds might think alike,”
she said.
 
“Do you really believe that
Gabby might have poisoned him?”

“I don’t like to admit it, but
it’s something we have to consider.
 
She
was awfully forthcoming about her own list of suspects.
 
She told me about Hilda Fremont from the
Boxcar Grill, Benjamin’s own sister, and Judge Hurley, of all people.”

“You act surprised.
 
I don’t have any trouble seeing him doing
it,” Grace said, shocking me a little with how confident she sounded.

“Honestly?
 
I couldn’t.”

“That’s because you’ve never been
judged by him in court.”

“Oh, that’s right.
 
He tried your speeding ticket case, didn’t
he?” I asked.
 
I remembered that it
hadn’t gone well for Grace, and she’d lost her license for three months for
driving forty-five miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone.
 
The new limit signs had just been placed that
morning, and her attorney had asked for mercy.
 
What Grace had gotten was the harshest penalty the law allowed.
 
She would have lost her job, but one of her
coworkers had broken her left leg just the month before.
 
She could manage driving well enough, but
climbing in and out of the car had been too difficult for her on a daily basis,
so they’d balanced each other out, though the company had docked each of them
half their pay during their time together.

“The man’s a sadist,” Grace said,
her voice suddenly filling with anger.
 
“Let’s go tackle him first.”

“Slow down.
 
Now that Jake is in charge, we aren’t going
to speak to any of his suspects until he’s had a chance to interview them
himself.”

“Then what are we going to do, dig
around the edges again?”

“We don’t have much choice.
 
If it’s any consolation, Jake has Phillip
doing the same thing, only in the past.
 
Everybody’s been relegated to second team on this one.”

“Even Stephen?”
 
Because he was her boyfriend, there had been
some friction between them when he’d been acting sheriff, but now that he was
second in command, things had gotten a lot gentler between the two of them.

“No, your guy and my guy are
running it together,” I said.

“Then I suppose that I can live
with it if you can,” Grace conceded.
 
“So
if we can’t go after our list of suspects, what can we do?”

“Think about it.
 
There are some questions we can ask that
might just lead us to new suspects that no one else has even thought of yet,
and if we can come up with fresh names, I don’t see any reason we can’t do a
little preliminary footwork ourselves.”

“I like the way you think,” Grace
said with a smile.
 
“The question is,
where do we start?
 
After all, it’s been
fifteen years.”

“I’m not saying the case isn’t a
little cold.”

“Cold?
 
Are you kidding?
 
It’s absolutely icy,” Grace replied.

“Maybe so, but there could still
be clues out there.”

“Where is the question,” she said.

“Off the top of my head, I can
come up with a few ideas about where we might get started.
 
Where was Benjamin Port living at the time of
his murder?
 
Where did he work?
 
Who did he associate with besides Gabby
Williams?
 
Did he have any trouble with
anyone he knew?”

“What I want to know is who gave
him that chicken,” Gabby said.

“I don’t think it was what killed
him,” I said.
 
“No one believes that it
was poisoned now.”

“Maybe not, but what if the killer
gave it to him as a smokescreen to cover up the fact that they were about to
poison him with something else?
 
What
better way to make a murder look like an accident than that?”

“I hadn’t really thought of it
that way,” I admitted.
 
“You’re making a
good point.
 
It’s at least something
that’s worth finding out.”

“But how?
 
Who can answer the questions we have?”

“Well, one thing is for sure; I
can’t go back to Gabby,” I said.

“I don’t blame you for that one
bit,” Grace said, “but I have an idea.
 
Give me ten minutes on the Internet.
 
I might be able to come up with a few answers myself without having to
ask anyone else.”

“Need I remind you that fifteen
years ago, the World Wide Web was just a baby compared to what it’s become
now?” I asked her.

“I get that, but it doesn’t mean
that information isn’t still out there.
 
Besides, what can it hurt?
 
Let me
look around a little and see what I can find.”

After double the allotted time
she’d requested, Grace closed her computer with a sigh.
 
“All I got was his obituary, and it wasn’t
one of those flamboyant ten-paragraph ones, either.
 
It told more about the mortuary that was
handling the services than about the man himself.
 
That was a wash.”

“Maybe so, but I’ve got another
idea.
 
Who do we know who has been
following the news in April Springs for the last twenty-five years?”

“I don’t know, your mother?” she
asked.

“Maybe, but I’m not going to her
first.
 
I was thinking that perhaps we
should speak with Emma’s father, Ray Blake.”

Grace looked unhappy about my
suggestion.
 
“Do you honestly think he’s
the best source for us to tap into?
 
The
man sees conspiracies behind every bush.
 
How are we going to know that we can trust anything he tells us?”

“Granted, we’re probably going to
have to read between the lines,” I said, “but unless you have a better idea, I
say we talk to Ray.”

“Ray, do you have a second?” I
asked the newspaper writer/editor/publisher/ad man when Grace and I walked into
the tiny offices of his paper.
 
The space
was so small that I was surprised that the glass door had enough room for the
April Springs Sentinel
’s name to be
spelled out without using any abbreviations.
 
I had to give him credit, though.
 
While many small-town newspapers were shutting down all over the
country, Ray had managed to keep his alive.
 
More of that was due to his ability to sell ads than to write news
stories, but the man was persistent in his dream to scoop everyone else in
sight on every story.

“That depends,” he said as he
looked up from a stack of old newspapers spread out on his desk.
 
A computer monitor was off to one corner, but
it was pretty obvious that he was doing research the old-fashioned way.
 
“Do you have a story for me?”

“Not really,” I said at the same
time Grace said, “Not yet.”

That caught his interest.
 
“Okay, you’ve got my attention.
 
Which is it?”

I looked at Grace, who shrugged
slightly, leaving it to me to combine our answers in a way that made
sense.
 
“What we should say is that we’re
digging into something right now, but who knows where it might lead?”

“Suzanne, forgive me if I’m a
little skeptical, but you’ve been reluctant to share much with me in the past,”
Ray said.
 
It was the biggest
overstatement he’d ever made in his life, and that was saying something.
 
I’d balked at his daughter, Emma, saying
anything at all to him about the cases I’d investigated in the past.

“I’ve never really had to ask you
for your help before, either.”
 
I’d used him
a few times in the past, but I’d always gone through Emma before.

“True.
 
Okay, what do you want to know?”
 
As he asked it, he leaned over and
nonchalantly turned on a small tape recorder sitting on his desk.

“Hang on a second,” Grace
said.
 
“Give us a minute to confer, Ray.”

He shrugged and went back to his
research as Grace pulled me out of his hearing for a moment.
 
“What’s going on, Grace?”

“I didn’t mean to make you commit
to something you aren’t willing to do,” she said.
 
“I don’t know what I was thinking when I said
that earlier.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about
it.
 
We both know that Ray’s not going to
give us anything without us giving him something in return.
 
You just reached that conclusion before I did.”

“Are you sure about this,
Suzanne?
 
He’s going to tape everything
we say, use it, and then claim that it was all on the record.”

I looked at her for a second
before I answered.
 
“Do we really have
any choice?”

“No, probably not,” she
answered.
 
“I just wanted to be sure.”

“Let’s do it.”

When we came back, Ray looked up
again.
 
“Did you two finish your little
conference?”

“We did.
 
Ray, what do you know about Benjamin Port?”

He nodded in satisfaction.
 
“So it’s true.”

“What’s true?” Grace asked him.

“Port was murdered after all.
 
I thought so at the time, but no one would
listen to me.”

“What makes you think that’s why
we’re here?” I asked him, trying not to give too much away too soon.

Ray chuckled.
 
“I’ve been at this too long not to know
what’s going on when I see it.
 
Ever
since I heard about what they found in the time capsule, I’ve been waiting for
your husband to come by.
 
I have to admit
that I’m a little surprised that he sent you instead.”

“He doesn’t even know that we’re
here,” I said.

Ray smiled a little too smugly for
my taste.
 
“Really.
 
Is there trouble in paradise, Suzanne?”

I couldn’t do it, no matter how
much I needed his information.
 
I reached
across the desk and turned off the recorder, much to his chagrin.
 
“We need to establish some rules before this
goes any further.
 
None of this is
officially on the record.”

The newsman frowned.
 
“I don’t follow anyone else’s rules, and no
one gives me orders.
 
If I learn anything
in the course of my investigation, I won’t let a soul tell me what I can and
cannot print.
 
As far as I’m concerned,
everything you say is on the record, always.”

“Then we’re done here,” Grace
said, tugging lightly on my arm.

“You’re right,” I said.
 
“Ray, if we can talk to you off the record
without that tape recorder running, then maybe we can work together on this.
 
Otherwise, we’re not saying another
word.”
 
I wasn’t bluffing, but I hoped
that it didn’t come to us walking out without anything, either.
 
My bet was that Ray was more interested in
what we had to say than in sticking to his own personal guidelines, but I
wasn’t positive about it as we headed for the door.
 
I’d tried that tack earlier with Gabby
because I’d known her well enough to gauge her response.
 
Ray Blake was another matter entirely.

“Suit yourself,” Ray said as I
opened the door.
 
“I’ll be here when you
change your mind.”

“He didn’t stop us,” Grace said in
bewilderment once we were back outside again.
 
“I can’t believe that he didn’t give in.”

“I’m willing to bet that he’s
counting on us being the first ones to cave.”

“Well, if that’s what he’s hoping
for, then he’s about to get his wish,” Grace said as she turned back to his
office door.
 
“Like you said before, we
really don’t have much choice, do we?”