by Tracey Drew
“Most days.” He gestured toward the exit. “Guess I can spare a few minutes.”
I slid a glance over at him on the way to the door. “If you can eat lunch in a few minutes, you might want to invest in some indigestion tablets.”
With his longer legs, Eric still managed to reach the door before me; he pinned it open. “When you come from a family of six boys, you learn to eat fast or miss out.”
“Oh.” My gaze shot to his face, but at some point while crossing the station foyer, he’d slipped on his wraparound shades. That he’d volunteered this tiniest scrap of personal information left me momentarily flummoxed. Eric Mana didn’t strike me as the type of guy to share anything but the cold, hard facts. “Five brothers? Wow. That must’ve been…”
As his eyebrows rose slowly above his shades, I realized I’d stalled in the middle of the doorway. Yeah. I should probably stop gawking at him if I planned to pump the man for information about my brother.
Giving a nervous oopsie chuckle, I scuttled out of the way. When I hesitated at the bottom of the entrance ramp, his deep voice came from above. “Left,” he commanded.
Like a good little sheep, I turned left and headed along the sidewalk. Eric fell into step beside me but said nothing; he just gave a nonverbal grunt when we reached the café.
Thanks to the lunchtime rush being over, the place was almost empty. We ordered from the counter, and since I was served first, I chose a booth near the back. After folding himself into the seat opposite, Eric set his phone, shades, and wallet on the table. He laced his fingers together, his cool gray gaze never leaving my face.
“My brother didn’t kill Lucas Kerr.”
If he really did only have a few minutes before returning to the on-the-record detective sergeant of the New Zealand Police doing his job, I didn’t have time to make polite chitchat. To his credit, my bluntness didn’t appear to disconcert him.
“Your reasoning behind this statement?” he said mildly. But his swift return to formality was a stark reminder that Eric Mana was a cop first, human being second.
I needed to keep my guard locked in the ‘up’ position.
“Aside from Sean being as squeamish as a kid watching their first horror movie, he had no motive.”
Did he know about Sean’s indebtedness to Lucas?
“Your brother had borrowed a substantial amount of money off his employer.”
Yep. He did. I didn’t want to admit that I also knew.
Under the table, I squeezed my hands into tight fists. “How much are we talking about? A couple of grand?”
“Ten thousand dollars.”
I theatrically crinkled my nose. “Hardly worth killing someone over.”
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg.” He leaned back in his seat as the server set down an espresso for Eric and a pot of peppermint tea for me.
“What do you mean ‘tip of the iceberg’?” I demanded once the server walked away.
Eric shook a sachet of sugar to loosen it, tore it open, stared at it as if it’d magically appeared in his hands, then folded over the torn edge and placed it neatly on the edge of his saucer. Once again, his chilly gaze found mine. “Your brother has a serious gambling problem. Lucas isn’t the only person Sean owes money to.”
His statement made no sense. “Sean doesn’t gamble—I mean, no more than any of us. He buys a lottery ticket religiously, and his idea of a good birthday or Christmas gift is a couple of scratchies in a greeting card…”
The chill in his eyes melted to what I could only describe as pity. The kind of pity one feels for someone making an idiot of themselves because they’re in complete denial of the obvious.
The server returned with the rest of our order: a toasted ham and cheese sandwich for me and a roast vegetable and chicken salad for Eric. She smiled at him, but seeming not to notice, he dismissed her with a polite but curt, “Thank you.”
“It’s more than that, Ms. Wakefield,’ he said as the woman returned to her spot behind the counter, shooting him the occasional dejected glance. “He started with the pokies, moved on to online gambling, then became an informal bookie, which put him in the crosshairs of some vicious people.”
“Tessa,” I said, taking from those sentences the only thing I could cope with. “Since you’ve lobbed a grenade into our family, you might as well do it on a first-name basis.”
If I’d waited for him to apologize, my toasted sandwich would’ve gone cold. Eric sipped his coffee, calmly watching me try to piece together this new information. I just couldn’t seem to get from point A: Sean owed more than ten thousand dollars to B: Lucas Kerr dead. Not with a police detective studying my face.
I sucked in a deep breath and poured myself a cup of peppermint tea. “Sean told you all this?”
“He did,” Eric said, caution slowing his response. “And having a gambling addiction isn’t, in and of itself, a crime. But added to other evidence we discovered at the crime scene, it does give him a motive.”
Steam rose from my cup as I lifted it to my lips, and I narrowed my eyes in response.
Actually, I was giving the detective my best stabby glare. Not that he noticed. “Like the drugs in Lucas’s storeroom. I’m guessing the pills my cat found weren’t the only ones in there.”
“They weren’t, no.”
“Then isn’t it possible”—I lowered my cup a fraction—“that someone who isn’t my brother killed him to get hold of those drugs? A gang or a rival dealer? That could explain the ‘get out of town’ note.” I warmed to my alternative theory. “Ooh. Or the drugs and the note might have been to throw you guys off the trail of whoever left the lipstick-smeared cup at the scene.”
“Noticed that, did you?” Eric said dryly.
“I also heard Lucas noticed a lot of women in town. That he might’ve been a little too friendly toward some of them. Women who had men in their lives that might strongly object to a harmless flirtation. Or more than a harmless flirtation.” I gave him the raised-brow knowing look. “Isn’t it possible there are others in Discovery Cove who wanted Mr. Kerr dead more than my brother?”
Like the leprechaun pin’s owner.
I didn’t dwell on that because I was most likely breaking a multitude of laws by not handing it in to the authorities. But in my defense, odds were the pin had nothing to do with murder and everything to do with party supplies the pop-up store stocked.
Eric’s mouth pinched shut. “It’s possible,” he said after a moment. “And we’ve just begun our investigation.” He stiffened, setting his cup back down on the saucer with a clink. “I can’t discuss any more of this case with you. We should eat and get back to the station.”
“Okey-dokey.” I picked up my sandwich without further comment.
Maybe I’d planted the seed that Sean Wakefield wasn’t the only potential suspect in town. I just hoped I’d done a good enough job of helping it grow some roots.
Seven
The drive back to Discovery with my brother took, oh, about two thousand hours. At least, that’s what it felt like trapped in my car with him. From the moment we’d walked out of the police station, he’d reverted to his fourteen-year-old self. With an everything-and-everyone-sucks attitude, he communicated in monosyllabic words and a range of disdainful grunts.
I gave up on conversation after twenty minutes of trying to elicit a rational response. But unless he snapped out of this sulky silence, we stood little chance of figuring out what had really happened to Lucas Kerr. As a school counselor, I’d peeled apart fourteen-year-old boys like onions during a couple of sessions in my office. However, with the possibility of my brother being arrested on a murder charge, time and coddling were luxuries I lacked.
Sean sat hunched in the passenger seat, his arms folded and his shoulders near his ears as he faked a nap.
“I had an interesting lunch with Detective Mana.” I overtook a farmer’s ute. Two smiling sheepdogs sat on the flatbed, their tongues lolling in the slipstream.
His eyes flew open as he bolted upright. “You had lunch with who?”
“Detective Mana.” We both knew he’d heard the first time. “But he said I should call him Eric.”
Sean’s jaw sagged.
Good, I had his undivided attention.
“Eric is aware of your debt and described you as having a gambling problem. Is that a fair assessment?”
I got an affirmative grunt as a reply.
Oliver’s voice popped up in my brain: It’s not my place to give away his secrets.
“Is gambling the reason you lost your job at the Stone’s Throw?”
His jaw bunched like he was biting down on a leather strap. “Yeah.”
“Do Mum and Dad know?”
A negative grunt. He grimaced, blowing out a may as well get it over with sigh. “I’d maxed out my credit card playing online poker, so I ramped up taking under-the-table bets at the pub. Ollie gave me a warning and a second chance, but when he had to step in one night to stop a sore-loser client from breaking my fingers…” My brother shrugged. “He told me to get out and get my act together. I’ve been trying to do that.”
“And Lucas just happened to offer you a job days after you left the pub?”
Sean frowned. “He was there the night the guy nearly broke my hand. When I saw the help wanted sign in the old butcher shop window and applied, he must’ve recognized me and felt sorry for me.” His frown deepened. “Now I think about it, Lucas didn’t ask too many questions before he told me I was hired.”
How could Sean not realize how suspicious that sounded? “And out of the goodness of his heart, he loans a huge amount of money to a complete stranger only a few weeks later?”
“It wasn’t huge to Lucas, and we weren’t strangers by then.”
Guess ten thousand wasn’t a lot if most of your income came from illegal activities.
“What were you? Friends?”
“Nah. I wouldn’t say we were friends. More like mates. Y’know. Wanna go for a beer at the end of the day, mate? Or, mate, wanna give me a heads-up if one of those crazy chicks comes in looking for me again?”
“Or, mate, can I borrow ten grand to stop some other guy from breaking my fingers and my legs?”
“Do you always have to be so judgy?” Sean grumbled. “Can’t a mate let another mate help him out without being given the fifth degree?”
“Third degree.”
“Whatever degree. He was just being a mate.”
Not if that mate happened to be murdered and thousands of dollars’ worth of illegal drugs found on the premises. Instead of defending my judginess, I opted for an out-of-the-blue question. “Did the store stock any Saint Patrick’s Day decorations?”
A grunt, followed by, “It’s not the time to be worrying about how you’ll decorate Unraveled for Saint Paddy’s Day.”
A complete sentence—progress. “Maybe. But do you have those clover party favors, sparkly green hats…leprechaun pins?”
“What? It’s only January, so no. Anyway, unless Lucas had decided to stay, he would’ve shut up shop and moved on to another town by the beginning of March.”
“Where he’d start selling drugs to another community?”
A loaded silence from my brother. “I didn’t know he was dealing, Tess.”
“Okay.” But to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure I believed him.
Slowing for a buildup of traffic, I glanced over at Sean. He scrubbed a hand tiredly over his face in an unguarded moment. Regardless of what he’d done in the past or whether he wasn’t telling the truth about Lucas’s side business, I knew down to my marrow that my brother hadn’t killed his boss. Not that Detective Mana and his police brethren would rely on familial intuition. And I had no idea if they were seriously looking at anyone other than Sean.
I replayed my earlier conversation with Oliver Novak about Brian Werth’s jealous rage—and recalled something Sean had said earlier. “Who was the crazy chick Lucas wanted a heads-up about?”
“There was more than one. When I saw him at the Stone’s Throw that first time, he was at a corner table, perfecting his lone-wolf act. Women got sucked in by it like dust bunnies into a vacuum. Lucas never had trouble finding female company.”
Nice. The victim had been a sleazy player…but that also widened the suspect pool. “Anyone in particular you can think of?”
“Why are you suddenly interested in my boss’s love life? I mean, my former boss’s love life.”
As I took the Cape Discovery turnoff, I mentally counted to ten, so I wouldn’t smack my little brother upside the head. “I am trying…” I said with as much patience as I could muster, “to figure out who in town has more motive than you to kill Lucas.”
“Oh. Gotcha. You don’t trust the cops to do that?”
“Do you?”
Sean bumped back against the headrest a couple of times and then slumped down in his seat. “Yeah, nah.”
The blue line of the ocean in the distance broadened as my car hugged the winding curves down toward the beach. Sunlight sparkled off the water’s flat surface, making it appear crystal clear. And not for the first time, I realized my hometown, which I’d always seen as like the ocean itself, was actually murky, churning with hidden dangers beneath.
“There was this one woman Lucas did his best to avoid. He called her Velcro,” Sean said. “I don’t know her name.”
“What did she look like?”
“A normal middle-aged woman, I dunno.”
Anyone over the age of forty would be ‘middle-aged’ by Sean’s definition. So not helpful. “Anything else you remember? What she wore? Hair and eye color? Attractive?”
“Normal middle-aged woman clothes. No idea—maybe brown to both? And, again, I dunno.”
Given that it was Sean, I’d believe he was pretty clueless about female apparel. Ditto hair and eye color. But a good-looking woman… “You didn’t notice if she was attractive? Really?”
A deadpan stare. “Cougars aren’t my thing.”
Ignoring his piggish response, I focused on the hint of a clue to the woman’s identity. “She was older than Lucas?”
“Like I said, a cougar. Yeah, I think Lucas was around your age. She was definitely old—I mean, older.”
Not much to go on, but it was a start.
While driving into Cape Discovery, I mentally compiled a list of women I knew over the age of forty. A deep suspect pool; so, again, not helpful. I parked outside the house where my brother rented a small downstairs apartment and left the engine running.
Sean climbed out of the car, slammed the door, and then leaned in through the open passenger window. “Someone else that showed up at the store a few times was the dentist’s son.” He drummed his fingers on the sill. “He’s in high school but not one of those foul-mouthed skateboarding brats that travel in packs. Dylan, I think his name is. Maybe you should try to find out why a quiet, studious kid like him was hanging around Lucas. Anyway”—straightening, he rapped his knuckles on the roof of my car—“thanks for the ride.”
After a half dozen steps toward his house, Sean paused, turned back. “Thanks for more than the ride, Tess. Just…thank you.”
I waved him off with a smile, even though I was absurdly touched by this small crumb of appreciation.
When I arrived home, I was greeted by matching yowls of demand for chin scratches and treats—not necessarily in that order. Pearl and Kit accompanied me up the stairs, perilously twining around my ankles. I walked into the living room, kissed Harry’s head—still covered in his black-and-white beanie, which had slipped down over his eyes as he snoozed in front of the TV—and curled up in Nana Dee-Dee’s chair.
By the time I’d pulled needles and yarn from the knitting basket beside the chair, Kit had launched himself onto my lap while Pearl perched on the back above my head. From there, she stared disdainfully at the partially knitted fingerless glove dangling from one needle. As I knitted and purled, I pondered how to talk to the dentist’s son without arous
ing suspicion. School was out for at least another two weeks, and I had no idea where Dylan—or any teenage boy for that matter—spent their long summer days.
I nearly dropped a stitch.
Thanks to Donna Hanbury, I did know where Dylan and his parents would be tomorrow morning. And I planned to be there too.
However, this prodigal daughter might be welcomed with a stray bolt of lightning when she returned.
Peter Salmon, the current vicar of Saint Barnabas, didn’t think much of me. Whenever our paths crossed, he’d smile and give me an acknowledging nod. But his expression was one a polite person assumed when entering a room someone had farted in moments before.
I wasn’t sure whether it was because he didn’t approve of my family’s sporadic attendance at Saint Barney’s, or if he still hadn’t forgiven me for laughing when he’d announced two Christmas Eve services ago that he was starting an Aerobics for the Almighty class in the new year. It had been a knee-jerk reaction—and, hey, it was bad enough the vicar power walked his sixty-plus-years-old bod around town in way too much Lycra every morning.
This Sunday, I planned to be on my best behavior.
Slipping into the very back pew with only a minute to spare before the service began, I scanned the rows in front. Two rows ahead, I spotted the recently clipped hair of a young man with protruding sunburned ears and hunched shoulders. A woman with dark hair held back with an Alice band bookended him on one side, a mountain-shouldered man on the other. The dentist’s bulk was unmistakable.
Jackpot.
I relaxed, as much as one can, into the wooden pew. Don’t ask me what that morning’s sermon was about. The vicar had a voice worthy of a world-renowned hypnotist, and five minutes in, I was ready to quit my potato chip addiction and cluck like a chicken. I zoned out between hymns, which Peter’s organ-playing wife accompanied. Her performance style swung from all the enthusiasm of a Broadway production to a zombie death march. I wondered briefly if she provided the music for Aerobics for the Almighty.
Thankfully, the service eventually finished with a great flourishing huzzah from Mrs. Salmon and the pianist, who looked somewhat miffed at being drowned out by the organ. The vicar invited the congregation for morning tea and fellowship in the church hall. Not feeling particularly fellowshippy, I avoided any chitchat or curious gazes by ducking outside. I slunk around the side of the church to where I had a fine view of the hall’s entrance.
