Rock Wolf Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “I think the police are right. It was a crime of passion. It was motivated by that idiot DJ getting in someone else’s way. But I don’t think the killer is a lover. I think it’s someone who just got sick and tired of him doing stupid stuff.”

  “I think that he got between two lovers,” Ellie offered Jeffrey.

  Jeffrey snorted. “Sounds like Mark Bob. The guy never could figure out how to leave well enough alone. He was always in everybody’s business.” Jeffrey looked as though he’d suddenly remembered something very special. “And he was gay.”

  Ellie felt the blood drain from her face. “What?”

  “Mark Bob Smith was gay,” Jeffrey told her with authority. “Since he was very young. Everybody knew. But I don’t think the police do.”

  “Thank you, Jeffrey,” Ellie told him with no small amount of appreciation. “I think I’m going to have to hire you after all.”

  Jeffrey gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “For now, just let the paper pay me and I’ll do this on the side. This is way more interesting than just answering phones and taking orders for classifieds.”

  Ellie laughed her way out of the office, waving over her shoulder. She was on her way to introduce herself to Detective Lowell. Hopefully, he would be the answer to a lot of problems the agents at Rock Wolf Investigations had been seeing lately.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Adam had mixed feelings about this whole case. He spent the rest of the day packing up Kari Jo Mounds’ stuff and loading it into a van. Once the van was dispatched to her mother’s home with strict orders to unload her boxes with or without the family’s consent, Adam called it a day. It was late, it was dark outside, and he hadn’t had anything to do all evening since the dancing violinists were about as low-key and completely easygoing as you could get when it came to performers in a stage show. Tonight had been their very first show. An audition of sorts. But the results had been good and now the night was over and it was time to go home.

  Sort of.

  Adam carefully opened the keycode protected door that led from the back of the house to the front of the house. But he didn’t just walk on through like usual. This time he was trying to see if there was anyone sitting at the front desk before he actually committed to going out there. Maybe he was avoiding Margo altogether, not that he was willing to admit that.

  I’m an idiot. That is totally what I’m doing!

  Adam figured it was pretty bad when your own mind was doing this back and forth volley of arguments about its intentions and the truth. He definitely needed to speak to Margo about what he and Ellie had learned from the stage crew earlier that day. But he wasn’t sure he really wanted to deal with what he found out in the process.

  There was no need to go to the front of the theater. Adam’s car was parked out back. He could have exited the theater through the back entrance, gotten in his car, and gone home without even thinking about this stupid stalker case for one more second. After all, Kari Jo Mounds was gone. Did it really matter anymore?

  Stepping from the back of the theater to the front, Adam reminded himself that it did matter. A lot. There was a murder to consider. The taking of a human life. If someone had done it once, then they could potentially do it again.

  Margo was sitting behind the front desk as Adam had known she would be. She looked tense. Her expression was taut, her eyebrows drawn in close together and the wrinkles on her forehead suggested she was really mulling something over in her mind. Her gaze was fixed on the desk. She had a pen in her hand, but she didn’t have the look of someone doing a straightforward audit or a balance sheet. Her expression suggested something else entirely.

  “Margo?” Adam questioned in a tone he hoped was mild and completely non-threatening. “Are you all right? You look upset.”

  “Upset?” She glanced up at him, but only for the split second it took to shoot him a dirty look. “What are you talking about? I’m just fine. I’m doing—finishing up paperwork from tonight.”

  “Margo, I wanted to ask you something about the stalker letters that Kari Jo was receiving,” Adam began slowly, testing the waters.

  Now Margo really did look up from her work. Her expression was pure annoyance. “Seriously? You want to talk about that now? Why? Kari Jo Mounds is no more. The cheating heart bitch of Branson isn’t working here anymore. There is no more reason for any of us to care that she’s being stalked, which she isn’t because I’m totally sure she and her mother are the ones making up that story.”

  “Margo,” Adam forged ahead, ignoring her dismissal. “The stage crew told me earlier that you had been given letters at least five times from some fan who asked you to pass them on to Kari Jo.”

  “What? That’s preposterous.” Margo curled her lip and made an angry face. “Who told you that? Casey? She’s lying I bet.”

  “There were five separate stagehands who told the same story,” Adam said gently. He was getting a really strange feeling in his gut about all of this. He had not expected the flat denial. What sense did that make? Why lie about it when there were so many witnesses?

  Margo pursed her lips into such a tight little moue that they almost seemed to disappear in her face. “Fine. I did give those letters to the girls to give to Kari Jo. I was sick and tired of being her little gopher. I’m not a secretary. I’m a bookkeeper. I’m not the one who is supposed to be following around after some obnoxious little girl to make sure she’d getting all her fan mail.”

  “That’s fine,” Adam quickly told her. He held up his hands and tried to keep calm. It wouldn’t do him any good to get defensive. Not right now. “I just wondered if you could tell me who gave those letters to you. That’s all I wondered.”

  For just a second, it was like Margo wasn’t entirely sure what he was asking. “What do you mean who gave them to me?”

  Adam frowned and straightened up a little bit. He felt sure she was just being difficult. “You gave those letters to the stage crew to put in Kari Jo’s dressing room. So, where did you get them?”

  “Oh. Where did I get them?” Margo went back to her work. She was now scribbling furiously with the pen as though she were about to try and cut through the paper. “I just found them at the front desk. That’s all.”

  “Nobody handed them to you?” For some reason, Adam was finding this difficult to believe. “You found them sitting here when you what? Came back from the restroom? It just seems so strange. You know? The letters look suspicious. If nobody handed them to you, why didn’t you at least notify me or someone else in management that they’d arrived?”

  “Because sometimes Mr. Lightman gets mail like that. Just weird mail. You know?” Margo was talking a mile a minute and yet it was making no sense. “He always says just to move it through. You know?”

  No, Adam didn’t know. He was very confused about it actually. “Do you remember when you found the letters?”

  “No. Why would I know that?” Margo waved her hand. “I don’t keep track of Kari Jo’s fan mail.”

  “If you could see the letters on the outside, then you knew that at least the envelope had been made using letters cut from a magazine.” Adam was getting the feeling there were no good answers to the questions he was posing to Margo. At least none that she could come up with. “Why wouldn’t you have mentioned that in the very beginning when we were looking for information about this case? Why wouldn’t you have mentioned, when I came to you and said that Kari Jo was getting threatening letters, that you remembered a few really strange ones that had been set on your desk?”

  “Because I don’t care,” Margo said bluntly. “I don’t give a shit about Kari Jo Mounds. I don’t care if some stalker hangs her from the highest tree, tortures her, and then drops her off a cliff. Do you get me? I really don’t care. So, why would I help?”

  “You don’t care.” Adam felt a sense of dawning horror. He’d been so horrible to Ellie about her suspicions regarding Margo and yet Margo was feeding into it. “You might have been the one to deliver l
etters to Kari Jo Mounds of a threatening nature and you were just happy to do so because why? Because you were mad at her?”

  Margo’s expression twisted into something very ugly. “Of course I was mad at her! The girl is the biggest spoiled brat on the planet!”

  “But she doesn’t deserve to be tormented like that,” Adam argued. “She’s a brat. It’s true. But she’s still a human being who deserved to live out her bratty existence without being threatened.”

  “That might be how you feel, Adam,” Margo snorted. “But the rest of us have another opinion.”

  Adam licked his lips. He could not believe the words he was getting ready to throw at Margo. They were horrible. “Is that because you and Kari Jo Mounds were involved and you’re angry at her for dumping you and then just pretending that none of it had happened? Is that why you let those letters go back to her without even bothering to care that they were going to cause Kari Jo a lot of undue stress?”

  “Oh puh-lease!” Margo shouted. She stood up and flung paper from her desktop into Adam’s face. “Are you kidding me? Kari Jo didn’t feel a single moment of distress about those letters! She probably forgot all about them! The woman is a liar and a cheater and a no good dirty bitch!” Margo was speaking with her hands clenched at her sides and a curl in her lips. She looked angry enough to spit right in Adam’s face. “I hate her. But why would I risk possible jail time just for that bitch?”

  It was actually a pretty sound argument, yet Adam could not help but think she was still lying about something. What and why? Was Ellie right? Had Margo actually been a part of this the whole time?

  “You were in a relationship with Kari Jo,” Adam said quietly. “Is that true?”

  Margo narrowed her eyes. “Who told you that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Is it true?”

  “Maybe.”

  Sometimes Adam had the feeling he was hopelessly behind when it came to this sort of thing. The thing that went on between a man and a woman. Or a woman and a woman. Or a man and a man for that matter. Adam just felt like he didn’t get relationships. What people meant, what they were saying between the lines and all of that. It just never made any sense to him. Until at the appropriate awkward moment—in this case right now—he suddenly became horribly aware of the thing he’d missed.

  “That’s why you and Hilary fought. You were seeing Hilary Allenwood. The two of you were an item. And you cheated on Hilary with Kari Jo.”

  “What?” You’re out of your damned mind!” Margo was already shaking her head and standing up. She seemed unable to decide what to do. Stand up. Sit down. Speak. Keep quiet. She was doing them all at once and it wasn’t going very well for her. “I didn’t. Well. No. It’s not like that. You’re making this all sound worse than it is!”

  “Then tell me,” Adam suggested. “If you think that it’s not worse than it really is, tell me what happened because I’m telling you right now the investigators have you in their sights for murder as well as stalking.”

  “Investigators,” Margo muttered. “Ha! You’re just talking about your girlfriend Ellie Pierce and her Rock Wolf Investigations pals. But they’re not in charge here, Adam. That’s the thing. That’s what you don’t get. The police? They don’t care about the murder of some loser DJ. They don’t even care whether or not Kari Jo Mounds was being stalked. So, you can just take your threats and try to find someone who does care.”

  “So it’s true?” Adam felt his heart beating frantically beneath his rib cage. He felt like an idiot and yet he also felt as though he was standing on the edge of really figuring this thing out. “You and Kari Jo were an item, but you were cheating on Hilary Allenwood, who then found out and then what?”

  “Oh, now Hilary is the one who was sending letters and murdering her informants.” Margo sucked back a breath. It was just a tiny hiccup, but it was enough.

  Adam waited a second to process what she’d just said, however unintentional it had been. “Informant? As in Hilary Allenwood was getting information for her stories from Aston Ryan?”

  “The asshole,” Margo said bitterly. She shook her head. Her expression was strange. As though she couldn’t help herself. “That man was such a low-life that pond scum would have been higher up on the list of humanity than him. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut about anything! Not even the stuff that Hilary didn’t need to know.”

  “Meaning the stuff about you and Kari Jo,” Adam prompted softly.

  “Exactly!” Margo fumed. She was now pacing energetically back and forth behind the desk. “That idiot told Hilary everything! I don’t even know how he knew some of the things he told her. It… it… Kari Jo was such a bitch! Kiss and tell. That’s what they used to call that.”

  Adam huffed out a little sigh. “So, you were with Hilary, and the thing with Kari Jo was just a fling. And then she told her boyfriend and all of a sudden Hilary knew what had happened and you were stabbed in the back by both of them.” Adam actually felt sorry for Margo.

  Then she started laughing. Adam frowned. What was so funny? But he realized that Margo was actually saying something through her laughter. She was muttering one word over and over again.

  “What’s that?” Adam pressed. “What are you saying?”

  “Boyfriend,” Margo finally managed to wheeze. “You think that Aston Ryan was Kari Jo’s boyfriend. You really think that!”

  Adam froze. Yes, that’s what he’d thought. That’s what he’d been told. Even Ron Skaggs had said the DJ kid was Kari Jo Mounds’ on-again, off-again boyfriend. What else would he be?”

  “Let’s just say that Aston Ryan didn’t have any interest in Kari Jo like that,” Margo sneered. “She had the wrong equipment for the job, if you get what I mean.”

  The wrong equipment for the job… Damn. Adam was suddenly feeling a million years old and a whole lot of behind on the local gossip.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Ellie peered around the corner of the ticket kiosk and made a gesture to Detective Lowell who was right behind her. They had managed to slip into the theater through the still open front doors. The last of the Garth Brooks Tribute show was still playing behind the Star’s big doors. Ellie could hear the incessant boom, boom of the bass and the dulcet tones rising to a crescendo as the last few dramatic stanzas of a big hit rolled through the stadium-shaped auditorium.

  But that was just a convenient cover for the real reason Ellie and Detective Lowell were there. After all, their goal was the woman behind the front desk now spinning in circles as she ranted and raved at poor Adam Cathcart.

  “Now?” Ellie whispered eagerly. She could not wait to jump out from behind their cover and watch Margo’s smug smile turn to open horror.

  But Detective Lowell was a bit more conservative than that. At six-feet tall, he had broad shoulders and the sort of face that would never be handsome. A scar bisected his chin and another one had barely missed his right eye. He was tanned and swarthy and looked a bit like a pirate trying to masquerade as a law enforcement official. Not that Ellie cared what the guy looked like. She mostly cared that he actually wanted to solve a murder case and bring a suspect in to be charged for it.

  Poor Adam was still staring at Margo as though the woman had just tried to tell him the moon was made of green cheese. “The wrong equipment for the job?”

  “Oh, Adam,” Margo mocked. “You’re so naïve sometimes. I find it difficult to believe you actually lived and worked in California of all places. Sometimes you totally reek of Branson.”

  It was kind of true, but Ellie didn’t appreciate Margo mocking poor Adam for that fact. The guy was nice. He was too nice by half. He was handsome and he was a good kisser and he was the sort of man who did a nice turn for someone and then expected nothing for it. Adam was the sort of man you took home to meet your parents and then married so you could find your happily ever after.

  “So, if Kari Jo wasn’t romantically involved with Aston Ryan, then why did you need to kill him?” Adam demanded of Margo.


  To Ellie’s right, Detective Lowell hissed and seemed poised to leap out from behind the kiosk. No doubt this was the moment he’d been waiting for. Confession time. After all, Margo thought she was confessing to Adam Cathcart. It wasn’t like he could do anything but tattle and even that was just his word against Margo’s.

  “He was a tattletale,” Margo said angrily. She was moving with big energetic strides and waving her hands in the air. She looked as though she was about to have a full blown tantrum. “If he had just kept his mouth shut! There was no reason for him to tell Hilary anything! But he wanted money. Can you imagine? He destroyed my life because he wanted money!” Margo was practically shouting by now.

  “So, Aston Ryan told Hilary that you were seeing Kari Jo, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the events of the night that Aston Ryan died,” Adam pressed. “You knifed him, Margo. Why bother?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me where she went!” Margo snapped. She stopped pacing and turned to stare at Adam. “I wanted to know where Kari Jo had gone. That’s all I wanted. I wanted to find her and talk to her and ask her why she would rat me out like that. I kept thinking there was a rational answer…” Margo kind of trailed off.

  Ellie held her breath. She hoped Adam had the sense to stay quiet for a minute and not to redirect the questioning. Margo was about to snap. They could all tell. “I didn’t mean to kill him,” Margo finally admitted to Adam. The fire had gone out of her voice. “The guy is so annoying. I can’t even explain to you how well he knows how to aggravate people. Period.”

  “So, he mouthed off and you what?” Adam shook his head and looked disgusted. “You just stuck him with a knife?”

  “I was threatening him. That’s all it was supposed to be!” she protested. Margo was now wringing her hands in front of her. “I meant to just poke him. To scare him into telling me. But he squirmed and I jabbed a little harder than I meant to and then he was dead.”