A Berry Cunning Conman: A Laugh-Out-Loud Cozy Mystery (Kylie Berry Mysteries Book 4)

by A. R. Winters

  “No, no… and I’m going to just go. Tell them they don’t need to come.”

  The thirty-something man dressed in a middle-management suit looked at me like I had lost my mind, then he returned his attention to his phone and whoever was on the other end of the call. “She doesn’t appear to be physically injured but I think she’s in shock. Best to send medical help.”

  Nooooo! I did not want an ambulance. I didn’t even have health insurance. Adding medical bills to everything else could ruin me.

  “I’m fine. I promise,” I said, but the man wasn’t listening. He’d completely tuned me out as he was giving instructions to the 9-1-1 operator as to the location and the details of what he’d seen.

  Thirty minutes later there were three squad cars parked around the scene, the cab I’d called had come and gone, and I’d been looked at by a paramedic. Brad wasn’t anywhere in sight, but Detective Gregson—the lead investigator of Morgan’s death and the person who had chewed Zoey, Joel and myself out for trekking all over a newly discovered goose-riddled crime scene—was waiting with arms crossed to talk to me.

  “She fine?” he asked. It sounded more like a bark.

  “She’s fine,” the middle-aged female paramedic with short brown hair said as she turned her attention to packing up her supplies.

  “Good. You”—he jabbed a finger at me—“you’re with me.”

  Suddenly I wasn’t so keen to leave the embrace of the soft glow of the ambulance’s interior, but there was nothing for it. I had to.

  “Thanks,” I said to the paramedic and then stepped away into the busy mess that was the crime scene left behind by whoever had tried to run me down. Officers were interviewing everyone around, studying the crime scene, and taking pictures. No one had taken my statement yet. Detective Gregson had wanted me medically cleared first.

  “State your name,” Detective Gregson said.

  “Kylie Berry.” He didn’t have a notepad out. I didn’t have much to tell about what had happened, but I would at least have thought he’d take some notes about what I did remember.

  “Ms. Berry, you are under arrest for the murder of Morgan Bleur.” He twirled me around, lifted one arm behind my back and started putting me in handcuffs.

  “Wait! What?”

  “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

  His litany continued as my head buzzed in its attempt to retain its hold on reality, because I knew that this couldn’t be real. I couldn’t be getting arrested.

  I hadn’t tried to kill anyone.

  Someone had tried to kill me!

  Chapter 22

  Dawn was turning the sky from inky black to midnight blue by the time I got back to the café. Gregson—I now refused to give him the respect of calling him detective—had kept me locked in an interview room for five hours. Someone or other kept coming in to say that it would be just a little while longer… just a little while longer. Again and again and again.

  I had wanted to get up and walk out, but I was scared. I’d wanted to ask for a lawyer, but no one was sitting down to talk to me yet. The only thing that happened for hours was someone asking if I wanted a soda or a pastry. Everyone was incredibly polite. And then Gregson had come in, and polite was not part of his repertoire.

  Gregson was all intimidation and scare tactics. He verbally hammered me for hours. He told me that he’d looked at the reports on the other recent murders and had determined that they’d had one thing and only one thing in common—me. I wasn’t for a second going to point out that Zoey had been a part of all of them, too.

  Finally he’d let me go. No charges filed.

  I wanted to kill him.

  My hand trembled as I fought to get the key into the café’s front door, and I staggered back when it was jerked open instead.

  “Kylie!” Brad exclaimed. He barreled through the now-open door and wrapped me in his arms. He pulled away and held my face in his hands. “What happened? I thought I’d lost you. I thought someone had nabbed you.”

  For the first time that night, tears burned in my eyes and my throat swelled with emotion. “I got arrested,” I wailed.

  “You what?”

  “I got arrested! I went shopping, bought hundreds of dollars of stuff, someone tried to run me over, and so Gregson arrested me. I don’t even have my stuff!” I was a wreck of big, messy, inelegant and very unladylike sobs. An engine could have been lubed with the snot that was coming out of my nose.

  Amazingly, Brad didn’t seem to care.

  “Oh, honey,” he said, pulling me in for a big, warm hug. “Everything’s going to be okay.” He pulled away and cupped my head again. Looking me straight in the eyes, he said, “We’ll get you more stuff, and then I’ll kill Gregson.”

  More snot, but this time it was because of a laugh. “Stop it,” I said through my tears.

  “Come on. Let’s get you inside.” Brad swung an arm around my shoulder, and I wrapped mine around his waist and snuggled my head into his shoulder. “That new guy you hired was ready to call in the Marines when you didn’t make it back. He managed to get hold of Zoey and Zoey got hold of me. Of course, I suspect she’s better than the Marines so I suppose I’m more of a consolation prize.”

  “You’re the best prize,” I told him and meant it.

  Jonathan had been there all night but insisted that he’d stay the whole next day anyway. He also insisted that I go upstairs and get some rest, and Brad was the guy to make sure I did it.

  He hung out in my apartment’s insanely large kitchen while I showered to wash the grime of the police station off of me. I dressed in shorts and an oversized t-shirt for modesty, and Brad tucked me into bed under my charred red princess coat.

  “We gotta do something about getting you some furniture,” he said as he sat perched on the edge of my floor mattress. He was smiling looking down at me, a dreamy smile. The smile of someone who had discovered that they hadn’t lost something dear to them after all.

  The care I saw in his eyes made me suddenly sad, and he must have seen it.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You know I’m not going to stop looking into who killed Morgan, right?”

  Brad did a slow head nod, but the care in his eyes didn’t change. “My mama told me sometimes you gotta accept people for who they are, that they aren’t the same person if they try to be who you want them to be. And Berry…”

  “Yes, Brad?”

  “I wouldn’t change who you are for anything.”

  Chapter 23

  I slept all the way through the breakfast service.

  I slept well into the lunch-time service.

  When I finally woke up and headed downstairs to the café, I didn’t know what to expect, but I had not expected what I found.

  The café was bustling with activity, and the aroma was heavenly.

  “You haven’t eaten, have you?” Patty asked as soon as I stepped through the door from my apartment into the kitchen. It wasn’t so much a question as it was an accusation. “Go out front. Sit. We’ll bring you some food.”

  “Well hey, boss!” Jonathan exclaimed. He was the “we” in Patty’s statement, or at least I hoped he was. It was hard to tell with her since she had more than one voice in her head.

  Jonathan came over and gave me a hug. “You’re looking so much better than when you came in. You gave me such a fright! Now, what do you want to eat? I made spaghetti and meatballs for lunch, just like you did it yesterday, and Patty has ten different types of muffins and cupcakes to choose from. And your friend Jack is out on the grill making breakfast to order. He could fix you up a big stack of pancakes and a side of eggs. He even made some warm maple syrup with some butter and rum stirred in. Never tasted anything better in my life.”

  I wasn’t sure that Jonathan had taken a single breath as he spoke. I felt as though I should be worried about him. He’d been here since yesterday morning before the sun had come up. And he�
��d still been here this morning before the sun had come up, when Brad had shuffled me up to go to bed.

  “Pancakes sound wonderful,” I said. “But are you okay? Do you need to go… home?” I wasn’t sure where his home was or if he even had one.

  “I’m fit as a fiddle and happy as a clam,” he said. His smile was contagious and so was his joy. There was no way to feel down around him. “I got in a few naps here and there, and with the café so busy, I haven’t even had a chance to feel tired.”

  Busy… The café?

  I felt as though I was gliding through a dream as I walked out of the kitchen and into the area behind the grill’s counter. As promised, there was Jack. His tall, fit frame was decked out in a pale lavender dress shirt that perfectly complimented his rich brown skin. I was pretty sure it was a cotton-silk blend and worth more than I’d be able to pay myself in a Sunday worth of months. His dark slacks fit him as perfectly as the shirt and were no-doubt twice as expensive. Over all of that he wore one of my white aprons.

  The grill’s counter nearest the café’s door was home to a slew of artfully arranged cupcakes and muffins, and the café’s floor had customers sitting at just about every single table.

  Just as Jonathan had said, the café was… busy.

  “Kylie, you’re up. Good. Take a seat,” Jack ordered, and I obeyed.

  Still in a daze at the amount of activity in the café, I climbed up onto the nearest stool in front of the bar.

  Jack twirled a stainless steel black-handled spatula in his hand. On the chalkboard menu for regularly priced items behind him was listed an array of options, and they were priced far more than I would have dared price them. Yet I’d spotted quite a few customers with happy stacks of pancakes.

  The ingredient choices listed on the menu board were blueberries, walnuts, chocolate chips, strawberry, banana, peanut butter and a whole slew of other options. To back up the offering were bowls overflowing with fresh blueberries, strawberries and all the rest—things that I was sure I didn’t have in stock as of last night. I knew that I hadn’t bought them. Well, I had bought some of them, but everything I’d bought last night had been left abandoned outside You Name It. So that meant that someone else would have had to buy all of this produce for me.

  “Jack, what have you done?”

  “Kylie, did I ever tell you that I worked my way through college by working in a gourmet pancake bar?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Well, I did. Gained thirty pounds doing it, but it was worth it.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Do you know why it was worth it?”

  I shook my head no again.

  “It was worth it because I can now make pancakes better than anyone I know.”

  A shy smile from me earned me a glorious smile from him.

  “Now what can I get you?” he asked in a booming voice, sweeping his arm past all the ingredients on the counter.

  I stared at them all. They looked amazing, and my stomach chose that moment to rumble. “Chef’s choice,” I finally said and was thrilled to watch Jack swing into creative mode as he put together the best stack of pancakes I’d ever had, filled with cut banana and chocolate chips and then drizzled with a silky smooth peanut butter sauce.

  “I can’t thank you enough for doing this,” I said as Jack sat down a plate of scrambled eggs that I could only describe as southwestern style, containing ham, diced tomato and sweet bell peppers. I know that I had not had any bell peppers in stock yesterday.

  “Seeing a person wrongly persecuted or badly handled by the established law is a pet peeve of mine,” he said. “And I would gladly stand in support of someone like you, someone ready to stand in support of others. These moments matter, and they are the moments that keep a community strong.”

  As always, Jack had me in awe of him. If he were a college professor, I would have been one of the fangirls sitting at the back of the auditorium-sized classroom with stars in her eyes.

  More customers came in, filling the grill’s counter and taking Jack’s attention away from me.

  I texted Zoey and let her know that I had a few minutes, and her and Joel walked in the café’s front door a few minutes after that. I collected my dishes of food and joined them at one of the few empty tables.

  Joel was wearing his tried and true jeans and plaid shirt combo, and Zoey was wearing a blue-gray baby doll tunic over black leggings with stylish yet sturdy-looking lace-up boots. Her makeup was extra warrior-princess fierce, and I was glad to see her without a huge bladed weapon at the ready.

  “What happened last night?” Zoey asked after we’d gotten seated. “I heard that you didn’t make it back from the store until early this morning. Jack said that Brad said that you’d been arrested and detained.” She looked both concerned and ready to fight.

  Joel mostly just looked concerned. He was sitting in his chair, leaning back with his arms crossed over his thick chest.

  There was no way I was going to stop eating the amazing meal Jack had made me, so I did my best to fill them in between bites. “Joel and I got back. Jonathan and I got the dinner service set up, and then I left to go get more supplies. I got done shopping and went outside to the bottom of the walkway to wait for a cab. Something fell off the cart, I went to grab it, and a car plowed into my shopping carts.”

  “I don’t get it,” Joel said. “What’s any of that got to do with you getting arrested?”

  I scowled. “A Good Samaritan was there and saw it all. He called the police, and Detective Gregson came. He didn’t even ask me what happened, but they asked everyone else.”

  “I’m still not getting where the arrest came in,” Joel said.

  I shrugged. “As soon as the paramedic cleared me as being okay, Gregson arrested me. Didn’t even talk to me. Just arrested me.”

  Joel’s face turned red. I wasn’t sure he was still breathing. After what felt like half a minute, he said, “Someone tried to run you down with their car, and you got arrested.”

  “Yep,” I said as discreetly as I could from around a mouthful of food.

  “That’s it. I’m pulling the plug on this,” he said. “This investigation is done.”

  My fork finally hit my plate. “What?” Zoey and I said in unison.

  “We started looking into this because the police were considering me a suspect in Morgan’s murder, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t want you involved in this anymore. It’s too dangerous.”

  “We’re not stopping,” I said, and glanced over at Zoey to make sure she was on board.

  “You can quit if you want to,” she said, “but we’re going to figure this out. You do not decide what it is that we do or what risks we take.”

  I felt like giving her an “Amen, sister,” but kept it to myself.

  “But this started all because of me,” Joel said. “I don’t want to have to post your obituaries in my paper. I want this to stop.” He pounded the table with the tip of his finger.

  “Poke a hole in it if you got to,” Zoey goaded him. “We’re not out.”

  Joel looked me, his eyes pleading. “Be sensible, Kylie.”

  “No, no, no, no, no…” I said, waving my retrieved fork in the air. “Uh-unh. I spent a lot of years being the person I was expected to be, and those days are gone. Sensible Kylie has left the building.”

  Joel rolled his eyes. “Not the best defense of your reasoning.”

  “I’m not defending anything. We’re telling you. Zoey and I are going to continue to investigate this murder until it’s solved.”

  Joel’s lips thinned, but I saw resigned acceptance in his expression. “Fine.”

  I didn’t bother to point out that his acceptance of “fine” didn’t have any bearing on the matter.

  “But at least put off any more investigating until tomorrow,” he said. “I have some meetings scheduled for today that have to happen. I’m going to be tied up, but I can clear my whole schedule for tomorrow.”

  I took the biggest bite of pancakes
that I could possibly fit inside my mouth. I didn’t want to lie to Joel, but I wasn’t willing to put off investigating Morgan’s murder for one second longer than necessary. Joel could put whatever priorities he wanted to before continuing the investigation, but that didn’t mean I had to. Someone had tried to kill me, and I wasn’t letting them get away with it.

  “We’ll review surveillance video today,” Zoey said with a light pat on Joel’s shoulder. “We’ll catch you up tomorrow on what we find out.”

  Joel blew out a breath and even smiled as he slouched in his chair. “Thanks girls. I really appreciate you holding off. We’ll be back in the swing of things tomorrow.” He looked at his watch, an old one with a leather band. “And now I’ve got to go. I’ll catch up with you both later,” he said as he got up. He kissed the top of my head and was gone a moment later.

  “We really reviewing surveillance video today?” I asked Zoey.

  “For the next five minutes. Then we’re gonna go track down a killer.”

  Chapter 24

  I leaned forward to more closely see the images that were playing across the screen of Zoey’s phone. There wasn’t any sound, but the image quality was good.

  “This is surveillance footage from that restaurant, Tandoori Nights,” Zoey said.

  “Is that Calista Jones?” I asked. A woman with bluish hair was sitting at a half-moon-shaped booth table with Morgan, except this woman didn’t look like the woman who Joel and I had interviewed. I mean, technically, yes, it looked like her. There was the bluish hair, the stocky, sturdy build, and the no-nonsense vibe, but that’s where the similarities stopped. Instead of looking like a farmer’s aged housewife, this woman was wearing a beautiful blouse with a plunging neckline and a dangling necklace for emphasis. And she owned it. She looked as good and confident as a model walking down a catwalk.

  Calista had layers.

  “Yeah, that’s her,” Zoey said. “Wait for it.”

  I watched the video for another minute before a hulking fifty-something man came into view. The man looked big enough to wrestle bulls—and win.