Brad got up and offered me a hand.
“You staying here?” I asked Zoey.
She mumbled something unintelligible and then stretched out on her belly with one knee raised and her forearm draped over her head.
Brad and I let ourselves out, and I locked the door before closing it. We headed to the back of Zoey’s building and got in Brad’s car. We then went by the gym, but Andy told us that Hannah hadn’t been in that morning. He said we might be able to catch her at work and told us she was a realtor working out of an office on Summit Street.
Stepping out of the gym, I asked, “Have they tested Hank’s nutrition supplement yet?”
“They’re working on it. I heard Detective Gregson is hoping to get news on it today. Since they know what poison they’re looking for, it should be pretty quick for the lab to determine if Hank’s supplement was spiked.”
I turned my head away to hide my grimace at the mention of Detective Gregson’s name. Our last encounter had left me unnerved. Of course, all of our encounters had left me feeling that way. But our last encounter had left me both unnerved and perplexed. He’d called me Maggie…
I forced myself to focus on the moment I was in. “Yancy’s Ground Up is down here at the end of the gym. According to the surveillance video that Zoey was able to pull from the bank across the street, Hank stopped there almost every day. Wanna check it out?”
Brad shook his head. “No need. Chances are the nutrition powder was spiked. You guys said he’d dip into that and drink it several times a day, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what the gym manager told us. He’d add some of the supplement to whatever he was drinking.”
“If that’s what happened, Hank could have been dosing himself with the poison for a day or two before it reached a lethal dose. That makes more sense to me than Yancy’s slipping in one or two big doses whenever he stopped by. But if the nutrition powder turns out clean, we’ll know to circle back to Yancy’s.”
That explanation worked for me, and it was a huge relief. Hank being poisoned by someone at Yancy’s would mean opening ourselves up to a lot more suspects.
Fifteen minutes later, Brad and I were in Greenier’s Realty. We’d asked to see Hannah when we came in and were told to wait while she finished with a client.
We sat, and I once again found myself sitting next to Brad with his arm around me.
“Brad, what made you decide to investigate? What if you get caught?” He’d told me he was at risk for being suspended or possibly even fired if he didn’t stay away from the case.
Brad shrugged. “I can get another job. Can’t get another sister.”
That was a good answer, one that said a lot about where Brad put his priorities.
I snuggled into his shoulder and was rewarded by a kiss on the top of my head. Our closeness didn’t last long, though. I straightened up as soon as Hannah came into view. She really was a striking beauty—literally and figuratively. She was wearing a gray pencil skirt with a slit up one thigh that opened and closed as she walked. Her blouse was a sheer cream gauze with a solid cream shell beneath. Her shiny blonde hair perfectly framed her face and bounced with loose curls around her shoulders. She wore only a little makeup, but what she did wear artfully accentuated her natural beauty rather than covered anything up.
Going by looks alone, she was the one who belonged next to Brad. Not me. I felt downright mousy in comparison. I tried to ignore how uneasy that made me feel, and I did my best not to compensate by inching closer to Brad—even when she flashed him with her dazzling smile.
“Hi, Hannah,” I said, giving a small wave. Her gaze shifted to me, and her smile instantly fell. She hadn’t even noticed me until I’d said something.
Her gaze turned venomous, but then flashed with the conflicting need to please when she shifted her gaze back to Brad.
She folded her hands before her and focused on Brad. Her focus was so intense that I got the feeling that she was purposefully excluding me. She was also smiling again, this time more pleasant than dazzling. “What can I help you with?”
“We’d like to talk to you about Hank,” I said. I might as well have been a ghost. Hannah gave no indication that she’d heard me speak.
Brad looked at me and then at Hannah. “What she said,” he said and pointed a finger at me.
I could have hugged and kissed him for that.
Hannah blinked. I could tell that Brad’s refusal to play along with her snub had put a chip in the icy wall she’d erected between her and me. Yet, when she answered, she spoke to Brad and only Brad. “I’ve already spoken to the police about Hank. They’ve taken my statement, and I have nothing else to say.”
My internal lie detector went wild. What she’d said didn’t track with what I knew about the events to date. “You ran out of the gym before the police got a chance to talk to you,” I challenged. As far as I knew, the gym didn’t become a part of the police’s investigation until after we tipped them off about Hank’s nutrition powder. That had been just yesterday, and Hannah had stormed out of the gym after Zoey and I had tried to talk to her. The police didn’t get the chance to talk to her at the gym, and I doubted they’d gotten around to tracking her down at home or work. “You haven’t spoken to the police at all.”
Hannah’s smile faltered again. She finally looked at me, right at me. “What do you know about anything?”
I’m sure she’d meant it as a rhetorical question, but I answered anyway. On top of that, I raised my voice so that anyone within easy earshot would hear. “I know you were obsessed with Hank.”
Panicked, Hannah looked quickly around her. No one else was in sight. “Keep your voice down,” she hissed. “I work with these people.”
Exactly…
“I know that,” I said in an even slightly louder voice than I’d used before. “Now, what were you saying about Hank?” If she didn’t start talking, I was going to start making stuff up. I’d have all her coworkers gossiping about her and wondering for themselves what connection Hannah had to a murdered man.
Anger had Hannah baring her gritted teeth. She grabbed my arm with a force that brought instant (but unshed) tears to my eyes, and marched me out the realtor’s door. But she didn’t stop there. She dragged me into the nearby parking lot, a good twenty feet away from the door. When she let go, I was sure there’d be a bruised outline of where her hand had been.
The one thing she hadn’t done was hit me. That fact was not lost on me. Of course, Brad was nearby and having a witness might have deterred her.
As for Brad, I was a little surprised that he didn’t intervene on my behalf. But I hadn’t done anything to show distress, and I supposed that, just like me, Brad wanted to see how far Hannah was willing to take her physical outburst.
“Do you think this is some game?” she asked, seething.
“I don’t know,” I said, nonchalantly. “Do you think that murdering men is a game?”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t murder anyone!”
I shook my head. “I don’t believe you.”
Hannah calmed into a deadly stillness and stepped within an inch of me. “I don’t care if you believe me or not. You’re nobody.”
Brad cleared his throat. When Hannah and I both looked his way, I saw that he’d taken his badge out of his pocket and was holding it down near his hip. “What about me? You care what I think?”
Hannah backed away from me but never took her eyes off of Brad’s badge. She shook her head. “I didn’t kill him.”
“Why?” Brad asked. “Why wouldn’t you have killed him?”
Hannah threw her hands up, exasperated. When she spoke, her voice was full of sarcasm. “I don’t know. Because I’m not a killer?”
“That reason doesn’t do anything for me,” Brad said. “You know how many people kill because they think of themselves as killers? Not very many. So why don’t you give it another try. Why wouldn’t you have killed Hank?”
“It’s none of your bus
iness!”
“Okay, okay,” Brad said. “I’ll fill in the blanks for you. You killed Hank because you wanted all of his attention for yourself but he wouldn’t give it to you.”
“No!”
“Or maybe it was because he’d found something out about you that you didn’t want anyone else to know.”
“Stop it!”
“Or maybe it was because he was a man and it was Freud and that whole penis envy thing.”
“You’re insane!”
“Don’t matter if I’m insane or not. It matters whether or not I can get the District Attorney to believe in my reasoning. You killed Hank. We already know that. You killed Hank. All that’s left to do is to come up with a reasonable motive, one that a jury could get behind.”
“What are you talking about? I told you, I didn’t kill Hank!” Her voice had become pinched as worry started to override her bluster.
“Ahhh, but you did. You beat him to death. We’ve already determined that. It’s fact. Not up for debate. You killed Hank.”
Hannah’s eyes were as big as saucers as she stared at Brad. “No,” she said weakly. “No… No.” Huge tears fell down her cheeks. “No.”
She was stuck in a loop of disbelief.
“Hannah,” I said gently and stepped forward to take her hand in mine. She switched her pleading attention from Brad to me, and for the first time I didn’t see contempt on her face when she looked at me. “Something terrible was done to Hank. When you sparred with him, it damaged his body in ways he couldn’t recover from.”
Hannah’s hand slipped from mine as she backed away. She covered her mouth and her strangled, almost silent scream as she crumpled to her knees. “Nooo, noooo,” she said over and over, shaking her head back and forth.
She was either a world-class actor or she was innocent.
She didn’t bother to try to hide her face as she wept. “I wanted a baby.”
“Huh?” I said it more out of surprise than to her.
“We’d wanted a baby,” she cried.
Brad squatted in front of her. “You and Hank wanted a baby?” Brad asked gently.
“No.” She shook her head as she rocked back and forth. “Angelica and me, we wanted a baby. Hank said he’d help us.”
Ooooh!
“Hannah, who’s Angelica?” Brad asked.
“My partner. We’re getting married next month.”
Suddenly the whispered exchanges and obsessive looks that Andy had mentioned she’d given Hank made sense.
I knelt down next to Brad in front of her.
“Hannah, how long did it take for Hank to give you an answer after you asked him if he’d help you have a baby?”
Looking defeated, Hannah shrugged and shook her head. “A few weeks?”
Waiting so long to find out something so important must have been terrible.
Brad spoke next. “And Hank said he’d help give you a baby?”
Hannah nodded.
“And, uh, had he started helping yet?”
I guessed that was one way to put it.
Hannah shook her head. “No. We had an appointment at the doctor’s scheduled. We were still working out details.”
“What was the doctor’s name?” Brad asked.
Hannah told us, and I grabbed my notebook and jotted the name down. Because of privacy issues, I doubted I’d be able to confirm that any appointments had been made with the doctor, but Brad might be able to work the tidbit into the investigation that Detective Gregson was running.
Brad helped Hannah to her feet, and she swiped at her eyes to clear away her tears. Then she reached for Brad’s hands again. “We still need help,” she said as she looked soulfully into Brad’s eyes. “Angelica and I would be wonderful mothers. We’d give the child the best life we could.”
All righty then…
“Brad,” I said hurriedly in a voice that was a full octave higher than my normal. I’d had no idea what I was going to say next. I just knew that I didn’t want that particular conversation to go on one second longer. Call it jealousy. Call it selfishness or insecurity. Call it anything you want. I needed Brad to leave with me and leave now.
And that gave me another thought. What if Samantha—Hank’s girlfriend—had known about Hannah’s request? What if her reaction had been like mine? Maybe she hadn’t wanted to share Hank, not even his DNA. And what if she’d voiced her concerns and he’d dismissed them? Would it have caused an emotional wound in her that would have made her want to kill Hank in order to get her way?
Or what if Hank was secretly rich? If he had a child with Hannah, would that knock someone out of an inheritance?
There were so many things to consider, but the one fact that I was now sure of was that Hannah had not knowingly or willing caused Hank any permanent harm. She was innocent.
I gave a head nod to Brad that I wanted to leave. He took the hint. He gave Hannah a consolatory pat on the shoulder and turned to go.
“Wait!” Hannah cried after us.
Brad stopped and turned back, and I hung my head in frustration. Hannah wasn’t accepting a non-answer to her inferred yet unasked question: would Brad be the sperm donor for her baby?
I hated to do it, but I turned back, too.
“Hank slept with Ellen.”
Ohhh, again! Hannah definitely knew how to take left turns during a conversation.
“Vic’s wife?” I asked just to be clear we were talking about the same Ellen. Hannah nodded yes. “Do you know that for a fact?”
Hannah hedged with a side shoulder lift and a side nod. “I think so. Something changed between the two of them. Call it women’s intuition, but they got a lot closer real fast.” Her voice got softer. “It’s what got me worried that Hank was going to back out of our agreement. I figured Ellen wasn’t wanting Hank to go through with it.” Her eyes flicked toward me, and that was all it took to fill me with shame for my own reaction to her interest in Brad for the same purpose.
“Can you think of anything else that might help us?” Brad asked.
Hannah shook her head. “No, that’s it.”
I gave her my cell phone number in case she thought of anything else, and then we left—with my hand slipped into Brad’s as we walked away.
21
We made it back to the café about thirty minutes into the lunch rush. I jumped headfirst into helping Jonathan, and Brad camped out at a spot out of the way on top of one of the kitchen’s stainless steel stools. He stole shreds of coleslaw and a pickle off a plate being prepared to serve until I slid a Reuben sandwich with all the fixings in front of him.
Before the lunch rush was even done, Jonathan started looking anxiously at the clock. Whatever life matter was pressing on him, it was worrying him hard.
“I’ve got this,” I told him.
“You sure, boss?”
“Yeah, you take off. Wanna take a couple or three Reubens for the road?”
“Great idea, boss!” He fixed the sandwiches and I wrapped them up with all extra yummies on the side.
“That guy’s great,” Brad said after Jonathan had gone. “Whatever you’re paying him, you should double it. He works like a fiend.”
Hearing Brad’s description of why Jonathan was so indispensable to me made my stomach knot. And he was right. I did need to talk to Jonathan about a raise. He’d earned it. Actually, he’d more than earned it. His skills in the kitchen had grown the café’s bottom line by increasing the number of customers who regularly came through the door. But sadly, I suspected that whatever life challenge Jonathan was facing couldn’t be solved with the type of paltry raise I could throw at him.
But there was no time to think about any of that now. I had to take care of some cleanup, figure out what to serve for dinner, and then begin the prep.
I got to work.
“What are you doing?” Brad asked. “You haven’t even eaten. I bet you didn’t eat any breakfast either.”
I had to stop and think. “I had scrambled eggs,”
I said, then paused, frowning. “No, that was yesterday.” What I’d had for breakfast this morning was coffee with some more coffee.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. You had nothin’.” He got up from his stool. “I’m making you lunch, and you’re going to eat all of it. I’ve watched you and your 60s flower-power buddy do it enough times. I’ll make you a Reuben.”
I didn’t realize how much my feet hurt until I sat down. I clasped my hands together then stretched my arms high over my head and arched my back, popping my spine in several places.
“Whoa,” Brad laughed and smiled. “I heard that from here. You need some oil on them joints or you’ll wear them out.”
“I’m not a car,” I said, teasing him back.
Brad stepped close and slid the finished Reuben in front of me, complete with pickle and coleslaw on the side. If a voice could be said to sound like a bedroom, his did. “No, you’re not a car, but you still need fuel.”
When he leaned in for a kiss, I didn’t stop him. Instead, I kissed him back. It was slow and tender, and it made me want more. Yet when Brad pulled away—a sly smile on his face—I didn’t stop him from doing that either. I might have wanted more, but I wasn’t ready for more.
“Eat,” Brad ordered before turning away and heading for the pantry. “You got any potato chips in this place? A good Reuben needs some potato chips.” To my surprise, he managed to find some, and he added them to my plate before picking a few off for himself.
He leaned his back against the counter and crossed one foot over the other. “I can’t believe you do this every day, day in and day out. It’s a lot. You ever get tired of it? Burned out?”
“Mmm.” I’d taken a huge bite of my sandwich and swallowed it down before answering. Hunger had made it one of the best sandwiches I’d ever had. “I can’t believe you do what you do every day, day in and day out, dealing with the worst moments in people’s lives. You ever get tired of that? Burned out?”
He flashed me his brilliant smile and stole another potato chip. “I asked you first.”
I smiled. “This is all still kind of fun to me, to tell the truth. Don’t get me wrong. It’s hard. Real hard. And the hours are sooo long, but it’s still really new to me, so it feels more like an adventure than being trapped on a hamster wheel.” I took another bite before I thought and then covered my mouth to mumble out, “Now you.”
A Berry Home Catastrophe Page 13
