“Pete…” Her expression was blank before turning brilliant with an aha moment. She puffed out her chest with pride, presumably because she was able to answer the question. “He said Pete was a nice guy.”
“What about Vic?” I asked. “Did Vic want to hurt Hank?”
“Nooo! I even saw Vic shake Hank’s hand after I’d left him. Vic told Hank he appreciated someone being so good to his girl.” She paused. “He meant me. He was calling me his girl.”
“Has Vic done anything to try to force you to go back with him this time?” I asked.
“No, not this time.” She smiled. “I think he finally sees that I wasn’t happy, and I just want to be happy. Vic loves me, you know. He was just slow on picking up that I could be okay on my own. He thought I needed him taking care of me, but I’m good.” She smiled brightly.
A customer with a basket loaded with produce approached, and Zoey and I stepped aside.
“What do you think, she the killer?” I asked Zoey.
Zoey looked her up and down. “I’d be less surprised if birds started singing on her shoulder and woodland creatures followed her everywhere.”
That was my thought, too.
24
I gave Jonathan a call from the passenger seat of Zoey’s car. “How are things? You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, boss. I heard the volunteer fire department is having a big potluck dinner fundraiser. They’ve got some big raffle prizes and got someone who used to be famous to come in and sing. I don’t think we’ll have many folks out this way.”
The lunch service was going to be a ghost town. That worked for me.
“Did Melanie make it in?”
“She sure did, boss.”
“Okay, stay as long as you can and then leave everything in Melanie’s hands. Tell her I’ll be in as soon as we can but that it will be a little after the lunch rush. With any luck, she won’t be on her own more than an hour.”
“Will do, boss. You getting close to figurin’ out who done that guy in?”
I sighed. “I think so.”
I honestly didn’t know if I was lying or telling the truth. I clicked to end the call.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I asked Zoey.
“One way to find out,” Zoey said as she put the car into drive.
Instead of heading back the way we’d come, Zoey went past the interstate and out of the city limits. The road narrowed from two lanes going in each direction to a narrow country road with no shoulder. We were on our way to see Hank’s business partner, Pete, and the drive was taking much longer than I’d thought it would.
The heavy rumble of an engine reached the periphery of my hearing but quickly grew in intensity. I twisted in my seat to see a pickup truck coming up fast behind us. Its wheels were larger than normal, exaggerating its height, and its front bumper looked as though it could plow right through Zoey’s back windshield.
“They’re not slowing down,” I said. “Is there a spot for them to pass?”
“Maybe after this curve.” Zoey gave her car some gas, but rather than put space between us and the oncoming truck, the truck’s engine gunned and it surged closer.
Zoey said a few colorful words, and I sat myself forward in my seat and pulled the seatbelt tighter across me. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop my head from snapping back and then whipping forward when the truck hit the back of Zoey’s car. The nose of her car jerked to the side and the rear fishtailed, but she was able to steady it.
The trees, bushes, and little country homes blurred together as we sped by.
“How fast are you going?” I asked with increasing concern.
“Ninety.” Zoey was so calm that she sounded bored, but I was ready to have a heart attack. A sharp turn was coming up way, way too fast!
I gripped the sides of my seat, did my best to push my feet through the floorboard in a sympathetic attempt to slam on the brakes, and tried not to scream. The huge truck was riding her bumper, and there was no way it was going to let us slow down without running us over.
“Oh God!” I said with thirty feet between us and a curve that might as well have been a gigantic horseshoe.
“Hang on,” Zoey warned.
My shoulder slammed into the passenger side door as Zoey shifted into the oncoming lane and slammed the brakes. Her tires screeched, but the truck whizzed by. It then tried to put its brakes on, too, but the heavier truck wasn’t able to stop fast enough to avoid the effects of the curve.
“It’s going to roll,” I said, but it didn’t. Instead the truck careened off the road and hit uneven earth that catapulted it a good fifteen feet into the air before it slammed back down. Its tail end slid to the side, and the truck came to rest on top of a destroyed barbed wire fence. In the field beyond, cows stopped their chewing.
“Can you see who’s inside?” I asked. I squinted but could only make out a baseball cap, sunglasses and a jacket that covered the person’s arms. It had to be a man or else it was a very stout woman.
“Can’t tell,” Zoey said.
The truck gunned its engine and lurched forward, but it stopped when yards worth of barbed wire and unearthed fencing posts were pulled along with it.
“Time to go,” Zoey said. She put her car into reverse, did a three-point turn, and then gunned it to ninety miles per hour again until she spotted a side road. She took it practically balanced on two wheels.
“We can take some backroads to get to Pete’s,” she said.
My thumb itched with the desire to call somebody—anybody with a gun and a badge—about the truck-driving maniac, but I didn’t want the resulting landslide of trouble that would follow. Brad would probably have to tell Gregson, and God only knew what Gregson would do to me. I was pretty sure he’d be willing to pull strings to get me committed to a psychiatric facility. Logic and reason were not part of his mental processing when it came to me. Me being locked up was all that seemed to matter to him.
I was more than a little bit lost by the time we got to Pete’s. We’d taken two gravel roads, a one-lane road, and a short trip through somebody’s pasture in order to get to Pete’s without returning to the road where we had our encounter with the homicidal truck.
I scanned every inch of available space as we pulled up the lane to Pete’s two-story home with white siding and an end-to-end front porch. “I don’t see a truck anywhere.” There was, however, a Dodge Journey SUV parked in front of his house.
“You think it could have been him?”
“No… Yes.” I sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe? Did he know we were coming?”
“Yeah, I called ahead. He seemed cool with it.”
Could have been a cover.
“He’s got a tin utility shed over there,” I said. “Might be deep enough to park a truck in.”
Zoey parked, and we got out. We walked in the direction of the shed, but I stopped when Zoey stopped.
“There’s grass here,” she said when the gravel driveway gave over to the green stuff.
“Yeah…” I wasn’t following what she was getting at.
“None of it’s smooshed down.”
I looked anew at the grass, seeing it through her eyes this time. I frowned. “No tire tracks through it.” At least we weren’t going to have to come up with an excuse for why we were breaking into Pete’s private property.
“He could have parked it somewhere else,” Zoey offered.
At this point I think she was just throwing me a bone.
We headed over to Pete’s house, climbed the stairs to his porch, and knocked on the wooden frame of his screen door. The solid door behind the screen door opened a moment later to reveal a man in his late thirties to early forties with silvering hair at his temples. He was around five ten and had a slender, fit build. He looked like someone who enjoyed long runs.
“Pete Hanley?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m Kylie Berry and this is Zoey Jin. I believe you spoke to Zoey?”
“Yes, an
d whose kin are you?”
My ears heard the words, but they were a complete disconnect for my brain. The resulting pause became awkward, and I looked at Zoey. Thankfully, she stepped in.
“We both moved into the area,” she said. “Our families aren’t from around here.”
“Oh…”
I could hear the disappointment in Pete’s voice and spotted the sudden reluctant distrust in his eye.
“But,” I said hurriedly, “we are good friends with Joel Mullen. He took over the Camden Falls Herald when his uncle died.”
“Oh!” Pete said, and this time he opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch with us. The smell of something wonderful cooking came out with him. My guess was fried chicken. “His uncle, Nick Mullen, he was a good man. Tell Joel I said hi.”
“I’ll be sure to.” I’d have to thank Joel later for the instant in he’d given us with Pete.
“So what brings you out here? You didn’t say on the phone.”
“It’s about Hank,” I said. I knew we’d have to tread lightly. Pete could very easily go back inside his house and close his door, conversation over. “Would you mind talking to us a little bit about him?”
“Well, I guess I could,” Pete said. He walked down the length of his porch to a high-backed wooden rocking chair and sat down. It was next to a wooden bench swing that hung on chains from the porch ceiling. Zoey and I sat down on it. I gasped when the swing tilted backward a little, but then relaxed when it stabilized. It was actually incredibly comfortable, and I became a quick convert of its appeal.
“Have you lived here long?” Zoey asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Pete said, crossing his legs. “My great grandparents actually homesteaded this land.”
Pete wasn’t that old, but there was something about him that felt old-fashioned. He spoke with a slow easiness that made one think that the world moved at a much slower pace through his eyes.
“How was it that you ended up going into business with Hank?” I asked. After meeting and talking with Pete, it felt odd that he’d go into a web-based business, one that definitely was not old-fashioned.
“Well,” he said, “my grandfather made it to the Olympics as a sprinter and a long jumper. My father tried to follow in his shoes, but, well, my grandfather was just one of them flukes of nature. There was no rhyme or reason for it. His parents weren’t athletic in the slightest.”
He paused in his speech. I found myself leaning into the empty pause in anticipation of the words to come. It had the same sensation as holding my breath. I simply knew that there had to be more to the story because I couldn’t fathom how his grandfather going to the Olympics could be a conclusive answer to my question about how he ended up in business with Hank.
Sure enough, Pete uncrossed his legs, then crossed them again from the other direction before continuing with his tale. “Just like my father, I took to running too. I guess we all had something to prove. It didn’t help me and Dad, though, because neither of us could hold a candle to the speed and ability of my grandfather. But I did show a talent for distances. I couldn’t run fast, but by golly I could run for a long, long time.” He was smiling like Andy Taylor, big and goofy without an ounce of malice. “I even made a name for myself on the marathon circuits. Not one you would know if you weren’t in the lifestyle, but I was… am… a downright celebrity to some.”
Ohhhh… I was starting to see a connection.
“When Hank approached me about starting an online exercise equipment business, I’ll be honest, I didn’t see why anyone would want to buy equipment that way. But he kept talking to me. He wanted my name associated with the business to help drive customer trust.” He raised his hands in a there-you-go gesture. “What can I say? Hank was a good talker, and he brought me around to seeing things his way.” He got quiet and his eyes fixed on the distance. “He was a good man. I’ll miss him.”
I pictured the truck that had chased us down the road. I reimagined Pete sitting behind the wheel with a maniacal gleam in his eyes and a Joker-esque smile on his demented face. But I couldn’t hold the image. It kept wanting to morph into Pete playing with grandkids and asking me if I wanted a cold glass of sweet tea. Besides that, there wasn’t a truck in sight.
It would have been convenient if Pete had been the one who had tried to kill us, but I couldn’t see it.
“Were you happy in your business arrangement with Hank?” Zoey asked.
Pete nodded. “Mostly.”
He didn’t say anything more.
“And that bit beyond the mostly,” Zoey prompted, “how was that?”
Pete lifted his hands again. “Not like what I wanted it to be.”
Again with the silence. I wanted to feed him ipecac so he’d get on with it and spit out the information we needed.
“What was the problem?” I asked.
“Now, I didn’t say there was a problem,” Pete responded with a slight edge to his voice. From that I gauged that he didn’t like the less than harmonious situation being insinuated upon him.
If he was putting up a wall, it was time to push.
“There was yelling between you and Hank at the gym,” I said. “We learned about it from witnesses.” I let the word “witnesses” hang in the air. It put pressure on him to tell us the truth because it said we already had part of the information. If he lied, he couldn’t be sure it was one he wouldn’t get caught in.
His lips thinned, he uncrossed and crossed his legs, switching sides, and he folded his arms over his chest. “Sounds like you’ve got everything you need if you’ve got witnesses.”
Oh, well played! If I’d had a hat, I would have tipped it to him.
“It’s important to get your version of events,” I countered, lobbing the ball back at him. Then when he didn’t say anything right away, I added, “Some of what was recounted wasn’t… flattering. But we understand that situations can be nuanced. Possibly there was something about the moment that others missed.”
His eyes narrowed. Everything I’d said was a big, huge bluff. I could tell he was considering calling me on it.
This was not a man I’d want to be pitted against in a high stakes poker game.
Pete smiled, but it was tight, not friendly. “Hank wanted to grow the business by adding to the line of equipment we offered, but he wanted to capitalize on gimmicks and fads with the use of more celebrity faces to push them. I wasn’t interested in going that direction and wouldn’t agree to it. Hank kept pushing the idea, and I got frustrated. I lost my temper the last time I told him no.” He paused and met my eyes with a sharp gaze. “That’s probably the incident you heard about.”
There was no way I could refute him. The only information I had to go on was Andy’s report that Hank and Pete had argued in the locker room. I’d have to take Pete at his word.
Besides that, I didn’t have a reason not to believe him. Pete was probably not the killer. The truck that had tried to run Zoey and me off the road wasn’t here, and the smell of freshly cooked food had greeted us when we’d arrived.
“Were you disappointed to learn that Hank didn’t leave you his half of the business in his will?”
Pete’s eyes widened. “I hadn’t heard. Have you seen the will?” Then he waved his question off before Zoey even had a chance to answer. “It doesn’t matter. You asked about me inheriting his half of the company. Never in a million years did I expect to. That wouldn’t make any sense. That’d be like saying, ‘Hey, did you hear he didn’t leave you his car or his house?’ I never expected him to, and he’d have no reason to. Ladies, I had nothing to gain from Hank’s death… and nothing to lose, nothing that is except for a good friend. But if that’s all, my lunch is getting cold…”
That was our cue. Our chat was officially over. But I needed to get in one final question.
“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Hank?”
Pete took a deep breath and thought a moment before answering. “Guy, the owner of the gym where
Hank and I would work out, he was looking at starting his own online exercise equipment company. His business model was going to be a little different than ours. It was going to have a stronger focus on local folks. But we already gave a steep discount to locals, and that wasn’t sitting well with Guy. He felt it was going to interfere with the success of his own business plans.”
“Does Hank’s death do anything to change that situation?” Zoey asked.
“No, but I’m not sure that Guy understood that. I think he thinks that I’m easier to sway.”
That meant that Guy might have killed Hank in order to give his own business a boost. Guy also knew how to get into Hank’s locker and was aware of Hank’s habit of adding his nutritional supplement to anything he was drinking.
Motive and opportunity. That made Guy the most likely suspect.
But Samantha had motive and opportunity, too. She had access to his nutritional supplements, and she’d inherited Hank’s half of the business. She was free of being trapped in a relationship she couldn’t bring herself to leave, and she could now afford to travel the world. She had everything she’d been wanting.
But did Samantha own a killer truck? Did Guy?
I didn’t know the answer, but it was one we had to find out.
25
“You going to make your tech call okay?” I asked Zoey when she dropped me off behind the café, but I shouldn’t have worried. Zoey was already popping in her earbuds.
“This is Zoey Jin,” she said in a smooth, melodious tone sweet enough to go to sleep by. It had me doing a double take. She slipped into an easy flow of Russian next that had my jaw dropping open. The girl had talents. I knew I shouldn’t be surprised, yet she never ceased to amaze me.
I shut her car door and watched her drive away before heading in through the café’s back door. The kitchen was empty, which didn’t surprise me. Jonathan would have had to leave more than an hour ago. What did surprise me was the empty stillness of the place.
A Berry Home Catastrophe Page 16
