by Sandi Scott
Ashley wondered if he could be the murdering sort. He didn’t seem like he had any anger toward Colleen, but why did he up and leave in such a hurry? What was he trying to hide?
“Hey-yo,” said a familiar voice at the kitchen door. “Smells amazing in here.”
“Hello, Ryan,” Patty said. “What brings you to our kitchen?”
“I came to talk to Ashley about something, but now that I’ve smelled the wonderful aroma in here, I’ve come to offer my services as a taste tester.”
Ashley smiled, untied her apron and hung it up before Patty could even respond. “Work first, taste second. What do you have for me? Any news to tell me?”
“Well, yeah. If you can spare some time, it’d be easier to show you at my office.”
As they walked into Ryan’s office, he led Ashley to a new desk in the back corner. “Welcome to Surveillance Central.” Ryan had gone all out arranging their “snoop cave”—fully utilizing his firm’s spare equipment—so they could watch from the point-of-view of their “persons and places of interest” cameras.
“In seeing it now, through your eyes, I may have gone a tad overboard,” he said, “but never mind that. So far I have two feeds to watch—Eddie’s webcam and the surveillance cameras from the night of the banquet. I’m still trying to crack the password for the banquet’s archive footage.”
“May I?” Ashley asked, walking over to the keyboard. He nodded and she tried a few passwords until, on the fourth try, she guessed correctly.
“PASSWORD123. That’s the password.”
“You’re kidding me,” he said, rubbing his eyes under his glasses. She thought the glasses made him more appealing, but he only used them after looking at a screen for so long that his contacts dried out.
“These guys sound like they need a good IT consultant. Does ‘Hello, I hacked your security and want you to hire me’ work as an introduction?” she teased.
“You would be surprised how many clients I’ve gotten that way.” He nudged her to move over and started typing and clicking on the computer.
“Oh, good, looks like they store footage on the cloud for thirty days,” he said as he started to download all the footage from the day of Colleen’s death.
Unfortunately—but not surprisingly—there wasn’t a camera in the dining room. Ashley guessed that not many crimes occurred in the middle of fine-dining parties packed with people, but it did turn out to be the perfect setting to poison someone, apparently, completely unnoticed.
“At least we can see who is going in and out.” Ryan took a sip from a liter of orange soda.
Venues like the Gulf Coast Women’s Club were concerned with monitoring their parking lots full of expensive cars, their combined worth in the millions. Besides, a security camera would look terribly unfashionable in the middle of all that upscale décor. People wanted safety measures, like security cameras, but not the visible reminders that the world needed them.
While Ryan tried to find the footage from the banquet, Ashley looked at the screen that had the view from Eddie’s hacked webcam. Eddie hadn’t even bothered to change his factory security settings, meaning that his webcam could be accessed by anyone willing to spend a few hours online learning how to hack it.
Onscreen, Eddie had been reading business news on his laptop for the past 30 minutes when he suddenly sat up and started touching all his pockets—first the breast pocket on his shirt, then his pants’ front pockets and finally stood up to feel the back pockets of his pants. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he started feeling around between the couch cushions, eventually tossing each of them across the room, getting progressively angrier with each toss.
“Whoa. He is not happy,” Ryan said. “I wonder what he’s looking for.”
“Oh, yeah.” Ashley reached into her purse and pulled out the flash drive, which was a heavy duty kind fitted with protective rubber padding. “Probably this.”
Ryan grinned mischievously. “And where did you find that?”
“Dizzy found it. All I did was move it into my pocket.”
“So, you stole it?” Ryan accused, still grinning.
“I didn’t say that. I said I just moved it into my pocket.” She turned the drive over in her hands. “Why in the world do you think Eddie would need a padlocked and encrypted flash drive? For all his close gator encounters?”
“You know, one of my clients is a construction company, and sometimes I see people who bring computer equipment out to construction sites use drives with rubber padding like that. Other times, that level of security is required by a company to comply with insurance requirements.”
Ashley groaned dramatically, spinning around in her desk chair. “And if Eddie’s been telling the truth, it could be initial construction plans for the hotel, and this is his hapless attempt to prevent the Localists’ sabotage.”
She was surprised to find that Eddie had picked a decent padlock combination, as all variations of relevant birthdates didn’t work. If it was a four-digit code, it was almost always a birthday.
“Tsk-tsk. He goes through all that trouble to fortify a flash drive but doesn’t even bother to secure the camera that watches him in his own home. Why do I feel like breaking this encryption is going to be a huge bother, only to find out that it’s just the blueprints for his dream man cave?”
Ryan’s hotel footage had finished downloading, so he called her over and they looked at the security camera viewpoints: front door, service staff door, two side doors and parking lot. They started with the service staff door, only because the one thing she knew for sure was that someone had disposed of the phone in the bathroom close by it.
“Whatever it is, I guess I’ll know it when I see it,” she stated, fast forwarding through a stream of service staff arriving. The footage showed her and Patty getting a good workout going back and forth loading their equipment and prepped food from the van. On the last trip, they recruited an athletic looking waiter to bring in the cake box which held the croquembouche. She didn’t see anyone “sinister” hiding in the shadows, stalking the cream puffs for the perfect time to pounce. Frustrated, Ashley wondered why it couldn’t be that easy.
“There’s a window here, out of view of any camera, where the cake box was alone in the van, but that’s not a lot of time to complete the tampering. And no way to control who eats the bad puff.” She opened another bag of chips from their snack stash. “But if it’s the kind of plot where any random target would do, why just one? Wouldn’t someone being treacherous just for treachery’s sake want to be a little more dramatic?”
Ryan shrugged. “Well, if one poisoned person accomplishes their goal, maybe they don’t want to do any more damage or draw more attention than they have to. What if they just wanted someone to get sick but gave them too large of a dose? Colleen couldn’t have been more than a hundred pounds soaking wet. Maybe the poisoner used a dose calculated to make someone on the heavier-end sick enough, but unluckily, it was a fatal one for someone Colleen’s size.”
“Oh, wow!” Ashley exclaimed. “You’ve already put a lot of thought into this. So why would someone do that? To make someone look…oh, right.” She sighed. “To make someone look bad.”
“Or some business look bad.”
“What? You mean, Patty and me?”
She’d been so fixated on the idea that she’d been framed for negligence to cover up a murder, she’d never considered someone framing her for negligence to make her look, well, negligent. She wondered why anyone would do that.
“If someone was going all this way to hurt Patty, they would have bothered to sabotage her food, and I don’t exactly have any enemies. I just moved back to town and spend most of my time back here in kitchens.”
Ryan gave her a pointed look. “And you guys have been doing really well, despite operating in a town resistant to change or foreign ideas.”
“What? Someone got offended by our French cooking? We cover all kinds of cuisines. Most American cuisine is technically fo
reign.” She tried not to guffaw and failed.
“I’m not saying that they’re against you ideologically, more like someone who doesn’t want your businesses to succeed, for whatever reason. One way of looking at it is that you guys have only been in business for a few months, and you already had clients scheduling their events around your availability. Somebody was getting that work before you came along or was hoping to get it in the future.”
“You’re right, after we came along, all of Houston’s fine-dining caterers lost their corner of the Seagrass upscale market. I bet they’re real protective of a territory that requires them to drive an hour and a half there and back with refrigerated trucks.” Ashley was still having trouble taking the idea seriously.
“You guys really have no other competition in town?”
“Well, if you’re talking about them competing on our level, not even close.” she replied, flipping her hair haughtily for emphasis, if not comic relief. Ryan threw a sour cream and onion chip at her. “But seriously, the options for catering in Seagrass are barbecue, Mexican food, barbecue, seafood, barbecue, barbecue…and the seafood guys mostly do fried stuff and ‘bring your own catch.’ Not many upscale events want to make guests catch their own food next to a smelly gutting station.”
“Just an idea.” He shrugged. “You know, if it turns out that someone poisoned your cream puffs, it might be worth putting in surveillance cameras at Fresh Start Kitchens. If someone is trying to blame Seagrass Sweets for Colleen’s murder, they might try messing with your food again to make it look like a pattern of negligence.”
“You say that like there’s another reason someone might want us to go out of business.” Ashley responded, when something on her monitor caught her eye. “Hey, wait. Remember me saying that I’ll know it when I see it?”
She motioned him over and began rewinding the footage. It was a little dark at that point, but they could clearly see a tall, heavyset man with a familiar bald spot.
“We’re looking at it.”
Ryan was squinting at the screen. “Is that Smoke Daddy Lee?”
Ashley nodded, taking note of the time stamp. “Yup. Going in the service entrance, even though he’s not cooking. This is around the time that I must have left to rearrange the desserts, meaning that he was out of my sight by the time I got back. Why would he be in such a hurry to go in and out?”
She pulled up time-synced side-by-side footage of the parking lot and the side door where they saw Colleen coming in, fast forwarding to the estimated time Ashley remembered her arriving.
“Huh?” Ryan said. “I don’t remember seeing him as a guest. He’s not dressed for it, either.”
“He wouldn’t dress appropriately for his own wedding,” Ashley commented, shaking her head.
A small, red sedan was seen pulling into the parking lot, and the disheveled Colleen power-walked inside, glancing behind her along the way. Not long after, a blue pickup parked on the opposite side, close to the service door, and out stepped the last person Ashley had hoped to see. And here she thought that Hope had been jumping to conclusions blaming him.
“No way.” Ryan blurted. “They arrived not even a minute apart. Either that’s a huge coincidence, or—”
Ashley sighed. “Or Colleen was being followed by Smoke Daddy Lee.”
CHAPTER 11
UNABLE TO SLEEP, Ashley got up before sunrise and started baking. The dark of early morning was occupied by bakers all over the world, creating something fresh before the rest of the world woke to eat. In Paris, when she was studying to bake under Patty, she loved finishing up the last batch of the day’s bread and then sitting next to the window, watching café owners wake up the street. They’d arrive at their cafés, roll up the gates, bring out the tables, sweep the bricks under the tables and start the espresso machines. Ashley had big dreams for Seagrass Sweets; it might be only catering now, but she hoped to open her own patisserie one day. When she did, these early mornings—when the day was still topped with the dew of possibility—would be her routine, not just the occasional delight.
She decided to make fresh fruit tartlets to bring over to the McCays, whom she was planning to visit this evening. The murder was frustrating her; the lack of a clear path to follow had kept her up all night. The way she saw it, she had three suspects with motive: Emma Phee, who was having an affair with Bobby that Colleen knew about; Smoke Daddy Lee, a Localist who had followed Colleen into the banquet and was upset about her encouraging Bobby to sell to a hotel developer and Monty Gahn, the fracker who may have been taking advantage of Bobby’s illness to negotiate a land sale.
Then there was Eddie. Eddie, who had basically thrown a grenade into Ashley’s original path and sent her back to square one. Eddie, who claimed he was having an affair with Colleen which she was scheming to protect by double-crossing Bobby. The details of Eddie’s story fit what Ashley heard in the bathroom, but there was still something that didn’t sit right; she couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something suspicious about him. She hoped the surveillance she and Ryan were doing on him—his webcam and the keylogger—as well as the data she might soon find on the flash drive would help her pinpoint exactly what didn’t fit.
She mulled over the details of the case as she delicately placed pieces of fruit in a symmetrical pattern on the tiny little tartlets. Two blueberries, a kiwi slice, a strawberry, a peach slice and a tiny leaf of lemon basil fit snugly atop the creamy filling. It was meditative work that helped her clear her mind.
Driving up the long driveway of the McCays’ house, Ashley admired the yellow blooms that gave no hint of the decline happening inside the impressive house. Bobby may not be long for this world, but the Hinckley’s columbines lining the driveway were a sunshine yellow that brought to mind nothing but eternal summer. It may have been morbid for her to prioritize speaking with Bobby before seeking out Emma on account of his limited time left, but she needed to get answers quickly. Besides, she knew that Emma wasn’t leaving town in a hurry, for the same reason. She could almost feel Emma circling Bobby and his estate like a starving vulture.
While she waited for Bobby, Ashley wandered around the garden, admiring his roses, rare flowers and plants, each meticulously labeled with a nameplate stuck at its base. She felt drawn to the elegant and delicate Lagerfeld roses. As she buried her nose in them, inhaling deeply, she was transported back to her birthday years ago, in the basement office where she worked with Ryan. They had walked into the office from a celebratory lunch and found a dozen of the pale pink roses on her desk. At first, she didn’t know who they were from. Sliding her finger underneath the sealed envelope, she kept looking at Ryan and had the strangest feeling in her chest, like a balloon expanding with each breath. When she read the card and saw that they were from Sergey, whom she hadn’t heard from in weeks, the balloon popped, leaving her feeling inexplicably grumpy the rest of the day.
Her memories were interrupted by a shrill voice coming from the patio. It was Bobby’s nurse, Georgie, a matronly no-nonsense, middle-aged woman who seemed older than her years. She was setting the brakes on Bobby’s wheelchair.
“Mr. McCay will see you now,” she said. Then she came closer to Ashley so that Bobby couldn’t hear. “But only for a short while; he gets tired easily and leaves us from time to time.”
Ashley smiled and rushed up the steps towards him, momentarily horrifying the nurse. As she approached the old man, she was struck by just how much he had deteriorated since the last time she saw him. She did her best not to show it on her face.
“Hello, Mr. McCay.” She reached out and gingerly took his hands.
He smiled weakly and chided, “Bobby, dear girl, don’t make me feel older than I already am.”
They laughed as Georgie slowly turned on her heel and made her way back into the house, stopping here and there to throw a cautionary glance over her crisp, white shoulder.
“Are you sure it’s okay to talk out here?” Ashley asked, crossing her arms and rubbing the
slight chill off her shoulders.
“Oh, yes, I love the sweet perfume from my flowers on the night air. Don’t worry about me.”
He took in a deep sniff and smiled with his eyes closed in rapture, then opened them slowly. “Would you like some iced tea or lemonade?”
“No, thanks. How are you these days, or is that a stupid question?”
“Oh, no, but I mustn’t complain. Who would listen anyway?”
His smile slowly dissolved into a look of confusion. Glancing at her face, he seemed to be suddenly unaware of who she was.
“I’m sure there are many people who’d listen, and I’m the least of them.”
As they caught each other up on their family members and shared acquaintances, Bobby’s answers were short and his eyes dull. But as soon as she mentioned his business, a spark seemed to light up his eyes, flickering brightly one minute, then fading the next.
“After all my years in business, my greatest satisfaction these last few years was selling bait and tackle. I know it sounds clichéd, but I enjoy the simple life, always have.”
Ashley smiled warmly. “Retirement looks good on you,” she lied.
His eyes glazed over as he looked out into the distance. “Yeah, I will probably do one last deal, then hang up the hat for good.”
She leaned forward and squeezed his upper arm tenderly. This jolted him back, giving them both a start, followed by chuckles.
“Ooh, don’t scare me, girl. I don’t need a heart attack on top of being sick.”
Ashley apologized and made a mental note to keep her hands to herself. Bobby pulled himself up in the wheelchair with a small grunt. She knew he was the kind of man who loved to talk about work. She hoped that by smiling and showing interest, she could get him talking without it seeming like she was snooping.
“Is the Bayview deal your last hurrah?” she asked.
