Criminal Confections

by Colette London

  Danny shrugged. He dislodged my arms from around his—I’d pinned him pretty good—and then stepped back to establish a few inches of breathing room. “I doubled back to go get you.”

  Aw, he hadn’t wanted to go on without me. He hadn’t wanted to leave things between us on a bad footing. Now I really felt like crying. Sniffling, I nodded. “You doubled back . . . and that’s when you decided we should apologize and be friends again?”

  Danny looked puzzled. “No, that’s when I noticed the body at the bottom of the ridge.” He nodded toward the SFPD officers and Christian. “I sure as hell wasn’t going to apologize. Not when you were wrong.” His you must be kidding look washed over me . . . but I’d swear he seemed glad to see me. “You’re so sappy.” He cracked a grin. “You should have seen your face. It was as if someone had just shredded your passport, right in front of you—”

  “Hey. I need that thing.” Just as I needed him.

  “—and you were going to kick their asses for doing it.” Danny shook his head, seeming to marvel at me. Not that he would. “You’re kind of formidable sometimes, you know that?”

  “I’m kind of a jerk sometimes, I know that.” Full of relief, I stared at his shadow-bearded face. “I’m sorry, Danny.”

  He knew what I was talking about. He glanced away, silently watching the police officers and Christian. Then he nodded.

  Danny slung his arm around my shoulders. He turned us both toward the ridge, then squinted upward. “See what happens when you don’t go running with me?” he asked. “Next time, just come.”

  I gave a choked laugh. “Next time, I will.” I fell into step beside him as we ascended the ridge. Looking at the SFPD officers talking with Christian, I remembered what had drawn me to gallop across the resort’s grounds in the first place. “Do you know what happened? Who was it at the bottom of the ridge?”

  Danny took away his arm. “It was Rex Rader.”

  “Rex?” I stopped cold. “Are you sure? Was he—”

  “Dead? Definitely.” Danny kept walking, forcing me to trot to keep up with him. “For several hours at least, judging by the condition he was in when I finally spotted him down there.”

  I shuddered, not wanting to think about the details.

  I lowered my voice as we approached the group on the ridge. I heard Christian’s voice filtering to us on a gust of wind, strident and shaken and slightly defensive. An officer nodded.

  I figured I needed to know more. “Do you think—”

  “Rex was pushed?” Spookily reading my mind again, Danny nodded. “He could have been. He wasn’t very well conditioned, though. It’s possible he slipped and fell on his own.”

  I remembered Danny saying that Maison Lemaître should have closed off the ridge trail or posted warning signs. He’d been right. This disastrous outcome was proof of it.

  I hadn’t liked Rex, but I hadn’t wanted him dead.

  “Slipped and fell? Seriously? Here at the ‘death retreat’ ?”

  I was trying to take refuge in comforting sarcasm. It was a way of distancing myself from the horror of what was going on. Evidently, my appalled voice carried, because one of the officers broke off from interviewing Christian. He approached me, instead.

  “‘Death retreat,’ ma’am? Can you elaborate on that?”

  I quailed. No doubt about it. I’m the type who gets jittery if a police car follows me innocently in heavy traffic. I start sweating when a patrolman parks beside me at the coffee shop. There’s something about uniforms, authority, and those damn mirrored sunglasses that makes me feel instantly guilty.

  I hadn’t done anything. Mr. SFPD didn’t know that, though.

  “I’m sorry. I was making a joke. I didn’t mean anything.”

  Protectively, Danny took a step closer. His shoulder shielded me from the police officer, making me feel . . . well, “runty” would be the best word for it, I guess. I was nervous, not incompetent. Pulling down my sweatshirt, I stepped forward.

  I nodded toward the ridge. “Do you know what happened?”

  “We’ll know more after we interview you and Mr. Jamieson,” the officer said somberly. I realized he must have known Danny’s name because Danny must have been the one who’d summoned help. I also realized, frankly, that the officer didn’t seem nearly as impressed by my bravado as I was. He pulled out a worn notepad.

  “Ah! You have a notepad,” I said in a too-hearty voice. “I do, too! Mine’s a Moleskine. It’s really handy. How’s yours?”

  My attempt at establishing camaraderie with him fell flat. (Hey, even I don’t bat .1000 on the whole making-friends-easily thing all the time.) And that’s how Danny and I wound up being interviewed by the San Francisco Police Department . . . for almost an hour.

  Chapter 11

  In the end, the police informed us that Rex’s death had “probably” been an unfortunate accident. In the absence of any material evidence, they didn’t have the impetus or the resources to investigate further. Not even when I reminded the officers (at risk to my own overworked nervous system) that maybe they should check “for tracks.”

  The officer Danny and I had spoken with had looked amused at that. Evidently, there were hundreds of tracks on the ridge, belonging to all the many Maison Lemaître guests who’d traversed that path over the past few days. Sneaker prints weren’t exactly the same as fingerprints. Several retreat attendees and staff members were interviewed, but no one had seen anything unusual.

  The conclusion was that Rex had gone for one of his usual runs on the ridge, then somehow slipped onto the bayside rocks below. He’d probably been killed, we were told, by a head wound.

  I couldn’t help touching my own lumpy noggin, feeling lucky that I hadn’t been thumped even harder. I’d had the dubious good fortune of landing on a nice, nonjagged hallway floor, with carpeting as a cushion and Danny to come to my rescue shortly afterward. I’d suffered a concussion, but I was alive.

  I wished I could say the same thing for Rex. I saw Nina dealing with the police after Danny and I were through, and knew that she probably felt the same way. After all, Rex had been kind to Nina at the buffet. Like me, he’d noticed her distress. He’d tried to help her feel better about things. That meant Rex wasn’t all bad. He wasn’t all smarm. He was . . . He’d been . . . a human being just like me, flawed and stressed and trying to get by.

  I said as much to Danny. He chortled, then shook his head.

  “Rex was our number one suspect in Adrienne’s death,” my pal reminded me, jerking me out of sentimental “Kumbaya” mode and back to harsh reality. “With him gone, we’re back at page one.”

  Oh yeah. Amid all the turmoil, I’d forgotten about that.

  I wanted to continue forgetting about it, too. All at once, I’d had more than enough of danger and death and uncertainty. In the wake of Rex’s unfortunate demise, Christian must have felt somewhat the same way, because he showed a little humanity himself and canceled the day’s activities.

  He did so via Nina, his right-hand gal, of course. After the police finished talking with him, Christian disappeared.

  But the antics of Lemaître’s (cowardly) leader aside, I felt at loose ends after Rex’s death. I knew it was probably shock talking, but I seriously considered leaving San Francisco.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told Danny, walking back across the grounds after being grilled by the authorities. “I’m starting to think that maybe Adrienne did accidentally overdose herself. She was in a dither that night at the welcome reception. She probably went overboard on the caffeine in her green drink, and that’s that. Whether she was conspiring to sell Lemaître’s secrets to a competitor or”—I lowered my voice—“having a fling with Bernard, Adrienne is gone now. None of that matters.”

  I don’t know why I thought, ludicrously, that talk of Bernard and Adrienne’s torrid (potential) romance deserved more discretion than her (supposed) corporate espionage. It just did.

  “It matters,” Danny said, “because she mattered
.”

  He was right. I sighed. “I’m all mixed-up. Sad too.”

  He looked away. Another man would have tried to comfort me. Danny wasn’t like that. He’d already reached his hug quota for the year in a single visit, and it hadn’t been a whole week yet.

  He cleared his throat. “How about that cocoa oil massage?”

  It was the closest he was liable to come to giving me a pep talk. I was grateful for the effort. Also, I was reminded of...

  “Not today.” I had to let him off the hook. I’d told him about my idea to treat Nina and Calvin to a couple’s massage, with Danny and me as tagalong incentivizers. “I made spa plans with Isabel today”—right after she (maybe) gave me a purposely injurious shove—“and I don’t want to leave her hanging.”

  “After seeing her last night, I wouldn’t want to, either.”

  While Danny grinned over that, we both lapsed into silence. I didn’t know what he was thinking about, but I was remembering the argument we’d seen Isabel having with Rex. She had, very literally, looked ready to commit homicide on the spot.

  Had she looked equally murderous on the night of Adrienne’s death? Maybe Isabel really had overdosed her rival. Given what Danny and I had seen last night, it certainly seemed plausible.

  Then again, everyone looked suspicious to me just then.

  “Probably,” I mused, “Isabel cooled off after Rex left.”

  “Probably she passed out before she reached him,” Danny volunteered, clearly on a similar wavelength as me. He glanced at me as we reached the Italianate stone fountain. “You know how much Isabel knocks back every day. And night. She was loaded.”

  “Probably way too drunk even to find Rex in the dark,” I said, “much less confront him on the ridge and push him off it.”

  We both stared toward the now-distant ridge, considering it. Unfortunately, that scenario felt much too plausible to me.

  “After all this, are you sure you want to keep a spa date with Isabel?” Danny gave me a serious look. “You can always say you’re too busy writing your overdue consulting report to have someone smear expensive mud all over you.”

  “It’s not ‘expensive mud,’” I replied with dignity. “It’s a treatment. Plus, Isabel doesn’t know about my consulting for Lemaître, so I can’t use it as an excuse. I was undercover, remember? Besides, my report isn’t overdue. Not technically.”

  Not yet. But I still felt that familiar (unpleasant) twinge of anxiety that always dogged me when I had work left to do.

  “All the same . . . ,” Danny pressed, not buying it for a minute.

  “I’m going. I still want one of those warm chocolate-fondue body wraps.” Staunchly, I glanced toward the spa. “You coming?”

  Danny blanched. “To the spa? Twice in one week?”

  I crossed my arms. “You’re my bodyguard, right?”

  “I’m your security specialist,” he corrected. “I don’t have to shadow your every move to make sure you’re safe. Besides, unlike your hotel room, the spa is a public spot. You’ll be okay. I have . . . something to do.”

  I quirked my mouth. “Is ‘something’ cute and blond?”

  “Call me if you run into trouble.” Danny didn’t even pause to consider confiding his hot-date plans in me. “Or signal me.”

  Demonstrating, he scratched his head. Slooowly. “Remember?”

  I swatted him. “I’m recently concussed, not stupid.”

  “Just making sure.” He flashed me a grin. “For all I know, you might have forgotten our whole storied history together.”

  That would have explained why I’d been so bitchy to him earlier, when I’d snarkily offered to pay him to leave me alone. But that wasn’t it. We both knew it. “I’ll never forget that.”

  Looking alarmed, Danny held up his palms. “Don’t start reminiscing. Now is not the time. We’ve got a spa to visit—”

  “A hot date to keep.” I waggled my eyebrows teasingly.

  “—and a murderer to find,” he went on. “Or maybe two.”

  I gulped. That was daunting. “Do you really think so?”

  Danny shook his head. “I think we’ll know more soon.”

  Then, with that cryptic comment, my track-pants-wearing buddy rotated his burly shoulders, gave me a grin, and left.

  I took a minute to savor the fact that Danny was really alive. (What can I say? I’m a secret softy at heart.) Then I took my shorts-wearing self to the spa to meet Isabel Lemaître.

  Forty-five minutes after being undressed, showered, steamed, slathered with a chocolate-fondue mixture that smelled like my sweetest dreams, rolled up in a gigantic heated foil electrified wrap, and left alone on a spa table to bake like a huge cocoa-buttered burrito (or a person-size hot bûche de Noël, minus the merengue mushrooms and fondant icing—take your pick), I finally realized I was being stood up. Isabel wasn’t coming.

  Honestly, I was relieved. And let down. Simultaneously.

  I still liked Isabel, despite everything. After all, if I suspected the worst of everyone who’d ever argued with Rex . . . well, that long list would include me. I admired Isabel’s free-spirited attitude and her cosmopolitan outlook. I envied her bodacious figure and her talent for effortlessly accessorizing. I even appreciated her ability to pour multiple cocktails down her gullet without so much as a boozy stumble (unlike me last year in Mykonos, when the local taverna’s Greek ouzo did me in).

  But I didn’t like wondering if my glamorous newfound friend might have pushed Rex Rader to his death in a fit of pique. That was seriously scary. So was the idea that Isabel could have had at least one good reason to overdose Adrienne: Bernie. Now that Rex was dead, Isabel was rapidly moving up in the suspect ranks.

  Isabel’s opportune no-show gave me lots of time to consider those suspects, too. I thought about Bernard. About Christian. About Rex and Adrienne. About my own place in this whole mess.

  I didn’t belong poking my nose into things—at least not things that weren’t 65 percent bittersweet, caramelized, and/or ganache-filled. Travis knew it. Deep down, so did I. Most likely, Danny did, too. But as Adrienne’s friend, I had a unique perspective on her final hours. I’d been close to her. I’d helped her. Heck, I’d sipped the same killer green drink she had! For all I knew, I remembered with a shiver that made a macabre joke of my body wrap’s decadent warmth, I’d been the killer’s original target.

  I still couldn’t rule out that frightening possibility.

  That meant I still had things to do. Maybe. If Rex had been the killer (and he’d been unreasonably driven to murder me by my initial refusal to consult for him at Melt—or to murder Adrienne and score her chocolate secrets for free), then the problem was solved . . . although that meant there was another murderer loose. If someone else had overdosed Adrienne and killed Rex, then . . .

  . . . then Isabel could have done it! Gobsmacked by the obvious, I groaned aloud. I couldn’t do much else, honestly. The spa technician (not Britney this time, but Portia) had wrapped my arms inside my heated foil wrap. I’d been wrapped like a mummy head to toe and left to bake, soaking up moisturizers and chocolate aromas while I waited for Isabel to join me. But Isabel wasn’t coming.

  Maybe because she’d killed Rex and then skipped town.

  It was conceivable. But so were several other theories—such as the idea that poor, confused Bernard had learned about his wife’s liaison with his onetime protégé and had pushed Rex off the ridge-side trail in irrational fury. Danny and I might not have been the only ones lurking in the shadows last night. I didn’t think Bernard would have killed Adrienne, but . . .

  Don’t even think about telling him ! Rex had warned Isabel last night. She’d warned Rex, too. They’d had to mean Bernard.

  But I just couldn’t believe Bernard was a murderer. Not even after he’d grabbed me, warned me, gotten frosty with me, and gotten confused with everyone else. But Isabel . . . well, just then, she seemed to be the likeliest suspect in Rex’s death—and Adrienne’s, too. Isabel ha
d had plenty of reasons to kill her husband’s mistress. Of course, I decided. It has to be Isabel.

  Burning to tell someone, I wiggled. “Portia? Hello?”

  No one answered. I could hear other retreat attendees in other treatment rooms, enjoying the spa services. I could hear the spa’s melodic New Age music. I could smell . . . burnt chocolate.

  “Portia?” I called louder. “Britney? Is anyone there?”

  I wasn’t just burning to share my murder theories, I realized with unease. I was just plain burning. I hadn’t noticed because of all my homicide-related conjecturing, but my wrap was overheating. I’d been sweating before; I dripped now. Gross.

  But I didn’t care about aesthetic issues just then. Not when I was burning. The acrid fragrance of burnt chocolate reached me. So did a prickling sensation on my legs. It hurt.

  Confused, I craned my neck to stare at the wrap’s controls. Its electronic panel flashed red. That was bad. When it came to mechanical things, exposed skin, and lipstick on my complexion, red was bad. My headache returned with a throbbing vengeance. My heart pounded, working overtime to push blood to my overheated extremities. Feeling even hotter, I swung my foot toward the control panel, trying to unplug my malfunctioning foil wrap.

  No dice. Grunting with effort, I rocked atop my spa table. I moved a few inches. “Britney?” I yelled. “Portia? Anyone?”

  At this rate, I’d turn into a human Ho Ho (no jokes not involving the famous creme-filled chocolate-rolled snack cake, please) before my spa treatment was over. I didn’t want that, I told myself crazily. Everyone knew Zingers were better.

  Sweat dripped into my eyes. Feeling woozy, I rocked harder. I managed to get to my feet, still burrito-wrapped in space-age foil. I swayed with the effort, my equilibrium as shaky as my ability to regulate my own temperature while fully insulated.

  This must be what it was like to be baked at 350 degrees, the most common temperature in today’s kitchens. I’d be damned if I was going to die covered in chocolate fondue, though. Mustering a surge of effort, trailing power cords and dollops of spa goo, I hopped toward the control panel. Almost there . . .