Roses and Revenge (Port Danby Cozy Mystery Book 4)

by London Lovett

  I shook my head. “Nope, I’m off the case.”

  “Except that you’re up here right now, and your eyes have swept this small room a few times since you stepped inside.”

  I was about to be offended, but he looked so miserable I decided to ignore his insinuation that I was a police plant.

  “Speaking of me looking around—” I walked to the coffee table next to his couch. There were no cigarette butts in the ashtray. “I can’t help but notice that your ashtray is clean.”

  “Yes. Wow, you are still obsessed about my dirty ashtray habit.”

  “No, that’s not it.” I rolled my eyes. “And even though those cigarettes weren’t tobacco, it was a gross habit. But why are they clean?”

  He tapped the front of his neck. “Like I told the detective, they were making my throat worse.”

  “But the one they found in your ashtray on the day of the murder? You said you didn’t remember lighting it.”

  “I still don’t. Must have been the cold medicine. Or maybe it’s such an automatic habit, I couldn’t remember lighting the thing. Or maybe I’m just losing my mind.” He shook his head. “I just want to wake up from this terrible nightmare.”

  Redmond’s heavy footsteps sounded on the metal stairs to the trailer. He knocked hard enough to rattle the walls and windows.

  “Guess that’s my cue to go. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  Jacob nodded. “Take care, Lacey. And thanks for the fudge brownie. They’re my favorite.”

  I smiled weakly at him. “I know.”

  Chapter 30

  The clove cigarette thing wouldn’t rest in my mind. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, but I decided to see if I could talk Briggs into letting me smell the evidence again.

  The moment I saw his car drive past the flower shop, I hurried out the door and headed down the sidewalk to the police station. He saw me as he stepped out of his car. He was carrying an evidence bag that seemed to be holding a pair of socks. He made a pathetic attempt to hide the bag by holding it behind him.

  “Miss Pinkerton, where are you off to in such a hurry?”

  “I was hoping to catch you, and it seems I have.”

  “I’m actually kind of busy.”

  “Yes, I saw the evidence bag you are working so hard to hide.”

  “And doing a terrible job of it, apparently.” He pulled the bag out from behind his back.

  I stared down at the socks and noted two things, not as an amateur sleuth but as a woman. They were men’s socks, and they were dirty as if the wearer had gone hiking in them.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said.

  He nodded once. “That’s good because I wasn’t going to.”

  “That’s fine.” I knew my nostrils were flaring slightly as I said it, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “What was it you wanted?” he asked.

  We were still standing on the sidewalk which I took as his way of telling me there was no reason to go inside the station. Fortunately, Hilda popped her head out the door. “Lacey, you have to come in and try the sugar cookies I baked.”

  I shrugged and flashed Briggs a smug grin as I slipped past him to follow Hilda to her plate of sugar cookies. They were in the shape of hearts and covered with red and pink sprinkles.

  “Now mind you, they aren’t as good as Elsie’s but then no one bakes like that woman.” Hilda went behind the counter to her desk and grinned proudly as she held the plate up for me. I kept the corner of my eye on Briggs, who’d walked through the gate with his bag of dirty socks. Surprisingly, he paused and watched me take a bite. As my teeth clamped down and the dry, flavorless cookie crumbled over my taste buds, I discovered why he had stopped. He turned his face to hide his amusement, while I worked up an enthusiastic chew and nod over the cookie. Hilda fidgeted with excited anticipation, waiting for my glowing critique. The cookie coated my throat like dry flour, and it took more than a few hard swallows to get the thing down.

  I held the other half in my fingers. “I’ll save this for later. It’s just delicious, and I want to enjoy it after my lunch.”

  She held up the plate again. “Here take another and take one for Ryder.”

  “Oh—are you sure?” I picked up two more and winked at her. “So good.”

  “Miss Pinkerton.” Briggs stopped at his office door. “May I speak to you for a moment?”

  “Yes,” I said on a thankful intake of air. I covered my mouth to stifle a cough caused by a few dry chunks of cookie lodged in my throat as Hilda buzzed me through the gate.

  Briggs shut the office door behind me, and without a word, walked to one of the cupboards in his office. He pulled out a bottle of water, untwisted the top and handed it to me.

  I lifted it in a silent thank you and washed down the rest of the cookie crumbs. My throat cleared of choking debris, I sighed.

  “A little dry,” he noted.

  “Like the Sahara desert during a drought. I’m not an expert baker, but I think she might have left out everything except the flour. But she’s very proud of them.”

  “I know. I’ve got my very own plate.” Briggs walked to his desk and lifted a napkin on a plate filled with the cookies. He turned around and leaned against the front of his desk. “What were you coming to see me about? And I’m hoping it doesn’t have to do with the murder case.”

  “It has to do with the murder case.”

  He nodded. “I figured as much.”

  “It’s all for nothing I’m sure, but I just wanted to get a whiff of the clove cigarette one more time.”

  “Really? Odd request. What do you think you’ll find?”

  “Nothing. Probably nothing.”

  Hilda knocked on the door and walked inside with a paper. “Sorry to interrupt but we just got this from the lab.” She was still beaming about her cookies. I showed her that I was still holding the little treasures in my hand.

  “Silly me, you need a napkin for those.” Hilda disappeared and scurried right back with a napkin.

  Red and pink sprinkles littered the office floor as I wrapped the cookies in the napkin. Hilda walked out and closed the door behind her.

  I turned back around to find Briggs reading the lab work. His brows looked stern as he read down the page. I could only assume it was the lab work from Jasper’s autopsy, and I could only assume that they’d found something of interest.

  Briggs put the paper down on the desk behind him.

  “You don’t have to tell me what’s in the report.”

  “All right,” he said with that aggravating calmness he was so good at.

  I kept my foot from stomping like an angry kid. “No, come on, tell me. Please. I’ll keep my lips zipped.” I turned the invisible key.

  He pushed off from the desk. “It seems that Jasper had a lot of sedative in his blood. It lines up with what his coworkers had told me.”

  “Yes, Jasper struggled with insomnia.”

  “It seems so.” He put up his hand up to stop my next question. “It wasn’t enough for a suicide if that was what you were about to ask. It was still death by suffocation. It just means he was probably out cold when the pillow was pushed down over his face.”

  I released a disappointed breath. “I see. I just thought maybe … Wait. That means that the murderer didn’t have to be stronger or bigger than Jasper. It could have been anyone.”

  “True. But if these socks that I just collected from Jacob’s belongings turn out to have the same dirt on them as the soil sample from Maple Hill, I think we have our ‘anyone’.”

  “Socks? Now this I know for certain. Jacob Georgio would not go walking around outside in socks. Especially not when he’s sick.”

  “Except that the witness, namely, Miss Nola, noted that in her official statement. When she saw Jacob walk past her trailer, he was only wearing socks. No shoes. She thought it was odd too.”

  “This just keeps getting more impossible to believe.” I tilted my head politely. “Can I please j
ust run Samantha past that cigarette again?”

  His confusion cleared quickly. “That’s right. I forgot you settled on a name for your partner.” He tapped the side of his own nose.

  “Actually, I believe you came up with it, comparing my nose twitch to Samantha on Bewitched. If only I could produce a little magic with that twitch. Then I’d erase this whole week from the calendar.”

  Briggs checked his watch. It was one of those chrome and black sporty man watches that looked extremely nice on his wrist. “I’ve got ten minutes. Let’s go to the evidence room.”

  “Really?” In my excitement, I crushed the dry cookies in the napkin. We both watched as crumbs cascaded onto the floor. “Oops.” I walked to his desk and grabbed the napkin off his plate of cookies and wrapped it as a second layer around the broken cookies in my napkin. “There. Hilda won’t know the difference.”

  I followed Briggs to the evidence room, a stale smelling, utilitarian room that was kept cold to preserve evidence.

  “Brrr, I hope I can even smell in this icy atmosphere.”

  “Do you want to skip it?”

  “No, continue. This will only take a second.”

  He carried the bag with the clove cigarette over to the exam table and handed me the latex gloves. I shoved my napkin full of cookie dust into my coat pocket and pulled on the thin plastic gloves.

  “What exactly are you looking for?” Briggs asked as he pulled on his own gloves.

  “I’m not totally sure.”

  He unzipped the bag and reached in for the clove cigarette. The brand Jacob smoked were thin and black with a tiny red band near the mouth end. I took it gently between my fingers. The end had been lit but very little of it had been smoked, if any. It seemed highly probable that Jacob had, out of habit, lit the cigarette, taken one good puff and been quickly reminded that his throat was too raw to smoke.

  I ran the cigarette past my nose. With something as fragrant as cloves, it would be hard to smell anything else. But then my hypersomia had earned me a hefty amount of respect in the perfume industry for the very reason that I was able to discern many scents from one bottle of perfume. The cold room and the curious gaze of the man standing next to me made it hard to concentrate. I closed my eyes and twitched my nose to wake up my highly sensitive olfactory receptor cells. I moved the cigarette beneath my nose as if I was breathing in the fragrance from a glass of wine. I could smell the clove and the singed end of the cigarette and possibly one other earthy scent. Most likely another compound in the cigarette. But the thing that was most interesting to me was the scent that was conspicuously absent. “Menthol,” I said succinctly.

  “Menthol.” Briggs immediately reached for his notebook. He flipped it open and clicked his pen. “You smell menthol.” He began writing before I could answer.

  “No, I don’t smell any menthol.”

  Briggs peered up at me and started to scratch out what he’d written.

  “No, don’t cross that out. Just add a big no to the front of it. Because there is no menthol smell.”

  His stubble covered jaw moved back and forth in a sort of impatient fashion. “I suppose I could start a list of all the smells that aren’t on the cigarette, but I’ve only got a few minutes.”

  “You won’t need to. Menthol is the only important absent smell.”

  It always took him a few minutes to catch up to my line of thinking. I could see a metaphorical light bulb turn on over his dark head of hair. “The throat lozenges. Jacob eats those things like candy.”

  “Right. And he was taking them before the murder because I ran into him outside the Corner Market on Monday. If he had lit that cigarette, I’m sure I would smell the menthol from his lozenges on the end. But I don’t.” I handed him the cigarette to return to the bag.

  “Miss Pinkerton, before you get too excited about your latest revelation, don’t forget there is other evidence that still points to Jacob. And as hard as it is to connect concrete evidence together to solve a crime, it’s much harder to use evidence that should have been there to solve it. If that makes sense.”

  “It does. I guess our minds are still synching up like a couple of seasoned partners.”

  He shook his head but with a smile.

  “I’m just going to keep this nugget locked up in my mind. You never know when it will come in handy.” I looked back toward the shelf where the rest of the evidence for the case was stored and looked back at him with a pleading grin.

  He started his defense before I even got the question out. “You said the cigarette. And I have work to do.”

  “Just two seconds with the pillow. That’s all. Two sniffs. Two seconds.”

  A low grunt followed as he acquiesced , it seemed, against his better judgment. He walked with extra hard steps to the shelf and pulled down the pillow. He pointed to the box of gloves. “New ones so there’s no cross contamination.”

  “Make sense.” I pulled off the first pair and dropped them in the trash can. Then I stuck my hands into the second pair. They were a perfect fit for his hands but my fingers were swimming in them. I held up my wrinkly hand. “Definitely couldn’t do surgery in these. They’d likely slip right off and end up in some body cavity.” I laughed at my joke, but Briggs had a decidedly less amused reaction.

  He pulled the pillow sharply from its bag. “Two seconds and I’m starting now with one.”

  I grabbed the pillow and pressed my face close to it. The front side or the murder side was stained with the pink clay mask that Jasper had been wearing. Most of the substance had dried and some of it had fallen off, leaving behind a powdery residue. The killer would have had to hold both edges of the pillow. I ran my nose along the trim of the pillow. My heart sank as once again I recognized the distinct scent of Jacob’s cologne. I turned the pillow over and as my nose raced over the fabric to the other side, I detected an odor, the same earthy odor I’d smelled on the cigarette. I couldn’t quite place it. I didn’t know all the compounds they put in clove cigarettes, but something about it was familiar.

  Briggs held out his hand. “Two.”

  I handed him the pillow.

  “Anything significant?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No, unfortunately.”

  He put the pillow away and back in its place on the evidence shelf, then walked me out. “Miss Pinkerton, try not to get yourself in a knot about this. We’ll get it sorted out, and the real murderer will face his … or her … day in court.”

  I walked out with heavy steps feeling more depressed than ever.

  “Let me know what Ryder thinks of the cookie,” Hilda called as I walked through the gate.

  Chapter 31

  “If it’s all right, boss, I’m going to take pictures of the Valentine’s bouquets and post them on Instagram.”

  “Good idea.” I finished washing the potting soil off my hands.

  Ryder carried his three Valentine bouquet examples to the island. Kingston, aware that something riveting would be happening in the center of the store, lifted off his perch and caused a black feathered ruckus during the short flight to the work island.

  “I’ll lure him back to his perch with some seeds.” I hurried over to grab the coffee can of crow treats.

  “No, wait. I think having a tame crow in the picture will get more likes.” As soon as he suggested it, Kingston pulled a rose leaf off with his beak. More petals fluttered down behind it. Ryder laughed.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to move my pushy bird?”

  “Nope, I’m sure. I’ll try and get one with him eating a rose petal. In fact …” Ryder picked up a fallen petal. Kingston’s head turned left and right with interest as Ryder placed the red petal on top of the crow’s shiny black head. He quickly snapped a picture before Kingston realized he was wearing his favorite edible flower like a hat. He puffed up and gave his feathers a good shake, dislodging the treat right where he needed it—at his feet.

  “I’m going to go into the office to place some orders. Let m
e know if Kingston gets too obnoxious.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  I sat down at the computer. The early morning visit with Jacob and then the follow-up visit with Briggs still had gears spinning in my head. It seemed impossible to think that the cigarette wouldn’t have the smell of menthol on it with the way Jacob had been sucking those lozenges down for his sore throat. It was as if he’d somehow lit the thing without actually putting it in his mouth.

  I spent twenty minutes on mind-numbing paperwork to help me kick all the other thoughts from my head. Surprisingly, it had helped. I was in full office mode and picked up my list for a purchase order when Ryder called down the hallway.

  “I posted some pictures on Instagram. Check them out and see what you think. The ones with Kingston are already racking up likes.”

  I picked up my phone and scrolled through the images. I beamed like a proud mom at the picture of Kingston standing with his black eyes peering out from a wall of yellow and white daisies. “These are great,” I yelled back to him. “My bird is a ham,” I yelled again just as Ryder came around the corner. “Oh sorry, didn’t know you were right there. I love these. You are a talented photographer. And I think my bird has a future in modeling.”

  Ryder laughed. “I agree. Hey, I’m going to head out for the day. I’ll open tomorrow.”

  “Sounds good. See you in the morning. Oh, wait.”

  Ryder’s face popped back into the doorway. “Yeah?”

  “I’ll be a little late tomorrow. I nearly forgot that my neighbor, Dash, is taking me on a flight along the coast.”

  Ryder stepped into the office as he pushed his long bangs away from his rounded eyes. “What? How cool. Lucky you.”

  “I’m excited and a little nervous too. I’ve never been in a small, two seat plane. But it should be fun, and my phone shows nice weather. I don’t want to keep you. I’ll be here before noon tomorrow.”

  “Have fun.” I heard Ryder thanking Kingston for his help while he pulled on his coat and gloves. A few seconds later, the door opened and shut.

  The pleasant diversion had swept my mind off work and the void was immediately filled by the investigation. The one person who I hadn’t given enough thought about was Jasper. I’d been so caught up in trying to find reasons why Jacob wasn’t the murderer, I’d given little thought to the poor victim, in this case a vibrant, talented man who had a stunning future in front of him. I was never close with Jasper, and he could be arrogant and self-centered on occasion. Still, it was wrong not to give him some consideration. I remembered that he had a very active and sometimes entertaining Instagram account.