Cremas, Christmas Cookies, and Crooks

by Harper Lin

  Kristin turned to me slowly. I couldn’t read the look on her face, but it scared me, maybe even more so because I couldn’t read it. “What did you say?”

  I took a step back. As far as I could see, her hands were empty, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t come after me with her fists and fingernails. I didn’t want that to happen. I liked having eyes. But I couldn’t back down now. “I asked if your way of indirectly getting your money back from her was to kill her.” I swallowed hard. Every muscle in my body was as tense as it had ever been as I got ready to turn and run.

  But instead she laughed again. It was a habit of hers that kept me decidedly off balance. “You think I killed Ronnie over rent money?”

  I wasn’t sure which part she was objecting to—the killing or the rent money. I tried to look confident. “You were angry when she wouldn’t see you. Maybe you didn’t mean to do it, but she refused to pay, and in a fit of rage, you killed her.”

  She laughed harder. “Over rent money?”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “You think I’d risk life in prison over a couple thousand bucks in rent money?”

  I shrugged nonchalantly, but my confidence was waning.

  “Hell no! I got her computer and called it even.”

  “So you didn’t slash her tires to keep her at the school so you could talk to her?”

  It was as if it were the funniest thing she’d ever heard. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Um, the principal at the school?” I suggested hesitantly. I tried to think back to whether he’d said it explicitly or whether it was just something I’d inferred from the other things he’d said, but it was hard with Kristin laughing in my face.

  “Varros? Varros told you that?” She laughed harder. “He would.” She threw the last of her things in the suitcase and zipped it closed. “No, I didn’t kill Ronnie. I was still trying to get a hold of her when I heard she’d gotten her head smashed in.”

  “So how did you get her computer?”

  She looked at me as if I was stupid. “You really are a goody-goody. I picked the lock at her apartment and took it. It’s not like she was going to use it anymore.”

  I thought the school might be able to find some continued use for what was, in fact, their laptop, but I didn’t think Kristin was the type who would particularly care about a technicality like that. Her story made sense, though. She didn’t seem overly concerned about my insinuation that she had actually killed her friend, so either she was a good actress—possible—or she really didn’t do it. One thing still bothered me, though. “If Veronica’s dead, and you have the computer, why are you still in town? Weren’t you afraid the police would come looking for it?”

  Again, the laugh. “No! And even if they did, it’s not like they’d know that I stole it. I would have told them she gave it to me and would have broken back in to take something else.” She paused thoughtfully. “She did have a really nice pair of diamond earrings my ex-boyfriend gave her.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “They hooked up after I broke up with him for cheating on me.” She shook her head. “They deserved each other.”

  It was my turn to shake my head. I couldn’t even begin to understand this girl.

  “Anyway,” she said, picking up her suitcase, “I wasn’t worried about the cops. Besides, it’s a cute little town you got here. Nice little shops downtown and all. Hey! Is that coffee shop yours? With the little pictures on the coffee? Anthony’s or whatever?”

  “Antonia’s. And yes, that’s mine.”

  “Cool. It’s a nice place. I’m going to stop by there on my way home to get some cookies and a giant cup of coffee to keep me awake. Are you headed back there? I can give you a ride.”

  “Um, no, thanks. I have my car. But thank you,” I said babbling, baffled from her friendly turn. I wondered if I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by identifying myself as the woman who owned the coffee shop “with the little pictures on the coffee” up front or if she was just being nice now because she’d decided we were done talking.

  She walked past me toward the door. “Good luck finding who killed Ronnie. But hey, be careful. Good girl like you isn’t used to dealing with people like this. You’re getting into some dangerous stuff.”

  She was almost at the door before I processed what she said. “Wait, what do you mean? People like what?”

  “There’s stuff you obviously don’t know about. Good girl like you could get hurt,” she said and disappeared out the door.

  I ran after her. “How? By whom? People like what? Murderers?”

  A young couple walking down by the pool looked up at me and then hurried away.

  Kristin laughed. “Just be careful. You seem like a nice lady, even if you are a goody-goody.”

  I watched, dumbfounded, as she headed down the stairs. The thing was, she didn’t know I’d been around more than my share of murderers in the past few months. At least, I hoped that was why she said it.

  Chapter 19

  “YOU’RE EARLY!” Sammy said as I walked into the café a little while later. I’d gone home to drop my car off and take Latte for a walk before heading into the café. It was mostly because I needed to do those things anyway, but also because I knew Kristin was headed to the café on her way out of town. It wasn’t that I wanted to avoid her, but I knew I wasn’t going to get anything else out of her, and seeing her would just make me want to try. I didn’t want to risk making a scene, as I nearly had at the Surfside when I started yelling about murderers as that couple was walking by.

  It was the late-morning lull by the time I got there, and there were only a few customers scattered around the café. Business would pick up again in about half an hour for the lunchtime rush, but at the moment, things were quiet. I was glad because it would give me the chance to see what—if anything—Sammy had managed to find out from Ryan. He had a tendency to be a talker, so I was optimistic.

  “I had some things to take care of this morning.” I dropped my jacket and purse off in the back, grabbed my apron, and came back out front.

  “Murder investigation stuff?”

  I nodded as I started to fix myself a double espresso. I needed the pick-me-up after what felt like a very long morning.

  “Did you find anything out?”

  I watched the espresso shots as they finished pouring into the cup, admiring the rich color. The crema was the perfect shade of brown and looked deliciously creamy. I took the first sip, letting the liquid swirl across my tongue. It was the perfect temperature—just a degree hotter would have been too hot to drink.

  “I found some things out,” I said. “But I’m not really sure what they mean yet.” I took my second sip. Still delicious. “What about you? Did you get the chance to talk to Ryan?”

  “Yup.” She sighed and leaned against the counter.

  “And?”

  “They have video, but it’s not of the actual murder. Apparently the camera that should cover that part of the parking lot is broken.”

  So the story was consistent. I nodded.

  “Apparently Mike was pretty mad about that, especially when he found out it had been broken for a couple weeks. Ryan said the principal got quite a lecture from him about it.”

  As a recent recipient of one of Mike’s so-called “lectures,” I sympathized. I downed the rest of the espresso—I was an adherent of the three sips rule—and contemplated another. It would be a lot of caffeine, but…

  “The footage they do have, I guess, is the problem. It shows Mrs. Crowsdale—I mean Ann—and Veronica walking to the parking lot together, then Ann walks to her car and goes back toward Veronica’s with a tire iron. She’s there for another couple of minutes and then walks away empty handed. Ryan said that all four of Veronica’s tires had been slashed. I guess Ann told the police that she got the tire iron because Veronica wanted to get a head start on taking them off while she waited for Triple A, but Veronica didn’t have one. He said Ann swore that,
when she left, Veronica was alone and working on taking off the first tire.”

  “She just left her there alone in the cold to wait for Triple A?”

  “I asked the same thing. Apparently Veronica told her to leave. Triple A was supposed to be there within fifteen minutes. They were, but she was already dead when they found her.”

  I started another double espresso. Despite the heat of the last one, I had gotten a chill.

  We stood there and watched the espresso pour into the cup. Without even seeing the video, based on its description, I understood why the police found it persuasive. I picked up the cup and took a second to admire the crema. It was all I could see because I’d used a porcelain espresso cup, though I knew the body and the heart of the espresso lay beneath it, as perfect as the crema. I knew because I’d pulled hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of espresso shots in my life, and when the part I could see—the crema—was perfect, the body and heart were too. I remembered not understanding that when I was a child until my grandfather had explained to me how in coffee, like in life, what you could see could often tell you about what you couldn’t see as well. Just like how Mike could guess what would have been in the video that didn’t exist based on what he could see in the video that did. Unless…

  “Did Ryan say whether there was any way to get to Veronica’s car that wouldn’t have been caught by one of the other cameras?” I asked.

  “He didn’t mention it. Why—” She caught herself. “You think someone else could have been there. Someone who wasn’t caught by the camera.”

  I nodded.

  “They would have had to be incredibly lucky or know that the camera was broken to avoid it, though.”

  “The whole staff knew. Varros said they talked about it in their staff meeting.”

  “So the murderer could be anyone.”

  It should have been a frightening thought, but Sammy and I grinned at each other. Despite the video evidence, it could be possible that someone other than Ann Crowsdale had killed Veronica Underwood. But we had to find out if our theory was plausible—if someone really could have gotten to Veronica’s car without being caught by any of the cameras.

  “Could you call Ryan to ask him if it’s possible?” I asked just as the bell over the café’s door jingled to announce the start of the lunchtime rush. It was a few minutes earlier than I expected it, but it wasn’t as though there was really a specific time for it—it was just whenever people started coming in.

  “I don’t think I have to,” Sammy said. She grinned and pointed over my shoulder.

  I turned around. It wasn’t the lunchtime rush—it was Ryan.

  “Just the man we wanted to see!” I said.

  “Well, that’s the kind of welcome a guy likes!” he said. “You have some new cookies you need me to taste test or something?”

  “No, but we have some gingerbread ones you can have.”

  He shrugged. “That’s good too.”

  I handed one across the counter to him.

  “So what’s up?” He looked over at Sammy and winked. She blushed furiously. Ryan grinned.

  “We have a question about the video evidence in Veronica Underwood’s murder,” I said.

  Ryan’s smile faded. “You know I can’t talk about that.”

  I started to protest that he’d already talked to Sammy about it, but then I caught the look in his eye. He couldn’t talk about it publicly. Or officially. Quietly with Sammy, yes. Openly in the café, no. Especially not when he was in uniform and on duty.

  “Of course. I understand.” I waited a couple seconds while he chewed on his gingerbread man’s leg. “What about if I had a hypothetical question?”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “About the café’s cameras, of course.”

  He nodded.

  “Well, I have a few, and they cover the whole café.”

  He nodded again. I was pretty sure he was playing along with what I was trying to do.

  “Well, what if one of them was broken? So a part of the café wasn’t covered?”

  “Just one?”

  “Just one. The other cameras would pick up enough so that you could figure out who was coming and going in the area of the broken one, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Is there any way someone could get into the area not covered by the other cameras without being picked up by one of them?”

  Ryan chewed his gingerbread slowly.

  I had only the slightest bit of doubt that he didn’t know where I was going with this, but the length of time he was taking to answer was starting to make me nervous. I glanced over at Sammy, who seemed to be awaiting Ryan’s reply just as eagerly as I was, maybe more. My interest in this case wasn’t personal—well, it was since Sammy had asked me to do it, but I didn’t have a vested interest in it. Sammy, on the other hand—Ann Crowsdale was one of her heroes, and I knew she would be crushed if it turned out that she really had murdered Veronica Underwood.

  Ryan finally swallowed. “Hypothetically?” he asked.

  “Hypothetically,” I confirmed.

  “Hypothetically, depending on the location and the setup of the cameras, someone could get into the area covered only by the broken camera without being picked up by any of the functional cameras. That’s why we tell people to have cameras covering the entire area.”

  “And have you ever seen a setup where this hypothetical situation would be possible?”

  “I have,” he said slowly.

  “Recently?”

  “Fran.” His voice was reproachful. I was pushing my luck.

  “Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. I just have an active investigation I need to be thinking about.” He paused. “And a boss who’s been sort of temperamental lately.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to run afoul of Mike with the mood he’d been in lately.

  He shoved the last of the gingerbread man into his mouth and chewed it slowly. I assumed the conversation was over and started mentally debating more espresso. But Ryan eventually swallowed and had more to say. “The other thing is, Fran,” he said gently, addressing me but looking at Sammy, “we take a lot of things into account before we make an arrest, especially in a murder case like this. One piece of evidence not being airtight doesn’t mean the whole case falls apart.”

  Sammy looked down at the counter. Ryan looked as if he were in pain for a second and then turned away. I patted Sammy on the back.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s just hard.”

  Ryan nodded.

  Before the situation could get any more uncomfortable, the radio on Ryan’s shoulder beeped, and some garbled nonsense started coming out of it. Ryan leaned toward it as if he could understand and then muttered something equally incoherent back into it.

  “Looks like I gotta go,” he said to us, speaking normal English again.

  “Need some coffee for the road?” I asked.

  “If you’re buying,” he said with a lopsided grin.

  “Just this once,” I joked back. I poured his cup of regular drip coffee then grabbed a second to-go cup. “Need another one?” I asked, both of us knowing I was asking about Mike.

  “Has the answer ever been no?”

  I poured the second cup of coffee but didn’t mention Mike abandoning his cup of coffee the day before. Maybe Sammy told him. I wasn’t going to bring it up.

  I handed him both cups, and he headed for the door. “Thanks, Fran. Bye, Sammy.”

  I waved goodbye. Sammy was still staring at the counter.

  “If you need a minute, there’s still that napkin order to be placed,” I said softly.

  She looked at me in confusion then nodded when she realized I was offering her the same excuse to go take a minute in the back as she’d offered me the day before. “Thanks,” she said and went in the back to cry.

  Chapter 20

  SAMMY MIGHT HAVE BEEN FEELING DISCOURAGED, but I wasn’t ready to give in just yet. Yes, the polic
e weighed lots of factors before making an arrest, and Ryan sounded every bit as confident about their suspect as Mike did, but I saw the heartbroken look on Sammy’s face when Ryan said that one weak piece of evidence wasn’t enough to ruin their case, and I couldn’t just let the matter go until I knew I’d investigated every possible lead. And I still had leads to investigate.

  Kristin had said that there was stuff I obviously didn’t know about and that I wasn’t used to dealing with “people like this.” That I was getting into “dangerous stuff.” I needed to know what that stuff was.

  I wanted to go sit down at the laptop in the back and spend some more time digging around online, maybe this time doing some general searches instead of just looking at the social networks, but Sammy was back there and needed her peace. I pulled my phone out of my pocket instead. I’d barely unlocked it when the bell over the door jingled, and it really was the lunchtime rush.

  I spent the next couple of hours steadily making drinks, serving sandwiches and snacks, and cleaning tables. Sammy came out of the back before too long, having cried herself out and calmed down, and Rhonda came in toward the end to work her shift. The crowd eventually cleared out, leaving just some of the all-day people who had been there before the rush and a couple new ones who had taken their places. I excused myself to go to the back, leaving the café under Sammy and Rhonda’s watch for a little while.

  I sat down at the computer and pulled up the browser to begin searching. I decided to start by looking up Veronica again. I tried to find some kind of information about her teaching record or credentials, but that was apparently not public information, so I switched gears and just did a general search. I didn’t know what I was looking for—news articles about arrests for organized crime or something, maybe?—but whatever it was, I didn’t find it. There was nothing to even point me in the general direction of the dangerous stuff and people Kristin had been talking about. So I looked up Kristin.