“We were, but this might be even more important than that.”
“What are we doing here, though? Helen and Henry have alibis, remember? They were getting married at the beach when Zane was murdered.”
“Grace, this is something else entirely. I could be wrong, but we might have missed the biggest clue in the entire case.”
“I’m listening.”
As we got out of the Jeep, the teen finally freed his bike and rode away.
I just hoped that we had that much luck.
“What was the oddest prank played during the reunion?”
“Well, the cellophane was pretty gross,” Grace said.
“I’m not talking about nasty.”
“I don’t know.”
“The new locks,” I said. “What if they weren’t a prank at all, but a way of hiding evidence for blackmail nearby without raising suspicion?”
“Do you think Zane kept the info he was using at the school?” Grace asked.
“It’s worth a shot,” I said.
“What if we find the right locker? We don’t have the combination.”
“Maybe we do,” I said. “Remember what Zane told Janet? That number was the key to their future.”
Grace got it immediately. “3205. You think that’s the key to getting the hidden information?”
“Why else would Zane have written those numbers down?” I asked. Steve, the white-haired janitor, was going out as we got to the door.
“What brings you two back here so soon?” he asked.
“We need your help,” I said. “Have you done anything with those new locks you found on the empty lockers yet?”
“No,” he said in disgust. “They are really heavy-duty. My bolt-cutters won’t even work on them. I’m going to have to get a special blade for my saw and cut them off.”
“That must make them pretty high-end,” I said, beginning to feel better about my theory.
“It was an expensive prank, that’s for sure,” he said.
“Could we see the locks ourselves?” Grace asked him sweetly.
He shrugged. “I don’t see why not. Come on. You can be my guests.”
“That’s nice of you,” I said.
“Everybody’s in an assembly, so the hallway should be empty,” he said.
As Steve led us to the first locker, I entered the numbers Maria had reported seeing on the slip of paper Janet had dropped at Napoli’s. Three to the left, past it again to the right for the twenty, and then straight to the five. If this was the right locker, we’d soon have the evidence that we’d been looking for.
It wouldn’t budge.
“Try it again,” Grace urged.
I did, twice more, with the same results.
“Where’s the next one?” I asked.
“Right over here,” he said. “Do you really think you can crack one of these? They’re supposed to be foolproof.”
“I’m not sure yet,” I said as I worked on the second lock with the same end results.
“How about the next one?” I asked.
“It’s over here,” he said as he led the way. “If this doesn’t work, there’s only one lock left. How sure are you that you’ve got the right combination?”
“I’m not sure at all,” I said. “All I can do is keep trying.”
“I like your spirit, I’ll say that much for you,” he said.
The third lock refused to yield on my first attempt, and I thought about giving up, but I had to give it two more tries before I moved on to the last locker.
I couldn’t believe it when the lock opened the next time I entered the combination!
“Well, well, well. That’s impressive. What good does it do you, though?” Steve asked.
I didn’t know, but whatever might be in there, I didn’t want Steve to see it. “Grace, you were going to ask Steve something earlier, weren’t you?”
She got it instantly. “Thanks for reminding me.” She put her arm in the janitor’s, and then she asked, “Steve, are you good with sticking doors?”
“I’ve managed to free one a time or two in the past,” he said.
She led him away as she asked, “Could you give me a few tips, then?”
I doubted that he even knew what she was doing. I had to work quickly, though. I pulled the lock off the hasp and swung the locker open.
Inside were two envelopes.
One was marked with Tom Hancock’s name, and the other had Billy Briscoe’s on it.
Mr. Branch must have been telling the truth, because there wasn’t an envelope for Candy Murphy there. He really had paid the blackmail money.
A sudden thought occurred to me as I stuck the envelopes in the back of my shirt. What had happened to the cash Zane had gotten? Had the killer taken it, or was it hidden somewhere else on the school grounds? I’d have to figure that out later. Right now, the most important thing for us to do was to find the murderer.
“It was empty,” I said sadly as I rejoined Grace and Steve.
He shrugged. “Sorry about that,” and then he turned back to Grace. “Like I said, I get off in an hour, and I’d be happy to come by your place and take a look at that door.”
“If I can’t fix it with your advice, I’ll take you up on it later,” she said as she disengaged her arm. “Thanks again for your time.”
“It was my pleasure,” he said.
We were three steps away when he called my name.
Steve must have seen the bulge in the back of my shirt.
I was all set to explain when he asked, “Would you like that lock anyway? It might come in handy down the road.”
“Sure, why not?” I asked as I took it from him and put it around a loop in my blue jeans.
“It wasn’t really empty, was it?” Grace asked me once we were safely back outside.
“No, we hit pay dirt,” I said as I pulled the envelopes out from the back of my shirt where I’d first tucked them.
“Suzanne, that was absolutely brilliant,” she said as she looked at them.
“Don’t give me too much credit. If we hadn’t seen that guy struggling to open his bicycle lock, I never would have made the leap.”
“You shouldn’t sell yourself too short. If it hadn’t been that, I’m sure that it would have been something else. I know you might not think this is ethical, but we need to read whatever is in those envelopes,” she said as she tapped them in my hand.
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said.
“All right then,” Grace answered with a grin. “As long as we’re on the same page.”
“I don’t want to dig through this muck any more than you do, but it might be the only way we uncover the killer.”
“Where should we go to look at what you found?” Grace asked.
“Let’s head over to the donut shop,” I said. “It’s the only place we can be sure that no one is going to sneak up on us.”
“That sounds like a good plan to me,” she said.
We got to Donut Hearts, and after I let us in, I locked the door behind us.
“Should we sit here where it’s comfy?” she asked as she pointed to my favorite couch.
“No, we’re too exposed here,” I said. “Let’s do this in the kitchen. The barstools back there might not be as comfortable as the furniture out here, but at least no one will be able to see what we’re up to.”
“That’s a good enough reason for me,” she said.
Once we got in back, I flipped on some of the lights, not enough to shine through to the dining area, but enough to illuminate the pages that we were both about to read.
“Which one should we open first?” Grace asked after we were both settled in.
“Let’s see what Tom’s envelope says,” I replied as I tore it open. Inside, there were IOUs, bank deposit slips, even larger ones for withdrawals, and a photocopy of a document that proved that Tom had stolen money from not only Zane, but a dozen other people as well.
“Do you know what this means?” I as
ked Grace as I pushed the documents across the counter toward her.
“Tom Hancock is a thief, pure and simple. What did he do with all that money?”
“I don’t know, but Zane had him dead to rights. If Tom didn’t share some of it with Zane, he was going to jail.”
“Man, and to think that I loved that guy once upon a time.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” I said. “You loved the boy, not the man that he became.”
“In a way it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Not on your life,” I said. “We can’t be responsible for who the people we once loved have become. Nobody has a crystal ball, Grace.”
“Still, I shudder when I think about what might have happened this weekend if Zane hadn’t been murdered.”
“You can’t live your life that way, either,” I said. “Shall we see what he had on Billy?”
That envelope was more puzzling. It held an old clipping from a newspaper in Hickory dated the night before we all graduated from high school, with something attached to the back of it.
“It’s a newspaper clipping?” Grace asked. “What’s the story about?”
“A hit-and-run accident,” I said. They hadn’t caught the driver, and an older woman and her best friend had died at the scene.
“What’s on the next page?” she asked me.
It was a picture of Billy on graduation day in his cap and gown. He was sporting a black eye, and he looked miserable.
Grace looked at it. “I remember that. Billy was so drunk he fell out of bed the day we graduated and gave himself a black eye. Remember?”
“I remember the story,” I said. “But what if he made himself look the fool so no one would realize what had really happened?”
“Do you think that he killed those women back then?” Grace asked.
“Think about it. Did you ever see his car again after that?”
“It’s all coming back to me now,” Grace said. “He had to ride to graduation with his parents because he said he’d left his car someplace with the keys in it and it had been stolen. I thought it was just one more stupid thing he’d done. I never dreamed that he was covering up a pair of murders.”
“We need to call Chief Martin,” I said as I pushed the papers aside.
“Suzanne, we still don’t know which man is the murderer,” Grace said.
“That may be, but if what’s in Billy’s envelope is true, he’s already a killer.”
I got the chief, and I was about to tell him what we knew when he cut me off. “I can’t talk,” he said in a near-whisper. “We’re getting ready to take Tom Hancock down.”
“Where are you?”
“Out at his parents’ cabin on the lake,” he whispered. “He doesn’t even know that we’re here.”
“There’s something else you need to know,” I said.
“No time right now. We’re getting ready to move,” he said, and then he hung up on me.
“What just happened?” Grace asked.
“They’re about to arrest Tom Hancock at his parents’ lake house,” I explained.
“Do they think he’s the killer?”
“They must, but I’ve got a hunch that Billy did it,” I said. “Tom might do some jail time for what he did, but Billy’s crimes are a lot more serious, motive enough to kill Zane to protect himself.”
“We don’t know where Billy is, though,” Grace said. “Do you think there’s a chance that he’s still at the hotel after what happened with Janet?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but we have to look for him.”
“I’m just as willing to run into a burning building as you are, but shouldn’t we have some backup here, Suzanne?”
“We can’t call Jake, he’s on that case all the way across the state, and George is visiting Polly in Raleigh. He’s trying to woo her back here. I’m afraid that we’re on our own, Grace, and we can’t really wait around for reinforcements.”
“Okay then,” she said after taking a deep breath. “Let’s go find Billy ourselves.”
In the end, we didn’t have to go as far as we’d feared we’d have to in order to track the man down, because he was waiting outside the donut shop for us both when we started to leave.
And what made matters worse was that there was a knife in his hand.
Chapter 19
“Get back inside,” Billy ordered us as he jabbed the knife in our direction. It was no steak knife, either. It was some kind of large hunting knife, with razor-sharp edges that caught the sunlight. I shivered as I imagined what it would do to bare skin.
“Take it easy,” I said, trying to calm him down a little.
He wasn’t interested in that at all. “Suzanne, you have four seconds to get that door open,” he said, “or one of you is going to get cut right here and now.”
I fumbled as I tried to put the key in the lock, hearing an ominous countdown in my head as the seconds slipped past.
“Time’s up,” he said coldly just as the key made it in.
“I got it,” I said as I pulled the door open.
“Get inside then,” he ordered.
We did as he asked, and I prayed that someone had seen what had happened. It was broad daylight, and we were being abducted at knifepoint on Springs Drive! How had no one seen it happen? When I did something stupid or embarrassing in front of my donut shop, it seemed as though the entire town was watching, but now, when I needed them the most, they were nowhere to be found.
“What do you want from us?” Grace asked, her voice cracking a little as she spoke. I looked into her eyes and saw that she was petrified, more afraid than I’d ever seen her in my life.
“I’m not an idiot. If we stay out here, someone’s going to see us,” he said. “Get into the kitchen. Now!”
We did as he ordered, and as I walked into the tight room, I tried to think of something I could use as a weapon to fight back with. If he’d had a gun, our odds would have been quite a bit worse, but surely there was something back there I could use to fight him off.
Unfortunately, everything was put away. Emma had done too good a job cleaning up the kitchen, and the only thing close enough to grab was the heavy donut dropper I used to make our cake donuts. I knew from experience that if I could swing it hard enough, it would become a deadly weapon in its own right. There was a heavy indentation on the wall that proved that.
But how was I going to be able to get the time I needed to grab it and swing it at Billy’s knife?
I’d just have to stall him until I could think of something.
“You didn’t kill Zane so that you could have Janet for yourself, did you?” I asked him.
He shook his head and snarled. “Why would I want her? She was just one more way for me to get to Zane. He’s the one who put it all together about what I’d done the night before we all graduated, and he claimed that he had substantial evidence on me. Where’s that envelope?”
“What envelope?” I asked. I’d put it under the counter in the kitchen when we’d left, hoping that would be enough to keep it safe.
“Why do you think I’m here?” he asked. “I saw you leave the gym with two envelopes. It was pretty careless taking them out in plain sight like you did. Where were they hidden, anyway? I looked everywhere for them after I got rid of Zane.”
Grace spoke up. “They were in one of the empty lockers at the school. Zane put new locks on four of them so he could hide the evidence in plain sight.”
Billy nodded and even smiled a little. “That was crafty of him. How did you figure it out? I’ve been beating in my brains trying to find those papers.”
“It took us awhile,” I said.
“Let’s see what we’ve got then,” Billy said.
Once he had those papers, I knew that Grace and I were as good as dead. There’d be no reason for him to keep us alive once he had them, so I had to act before I turned them over to him. “I still can’t believe that you killed Zane. You were drunk at the reunion. I kn
ow that firsthand. You approached me early on, remember, and you absolutely reeked of alcohol, Billy.”
“I didn’t take a single sip all night,” he said. “I did, however, spill an entire drink on my clothes to make it appear that I was too drunk to kill Zane.”
Sweet Suspects (The Donut Mysteries) Page 19
