An Imitation of Murder (Sky High Pies Cozy Mysteries Book 9)

by Mary Maxwell

  “I wonder if Eva King could be Oscar’s wife,” I said, sifting through what little I knew about the guy that ran the art gallery.

  Trent glared at me. “She was his sister,” he said. “But she died when they were kids from a rare disease called…” His eyes bounced down to the notepad again. “…ah, it’s here somewhere,” he continued, sounding more frustrated than a few seconds before. “I could swear I wrote it down when Tyler called me on the drive.”

  “You were taking notes while driving?” I asked. “Isn’t that illegal?”

  He answered with a blistering scowl. Then he said, “What else did Pia tell you?”

  “Hmmm…”

  “I don’t have all day, Katie. There’s something about this story that isn’t exactly adding up. Your friend claims that she walked into an empty house where the living room floor was covered with blood. We’ve got a dead girl calling 911. And then you somehow got mixed up in all of it. Do you have any clues about what’s going on? Because I sure don’t.”

  I raised one eyebrow. “Neither do I, Deputy Chief Walsh.”

  “Then let’s get on with it,” he said. “Just the highlights. What else do you know?”

  “Well, Pia and Vito have been dating,” I said. “That was something new that I hadn’t heard until quite recently.”

  He smiled. “Slowpoke. I ran into Myra Wheeler and Agnes Grimsby at Food Town a couple of weeks ago. They were both chattering away about the millionaire artist and the divorced caterer.”

  “What did they say?”

  He shrugged and rolled his eyes. “You know how it is. If they’re just gossiping about people, I maybe catch every third or fourth word. So that night at the store, I heard, like, ‘Pia Lincoln, blah blah blah, too much makeup, blah blah blah, that painter from New York City, blah blah blah, then maybe something about how she was robbing the cradle and—”

  “Whoa! Robbing the cradle?”

  Trent laughed. “Yeah, that’s what Myra kept saying. Vito’s around thirty and Pia is in her late forties.”

  “She’s thirty-nine,” I said defensively. “Just a few years older than you.”

  His chin jutted out. “I’ll be thirty-three next birthday, Katie.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Like I said, Pia is just a few years older than you.”

  “Can we get back to business?” he asked.

  I smiled, waiting for his next question.

  “Did she mention anything about a silver Aston Martin?” Trent said.

  I blinked. “Pia?”

  “Yes, Katie. Did she tell you that a silver Aston Martin was parked in Marclay’s driveway when she arrived.”

  “No, she told me there was nobody in the house,” I said. “Why are you asking about an Aston Martin?”

  He reached into his pocket, retrieved his phone and then worked the screen for a few seconds.

  “Because of this,” he said, holding the phone toward me.

  The screen was filled with the image of a two-door silver sports coupé parked in front of Vito Marclay’s front door.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  “It’s the car,” Trent answered. “The silver—”

  “Right, of course,” I interrupted. “I see that it’s a silver sports car. But how is this picture associated with Pia Lincoln and whatever happened here at Vito’s house this afternoon?”

  Trent tapped the screen before sliding the phone back into his pocket.

  “Because that was from Pia’s Instagram,” he said. “She took that picture and posted it about five minutes before we got the call from Eva King.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Zack was on a weeklong trip to Santa Fe for a freelance photography assignment. Besides shooting dozens of images for a turquoise jewelry catalog, the trip involved a deluxe casita at the Four Seasons, chilled bottles of bubbly delivered to his room every afternoon and incredible views of the surrounding mountains.

  “You’d hate it here, sweetheart,” he’d joked the first night. “The bathroom has a heated floor and huge soaking tub, there’s a kiva fireplace and I just ordered dinner from the most incredible room service menu you can imagine.”

  Although I was going to miss him terribly and felt a smidge envious, I’d decided to use the time to catch up with friends, clean my apartment and work on a couple of new cupcake recipes. But after the unsettling afternoon at Vito Marclay’s, my original plan to dust and vacuum seemed a little too lonesome. Instead, I’d invited my neighbor to join me for tacos and a margarita at Cactus Moon, a small restaurant that had opened the same year my grandmother launched Sky High Pies.

  “This is such a good idea,” Viveca gushed, sliding into the booth across from me. “Holt has his weekly poker game tonight, so I’d been trying to decide between a can of tomato soup or microwave popcorn.”

  When I moved back to Crescent Creek after a dozen years in Chicago, Viveca England was the first person that I met. She’d recently started dating a guy named Holt Crosby, so our regular chats now included updates on our respective romances as well as news about the fledgling interior design business that she’d decided to launch from her home office.

  “I’m glad we could do this,” I said, sipping the glass of chardonnay that I’d ordered before she arrived. “It was a crazy afternoon and I didn’t really want to clean my apartment tonight.”

  She rolled her eyes and giggled. “Talk about crazy,” she said. “I spent an hour on the phone with my ex-husband.”

  “What’s going on with him?”

  She laughed again. “That’s the problem. He hit a brick wall and expects me to help him figure out how to put the pieces back together again.”

  I’d heard enough from Viv to know that she and her ex had a turbulent marriage. But it had been months since she’d mentioned him. In recent weeks, she’d been happy and content with her new relationship and the prospects of her business venture.

  “You know what?” she said. “I don’t want to talk about my stuff. Why was your day so crazy?”

  I took a quick sip of wine before asking if she knew Pia Lincoln.

  “The caterer?”

  I nodded.

  “I met her once,” Viv said. “At a fundraiser for the pet shelter.”

  “Well, she called me earlier from her fiancé’s house,” I said. “There had been some kind of…well, it looked like someone had been gravelly wounded or possibly killed, and—”

  “What?” Viv’s eyes were wide and her mouth hung open.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s disturbing, very, very disturbing. She called me in shock and asked me to come over.”

  Viv nodded. “And I can tell from the look on your face that you did.”

  “Right,” I said. “She walked into something that none of us should ever see.”

  “Was her fiancé…” Viv gulped in a breath. “…dead?”

  I shook my head. “No, he wasn’t even there. The house was empty.”

  Viv frowned slightly. “Wait a sec. Pia found…what? The aftermath of something bad?”

  “Yes, there was a great deal of blood,” I said. “And there was evidence of a struggle—an overturned chair in the dining room, a broken vase in the entryway and a painting on the wall that had been punctured or torn.”

  “Where did you say this happened?” Viv asked in a hushed voice. “And who was involved?”

  “Pia’s fiancé is Vito Marclay. It happened at his place on Balsam Drive. As for who was involved, there’s no way to know at this point. The house was empty when Pia arrived.”

  “Do you know him?” Viv asked.

  “No, I haven’t met him. Have you?”

  Before she could answer, the restaurant’s owner approached our table. He was a middle-aged man with a bushy beard and thinning hair named Bryce Endicott. His parents had opened Cactus Moon shortly before Bryce was born. He’d worked at the restaurant for the past few years, preparing for the moment his mother and father decided they were ready to trade chips and salsa for AARP ca
rds and a condo in Scottsdale.

  “Good evening, ladies,” he said. “How are we tonight?”

  Viv smiled. “I’ll be a little bit better if I can get something to drink.”

  Bryce frowned. “Oh, I’m so sorry. We’ve got a couple of new employees tonight. Have you been waiting long?”

  Viv laughed brightly. “Not at all. And I completely understand.”

  “What can I bring you?” he asked.

  “I’ll have a glass of whatever Katie’s drinking,” Viv said.

  Bryce bowed slightly and headed for the bar.

  “I didn’t mean to make him feel bad,” she whispered.

  “It’s fine,” I assured her with a wave of one hand. “He had two people quit last week, so things are a little bumpy at the moment.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  I smiled. “Boy meets girl,” I said. “Girl quits job. Boy and girl leave town to find their happily ever after on a tropical island.”

  Viv laughed again. “Are you talking about the cute little blonde and the bartender with all the tattoos?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh! I knew it! Holt and I came here for dinner a couple of weeks ago. The bartender told us he was new in town, and she was making eyes at him the whole night.”

  “Candy and Wendell,” I said. “Love at first sight. And a shared dream to live in Hawaii.”

  Bryce returned with Viv’s wine and apologized again for the delay.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ve all been there before.”

  He made a face. “I suppose so, but there seems to be a scarcity of good employees these days.”

  I glanced over at the new bartender. She was carefully pouring vodka into a shot glass. Her hands were shaking so badly that some of the liquor splashed onto the bar.

  “She’ll get the hang of it,” Bryce said confidently. “Otherwise, we’ll be heading for divorce court.”

  I did a double take. “Is that…” I narrowed my gaze to study the woman’s face. “Oh, my goodness! It is Molly, isn’t it?”

  Bryce’s face lit up with a proud smile. “Doesn’t she look fantastic? As of last Monday, she’s lost one-hundred and sixteen pounds.”

  “Well, she looks even more stunning than before,” I said. “I’ll stop over and chat after a bit.”

  “She’d like that,” Bryce said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check on the kitchen. We also have a new line cook, and he’s having a hard time remembering the difference between taquitos and tostadas.”

  CHAPTER 9

  An hour later, Viv was sipping her second glass of wine and I was trying to decide if a third sopapilla was worth the calories.

  “Go for it!” my mischievous neighbor cheered. “You only live once!”

  I decided she was right and took a bite of the puffy fried tortilla coated with sugar and honey.

  “Hmmm,” I purred. “These are addicting!”

  “I know,” Viv said, tapping her half-eaten dessert with a spoon. “Why do you think I ordered the flan? It’s too rich for me to finish, so I feel a lot less guilty.”

  While I savored the rest of my sopapilla, Viv asked me to loop back to the story I’d started before we ordered dinner.

  “About Pia?” I asked, licking a drop of honey from my fingers.

  She nodded. “What’s the latest?”

  “I haven’t heard anything since I left Vito Marclay’s,” I answered. “I’ll probably give Trent a call when I get home.”

  “Where’s Pia now?”

  “I imagine she’s still at the station talking to Dina Kincaid.”

  Viv frowned as she leaned closer. “Do you think she…killed him?” Her voice was low and cautious. “I mean, you said there was a lot of blood, right?”

  “I can’t say for certain. I never went inside. But from what Pia told me and what Trent talked about later, it looked like someone had been badly injured.”

  “Or killed,” Viv said, cupping one hand to her mouth. “Maybe it was a lovers’ quarrel.” She leaned back and drank more wine. “Or a crime of passion. I saw a Dateline the other night that was all about this husband who strangled his wife to death after she flirted with their chauffeur.”

  I listened as Viveca recounted the television program in its entirety. She told me about the resentment and duplicity that had simmered below the surface for months before the man lashed out at his wife in a jealous rage. She described the murder and resulting investigation. And then she summarized the husband’s defense strategy.

  “Sleepwalking?” I said incredulously when she finished. “Did it work?”

  Viv smiled. “Like a dream! They did tests on his brain while he was asleep, like the kind where they attach all those little doodads to your head. When he woke up the next day, the doctors determined that he had a really bad case of a sleep disorder called parasomnia.”

  “Well, I don’t know if that’s involved with whatever happened at Vito Marclay’s,” I said. “But I do know that I’ve never seen Pia quite so distraught.”

  “I can’t even imagine,” Viv said. “I mean, if I walked into someone’s house and found blood everywhere, I don’t think I could even dial the phone to call the police.”

  “No doubt,” I said. “That’s why she called me. She was able to get her phone out of her purse, but the best she could do was hit the redial button.”

  “Which was you?”

  I nodded.

  “And so you called 911?” Viv asked, picking up her spoon for another bite of flan.

  “Yep. I did. And so did someone named Eva King.”

  Viv’s eyes shot up from the dessert. “Did you say Eva King?”

  The whiplash reaction was surprising, but I didn’t have to wait long for an explanation. Before I could respond to her query, Viv blurted a few follow-up details that justified her words as well as the incredulous expression on her face.

  “I was in the hardware store earlier,” she said. “And I heard two women whispering about someone by that name.”

  “They were talking about Eva King?”

  She shook her head. “Whispering,” she said again. “Not talking. And that’s part of the reason I noticed them in the first place.”

  “Because they were talking softly?”

  “Yes,” Viv said. “And please don’t judge; it’s human nature to try and hear when other people are whispering.”

  I smiled. “Especially in a place like Crescent Creek.”

  “You got that right,” Viv agreed. “And as I listened to them murmuring, the one thing I distinctly remember was they both seemed to think it was funny that a dead person had called 911.” Viveca’s eyes sparked with contempt. “I mean, how perfectly awful is that? To make jokes about someone who’s passed away?”

  I felt my breath catch in my throat.

  “Can you say that again?” I asked.

  “Which part?” she said. “I was in the hardware—”

  “Just the last thing,” I interrupted. “About the 911 call.”

  “Okay, sure. The two women were talking about how funny it was that someone named Eva King had called 911 because she’d been dead for decades.”

  I let the words echo for a moment in my mind before I thanked Viv for sharing the story about the overheard conversation.

  “No problem,” she said. “I just thought it was totally bizarre that you mentioned the name because I just heard it earlier in the day.”

  “Did you see who it was?” I asked. “The two women talking about Eva King?”

  Viv shook her head. “Sorry, but I didn’t. By the time I walked down the aisle and around the corner, there was nobody in the area.”

  “Anything you remember about their voices?” I asked. “Maybe a distinctive accent or a particular phrase?”

  She bit her lower lip, considering the question as she replayed the incident in her mind.

  Viv shrugged. “No, I didn’t notice anything special,” she said. “But I remember that the loud
er of the two said, ‘We’re going to do whatever it takes to sell those portraits and teach him a lesson.’”

  “Those portraits?” I said. “As in more than one?”

  “I guess so,” Viv answered. “Then she added something about it being another reason the police would focus on Oscar.”

  “Really? They actually said that?”

  Viv nodded. “Yes,” she told me. “But after that, Leroy Bosch and his kids came into the store, so you can imagine how hard it was to eavesdrop on what was being said in the next aisle.”

  Leroy Bosch and his wife were the proud parents of three young boys under the age of nine. Whenever they came to Sky High Pies for breakfast or lunch, Harper always joked that she deserved special wages to clean up after the Bosch kids.

  “They’re experts at using maple syrup as glue,” she’d told me during their most recent visit. “I found a knife and fork attached to the bottom of the table about an hour after they left.”

  I was smiling about the memory when I heard Viveca tapping a spoon on her water glass.

  “Oh, sorry!” I apologized. “Your comment about Leroy and Ellen’s band of bruisers reminded me of something that happened at Sky High.”

  She smiled. “Yeah, they’re pretty darn memorable alright. That’s part of the reason I got out of the hardware store as soon as I could.”

  “Smart move,” I said.

  “And one that I will probably make again and again,” Viv added. “Until the youngest Bosch boy is, oh, I don’t know, maybe twenty-five.”

  CHAPTER 10

  When Trent answered the phone that night, his voice made it clear that he wasn’t overjoyed to hear from me.

  “Do you know what time it is, Katie?”

  I glanced at the clock on the microwave in my kitchen.

  “It’s a few minutes after ten,” I said. “Are you already in bed?”

  “No, I’m watching the news. Channel 4 came up from Denver to cover the Vito Marclay case. I guess the guy really is kind of famous.”

  “Seriously? They’ve got it on the news?”