Girl in the Shadows (Cozy Mystery) (Diamond Files Mysteries Book 1)

by Angela Pepper

  Derek opened the refrigerator and pulled out two cans of sparkling lemonade. He handed me one and set his on the counter. I grabbed a nearby tea towel and used it to dampen the sound of opening the cans. Derek's salt-and-pepper eyebrows rose in admiration.

  “That's impressive,” he whispered.

  I nearly burst out laughing. Opening a can of soda quietly was impressive? He was definitely trying to boost my confidence, but I saw right through it. I'd had a coach who'd done the same thing, offering lame compliments for the smallest things. I was onto guys like Derek Diamond and their tricks.

  In the next room, Mitzi was getting louder—loud enough for us to hear what she was saying in the interview. “I didn't do anything wrong,” she was saying. “A woman has to protect her family.”

  The male detective asked, “Protect them? What did you do to protect your family? Who did you hire to kill your husband?”

  She let out a strangled laugh. “Don't be preposterous!”

  “We know you're involved. The sooner you tell us the truth, the sooner this can all be over.”

  “When do I get my shoes back?”

  “Ma'am, they're evidence.”

  She yelled back, “Evidence I walked across my own damn lawn! I got those grass stains when I went out to meet you and the rest of your thugs!”

  The female detective took a softer tone than her partner. “Mrs. Kensington, you were inside the residence when the first responders arrived.”

  “Of course I was,” Mitzi answered with disgust. “All the neighbors would have been gawking. I was on the front lawn before that. Before everyone arrived with lights flashing. That's when I got grass stains on my shoes.”

  “Are you sure about that? Is that really what happened?”

  Mrs. Kensington went quiet. Two minutes passed, and I heard only a few exasperated sighs.

  “She should have called her lawyer,” I whispered to Derek.

  He shrugged. “Her conscience isn't that guilty.”

  “But she still shouldn't talk to them without a lawyer. Do you think she's just being cheap?”

  “People aren't always rational,” he said.

  “Maybe she's broke because she spent all her liquid cash on a hit man.”

  Derek snorted softly. “If she'd hired a genuine professional, he would have done the whole job, including staging the burglary. If she threw the rock in the window, she was covering for someone or something.”

  “But why? If she came home and found her husband dead, why would she make it look like something else?”

  “You tell me,” Derek said. “Maybe he wasn't murdered.”

  I was being tested. I gave the matter some thought. There was another reason men were occasionally found dead by their own belts. Auto-erotic asphyxiation. This was the kinky, sexy stuff of tabloid scandals.

  After a moment, I answered, “She wanted to avoid embarrassment,” I said. “Mitzi Kensington was far more concerned about the neighbors seeing us at the front door than she was about the warrant. Maybe her husband accidentally killed himself while he was doing something private.”

  “Also known as death by misadventure,” Derek said.

  I grimaced and raised my hand like I was in a classroom. “I know, I know,” I whispered excitedly. “He was doing something nasty in the gyroscopic gym equipment and accidentally strangled himself. That's why she disassembled the thing.”

  Derek gave me another look of admiration. “Abby Silver, you have a dark mind. You really are a natural.”

  I beamed, and just as quickly, I wiped the grin off my face.

  On the other side of the wall, Mitzi had started talking, louder than ever.

  “I'm telling you, the shoe prints at the back of the house aren't mine,” she said vehemently. “You know who wears the same size shoes as me? That hussy!”

  One of the detectives asked, “What hussy?”

  “She must have broken in,” Mitzi said. “That's what happened. Brock had broken it off with her. He was loyal to me, you know. He'd have these flings, but they didn't mean anything to him.”

  “Your husband had a mistress?”

  “A mistress?” Mitzi let out a cruel laugh. “We're not French, detective. She was no mistress. Just a garden-variety slut. A whore! A pathetic freak who couldn't get a man of her own!”

  “Your husband was having an affair?”

  “Not anymore. He'd dumped her, but she couldn't stand it. She couldn't let him go. So she broke into our beautiful family home and... she must have done it. That's what happened. She broke in, and when he told her to leave, she killed him!”

  I shot Derek a look and whispered, “She's making this up as she goes along.”

  He held his finger to his lips. We both listened as she continued ranting, calling the woman every bad name in the book before breaking down into unintelligible sobs.

  The detectives patiently questioned her, probing for specific details.

  After several minutes, she composed herself enough to spit out a name. “Roxanne Hartley,” she said. “You need to find out where she was that night. Take a real good look at her. My Brock wasn't perfect, by any accounts, but she's worse. She's a killer.”

  Derek gave me a puzzled look. “Who?”

  “Roxanne Hartley,” I said. “She's not even mentioned once in the police report, but I know that name.”

  “Great,” Derek said. “We're done.”

  “The police will take it from here, I guess.”

  Derek stooped down and roused Chewie from her snoozing position on a pillow borrowed from another room. “Wake up, girl. Time to go sleep in your real bed.” He looked up at me. “We can go now, since we got what we came for.”

  “The shoes?” I asked. “So, we're done with the case?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “I guess we have to type up the reports.”

  Derek gave me an amused look. “Not until we have our killer.”

  “I'm sure the detectives will keep you informed. I mean, they let us come along and listen in to all of this.” I thumbed in the direction of the dining room. “What more do you want?”

  Derek gave me a deadly serious, intense look. “I want to look the killer in the eyes when I tell her she's going down for murder.”

  I glanced away. Was he serious? Derek Diamond had some unconventional methods, but that sounded like crazy talk to me.

  I muttered, “Oh, okay.”

  “And if we get started first thing tomorrow morning, we'll beat the police to Roxanne Hartley.”

  Chapter 6

  I got home at 10:10 p.m. and found my apartment still occupied. Specifically, my sofa was occupied by a lanky redhead bathed in flickering blue light. Owen had apparently moved some of his things in, including a large television.

  Owen turned down the volume on the TV and shook a bowl of popcorn invitingly. “Come get some,” he teased.

  “You're psychotic,” I said.

  “And you've had a long day,” he said, looking me up and down, his eyes lingering on the length of legs showing between my high heels and short skirt. “You look great, though.” He set aside the popcorn and patted the tops of his thighs. “Come give me a lap dance.”

  “You're disgusting,” I said.

  He growled back, “Just how you love it.”

  Shaking my head, I walked down the hallway and into the bedroom. When I'd ditched him there the night before, I thought he'd take a hint and leave. Getting rid of my ex was going to be more difficult than I'd hoped.

  I closed my bedroom door and sat on the edge of my bed. In the quiet, I realized my left ear had a mild ache, and the room had a slight spin. I'd had only a few sips of wine at the Kensington residence, hours earlier, so it wasn't inebriation that had me off kilter. It was my intermittent vertigo, coming back for a little reminder of how one small problem with the tiny tubes in my ears could make my whole world spin. Owen was a lot like vertigo. I sighed as I surveyed his wreckage so far. He had showered and carelessly
left his damp towel on the bed, where it would be sending dampness into the duvet and mattress. Owen had been wealthy his whole life. He didn't know how to take care of things or be aware of the damage he caused.

  I jumped up, ignoring the swirling in my head, grabbed the towel, and shoved it into the laundry bin. I cursed his name the whole time. I took off my expensive new suit, hung it in the closet with care, and changed into a sports bra, the nearest tracksuit, and my blue running shoes. The edge of the right sole was worn down already, but the shoes still had some life in them.

  I tucked my phone and keys into the waistband pocket, refilled my water bottle in the bathroom, and headed toward the apartment door. I didn't turn my head or even look at the lump on my sofa.

  I could feel Owen's eyes on me. He said, “It's getting a bit late for a jog in this neighborhood.”

  “I'll take my chances,” I said. To get away from you, I finished silently in my head.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, I'd lost track of which lap I was on. The smooth dirt of the local high school's track made satisfying crunch sounds with every step.

  I lost myself in the running meditation.

  When life gets rough for some people, they drink. That was Mitzi Kensington's method for coping with police showing up with a warrant for her stained Louboutin shoes.

  Other people play video games, gamble, surf the internet, sleep with strangers from a hook-up app, spend money shopping, or simply self-destruct.

  I run.

  The first few minutes are tough. Sometimes I start off running too fast, like today. I run like there's something behind me, and I find myself gasping, unable to catch the right rhythm. In those first moments, I wonder why I even run at all, if it means wheezing for oxygen while every muscle in my body complains. But I keep going, push through that initial membrane of resistance, and something else takes over.

  The engine.

  The engine is stronger than me.

  The farther I run, the more life's ups and downs smooth out into a flat line. My problems get smaller with every step. No matter the problem, running is my answer.

  They say when you have a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

  Every time I hit an obstacle in college, I'd go for a long run and the solution would come to me. Except it was always the same solution. Quit. Quit whatever I was doing and run toward something else. I switched my major so many times, it was a miracle I even graduated.

  Not that my puny four-year degree counted for much in the tight job market. Working for Derek Diamond, assisting him in an investigation, was the closest thing to an actual career I'd ever experienced. And it was fun. The experts say my generation should be worrying less about following our passions and worrying more about finding a job—any job. The fact that working for Derek was actually fun scared me. Was I chasing an illusion? If the temp agency placed me on more investigation jobs, assuming that was even possible, would it continue to be fun?

  The one thing that had always scared me, ever since I was little, was certainty—specifically, when other people had certainty. Where did certainty come from? How did other people figure out what they wanted in life? I didn't even know what a career passion felt like, much less what mine was.

  In college, whenever I took an entry-level course to explore a potential passion, I'd find myself surrounded by dozens of people who were already experts on the subject. It seemed like everyone else in the world had been born knowing what they wanted to do with their lives, and they all had years of experience on me. What would it feel like to be so certain?

  The only thing I had any certainty in was running. Even so, I had to fight those first minutes of doubt every single time.

  Something was fundamentally wrong with me. I was broken inside. I'd come into the world premature and underweight. Then I'd defied statistics and grown to be six feet tall. Other people were roses. I was a weed, an accident that persisted, albeit aimlessly.

  Distracted by my thoughts, I didn't see where I was running and stepped on a loose pebble. My foot slid and twisted my ankle uncomfortably. I hopped through the next few paces. It wasn't bad enough to slow me much, but I might feel it tomorrow.

  Tomorrow.

  I had no idea how Wednesday would end. We were meeting at the same diner again, and then meeting with the woman Mitzi Kensington claimed was obsessed with her husband.

  My pace picked up with the thought of asking more questions. And then I slowed again as I imagined myself screwing up. Even now, replaying my conversations from that day, I cringed at the bluntness of my words. I'd actually implied she was covering for something her daughter had done. It was a miracle the woman hadn't slapped me across the face and kicked me out of her house.

  No, investigating was not my calling. No matter how much Derek tried to boost my confidence, it wouldn't make up for the fact I didn't believe in myself.

  I was passionless. The essential thing inside me that was broken would never stop being that way. The best I could do was let my engine take over.

  Don't think. Just run.

  Don't question. Do the job, step by step, and go along.

  Don't think.

  Just run.

  * * *

  My mind was pleasantly blank when I finished my run and returned to my apartment building.

  The forced air blowing into the elevator cooled the sweat on my skin and made me shiver. It was a warm June evening, but I'd used all the energy stored in my muscles. I hadn't eaten enough that day. I was empty, and I felt like I might never be warm again.

  I opened the door of my apartment. The television was off, but Owen was still there, using his laptop on the sofa.

  He gave me a wary look, nothing moving except his eyeballs. He looked at me the same way he might have watched a wild animal who'd accidentally wandered into the apartment.

  I walked to the kitchen, filled a glass with tap water, and drank it. The kitchen was cleaner than it had been the day before. My bowl of avocados and tomatoes had gotten overripe and would need to be thrown out.

  I made eye contact with Owen, who was still frozen on the sofa.

  “Good run?” he asked.

  Trust a nonrunner to ask you a stupid question, like if a run was good or not. A run was always equal parts hell and ecstasy, and not the sort of thing you can express in words.

  I shrugged. “I need a shower.”

  “You want someone to wash your back?”

  I lifted the glass to my lips and let one final drop of water fall on my tongue.

  “Sure,” I said, setting the glass down.

  It was done.

  Owen would accompany me to the shower. He'd undress me, frown at the condition of my toes, and get the water the right temperature. I'd avoid his eyes but let him kiss me under the hot, steamy water. Then I would take him to my bed. I would tell him it meant nothing, and we weren't getting back together, and he'd pretend to be listening, but wouldn't hear a single word.

  In the back of my mind, I'd hear my friends telling me I was being an idiot.

  I'd tell them I'm always being an idiot, whether I'm sleeping with Owen or not, so what's the point in torturing myself over my choices?

  I had too much uncertainty in my life.

  It gave me great comfort, because even though I knew Owen was bad for me, at least I was certain it was wrong.

  Chapter 7

  WEDNESDAY

  9:05 a.m.

  Maggie's Diner

  Roxanne Hartley was the chic friend of Brock Kensington's that we'd seen in the photograph in his home office.

  Her name had not been mentioned in the police homicide report, but thanks to my memory, I did have some background information. Roxanne Hartley was an admirable local businesswoman who had worked her way up the corporate ladder, and now owned a cosmetics empire. Her chain of Hartley Cosmetics retail stores was a growing competition for Sephora.

  Roxanne believed in helping other women succeed. In addition to running th
e cosmetics chain, she was the founder of a charity that helped women in crisis. The organization helped by first getting at-risk women into safe housing, and then assisting them with resumes and a wardrobe for interviews, as well as ongoing career counseling.

  I'd never seen the woman in person, but I'd heard her interviews on the local radio stations. She was a winner. She didn't sound like the kind of loser who would have an affair with a married man, let alone kill him in a jealous rage.

  On Wednesday morning, I met Derek at the diner and filled him in on what I knew about Roxanne Hartley. He'd done some internet research overnight and come up with the same basics.

  “She's quite the woman,” he said. “A real role model.”

  “But something's not right with her,” I said. “She runs a charity to help victims of domestic violence. Why would she have an affair with a wife-beating jerk like Brock Kensington?”

  Derek gave me a sad look, like he genuinely felt sorry for me. “When you've been around as long as I have, those kinds of ironies don't surprise you anymore.”

  “Roxanne Hartley isn't such a winner after all,” I said.

  He looked me in the eye and said, “It's not our place to judge.”

  “She shouldn't act like she's so perfect, though. She's a liar.”

  “Spoken just like a twenty-five-year-old who's only starting to see the world as it truly is. People make choices every day that are no good for them. I reckon you're not perfect, either.”

  “Whatever.” I reached for my coffee, switched it to my left hand to avoid the lipstick smudge, and drained it.

  When the waitress came to refill our coffee cups, she gave Chewie, who was boldly sitting on the bench seat next to Derek, a dog biscuit and a head pat. People at nearby tables had been giving us curious looks, but nobody spoke a word to Derek about having a dog in the restaurant.

  Derek stirred his coffee and pulled out his phone to check messages.

  He frowned at the screen and informed me, “We've got good news and bad news. Which one do you want first?”

  I wished I was a good-news-first kind of girl, but I wasn't. “Let's start with the bad news.”