Lipstick on a Pig (A Paranormal Cozy Mystery) (Willow Bay Witches Book 4)

by Samantha Silver

  “Oh, yes, of course. Jessica. What an absolute tragedy. I truly hope and trust that the police will find the monster who killed such a promising young woman.”

  “What I’d like to know is how you can explain a third woman that you were seeing having either disappeared or turned up dead?” Jason apparently decided to go straight for the jugular after making Cork relax slightly. Jonathan Cork suddenly resembled a fish, his mouth opening and closing over and over without saying anything.

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” Cork finally managed to stammer out.

  “Don’t play dumb with me. I’m not here to write an article or some exposé. I know that you were sleeping with all three women. Jessica Oliver, Ella Port and Laura Kasic. Kasic and now Oliver are dead, and Port disappeared a few years ago. I think we can pretty safely assume she’s dead too.”

  “I’m not admitting to anything. I was Oliver and Kasic’s employer. Both were killed in unfortunate circumstances. While I can confirm that Ella Port was a client of the firm, I had no direct contact with her; her lawyer was another associate here.”

  Great. He was going all lawyer talk on us.

  “You were a suspect in the disappearance of Laura Kasic,” Sophie chimed in. “What do you have to say about that?”

  “I have to say that the police cleared me of any wrongdoing, I am not a suspect in her murder nor was I ever arrested for it, and now I’m leaving.”

  “Fine, but if you leave now, I promise you Jason will be writing an article detailing how three women you slept with have either been murdered or gone missing,” Charlotte said, and I looked over at her, shocked that she was willing to lie so blatantly.

  Cork looked torn as he looked from Charlotte to Jason. His look was hard; he wasn’t about to correct her. Finally, Cork sighed.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’m not admitting to any affairs. After all, I’ve been happily married for twenty years. However, it is true that two of my former employees and one former client have either been murdered, or disappeared. However, I had absolutely nothing to do with it.”

  “What was your alibi for Laura Kasic’s murder?” I asked. It was the earliest murder, and the one the police cleared him for.

  “I was in London.”

  “Like, London, England?” Sophie asked, and Cork nodded.

  “Yes. I’d flown out the day before. I showed the police my passport; immigration had stamped it right around the time Laura was murdered. There was absolutely no way I could have killed her, I was thousands of miles away by then.”

  Damn. There went my theory of an alibi that could maybe be disproven. Being on another continent was a pretty solid alibi for not killing someone.

  “How do we know you didn’t hire it out?” Jason asked him. Oh, yeah, I hadn’t even thought of that. Cork threw up his hands.

  “The police in Chicago thought that too. Ask them. They looked over every single financial record I had. There were no strange payments, other than, well, certain gifts that I gave to Laura. For her excellent work at the firm, of course.”

  “Of course,” Jason replied cooly.

  “And what about the others?” I asked. “Where were you when they were killed?”

  “A few days ago, when Jessica Oliver was killed, I don’t know the time of her death, but I spent that whole evening at home with my wife. When Ella disappeared, I was with my wife. She was giving birth to our third child, and had a horrendously long sixteen-hour labor. They were just about to give her a C-section when little Gemma finally popped out. From eight until noon the next day, I was at the hospital, waiting for my daughter to be born.”

  I shared a glance with Sophie. This wasn’t good. It seemed like maybe Jonathan Cork wasn’t our serial killer after all.

  “Fine,” I said. “Say we believe you. What reason do you think anyone could have had to kill the three women?”

  Jonathan Cork thought for a moment. “For Laura, I have absolutely no idea. She was a wonderful woman in every way. She had no enemies, no one who would want her dead. Ella, well, she had the lawsuit with her old boss. He got a little bit too hands-on, and when she went to HR, he fired her. She had a case, and a good one, too. Annie, her lawyer, had come to me a few times for advice, so while I didn’t work with Ella directly, I knew some of the details of her case.”

  I noticed that he was careful not to say that he didn’t know Ella at all, just that he didn’t work with her case.

  “I was sure the case was as close to a slam dunk as you can get in unlawful dismissal cases, which are notoriously hard to prove. Luckily Ella had done everything right. She had recorded dates and times when the harassment occurred, recorded conversations with her boss in secret, had kept all of her excellent performance reviews. The last one had been from a week before she was fired. Then the icing on the cake is she was fired the afternoon after complaining to HR. The morons didn’t even wait a few weeks to make it look like a coincidence. That’s the only thing I know about Ella that could have gotten her killed.”

  “And Jessica?”

  Smith shrugged. “She sometimes rubbed people the wrong way. She took a lot of care about her appearance, and she could get a bit disruptive if she didn’t get her way.”

  Gee, you don’t say, I thought to myself as Cork continued. “But it wasn’t anything that someone would want to kill her over. She might have rubbed some people the wrong way, but that was it.”

  “Thanks,” I said to Jonathan Cork.

  “You’re not going to write all that in the paper, are you? Please, my wife…” Smith trailed off.

  “Maybe if you really care about your wife you won’t stick it into the first skinny blonde thing you see next time,” Jason replied. “But no, I won’t be running an article about you. You don’t need to worry about that.”

  Visibly shaken, Cork nodded curtly and got into his car, starting it in record time and racing out of the lot.

  As the three of us went to the car, I noticed Charlotte hanging back. Whatever spell she’d set, she was obviously going to reverse it as soon as Jason was out of earshot.

  When we were back on the road to Willow Bay—Charlotte driving her own car back—Jason, Sophie and I discussed what we’d found out.

  “So do you guys think he’s the murder, or not?” Sophie asked as she drove down the Interstate so fast that I was more focused on our impending deaths in a fiery wreck than the conversation.

  “I don’t think he did it,” Jason replied first. “He seems like the kind of guy who just doesn’t have it in him. He’s the perfect weasel-like personal injury attorney. The kind who looks good, says the right thing, and fights all his battles in a court of law. Not the kind of guy to go out and murder women he’s been with in cold blood. That said, I could see him being the type to hire a hit. I just don’t see him getting his hands dirty, and his alibis did seem pretty solid, without checking them.”

  “I think you’re right,” I replied slowly, my eyes watching the speedometer. “I don’t think he’s the kind of person that would kidnap someone, murder them and hide the body in the woods.”

  “So we’re back to square one, basically,” Sophie said.

  “No, I don’t think we’re quite there,” I replied. “I think that there is definitely a link between the three women, and I think there’s a serial killer out there. It’s just probably not Jonathan Cork. Unless he hired a hitman.”

  “Which we have no way of figuring out if he did or not,” Sophie answered.

  “If solving murders was easy, everyone would be doing it,” Jason offered in reply.

  “And the murder rate would probably go down,” I muttered. If only.

  Chapter 14

  We dropped Jason back off at his home, then Sophie and I went back home. We opened the door to find Sprinkles lying next to it with his hands in between his paws.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he whined as soon as we entered. Sophie and I looked at each other. Uh oh. This wasn’t good.

 
; As Sophie and I made our way to the living room, my first thought was how on earth did it start snowing in here? until I realized it wasn’t snow. It was toilet paper.

  “Bee,” I muttered, looking around for the guilty party. It couldn’t be that hard. After all, Bee was a black cat, in a living room covered in white toilet paper. It had all been torn to shreds; even the two cardboard rolls I spotted lying on the ground had been thoroughly destroyed. And it wasn’t like she’d just left the toilet paper in a neat little pile in the middle of the room.

  No, the toilet paper was everywhere. She would have made teenagers playing a prank proud. Shreds of toilet paper covered the couch, the bookcase; a string was hanging off the TV. There was even a long string of toilet paper hanging off one of the blades of the fan, reaching halfway down to the floor. Bee had obviously put a lot of effort into ensuring the living room had been well and truly decorated.

  “What?” my cat asked innocently. She was lying on top of her climbing tower—which was, unsurprisingly, the only part of the room that didn’t have any toilet paper on it—basking in a ray of sunshine that was pouring in through the window.

  “Do you want to explain this?” I asked, motioning to the toilet paper.

  “Explain what? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The toilet paper, Bee. How did all this toilet paper get here?”

  “Ohhh, that. I think it was the dog. I barely even noticed it.”

  “Well I don’t think it was the dog at all.” I crossed my arms across my chest to let Bee know I was serious about this. She replied by rolling onto her side and stretching her limbs, then closing her eyes once more.

  “You’re allowed your opinion. Oh, wait. You think I did it?” Bee suddenly asked, opening her eyes wide in innocent protestation.

  “Yes, Bee. I think you did it.”

  I could see Sophie struggling not to laugh next to me, even though she could only understand my half of the conversation.

  “Well, I can’t say I did. However, I must say that whatever gremlins crawled out of the woodwork and did do this might have left if you had been home.”

  Ah. So I was being punished for going away. That was the reason for today’s batch of psycho from my cat.

  “Oh, so that’s what this is about, is it? And why did my going away result in this redecoration of the living room?”

  “You should ask Gloria. She came by with Buster earlier. She might know, even if she wasn’t able to get into the house.”

  That explained it. Gloria was a woman who had recently retired to Willow Bay from Portland. She’d brought her cat Buster to my vet clinic a couple of months ago, and he and Bee had immediately hit it off. Ever since, Gloria would bring Buster into the clinic once or twice a week and the two of them would spend the day together—usually sitting on top of the bookcase, mocking and judging the other animals that came into the clinic together. Gloria must have come by to drop Buster off for a play-date while the vet clinic was closed.

  “Look, Bee. I’m sorry you didn’t get to play with Buster today. But this is completely unacceptable,” I told her as I started to scoop up shreds of toilet paper off the ground.

  “I told you, I didn’t do it,” Bee replied comfortably from her spot in the ray of sunshine.

  “Of course you didn’t,” I muttered as Sophie began to help me clean up. Just then, Charlotte came in through the front door.

  “Well, this is different,” she said as she walked into the living room.

  “Bee had a bit of a fit because Buster came by and no one was here to let him into the house,” I explained, glaring at my cat.

  “Don’t tell her lies, I told you I didn’t do it.”

  “And I don’t believe you,” I shot back.

  “First you abandon me for the whole day, and now you don’t take my word for anything. The betrayal is like a knife through my heart.” I rolled my eyes. Bee could be so dramatic.

  “What was the spell you cast when we saw Jonathan Cork?” I asked Charlotte, who gave me a small smile.

  “I have to say, I surpassed even myself,” she bragged. “I managed to pull off a truth-telling spell.”

  Sophie and I stared at her. “Really?” I asked. Truth-telling spells were among the most difficult spells in the witch world to pull off. Charlotte nodded, unable to hide the slightly smug smile from her face.

  “Yup. First one I’ve really tried. At least, I’m pretty sure it worked.”

  “How would you know if it didn’t work?” I asked.

  “He probably would have started babbling incoherently, or making completely false statements. That’s why it’s such a dangerous spell to pull off.”

  “Wait,” I said. “What about the fact that he wouldn’t admit he was having an affair with the three women?”

  “Well he never actually denied it. He just said he wouldn’t admit to anything. Plus, it was my first ever truth spell, it was never going to be perfect.”

  “Oh, sure, now you’re being humble about it,” Sophie teased.

  Charlotte shrugged. “Hey, if you had pulled off an almost fully functional truth-telling spell, you’d be bragging too.”

  “Yeah, well, I can talk to Sprinkles,” Sophie said, patting her dog’s head happily.

  “Get back to me when you can do more than just one magic thing,” Charlotte replied, and Sophie glared at her. Sophie’s lack of magical abilities were a little bit of a touchy subject for her, so I interrupted before she had a chance to reply.

  “So what this means is that Cork wasn’t lying when he said he didn’t hire a hitman?” I asked Charlotte. She nodded.

  “Yes. He wouldn’t have been able to lie about it; he would have only been able to dodge the question.”

  “So that definitively crosses him off our suspect list,” I muttered. In a way, it was a good thing. After all, I couldn’t see a man like that murdering women in cold blood. I could have seen him hiring out a hit, though.

  “And now we’re back to no suspects,” Sophie muttered, grabbing a pile of toilet paper and throwing it dejectedly back onto the floor.

  * * *

  An hour later I decided to drop past the vet clinic to grab some files I wanted to look over before we re-opened, and also take a few minutes to myself as I thought about everything we knew about the case.

  As I walked the twenty minutes from home toward Main Street, I thought over everything we knew about the case. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure there was a serial killer out there. It was just too much of a coincidence that Jessica Oliver looked almost exactly like the other two women who had presumably had affairs with Jonathan Smith and either disappeared or been killed. No, I knew we had to be on the right track with the serial killer angle.

  The problem was, we had no idea who to look at. I thought maybe the four of us could go to the funeral, at least that way we could maybe talk to some of Jessica Oliver’s coworkers again and get an idea of who could be a suspect. It had to be someone who had worked at the firm in Chicago and then in Portland, so it wasn’t likely to be a low-level worker where the turnover would have been high. I suspected we were looking at associates, or maybe even partners.

  All that thinking made me hungry; by the time I got to Main Street I decided to pop in to see Betty at her café, which was still bustling with activity.

  “Hi Betty!” I greeted her as I walked in and up to the counter. It was late enough that there was a free table, but I opted for a slice of apple pie for take-out instead—unfortunately all the cheesecake slices were long gone.

  “Hey, Angela, how are things?” Betty asked as she poured the milk into a to-go latte cup.

  “Good, how about here?”

  “Oh, busy as always during the festival! My brain is starting to feel a bit muddled from the lack of sleep, but it’s worth it.”

  “Don’t say that too loudly, people will start talking,” I half joked, as I noticed Antonia deLucca sitting at one of the tables, straining to listen in on our conversat
ion. I had a feeling that the next day more than a few people were going to hear about how Betty might be starting to lose her marbles.

  “Ah, well, people talk. That’s what they do,” Betty said as she rang up my order and handed me my change.

  “You have a very Zen view on life for someone who’s probably made two hundred coffees today.”

  “It’s keeping me sane,” she grinned. “Oh, that and watching the news. Did you see that the video that was taken of Jessica Oliver having that argument with you the day before her death made the local news?”

  I groaned. “Great.”

  “Don’t worry. You come off just fine, after all, you were just trying to calm her down.”

  “I guess I should be thankful Sophie didn’t punch her in the face, like she did Kelly Dottory that time,” I admitted. With Sophie around, things could have gotten a lot more intense than they had.

  “See? Looking on the bright side of life. It’s the secret to getting through tough times, like having to make two hundred coffees in a day,” Betty told me with a wink, handing me my pie. I thanked her with a smile, then left the shop.

  I was halfway down the street to the vet clinic when I spotted Matt Smith coming up the street the other way. I checked to see if there were any cars coming so I could cross the road before he noticed me, but just as I began to make my move, I heard his voice call out, “Hey, Angela!”

  Great. There was no getting out of it now. I plastered the fakest smile on my face I could possibly muster in the hopes that he would get the hint that I didn’t want to talk to him.

  “Hi, Matt,” I greeted him. “Sorry, I’m in a bit of a rush, I have to go to the vet clinic and grab some stuff before I meet my boyfriend for dinner.” So that last part was a lie; I knew Jason was going to spend the night working on his articles for the paper. I just wanted to emphasize to Matt that I had a boyfriend.

  “No problem. Hey, I wanted you to know, I’m buying up the building your vet clinic is in, so we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of each other in the future.”