A Juicy Murder

by Eryn Scott

  Wrapping his arms around her, Luke pulled her into a tight hug and kissed her forehead.

  “Sleep well,” he said. “Call me in the morning.”

  But when he pulled away, she reached out and grabbed his arm, fingers trembling.

  Luke turned back toward her. “What?” He searched her face in the moonlight.

  She opened her mouth but couldn’t seem to say anything, so she pointed a shaking finger at her front door.

  It was open.

  20

  It was as if a bucket of ice had been dumped directly into her veins. Besides not being able to talk, Hadley was paralyzed.

  Luke wasn’t. He pushed her back, off the porch, then ran to his truck, coming back with the baseball bat he carried inside the cab. The very bat he’d used to save her life last year.

  “Do you want to stay here or walk behind me?” he asked quietly.

  “With you.” She reached out and grabbed his hand, not wanting to be alone.

  Inside, Luke turned on the foyer lights and the interior came into view. The place appeared normal, from there. Hadley scanned each surface frantically as they walked forward, her ears strained to hear anything out of the ordinary. She longed to call out for the cats but wasn’t sure if they were alone yet and didn’t want to lead the criminal right to them.

  As they rounded the corner into her kitchen, she thought of the other night, breaking into the juice bar. Hadley wondered if this was some cruel form of karma. It felt awful knowing someone uninvited had been in her space, and she vowed to never break and enter again.

  The terrible feeling began to loosen its hold on her lungs as they searched around the kitchen, the living room, and then into her bedroom. There was nothing out of place, nothing missing. She let go of Luke’s hand and began to break off, searching around the guest bedroom and laundry room herself. Nothing was different.

  Hadley stood in the living room, blinking. That was when she realized the cats hadn’t come out to greet her like they usually did. Her heart stopped.

  “Ansel. Marmalade. Sweet Pea.” She clicked her tongue after calling their names, like she did in the morning when she would feed them.

  Her shoulders relaxed when she heard the bell jingling on Marmalade’s collar—as a tiny kitten, she had the tendency to race around underfoot, and it was safer knowing where she was at all times. Marmalade galloped into the room first, ears back and fur on end. Ansel trotted in after her, but his fur was just as puffy and his mannerisms just as irritated. Hadley agreed. If she’d had fur, she was sure it would be up, hackles raised. She waited for Sweet Pea to come around the corner from her bedroom after the other two.

  Hadley’s heart rate increased as she scanned the room for the calico. “Sweet Pea,” she called again and clicked her tongue.

  Luke’s face darkened with understanding, and he walked around the room, calling the cat’s name and looking under furniture.

  The feeling of nausea intensified in Hadley as she and Luke searched the house. Sweet Pea was nowhere to be found. Tears gathered in Hadley’s eyes as she shook her head.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  She was only vaguely aware of Luke pulling out his phone and calling someone.

  “Paul, hey. We need you out at Hadley’s place right now. There’s been a break-in. No, she’s okay, but someone took Sweet Pea.” Luke put a hand on her shoulder as he hung up. “Your brother’s on his way.”

  He led her over to the couch and made her sit. Ansel and Marmalade were instantly next to her, purring and rubbing up against her. It was as if they knew she was upset, and why.

  Luke brought her a glass of water and sat with her, rubbing her back until Paul’s big clompy boots sounded in the hallway.

  She looked up into his familiar face and … broke into tears.

  “Had, I’m so sorry.” Paul pulled her into a hug and then handed her back over to Luke. “I’m going to have a look around and see if I can find anything to go on here.”

  Paul focused on the front door first, fingerprinting the area. Then he went through the whole house, taking notes and looking for anything Hadley and Luke might’ve missed in their surprise.

  From the way Hadley was zoned out, worries consuming her thoughts, it could’ve been two minutes or two days later that Paul sat down across from her in the living room.

  “They must’ve picked the lock. There’s no sign of forced entry anywhere, and they didn’t leave a single fingerprint behind,” he said.

  Hadley didn’t keep a key outside like many people because of Paul’s warnings about how easy those are for criminals to find most of the time. She’d also gotten the locks changed when she’d moved in last year, knowing Leo had lived there for decades, and people gave out keys and lost track of them over the years.

  “Do people in Stoneybrook know how to pick locks?” she asked, swiping at her misty eyes.

  “This proves at least one person does.” Paul shrugged.

  Hadley nodded.

  “Well, at least we know it wasn’t Hunk,” Luke said.

  Paul cleared his throat. “And how do you know that?” he asked in a warning tone.

  Luke’s face pulled into a grimace. “We may have followed him tonight.” He turned to Hadley.

  Together they explained to Paul what they’d seen up at the old warehouse.

  “You two are lucky they didn’t see you.” Paul sighed. “Though I’m not worried about him being the killer, I wouldn’t put it past him to do more than threaten a person for spying on him.”

  “Wait. What?” Luke asked through a cough, as if he’d sucked in air too quickly in his surprise.

  “You don’t think he’s the killer anymore?” Hadley asked, concerned since she and Luke had just concluded he was their best suspect.

  Paul shook his head. “We checked into the lie he told about his trainer. But it wasn’t a lie, well … not to us, at least. He tried out a different trainer last week while his usual one was off on a trip to the East Coast. It didn’t work out, so he didn’t want his old one to find out. Apparently, the two trainers are very competitive with each other, so Hunk wanted it to stay a secret. That’s why Jenny told Luke that he only had one trainer. She was worried the original one might overhear from inside the locker room. So technically, his alibi was his trainer, just not the one you met, Luke.”

  Luke looked too tired to fully take in the information.

  “So what do we do now?” Hadley asked, yawning.

  “Though we can’t be sure this is tied to our murder case, I have a hunch it might since they took Sweet Pea and not any of your other cats. I’ll check through alibis of our suspects for tonight.”

  Closing her eyes for a moment, Hadley murmured a thank you.

  Ansel was purring on her lap, but Marmalade had gone off into the kitchen. She was batting something around, something colorful. Hadley peered over at her.

  “Whatcha got there, girl?” she asked.

  The cat paused in her game, then picked it up with her teeth and brought it over. She vaulted onto the couch, dropping the thing she was carrying and batting it about on the cushion.

  It was a bright pink hair elastic.

  “That’s cute,” Paul said with a smile. “Does she always carry them around like that in her mouth?”

  Hadley nodded first then shook her head. She took the pink band from Marmalade’s paw. The hair elastic wasn’t a surprise. The moment Marmalade got her paws on a loose one lately, she brought it to the kitchen and flung it around until it slid under the stove or refrigerator.

  The problem was, Hadley only bought black hair elastics as a rule. Her long hair was almost black as it was, and she preferred ones that blended in.

  She hadn’t owned a pink hair tie since she was a little girl

  “This isn’t mine,” she croaked out the words, looking from the band to Paul to Luke to Marmalade.

  The cat tipped her head, her eyes wide. She thought this was all part of the game, and leaped for the band
in Hadley’s hand. In other circumstances, Hadley would’ve laughed at her cat’s antics, but she felt too punched in the gut to give in to the feeling now.

  “Could a friend have left it here?” Paul asked. “Suze?” But even as he asked the question, he shook his head.

  Suze was adamant she couldn’t use regular hair ties on her unruly curls. She’d broken many a hair accessory back when they were younger. Then one day when they were down by the river playing, she’d found a river-smoothed piece of curvy wood and had stuck it into her hair like a chopstick to hold it up. It held all day, and she’d been wearing her “hair sticks” ever since.

  So it wasn’t Suze’s. In fact, Hadley couldn’t think of a single person who used bright colorful hair elastics like this one.

  Paul grabbed it with his gloved hand, sliding it into an evidence bag he pulled from his kit.

  She sucked in a breath.

  “I know whose it might be.” She gulped. “Jenny from Hunk’s gym wore a bunch of these on her wrist the other day when I was there. She had one of every color, it seemed.” Hadley wrinkled her forehead. “But it’s gotta be someone else. Jenny’s not even involved in this case at all.”

  “Jenny Thomas?” Paul asked, his voice low and serious.

  Hadley nodded. Luke sat up, looking awake now.

  “There’s some hair wrapped on this. Maybe we can get a DNA sample from it,” Paul said. “It just so happens that when McKay ran the records for CPU Knight, Jenny Thomas’s name came up on the list of people who’d purchased the program. She’d just bought it a week prior to Laney’s death. From what Owen and Hunk told us, it took a few weeks after they purchased for the blackmailing to start, so maybe she hadn’t been blackmailed, yet.”

  Luke leaned forward. “She could’ve figured out what happened to Hunk and realized it would happen to her too. Maybe Jenny silenced Laney before she even threatened her.”

  A chill wound through the room.

  Hadley shivered. “Which means Jenny Thomas must be hiding a really big skeleton in her closet.”

  21

  Paul promised they’d get moving on the DNA evidence first thing in the morning. “We’ll find Sweet Pea, Had,” he told her with a small smile. Then he waved to Luke and headed out to his truck.

  An hour prior, Hadley hadn’t wanted to stay in her house any longer than she needed to. But once Luke agreed to stay with her, she realized moving the cats to another house would only add to the trauma. She was also glad Luke wasn’t going to be driving anywhere tonight, seeing how he’d fallen asleep three times while Paul did his fingerprinting work.

  After double-checking all the locks around the house, Hadley and Luke settled onto her bed, laying on top of the soft duvet. She felt dusty still from their time sneaking around the warehouse and didn’t want to get her clean sheets all dirty. She was also too tired to think of changing, so this would have to do until she could convince herself to get up.

  “I think I have some basketball shorts and an old T-shirt of Paul’s that might fit you,” Hadley mumbled into Luke’s shirt as she laid her head on his chest.

  He wrapped an arm around her, pulling her closer. “Sounds good,” he said.

  The cats jumped onto the bed and settled at the foot like usual. Hadley snuggled closer to Luke, breathing in his sandalwood and fresh air scent.

  All four of them were asleep within a few minutes.

  Hadley woke still dressed in her dusty clothes, sitting on top of an empty bed. Even the cats were gone. She panicked for a moment before she heard a cabinet shut in the kitchen and remembered Luke was here with her. Relaxing back into her pillow, she stretched and checked the clock.

  It was nine thirty.

  Sucking in a breath, Hadley sat up. She was late for opening the shop. She stumbled into the kitchen, rubbing her tired eyes.

  “I’ve gotta go,” she mumbled, searching around for her purse.

  Luke, at the stove in front of a skillet, glanced over his shoulder. “I already called your grandma and told her you wouldn’t be in today.”

  Hadley stopped then leaned on the kitchen counter. She hadn’t realized how much she needed a break until Luke said that. In fact, she was so relieved, she felt herself tearing up all over again.

  “Thank you,” she whispered and walked over to the stove. Wrapping her arms around his middle, she leaned into him.

  “Millie says to take care of yourself. She’ll look after the shop for today.” He kissed her forehead and turned off the burner. “You hungry?”

  “Famished.”

  He pointed to the kitchen table where he’d set two plates. She poured herself a cup of coffee and then settled behind one of the plates while he dished her up the scramble he’d been working on.

  Luke sat down, digging in to his own plateful. “Paul called too,” he said after swallowing his first bite. “He said the judge granted them a warrant to search Jenny Thomas’s home and work. He’ll contact us when they find Sweet Pea.”

  Hadley smiled, noticing how he’d said when they find her. She loved how positive and supportive he was. She needed that more than ever today. While she already knew how special Sweet Pea was, losing her made Hadley feel as if there was a piece of her heart missing.

  In addition to needing the day off to rest after last night, Hadley was also grateful she wasn’t downtown today. The townspeople meant well, but she didn’t feel like answering the same questions all day long.

  After breakfast—and after Luke caught Hadley checking her phone for the ninth time to see if Paul had called yet—they went out into the yard to enjoy the beautiful summer day. Hadley puttered around, pruning and weeding. She kicked her shoes off and sunk her toes into the green grass. Luke worked on the sprinkler system she’d bought a few months back but hadn’t had the time yet to install. The cats came out too, sunning themselves on the porch and chasing the occasional butterfly.

  Hadley lost herself in the sunshine and the work. Luke had the sprinklers working and hooked up to an app on Hadley’s phone. And Hadley had weeded all but one of her flowerbeds in a couple of hours. But the case was never far from her mind, so when Luke’s phone rang, she froze.

  “It’s work,” he said, frowning at the screen. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked.

  She was about to go back to her gardening when she saw his face fall and his hand move up to pinch the bridge of his nose.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Luke sighed. “Okay, get the team together. I want an update ten minutes ago.”

  Ending the call, Luke let his head fall back. His shoulders tensed with worry.

  “What happened?” She dropped her shovel and went to him.

  Luke wet his lips. “The software update we just pushed out has a major glitch. It’s not good.” He glanced back down at his phone.

  “Is it something they can handle, or are you going to go out there?” Hadley put a hand on his arm.

  “I can’t leave you in the middle of the search for Sweet Pea and Laney’s killer. Not after someone broke into your place.” He cut the air with his hand.

  Hadley cocked a hip. “You most certainly can and will.” She poked him in the chest. “They need you, and you’ll feel better if you can be there to supervise, put out fires, whatever else you do to fix a glitch.” She cringed, realizing she knew very little about what he did.

  He ran a hand over his face, but by the time it dropped away, he nodded. “Okay, you’re right.” He held her shoulders and leaned in to kiss her. “Thanks for understanding. I’ll call to check in.”

  She swatted him away. “Drive safely. Hopefully next time I talk to you, you’ll be glitch free.”

  He chuckled and turned away, jogging around to the front of her house.

  The rest of the day flew by without any news from Paul or Luke. So she woke with a start when her phone rang with a call twenty minutes before her alarm went off on Saturday morning.

  “Hello?” she answered groggily.

  “Can you stop by and see
me before you head to the market this morning?” Paul asked, his voice an odd mixture of too awake and absolutely fatigued.

  “Sure.” Hadley sat up in bed. “Did you find something?”

  Paul was silent for a moment. “We got the results back on the hair sample. It was Jenny’s hair elastic.”

  Hadley sucked in a breath.

  But Paul added, “The only reason we know it was a match is because she agreed to a DNA swab, which, to me, doesn’t seem like something a guilty person would do. Still, I’m about to leave with a team to search her house. We’re just waiting on the warrant to come through. I’ll know more by the time you stop by in an hour or so.”

  “Okay, see you soon.” Hadley hung up.

  There was no way she was going back to sleep. She got up and busied herself with making a big omelet and puttering around the house making sure all of her doors and windows were double locked.

  “Not that it helped last time,” she mumbled to herself with a grimace as she locked her front door and turned toward her car.

  The pit in her stomach only intensified as she drove into town and parked. When she walked into the sheriff’s office, Sharon stood up from her reception desk and bustled out toward Hadley, pulling her into a hug.

  “I heard about Sweet Pea. I’m so sorry. Paul’s still working on finding her.”

  Hadley’s hope fell as she pulled away. “You mean, they didn’t find anything at Jenny’s house?”

  Sharon shook her head. “He’s in there questioning her right now.” She motioned to the conference room. “Why don’t you go wait for your brother at his desk,” Sharon suggested. “He should be done soon.”

  “Thanks.” Hadley sighed and started over to the desk.

  “And Hadley, make sure you stay hydrated, dear. You know it’s easy to forget when you’re worried about other things.” Sharon winked.

  Hadley smiled at the woman over her shoulder. She walked forward, weaving through old oak desks situated on the worn beige carpet. The place had about as much color variation as the inside of a box of Cheerios. But she didn’t go to Paul’s desk, instead making her way to the cooler, slowly pouring herself a cup of water.