by Anna Castle
He smiled, a tight little smirk of satisfaction. “I didn’t think you would dare.”
“The thing is, Greg, if I did tell him — or, I should say, when — you are going to be in such deep shit.”
“You’re the one that’ll be in the shit. In my observation, people get pretty angry about things like betrayal of trust and thoughtless, reckless—”
“Thoughtless, reckless, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. And you’re right: Ty would probably be pretty mad at me. But if you put that picture out there on the web, guess who else he’d be mad at?”
Greg’s Adam’s apple jogged up and down. His eyes turned hard and piggy behind the glint of his glasses.
I chuckled as I watched him work it through. “You didn’t think about that, did you? You aren’t just messing with me. You’re messing with Tyler Hawkins, the rich, respected, high-tech security mogul. Didn’t it occur to you that he might, oh, I don’t know, hunt down the source of that mangled photograph, figure out how I got into this fix in the first place, and do something about it? You got a tiger by the tail here, Greg.”
Panic flashed in his eyes. He slumped back in his chair as the tip of his tongue emerged and started working his lower lip. His eyes darted nervously around the room. I could practically see smoke spiraling out of his ears as his brain went into overdrive, cranking over his shrinking options. I worried that I’d gone too far. Bad Penny! Never able to resist poking that bear. But what could he do? The proof of his crimes was scattered all over town, on all the hard drives and smartphones of all the people he’d been abusing. He couldn’t scrub every piece of computing equipment clean before Ty found enough evidence to charge him.
He must have found an escape hatch, because he sat up straight again and smirked at me. “He won’t be able to make a case. There might be some funny stuff in that security suite, but there’s no proof that I ever did anything with it.”
I gaped at him. “There’s me, you moron. You blackmailed me. I have the email you sent me with your original threat. I have the doctored photograph. I can hardly wait to get up in court and testify against you. And there’s Krystle: she’ll testify.”
A tactical error. He grinned through his teeth. “She won’t. And neither will anyone else.” He chuckled. “You didn’t think about that, did you, Penny? No, you were only thinking of yourself. I was right about you: you’re selfish.”
My turn to narrow the eyes. I wasn’t selfish, at least I didn’t think so, but I was self-directed. Sometimes that bordered on the self-concerned. But hey, couldn’t anybody say that? Anybody but a doormat, that is? I never claimed to be Mother Teresa.
“Now you’re getting it,” Greg said. “A lot of people are in the same boat. If you rock it, everybody gets splashed. If you expose me, you expose all the secrets and some of them could have pretty serious consequences. Do you want to be responsible for them?”
I shook some sense into my own head. “You can’t blackmail me with other people’s secrets. How big a fool do you think I am?”
He shrugged. “They’ll hate you for it. You’re new here, Penny. You don’t know how things work. They’ll blame you and they’ll never forgive you. Small towns have long memories.”
Damn! He was right about one thing: I hadn’t thought about the consequences for everyone else. If I pulled the plug, how many marriages or businesses or who knew what might go down the drain? And he was right about another thing: some people would blame me, as much as or more than him. Maybe I should call Ty and ask him to hold off until we had time to think things through some more. Ty would say, No way, I’m shutting that creepshow down. And he would be right, right? You can’t leave a blackmailer running loose in your hometown.
Don’t rock the boat. String the bastard up. Hold off. Crack down. I was stuck in that bipolar two-step again. This whole thing was driving me crazy! All I needed was one clear path before my feet, so I could let my frustration drive me straight ahead.
Greg chuckled while he watched the slideshow of expressions cross my face. He glanced at the clock and spun around to the file drawer where he kept his booze. He got a paper cup and pulled out a bottle, twirling around to set the cup on his desk while he worked the cork free.
“Hey, that’s Krystle’s mezcal,” I said. “Her friend Jason gave it to her at my party.”
“Friend? Is that what she told you?” He smirked. “She brought it over yesterday in lieu of today’s foot massage.” He poured a shot and tossed the mezcal down. Then he crumpled the cup and pitched at the wastebasket, missing his target yet again. I waited a few seconds before I picked it up, wishing I could just let it lie.
Greg made a sour face and then a small retching noise, like he was choking on the mezcal.
“That’s harsh stuff,” I said. “Couldn’t stand it myself.”
His eyes lost focus as his face twisted in pain. He grunted and clutched his belly with one hand. He planted the other hand on the desk and hauled himself to his feet, staggering back against the bookshelf and knocking a rack of CDs to the floor. He was turning pink: a bad, hot, sick pink. He suddenly jack-knifed forward, like someone had punched him in the gut. Vomit spewed from his mouth, spraying across the desk.
“Eeaaawww!” I yelled, jumping to my feet.
His eyes rolled up and he collapsed on the floor. His feet jerked once, hard, kicking the chair into the file cabinet and knocking down the stack of paper cups. He lay still. Dead still. I stared in mute horror at his nonbreathing body for a long, unbelieving minute.
Then my feet took over from my blanked-out mind and moved me out of that room, down the hall and through the swinging door to the reception area.
The receptionist took one look at me and said, “My God, Penny, what’s wrong with you?” She was on her feet and moving toward me before I could gather myself to shake my head, and say, “Not me. Greg. He’s dead.”
“What?” She swung through into the hall and trotted to his office. Then she screamed, an ear-splitting shriek. She kept on screaming as she ran back past me and out the front door into the parking lot.
Chapter 26
The front door flew open and Andy Lynch, the insurance guy from next door, ran in. “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”
“Greg,” I said, pointing at the glass door.
He ran into the hall, glanced into Greg’s office, and cried, “Thank God! I mean, oh my God!” He ran back out and started punching numbers into the phone on the front desk. He spoke words that didn’t make any sense. He was all wavery, like he was underwater. Maybe I was underwater. I felt very, very strange.
He hung up the phone and looked at me. “You need to sit down.” He got an arm around my shoulders and put me in a chair and bent me forward so my head hung between my knees.
That was nice. It was darker down here. Quieter.
“Breathe,” said the man with the military hair.
I breathed. In and out; in and out. Breathing was good. Then I remembered and sat up. “Is he dead?”
“God, he must be. I called the sheriff.”
I nodded and hung my head between my knees again. I liked it better down there.
Pretty soon I heard a siren off in the distance. A minute later and the whole world was full of sirens and flashing lights. I sat up and turned to look out the big front window. Four patrol cars had crowded into the small parking lot.
Sheriff Hopper strode in with Deputy Finley close on his heels. They cast a glance at me and turned to Andy Lynch. “Back there,” he said, pointing down the hall.
More deputies came in and followed them back. Andy Lynch sat down behind the desk. He opened drawers and shuffled through papers, as though trying to find something to keep his hands busy. I had no idea where the receptionist was. Still running, probably. At least the screaming had stopped.
Sheriff Hopper stood in the hall, looking in to Greg’s office. “Bag everything, including the puke.” He came back out front and looked at Lynch. “Were you with him?”
Lynch sh
ook his head and pointed at me. “She was, I think.”
The sheriff turned to me. “Are you OK?”
I nodded. I was alive, that was the main thing. Alive was good.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“I don’t know what happened. We were talking, he took a drink of that mezcal, and then he turned pink and threw up and fell down and died.” Which was the second time that had happened to me this month.
“Did you smell almonds?”
“Almonds!” The memory of what I’d smelled rushed up and smacked me in the face. I must have looked like I was about to throw up, because the sheriff reached out a massive hand and patted me gently on the back.
“There, there. Try not to think about it.”
Andy Lynch said, “Do you need some water?”
I shook my head emphatically. Not from this building, I didn’t. The whole place could be poisoned. “Don’t eat the cookies.”
Both men looked at me as though I was delusional. Andy Lynch said, “Look, Sheriff, I don’t know anything about what happened in here. I was next door, working. I came over when I heard Pam screaming outside.”
“All right, Andy. You can go on back to your office. Somebody will be over to take your statement in a minute or two.”
Andy nodded, ran a shaky hand over his flattop, and left.
Finley came out of the back room. “We’ve got everything under control and the coroner’s on his way.”
“Good work,” the sheriff said. “Now, Penny. Do you mind if I call you Penny?”
I shook my head. That was my name, wasn’t it?
“Did you see Mr. Alexander eat or drink anything besides that mezcal?”
I shook my head again. “He drank a shot and that was it. But Sheriff — we all drank from that bottle.”
“All who?”
“At the wake. After everybody left, except a few of us. We were dancing.” I looked up at Finley.
He nodded and took over, giving a tidy summary of Jason’s unexpected arrival and the impromptu mezcal-tasting party. He’d driven Krystle and Jason back to her trailer and dropped them off, putting the bottle into her hands.
“So how did it get here?” Sheriff Hopper aimed the question at both of us.
We shrugged in unison. Synchronized shrugging. I knew how it had gotten here and I suspected that Finley knew, but I didn’t know if he knew that I knew and I was pretty sure he didn’t know how I knew.
The sheriff looked at me and then at Finley. “Well. We’ll have to talk to Ms. Cameron. And this Jason fellow.” He gave Finley an appraising look. “I’ll send Freshwater. Ugly business. What brought you here today, Penny?”
“Oh. I, uh. Uh, I.” This was bad. My brain was barely coming back online. I wasn’t ready to answer tricky questions and I didn’t particularly want to talk about the blackmailing in front of Finley. I didn’t know if he was an enemy or an ally. How bad was his secret?
The sheriff waited with eyebrows lifted.
Then I remembered my perfectly good reason. “I came to talk to Greg about the museum website, you know? He and I are — were — working on it together.”
“That’s right. I heard about that. Sounds like a good idea.” Sheriff Hopper pursed his lips. “You were there when Jim Donnelly died, too, weren’t you?”
I nodded. “He fell right on top of me. That was worse, except for the vomit. I liked Jim.” That didn’t sound right. “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s horrible that Greg died, too.” I met the sheriff’s sympathetic hazel eyes and felt an urge to tell him everything; a powerful urge, like a form of hypnosis. Some kind of sheriffy superpower. I could tell him everything, get it all off my chest and let him deal with it. “This is going to sound kind of weird, Sheriff Hopper, but I did have kind of a problem with Greg. Actually, as it happens, he was blackmailing me.”
“Blackmailing? That does sound a little odd, Penny, or perhaps a mite on the dramatic side. Are you sure you didn’t pick up that word from one of those crime shows on TV?” He glanced at Finley, who rolled his eyes with a slight shake of the head, like a warning that I was talking crazy talk.
Not an ally, then.
“Of course I’m sure. It wasn’t just me. He was blackmailing a whole bunch of people.”
“A whole bunch of people! Right here in Lost Hat?” The sheriff put his hands on his hips and looked down at me with a small smile. “I’ll tell you what: let’s us go on back to the station. We’ll fix you up with a nice hot cup of coffee and let these boys get on with their work. Finley, tell them to dust everything for prints — doorknobs, windowsills, you name it — and to search the place with a fine-toothed comb. We need to find out what went into that bottle and when. Who done it would be nice, too. And have somebody ask Andy Lynch and that gal out there who else has been in this building today.”
He ushered me out the door. The receptionist was huddled in the back seat of a squad car, wrapped in a blanket, talking to a deputy between gulping sobs. Sheriff Hopper spoke briefly to the deputy, then came back to me and led me to his car. He tucked me into the front seat, placing a guiding hand on the top of my head.
When we got to the station, he passed me off to Sergeant Garza, who took me back to Intake to be fingerprinted. He said they needed prints from everyone who had been in Greg’s office, so they might as well do me while I was here. That lowered my anxiety level until I remembered all the places they might find my prints. The power strip under the desk, for example. How would I explain that?
Sgt. Garza settled me in a small room filled by a square table and four vinyl chairs. A mirror covered half of one wall. The others were painted mustard yellow. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Isn’t this an interrogation room?”
Sgt. Garza smiled. “We call it a consultation room. It’s just a place to talk, Penny. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not a suspect?”
“I don’t know. What do you suspect?” He chuckled at his own wit and left me alone while he went to get me a cup of coffee. It was thick and pungent, piping hot and loaded with sugar. Bound to do wonders for my galloping heart rate.
I sat there, trying not to worry and failing. The environment was not comforting. They should paint bunnies and sunflowers on the walls to cheer the place up, maybe hang a few travel posters for countries without extradition treaties. At least I had a chance to organize my thoughts. I needed to explain Greg’s blackmailing scheme without dragging anyone else into it. Everyone’s secrets were going to come out eventually, but let that be the sheriff’s doing, not mine. I needed to tell him my suspicions about Jim’s death, too. Everything; I needed to dump every bad thing that had happened in the last few weeks into Sheriff Hopper’s extra-large lap. Crimes were his problem, not mine.
The door opened. The sheriff and Finley came in, making the eight-by-ten room feel like a broom closet. The sheriff balanced himself on one chair, knees spread wide and feet firmly planted. Finley perched on another and crossed one long leg over the other. He pulled a notebook from his shirt pocket and poised his ballpoint over a blank page.
Notes would be taken. I was being interrogated. Didn’t that make me a suspect?
“How’s that coffee?” Sheriff Hopper asked.
“Fine,” I said, starting out with an obvious lie.
He chuckled, giving me a pass on that one. “Now then, Penny. I get the feeling you think you know something about these recent deaths. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“Yes, sir. What I think is that Jim was murdered, like Greg. In fact, I think he was murdered instead of Greg. By accident, I mean.”
“How do you figure that?”
“That pink snack cake. Greg brought them to the meeting, but nobody else would touch them. But then Jim started teasing him and acting all competitive. You know, horsing around. He snatched a cake out of Greg’s hand and ate it. Or half of it.” I looked at Finley. “Y’all told me they sent it to the coroner along with Jim’s body, to be tested. Didn’t they do that?”
“They did indeed.” He was all lawman today. His blue eyes were hard as ice and his mouth barely moved when he spoke. “We did everything by the book.”
The sheriff said, “That news has been all over town since that little drama on Saturday night. It was the cake, all right. The filling was dosed with OxyContin, crushed to defeat the time-release coatings and mixed into a solution injected with a syringe.”
“Oh, how horrible!” Fresh grief for Jim welled up in my chest, filling my eyes with tears. Suspecting was one thing. Knowing was a whole different thing.
“A walloping big dose, I’m sorry to say. Somebody made sure it would do the trick.” Sheriff Hopper’s eyes never left my face, but his gaze was sympathetic. “However, there’s no reason to suspect that drug was meant for Greg. In my experience, these things are usually pretty straightforward, once you get a handle on it.”
OxyContin in a pink cake was straightforward? In my experience, strange surprises cropped up all the time. “But why would anybody want to murder Jim? Everybody loved him.”
“Why would anybody want to murder Greg Alexander? Any ideas about that, Penny?”
I drew in a breath. “It’s kind of a longish story.”
“Take your time.” He and Finley exchanged another glance. This one seemed to be saying, Get ready for a whopper. Finley looked down at his notepad, but he had the slightest of sly smiles on his lips. He was deliberately undermining me, making me look childish and overimaginative.
Or maybe I was imagining it.
I began at the beginning. I told them about the figure studies and the contest and the blackmail letter with the doctored photograph and my penalties. The sheriff’s freckled face grew dark with anger as I talked. Finley didn’t so much as twitch.
“You must have been pretty darn mad,” Sheriff Hopper said. “You must have really hated that guy.”
“I’ve never hated anybody so much in my life.”
He leaned forward and stared into my eyes. “Hate’s a pretty powerful motivator, Penny, don’t you think?”
“Sure it is. I guess.” Was it therapy time now? Then I twigged. “Hey, wait a minute! There was no motivating. I mean, I wasn’t motivated to kill him. I was motivated to put him in prison.”
