Sweets Forgotten (Samantha Sweet Mysteries Book 10)

by Connie Shelton

  “Hey, girl, what’s up?” Her best friend, Zoë. They hadn’t seen each other in a couple of weeks.

  “We need to get together, maybe ‘do lunch’,” Sam joked.

  “Just say when.”

  “Actually, lunch might be tricky but how about if I pop by for a cup of tea after work today?”

  Zoë seemed delighted with that idea. “I have a special Assam that’s waiting to be opened.”

  With a plan in place, Sam set her phone down and picked up the nearest order form. Five minutes later she was happily piping brightly colored frosting onto a five-year-old’s birthday cake, turning a square cube of layers into the backdrop for the latest popular cartoon characters, some little munchkins who lived in a cave world and came out often enough to fight off criminals in the way only preschoolers can imagine that they would. That one went into the fridge and she’d just begun a fairy princess castle, complete with sugar cone turrets, when she heard animated voices out front.

  Jen’s voice came through, asking someone to wait, only moments before Jane Doe came walking through to the kitchen. Evidently, Beau’s Colorado lead had not worked out.

  “Hi, Sam.” Jane wore the same clothing as yesterday. She or someone else had taken the time to sew her ripped sleeve seam back together and the blouse had been laundered. “Melissa took me by the sheriff’s office but I guess they didn’t have any news for me. They wanted me to go back to the shelter but there’s nothing to do there. A lot of the women have jobs and leave during the day or else they are out on interviews or appointments with their counselors. I thought maybe I could help out here?”

  Sam stuck a smile on but wasn’t feeling the love. Just because Jane had saved a batch of chocolate from destruction yesterday didn’t mean she had to adopt the woman and keep her around all the time, did it? She brought herself up short. This poor lady was lost and hurt and no doubt feeling completely disoriented. The least Sam could do was to be hospitable.

  “Let’s get you a cup of coffee and something to eat first,” she suggested.

  Jen took Jane’s elbow and subtly steered her back to the front room.

  “Okay, now what can we do to keep her busy?” Sam said quietly to Becky.

  “She wasn’t much good with the sugar flowers,” her assistant whispered. “I had to redo a bunch of them. Her skill seems to be with chocolate.”

  Sam paged through the order sheets once more. One customer wanted a ganache-covered cream cake and another had requested “something creative” in chocolate to serve with afternoon tea. She could mention those to Jane and see if the woman’s interest piqued. If so, maybe she really could be of help. Meanwhile, she would call Beau while Jane was finishing her cheesecake out front.

  “That Albuquerque homicide detective is on his way up here,” Beau said, “and no, I haven’t had any results on your Jane Doe. The one in Pagosa Springs wasn’t a match.”

  “Last night you mentioned having me help with your investigation,” Sam said. “I don’t know about a homicide—the pictures always make me queasy—but maybe I can do some of the computer work that’s involved in finding Jane’s real identity.”

  He leapt on that suggestion. “You’ll have to come to the department. Our computers are on a separate secure network and you can’t get into them from yours. But that would be great. Dixie said we’ve had a bunch of email responses to the notice we sent out, but we haven’t had anyone with the time to go through them. How soon can you get here?”

  Sam heard Jane’s voice again, her coffee break almost done. “Let me assign her something to do and I’ll come right away. Say, fifteen or twenty minutes?”

  “The sooner the better. I’ll have to set you up with access and I have a feeling Detective Taylor will be here any minute and I’ll be tied up with him the rest of the day.”

  Jane’s smile lit up when Sam presented her with the idea of making something chocolate for a ladies tea. “Do you have any Grand Marnier? I remember a certain type of truffle …”

  Sam scanned the supply shelf and came up with a bottle of the rich liqueur. “Go for it. Truffles sound like just the thing.”

  She sent a little cautionary glance toward Becky. Translation: taste one before they go out to the customer.

  “Oh, Sam,” Jane said. “I came across something that might be meaningful.” She reached into the pocket of her skirt and came out with a small slip of paper, which she handed to Sam.

  The scrap appeared to have been torn from a pad of generic white paper. It contained a string of numbers, handwritten in blue ink—3679854. Sam studied Jane’s face.

  “I think it’s my writing, but I have no idea what they mean.”

  “Seven digits—it could be a phone number, but it’s not a local one.”

  Jane simply shrugged. It could take days to dial it with every area code in the country, and even if she reached someone, Sam had no idea what to ask. Are you missing a slender, dark haired woman? Surely Beau’s department had access to quicker ways of checking. She told Jane she would take it to him.

  Ten minutes later she had found a parking spot on the side street near the Sheriff’s Department office and walked in to find Beau talking with a man in his fifties whose sport jacket looked a little rundown at the elbows. He had receding hair and tired lines around his eyes. Beau introduced him as Kent Taylor, APD Homicide.

  Taylor gave her an almost surly hello that Sam chalked up more to an attitude of ‘let’s get on with it’ than rudeness. Beau pointed Taylor in the direction of the office coffee machine and excused himself, leading Sam into his private office.

  “I’m going out with the detective to see if Robinet’s wife is home now, and then to interview his business partner again. Here’s the file with Jane Doe’s photo and information. I’ve set you up with a user ID and password, written down here.”

  Sam looked at the incomprehensible jumble of letters and numbers. While she would have preferred an easy password such as Iluvchocolate, as long as she had the little note at her side she supposed she could handle this one.

  “I’ve already got you logged in,” he said. “If you leave the desk you need to log out and lock the door.”

  “Really? Even in your own department?”

  “It’s a rule. Not that the guys would do anything dishonest with the information but people are always closing out someone else’s file and losing information that wasn’t saved. It’s simpler if we all follow the log-out protocol.”

  “Got it. So, what am I looking for?”

  “Go through these emails. A lot of them will be negative—just saying they don’t have our Jane Doe in their files. If they ask for a courtesy check on their own missing persons cases, save those for one of my guys to work later. What you’re looking for would be some other department who thinks the MP they’re looking for could be your Jane. Compare the photos they will have attached and see if it’s remotely possible. Print out any promising ones, file the others.” He showed her how he had already set up folders to save the other messages.

  “Don’t delete anything. You never know how or when something might be of use. Just file them for now.”

  She showed Beau the paper with numbers Jane had found in her pocket this morning and mentioned their theory that it could be a phone number.

  “Pretty generic, but if it’s a telephone, Dixie can do some things to cross check it.” He took the slip and walked toward dispatch before leaving the building.

  It took only a half hour of click-and-drag tedium for Sam to decide that piping roses on birthday cakes was thrilling by comparison to law enforcement work. She felt her eyes glazing over and decided to log out for awhile and stretch. At the coffee machine she poured a cup but it turned out horrendously strong and tasted like the janitor might have made it two days ago. She realized she was spoiled to her signature blend at the shop and the fact that Jen kept the pot refreshed throughout the day. She trudged back to the desk and pulled her login information from the slip of paper in her pocket.
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  Two hours later she had organized the responses into folders as Beau wanted. Although a couple of them showed dark-haired women of about the right age and build, none pictured the Jane Doe sitting in Sam’s shop right now. It looked fairly certain that she would have to spend another night in the women’s shelter.

  * * *

  Beau negotiated Goldenrod Lane, remembering the exact turn to the Robinet house only a moment before he reached it. Kent Taylor looked around with the wonderment city folks showed when they encountered high-dollar homes in remote rural places. The Albuquerque cop was a man of few words, Beau was discovering. Beyond the initial greeting when he arrived in Taos this morning, he’d not said much. In fairness, what was there to say? Reports had been emailed and Beau had read them all—the autopsy, the crime scene details, what little information had been obtained from employees at the Kingston Arms. He pulled into the Robinet driveway, seeing no changes in the house or acreage since his last visit.

  Taylor got out of the passenger seat and automatically walked to the roadside mailbox, opening it and pulling out a sheaf of envelopes.

  “Looks like no one’s checked mail in a few days,” he said, flipping through the stack as he returned to Beau’s cruiser. “Couple bills, bunch of junk. This one looks like some kind of greeting card. Addressed to Josephine Robinet. Maybe it’s her birthday and she took a trip somewhere.”

  “Anything’s possible.” Beau scanned the front entry where a skim of dust covered the deck, not mussed by a single footprint. He would look through the mail later.

  “Here’s something from the Holbrook Academy,” Taylor said. “Looks like a billing statement. They got a kid?”

  “Yeah, Zack’s parents mentioned a grandson.”

  “That’s someone else to notify. Poor little guy.”

  “I get the impression he’s a teenager. Hard to tell how they take news like this. I’ll check with the grandparents. They’ve probably already made the call or gone down to visit.”

  Taylor stared at the large house. “Looks like these folks have the money to afford sending a kid to Holbrook.”

  Beau thought about the luxurious office furnishings at ChanZack Innovations and the trendy clothing the business partner wore. Appearances didn’t always mean a lot but it was entirely credible that they could send their kid someplace like Holbrook Academy.

  He walked up to the front door and pressed the doorbell. Again, the hollow-sounding chimes inside. There was a film of grit on the doorknob. Of course, owners would likely come and go through the attached garage. He walked toward it. Kent Taylor had pocketed the mail and followed along.

  “All the tire tracks look old,” Taylor said.

  “Yeah, I noticed that.”

  They circled the garage and let themselves into a walled patio through an unlocked high wooden gate. Three sliding glass doors opened onto a huge tiled deck, each door at a different angle to ensure privacy. Peering into the middle one showed a great room large enough to entertain an army battalion or half the kids at the local high school, depending on your preference. Oversized leather couches faced a theater-sized TV screen, and a variety of Indian pottery, mostly in the Tewa and San Ildefonso styles, filled nooks and crannies. No one was in sight, although a discarded shirt over the nearest chair, a plugged-in cell phone and some pocket change on the kitchen counter made it look as if someone could have walked out of the room five minutes ago. Beau tried the door but it was securely locked.

  “This one’s a pretty fancy master bedroom,” Taylor said, his hands cupped around his eyes at the door to the west.

  Beau walked to the third door and saw that this room was another bedroom done in grand style. He tugged at the door handle but this one didn’t budge either.

  “Okay. So the wife’s off somewhere out of town, the son is at boarding school and hubby went and got himself killed in Albuquerque.” Kent Taylor probably didn’t mean for his words to come off so cavalierly. Beau saw it as the attitude of a cop who’s seen too much and is facing the end of a long career.

  “I suppose we should begin canvassing the neighbors, see if anyone is a friend of Mrs. Robinet and might know how we can reach her.”

  They had circled again to the front of the house. Beau faced the road, scanning the neighboring properties and realizing that neither the garage nor the front porch were likely to be visible to any other homes on this curving lane. No matter. It was work that had to be done because you never knew where a lead would come from. Although Beau would have appreciated the chance to stretch his legs, Taylor suggested they take the cruiser to the nearest neighboring house, about a quarter mile up the road.

  A sleepy-eyed man of about fifty, wearing only a pair of boxers, answered after their second ring at the doorbell. His expression clearly said “I was asleep, what the hell do you want?” Night shift worker, no doubt. They usually disconnected their doorbells and turned off phones, so Beau didn’t have a whole lot of sympathy for him.

  “Sorry, never had nothin’ to do with ’em,” said the man, who gave his name as Randy Walker.

  “Within the last few days, would you have seen Mrs. Robinet leave the house, maybe with a suitcase?”

  “I tell you, we never exchanged more’n a dozen words in the five years since they built that house. Me, I work nights. Don’t see much of anyone. My one neighbor, Buddy, we try to catch some Sunday football now and then.” He nodded his head toward the west, presumably indicating the next house along the road.

  “Well, if you should see Mrs. Robinet return home, would you mind giving my department a call? We really need to get in touch with her.” Beau handed the man his card.

  For the first time, Walker’s eyes fully opened. “One of ’em done something wrong?”

  “Thanks for your time,” said Kent Taylor.

  The two lawmen headed back to the cruiser parked at the road. The next two houses yielded no answers to their knocks, but that wasn’t unusual for midday. It was a neighborhood where people held jobs. They doubled back and walked up to the house directly east of Robinet’s.

  A woman with a baby on her hip answered the door, her blond hair caught up in a clip at the back, strands hanging across her face. A toddler edged into view from behind her red calf-length skirt. The woman looked ready to slam the door had the visitors turned out to be selling magazines, pans or religion. At Beau’s question, she gave her name as Lacy Padilla.

  “I might have Jo’s cell phone number,” she said, her eyes aiming skyward as she worked to remember. “She had me accept a package for her once and asked me to call when it arrived.”

  “That would be very helpful,” Beau said.

  She untangled the one kid from her leg and shifted the baby to her other side so she could reach into the pocket of her skirt. One-handed, she thumbed across the cell phone’s screen until she came up with it. Beau wrote down the number she read out.

  “Did you know the Robinets very well?” Taylor asked.

  “No, not at all. I mean, you’d think that Jo and I both being home all day we would have the time to socialize. But we never did. She seemed all wrapped up in charity work and her husband’s business. I got pregnant the first time shortly after they moved in next door. Talking baby food and diapers and that kind of thing completely did not interest her. And, unfortunately, the Junior League and all that stuff completely does not interest me. You might check with Sharon across the road and down a little ways. She’s about the only other person who’s home a lot. Other than Randy—you may have met him.” She made a face at the mention of the boxer-clad gentleman.

  Beau thanked her for the information and, as usual, handed out his card in case she thought of anything else.

  Sharon Redmond answered so quickly after the doorbell rang that Beau knew she must have been watching as they drove up. Chances were she had seen their entire progress up and down the road. She seemed that kind of woman, with her tightly bobbed hair and pursed mouth.

  “Well, I heard fights sometimes,”
she said with a juicy little smile.

  “Physical?”

  “Nah, I think mostly verbal. Summer nights when windows were open was mostly all I ever got wind of. But you never know. That Zack Robinet has a hell of a temper.”

  “Does he?”

  “I used to see him rag that kid of theirs. Drive him to school, reaming him out over grades or sports and such. That was only the first year they lived here, though. After that, I guess the kid went away to school. I only ever see him on holiday weekends. He was here over the summer and I think the dad tried having the son work at his office. They’d go off together in the mornings. But that lasted a couple weeks. The kid is a teenager with attitude now and he dishes it out as much as the dad does. There was another screaming match and the boy went off with friends and didn’t come back for nearly a week.”

  This was degenerating into blatant gossip but the lawmen let her go on until she’d covered the summer and it seemed the son had gone safely back to Holbrook Academy in August.

  “Thanks for your time, Mrs. Redmond,” Kent Taylor said. He rolled his eyes the moment he and Beau turned away from the door.

  “Well, not much to go on for a morning’s work,” Beau muttered as they walked back across the road to the empty Robinet home.

  He pulled out the number Lacy Padilla had given him and checked it against the one given by Zack’s parents yesterday. It was different. He dialed this new one but it went to voicemail. Beau left only his name and number. Then he remembered something.

  “It can’t hurt to try,” he said, leading the way to the back of the house once more.

  He stood at the sliding door to the greatroom and dialed Josephine Robinet’s number again. Sure enough, a faint tone came through and he noticed that the screen on the phone on the kitchen counter lit up.

  “What woman goes anywhere these days without her cell phone?” Taylor asked.