Terror in Taffeta

by Marla Cooper

  The plan was simple: Brody and I had looked up the conference schedule online and would get there right as the eleven o’clock session ended. We’d use the element of surprise to our advantage, and Ryan would have to talk to us. Okay, well, maybe not, but at least he couldn’t totally ignore us.

  We got to the hotel in plenty of time, and Evan pulled the rental car up to the front door.

  “Are you coming in?” I asked.

  “Oh, well, I just thought I’d…” He motioned toward the parking lot as an awkward look passed between us.

  I didn’t particularly want him edging in on my interrogation, but it would have been nice if he’d offered. (I’m complicated that way.) I was pretty sure he didn’t want Ryan to know he was the one who had given up his location. Oh, well. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he was letting me down again.

  “I’m only a phone call away if you need help or anything,” he offered.

  Some help he was. But then again, what had I expected?

  Brody and I climbed out of the car as Evan called after us: “Let me know when you’re ready to go back to the airport.” He quickly pulled away as the automatic doors into the lobby swooshed open.

  Downstairs, a sign propped on an easel welcomed us to the Data Solutions West Conference. The hall was deserted except for a table bearing the picked-over remnants of the morning break. I helped myself to a blueberry muffin as Brody plopped down on an oversized velveteen chair under a potted palm.

  “Yuck,” I said, spitting out my first bite of the overprocessed pastry. “You can practically taste the trans fats.”

  Right at noon, the doors to the ballroom swung open and hundreds of conference attendees poured out of the room, heads full of data solutions. I scanned the crowd anxiously, Brody by my side; we hadn’t been prepared for the hordes of lanyard-wearing geeks we’d have to fight our way through to find the best man.

  As I craned my head to get a better view, Brody elbowed me in the ribs.

  “Ow!” I yelped. “What was that for?”

  “Over there,” he whispered excitedly, pointing to three men huddled near the coffee carafe. Ryan was at the center of the group, talking animatedly about the new app LionFish was developing. After we crept up behind him, I tried to give him a moment to finish—just because I was there to accuse him of murder, there was no reason to be rude—but he spoke with such enthusiasm, I was afraid he’d keep going until it was time for the next session.

  I took a deep breath and tapped him on the shoulder, interrupting his long-winded speech, which had no doubt been perfected for just such an occasion. Ryan turned to us with a big smile, ready to share his elevator pitch with a new audience. He scanned our faces, and I caught the way his eyes flicked downward toward my chest for a conference name tag, his smile in place the whole time.

  “It’s me, Kelsey, from the wedding.”

  “Oh, Kelsey! Sorry, of course,” he said, his face registering recognition. He looked puzzled, but certainly not alarmed to see us. “Small world.” He reached out to shake hands with Brody. “And you’re the photographer, right?”

  “Brody,” said Brody.

  The two men Ryan had been talking to took their cue and wandered off into the crowd.

  “So,” Ryan began, “you’re not here for the conference, are you?”

  “No, actually, we came to see you. Is there someplace we can talk for a second?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  “Sure,” he replied. “What’s up?”

  We walked back to the lobby and settled into a cluster of chairs in the corner, away from the prying eyes of the data solutions community.

  “So, Ryan,” I began, “we wanted to talk to you about Dana.”

  His face darkened. “Dana? What about her?”

  “As it turns out, I’m trying to help the Abernathys figure out what happened to her.”

  “I don’t know anything about that; I flew out first thing Sunday morning. I didn’t even know she was dead until Vince sent me a text message.” He fidgeted distractedly, bouncing one leg up and down while he talked.

  I was trying to formulate a good follow-up question when Brody jumped in to help: “Ryan, we know about the blackmail.”

  Ryan’s eyes grew wide. “Blackmail? I don’t know what you’re…”

  Brody rolled his eyes. “Dude, c’mon, I just said we know already.”

  Ryan sighed and fell back in his chair. “How did you find out? Who else knows?”

  I looked cautiously at Brody. I didn’t want to tell Ryan everything we knew, at least not yet. “Let’s just say Dana left behind some evidence.”

  “Where? We looked everywhere for—” He stopped abruptly. He might as well have clamped his hand dramatically over his mouth.

  Aha!

  “So it was you who trashed her room?”

  “Okay, yes, I went through her room, but I didn’t kill her. You have to believe me!”

  I wasn’t sure what I believed, but I’ve watched enough crime shows to know that the killer always says that. Maybe Brody and I should have worked out a good cop, bad cop scenario before we started.

  “Okay, yes,” Ryan said. “Dana was blackmailing LionFish, but we were cool. I didn’t want her dead. I just wanted the whole thing to go away before everyone found out about … well, you know.”

  “About LionFish tanking?” Brody suggested. He wasn’t quite a bad cop, but maybe he could be the “slightly testy cop.”

  Ryan checked to make sure no one was within earshot. He leaned in toward us and lowered his voice. “Look, the company went through a rough patch, okay? And, yeah, we lost some money. I won’t lie: I was really angry that Dana took advantage of the situation. But it was being handled.”

  “But you said yourself you needed the problem to go away,” I said.

  “Well, sure, but I gave her everything she wanted. I wasn’t trying to permanently silence her, if that’s what you’re thinking. I figured I’d give her the cash, she’d give me the data, and we’d go our separate ways. No harm done.”

  “But,” Brody persisted, “you were looking for the flash drives, which means Dana didn’t hold up her end of the deal.”

  “She was going to give me everything after the reception that night, but then she collapsed in the church and I didn’t see her again. I went to her room a couple of times, but she never answered the door.”

  “So you broke in?” Brody asked.

  “Yeah.” Ryan looked uncomfortable. “I mean, sort of.”

  I had a quick fantasy of Brody jumping out of his chair, grabbing Ryan by his collar, and screaming in his face, spittle flying, “Which is it? Yes, or sort of?” I waited a beat, but it didn’t happen. Was I going to have to do everything myself? I cleared my throat. “So which is it? Yes, or sort of?”

  “Let’s just say I had some help,” he said, fiddling with his lanyard and refusing to meet our eyes.

  “Look, Ryan,” I said, “you’re going to have to help us out here, or I’m going to have to go to the cops with everything I know, including LionFish’s”—I looked around furtively—“situation.”

  “No! Please, I can’t let that information get out.” I hadn’t really meant to, but I could see I’d struck a nerve. “We screwed up our first round of funding big-time, and if people find out, it’s over.”

  “I’m serious, Ryan. I’m done playing investigator, and after I’m done talking to you, I’m going to turn everything I have over to the police. If you’re not guilty, you’re going to have to convince me, or I’ll hand the files over to them as evidence.”

  That got him talking.

  “Look, the other partners insisted I bring a team from CIS with me—Corporate Intelligence and Security. They didn’t trust Dana to turn over the information, and they wanted to make sure nothing got out. It would be a disaster for our company, okay? When I told them I hadn’t gotten the information yet, they went and searched her room themselves.”

  “You mean to tell me two complete stra
ngers crashed the villa?” I’d had to deal with uninvited guests before, but they didn’t usually wreak such havoc. “That was an awfully big chance they were taking. Why didn’t they just have you take care of it?”

  “I know! I told them I’d handle it,” said Ryan, “but they didn’t trust me. Maybe they thought I was in on it, too.”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but I could see why they might have suspected him. After all, he and Dana were friends long before she’d started blackmailing them; for all they knew, he’d been the one who’d given her the data in the first place. I could see why they’d want to take matters into their own hands.

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “How do we know they didn’t kill Dana?”

  “I don’t think they would have killed her,” Ryan said. “I mean, they wouldn’t … would they?”

  I rolled my eyes; no wonder cops on TV always seem so irritable. “I don’t know—that’s why we’re asking you.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I mean, why would CIS have let me give her the money if they were just going to kill her anyway?”

  “Good point, I guess.” I wasn’t entirely convinced, but I hadn’t prepared a rebuttal.

  “Maybe the plan all along was to kill her and steal the money back,” Brody offered.

  “No,” Ryan replied. “It’s not like it was in a messenger bag full of unmarked bills. They deposited it in an offshore account somewhere. It would have been impossible to recall the deposit, and they knew it.”

  I stared at the ceiling over Ryan’s head, momentarily absorbed by the ornate wallpaper border. I made a mental note of the cobwebs in the corner. Yech. I would never hold a wedding reception here. I sat up suddenly. “Maybe they thought she was going to blab. You know, they wanted to shut her up?”

  Ryan thought for a second. “Why would she talk after we gave her what she wanted?”

  “Or maybe she already had,” I continued. It made sense. They gave her the money, she talked, and they wanted to make sure it stopped there.

  “No, she definitely hadn’t told anyone,” Ryan replied, looking pensive.

  “But how do you know that?” I persisted.

  Ryan’s demeanor shifted suddenly. Had he said something he hadn’t meant to say? Lucky for me, he was as bad at interrogations as I was. “I just know, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said as I gathered up my bag and stood to go. “If you’re not going to tell me—”

  “Wait!” he pleaded, jumping up after me. “They had someone keeping tabs on her, someone who could get close to the wedding party.”

  “Ooh, a spy?” asked Brody. “This is getting good.”

  Suddenly, a piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Ryan, who was the spy?”

  “Just … someone.”

  I jumped out of my chair, propelled by a vision of Leo the actor dressed as a Mexican priest. “It was Father Villarreal, wasn’t it! They wanted someone who everyone would trust, someone they’d open up to.”

  Ryan didn’t have to answer; his look said it all as he sank back down into his chair and rubbed the side of his head in what must have been a major Excedrin moment.

  Damn.

  If LionFish’s security team had sent a fake priest to perform a wedding ceremony, then was it such a stretch to believe they could have killed Dana? Because, come on, who screws with a wedding? Okay, maybe that was just the wedding planner in me talking. Clearly I was taking the deception kind of personally.

  I fished through my bag for a notepad and pen. “Ryan, we’re going to need some names.”

  He sighed, looking defeated. “Sam Fortney and Naomi Cutts.”

  “Naomi Cutts? Why does that name sound familiar?” Before he had a chance to reply, I remembered. “You mean the same Naomi who was Trevor’s date?”

  “Yep,” Ryan said.

  “But she’s missing!” I exclaimed.

  “She’s not missing. She e-mailed me this morning.”

  “But when I asked Trevor about her, he clammed up. He was acting really suspicious and we thought—”

  Ryan held his hand up to stop me. “That’s because she wasn’t really his date. He needed someone to keep Dana away from him, and she needed a cover. I set the whole thing up.”

  “Wait, so you’re telling me Naomi was from LionFish?”

  “Yep.”

  “And she and this Sam guy were the ones who tossed Dana’s room?”

  “I’m sorry. I should have said something earlier. I thought maybe if I kept my mouth shut, no one would find out. But if they really did this, our financial data is going to be the least of my worries.”

  Well, that was a relief. Everything was starting to make sense. LionFish was in trouble, Dana was blackmailing them, Ryan wanted to pay up, someone else wanted to shut her up, and the company had sent a security team to finish the job.

  Naomi was no missing person; she was a suspect. Everything was falling into place, and I couldn’t wait to go hand over her and Sam’s names to the police. This was news I was going to enjoy delivering in person—even if it did mean flying back to Mexico one last time.

  CHAPTER 28

  “Taxi?” the doorman said, as we planted ourselves near the hotel’s revolving doors to wait for Evan.

  “God, I wish.” I smiled. “I mean, no, thank you.”

  It was tempting to jump into a Yellow Cab and hop the next flight to San Francisco, but I still had one piece of business left: turning over the information Ryan had given me to Zoe and Mrs. Abernathy and washing my hands of this business once and for all.

  I paced back and forth, borderline giddy, clutching the notebook containing the names of my two prime suspects. The team from LionFish had had plenty of opportunity, more than ample motive, and, well, I didn’t know about the means, but I was sure someone more experienced than me could figure that one out. Mrs. Abernathy could take the information to the police or she could pass it on to her attorneys, but my work here was done.

  After an excruciatingly long wait—in reality probably no more than seven or eight minutes—Evan rounded the corner in the rental car and Brody and I piled in.

  “How’d it go?” Evan asked.

  “It went well,” I answered. “I’ll fill you in on the way back, but do you mind if we drop Brody off at the main airport first? He’s going to go ahead and fly back to San Francisco.”

  “Sure,” Evan said. “Does that mean you’re coming back with me?”

  “Yeah. Call me old-fashioned, but I want to deliver the news in person.”

  We pulled up to Terminal 2, and Brody and I got out of the car.

  “Are you sure this is okay?” Brody asked, pulling his luggage out of the trunk.

  “Of course! Go, go. I’ll be fine. I’ll be right behind you, as soon as I retire from my accidental career in law enforcement.”

  “Okay,” he said, scooping me up in a big hug and planting a peck on my cheek. “Let me know when you get a flight. I can pick you up from the airport.”

  “You mean you haven’t had enough of me yet?” I punched him playfully on the arm.

  “Almost, but not quite,” he joked.

  “Well, you should get a medal,” I said, handing him his camera bag. “Thanks again for everything. I really don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  We finished saying good-bye, and I climbed back into the car with Evan and rolled down the window. “Don’t forget to bill your return flight to Mrs. Abernathy,” I called after Brody as he walked away.

  “Oh, don’t worry!” he exclaimed, smiling broadly. “I even booked myself in first class!”

  I buckled my seat belt as we exited Lindbergh Field and headed toward the private airstrip where Evan’s plane was waiting.

  “You hungry?” Evan asked. “We could stop at In-N-Out Burger.”

  I shrugged in response. My stomach was starting to grumble, but I wasn’t eager to spend any more time with Evan than I had to.

  “C’mon, it’s not like the plane can le
ave without us.” He smiled winningly. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was trying to charm me into forgetting about the other night. It didn’t matter. I was still miffed.

  “I can wait till later,” I replied. “I want to get back to San Miguel and wrap things up.”

  Evan looked hurt, but he left it at that.

  After riding in silence for a bit, I flipped on the radio, trying to find something to fill the void in the conversation. Why was there nothing but Spanish-language stations? Probably because we were only fifteen miles from Tijuana. After the last couple of weeks, I was ready for a break from all things Mexican. I scowled and turned the radio back off.

  “What are you thinking about?” Evan asked. He never had been comfortable with silence, even if he’d caused it himself.

  “Just that I can’t wait to be back in my own bed.”

  He sighed, then pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall and turned off the ignition.

  “Look, Kelsey, can we talk about the other night?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest and stared out the window at a pawn shop next to a Chinese restaurant.

  “I’m sorry about what I said.” He reached out to take my hand, but I refused to unfold myself.

  “I don’t care that you said it. I’m just upset that you seem to believe it.”

  “Well, I mean, c’mon…” He wasn’t exactly leaping in with a well-articulated explanation. “You’re around weddings all the time. I assumed … I mean, surely you must want to get married yourself.”

  I kind of wanted to smack him. Good thing we were having this conversation in a parked car and not in midair, in case I decided to act on the urge.

  “Maybe,” I said, “someday, but not right now. Weddings are my job, not my goal. I’m not acting out some secret fantasy I doodled in my spiral notebook in eighth grade.”

  “But you can understand how a guy might feel pressured, right?”

  “What?” I turned in my seat to look at him. “No, I really can’t.”

  “It sets an impossible standard. All day long you’re immersed in true love and long-term commitments and all that fairy-tale, happily-ever-after crap.”