The Michaela Bancroft Mysteries 1-3

by Michele Scott

  "It might. But why wouldn't Juliet just break up with him?" Joe asked. "Why go through the whole deal of telling her dad and all? Sterling was never convicted of killing the girl. You said that the papers reported it to be an accident."

  "I don't know. But Rebecca Woodson's family filed a wrongful death suit. They don't seem to think it was an accident."

  "Okay. Keep talking. Go back to Sunday at the fashion show. Maybe you missed something."

  "Juliet seemed flushed and hurried. Camden had thought she and Sterling were off together because she couldn't find either one of them. She offered Juliet a shot of tequila after she showed up, but she refused and got up on the stage."

  Joe nodded. "But what about Zach? Where was he during all of this?"

  "On the runway," Michaela replied. "I saw him up there, and then Juliet came rushing through because she was next. He asked her if she was okay when he saw her stepping up on the stage as he was getting down. She nodded and the show went on."

  "One thing we know then is that Zach didn't kill Sterling, so we can cross him off the list, but what we don't know is if he's protecting Juliet. From the sound of it, he's protecting her from something. We can also guess they're protecting her father. Strange, though, I don't think Daddy would go and advertise to his little girl that he planned to knock off her boyfriend."

  "No. I agree with that. Let's stay with this train of thought, that the murder has to do with Rebecca Woodson," Michaela said.

  "Okay, we'll see if we can't peel this back a bit more and give each of them a motive. I know we can only theorize but it might help. Say Juliet felt threatened by Sterling. Maybe the dude did kill this Rebecca Woodson. He might have threatened Juliet for something; maybe she didn't want to see him anymore for another reason. Who knows if there was a lovers' quarrel? Say there was. Taber threatens Juliet Mitchell, who tells Zach, who is their buddy. Now, Juliet is a pretty girl, and Zach may have had a thing for her. You said they were all kinda lovey-dovey when you spotted them in the stall area?"

  Michaela nodded. "Definitely. I would even go so far as to say that they looked to be more than friends."

  "Okay. Zach sees an opening where Sterling screwed up with the girl. He's there for her to lean on and she tells him that Sterling threatened her. Zach was in Santa Barbara with Sterling when this Rebecca Woodson died?"

  "Yes. And what if Zach knows that her death wasn't an accident and thinks that Sterling might have killed her? He decides to protect Juliet, and one or the other goes and tells her father about Sterling's threat and what happened in Santa Barbara."

  "We're like a regular Holmes and Watson, girl."

  She smiled. "Sort of, huh? Now, Ed Mitchell hears this and he's not happy. He kills Sterling. Zach and Juliet assume he did it because they told him about Sterling and maybe Ed went ballistic. Now Zach and Juliet feel the need to protect her father."

  "Exactly. The kicker is, where does Pepe Sorvino and his clan come in and what's the deal with the ring that you saw Mitchell give to Pepe?"

  "A payoff?"

  Joe clucked his tongue. "Possible. I'm gonna call around to a few of my cousins and see if the Sorvinos have any ties with one of the families."

  "Mafia?"

  Joe shrugged and wheeled the van onto her property.

  "Wouldn't you know that already? With your connections?"

  "You've watched one too many Sopranos."

  She shook her head. They pulled up in front of her house. Michaela extracted the videotapes from the backpack she'd taken into Sterling's place. "Wanna watch some movies?"

  Joe looked at his watch. "Can't. What you got?"

  "Compliments of Sterling."

  "You little vixen."

  "Never know what we might find. I figured I might as well grab them. We've already broken a hundred laws tonight."

  "Report back. I told Marianne I'd be back before Conan. We like to watch it together."

  "Deal."

  Michaela went inside her house. A quiet staleness that she had never gotten used to since her old lab, Cocoa, passed away came over her. She sighed. What it must feel like to come home to a family. Lucky Joe.

  She got her video camera out. These videos hadn't been transferred from the camera-type cassettes. She would have to put them through her camera to see, and then run it on her laptop. Maybe she'd make some popcorn for the evening's entertainment. Probably just shots of high-priced vacations that he'd taken. She put some popcorn in the microwave, grabbed a bottle of water, and started watching the first tape while it popped.

  The bag remained in the microwave before she ever got to it, an hour later. What she saw on the tapes was not only startling, they also revealed someone who would have one helluva reason to put Sterling in the ground, where he couldn't speak a damn word.

  TWENTY-THREE

  WHAT MICHAELA VIEWED ON THOSE TAPES WAS completely scandalous. They were appalling, so much so that she had to fast-forward through quite a bit of it. All she could do was repeat the word wow over and over again, and shake her head.

  All the tapes, except one, displayed a story of a love affair, if that's what it could be called. More of an erotic affair. The stars were Sterling and a woman she had never seen before, and they did things on those tapes together that she had no clue were even possible. One tape featured some other gal with Sterling. Probably a one-night stand. Is this what Juliet had discovered—that Sterling had this disgustingly perverted side to him? Had he taped her?

  Michaela had never seen an X-rated movie—never had an inclination to—but what she saw on the tapes was likely way up there in that category. It was actually gross. The thing was, it became obvious to Michaela that the woman who was on most of the tapes had no clue she was starring in them. At the end of the last tape, which she assumed was the most recent one taken, Sterling sat by himself at the end of his bed. He slicked back his hair with his hands, sighed, and started speaking:

  "As you can see, Carolyn, we've had quite a run, and I'm sure Charles will not be a happy man when he receives these tapes. Don't bother destroying them. I have a few copies in select places. You've been charming and fun and it is obvious that you make an excellent star, but you have not come through for me as you had promised." He raised his voice now, sounding like a madman. Ha! Michaela had always sensed there was something lurking underneath that suave, smooth exterior and here it was, coming out of him as a freakish pervert. "You, my dear, promised to get me back in good with the family and make sure my allowance not only matched what it once was, but was increased substantially. You've failed miserably. I am now giving you, as of today, one week to make good on your promises, or else something tells me that you won't be getting a dime of the Taber fortune once the family sees this. I don't have much more to lose, but you, my dear, have what, forty, fifty million that would slip out of your nasty little hands—which I love, by the way. One week, Carolyn. One week."

  With that the tape finished up. The date flashed across the screen. It was almost a week to the day before Sterling was murdered.

  Holy flying horse pucky. Who was the woman who had made promises to Sterling that she couldn't keep?

  MICHAELA WRACKED HER BRAIN AND WENT OVER everything about three hundred times. At least it felt that way. Finally, at about 1:30 in the morning, she started to drift off to sleep, and that's when she heard it. At first it was like the moment when falling asleep as the body drifts into that next stage, almost as if the soul is being shaken loose—the body jerks and then a deep sleep follows. The jerk came, but not the sleep. A noise in the house. She sat up and listened. Had she started dreaming? No. There it was again—in the kitchen. What if someone was rummaging for a weapon—a knife? She quietly slid out of bed and tiptoed over to her bedroom door; she kept a baseball bat behind it. She now realized that she should've been keeping it next to her bed. What good would it have done her if whoever was down there had made it upstairs without her hearing? The phone. She needed to get to the phone and call 911. Dammit, she'd l
eft the portable phone in her office. She wished for the day when phones couldn't travel all over the house, when they had cords on them and were stationary. Yes, that would've worked much better right about now.

  She heard a creaking sound. Whoever was there now climbed the stairs. She gripped the bat tighter and hid behind the door. She stood still as she watched a figure enter the room. It was not a man, but a woman, and as Michaela switched on the light, she was stunned to see Juliet Mitchell spin around and point a gun at her.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  "JULIET! WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?" Michaela white-knuckled the baseball bat, poised and ready to swing. "Put the gun down."

  "Give me the letter!" Juliet yelled. Her tearstained face was streaked in black from mascara. She did not look well, and if Michaela was right, she smelled of alcohol.

  "Juliet, let's talk about this. Rationally. You put the gun down and I'll put the bat down and we can talk. Okay?"

  "Give me the letter. I won't let you ruin my life!"

  "I don't want to ruin your life. Let's talk."

  "No. You don't understand."

  "Tell me then, what don't I understand?"

  "Juliet, put the gun down!" Zach Holden, standing behind the girl, looked as horrified as Michaela felt. "Please, Jules. This won't solve anything. Let's work together on this."

  Michaela wasn't too sure she should be relieved to see Zach or not, but if he could get Juliet to put the gun down, she at least would still have the bat in her hands.

  "Why should I? If anything happens to my dad, then what good is any of this? Especially after what you told me tonight!"

  "Juliet, all I was trying to say is that we're young and we don't need to rush anything. This has nothing to do with your father."

  "It has everything to do with my dad! Everything. You're just like Sterling. All you want is one thing." Positioned between Zach and Michaela, Juliet weaved a bit to the side. Michaela looked for the right moment to pounce. But she had no idea where Zach stood in all of this.

  "My dad only wants to protect me and I thought that was what you wanted, too." She turned away from Michaela and pointed the gun at Zach.

  "That's not true," Zach replied. "I'm sorry about tonight. You surprised me is all. I thought we agreed to take things slow. The marriage thing, it was out of the blue. You've got to admit that. But, I'm not opposed to getting married at some point."

  Michaela saw that Zach was trying to save his skin, but she hoped it wasn't as obvious to the girl. "I believe him, Juliet. Give me the gun and you and Zach can go and work things out."

  "Give me back the letter. We know you were at Sterling's tonight. It had to be you. You overheard us in the barn at the polo field." Juliet slumped to the floor, and Michaela and Zach both seized the opportunity. Zach wrapped his arms tightly around her, and shook the gun out of her hand, and Michaela quickly picked it up. She didn't want to aim it at anyone, but she needed the power right now. Still, instead of turning it on either one of them, she simply held it, while Zach wrestled with Juliet, who finally calmed down and began crying into his shoulder.

  Michaela had a lot of questions and she was in no mood to not have them answered. "Okay, it's truth time for all of us. I know about the letter and what it says. What you wrote in there, Juliet, is disturbing to say the least. It's obvious to me that you and Zach are protecting your father because he murdered Sterling, and I have been made the fall guy. Frankly I don't care how it was done, but you two are going to tell the police. And—how in the hell did you get into my house?" Her body quickly filled with a heated rage. Tomorrow she planned to start looking for a new four-legged companion.

  "The letter…yes, Juliet wrote it," Zach said.

  "Got that much. Why don't we start with tonight, Juliet? How did you get in here?"

  "Your kitchen window was cracked and I crawled through."

  Here Michaela thought she'd been careful when she locked up each night. Living in the back forty wasn't apparently as safe as it once was. "Did you actually think you would find the letter and get out of here without me knowing? And you." She turned to Zach. "How did you get in, and how do you play into all of this other than wanting to protect Juliet and—from what I gather—keep on jumping her bones?"

  Zach sighed. "We went out tonight. We figured that you'd overheard us in the barn talking about the letter and then when we got into Sterling's place, we knew it had to be you who was there. We tried to figure out how we could get the letter from you."

  "How did you know that I even had it?"

  "We didn't for sure, but we needed to know. Juliet drank more than usual and she was talking nonsense about coming here and confronting you and getting the letter back. I told her that we needed to wait until tomorrow and then we could all have a sensible discussion about it."

  "I would've appreciated that, rather than having a gun pointed at me." Michaela wasn't completely buying their story. For all she knew they'd come here to kill her.

  "I told her it was crazy, and we argued about other stuff."

  "Uh-huh."

  "When I dropped her off at home, I had a bad feeling that she might do something stupid, which she did. I called her a few times and when she finally answered she said that she was on her way to get the letter from you."

  "So, you drove out here and obviously saw how she'd gotten in, made your way in as well, and here we all are—the three musketeers." She turned to the inebriated Juliet. "You're lucky you didn't kill yourself or someone else in your condition," Michaela snapped. "Okay, the letter. I'm not giving it back, and seeing how I now have the gun in my possession, we're going to call the police and the two of you are going to tell them everything that you know."

  "We didn't do anything!" Juliet cried. "We didn't kill Sterling."

  "I believe that. But you did break into my house and hold a gun on me, and I think you're protecting your dad, who may have killed him." Michaela tried to change her tone to one of empathy. She understood the need to protect a parent. Over the years she'd shielded her own father, who had fought his gambling addictions on and off, but this was far worse. Juliet was protecting her father from murder and had involved Zach to a point that the two of them could possibly be considered as accomplices.

  "She's right, Juliet," Zach said.

  "No. We don't know for sure it was my dad."

  "Can I ask you what you told your father and why you think he might have killed Sterling?" She looked at Zach. "Does it have to do with Rebecca Woodson's death? I know about last summer."

  Zach nodded. "I'm the one who told Juliet about that. I saw her getting serious over Sterling and I knew that his intentions weren't always honest. He was known for telling a woman one thing and then doing another. I thought he was stringing her along like he had Rebecca, and I didn't want her to get hurt."

  "Do you believe that Sterling had something to do with Rebecca's death?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know what to believe. I was driving home the night of the party. Sterling denies he had anything to do with Rebecca going off that pier, but Tommy Liggett was there and he confided in me that he saw Sterling follow Rebecca out on that deck. Look, Sterling was a complicated guy and I didn't know if Juliet could trust him."

  "You and Sterling were friends, though."

  He laughed. "Sterling had a lot of friends. He had friends out of convenience. When it worked for him, then it was all good. If there was someone better to hang out with, though, he'd leave you high and dry. People understood that about him. The only real buddy he ever had was Justin Nightingale. When Justin was alive those two were tight."

  Robert and Paige's son. That part of the web had not been unraveled enough just yet, but she had to take it one step at a time. "And this didn't bother you? You went and hung out with him for a part of your summer."

  "I was only in Santa Barbara for a weekend."

  "I feel sick," Juliet said.

  "Sit down," Michaela told her and pointed to her reading chair and ottoman in the corn
er of the room. The danger appeared to be over, and before she picked up the phone and called Peters she wanted to try and get as many answers as she could out of these two, although it looked as if Juliet was going to pass out.

  She turned back to Zach. "Why did you go to the coast with Tommy and Sterling?"

  "Why not? Tommy had been out there already with him for a month and said it was a blast. Sterling paid for everything. I thought it would be cool, so I went."

  "And you met Rebecca Woodson."

  Zach nodded. "Everyone met Rebecca. Total party girl, who wanted more from Sterling than he could give, but he fed her lines, you know—stuff like she could come visit him. He even told her he'd get her a place to stay in the desert. Stupid stuff for him to say, because we all knew that he wouldn't live up to it. I left because I was kind of over the scene and his bull."

  "Do you think Ed Mitchell killed Sterling?"

  "I don't know. I think he's very protective of Juliet and he'd do anything for her."

  "And so would you."

  "Yes," he replied quietly.

  "Even if it meant sending an innocent woman to jail."

  "I'm sorry. You have to understand—"

  "No, I don't! And now you have to tell the police what you know. As far as the letter goes. I don't think it's necessary for us to tell the cops how either one of us might have it in our possession, but I'm giving it to them."

  "You can't give them the letter." He pointed to Juliet, who had passed out in Michaela's chair.

  "I don't care about your promises, Zach. I think you're a good man with ethics. I really do, and now is the time to live up to them. If Ed Mitchell is guilty and I go to jail for something that I didn't do, can you honestly live with yourself?"

  Zach stood there for a moment, then pulled out his cell phone.

  "Who are you calling?" Michaela asked.

  "The police."

  TWENTY-FIVE

  DETECTIVE PETERS SEEMED TO BE AS THRILLED to see Michaela at three o' clock in the morning as she was to see him, which was not at all. But maybe they could get this mess straightened out and her life back to normal.