by Mary Maxwell
He drank some coffee, lifting the cup with one hand while the fingers of the other drummed against the tabletop.
“So what’s on your mind?” He cleared his throat. “Your message said it was about business. Are you looking for a second location for your little cookie café?”
I clenched my teeth at the snarky reference to Sky High. I’d been around men like Frank Kanter enough to know it’s best to take the high road even when they go low with patronizing language and demeaning attitudes.
“I wanted to ask you about Gallagher Holdings,” I said.
The fingers that had been tapping on the table froze in midair.
“Say that again, please?”
“Gallagher Holdings.” I paused, keeping my eyes locked on his cold stare. “I was doing some research into Wendy Barr’s death, and that name popped up in relation to a property in California.”
Kanter hunched his shoulders. “Never heard of it.” He lifted the coffee again for another sip. “Was there anything else?”
I smiled. “You’re not familiar with Gallagher Holdings?”
His left eye twitched faintly as he repeated the denial. When I described more details about the sales record for the parcel of land in Fullerton, Kanter pushed the cup toward the center of the table.
“I think we’re done here,” he said. “I came to meet you on good faith, Miss Reed. I have no time for games.”
“What about blackmail?” I said. “Did you have time for that?”
His eye trembled again, but he calmed it by brushing his brow with one finger. Then he pursed his lips, forming a smirk that would’ve been right at home on the face of any teenager preparing for a spat with a peer.
“I know about your background,” Kanter said, lowering his voice to a mix of gravel and grit. “Big shot private detective in Chicago, working with the cops, catching crooks and nailing cheating husbands to the wall.”
I smiled, feeling suddenly calm and centered. “Most of that’s true,” I said. “Although I wasn’t a big shot and the only nails involved were these.” I lifted one hand, fluttering the tips of my fingers. “And I’m human, so I make mistakes. But there was no mistaking the fact that your name appeared with Gallagher Holdings as the proud new owners of a piece of undeveloped property in—”
“Who do you think you are?” he said through clenched teeth. “I know my rights. You’re not a real cop. Whatever game you’re playing might make you feel powerful and important, but I don’t have to sit here and take this crap.”
He was out of the chair before I could blink or take a breath.
“I’m just as upset about Wendy Barr as everyone else in town,” Kanter added, leaning down and hitting the table with his knuckles. “She’s been a tenant in my building for years. We maybe didn’t get along like happy campers each minute of every day, but that’s life, isn’t it? Business deals can be prickly. Everybody’s angling for the best terms for themselves, including me and especially Wendy. That woman knew how to get what she wanted, no matter what it took.”
When he finished, I quickly got to my feet. I wanted to be eye-to-eye with him as we moved into the thornier parts of our conversation. I also wanted to be ready to follow him out the door when he bolted.
“What do you mean by ‘no matter what it took’?”
Kanter sighed. “Oh, for the love of…” He pulled keys from one pocket and turned toward the door. “I really thought you wanted to talk about legitimate business, not this garbage.”
“Please,” I said. “Just give me a few more minutes. I’m trying to figure out what happened to Wendy. I heard that she had recently come into some unexpected good fortune in the form of significant amounts of money. The same source also told me that Wendy was communicating with a third person about Gallagher Holdings. I was simply following that lead when I came across the online posting about real estate sales in Fullerton. And that’s where—”
Kanter moved away from the table. I followed on his heels, keeping up as he crashed through the door and onto the sidewalk.
“That’s how I got the idea,” I continued, “that Wendy’s newfound wealth had something to do with you and Gallagher Holdings.”
He grumbled a few words that I couldn’t catch, so I walked faster, moving around to his left and then swerving into his path. He stopped when I held up one hand. I’d spotted his F-150 not far from where we stood, and I knew that there wasn’t much more time to get through to him.
“Please,” I said. “I’m just trying to understand—”
“Enough!” Kanter fumed. “I don’t want to get into it. It’s none of your business.”
The fury in his eyes was unmistakable. I figured that I had about ten or fifteen more seconds before the guy either exploded in a rage or took off in his truck.
“Was Wendy blackmailing you about falsified structural engineering reports?”
Kanter’s mouth tightened. “What did you say?”
“There’s a rumor going around town,” I told him. “If it’s true, that’s between you and the federal government. What I’m trying to do is—”
I stopped when he raised one arm and pointed a finger at my face. “Listen,” he said. “You can believe the lies if you want to, but those are all legit transactions. My guy inspected each one of those buildings before he wrote valid reports. As for Wendy Barr, and I’m sorry to be so cold, but she got what she deserved.”
The icy tone of his voice stopped my heart for a split second. The man had never been known as warm and affable, but the bitter wrath in his gaze was something that I’d rarely seen before.
“How am I supposed to respond to that?” I said.
Kanter laughed. “Suit yourself. I’m just shooting straight.”
“Really?” I managed a smile. “How is running away from a few simple questions the same as shooting straight?”
He moved closer. “I’m not running away,” he said. “I’m just not interested in wasting time.”
“Then why not tell the truth?” I asked. “Was Wendy blackmailing you?”
There was a momentary flicker of something different in his eyes, as if he might actually submit to reason. But the moment passed and the impenetrable glare returned.
“I’ll tell you this much,” he said. “I’m going down to Denver on Monday morning to see my attorney. I’m prepared to meet with the feds about their claims that my business partner and I falsified engineering reports. And, may I add again, those claims are unsubstantiated. We did nothing wrong. If my guy saw problems in those buildings that the other engineers missed, that’s not my fault.”
“What about Wendy?” I asked.
“Oh, for the love of all things,” he hissed. “You’re right. Okay? Does that make you feel better?”
I took a breath. “I’m right?”
“About the blackmail thing,” Kanter replied. “Wendy Barr was a nosy, prying bitch. Pardon my French, but that’s the only word that I can think of at the moment. She was in the building late one night when a couple of my business associates were discussing some of our…” He paused to swallow. “Well, we were talking about our approach to doing things, okay?”
“Does this involve the air ducts?” I said.
Kanter’s eyes narrowed. “You know about that?”
I nodded. “I stopped in the ladies’ room the other day when I came by your office,” I said. “I actually heard you talking to someone, although it wasn’t about business. You were discussing a Garth Brooks concert.”
He smiled, but kept quiet.
“At the time, I thought it was odd,” I continued. “Odd, but not unheard of. That probably happens fairly often, right? People accidentally hear things through air vents or thin walls or open windows.”
“Yep,” Kanter said, still grinning.
“I also had conversations with a couple of other folks who’d been in similar situations,” I said. “They were in the Sagebrush Lofts for different reasons, but someone overheard what they were saying.”
“Doi
ng something about the air ducts is on the list,” Kanter offered. “We’ll get it taken care of sometime, but there are bigger fish to fry at the moment.”
“Always,” I said.
“How did you get from hearing my phone conversation through the air vent,” he said, “to figuring out that Wendy had been blackmailing me?”
I smiled. “My little gray cells.”
Kanter frowned. “Your what?”
“My brain,” I said, tapping the side of my head. “I simply connected the dots between things that I’d learned from various sources.”
“Did you tell the police?”
“I absolutely will,” I said. “I like to be on the right side of these things.”
“So what now?” he asked. “Do I get in my truck and drive away?”
I ignored the question, telling him what was really going through my mind. “People do things all the time that they wouldn’t normally do when money, power or prestige are on the line,” I said. “They lie. They conceal their actions. They falsify structural integrity reports to negatively impact the sale price of a building so they can buy it on the cheap and sell it later for an enormous profit. And in certain truly desperate situations, they kill.”
Kanter smiled, but his eyes were humorless and dark. “If you’re insinuating that I murdered Wendy Barr,” he said, “I can assure you that it’s the last thing that I would ever do. I’m not that desperate for money, power or prestige.”
CHAPTER 28
“You know my least favorite thing about being a detective?” asked Dina Kincaid. “People who tell obvious lies and then act shocked when you call them out later.”
We were sitting in a booth at Scoops of Joy, luxuriating in the bliss of hot fudge peanut butter cookie dough sundaes. It was seven o’clock on Friday night, and the ice cream shop was humming with customers. When I’d called earlier to tell her about my conversation with Frank Kanter, Dina had suggested that we meet for a flashback dinner. It was something that we did every now and then to rekindle the decadence of our high school days—ice cream for all three courses of the meal along with the latest local gossip and a brief respite from obligations and expectations.
“Who are you talking about?” I asked.
She pressed a napkin to her lips. Then she folded it into a square, dropped it in her empty sundae dish and told me that her remark was about Sue Carswell.
“I asked her to come in for another conversation,” Dina explained. “When she claimed that she spent the entire day of Wendy’s murder home alone, I told Sue that we had a witness who saw her driving in downtown Crescent Creek that evening with a male passenger in her car.”
“How’d she take the news?” I asked.
Dina smiled. “How do you think? There was a huffy denial and melodramatic story about her innocence before she admitted to the affair with Ken Higby.”
“They always crack in the end,” I joked.
“Not always,” Dina said. “But most of the time. With Sue Carswell, the lie was part of a cover-up. When you saw her on Sunday, Ken was in the passenger seat. That’s also the reason they both gave the same answers when we interviewed them separately. They were embarrassed about carrying on behind Wendy’s back. Sue was giving Ken a ride that evening. He was meeting a few of his buddies for dinner since she had plans with Wendy.”
I smiled. “What’s that old saying about weaving wicked webs?”
“It’s actually tangled, not wicked,” Dina replied. “‘O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.’”
“Tangled, wicked,” I said. “Six of one, half dozen of another.”
When her phone buzzed in her purse, Dina pulled it out and flicked through the latest text messages. She replied to a couple, deleted a few and then looked up with a bug-eyed stare.
“I knew that I missed something,” she said. “I didn’t tell you about the license plate yet.”
“Are we talking about the guy that I saw talking to Wendy on Sunday?” I asked.
She nodded. “I ran it through the system. The car is registered to someone that lives in Denver, a guy named Anton Cady. I’ll have a photo that you can see later, but the person that you described matches the stats in the file.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
Dina shook her head. “I didn’t, but I reached out to Adam Caldwell with the Denver PD,” she said. “Just to see if Cady has a record.”
“Does he?”
“That’s affirmative,” she replied. “But Adam also told me that Cady’s a confidential informant these days on a hush-hush case that the federal government’s working.”
“In Crescent Creek?”
She shrugged. “Adam didn’t know much more. I told him that Cady had been spotted with our victim the day that she was murdered.”
“Well, that’s all pretty intriguing,” I said. “It was nice of Detective Caldwell to share it, too.”
“He’s a good egg,” Dina replied. “And he likes you and Zack a lot. Whenever I talk to him, he asks how things are at Sky High.”
“That’s sweet,” I said. “He is a good guy, and Madelyn is super cool.”
She smiled. “Isn’t it great when two nice people actually find one another in this crazy world?”
“It’s the best.”
“Maybe someday it’ll happen for me again, too.” There was a wistful look in her eyes as she glanced down. “But right now, I’m happy with my life. I’ve got some great friends, a fulfilling job and a place to call home.” She looked at the phone again. “But my memory could use an upgrade. I also forgot to tell you about my conversations with Sharon Ruiz.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “What did she tell you?”
I listened as Dina summarized her interviews with Sharon. They’d talked twice in the past few days: a long conversation the morning after Wendy was murdered and a follow-up chat two nights later. She confirmed that Sharon and her three full-time employees were all in Los Angeles the day of the murder. And then she repeated something that I’d already heard from Helen Studebaker: Sharon’s company van was in Wendy’s neighborhood shortly before her body was discovered.
“We obtained security camera footage from one of the neighbors in the area,” Dina explained. “It shows Sharon’s van driving down Ogden Terrace at six-thirty on Sunday evening. Unfortunately, the driver’s face wasn’t visible.”
“Any idea if it was a man or woman?” I asked.
Dina shook her head. “It’s too grainy and far away to be helpful.”
“Okay. Who else had access to the company vans if Sharon and her team were out of town?”
“Three people that we know of,” Dina answered. “Sharon’s husband, her sister and a young guy who helps pack orders for the company from time to time.”
“Do you think one of them was involved?” I said.
“Not unless they can travel through time and space,” Dina told me with a faint grin. “Sharon’s husband was in Tulsa, the sister was with Sharon at the trade show and the odd jobs guy worked a double at Café Fleur that day. I talked to Drea Scott, and she confirmed that he clocked in at seven on Sunday morning and was at the restaurant until ten that night.”
Dina’s phone chimed with the arrival of a new email. She picked it up, tapped the screen and read the first few lines of the message.
“Must be kismet,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She showed me the email. I read the subject line—Blood Evidence Analysis—and the first sentence of the message: Drops of blood discovered in van owned by Ruiz Creative Candles confirmed as conclusive match for Wendy Barr’s blood type.
“It looks like someone used Sharon’s van to move Wendy’s body from the Sagebrush Lofts to her duplex on Ogden Terrace,” Dina said. “We also found blood spatter in the lobby of the building as well as Wendy’s hair, tissue and blood on a bottle of vodka that was recovered from Wendy’s desk at work.”
I felt a chill. “Well, that’s a
pretty stunning development.”
Dina nodded. “I didn’t want to say anything until the tests came back from the Crime Lab.”
“Of course,” I said. “I totally understand that.”
“Protocol,” she added with a sigh. “It can be our friend as well as a pain in our backside.”
“Speaking of the Sagebrush Lofts,” I said. “Did you find anything on the CCTV cameras in the parking lot?”
“That was another dead end,” she told me. “The van was parked at the far edge of the lot, just out of camera range.”
“Then how did they get Wendy’s body from the lobby of the building into the van?”
“I think they used the entrance on the west side of the building,” Dina said. “We checked with Kanter’s office, but the security camera on that door hasn’t worked since last month.”
“Maybe the killer was aware of that,” I said. “If they used the side entrance to move Wendy’s body into the van, a broken surveillance camera is a huge advantage to not being identified.”
“Except there’s one other thing we can check,” Dina said with a big smile.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Someone else who lives on Ogden Terrace returned my call this afternoon,” Dina said. “They’ll be back in town tomorrow, so keep your fingers crossed that their security camera caught a glimpse of the person that drove Sharon’s van to Wendy’s on Sunday evening.”
“We can hope,” I said.
Dina smiled. “And there are times that hope actually helps get us across the finish line.”
CHAPTER 29
I had just started a fresh pot of coffee in the Sky High kitchen the next morning at six-thirty when Harper leaned into the pass window and announced that we had two early birds on the front porch.
“They could be tourists who don’t know that we open at seven,” I suggested.
She shook her head. “It’s Ron and Jenna Gaynor. Should I let them in?”
“I’m ready,” Julia said, coming out of the walk-in with a box of fresh strawberries. “Are you all set in the dining room?”
