Kill the Competition

by Stephanie Bond

  She looked at Wade, who dwarfed the stool he sat on. “Um, yes it was.”

  Her mother put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Franklin, she has a man there!” Then she uncovered the mouthpiece. “So your couch must have been delivered.”

  She squinted at her mother’s jump in logic. “Hm?”

  “I assume if you’re entertaining, you must have your couch.”

  “Oh. No, not until tomorrow.”

  “So who is this man who sits on the floor?”

  She glanced at Wade and shook her head. “Um, he’s a friend, Mother. Where are you and Dad?”

  “Iowa.”

  “What’s in Iowa?”

  “Lots of corn, dear. We’ve stopped at a Holiday Inn for the night in Dubuque.”

  “That sounds…lovely.”

  “So how are you?”

  “Oh…fine.”

  “Did you get your big promotion?”

  “Um, not yet. But soon. I hope.”

  “Dad wants to know how your car is.”

  “Tell Dad the car is…fine.”

  “I worry about you—what if something happens and you need to get in touch with us? Your dad says we should have gotten one of those car phones.”

  She pressed her lips together. “Nothing’s going to happen, Mom.”

  “I’d better go. I’m at a pay phone and I’m holding up the line.”

  “Okay, Mom.” Belinda paused, suddenly loath to hang up. “I love you both.”

  “We love you, too. Good-bye, dear.”

  She slowly returned the phone to its cradle and, feeling Wade’s gaze on her, tried to dissuade any comments by taking her time turning off the ringer.

  It didn’t work.

  “I take it she hasn’t heard about the murder?”

  “No. She and Dad are on a cross-country trip they’ve been planning for years. I’m not about to ruin it for them when this thing could be over tomorrow.”

  “They sound nice, your folks.”

  She smiled fondly. “They’re completely neurotic, but yes, they’re great. I’d hate to cause them any more embarrassment.” She sipped from her coffee, hoping he hadn’t noticed the slip of her tongue.

  But he had. “Any more embarrassment?”

  “My mother had planned that by now I’d be happily settled into a grand home and working on grandchildren.”

  “A breakup can be hard on the entire family,” he agreed.

  “Do your parents live around here?”

  “Birmingham, Alabama. That’s about three hours away and where I grew up.”

  “Do you see them often?”

  “Not as much as I should.”

  “Were they close to your ex-wife?”

  “Not really. Tania wasn’t the warm and fuzzy type.”

  So, in manspeak, Tania was exciting—the kind of woman who broke rules and got away with it. “But your parents were upset about the divorce?”

  “Just disappointed. I hid all the problems from them, so to them our breakup seemed sudden. In reality, we’d been separated for two years.” He cleared his throat. “But enough about me. I’m going to need a list of anyone who might have legitimately been around the trunk of your car.”

  The man was going to have to work on his interrogation segues. “Well, me of course. And any of the girls might have touched it getting in and out of the car. You. Then there was the guy at the auto shop who gave me an estimate for repairs—his name was Dave, I believe. And my neighbor, Perry.”

  “Was this the guy you were hiding from in the food court?”

  She nodded. “He lives two doors down and can be a little pesky.”

  “I’ll try to remember that you don’t like pesky men.”

  A tingle passed over her shoulders, although she suspected Wade’s teasing was a ploy to keep her mind off the matter at hand.

  “When did your neighbor have an opportunity to be near the trunk?”

  “A few nights ago he walked over to inspect the damage on my car.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  She guessed at the spelling, and he wrote it down.

  He pursed his mouth. “This guy was at the Stratford Building yesterday.”

  “He told me he was going to repair the elevator—I assumed he meant the shaft that Jeanie Lawford fell down.”

  He made a few more notes, then asked for more information about her coworkers at Archer. She told him about Juneau Archer, Clancy Edmunds, Monica Tanner, and Tal Archer, plus the little she knew about each person.

  “Clancy was the one who told me about Margo firing Jim Newberry. He said that Jim had filed a lawsuit against the company. Clancy is also the person Libby said everyone suspected of stealing the money that was reported missing today.”

  “Juneau and Tal Archer—father and son?”

  “Right. I’ve only met the son once. Juneau is rarely in the office.”

  “Any of these people have a beef with Margo?”

  “Monica Tanner opposed an acquisition that we just signed with a company called Payton Manufacturing, but it didn’t appear to be more than professional disagreement.”

  “Margo was pushing the acquisition?”

  “Yes. In fact, I was brought on board specifically to facilitate and oversee the financial aspects of the deal.”

  “Did sealing the deal have anything to do with the promotion you were offered?”

  Her neck itched. “Yes.”

  “What about the woman’s assistant—” He read from his notes. “Brita Wheeling?”

  “I don’t know much about her either, although I gather she’s loyal to Margo.” Brita was willing to wield an umbrella on her boss’s behalf.

  “Okay, tell me more about the women in your car pool.”

  She hesitated. “I’d rather wait to see if Jim Newberry is found.”

  He put down his pen. “You don’t want to talk about your friends?”

  “Not if I don’t have to.”

  “Are you afraid you’ll get them into trouble?”

  “I’m afraid that something I say will be misconstrued.”

  He steepled his hands and sighed. “You wouldn’t want to appear as if you’re covering up for them.”

  She bristled. “There’s a difference between covering up for someone and protecting their privacy.”

  “Are you close to these women?”

  “I’ve only known them for a short while, but I’d like to think I could be.”

  “What do you think they’re telling the detectives about you right now?”

  That she was aloof, standoffish, guarded, and maybe a little stuck up. She dropped her gaze to her hands. “I honestly couldn’t say.”

  He was quiet for a long while, then asked, “Are you hungry?”

  She shook her head, but her stomach growled.

  He laughed. “How about I whip us up an omelet?”

  “From my refrigerator? Good luck, Lieutenant.”

  “Just Wade,” he said, rolling up the sleeves of his navy uniform shirt. “I went off duty a few minutes ago.”

  She finished her coffee. “If I hadn’t seen you at Gypsy Joe’s, I would have thought you never went off duty.”

  “See all the things you don’t know about me,” he said lightly.

  “I’m learning.” And rather liking it.

  He opened the refrigerator. “While I’m doing miracles with condiments and bottled water, why don’t you freshen up?”

  She blinked. “That was subtle.”

  “Salyers and Truett will be back soon. I thought you might want to take a shower and maybe change clothes, you know, to recharge.”

  In case they arrested her, he meant. “Good idea,” she said, sliding down from the stool. “I won’t be long.”

  She dashed up the stairs and turned on the shower. While the water heated, she pulled clean, comfortable clothes from her closet, her mind spinning, still unable to fully grasp what had happened today and what was on the line. Her job, her reputation, her sanity, p
erhaps even her life, considering Georgia was a death-penalty state.

  Wade’s question about what Libby, Carole, and Rosemary would have to say about her dominated her thoughts. Would they think she was capable of committing such a heinous crime? Or was it possible that one of them had accidentally killed Margo, then conspired with the others to set her up?

  She shook her head, resolved not to think about murder and mayhem for the duration of her shower. Even with the bathroom door secured, she felt strange undressing with Wade downstairs in her kitchen. She stepped under the showerhead and raised her face to allow the warm water to wash away as much of the day as possible, resisting the urge to stand there until she dissolved and washed down the drain.

  As she ran a towel over her body, she wondered who would miss her if she had been the one murdered and stuffed into a trunk. Her parents, of course. And Vince would probably feel bad, but he would not be heartbroken. Her acquaintances and coworkers in Cincinnati would send flowers, and perhaps Rosemary would insist that Margo let people off to go to her memorial service. The girls would find a new carpooling buddy before long, and she would be relegated to a topic of conversation during long commutes and martini splurges.

  She dressed quickly, then opened the bathroom door to the hall to help the steam dissipate from the mirrors. The delicious aroma of rosemary tickled her nostrils, and her stomach roared—no wonder, considering the fact that it was almost 7:30. The horrible day couldn’t succumb to darkness fast enough, but she hoped that daylight didn’t bring worse.

  She used concealer to cover the bruise as well as possible, then she brushed powder over her shiny, clean skin. She skipped extras except for strawberry lip balm—her mouth was chapped from constantly licking her lips and from being dehydrated. The blow-dryer made short work of her hair, which she finger-combed and left as-is.

  She sighed, dropped her wet towels in the laundry closet, then walked into the spare bedroom to peek through the blinds down at her bereft front yard. The dusk-to-dawn light flickered down on her narrow, empty driveway and little patch of yard, now trampled. The crowd was gone, but the stakes and yellow police tape remained, loose ends flapping in the light breeze.

  Loose ends. A perfect analogy for her life.

  “Soup’s on,” Wade called.

  She released the mini-blinds to snap back, then left the room and walked downstairs, sniffing appreciably. “Wow, something smells good.”

  He glanced up, and his hands stilled. His look was so boldly admiring that she had an absurd blip of panic that she’d forgotten to put her clothes on. “Wow,” he said. “I was about to say the same thing. That’s some great perfume.”

  “Ivory soap.”

  “Like I said.”

  She was sure that no matter how pink she already was, she got pinker. He had found her radio and tuned it to a classic rock station. Fleetwood Mac’s “You Make Lovin’ Fun” made the small space seem even more cozy. To distract herself, Belinda gestured to the steaming omelets he’d served up on small plates at the breakfast bar. “Looks like you did work miracles.”

  He smiled—a look that was becoming alarmingly likable. “Don’t give me too much credit. I just threw in a few spices and a little parmesan cheese.”

  “I hate to blow any image of my culinary skills you might have,” she said, “but I only keep that stuff around to jazz up delivery pizza.”

  He was staring again, wiping his hands on a towel and shaking his head. “Lady, if it turns out that you’re a cold-blooded murderer, I’m going to be mighty disappointed.”

  That made her smile. “I’ll bet you’ve met all types of criminals, haven’t you?”

  He nodded and joined her on the other side of the bar. “Everyone has the capacity to do terrible things. Put someone in the right situation, then offer the right incentive or trigger the right emotion, and that person will choose wrong over right, even if it goes against their nature.”

  He might have been looking into her head, analyzing why a perennial good girl would suddenly compromise her integrity in exchange for outward signs of success that would prove she had made the right decision to move to Atlanta. Fudging to push through a merger wasn’t as serious a transgression as taking a person’s life, but it still led to unpleasant self-revelation.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked, pointing to her untouched plate.

  She managed a smile. If he knew what she’d done, would he still be turning those amazing eyes in her direction? She cut into the fragrant omelet and delivered a forkful into her mouth. “Mm, wonderful.”

  He lifted his coffee cup to his mouth. “Says the starving woman.”

  They ate in companionable silence, listening to Sting and Heart, each lost in their own thoughts. Downey, having been ignored long enough, sauntered into the room, head held high.

  “There she is, Miss America,” Belinda murmured.

  Wade leaned over and gently scooped the cat into his lap.

  “Careful—she bites.”

  But Downey lay on her back over his knee and gave him full access to her underbelly, the little hussy.

  Belinda sighed. “I guess she bites only me.”

  He scratched the cat’s stomach for a few minutes, then set her down. She prowled every corner.

  “She’s looking for that pillow the detective took.”

  “Attached to it, huh?”

  “She hasn’t exactly acclimated to the move.”

  “What about you?” he asked quietly. “Does this incident make you want to go back to Cincinnati?”

  She studied her coffee. “Yes.”

  “It looked to me from the items you were taking to Goodwill, that you were ready to put all of that behind you.”

  “Ironic, huh?”

  “So are you going to tell me what happened to you and Vince?”

  She lifted an eyebrow.

  “I remember his name from the pillow.”

  Of course. Belinda took a deep breath. “It’s simple, really—”

  The doorbell rang, and she gratefully bailed to answer it. Wade followed. He walked into the living room and looked out the bay window. “It’s Salyers and Truett.”

  The omelet was subjected to another flip in her stomach as she opened the door. The man and woman weren’t smiling and didn’t wait for an invitation to enter. Salyers took in the music, the plates. “Hope we weren’t interrupting anything.”

  “What did you find out?” Wade asked, his tone impatient.

  Truett grunted. “Jim Newberry is AWOL—his wife hasn’t seen him since he left their home earlier today. She gave us something with his prints on it, though, so we’ll be able to run them against the ones lifted from the trunk lid.” Then he looked at Belinda. “And those carpooling friends of yours are a closemouthed bunch.”

  She swallowed hard—Rosemary, yes, but the only thing that could keep Libby and Carole from talking was a mouthful of Krispy Kreme doughnut. Or guilt?

  “But right now,” Salyers said, “it looks as if Newberry is our man. His wife confirmed that he hated the Campbell woman and made threats against her life. We have a three-state APB out on him, though, so we’ll find him.”

  “Meanwhile,” Belinda said, “what about me?”

  “For now, go on about your business,” Salyers said. “Ride the car pool to work tomorrow, follow your normal routine.”

  “What do I tell my coworkers about the murder?”

  “As little as possible. Everyone will be talking plenty, but pay special attention to anyone who seems overly interested. Sometimes the perp will be eager for details.”

  Chapter 24

  “I have to know every last detail,” Libby insisted, her eyes as large as eggs.

  “Let the poor woman get in the car,” Rosemary said from the driver’s seat.

  Belinda slid into the seat behind Rosemary and pulled the door closed, wincing at the twinge in her wrist. “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  Libby’s shoulders fell. “You can’t
not talk about it.”

  “I don’t have the strength to rehash it, Libby.”

  “You do look pooped,” Carole offered.

  The young woman was being kind. In all, Belinda might have slept thirty minutes. Sitting up. With the lights on. An image of Margo’s face was branded on the insides of her eyelids.

  After Detectives Salyers and Truett had left, Lieutenant Alexander had gone outside to remove the stakes and tape from her yard. When he’d come back, they’d been as awkward as teenagers entangled in a murder investigation. She had offered him another cup of coffee, and he’d declined. Then he’d offered to stay—on the couch. She had reminded him she didn’t have a couch, and for some reason had felt the need to repeat the fact that she had only one pillow. More awkwardness had ensued until he’d finally saluted and left.

  That exchange alone would have kept her awake, but with the other demons on her back, sleep had been nowhere to be found.

  “You should have come over to spend the night at my house,” Libby said.

  Belinda smiled. “It was nice of you to offer, but I truly thought I’d sleep better in my own bed.” And considering how nosy Libby had been in a three-minute conversation on the phone last night, she knew the woman would ply her for particulars about the murder until the wee hours.

  “It was on the eleven o’clock news,” Carole said, turning around in her seat. “They showed Margo’s picture and Jim Newberry’s.”

  “Was my name mentioned?”

  “Oh, yeah. And they showed your car being towed away.”

  Great. Libby offered her a doughnut, but she shook her head—her stomach was still a little on the puny side.

  “When the police showed up at my door last night,” Libby said, talking even faster than usual, “I thought it was about the missing money. I couldn’t believe it when they told me Margo was dead, and that you had found the body in your trunk. Now I feel kind of bad about how many times I slammed on the brake while I was driving your car—she was probably bouncing around back there like a sack of potatoes.”

  “Libby,” Rosemary chided.

  “I’m just saying what everyone else is thinking.” She turned to look at Belinda. “Good gravy, when you opened the trunk, did you freak plumb out?”

  “You could say that.”