The Candy Cane Cupcake Killer

by Livia J. Washburn

  In fact, once the housemates had finished eating lunch themselves, Phyllis said to Carolyn and Eve, “Do you two mind cleaning up? I think it might be best if Sam and I went on downtown now, while Miss Prosper and her friends aren’t out there, spying on us.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Carolyn said. “Of course Eve and I can take care of things here.”

  “That’s right,” Eve seconded the statement. “You two should go ahead while you’ve got the chance.”

  “We’ll be early,” Sam pointed out as he stood up from the kitchen table, “but I suppose we can wait in Jimmy’s office, or maybe walk around the square.”

  Phyllis thought that was a good idea. They could walk by the Cranmoor Building, where Nate had his office, and see how the second-floor windows lined up with the trajectory of the shot that had killed Barney McCrory.

  Quickly, they got ready to leave. Instead of taking Sam’s pickup this time, they got into Phyllis’s Lincoln inside the garage. The garage door was closed, so they couldn’t be seen from the street. Phyllis opened the door, backed out quickly, and turned toward the downtown area.

  They had gone less than a block when she noticed something odd in the rearview mirror.

  Someone was following them on a bicycle.

  The schools hadn’t dismissed for Christmas vacation yet, since Christmas was still more than two weeks away, so there shouldn’t have been any kids out and about on a weekday. Well, not many anyway, Phyllis thought. These days there were always a few homeschooled children around.

  The person on the bicycle didn’t look like a child, though. He appeared to be a grown man, and a rather large one at that. In fact, he was so big, he looked ridiculous perched on the bicycle seat.

  He seemed to be having trouble controlling the bike, too. He wobbled and weaved back and forth nearly from one side of the street to the other as he pumped hard on the pedals. It was a good thing there was no traffic right now.

  Then Phyllis exclaimed, “Oh, dear!” as she saw the cyclist lose control of the bike and fall over. It was a classic wipeout, the sort of crash that left a rider with skinned elbows and knees, if not worse.

  “What’s wrong?” Sam asked, as Phyllis slowed down.

  “There was a man back there on a bicycle,” she explained. “He wrecked it.”

  “Kind of a chilly day to be out ridin’ a bike,” Sam said, as Phyllis turned into a driveway and began to back up and turn around. “Sure it’s not a motorcycle?”

  “It would be just as cold on a motorcycle as on a bicycle, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess it would,” Sam said with a shrug. “A bicycle just seems colder somehow.”

  “Anyway, this fellow looked familiar. I want to make sure he’s all right.”

  Phyllis hadn’t realized until just then that there was something familiar about the man. I must have noticed it subconsciously, she thought as she drove toward him.

  By the time she reached him, he was sitting up and shaking his head like he was groggy. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. She hoped he hadn’t hit his head on the pavement and seriously injured himself.

  The curb was empty, so she parked there even with the man and the overturned bicycle. He was an overweight young man with a shock of curly dark hair and thick lenses set in black plastic rims. He wore jeans and a University of North Texas sweatshirt with a lightweight Windbreaker over it.

  The knees of the trousers were torn. It looked like he had skinned his knees, although his elbows appeared to have escaped the crash unscathed.

  Phyllis got out of the car and asked, “Good heavens, are you all right? That was quite a tumble you took.”

  The young man’s glasses had slipped down on his nose. He pushed them up and said, “Yeah, I—I guess so. It knocked the wind out of me pretty good.”

  Sam had gotten out of the Lincoln, too. He came around the front of the car and said, “I know you. You’re one of the fellas who was with that reporter gal. Miss Prosper.”

  The young man looked down, seemingly embarrassed.

  “Yeah,” he mumbled. “I’m one of Felicity’s interns.”

  “You were following us, weren’t you?” Phyllis said sternly.

  “She told me to, okay? I’m sorry, but she’s the boss. She calls the shots.” Under his breath he added, “Boy, does she ever.”

  Sam said, “She left you behind to keep an eye on us, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah. She and Nick went to get something to eat. They said they’d bring something back for me.” The young man blew out his breath. “Nick said I could go longer without eating because I’ve got plenty of fat stored up.”

  “Well, that was rude,” Phyllis said.

  “Yeah, maybe, but it’s true.” The young man pushed up his glasses again. “They left me the bicycle. Felicity carries it around with her so she can get in her ten miles a day.” He groaned. “If she finds out I wrecked it, she’ll kill me! I told her I wasn’t any good on bikes.”

  Sam went over to the bicycle and righted it.

  “Doesn’t look damaged to me,” he said. “Anyway, wouldn’t she be more worried about you?”

  A bitter laugh came from the young man. He said, “You don’t know Felicity.”

  “And I don’t think I want to,” Phyllis said. “If you’re all right, we need to be going.”

  “Before they get back, huh? I don’t blame you. Go ahead. I won’t try to follow you. I’ll say I lost you at a light.”

  “Won’t that get you in trouble?” Sam asked.

  The young man shrugged and said, “Felicity will be mad. She’ll get over it, though. She’s really not a bad person. She’s just . . . driven.”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Josh Green.”

  “We’re obliged to you, Josh. Did you say you’re an intern?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “So that means you put up with that gal bein’ mean to you, and you don’t even get paid for it?”

  “It’ll all be worth it someday,” Josh said, “when I’m an award-winning TV news producer.”

  “You hang on to that dream, son. Hope it works out for you. Just not today.”

  Sam pushed the bike up onto the sidewalk and lowered it carefully onto its side. He extended a hand to Josh Green and helped the youngster to his feet. Then, while Josh stood there brushing off the seat of his pants, Phyllis and Sam got back into the Lincoln.

  Phyllis turned around in another driveway and they headed for downtown again, leaving Josh standing there on the sidewalk in a slump-shouldered attitude of despair.

  Chapter 9

  Christmas decorations were up on the buildings and streetlights around the square, and the tall Christmas tree, covered with lights and ornaments, stood proudly on the courthouse lawn. Everything was starting to look festive, Phyllis thought.

  “Poor kid,” Sam said, clearly referring to Josh Green, as Phyllis was parking. “Sounds like that TV gal is sort of a dragon lady to work for.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Phyllis said, “but it’s his choice to be her intern.” She looked around suspiciously. “He didn’t hop back on that bike and follow us, did he?”

  “I don’t think so. Fact is, it looked to me like it was all he could do not to start cryin’ like a kid who’d fallen off a bike. It must’ve hurt like the dickens when he landed in the street.”

  Phyllis agreed. She had seen that same look of stubborn stoicism on her son Mike’s face when he was growing up. In fact, he had wrecked his bike on the same stretch of street more than once.

  But it was up to Josh to escape from Felicity Prosper’s clutches if he wanted to. For now it was more important that she and Sam had given him the slip. She pointed and said, “There’s the building where Nate’s office is.”

  “Yeah. We don’t know where his office is situ
ated inside the building, though, or which way the windows face,” Sam pointed out. “If they’re on this side . . .”

  He didn’t have to finish the sentence for Phyllis to know what he meant. She turned her head, looking from the office building back to the south.

  There appeared to be a clear line of sight past the eastern face of the courthouse and on down South Main to the spot where the parade had assembled. Someone would have to be a pretty good marksman to make such a shot, but it didn’t strike her as being impossible by any means.

  “Was Nate a good shot in high school?” she asked.

  Sam shook his head and said, “I don’t have any idea. I seem to recall him talkin’ to some of the other fellas about goin’ huntin’, but there wouldn’t have been anything unusual about that. Plenty of the boys went deer huntin’ or dove huntin’ every year. Some of the girls, too.”

  Phyllis understood that. Even though she wasn’t a hunter herself, she knew the tradition was still strong in Texas. These days, youngsters had to be more careful about certain aspects of it—they couldn’t have deer rifles or shotguns in their pickups at school, as had been an everyday occurrence when she was growing up—but they still learned how to handle firearms and how to shoot.

  So at this point she had no way of knowing if Nate Hollingsworth could even make such a shot, but she certainly couldn’t rule it out.

  The encounter with Josh Green had delayed them enough that it wasn’t long until their appointment with Jimmy D’Angelo. They walked down the street to his office, where his receptionist greeted them with a friendly smile.

  “Jimmy said for me to tell you to go on into the conference room,” she said. “He’ll join you in there shortly.”

  Phyllis and Sam had been in the firm’s conference room before. It was just what you’d expect from such a place: a lot of dark wood and rich leather and portraits of the firm’s partners on the wall. D’Angelo was an associate, not a partner, but Phyllis wouldn’t be surprised if he wound up running the place someday.

  She and Sam sat down at the mahogany table. Sam leaned back in the plushly upholstered chair and said, “Every time we come in here, I feel like there ought to be cigars and whiskey. Maybe some retired brigadier with a white handlebar mustache sittin’ in the corner readin’ the London Times.”

  “I’m just thankful there aren’t any smelly cigars.”

  “How about the whiskey?”

  Before Phyllis could answer that, one of the other doors opened and Nate and Allyson came into the conference room, followed by Jimmy D’Angelo. The young couple took seats on the other side of the table, and the lawyer sat at the end. He had a dark blue folder with him.

  “Thanks for coming in,” he said. “You don’t mind that Nate and Allyson are here, do you?”

  “Of course not,” Phyllis said.

  “And you two are all right with Phyllis and Sam being here, right?”

  “Yes, that’s fine,” Allyson said. She didn’t look happy, but Phyllis didn’t think it was because she and Sam were there.

  “First things first,” D’Angelo said. He opened the folder and took out two documents. There were two sheets in each one, held together by a paper clip. He pushed them down the table to Phyllis and Sam and instructed, “Look those over, please, and if they’re accurate statements, you can sign them.” He took a pen from his shirt pocket and passed that down to them as well.

  Phyllis looked over her statement while Sam was reading his. It was exactly what had been said at the police station the night before, so she nodded to D’Angelo and picked up the pen, saying, “Everything looks all right to me.”

  “Me, too,” Sam said.

  Phyllis signed first and handed the pen to Sam, and then, when he had signed his statement, he picked up both documents and handed them back to the lawyer, along with the pen. D’Angelo replaced the documents in the folder.

  “I’ll have these delivered to the police,” he said. “Now what we all need to talk about is what happened last night.”

  Allyson said, “We’ve been over it and over it. I don’t see why we have to keep repeating the same things.”

  “Because sometimes when you’re going through a series of events, new memories crop up. We have to be sure we have every possible fact at our disposal.”

  Nate said, “Wouldn’t it be better to do this after I’ve been arrested? Rehashing it now is just upsetting Allyson, and there may not be any need.”

  “You’re not going to be arrested,” Allyson said. “How can the police arrest somebody for something they didn’t do?”

  It’s a good thing Carolyn isn’t here, Phyllis thought. She would have an acerbic comment or two in response to that question.

  D’Angelo said, “Unfortunately, it happens all the time. The cops just go by their interpretation of the evidence they have.”

  “There can’t be any evidence saying that Nate killed my father, because he didn’t do it.”

  “There’s evidence establishing that he had a reason to, whether he did or not,” D’Angelo said bluntly. “That argument over the gas wells, along with the value of your father’s estate—those things go right to motive.”

  Nate said, “Yeah, but just because something looks bad doesn’t mean that the police will arrest somebody. How many high-profile murders have there been over the years where the identity of the killer seems obvious to everybody, but the police never arrest anyone?”

  “It happens,” D’Angelo admitted. “Not very often, but when it does, we remember it because, like you say, those are high-profile cases. This one doesn’t have any movie stars or professional athletes involved in it, but it’s going to draw some interest anyway.”

  It already has, thought Phyllis. She had told D’Angelo about the people from the Inside Beat TV show, but the lawyer might not have mentioned that to Nate and Allyson, so Phyllis didn’t say anything about it, either.

  D’Angelo went on. “This case has got sexy girls, a cowboy, and Santa Claus mixed up in it. If it hasn’t gone nationwide yet, it will before too much longer. And the more publicity it gets, the more pressure the DA will put on the cops to make an arrest. This DA, he doesn’t like pressure.”

  Phyllis knew that from experience . . . the experience of looking out through the iron bars of a jail cell.

  “So, we have to be ready,” D’Angelo said, “and if we wait to make our preparations, it’ll just be harder then. Let’s go through all of it, starting with the visit the two of you paid to Mr. McCrory’s ranch yesterday afternoon.”

  Nate sighed and said, “Frank Holbrook came by my office yesterday morning. I hadn’t talked to him in a while. He said he just wanted to touch base with me and see if maybe Barney had reconsidered the lease offer. I told him that he hadn’t, but that I’d go out and check with him one more time, just to be sure. This was right before Allyson came in. We were meeting at the office so we could go to lunch together.”

  “Allyson, had you met this man Holbrook before?” D’Angelo asked.

  She shook her head and said, “No, although I’d certainly heard plenty about him from Nate. He seemed like a nice man. I asked him to come to lunch with us, but he said he had another meeting.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “We went to lunch,” Nate said.

  “And while we were at the restaurant, I decided to ride out to the ranch with Nate,” Allyson said. “I hadn’t really tried to convince Dad that it might be a good idea to sign the lease, so I thought I’d talk to him about it.”

  “Where was he when you got there?”

  “My dad? He was out in the barn. He had a cow about to calve, so he was keeping an eye on her.”

  “Was anybody else around?”

  “A couple of the men who worked for him—Fred Harriman and Matt Gonzales.”

  “So there were witnesses to the conversation.” />
  Nate said, “You mean, were there witnesses to the argument? Yeah, there were. We went off a little ways to talk, but when Barney got worked up, like he did yesterday, he could be pretty loud. Fred and Matt wouldn’t have had any trouble hearing every word he said.”

  “And they could hear what the two of you said, too?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “I know they heard me,” Allyson said, looking embarrassed. “I got . . . pretty loud and angry. Daddy acted like Nate was somehow betraying him, just because Nate thought the gas lease was a good business deal. It made me mad at him for treating Nate like that.”

  “So, the two of you left the ranch on bad terms with your father?”

  “Barney calmed down a little after I promised I’d let the subject drop,” Nate said. “I told him I’d call Holbrook and tell him it was no deal. After that there was sort of a truce declared, I guess you’d say. I think there were still some hurt feelings on both sides, though.”

  “We told Dad we’d see him at the parade last night,” Allyson said, her voice catching with emotion as she did so. “I was looking forward to seeing him driving that carriage with Santa in it . . .”

  She didn’t sob, but tears welled up in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Nate reached over and rested a hand on her shoulder. Allyson caught her bottom lip between her teeth in an obvious effort to control her emotions.

  D’Angelo turned to Phyllis and Sam and said, “That brings us to yesterday evening, when you saw Mr. McCrory at the parade and went over to talk to him.”

  “Wait a minute,” Phyllis said. Since Allyson was upset, she asked Nate, “What time was it when the two of you left the ranch yesterday afternoon?”

  He frowned and said, “Oh, I guess it was about three o’clock.”

  “And it was six when Sam and I were talking to Mr. McCrory. The parade was supposed to start at six, but I remember thinking it was running a few minutes late, as usual. It’s hard to get something like that coordinated and started exactly on time.”