Another shrug. “Not really. But she seriously wanted to write a book about those Fiancé murders. Maybe she went somewhere to work on it.”
Ross didn’t point out the obvious fault in his reasoning. If Courtney couldn’t afford to live somewhere other than at home even with a part-time job, then how could she support herself while holing up to write a novel?
20
Perkins restaurant, on the corner of Hastings Way and Highland, was one of the survivors after old Highway 53 was replaced by the new double-lane. The night shift manager, Alex Engstrom, Karla’s immediate boss, was waiting for Kendall in a booth near the entrance to the kitchen, a digital adding machine in front of him spitting out a tape of numbers. He hastily finished what he was working on and shoved it to the side when he saw Kendall.
She slid in across from him and introduced herself. “I want to talk with you about Karla Foley. Let’s start with how long she’s been working here.”
“I’ve only been working here for about a year. Karla’s been here since she was sixteen. She was an awesome waitress, brought in more tips than anyone else.”
“So she was good with the customers.”
“Oh, yeah. Some of them waited just to get served in her section.”
“Did you ever notice anyone who had too much interest in Karla?”
“I didn’t. I talk about that with all my staff: If something like that happens, they’re supposed to report it to me and let me handle it.”
“If there was someone hanging around, but not really being offensive, is it possible no one noticed?”
“I guess so. If they came in when we were busy, sure, it could happen. But Karla worked nights. There’s a busy period between five and seven, but not so much that a nut job would go unnoticed.”
Kendall knew that a lot of “nut jobs” presented as normal. “Can you give me the names of anyone else who works here that Karla was friends with? And of the other waitresses that worked the same hours as Karla?”
She took down the names and the manager left the booth after taking Kendall’s order for a short stack of pancakes and a cup of coffee. Perkins had great pancakes and right now Kendall really needed the sugar rush they provided.
They were as good as expected, and Kendall did everything but lick the plate. She was about to push out of the booth when Alex returned with a tall, wide-shouldered woman with blonde hair. “This is Stephanie. She and Karla worked the same hours.”
“Karla and I were friends,” she said with a thick German accent. Stephanie, nearly as tall as Kendall, was muscular for a woman, her toned arms snug against the short sleeves of her uniform dress. “It’s terrible about Karla, no? Who would do this?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I need to know if her murder was a random thing, or if someone wanted to kill Karla specifically.”
“How can I help?”
“Did Karla ever tell you if there was someone bothering her—a customer, maybe?”
“No. All the customers loved her.”
“And she didn’t say anything about having a problem with anyone?”
“She didn’t like her roommate much. But the girl was sloppy, is all.”
Maybe Kendall was asking the wrong questions. “How about a customer that just hung around a lot?”
Stephanie’s broad forehead wrinkled. “Ya, there is one. He comes in late and always makes sure he sits in her section. But he seemed nice. Karla never complained about him.”
“How about tips? Did he tip her more than necessary?”
“She didn’t say anything about that.”
Karla would have boasted about it if he’d left her excessive tips. If this guy was her killer, he wouldn’t want to stand out by tipping too much.
“Can you describe him?”
“He was just a guy. Always wore one of them baseball hats.”
“How old was he?”
“Hard to say. Forties, maybe?”
“Could you describe him for a sketch artist?”
“Oh, no. I didn’t pay him much attention.”
A few more questions revealed that the guy was average height and weight, and Caucasian. A big nothing except that Stephanie didn’t think he’d been in since the night Karla disappeared. That fact could mean he was their perp or that he’d just tired of eating at Perkins. Kendall left after questioning everyone who had worked on the nights Karla waited on him. None of the other servers remembered the man.
When Kendall parked behind her apartment, she saw a dark Cadillac pulling out of the alley. The car looked like the one driven by Maggie Cottingham. Was Maggie having Brynn do research for her?
Kendall tapped on Brynn’s door. “I was going to order a pizza. Are you interested in joining me?”
Later over pizza, Kendall asked Brynn, “Are you doing research for Maggie Cottingham?”
“No.”
It was going to be one of those nights. Kendall decided not to force the issue and asked, “Have you talked to Ryan?”
“Yeah.”
So much for that subject, Kendall thought. “Have you called Mrs. Lindblad?” Brynn hadn’t mentioned following up with the old woman Kendall had laid out the cards for.
“No.”
Exasperated, Kendall stood to put away the leftover pizza.
“You told me she didn’t ever touch the cards, right?” Brynn asked.
“Right. I shuffled them and laid them out for her. Why, what’s the difference?”
“The person you’re reading for is supposed to touch the cards and shuffle them first so her aura is taken on by the cards.”
Brynn was talking now, even if she wasn’t being forthcoming about Ryan or her meeting with Maggie.
“I told Mrs. Lindblad that I didn’t know what I was doing. You were going to have her come over and give her another reading, right?”
“I talked to her about it on the phone,” Brynn said. “I told her because you were the one who touched the cards and laid them out, the reading you did was really about you, not her.”
Kendall didn’t put much stock in things like fortunetelling, auras, or witches, but Brynn’s readings were often uncannily accurate. When she had done the reading she’d suspected it wasn’t a good sign that so many black cards were turned over. “About me? What did the cards say about me, I’ve got two months left on the planet?” Kendall laughed. “Go ahead, lay it on me.”
Brynn squirmed in the chair. “I . . . I think it was about your case. You laid out the cards on the day you found the man frozen. The cards said he was murdered.”
21
Kendall shouldn’t have been surprised. Maggie Cottingham must have given Brynn the idea that Wetzel had been murdered. “Brynn, I think Maggie is influencing you.”
“She isn’t. She told Chuck Wetzel’s parents to accept that his death was just an accident.”
“I’m getting the feeling there’s more to this than the layout of the cards.”
“They’re still on the table. I’ll go over them with you if you want.”
“Brynn, if Maggie believes Wetzel’s death was an accident, then why were you with her tonight?”
“I did some research on the case,” Brynn admitted. “But not for her.”
“It’s my case. You need to be talking to me about it, not Maggie. Anyway, I’ve closed the case. You don’t need to be working on it.” Technically, Kendall hadn’t closed it yet; the paperwork was still on her desk.
Brynn told Kendall what she’d found out about the dead girl’s real father. Even though he had openly admitted he would like to kill Wetzel, he had a solid alibi for the night Wetzel froze to death. She explained that Ryan helped her find verification on Facebook about Simington’s alibi.
“Then that’s it,” Kendall said. “Case closed. Everyone connected has an alibi. I’m not interested in what the cards said.” Kendall didn’t remind Brynn that anything online was suspect until confirmed, but she made a mental note to have Simington’s alibi verified.
“Not everyone had an alibi,” Brynn whispered. “The girl and her brother who were killed in the accident? Their mother doesn’t have an alibi.”
Kendall sighed. “And I suppose you told Maggie that.” Cottingham was like the proverbial dog with a bone if she smelled money to be made. Kendall had talked to Alice Dixon, but the woman didn’t appear to be hiding anything, and she’d been discounted as a suspect mostly because so much time had passed. If she were going to retaliate against the man responsible for her children’s deaths, logically, she would have done so a long time ago.
“Maggie came here looking for you. I told her I didn’t know when you would be home.”
Kendall took a moment to collect her patience. She hated it when Brynn avoided the point. “How did you go from telling her I wasn’t home to discussing Wetzel with her?”
“She started talking about it again. I didn’t think there was any harm in telling her what I was doing. She offered to pay me for what I found out. She wanted to go to that bar—the one Wetzel was in that night—and talk again to anyone who saw him leave. She wanted to ask them if the person he left with could have been a woman trying to pass as a man.”
Brynn and Maggie would keep at this until they found something. Or not. Kendall shouldn’t care what they did. She had checked Alice Dixon’s alibi, and been satisfied with it. Apparently, Brynn had found a hole in it. “Brynn, I don’t want you to get involved in something that could put you at risk.”
Brynn’s ice-blue eyes flashed. “You mean like with Ruby?”
Ruby Rindsig had tricked Brynn into doing a card reading for her when she wanted to find out about Kendall’s investigation of a missing baby. The outcome could have been fatal if Ryan hadn’t happened by the apartment that day and offered Brynn a ride to Ruby’s trailer.
“I mean doing police work,” Kendall said. “You aren’t trained to handle dangerous situations.”
“This is different,” Brynn said. “I won’t be doing anything dangerous.”
“The Wetzels are Maggie’s clients, so I can’t stop her from investigating further if she wants to, Brynn. I’m just not comfortable with you helping her.”
“But Maggie will pay me.”
“You don’t need money anymore, right?”
“Only if I let Eileen help me out, and I don’t want to keep doing that. It would just be wrong now that I’ve been on my own for so long. She already gave me a car.”
Kendall knew how important Brynn’s independence from her mother was to the girl, even if she and her mother were on better terms lately. Maybe spending time on the Wetzel case would be good for her. “I can’t stop you from looking into it as long as you let me know if you find out anything that could be relevant to my case. And if anything looks even the least bit dangerous.”
Brynn nodded in agreement, wisps of her feathery white hair moving with her.
22
Kendall and Ross spent the next day following up on leads relating to Karla Foley’s murder. At two o’clock, they stopped at a deli for lunch. Remembering all the pizza she’d eaten the night before, Kendall ordered a salad.
“Dieting?” Ross asked.
“No, just trying to keep from having to diet.”
“Got it.” He ordered a foot-long sub with extra mayo. And chips. “We’re not getting zilch on this case. Don’t you think it’s about time we considered there could be a connection to the Fiancé case or to Courtney Jorstad going missing?”
With so little to go on, they might have to go that route. “Maybe. Why don’t you tell me what you have on it so far?”
“How did you know I was working it?”
“Because it’s what I would have done if our positions were reversed.”
“I don’t really have anything new. Everything still seems to indicate she left on her own, but nobody who knows her thinks she’d do that without telling someone. It’s weird that all her clothes are still in her closet; the only ones missing are what she was wearing the day she left—or was taken.”
“Did she have enough money to support herself if she’s living on her own somewhere?” Kendall asked.
“Her checking account and savings accounts don’t show any big withdrawals. She has a credit card, but it has a thousand-dollar limit and no new charges since she disappeared. But her parents said she didn’t spend a lot on herself and thought she should have a bigger balance in her savings account.”
“Do you have a file started on her?” When Ross said he did, Kendall asked if he had a photo of the girl. He opened his notebook and pulled out a wallet-sized photo.
“I got this from her parents.”
She studied the photo. The picture, similar to the one her parents had shown Kendall, revealed that Courtney, although she had a pretty face, was too heavy to be her partner’s type even though he was showing signs of interest. He was worried about her, though, that much was evident. There didn’t appear to be any similarities between Courtney’s disappearance and Karla’s murder, but it wouldn’t hurt to rule it out.
“What?” he asked.
“I was thinking that she kind of looks like the Foley girl. Her face, anyway.”
Ross snatched the photo back and returned it to his notebook. “No way. She’s not the same type at all.”
Baffled by Ross’s response, Kendall said, “Let’s talk to her BFF again, the Gullickson kid. You said you thought he was holding something back when you questioned him. Let’s see if we can rattle him into being more cooperative.”
They finished their lunch, then caught up with Gullickson outside of the Davies Center as he left his last class. Ross introduced him to Kendall, and after a few questions, they ascertained they would get nothing more from the boy. As he had when Ross talked to him earlier, he suggested they talk to Courtney’s book group. Either he knew no more about his friend’s disappearance or wasn’t ready to open up.
Back in the car, Kendall said, “You’re right. I got the feeling he knew more than he was telling us. He was too anxious to send us off to talk to her book club, for one thing. Have you talked to them yet?”
“No. Not yet.” He glanced over at Kendall. “I was hoping you’d go with me.”
“Now that we’ve started on this path, we may as well continue. Tell me again what she said about the club.”
“She said they read mystery books and books about true crime. Some of the members are wannabe writers. One member of the group, a guy named Daniel Holmes, was real interested in the Fiancé case, so he picked a book about it for the group to read. That’s what got her interested in it.”
“Is this group all kids her age?”
“No. They were a group that spun off from one that met at the library. They’re all older than her.”
“How about girlfriends?” Kendall asked. “They always know what their besties are up to.”
“I talked to three that her parents mentioned and one Gullickson told me about, but none of them were that close to her. They all said Gullickson was her best friend.”
“Think she and Gullickson were involved as something other than friends?”
“I didn’t get that vibe from anyone. I doubt it. Kind of figured him for gay.”
Kendall chuckled. “You always think you know who’s gay, and you’re never right about it.”
“Just because I was wrong about you. You’re the only one.”
Kendall quickly ran off a few others he’d been wrong about.
“So, you hear from Nash yet?” Ross asked.
Kendall couldn’t avoid talking about him forever. “No. He told me when he left that I shouldn’t expect to hear from him.”
“Did he tell you anything about what he’s working on?”
“You know as much as I do. He’s undercover on something so big that the Chicago and Milwaukee PDs have joined forces to get it done.”
“What about the divorce?”
Kendall bristled. She wanted to say it was none of his business, but he was her partner and Nash’s fri
end. “It’s in progress. Nash and Shari had their first hearing before he left. It’ll be finalized when he gets back.”
“At least you don’t have to worry about any fights over it. Shari wants the divorce too. You two gonna tie the knot when it’s final?”
“We haven’t even had time to date, much less think about marriage. What about you? Anything new in your love life?”
Ross pulled the car into the lot next to the station. He grimaced and put the car into park. “Brandi dumped me.”
Kendall remembered the attractive blonde he’d brought to Nash’s going away party. The woman had acted like attending a party in the Rat Pak was beneath her social standing. The only glimmers of animation from the woman were when pictures were being taken that included her or when she was receiving male attention.
“I didn’t realize you were in love with her.” Kendall wasn’t sure her partner had ever been in love, but this Brandi must be the reason he’d been so moody lately.
“I wasn’t in love with her,” he snapped as they entered the station. “It was fun, that’s all.”
Kendall suspected his real pain had to do with the fact that he was usually the dumper, not the dumpee when a relationship ran its course. Ross took a quick turn into the men’s room, shutting Kendall off from any further comment on the situation with Brandi.
Jared Danunnzio, the murdered girl’s boyfriend, was waiting for her at her desk. He sat in the chair in front of the desk holding a Smartphone, engrossed in sending a text message.
“Jared, have you been waiting long?”
He shoved the phone in his pocket. “No. Just got here. They said you were coming in. Have you heard anything else about Karla?”
“We’re exploring all possibilities.”
“I guess you couldn’t tell me anyway, right?”
“That’s true,” Kendall said. “Not while the investigation is still ongoing. Did Karla ever talk about work? Maybe mention any of her regular customers?”
“Yeah, there was this one guy. Stephanie told me you were in Perkins asking about Karla’s customers. That’s why I came to see you.”
Iced Malice Page 8
