Fireworks in Paradise

by Kathi Daley

  Kyle turned back toward the computer while I began browsing the report he had just handed me regarding Jennifer Reinhold’s murder. The main thing that stood out right away was the number of neighbors who had been interviewed. Based on a cursory scan of the documents in my hand, no one saw or heard anything on the day, based on forensic evidence, the prosecution had determined Jennifer Reinhold was most likely murdered.

  One woman had reported she saw a man, or possibly a woman, standing in the meadow behind the Reinhold home when she got up for a drink in the middle of the night. She couldn’t remember exactly which night that had been, hadn’t seen the person’s face or any distinguishing features, and could only offer dark clothing as a description, but she was certain it would help them close in on the killer.

  Living in a place where the climate is mild in the summer did lend itself to a homeless population that tended to camp out in the forest and meadows surrounding town. Chances were the woman had simply seen one of those seasonal campers, though it was possible she really had seen someone burying Mrs. Reinhold’s body. I knew if I was going to bury a body I’d do it in the middle of the night. Of course, I’d also take the body far, far away and not leave it in a shallow grave just beyond the wall of my property.

  It really did sound like Steven Reinhold had been intentionally framed.

  “Let’s look further into the Reinhold investigation tomorrow. What do we know about Bristow other than his obvious motive, the strip mall he wants to build? Could there be any other reason Bristow might want Harper dead?”

  “Honestly, I think if Bristow ends up being our guy, we’ll find that his motive had to do with his project, although unlike the cases Judge Harper was looking into, there isn’t a file on Bristow. We don’t have any notes from the judge regarding his dealings with Bristow.”

  “We don’t have notes from his safe, but what about paperwork he keeps regarding town business?” I asked. “There might be something in his office at home, but probably what we’re interested in would be in his office in town.”

  Kyle glanced at me. “How do we get a look at his town council files?”

  Harriet Kramer had been the mayor’s secretary through three administrations. She was one of Helen’s best friends and, like Helen, a major player in the local gossip network. Harriet was definitely not a by-the-book person, so I was sure I could get her to let us into the mayor’s office. The worry was whether I could get her to keep her mouth closed about it.

  Harriet didn’t pick up when I called, so I left a message letting her know I needed a favor that would require a certain level of discretion and asked her to call me back as soon as possible. Like Helen, Harriet believed she could keep a juicy piece of news to herself, but, also like Helen, she rarely could.

  After I left my message, I turned back to Kyle. “When you first came back to the computer room you said you had a thought you wanted to follow up on.”

  Kyle nodded. “The concept that the original ban against commercial properties of a certain size and purpose within town limits could have been challenged in the past is an interesting idea. I decided to find out how the current statute is worded. It does appear the ban is still in place, so I did a search of town council records using the ordinance number as my search term and found eight references to the ordinance being challenged between 1990 and now.”

  “But not prior to that?”

  “The town council records have only been digitized back to 1980, and even then the records are spotty until after 1990. I think going back through the book with this specific question in mind is our best bet at this point.”

  I glanced at my watch. “We don’t really have time right now. I suppose we can come back after we’re done at the resort for the day.”

  “I’m up for it if you are.”

  I smiled. Spending time with Kyle, no matter what we were doing, seemed pretty good to me.

  “How do you think our first date is going?” Kyle asked with a grin on his face as I began gathering my things.

  “It’s going great. Better than great. It’s exactly the kind of date I dream about at night,” I teased back. “It’s been something really special we can tell our grandchildren about.”

  Kyle’s smile faded just a bit. “Do you think about that? Us having grandchildren?”

  “God, no. I’m nowhere old enough for grandchildren.”

  Kyle continued to look at me with a serious expression. “What about children? You’re raising the girls, and I know that’s like having children, but do you ever think of having any of your own?”

  I frowned. “You’re trying to turn this into a real first date where all sorts of awkward and sensitive subjects are shared, aren’t you?”

  Kyle’s boyish grin returned. “I’m sorry. I really wasn’t trying to do that. And I know exactly what you mean about first dates and awkward situations. I’ve had plenty.”

  “I’m not sure that’s any better.” I raised an eyebrow. “How about we agree to keep future offspring and past dates off the table for the time being?”

  Kyle pulled me into his arms. He kissed my neck and then worked his way up to my mouth. “How about we keep it safe and not talk at all?”

  I groaned. “As much as I love that idea, we do need to get back to the resort. Rain check?”

  “Definitely.”

  Chapter 13

  As it had been the previous day, the resort was packed when Kyle and I arrived. Kyle went to find the girls while I headed down to the beach to check on the preparations for today’s contest. I was halfway between the house and the beach when I ran into Doc.

  “Did you ever have a chance to talk to Sam Wilson?” Doc asked as I turned to leave.

  I shook my head. “I’ve been pretty busy today. Besides, I’m not sure my tracking him down will go over well with Roy’s new partner.”

  “Don’t have to track him down; he’s here. I don’t suppose the new deputy can object to you running into the man on your own resort and entering into a casual conversation.”

  I grinned. “No, I don’t suppose she could find fault with that. Do you know where he is?”

  “Last time we saw him he was over where they’re setting up for the bikini competition.”

  The fact that Sam Wilson was here was a stroke of luck. And that he appeared to be alone was downright miraculous.

  “It looks like you wanted to be sure to get a front-row seat,” I commented when I sat down next to him in the first row off the stage. The rehearsal didn’t begin for another hour, so the bleacher was mostly empty.

  “My girlfriend is a contestant. I told her I’d sit up front and take some photos during the rehearsal.”

  “You should have a wonderful view from here. What’s your girlfriend’s name? Maybe I can put a bug in the judges’ ears.” I would never really do that, but I was willing to say it if it would facilitate the rest of our conversation.

  “Gwen Jorgen.”

  I hoped I didn’t look as surprised as I felt. “I know Gwen. I didn’t know you were dating.”

  “Our relationship’s pretty new. Normally I like to keep my options open, but Gwen is really special.”

  “I don’t know her well, but she seems very nice. I hope she does well.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  I paused as I searched for a way to continue the conversation. “Didn’t she have a cousin or something who recently moved to town?”

  Sam nodded. “Yeah. Just two weeks ago. Gwen got her a job at the bar down near the Twenty-Second Street pier. It’s not the best job in the world, but the tips are good and Gwen and her cousin are sharing the rent on her apartment.”

  “It seems like there are all sorts of new people in town. Have you met the new deputy?”

  Sam frowned. “Yeah, I met her.”

  “I take it by your tone you two didn’t hit it o
ff.”

  “That woman had the nerve to accuse me of slitting Judge Harper’s brake lines.”

  “Really?” I tried to appear as shocked as I could manage. “Why on earth would she think that?”

  “My mom lives next door to Judge Harper. In fact, my family has lived in that house for a long time, so I knew the judge when I was growing up. We had an argument not long before he had his accident and the deputy heard about it, so she thought maybe I was mad enough to want to hurt him. I’d never hurt Judge Harper, no matter how mad I was, and I told her that.”

  I narrowed my gaze as I watched Sam’s face. “Do you think she believed you?”

  “Not at first. She kept asking the same questions over and over, like I was going to change my answers if she asked enough times. I kept trying to tell her she had the wrong person, but she didn’t seem to want to let it go. Finally I remembered my friend from work didn’t have a ride to his second job because his car was in the shop and I let him borrow mine. I wasn’t planning to go out that night and he picked me up for work the next morning. The lady deputy said lending my car to a friend wasn’t much of an alibi. I could just as easily have taken a cab or hitched a ride with someone to get to the community center. I told her she was nuts if she thought I’d take a cab.”

  I laughed. “I bet she wasn’t happy with you calling her nuts.”

  Sam smiled. “No, I don’t suppose she was. It seemed like she was still going to pursue me as a suspect until my mom called to remind me that I’d promised to have dinner with her. Her call reminded me that we’d both watched the same show on television the night of the accident. I specifically remembered we’d talked about it the next morning, before we got the news about the judge’s accident. The deputy didn’t think that was much of an alibi either, until I reminded her it was a new show, not a rerun. I repeated all sorts of details about the plot that I couldn’t have known if I hadn’t watched it, so I must have seen it, just as I claimed. She didn’t seem happy about it, but she finally backed off.”

  “Didn’t it occur to her that you could have recorded the show and watched it later?”

  Sam snickered. “No, I guess not.”

  As far as I was concerned, Sam had a weak alibi, but I didn’t have the sense that he was the person we were looking for. He didn’t seem to have any problem talking to me about the events of the night in question or Judge Harper’s death in general, and it seemed that if he was guilty of killing a man he’d known most of his life he would have demonstrated at least a bit more emotion. I supposed I could confirm the details of his conversation with his mother about the television show, but I didn’t want to waste my time chasing leads that appeared to be nothing but dead ends. While I wasn’t ready to take Sam off the list altogether, I decided to move him down to the very bottom and move on to more likely candidates.

  Sam and I chatted for a few more minutes before I said I needed to go but would be sure to put in a good word for his girlfriend with the judges.

  If Sam wasn’t guilty, that left me with two suspects: Striker Bristow and someone associated with Steven Reinhold and the death of his wife.

  While I was busy helping with the various events the resort was sponsoring, the girls had somehow talked Kyle into entering the sandcastle-building contest with them. When Kyle had suggested that his team build Cinderella’s castle, complete with drawbridge, pumpkin carriage, and abandoned glass slipper out of sand, I’d thought he was crazy. Oh, I was sure that with enough time, the right equipment, and a lot of talent, it could be done, but his team consisted of four little girls with plastic shovels and colorful buckets. I hated to see them tackle anything too hard, but they seemed quite adamant about going with their choice, so I wished them well and settled onto a picnic table under the trees to watch while I reorganized my murder notebook.

  Kyle and I would be working that evening on the theory that the book Striker had been reading in the library provided a clue, and we planned to follow up on Jennifer Reinhold’s death tomorrow, so I wanted to focus my thoughts. I turned to a new page and jotted down the suspects that were left, along with any notes I had about each.

  I began with Striker Bristow. I had a strong feeling he could be our guy. Money was about as strong a motivator as you were likely to find, especially when so much of it was involved. Next to his name I wrote the words land ownership. And even if he turned out not to be guilty of killing Judge Harper, I was interested in the circumstances that surrounded a large plot of Collins land being sold to him. Below the words land ownership I added Frannie’s book. I didn’t know if Bristow found something to blackmail Judge Harper with or an old forgotten statute that might help his cause, but I did think Frannie’s book could very well end up providing an important clue.

  I skipped a couple of lines and then entered my next suspect, who, at this point, I could only think of as the person who actually killed Steven Reinhold’s wife. Trying to figure out first if Steven was innocent, as his neighbor claimed, and second, who was really guilty if that were the case, wasn’t going to be an easy matter. Still, it made sense that the real killer would feel threatened if Judge Harper began to look into the old case. If Steven did turn out to be innocent, I would have to rank this as-yet-unnamed individual my number one suspect. For the time being I listed this suspect as possible wife killer.

  And then there was Sam Wilson. The guy had always been odd, but there was something about him that made me downright uncomfortable. Killing a man for sleeping with your mother might be a bit extreme, but Sam struck me as an extreme sort of guy. Still, at this point I considered the likelihood that he did it to be a distant third to the other two, but my instincts told me it was too early to eliminate him.

  “Tj,” I heard Gracie shout.

  I looked up to see Kyle and his team standing in front of the best Cinderella sandcastle I’d ever seen. I had to hand it to the man, who had a huge grin on his face; when he said he could do something he almost always came through, no matter how huge the challenge. I was still getting used to us as a couple, but I did realize, as I watched him jumping up and down with the girls as they were awarded a second-place ribbon, that I was a very lucky woman to have such a totally wonderful guy in my life.

  Later that evening Kyle and I settled into his computer room with the documents we’d copied from Judge Harper’s files as well as the file Roy sent over, the book Frannie had lent us, and the notes we’d made. Since we planned to focus on Jennifer Reinhold’s murder the following day and I’d all but eliminated Sam as a suspect, we decided to focus our efforts on Striker Bristow. What we really needed to do, I decided, was speak to the man in person. It was too late to call him this evening, but perhaps I’d follow up tomorrow.

  “Let’s start with the book,” I suggested.

  Kyle moved over to a table with conference-style chairs surrounding it and opened it to the first page. “It’s hard to know where to start.”

  “Frannie said the men were looking at the middle third of the book, so let’s start one third of the way in,” I suggested after taking a seat next to Kyle.

  I could feel the warmth from Kyle’s shoulder next to mine as we worked side by side. I tried to focus on each page of the book as Kyle carefully turned the pages, but all I could think about was how much I wanted to kiss him. I guess it was always this way at the beginning of a relationship. I could remember being hypersensitive to the presence of other men I dated in the beginning, but somehow my heart knew this was different. I glanced at Kyle’s face. He was looking intently at the page he’d just turned to. I wondered if he was as aware of our shoulders touching as I was.

  “Look at this.” Kyle pointed to the page.

  He was looking at a newspaper article dated June 5, 1974.

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  “Apparently a young attorney working for the district attorney’s office mishandled some evidence and it ended up being inad
missible in court. The end result was that a man who’d been on trial for killing someone in a bar fight went free and he killed someone else later.”

  “Oh, no. That’s awful. But what does that have to do with Judge Harper?’

  “The young attorney responsible for the man going free was none other than Harold Harper before he was a judge.”

  I frowned. “You think Bristow somehow found out about the black mark on Judge Harper’s otherwise outstanding career and hoped to blackmail him into changing his position on the strip mall in exchange for his silence?”

  “Maybe. I suppose young attorneys make mistakes all the time, and I’m not sure if this mistake is one Judge Harper tried to bury, but it seems that at the very least it’s worth following up on.”

  “I agree. Let’s try calling Bristow tomorrow and see if he will meet with us.”

  “If Bristow did kill Judge Harper, he’s unlikely to say as much,” Kyle pointed out.

  “True. But maybe we can pick up a vibe. It seems to me it might be important to find out how the judge responded to Bristow’s threat, if a threat was even made. If the judge agreed to change his vote to support Bristow’s project in exchange for his silence, he would have no motive to tamper with the car. However, if Judge Harper resisted Bristow’s blackmail threat that could have angered Bristow enough to take the next step and make his demands more clearly heard.”

  Kyle took a photo of the article with his phone so we would have it with us the following day. “Do you want to keep looking?” he asked.

  I yawned. “No. I’m exhausted. I really should get home. If the lead with Bristow doesn’t work out we can still try to speak to Clarissa Halloran tomorrow as planned. If that doesn’t turn up anything we can come back to the book tomorrow evening.”

  Kyle closed the book, then turned so he was facing me. I felt the heat rise to my face as Kyle cupped my cheeks in his hands and looked deeply into my eyes. My heart began to pound as he opened his mouth just a bit. It seemed like he was going to say something, but then at the last minute he leaned forward and kissed me. I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him back.