Salami Murder: Book 8 in The Darling Deli Series (10 page)

The door to the stairs to the upper part of the building was shut and locked, not propped open as it usually was. The brick was kicked to the side, lying forgotten in the parking lot. Moira fumbled with her keys for a moment, glad that her daughter had given her a set of duplicates. When she finally got the door unlocked, she traded an anxious glance with David before walking in. Maverick followed behind them, whining softly.

She knocked on the door to Candice’s apartment, her heart in her throat. There was no answer, so she tried the doorknob. The door was unlocked, and swung open quietly with only the slightest pressure. David put his hand on her shoulder and she stepped aside, letting him precede her. She followed, her hands clenched tightly around Maverick’s leash as she tried not to imagine what they might find inside.

David checked each of the rooms methodically. When he came out of her bedroom and gave a quick shake of his head, she breathed a sigh of relief. Candice wasn’t there, but at least they hadn’t found her injured, or worse.

“Have you tried calling her phone?” he asked.

“I did in the car.”

“Try again now.”

She did as he suggested, and was surprised to hear a soft vibration coming from the kitchen. She hurried over and followed the sound to where she found the phone next to the fridge. The screen was cracked, but otherwise it was functional. She was about to call out to David that she had found her daughter’s cell phone when she heard his voice.

“Moira. You’d better come here.”

With a feeling of dread, she did, Candice’s phone clutched in her hand as she approached David, who was standing in front of the coffee table. He had pulled on a pair of black latex gloves and was carefully holding a piece of paper.

“Don’t touch it,” he warned gently. “But you need to read it.”

She leaned forward, her shoulder brushing his arm, and focused on the words that seemed to be swimming across the paper. The typed note was simple, but terrifying.

I have Candice. If you want to see her again, bring ten thousand dollars to Rapid Creek Park and leave it at the top of the tallest slide tomorrow evening before sunset. If you contact the police, I will know, and you never see Candice again.

Moira exhaled slowly, feeling as if she had been punched in the gut. She sat down on her daughter’s couch, barely paying attention as David rummaged around in the kitchen for a plastic baggie to put the note in. Maverick gave a low whine and rested his head on her knee. She patted his head absently, her body on autopilot. Did she have ten thousand dollars that she could access in time? She thought so, though she wasn’t sure what she would tell the bank about what the money was for. She had a vague idea that paying off a kidnapper was illegal, but she would come up with something.

She stood up and began walking towards the door without any real sense of her actions. When David grabbed her arm, she was so surprised that she stumbled and would have fallen if he hadn’t supported her. She had nearly forgotten that he was there; all of her thoughts had been focused on her daughter.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To get money out of the bank.” Where else would she be going?

“You can’t do that.”

She bristled.

“Yes I certainly can. Candice is my daughter. Do you know what that means? It means I am going to do whatever it takes to get her back. Period.”

“We’ll get her back,” he said. “Alive and well. I promise. But
this
isn’t the way to do it. We have to go to the police.”

“You read the note. If we go to the police, he’s going to kill her!” She realized she was screaming and hyperventilating, and forced herself to calm down. Her passing out in a limp pile on the floor wouldn’t help Candice any.

“Listen, the police know how to handle situations like this. There’s a reason you aren’t supposed to negotiate with kidnappers; it doesn’t end well.”

“I can’t just sit back and do nothing while my daughter is in danger—” she began.

“That’s not what I’m saying. Do you trust me, Moira?” He looked into her eyes, searching for an answer. It took her a moment, but at last she managed a nod. She did trust him, she realized. He wasn’t the sort of man that would let an innocent girl—her daughter—get hurt.

“Then trust me when I say the best thing you can do right now for Candice, the very best thing, is go directly to the police and tell them every single thing that you know. Okay?”

“Okay,” she whispered, her throat thick with panic. All she wanted was to have her daughter in her arms—and to see her kidnapper sentenced to a lifetime in prison.

She spent the next few hours enduring a disorienting attack on her senses: red and blue flashing lights, day-old coffee, and repetition of the same phrase by everyone she met, a strange litany in her head.
We will find her, we will find her, we will find her.

Just go home and wait
, she thought.
How am I supposed to do that?
She wished that she hadn’t listened to David and gone to the police. She felt powerless; she couldn’t directly go against their orders not to give her money to the kidnapper, but she also knew she couldn’t just sit around and
wait
for someone else to find her daughter.

Still fuming as she pulled into her driveway, she parked and let Maverick out. Subdued, the dog walked to the front door and looked back at her, waiting.
He knows something’s wrong
, she thought.
I wish he could talk. He could tell me whose scent he picked up in that apartment.

“Go on in, boy,” she said, unlocking the door. She followed him inside, lost in thought. There must be something she could do to help the investigation, but what?
I could call her friends,
she thought.
Maybe she said something to one of them about someone following her or threatening her.
She knew it was a long shot, but she was determined not to leave any stone unturned. Now the only question was, who should she call first? Now that Candice had her own place, Moira was no longer up to date on details of her daughter’s social life. She didn’t know who her daughter considered a close friend these days.
I’ll start with Allison
, she decided. At least she knew that the two young women had seen each other recently, and besides, she already had Allison’s number in her phone.

She sat down at the kitchen table and closed her eyes, resting her forehead against the palm of her hand for a moment. She was finding it hard to focus; her thoughts kept returning to worse and worse images of what would happen to Candice if she wasn’t found in time. Now was the time that she needed to think clearly, more than ever. With a sigh, Moira opened her eyes and grabbed her phone. She had work to do. Her brain would just have to keep up.

“Hey Ms. D, what’s up?” Allison’s bright, cheery voice was like a punch to the gut for Moira. The blonde-haired young woman was so like her daughter, it almost seemed like she was talking to Candice.

“Allison… Candice is missing,” she managed to get out after a moment. “She’s been kidnapped.”

She related the events of the evening quickly, managing to keep her voice steady as she spoke to her stunned employee. But as she asked the young woman for help, her voice broke in fear. “I don’t know where she is or what’s happening to her, Allison. I know she and you are friends. Can you think back to anything she might have said over the last few weeks? Was there anyone following her around, or anyone that had made her uncomfortable?”

“Oh my gosh, Ms. D. I’m so sorry. I can’t believe this is happening. No, I can’t think of anyone. Except… well, she has been seeing Eli a lot. He always seems to be on his way over or his way out whenever I get to Candice’s. He calls her all the time, too. She doesn’t seem to mind, but it seemed a bit excessive to me—I mean, they just met,” Allison said.

Eli
, Moira thought.
I should have listened to my gut about him
. He had motive to want Candice’s shop to fail, and her daughter trusted him enough to have given him access to the shop and to trust him when he came over unannounced.

“Thank you,” she responded distractedly to Allison. “I have to go now.”

She hung up, feeling oddly detached. She felt as if she were trying to run in water, but her mind was working a mile a minute as she searched for any hint that Eli might have been planning something like this. She wished that she had told Candice about her suspicions about him a few days ago, during the fiasco with the cut water pipe.

Pull it together
, she told herself firmly as her mind wandered, her imagination coming up with more and more unlikely ways she would have, could have prevented her daughter’s kidnapping.
I’ll have time to freak out later,
after
Candice is safely home.
Right now, it was time to buy some ice cream.

She got off the phone with the police moments before she pulled into the ice cream shop’s parking lot. After telling them what she knew, they had agreed to send some men out to track Eli down. Moira was hoping she could speed up the process by questioning the employees at the ice cream shop. They might have an idea of where to find him, and could perhaps shine light on any suspicious behavior in the last couple of weeks.

Ready to do whatever it took to find her daughter; Moira strode purposefully into the ice cream shop and stopped short when she saw Eli himself at the counter. He was handing a chocolate cone to a toddler whose mother held her up so that she could easily take the treat. When he heard the bell on the door jingle, he looked up.

“Ms. Darling,” he said with a smile. “It’s nice to see you. Can I get you a cone?”

Shaking off her shock, Moira steeled herself and approached the counter. She waited until the girl and her mother left, reluctant to cause a scene now that she had doubts about Eli’s guilt. If he had kidnapped Candice and had her stashed away somewhere, would he really be working the counter so nonchalantly? She had imagined that wherever her daughter was, the kidnapper would be there too, watching her.

“Where’s Candice?” she asked him once they had privacy.

“She’s not here, we weren’t going to get together until later.” He must have registered the worried expression on her face because he added, “Is everything all right?”

“No, it’s not. Candice is missing.”

He paled.

“What happened? Is there anything I can do to help?”

She scrutinized him. He looked concerned, and there wasn’t a trace of guilt in his eyes. Either he was an excellent liar, or she had the wrong guy.

“Where were you earlier today?” she asked at last.

“You don’t think I…” he blinked and shook his head. “I was here, working. You can ask anyone. My buddy Keith was here too, until about an hour ago.”

Moira closed her eyes as disappointment rushed through her. Her guess had been wrong; she was even farther from finding Candice than she was before, since she had just wasted half an hour driving all the way back to Lake Marion and talking to Eli.

“Do you have any idea, any at all, of who might have taken her?” she asked desperately. “Has anyone been following her?”

“The only person I can think of is her ex. Adrian,” he said. “She told me that he won’t leave her alone; he comes over at all hours, and keeps calling her. She’s even found him in the candy shop before; she thinks he made a copy of the key.” Eli paused, his gaze drifting over her shoulder. Moira looked back to see a trio of police cars, lights flashing, pull into the parking lot. Embarrassment reddening her face, she apologized to Eli, then faced the door, ready to explain her mistake to the officers. How could she have been so foolish? Each officer looking for Eli at her request was one less officer looking for her missing daughter.

After the debacle with Eli, she doubted the police would listen to her if she set them on Adrian’s trail. Besides, David was right. They certainly knew how to do their jobs better than she did. She knew that her daughter’s kidnapping was the focus of the police right now, and she didn’t want to waste their time with yet another false accusation. But she couldn’t ignore her gut, either.
I’ll go find Adrian myself
, she thought.
I know where he lives, at least. If he isn’t there, I’ll contact David and then the police and let them know what Eli told me after they left.

She checked her phone for what felt like the thousandth time in hopes that Candice had managed to send her some sort of message, then put her car into gear and left the ice cream parlor. Adrian lived in an apartment complex partway between Lake Marion and Maple City, and the drive had never felt longer to her. She wished that she hadn’t dropped Maverick off at home; if she did find the kidnapper, he could be a help.

Pulling into Adrian’s apartment complex, the first thing she did was look for his car. If he wasn’t here, this was all a waste of time. But there it was, parked between a red pickup truck and a green sedan. He was here… but was Candice?

Clutching her phone tightly in her hand, she entered the apartment building and made her way slowly up the stairs. Her heart was in her throat, and the coffee that David had made her drink had turned into a cold sludge in her stomach. Part of her knew that this was likely a waste of time; while Adrian was not her favorite of Candice’s recent boyfriends, he wasn’t necessarily a criminal. Chasing after a lead made her feel slightly better though. Doing anything was better than sitting in silence at her home or at David’s office and imagining the terrible possibilities of what might be happening to her daughter. Anything was better than that.