Sweet Somethings (Samantha Sweet Mysteries) (21 page)

Beside the city patrol car at the
curb stood another officer; Sam recognized him as she pulled in closer.

Ray Hernandez looked up from his
clipboard. “Sam, hi. Um, you always this eager to visit us?”

“Sorry about that little screech
of tires.” She put her gearshift in Park and killed the engine. “Who’s that
woman that was just being taken in? Does this have anything to do with one of
Beau’s cases?”

A wrinkle of puzzlement flicked
across his brow.

“Don’t think so,” he said. “We had
a 10-14 call, prowler alert. Caught her breaking and entering. Why? You know
her?”

Sam shook her head. “Not
personally. But she was seen this morning near the scene of another crime.”

“Let me guess—the murder that the
sheriff is working on?”

“Yeah. What’s her name?”

“Kaycee Archer, according to her
ID. We caught her, apparently, just after she got the screen off a back window of
someone’s place and was trying to force the glass open. She didn’t actually
steal anything. She won’t be here long—seems to have plenty of money so she’ll post
her own bond right away.”

Hernandez seemed eager to get
inside so Sam started her van again and pulled away, pondering what he’d just
told her. Why did that name sound familiar? She had heard it somewhere and the
fact that Kaycee had been at the hotel this morning . . . she had to be
connected with someone at the festival. The
 
question
was, who?

Sam found her attention wandering.
It had been a tiring weekend, with a long and strenuous week leading up to it.
She could feel the adrenaline draining out of her. All she wanted to do now was
get home, kick off her shoes and spend a quiet evening with Beau.

* *
*

Monday morning he rose early and
managed to do the ranch chores and leave for work without waking her. When she
came downstairs she found a note propped against her favorite coffee mug—“Hope
you slept well”—followed by a scrawled outline of a heart.

She filled her mug from the carafe
he’d so thoughtfully made for her, telling herself that she would take the
morning off and just roam around the house in her robe and slippers. But once
she’d drunk the first dose of caffeine she felt too wired to sit around. A
shower, a fresh baker’s jacket, and she walked in the door at Sweet’s Sweets a
little after nine o’clock.

“Hey, what happened to your idea
of taking the whole day off?” Becky asked, standing near the worktable with her
own coffee cup in hand.

“Couldn’t do it. Sleeping until
seven-thirty
is
late for me. It
already feels like I’ve taken half the day off.”

Jen stepped through the curtain
from the sales room, hearing Sam’s voice. “Things are pretty quiet here. Maybe
everyone in town got their pastry fixes over the weekend.”

“That’s fine,” Sam said. “We can
all use a breather. We’re getting into the wedding season and pretty soon we’ll
be looking back fondly on this day.”

Becky set her cup down and
returned to a beach-themed birthday cake. Sam sat at her desk, knowing she
would have a zillion emails and figuring she’d better take inventory of all her
supplies to be sure they could handle an influx of large cakes during the
coming weeks. Before she’d finished her list, Jen buzzed her on the intercom to
announce that Beau was on the shop’s phone.

“Hey there,” he said. “I didn’t
want to call your cell and wake you up. In case you really had managed to stay
home for a restful day. Looks like I know you pretty well.”

She laughed. “That you do.”

“I reached that lawyer in New
York,” he said.

Lawyer? Her mind went blank.

“The number we found on Carinda
Carter’s phone. Charles Hanover of Hanover, Ruskin and Hanover. I told him we
were trying to locate Carinda’s next of kin.”

“Oh! Yeah, what did he say?”

“He said he would notify them.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t discuss it much, even when I said that I was
investigating her murder. Playing the attorney-client privilege card unless I
come up with a court order for further information.”

“So, nothing?”

“All he would tell me was that
Carinda had told him she was getting away for awhile, pending the outcome of a
court case.”

“What kind of case?”

“He wouldn’t even tell me that.
The guy was pretty rude. Treated me like a rube lawman from the sticks.”

“So . . .”

“So, I’ll get that court order and
we’ll proceed from there. If this court case he mentioned has any bearing on
Carinda’s death the prosecutor will, no doubt, hammer him for any scrap of
admissible evidence. Of course, first we have to have a suspect and make an
arrest.”

It sounded like a merry-go-round
of gamesmanship in the legal system.

“Curious. I wonder what Carinda
was running from. Maybe there’s an ex-husband or abusive boyfriend in the
picture somewhere.”

“There could be, and that might be
what the whole court thing is about, although I’m not sure why the attorney
wouldn’t tell me so. I’m just now catching people in their offices where I can
start asking questions about the lady and her past life. According to her
Social Security records, her last employment was with a graphic arts firm in
New Jersey. I’ve got a call in for the head of the department to see if I can
find out more about why she left.”

Sam heard his intercom line ring
in the background.

“Sorry, darlin’,” he said after a
short pause. “It’s Ray Hernandez. I’d called him earlier about that10-14 you
told me about yesterday. Maybe he’s got answers for us.”

Last night over their dinner of roast
chicken Sam had mused aloud about Kaycee Archer and the fact that Kelly had
overheard her arguing with Carinda before her death. Beau had promised to get
more details about Kaycee’s arrest.

As she entered her supply order, Sam
found herself thinking about Carinda and wondering why none of them knew much
about the woman’s life before she’d arrived in Taos. For someone who constantly
wanted to be in the middle of things she had talked very little about her past.
Sam decided she should call a final meeting of the festival committee, along
with some of the Chamber board members, as a debriefing on the event and to
decide if there would be another one next year. Maybe she could ferret out
personal info on Carinda from someone who’d known her better.

She got so caught up with that
subject that she nearly ordered five pounds of sugar instead of the fifty she
needed. Shoving aside thoughts of festival business for the next hour, she
concentrated on her own work.

When Beau stopped by to see if she
was interested in lunch she looked around, feeling a bit like a groundhog
emerging into the light. Julio’s area of the kitchen was clean and well
organized and he said he was making a batch of their basic muffin ingredients
for the following day; Becky had finished the adorable beach scene cake,
complete with brown sugar sand and sugar-paste umbrellas. They assured Sam the
shop could spare her for awhile.

Outside, the day had turned much
warmer and the wind had increased, kicking up little dust devils in the school
ground a block away and sending tan ribbons of dirt skittering down the
streets.

Beau backed his cruiser out of its
parking space and headed south. “I still haven’t done a thorough search of Carinda’s
place and I think it’s high time I do that. That New York lawyer might try to
withhold information from me, but there have to be things I can learn right
here in town.”

“Want some help?”

“Sure—let’s grab something to eat
before we tackle it.”

Since she’d only eaten a blueberry
muffin this morning and it was already nearing two p.m., Sam didn’t argue with
that logic. They went through the Taco Bell drive-up and carried their bag of
tacos to the apartment. Eating the fast-food lunch at Carinda’s small kitchen
table felt a little weird, but Sam was still mulling the information from the
attorney.

“If Carinda left New York because
of a boyfriend or husband, I suppose he would be a logical suspect, someone
with the rage to stab her. He could have tracked her here, no matter how
careful she thought she was being,” Sam said, taking a swig of her soft drink.
“Maybe we’ll find some kind of written record, some evidence of a philandering
boyfriend or her own medical records proving someone had abused her.”

“For all we know, the attorney
himself might have advised her to get away from New York and hide out in a
place none of her old contacts would think to look. I just don’t get why he
wouldn’t have told me that.”

He looked around the bare-bones
room. “And if her killer was one of our other suspects—Bentley Day or Farrel O’Hearn—maybe
we’ll find evidence to cinch the case. My forensic team is still checking
records from the cell phone. You’d be amazed what people will say in a text
message, like they have no clue those records can be accessed later.”

Sam glanced from the small kitchen
to the living room. “Where do you suggest we start?”

“We didn’t give much attention to
the kitchen the other day,” he said, wadding up the last of his paper wrappers.
“Why don’t you start here? Be sure to look inside places like canisters and
food storage bowls, and also check the undersides of drawers and shelves. I’ll
take the bedroom, even though we pretty much went through that already. Maybe
there’s something we missed.”

Sam left the empty food bag on the
table so they could take it with them. She was vaguely aware of Beau leaving
the room as she opened the first set of cupboard doors and began taking out
dishes. She set some cheap earthenware plates aside and had started opening the
lids on plastic bowls when she heard Beau’s phone ring in the other room.
Before she’d gone through the first section of cabinet he rushed into the room.

“I gotta go.” His face was pale,
his voice tight.

“What’s the matter? You feel
okay—?”

“It’s the peace-and-love bunch.
They made a big bonfire, which went out of control and got into some old crop
stubble. It’s spreading. Right toward our place.”

Chapter
18

Sam felt her heart thud. She
dropped a blue plastic bowl and started toward him.

“You don’t need to come,” he said.
“I’ve got dispatch calling the Forest Service to organize resources to fight
it. Main thing is that I’ll need to get the horses into their trailer and out
of there. Rodriguez has the same problem so we’ll help each other.” Beau was
already at the door, a hand on the knob.

“But, shouldn’t I—?”

“Right now, extra people and
vehicles are just going to get in the way. Already, Rico says he chased some
guy off our property, thinking he might be a looter.” He noticed her
expression. “Darlin’, please—I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But really—it’s
better that you aren’t there. Just stay here and keep searching for what we
talked about. Helping me solve this murder case is every bit as important as
anything else you could be doing at home at the moment.”

He was out the door before she
could formulate an argument.

She turned back to the cupboard,
glancing at the underside of each dinner plate as she put it away, unable to
stop thinking of a field of flames being whipped by the wind toward their
property. The wooden barn, the horses and dogs, their own fields of new corn
and alfalfa, barely out of the ground this early in the season. The log house.
Her tacos threatened to come up and she ran for the bathroom.

False alarm, except that she found
herself breathing hard and struggling not to imagine the worst.

Get a grip, Sam. Get those pictures out of your head and go back to
work
.
Find the evidence, then you can
call Kelly to come pick you up
. She walked to the bedroom. It made more
sense that Carinda would have hidden things there than in the kitchen anyway.
She saw that Beau had opened the closet and put Carinda’s suitcase on the bed.
His phone call must have come just as he was about to open it.

The bag had a long zipper that ran
around three sides of it, along with others that opened two smaller sections on
top. She pulled at the long one and lifted the lid. Inside, the bag looked
completely empty. As she swung the lid of the suitcase fully open, she noticed
that it seemed heavy for its size. Taking another look at the zippered
sections, one of them contained a sheaf of papers. She reached in and pulled
out the whole batch, allowing herself a little mental
ah-ha!
moment.

Travel brochures lay on top of the
pile, which contained documents of some sort, a large brown envelope addressed
to Carinda Carter at a New York City address, a cluster of newspaper clippings,
and a business-sized envelope addressed to Carinda here in Taos. Sam sat on the
bed and spread out the cache of information.

The business-sized envelope was
from the law firm in New York, the same one Beau had called. Inside, a single-sheet
letter from Charles Hanover informed Carinda of a court date in early July that
she would need to attend. The larger envelope contained a thick bunch of
pages—two stacks of stapled sheets with a legal-looking blue cover sheet on
each. A quick peek at the top page: Last Will and Testament of Julia A.
Joffrey.

Why did that name seem so
familiar? Sam closed her eyes for a moment and saw it in print. That copy of
People
magazine with the article about
the wealthy heiress who had died a few months ago, leaving her family embroiled
in a big battle.

Farrel O’Hearn, in her booth at
the festival, had been telling someone that she ‘knew the old bat.’ Finally,
the connection Sam had been seeking between Farrel and Carinda. Her gaze fell
to the little clutch of news clippings. The longest one carried the headline:
Heiress’s Estate Remains a Muddled Mess. Sam picked it up and began skimming
the lines.