The Candy Cane Cupcake Killer (11 page)

But as he stammered a response to Felicity's angry questions, at least it served as a distraction, and Phyllis was grateful for that. She and Sam reached the Lincoln and got in quickly. The slamming doors made Felicity's head jerk around. She started toward them, but Phyllis was already backing out of the parking place. As soon as she could, she shifted into drive and pressed down on the gas.

That left Felicity behind them, stomping one expensively shod foot in frustration.

“Poor kid,” Sam said. “But better him than me.”

“Amen,” Phyllis said.

W
hen Phyllis and Sam got back to the house, Carolyn and Eve wanted to know how the meeting with D'Angelo, Nate, and Allyson had gone. Eve seemed especially interested in the details, which was unusual for her. She didn't have much to occupy her days, though, Phyllis thought, so it wasn't really surprising that she would try to distract herself this way.

When they had gone over what had happened in D'Angelo's conference room, Phyllis concluded by saying, “When we got back to the car, that lady reporter was waiting for us again. I'm not sure how she found us, but she was there, ready to pounce.”

“The one who's parked in front of the house again?” Carolyn asked as she nodded toward the front window.

Phyllis stepped over there, looked through the gap between the curtains, and sighed as she saw the now-familiar van. She pulled the curtains a little more tightly closed and said, “I'm just going to ignore them. Maybe they'll go away.”

“I wouldn't hold my breath waitin',” Sam said.

Phyllis went over to the computer and said, “I'm going to see what I can find out about Clay Loomis.”

“On the theory that he may have been the intended target?” Eve asked.

“That's right.”

“Believe I'm gonna go sit out on the back porch with Buck,” Sam said. “We'll keep an eye out and make sure that Felicity gal doesn't try to sneak around and peep in the windows.”

“And I've got some potatoes cooking for potato salad,” Carolyn said. “I need to check on them.”

That left Eve in the living room. She said, “I'll keep you company, Phyllis. If you need to use me as a sounding board for the case, feel free.”

“All right,” Phyllis said. She had never talked much about her investigations with Eve before—except when her friend was the subject of one of them—but sometimes it was helpful to lay out a theory in words.

First, though, she did some searching online. It wasn't difficult to find references to Clay Loomis in the archives of the local newspaper. Most of them were mundane stories about the activities of the county commissioners, but the county-government website had a biography page for each of them, and Phyllis went to the one for Loomis.

From it she learned that Loomis owned a commercial trucking business and that he was married. That gave Phyllis two more trails to follow. Those trails converged, however, when Phyllis's searching led her to a story about the trucking firm, Cross Timbers Transport. It was a publicity piece in a
newspaper supplement about the Parker County Chamber of Commerce and the businesses located in the county. The businesses covered in feature stories were actually the ones that had bought a display ad in the supplement.

Of the most interest to Phyllis was the photograph accompanying the story, which showed Loomis, his two partners, and their wives all standing in front of an eighteen-wheeler emblazoned with the company logo. Loomis had his arm around the shoulders of a strikingly attractive Hispanic woman identified in the caption as his wife, Serita.

Loomis's partners were named J. D. Ridgely and Phil Hedgepeth. Their wives, respectively, were named Willa and Lindsay. Both women were pretty enough, Phyllis thought, but not as stunning as Serita Loomis. As her husband embraced her, he wore the self-satisfied smirk of a man who was rich, successful, and married to a beautiful woman.

Another picture with the same article showed some of the employees of Cross Timbers Transport, also smiling into the camera as they stood in front of one of the big eighteen-wheelers: head mechanic Grant Freel; mechanics Jimmy Dempster, Wally Lomax, and Joe Patton; drivers Ed Paddock, Henry Miller, Bob Wygand, and Mac McHale; and the lone woman in the group, office manager Jaycee Fallon, a blonde with a brilliant smile.

Those were a lot of names to remember, and in all likelihood none of them had any connection with the case. Phyllis filed them away in her memory, anyway. It was impossible to predict when something might turn out to be important.

From the sofa, Eve said, “My, you spend a lot of time just
looking at things on the computer, Phyllis. And you seem so intent on them.”

Phyllis repeated the thought she'd just had. “You never know when something will turn out to be important. Right now I'm trying to find out as much as I can about Clay Loomis's life. If he has an enemy who hates him enough to shoot at him in the middle of a Christmas parade, something about it might turn up in the information about him on the Internet.”

“How did sleuths find out about such things before there were computers?”

Phyllis frowned and said, “That's a good question. I suppose they had to go to newspapers and physically search through all their old archives.”

“The morgue, you mean.”

Phyllis nodded.

“Yes, I think that's what they call it. It's a lot easier this way. They'd have to go around and talk to people who know the person they're investigating, too.”

“You and Sam do that. I've heard you talk about it. I've even seen you doing that.”

“Yes, but I like to find out as much as I can beforehand,” Phyllis said. “That helps me know which questions to ask so I'm not just wasting my time.”

“I understand,” Eve said, nodding.

Phyllis smiled and said, “It almost sounds like you're thinking about becoming a detective yourself.”

“Me?” Eve looked genuinely shocked. “Oh, goodness, no! I could never do that. I'm just curious about how you go about doing the things you do.”

“Half the time I don't believe I know that myself,” Phyllis
said with a little laugh. “I just muddle along, asking questions until things start to make sense.”

“The world is so crazy I would think that when something actually makes sense, it might stand out a little.”

“You know,” Phyllis said, nodding slowly, “that's true.”

Eve seemed satisfied for the moment, so Phyllis went back to her searching. She turned her attention next to Loomis's political career, beginning with his most recent reelection campaign. She wasn't sure any of his political opponents would be holding a grudge against him that went back any farther than that.

As Sam had indicated, any political campaign could become heated. That had been the case this election season, when Clay Loomis had run for reelection to the commissioner's court against a man named Gene Coyle. Phyllis found a newspaper story about a candidates' debate between the two men in which Coyle had accused Loomis of using his position for personal gain. Loomis had denied that, of course, and challenged Coyle to come up with specifics.

Coyle hadn't done so at the debate, but a few days later the story had broken that Cross Timbers Transport had leased trucks to a company that provided gravel for a major road-expansion project carried out by the county. Clay Loomis hadn't benefited directly from the road-construction deal, but indirectly his company had made quite a bit of money.

Not so coincidentally, Gene Coyle was in the sand-and-
gravel business, and his company had lost out in the bidding war for the contract on the road-expansion project. Clearly, he believed that Loomis's alleged conflict of interest had cost him the lucrative contract.

In follow-up stories, an angry Loomis had denied that charge and was able to prove that he had recused himself from the bidding process just so there wouldn't be a conflict of interest. Everything about the deal was a matter of public record, he insisted. The company that got the contract—the company to which Cross Timbers Transport had leased trucks—had submitted the lowest bid, plain and simple.

Of course, it was easy enough for Loomis to
say
he recused himself from the bidding process. Phyllis had no doubt he had done so.

Still, he had served with the other commissioners for quite some time, and there was a good chance they were all friends. He could still wield some subtle influence on their decisions, even though he didn't do so openly.

But a low bid was a low bid, Phyllis supposed, and it was hard to get around that.

A few days after
that
story had broken, another one came out, this time concerning Gene Coyle. The newspaper had received an anonymous tip that when Coyle lived in central Texas a number of years earlier, he had been in trouble with the law over both drugs and domestic violence.

Lack of evidence after a lengthy investigation had led the police to drop the drug charges, and Coyle's clearly battered first wife had refused to press charges against him. She had divorced him, however, claiming mental and physical cruelty.

When interviewed by the newspaper, a livid Coyle had
declared vehemently that all the allegations against him were false, that Clay Loomis was responsible for dragging up all this old dirt—a pack of lies, Coyle called it—and that Loomis would be sorry he had resorted to such tactics.

The election had been less than two weeks later, and Loomis had won handily, taking nearly sixty-five percent of the ballots.

Phyllis sat back and took a deep breath as she stared at the monitor. It seemed to her that a perfectly feasible motive for Clay Loomis's murder was staring right back at her.

Coyle had even hurled the classic “You'll be sorry!” threat at Loomis.

She wondered if Chief Whitmire knew about any of this . . . and if Gene Coyle owned a rifle.

“You look like you've found something,” Eve said eagerly. “You just solved the case, didn't you?”

“No, not at all,” Phyllis said. She pointed at the screen. “But this could cast some definite doubt on Nate's potential guilt.”

She reached for the mouse to see what else she could find.

A search of court records for the county turned up something almost right away. A lawsuit had been filed against Loomis a month earlier by his partners, Ridgely and Hedgepeth. The information available online didn't include anything other than the date of filing and the fact that the suit was still pending.

Phyllis went back to the picture of the three men standing in front of the truck with their wives. Everyone looked happy in that photo, but the newspaper supplement in which it
appeared had come out six months ago. Obviously, a lot had changed during that interval.

So there was a business dispute and an ugly election controversy that could have caused a great deal of bad blood among the parties involved and anger directed toward Clay Loomis. Phyllis clicked back over to the window containing the court records and continued her search.

It didn't take long for her to discover that Serita Loomis had filed a petition for divorce from her husband three weeks earlier, not long after the election.

Other than being reelected, it has been a bad autumn for Clay Loomis, Phyllis thought.

A spouse was usually the first suspect in a murder or attempted murder, especially an estranged spouse seeking a divorce. Phyllis couldn't find anything to indicate that the Loomises had children, so maybe there wasn't a custody battle going on, but Loomis had a successful business. Surely Serita would be seeking a piece of that, and Loomis would be trying to keep it out of her hands.

So, in less than an hour of searching on the Internet, Phyllis had turned up what she considered to be four perfectly feasible suspects: Gene Coyle, J. D. Ridgely, Phil Hedgepeth, and Serita Loomis.

The problem was that they would be perfectly feasible suspects only if Clay Loomis was the person who'd been killed.

He was still alive, Barney McCrory was dead, and it was nothing but sheer speculation that Loomis had been the real target.

Phyllis sat back and sighed.

“What's wrong?” Eve asked.

Quickly, Phyllis laid out the information she had uncovered, then said, “But none of this really does Nate much good at this point. Chances are, the police won't take any interest in it. They'll only investigate people who have a motive for wanting Mr. McCrory dead. The theory that Loomis was the intended victim and that Mr. McCrory was killed by accident might impress a jury, and all this other stuff could help to create reasonable doubt, but to reach that point the case would have to come to trial. I'd rather it didn't ever get that far.”

“Then it comes down to finding proof that whoever pulled the trigger was aiming at Loomis,” Eve said. “You'll have to put them there, on the scene, with a rifle in their hands and a reason to kill that man.”

“Yes,” Phyllis said. “It's as simple as that.”

“So, you'll need to get out there and do some good old-fashioned legwork.”

Phyllis nodded and said, “You're right. That's what being a detective is all about.”

“Of course, you always say that you're not really a detective,” Eve pointed out.

“Sometimes, though, it's foolish to fight the inevitable,” Phyllis said.

If Nate Hollingsworth is innocent, and if anyone is going to save him, it will have to be me, she thought.

With good old-fashioned legwork, as Eve had put it.