Stiff in the Sand Page 9

  “Well, now you know.” I turned my attention back to the screen, my tongue aching from all the biting I was doing. If I was going to prove Robbie’s innocence, I’d probably need Deke’s assistance. I couldn’t risk turning him into an enemy now.

  My nose wrinkled at the first sight of Aubrey in one of the pictures, but then I felt bad for it. Her husband was sitting in jail, most likely, and she had to be a wreck.

  She wasn’t a wreck that night, was she? Smiling brilliantly, friends with everybody. In that respect, she reminded me a lot of the late James Flynn.

  Deke snorted, taking a sip of his coffee. “She was working the room, wasn’t she?” he asked.

  “Like it was her job. Hey, maybe it was. Maybe Robbie asked her to be his ambassador. I’m sure he had other things to worry about.” She was another one I’d like to speak to if given the chance. She might be able to give me a little insight into the relationship between Robbie and James.

  I kept this to myself, though. For some reason, I had this strange sense Deke would tattle on me to my father if he knew just how far I was willing to pursue this. A silly idea, since I was sure Deke didn’t even know Dad’s phone number. But I couldn’t shake it, regardless.

  I flipped through a few more photos. Nothing earth-shattering. There was one of me, and I remembered him taking it. I also remembered giving him a hard time about it. Now, all I did was cast a doleful look in his direction before moving on.

  The first shot of James made me shiver. I couldn’t help it. There he was, alive and well and vital and energetic. He had no idea that the moment that shot was taken, he had less than an hour left to live.

  I got up, going to the window, rubbing my arms. “Wow. Sorry. I had no idea how that would affect me.”

  “And I admit, I didn’t think of it, either. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. And to be honest, I need to tell you this, but there isn’t much here that would shed any light on the situation. Except for one section which I can skip to if you want.”

  I nodded, still looking out across the street. The storefronts were shuttered on a Sunday morning. I guessed there weren’t many people in the market for stationary or knickknacks or homemade candles at that time of day.

  “Here we go.” He was waiting for me, and wasn’t this whole thing my idea? How would it look if I got all swoony and emotional when it was my idea for him to be there in the first place?

  So I threw back my shoulders and returned to the dining room table, sitting next to him. Now that the initial shock had passed, I felt more at ease.

  He’d clicked ahead to where Robbie and James gave their speeches. I could practically put myself right there in that moment. I was so proud of Robbie. And he looked so happy, didn’t he?

  Or did he?

  “It’s not easy, is it?” Deke asked, watching me as I went through the photos. “Looking at them, knowing what we know now. Wondering what might have really been going on under the surface.”

  “You’re right,” I admitted. That was exactly what I was doing. Now, I looked at the smiles with new eyes, and thought they looked a little tight. A little too strained. In one picture, Robbie was smiling in James’s general direction, but his eyes were hard. There was no warmth in them.

  I sat back in the chair, frustrated. “I don’t know what I thought this was going to accomplish,” I muttered, downhearted. “What was I expecting? Something that would exonerate Robbie? Talk about naïve.”

  “Hey. I don’t think you’re naïve.”

  I burst out laughing. “Tell me another good one,” I said with a roll of my eyes.

  “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to help a friend. But I honestly don’t think there’s much to be done here. There was bad blood between them, you can see it written all over their faces.”

  “But why? That’s what I don’t understand. That’s what I want to know. Why did things turn around? They couldn’t have started off badly, or else Robbie wouldn’t have wanted to go into business with him.”

  “It’s none of your business,” he warned.

  “It’s not your business whether or not it’s any of my business,” I retorted, and I knew I sounded childish but what did it matter? “I appreciate you coming all this way to show me the pictures, but I think maybe it would be best for me to go my own way on this. You don’t have to get involved.”

  “Maybe I want to see how this plays out,” he suggested. “And maybe I feel, I don’t know. A personal connection to the situation. After all, I was the second person to come across the body.”

  I eyed him with suspicion. “Don’t tell me you’re second-guessing whether or not I did it.”

  “Why would I do that? I mean, just because you were crouching next to the body with your hand wrapped around the handle of the knife…”

  “Oh my God, get out of my apartment if that’s how you’re going to be.”

  He laughed, shaking his head. “You are so touchy. I’m kidding. Still, maybe it bothers me a little bit to think of you doing this on your own. In spite of your father’s warnings, and in spite of my warnings, I get the feeling you’re not going to let this go.”

  “You’re right.” I shrugged. “I can’t help it. I’d kind of like to know who did this. Maybe I can thank them personally for giving me the chance to stumble over a dead body and contaminate my first crime scene.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot. I was going to show you the pictures I took of the body.”

  I shivered again, like I had before. “I’m not sure I want to see it now,” I confessed.

  “Are you sure? Not even if there’s something very interesting which I’m hoping the police figured out by now?”

  How was I supposed to say no to that? He may as well have dangled a treat in front of a puppy’s nose. Or sugar in front of mine. “Okay. What’s up?”

  “First off, look at James again.” He found a photo of James giving his little speech, his glass raised in the air. With his arm lifted the way it was, his suit jacket had fallen open a little bit. Thanks to the angle Deke captured, a packet of papers was visible sticking out of the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “Once I saw that,” he explained, “I went back to some of the other pictures. You can see the outline of that packet over and over again. He must’ve been carrying those papers around all night.”

  “Interesting…” I looked at him, brows lifted. “What does it mean?”

  He sighed, shaking his head. “I’m about to show you this, and you have to promise you won’t tell anybody about it.” To my surprise, he pulled his phone from his jeans pocket.

  “You took pictures with your phone?” I asked, stunned. “What happens if they back up to the cloud?”

  “They won’t. I never let anything in my phone automatically back up, neither should you. Just one of those things I’m sort of passionate about.” He opened a folder in his photo app and held the phone out to me. “Here. I don’t know why instinct told me to take these on my phone, but that’s what happened. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “That makes two of us. Remember, I touched the knife.”

  I took the phone, looking at the picture. There he was, just the way he was when I found him. Jacket hanging open, a patch of blood on his shirt with the knife in the center. “What am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked, my throat tight. It was grislier than I remembered, maybe because I’d been in shock at the time.

  “What’s missing?”

  I looked again, and this time I saw what he was talking about. “His pocket is empty.” Sure enough, there was nothing in that inside pocket.

  “Not only that, but the lining is sticking out. See?” He pointed. “Somebody took those papers out of his pocket either before or after they stabbed him. They did it in a hurry.”

  “So I guess we can assume he wasn’t the one who did it, then. If he had taken the papers out of his own pocket, like in an office or something, he wouldn’t have left the lining sticking out.”

  He nodded. “At least,
I would assume not. Besides, from what I understand his office is at the top of the tower. He would never have the time to go upstairs, deposit the papers someplace, come downstairs and get himself murdered—as it is, not more than a few minutes at a time go by without another picture of him on here. Trust me, I checked.”

  “Whoever killed him wanted those papers.” Our eyes met, and I was sure there were a million questions in mine.

  “It would look that way.” He said back in his chair, arms folded over his chest. “So. What do you think it means?”

  I looked back down at the phone, then at the photo on the laptop. “I think it means I need to talk to that sous chef. And to Robbie’s wife. Even to Robbie, if possible. Somebody’s bound to know what those papers were about.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The resort sure didn’t look the way it had on Friday. Amazing, the difference a weekend could make.

  And a murder.

  What was going to happen to it? Certainly, it would still open. Wouldn’t it? All that work, all those jobs. It was in a state of limbo, what with both of its concerned parties out of commission for the time being.

  The local paper sat beside me, on the passenger seat. The headline spoke volumes. LOCAL CHEF CHARGED WITH MURDER OF BUSINESS PARTNER.

  And there was a photo of Robbie and James, the two of them smiling just minutes before the murder. That was the angle the press was taking. The fact that everything seemed just fine on the surface, that they had made toasts praising their partners just minutes before one of them plunged a knife into the chest of the other.

  I was probably going to regret this. No, I was definitely going to regret it. But I had to try.

  I continued, then, past the resort and deeper into town. Paradise City couldn’t have been more different from Cape Hope if it tried. The beachfront properties were all glitz and glamor, towering hotels and spas and the like, while further away from the shoreline was a different world of cinderblock apartment complexes and what used to be grand, Victorian hotels but had been converted to boarding houses.

  The police station was around a mile from the beach. I parked in the lot and hurried down the sidewalk with my fingers crossed. Maybe the gods would smile on me and Detective Joe would be in a good mood today.

  The gods were disinterested in my petty concerns, evidently.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked when he saw me waiting at the desk. At least he’d changed his clothes since Saturday morning, now wearing a pale lilac shirt, purple tie and grey slacks. The man could coordinate.

  I forced myself to stop taking mental inventory of his many delightful qualities in favor of looking him in the eye. Gosh, they were still the same pretty shade of jade. “Uh. Um.” What was I doing there, again?

  “Well?” He did not look amused, swishing a plastic stirrer around in his coffee. “Out with it. Did you remember something you couldn’t recall this weekend? Maybe something to exonerate your old friend?”

  That made my cheeks burn. “You don’t have to be nasty,” I whispered, careful not to make a scene in a bustling station. “But of course, this is in relation to Robbie being charged.”

  “Of course,” he echoed, looking me up and down. “I have the feeling I’ll regret this, but come on. My office is this way.”

  His office. I had stepped up in the world. He led the way, not bothering to take it slow for my sake, and I tripped over my feet as I tried to keep up. It seemed I had trouble with my coordination lately. Though at least it wasn’t a dead body tripping me up this time.

  His office was more like a cubby, but that didn’t surprise me. In fact, it brought Dad’s office to mind. Shelves stuffed to overflowing, the desk piled high with folders. Maybe five empty coffee cups.

  And in the wastebasket, a pile of chewed-up coffee stirrers. Maybe Joe wasn’t the cool cookie he pretended to be. Maybe he took his stress out on strips of plastic, chewing them to pieces.

  He closed the door. “What brings you here? Let me warn you, I have a ton of work to process.”

  “I understand. I only wanted to know if you found the papers missing from James Flynn’s suit jacket.”

  That surprised him. How could I tell? Easy. He dropped into his chair like his legs had given out on him. “What papers?” he asked in a way-too-casual tone.

  “The papers that were in his jacket pocket throughout the night. I’ve seen pictures from earlier in the evening and you can see a folded packet in there. There was no such packet when I found him.”

  “And how do you know that? Were you looking for them when you found his body?”

  It was time to lie like a rug. “Do you remember the first body you ever saw? The first dead one? I do, and it was James Flynn, and I can’t forget a single detail. His jacket was hanging open. I would’ve seen white papers against a dark blue lining. They weren’t there. I close my eyes, and I see him. But I don’t see the papers.”

  Maybe it was a detective thing, the ability to hold a person’s gaze so they couldn’t look away no matter how much they wanted to. All this time, I thought it was just my dad.

  Joe stared at me, immobile except for the twitching of a muscle in his jaw. “Do you play poker?” he asked out of nowhere.

  “Not generally.”

  “Good. Because you’d lose your shirt.”

  “Are you saying I’m lying?”

  “No. I’m saying you’re lying, and you’re terrible at it.”

  I dug my nails into my palm. It was one thing to threaten to knock a stack of books onto Deke’s head, but I couldn’t go around threatening a police detective. “The papers weren’t there. Did you find them? That’s all I wanna know.”

  “It isn’t any of your concern.” Then, he smirked, leaning across the desk. “Or is it? Maybe you knew what was in those papers.”

  “Huh?” I leaned back, away from him.

  “Yeah. Maybe you knew, and you took them after finding the body.”

  “No!”

  “Maybe you knew they had something to do with your old friend, so you took them out of his pocket.”

  “Why would I go out of my way to ask you about them, then?”

  “To throw me off.” He shrugged, sitting back, stirring his coffee. I wondered if he wanted to chew on the stirrer. I wondered if my presence was the only thing keeping him from doing it. “What do you think? I think my theory sounds solid.”

  “I think you don’t know what you’re talking about, with all due respect.”

  “With all due respect, I think maybe you knew there was bad blood brewing between the chef and his business partner, and you let the memory of teenage love muddy your thinking. You heard them arguing and you decided to take matters into your own hands.”

  “If that’s really what you thought, why did you charge Robbie with the crime?”

  “Are you trying to talk yourself into a trip to jail?”

  “No. Of course not. But one, it wasn’t teenage love.” I held up one finger, then added another. “Two, I knew nothing about the relationship between Robert and James until I overheard their fight.”

  “Eavesdropped on their fight?”

  “Happened to be in the same room as they were in while they were fighting,” I concluded, glaring at him. He seemed to accept this. Or, at least, he didn’t have a comeback for it. “Anyway, I knew nothing of any bad blood. People argue. You’re the one telling me there was bad blood, not the other way around.”

  His face went blank for a second. Then, to my surprise, he chuckled. “You got me there,” he admitted, spreading his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I said too much. You have a way of getting me talking, Miss Harmon.”

  “Please. Emma. I haven’t been called Miss Harmon since grade school, and that was usually when the nuns were annoyed with me.”

  “I can’t imagine why anyone would ever be annoyed with you.” Before I had the chance to say something that might get me into trouble—it was hard to remember he was a cop, not somebody I could mouth off to w
ith impunity—he leaned in again.

  This time, he didn’t look so tough or sarcastic. His mask slipped, as it were, and it revealed a decent guy trying to get through a difficult case. Just like on Saturday, I noticed how tired he looked. Even his voice was softer when he spoke again.

  “Look. Emma. I understand you’re concerned about your friend. I do, really. And no, I don’t personally think you killed James Flynn to protect your friend. Though I have to warn you, and I shouldn’t be saying this, there have been others who’ve suggested it.”

  “Others?” I squeaked.

  “Don’t worry,” he was quick to add. “I don’t take them seriously. It isn’t my first case. I’ve been doing this for ten years.” Funny. He looked no older than thirty. I guessed keeping in shape had its benefits, and I instantly began questioning my sugar addiction.

  Still, the thought that someone might’ve fingered me for the crime left me cold inside. Who would do such a thing? Heck, nobody at the event knew me besides Robbie. And I doubted he would accuse me.

  “Who was it?” I had to ask.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “That’s not fair. You shouldn’t have said anything if you weren’t going to tell me who it is.”

  “You’re right, I shouldn’t have said anything. I wish I hadn’t. But no, the specific information shared during interrogations cannot be revealed.” He shook his head, sighing. “You have to learn to leave well enough alone.”

  Yet another thing the nuns had tried to drill into my head. It hadn’t worked then, either.

  “Can you at least tell me if you knew about the papers that are missing? Did you even pick up on that? I know you have all of Deke’s photos.”

  “Ah. The two of you have been talking this over.”

  “We were working together. We’re still working together, technically, although the article we were there for has been postponed since, you know. There’s this whole unfortunate murder thing going on.”