Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  Not only was the man not Bruce Vilsack, but the attack didn’t even happen in Fair Haven. It’d happened when Becky was away at school. It did explain a couple of things though, like why she refused to work the night shift and why she’d dropped out of school to come home and work two jobs in Fair Haven. She probably thought it was safer here.

  I tapped the edge of the screen.

  Elise swiveled it back to face her. “So unless she accidentally attacked Vilsack because he surprised her, the odds of her being behind his murder are pretty slim.”

  Very slim, especially since people didn’t carry around a baseball bat for the heck of it. At least, no one I knew did.

  Something about the time of death bothered me as well. I checked the date again. Assuming Becky went to the support group meeting last week—and that’d be easy enough to check—she would have been there at the time he died.

  I closed the file and gave it back to Elise. “It seems like the support group connection is a dead end.”

  My phone dinged with a text message. TOD based on his broken watch. Assuming it broke in the fight/fall.

  That meant his time of death could be off, but since we didn’t have a reason to suspect Becky of killing him anymore, our effort was probably better spent looking for someone else who might have had a reason to hurt him.

  The person who owned the bat seemed like the best place to start. “Did we ever find out if Bruce Vilsack knew anyone with a baseball connection?”

  The bat might have been purchased at any sporting goods store by someone with no connection to a team, but it seemed like a strange and messy weapon to choose if it wasn’t something the person already owned for another reason. It carried too big a risk that the first swing wouldn’t knock the victim unconscious.

  Elise shifted a stack of papers closer to her. “Quincey planned to run that down right after we got confirmation that the bat was the murder weapon, but with the way things have been, I’m not sure he got it done.”

  She sifted through and pulled out a sheet with a yellow sticky note pasted onto it. The names were difficult to read upside down, but it was a long list—around twenty-five people.

  I pressed a hand to my forehead. “How is it possible he knows that many people with a baseball connection?”

  Elise squinted at the sticky note. “It looks like Quincey wrote he was a mother of a hateful cream, but I have to assume he meant member of a baseball team.”

  The mere idea of interviewing an entire baseball team made me exhausted. I leaned forward and read the names upside down. A few of them were familiar because I’d met them around town. One was even a Sugarwood employee.

  One was also an employee at The Sunburnt Arms. I pressed a finger beside it. “Tim O’Brien.”

  Given the long-time connections among Fair Haven residents, being on the same baseball team didn’t guarantee guilt any more than the PTSD group connection had proved the two murders were connected. But it was a fresh start.

  Elise called The Sunburnt Arms and confirmed that Tim was working the night shift.

  She placed the phone handset back in the cradle, leaned back, and ran both her hands over her hair at the same time. “It’s late, but I think we should talk to him tonight.”

  Knowing my mom, she’d be so engrossed in her research that she wouldn’t want to leave the station yet anyway. When it came to working a case, my parents had the energy of a three-year-old on a sugar high.

  Now that I was seeing my mom out of her element, I couldn’t help but wonder if she also crashed as hard. My parents, apparently, had been quite good at hiding things from me growing up.

  Besides, if we got this done tonight, Elise might actually get to see her kids tomorrow.

  “Let’s go.”

  The Sunburnt Arms parking lot was less full than I expected when we pulled in. Mandy had said she had a full house booked.

  Mandy herself stood on the covered porch, blocking the door, her arms crossed. Tim must have asked her to come watch the front desk because he needed to talk to the police.

  She started shaking her head before we were halfway up the steps. “You can’t be here again. You already did your search.”

  It was a good thing Chief McTavish was out sick. With this kind of greeting, he’d have been sure to think Mandy was hiding something. Forget Chief McTavish, my mother would have said she was hiding something.

  Elise’s mouth hung open a fraction. She clearly hadn’t been expecting a hostile reception. “We’re just here to talk to Tim.”

  Mandy swiveled her body to face me, but continued blocking the doorway. “Do I have to let her in? By law.”

  If Mandy kept this up, even I might start to suspect her of being involved, though deep down I knew she never would have killed one of her employees. “Not technically. Not without a warrant. But we really are here just to ask Tim a couple of questions.”

  “One of my guests could come down for something and see you.” She widened her stance. “I lost two bookings for tonight already because they heard about the murder. This is going to destroy my business if anyone else sees police hanging around again.”

  So she wasn’t trying to protect Tim or hide anything, she simply didn’t want more guests feeling unsafe and spreading the word about her bed-and-breakfast. “What if we talked to him outside? Would that be okay?”

  Mandy’s arms lowered to her sides a fraction of an inch at a time, and she stepped clear of the doorway. I motioned for Elise to wait, and I went inside to bring Tim out. Even if a guest saw me, I looked like anyone else. Elise’s uniform gave her away immediately.

  Tim followed me without argument.

  The problem with being outside to talk to him, though, was that I couldn’t see his face or his posture well enough to read it. “Let’s sit in the car.”

  I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. Three people couldn’t comfortably sit in the police cruiser’s front seat. That left the back seat. The back seat where people were placed while covered in all sorts of bodily fluids. My skin crawled like I was covered in fleas.

  Technically, I could have sat in the front while Elise sat in the back, but then I wouldn’t have had as good a view of Tim and his reactions. We couldn’t afford to miss something. The solution to this case was already slippery enough.

  The memory of my mom on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor at The Sunburnt Arms, flashed across my mind. If she could survive that, I could survive this.

  I climbed in one side, and Tim slid in the other. I’d have to take a bath in disinfecting wipes and wash my clothes three times after this was over.

  He didn’t demand to know what was going on. In fact, he didn’t ask anything at all. He must have already realized there was only one reason we’d want to speak to him this late at night.

  He kept as much distance between us as possible as Elise recited the Miranda warning.

  “You didn’t mention to the police earlier that you and Bruce Vilsack played on the same baseball team,” I said.

  Tim shrugged. It looked too casual for the situation. Most people, when interviewed by the police, even if they were completely innocent, had some degree of nervousness. Tim’s shrug looked like he’d practiced hiding his true reactions before.

  “I didn’t know it mattered. There’s only one team in town, so anyone who plays, plays with us.”

  I gave Elise a pointed look, and she handed me the photo of the bat from the file she’d brought along.

  I offered the photo to Tim. “Do you recognize this?”

  The dim overhead lights stretched shadows down his face and washed out his skin to a sickly yellow. He could try to claim that he couldn’t see it well enough in this lighting.

  Instead he said, “It looks like mine.”

  If my mom were here, she’d say it was a smart answer because he didn’t say the bat was his. He only said it looked like his.

  Which meant I wasn’t going to confirm his obvious suspicion that th
is was the murder weapon yet. “This bat was found at The Sunburnt Arms. If it is yours, how do you think it got there?”

  He flattened his hands against his thighs. “I always bring my bat and glove with me to work after the Wednesday night game so I can clean them when there’s nothing else for me to do. Once the laundry’s done, the night shift gets pretty quiet.”

  Elise shifted in her seat. She’d caught it too. Tim regularly did the laundry at The Sunburnt Arms. That meant he’d know how to work the machines, and he’d know that, with Vilsack dead, no one else would be checking in on the laundry until morning. By then, the evidence would be long destroyed.

  It was still all circumstantial though.

  Elise dug through the file. I knew there wouldn’t be a record of whether or not there’d been a mitt at The Sunburnt Arms. It would have only been logged into evidence if it had blood or some other evidence on it. It could be in some of the photos, but those were all digital except for the bat, which we printed off to bring with us. We’d have to spend hours manually searching each image.

  I knew all that, but Tim didn’t.

  Take the gamble, I silently urged Elise.

  Elise ran her finger down a page and stopped it halfway. She skewered Tim with her gaze. “If you brought both the bat and your mitt, why didn’t we find a glove at The Sunburnt Arms?”

  “It was a busier night than I expected. Mandy left me an extra-long list, and I fielded a lot of phone calls. I cleaned my mitt and left my bat there to work on over the weekend.”

  He’d answered quickly. He’d either had that answer ready or he was telling the truth. Though that didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t killed Vilsack. It only meant he knew the bat would be there and knew that he could use it.

  Using his own bat wouldn’t say much for his intelligence. Perhaps that was the plan. It felt a lot like how Vilsack’s body wasn’t well-hidden on the Schmitkes’ land.

  I leaned my shoulder into the seat and waited to see if he’d add anything, but he didn’t.

  As his defense attorney, I’d have had to show that the real killer could have known the bat was there to use. As someone building a case against him, I had to prove that no one but Tim could have known. “Where did you leave the bat?”

  “Behind the front desk.”

  The answer was quick again, but it was also the answer I’d expect if he killed Vilsack. He wouldn’t claim to have left his bat somewhere no one else could have found it.

  For a second, I wished my mom was here. We could bounce the questions that needed to be asked back and forth so Tim would feel surrounded and pressured.

  I smiled sweetly at him. Innocently. “It seems like you value your bat. Cleaning it off each time you use it must be time-intensive.”

  I had no idea if that were true or not, but it didn’t matter.

  “Not that much time,” Tim said. “But yes, good bats are expensive.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a movement from Elise. I didn’t look at her to give it away, but hopefully she knew where I was going now. This type of questioning worked better tag-teamed. I’d give her a chance.

  Elise peered around the edge of the seat. “It certainly doesn’t look that way. Why leave a valuable and treasured item where anyone could snatch it?”

  “Susan didn’t like me leaving a dirty bat in the kitchen, and it got battered around when Mandy or Becky needed something when I used to leave it in the closet. Besides, our front desk is supposed to always be staffed.”

  There was an edge to his voice—angry and worried, not that different from a parent calling a teenager who was supposed to be home an hour ago.

  Now was the time to push a little harder. At this point, he’d either make a mistake or ask for his lawyer.

  I leaned forward enough to make it feel like I was invading his personal space in the confined area. “You weren’t too upset at Bruce’s death.”

  “I have an alibi,” he said, the words rapid-fire.

  “You don’t even know when Vilsack died,” Elise said at the same time as I thought it.

  “I was with her from the middle of the afternoon, from around three, until the next morning. We were together the whole time.”

  He the way he emphasized whole time made it clear that what he really meant was we were sleeping together.

  The declaration felt off to me, but I couldn’t figure out why. “We’ll need her name, address, and phone number. And you’re not to contact her to warn her we’re coming. We’ll be able to check the phone records.”

  A small lie. We couldn’t check his phone records or hers without a warrant, but it should be enough to keep him from calling her, and Mandy would tell me if he left work early. If we had a full police force, we might have put a tail on him, but as it was, hopefully my empty threat would scare him enough.

  “Text records too.” Elise handed him a pen and notepad. “Put her information here.”

  By the time we finished with Tim, it was after midnight, much too late to try to check his alibi. We headed back to the station.

  My mom and Mark were waiting in Chief McTavish’s office with take-out from one of the local fast food places.

  My mom gave one of the bags the same look she might have given a pair of dirty shoes on her table. “It was the only place open.”

  Elise and I pulled two more chairs up to the desk, and Mark handed out the meals. My mom had gotten a wrap, the healthiest thing at the table when compared to my chicken fingers and Elise’s cheeseburger.

  Mark goofily walked his fingers across the corner of the desk and snagged a fry from my meal.

  Elise swallowed down an unladylike-sized bite of burger. “He’s lucky you’re here, Nik. I’d never let him pick from mine.”

  I froze with my chicken finger halfway into the barbeque sauce. That was what had been bothering me. People had to have a certain level of intimacy before stealing from someone else’s meal. In fact, the only people I’d ever seen do it were couples in a romantic relationship.

  But the other day, at The Burnt Toast, Tim’s male companion stole a French toast stick from his plate and gave him what now, in hindsight, could have been a flirty smile.

  If I was right, if Tim was gay, he was also lying about his alibi for the night Bruce Vilsack died.

  13

  “Are you sure about this?” Elise whispered as she knocked on the duplex door that matched the address Tim gave us for his alibi. It was still early in the morning. Despite our late night, we’d agreed we needed to reach her before too much time had passed.

  I couldn’t be sure about Tim’s sexuality unless he admitted it to us, but the hints were there. “About sixty percent.”

  “Sixty percent.” Her words ended in a hiss. “That’s not much better than chance.”

  The door opened. The woman on the other side was close to Tim’s age. She wore her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, heavy eye makeup, and almost nothing on the rest of her face. It made her look a bit like a raccoon. Based on her black pants and the logo on her shirt, she’d been getting ready for work before we knocked.

  The woman’s gaze flickered over Elise’s uniform, and she braced a hand on the door frame. “What’s going on?”

  “Leslie Bell?” Elise asked.

  The woman nodded.

  “We won’t keep you long, but we need to ask you a couple questions.”

  When I first met Elise, her interview skills sounded like they came from an 80s TV cop sitcom. Now she even knew not to give away what our questions would be about. Hopefully she realized how far she’d come.

  Leslie showed us in to her kitchen/living room. The smells of coffee and hairspray hung in the air.

  She wrapped her hands around the mug on the counter. She didn’t offer us any, but to her credit, she also didn’t insist she didn’t have much time to give us. It made me think Tim had listened to our warning and hadn’t contacted her. She wasn’t nervous enough for someone who knew they might have to give an alibi for a
murder.

  Elise brought out her notebook. “Do you remember where you were a week ago Thursday night?”

  “I was probably here.” Leslie turned her cup around in her hands. “Thursdays are work nights.”

  Probably—she didn’t want to commit to an answer. She was trying to wait us out. “Were you alone?” I asked.

  The look Leslie gave me was the opposite of friendly. “I don’t see how that’s anyone’s business but my own. What’s this about?”

  There it was. She knew she didn’t have to answer our questions. We’d have to play it out and hope she’d be honest. Or that we could catch her in her lie. “We’re trying to establish where Tim O’Brien was on that night. He claims he was with you from the middle of the afternoon until Friday morning.”

  Elise shot me a what are you doing?! look.

  Leslie sipped her coffee without missing a beat. “Yeah, Tim was with me.”

  All my instincts, honed from sitting in on my parents’ meetings with clients and interviews with witnesses and court cases, screamed at me that she was lying. Her answer was too practiced and casual, like she was used to giving it. She likely wasn’t used to defending it, though.

  And she hadn’t noticed the flaw in her story. “You weren’t entirely sure you were here, but you’re sure about being with Tim?”

  “I told you I was here.”

  “No,” Elise chimed in. “You said you were probably here.”

  Leslie’s coffee cup hit the counter hard. “I was here. With Tim. Exactly like he said.”

  The flaw in her story drew me in. For all the times I’d heard lawyers described as sharks, I hadn’t understood it until now. I smelled the blood in the water.

  “That’s interesting.” I tilted my head like I was examining her closely and wasn’t sure what to make of her. “Because you said you were here because Thursday’s a work night. That made it sound like you wanted to turn in early and get a good night’s sleep.”