For now. She was sure to keep hearing about Carinda’s murder and had a sneaking suspicion that someone involved with the festival would end up being implicated. She could only hope that, if it was Bentley Day or one of the other out-of-towners, Beau was close to figuring it out and making an arrest.
As Sam was leaving, Greta thanked her profusely and assured her that the people they fed for the next couple of days would love the extra treats. Sam started her van and dialed Beau.
“If you don’t have any objection,” she said, “I’m picking up deli food for dinner. Roast chicken, salads and rolls okay with you? I can’t seem to summon up the energy to cook.”
“I’ll go you one better. I’m about a block from the store now—I’ll even pick up the food.”
Well, what woman in her right mind would say no to an offer like that? She headed north on Paseo, cruising slowly along. The midday temperature hovered around eighty, with a crystalline blue sky and a sharp quality to the light. She realized what a perfect weekend she’d nearly missed, stuck indoors for most of three days.
Passing the municipal complex she glanced that direction just in time to catch a flash of turquoise clothing. A blonde woman with her hair up in a clip, hands cuffed behind her back, was being led into the building by a uniformed officer. Her appearance so closely fit what Kelly had described at breakfast that Sam whipped her steering wheel to the right and bounced a little as the van took the driveway a bit too fast.
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.
Joffrey had inherited a fortune from her father’s lucky entry into the airline business at the moment when air travel was coming into its own in the mid-twentieth century. Instead of operating an airline himself, Randal Joffrey had started supplemental businesses that would prove crucial to the industry—fuel, food service, even the manufacture of airsick bags and those ubiquitous yellow life jackets. But where he had really amassed the fortune was in spotting those cities that would eventually become hubs for major airlines and buying up cheap country property all around their existing tiny airports. When Randal died in 1982 at the relatively young age of sixty-four, his will was quite clear—his daughter Julia inherited it all, an estimated fifty billion dollars at the time. Julia’s mother had died some twenty years earlier than Randal, and he made it clear that neither his second or third wives, nor any of their offspring, would get a cent.
The problem arose when Julia never married and never had children of her own. The line of succession for the vast fortune was unclear by law, and as she aged Julia tended to go with her whim of the moment, wh
ich had always been her way—according to ‘unnamed sources’ in the news article. She had rewritten her will at various stages of her life leaving the massive fortune—at different times—to her half-siblings (in defiance of Daddy’s wishes), to a nurse who had cared for her when she became permanently crippled at the age of fifty, to an art museum, and to her dogs.
According to the articles, the last known will left measly one-million-dollar bequests to the nurse and the dogs, with all the rest of it going to a favorite half-niece—Carinda Carter.
Sam felt the breath go out of her. She looked around. What on earth was a billionairess doing living in this dump of an apartment? Then it dawned on her; this is what the big court case was about. The will was surely being contested and Carinda had not actually received her inheritance yet. Sam dropped the news articles and picked up one of the copies of the will.
She ran her finger down the lines of type, skimming, hoping to find the bottom line. The language was obscure legalese and it was no wonder the lawyers were having a field day racking up billable hours while they sorted it out. Buried in the middle of the ream of paper, one provision caught her eye. If she was reading it correctly it looked as if, in the event Carinda died before she inherited, the whole thing would be meticulously divided among that throng of Julia’s half-siblings, their children and grandchildren, and a variety of charitable causes. What a mess. What a motive!
Even if hundreds of other people came into the picture, the money was so astounding that any one (or all of them in cahoots) would end up better off than the Powerball lottery winners from all time. No wonder Carinda had chosen to hide out, probably on advice of her lawyer. But there was that court date in July. She had to stay alive long enough to get there and to receive the inheritance. Once hers, she could write her own will and do with the money as she wished.
Oh, Carinda, there were so many other ways you could have played this. Assume another name during the hiding time, get your lawyer to work through two or three intermediaries, and for god’s sake, stay low-key! Sam shook her head. When it came right down to it, Carinda’s pushy ways and noisy arguments might have very well been the thing that got her noticed. Anyone who was following the whole Joffrey fiasco in the media might have inadvertently pointed the finger right at Carinda. Sam almost felt sorry for the poor little wealthy girl.
Sweet Somethings (Samantha Sweet Mysteries) Page 16