Spooning Leads to Forking (Hot in the Kitchen Book 2)

by Kilby Blades

  “He’s started seeing a therapist,” Tasha went on. “He’s going twice a week. And not just any therapist—Jonathan Levine, Board Certified psychiatrist notorious for overmedicating and overdiagnosing. I’ve seen his name connected to at least a dozen divorce cases. He’ll substantiate Keenan’s emotional distress claims on paper, and he’ll make it look bad.”

  “What else?” Shea grabbed her now-empty glass off of the nightstand and made to leave the room, squinting against bright light from the hallway when she opened the bedroom door.

  “He’s taken a leave of absence from his companies. At the end of the workday yesterday, a communication was sent to his employees. The email directly referenced taking time off to handle family matters, which I can only assume means you.”

  Shea stopped dead in the hallway.

  “This changes the game,” Tasha continued. “Now he’s playing ball. And I’m not gonna lie—the money makes things tricky, Shea. The farther he goes to painting himself as a victim, the more he’ll make you look like a freeloader and a gold-digger. He’ll make himself out to be the hero who gave you prospects when you had none. It’ll be all about how he got you your first job and put you through college and how you’re leaving him only now that he gave you wings to fly on your own.”

  “Only, none of that is true.”

  “It’s not about the truth—it’s about what the courts will believe. You’re young, you’re beautiful and you’re black. A lot of judges will take one look at you and invent all kinds of stories about who you are and why you married Keenan. Misogyny and prejudice are alive and well.”

  “I had prospects,” Shea seethed, not angry with Tasha—angry with the situation. “I stood to inherit a restaurant chain—no, an entire franchise, and a successful one at that. And Keenan didn’t get me my first job in New York. I got myself my first job before I even moved there. And when that fell through, my friend Kendrick helped me get another one. I started working for Keenan much later.”

  “Good,” Tasha said approvingly. The scratch of a pen Shea heard in the background told her Tasha was taking notes. “I need more of those kinds of details. And we’ll want any documentation you have to that effect—old tax returns that show W-2s from earlier jobs in New York. We’ll also want depositions from witnesses. Especially the restaurant chain. I’m guessing you stood to inherit from a parent or a grandparent?”

  “My father,” Shea mumbled, still upset.

  “Do you still stand to receive it?”

  Shea shook her head, not that Tasha could see her. “When I told him I didn’t want it, he sold.”

  “Any idea of the selling price?” Tasha was still writing.

  Shea sighed. “A lot.” When she realized how vague that sounded, she revised her statement to, “Probably low eight figures.”

  “Good,” Tasha praised again. “We’ll definitely want his testimony.”

  The very notion punched Shea square in the gut. She hadn’t spoken to her father in more than two years and was the very last person who should be asking him for a favor. By his standard, she’d committed the gravest trifecta of daughterly sins: leaving home without his blessing, marrying without his permission, and declining his legacy.

  “My dad and I aren’t exactly on good terms.”

  “We need your case to be as strong as possible, given the situation with the money. We want it to be heard in a divorce court—not a criminal one. And I’ll be honest—given the case I think that Keenan is building, I don’t think you’re gonna get away with a no-fault divorce.”

  Shea closed her eyes and rubbed her temples against her headaches, the daylight still bright through her lids.

  “So we file before he can,” Shea said, like filing for divorce was nothing—like settling out of court hadn’t been Plan A, and that this Plan B was as light and easy as her voice.

  “Alright.” Tasha took a deep breath. “We talked about what that would mean…”

  Shea took a deep breath of her own. Finding herself in the kitchen, she dropped down on one of the bistro chairs next to the counter. “It means if I want to win, I would have to go against him with cause.”

  “You’ll be kicking the hornet’s nest,” Tasha said plainly, “but I think it’s the right decision. If he’s taking winning to another level, we’ll get the advantage by moving first.”

  12

  The Mills

  Dev

  “What do we know so far?” Dev grilled Brody the moment he buckled into the cruiser. The two men had remained silent on their way out of The Big Spoon. Dev didn’t bother confirming whether it was another case of vandalism at one of the plants. If it wasn’t what he thought it was, Brody would’ve already been busy filling him in on something else.

  “Explosion at 3-1-2-4-5 River Road—a sawmill built in 1981 on a twenty-two-acre lot. The main building has three floors with a total of eighteen thousand square feet. Suspicious noises were reported at approximately 9:13 p.m.; it was later determined to have been an explosion of some sort.”

  “Who called it in?” Dev wanted to know. He was already fishing the second phone out of his pocket—the one that had been issued to him by the Sapling PD. It had all sorts of features and apps meant specifically for law enforcement. If it had alerted him during dinner, he hadn’t heard, maybe because The Spoon had been noisy—or maybe because he’d been too caught up in Shea.

  As he listened to Brody with half his attention, he navigated on his phone to see what he could find from what dispatch put into the system. The screen facing Brody in the cruiser was at the wrong angle for him to see.

  “Anonymous call,” Brody said, taking his eyes off the road long enough to throw Dev a look he’d seen before. Nine times out of ten, anonymous callers were related to the crimes.

  Their inability to trace previous anonymous calls in this string of cases meant the offenders were smart enough not to get caught. But it still didn’t mean they were professionals. In this day and age, anyone who got Forensic Files and Wives with Knives on TV could figure out all kinds of ways around the law.

  Solidifying Dev’s point of view was the fact that the mills were far enough outside of town to be out of earshot from neighbors. Anyone close enough to hear the explosion was either out hunting, or hiking, or knew something about the crime. It was too dark to do the former—unless it was teenagers or tent campers trespassing on private property—and no one would have been around to call it in or have cause to keep it anonymous.

  “Anyone inside?” Dev asked next.

  “Not that we can tell. The fire’s too hot to send a crew all the way in.”

  “Scene status?” Dev asked, mentally filing away each tidbit even as he finally got eyes on the transcript of the call report.

  “Fire’s on the scene. EMTs are on their way and by now they ought to be…” Brody’s gaze flashed to the clock on the dashboard and he gnawed on his gum as he thought. “…around five minutes out.”

  “Did anyone call Cliff?” Dev asked, having half a mind to text the man himself. He pulled out his personal phone to rifle for Cliff’s number.

  “Dispatch got a hold of the plant schedule. We’re trying to get the last shift supervisor on duty. We’re looking for visitor and delivery documentation, including outside vendors.” Brody looked at him grimly. “Depending on the timing, a night watchman or a cleaning crew, or even a workaholic employee could have still been inside. Last whistle was only two hours before the explosion.”

  Dev didn’t want to think of that possibility. And the waiting was the worst part; Dev was on tenterhooks for information about any injuries, or worse, news on anyone he cared about or knew. Since that meant pretty much everyone in town, the waiting part chilled him to the bone.

  “Did corporate ever hire that night watchman?”

  It was a detail Dev would know if he hadn’t been so behind reading his reports. Better security had been an official recommendation after the incidents at Number Ten and Number Five.

  “Aff
irmative,” Brody reported. “Only they didn’t hire a watchman for each plant. They hired one watchman for all the plants and put him on rotation.”

  Dev looked up from his phone long enough to throw Brody an incredulous glance.

  “I don’t suppose we know the whereabouts of this person?” Dev trailed off.

  If the night watchman had been anywhere near the site, he’d have been the one to call it in. Either he was far away at another plant, or he was inside.

  “Still digging,” Brody admitted. “We’re only thirty-six minutes in. There might be a lot more information once we get to the scene.”

  “Sheriff.” Jack, the other deputy, tipped his hat in Dev’s direction the moment Dev stepped out of the car. Hot air temperatures from the fire immediately assaulted the exposed skin of Dev’s face and hands. It didn’t seem to matter that they were at the edge of a wide perimeter. The fire blazed from a quarter mile away. Still, it radiated intense heat.

  Dev fished in his pocket for the handkerchief he always kept there, cupped it inside his hand and raised it to cover his mouth and nose. Industrial explosions smelled a lot worse than a campfire in the woods.

  “Here,” Jack continued, abandoning his greeting long enough to stride to his kit and fetch Dev a mask. Dev put on his P100 but kept his handkerchief in his hand.

  “Thanks,” Dev managed offhandedly, his eyes still glued to the burning building as he put it on. It had once looked a lot like Number Six—that was the mill where Evie still worked, on the east bank of the river. This one was on the west.

  “What have we got?” Dev wanted to hear Jack’s take.

  Arriving at a crime scene as a small-town sheriff was nothing like they showed on TV. No yellow tape to form a perimeter or marked police cars flashing lights and barricading the streets. No multiple officers already hard at work processing the scene. The duty officer was the first one there. If the duty officer wasn’t the sheriff, you were lucky to get her to show up whenever she could.

  The other thing about incident scenes was there wasn’t much to do. It had always struck Dev as a lot of “hurry up and wait.” The firefighters cooled the flames—slowly and methodically, they wetted down the building and took precautions to protect the surrounding wooded area.

  I’ve got to catch him.

  The same mantra Dev had repeated at the scenes of the previous crimes repeated itself in his head. This was the third one in three months. He had to know at least half the people who worked in the few mills that were left. Hell, one of those people was Evie. And even if he didn’t know any of them, everything about this was wrong.

  It may have been theft on the surface and vandalism in truth but when you played with explosions, people got hurt. From Duff’s injury alone, whoever was arrested for this would be charged with manslaughter.

  “Who would be this stupid?” Brody echoed Dev’s thoughts. Even cut-rate criminals knew as soon as a cop got hurt on a job, the stakes changed. Duff hadn’t died, but she could’ve—which meant anyone who continued a series of crimes this easy to link together was just plain stupid or had a whole lot of skin in the game.

  “Someone with the right motive,” Dev murmured through his mask. “Someone with so much to gain from destroying the mills, they’re willing to take the risk.”

  He and Brody exchanged a knowing look. The further they got into this investigation, the more suspicious Packard Industries looked. Technically, they were responsive. They had attorneys galore and other oddly titled people whose job it seemed to be to clean up incidents such as these. They had agreed to more stringent and preventative measures. But if they were doing their part, why did the incidents keep getting worse?

  Most unsettling was the reappearance of Donovan Packard, Jr., progeny of the original man who had built the mills and inhabitant of the helicopter Dev had seen the week before. He was staying up on Elk Mountain at the Packard house—the grandest of all the Hamren estates—along with some sort of entourage.

  Dev had yet to meet the man. Brody had made contact, casually questioning him and his party as he escorted them to and around the closed-down mills. The sites where the most recent incidents had occurred were still considered crime scenes. Only the site where Duff had been hurt had been fully assessed by the insurance company and cleared for construction.

  “I don’t trust ‘em,” Brody announced for at least the fifth time. “Something about that Don Packard Jr. and his lackeys just isn’t right.”

  Dev took the assessment with a grain of salt. Brody would be a great cop one day. He was thorough. But he was too reluctant to exonerate anyone from suspicion. At any chance to focus on Don Jr., he’d been hot to trot.

  “Problem is, he lives 1,800 miles away. He isn’t involved in day-to-day mill operations, and—as far as anyone can tell—this is his first time setting foot in town. Even if you have a hunch that he’s involved, what grounds do we even have to bring him in?”

  “He’s after the insurance money,” Brody claimed with conviction. “That’s your motive right there. The mills are losing money and Packard wants to collect.”

  The thought had crossed Dev’s mind as well, but it wasn’t so simple as that.

  “Packard Industries the company, or Don Jr., the individual?” Dev quizzed. “It’s the company that owns the mills. We don’t even know that Junior would benefit directly. To make a person a suspect, you need individual motive.”

  “Still, I’d like to get him in the interrogation room and ask him a few questions,” Brody said with a darkly dramatic flair, convincing Dev yet again that the young deputy watched too many cop shows.

  “We need to tread lightly,” Dev warned in the authoritative voice he used when Brody needed to be reined in. “If we even look at him sideways, he’s gonna shut his mouth and lawyer up. You want to keep him talking and get something out of him? Don’t let on that he’s a suspect. Keep him nice and relaxed.”

  Brody nodded with some disappointment, but Dev knew he would follow the order—yet another quality that would make Brody a great cop.

  “There’s still a question needs answering,” Brody said a minute later. The two of them stood side-by-side, watching the diminishing fire.

  “If it’s like you said, with all his lawyers to take care of things and with him never once having been in town, what is he doing here?”

  13

  The Big Spoon

  Shea

  “What can I get you?”

  A bartender who Shea had seen before but had never officially met dropped a cocktail napkin at her place at the bar. At two o’clock in the afternoon on a Monday, The Big Spoon was dead save for a table of three men at the tail end of a leisurely lunch.

  “Oh, nothing—thanks,” Shea said politely, trying to be inconspicuous as she searched for signs of either half of the Kingston brood. “I’m waiting for Delilah. She’s supposed to meet me here.”

  The man turned his gaze off to the right—toward a clock behind the bar. “Yeah … she must be running a little late.”

  Craving an eyeful of Dev, who might just happen to be at The Big Spoon by virtue of owning it, warred with her sense of self-preservation. Shea had to teach herself how to stay away from that man.

  She’d changed her mind no fewer than ten times over the course of the weekend. Seeing this through gave her absolutely no room to slip. She tried to reconcile the part of her that was terrified by this with the part that was eager to rejoin the real world. Friday had been the first time in two months that she hadn’t eaten alone.

  It was also the first time in two months that she’d talked to anyone about food and gotten that rush she sometimes did when she got to use her culinary skills. All day, every day was too long to focus on her film project, and having more to her day brought her joy. Life had been damn-near perfect in the moments before she’d found out Dev was the sheriff.

  “I am so. Sorry. I’m late.” Delilah’s staccato apology came from behind Shea’s back before the woman herself came into view.
A slow-moving Delilah was laden with bags of bread—two hung on her elbows and two in her hands. She even had a pink box under her chin. As Shea rushed to relieve her of some of her load, it suddenly dawned on her that Delilah pretty much worked all the time.

  Early mornings at the bakery turned into afternoons and evenings at the restaurant. From the contents of the bags in her arms, it seemed Delilah supplied The Big Spoon with its dinner rolls, sandwich bread and buns. Functioning as a retail baker, an industrial baker, a restaurant manager and a chef explained Dev’s desperation and Delilah’s gratitude. It also explained why the food at The Big Spoon kind of sucked.

  “Take the box,” Delilah implored. Shea did that and then grabbed two of the bags.

  The Big Spoon smelled as restaurants did—some vague combination of food and alcohol with the light scent of sanitizing cleaner. In the dining room, there was also the smell of wood from the chimney fire. But drawing close to Delilah gave Shea the most delicious whiff of cinnamon and sugar that seemed to trail behind as Delilah led them forth.

  Delilah elbowed her way through a double-jointed swinging door behind a partial wall and led Shea into a pristine kitchen. The lunch shift crew had already gone home.

  “Where do you want this?” Shea held up the pink box after setting the bread down and giving the woman a minute to catch her breath.

  “Nowhere. I brought them for you.”

  Shea knew instantly that the box contained morning buns. She hadn’t been to the bakery that day—an attempt to make some headway on her writing.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Shea replied politely, but she was happy that Delilah had.