I hung up and dialed Pinky’s number, wondering how I was going to spring the news on her. No need to wonder—the words sprung out of my mouth with a life of their own. “Pinky, Molly died right here in my shop bathroom. Clint and Mark are here, and Clint thinks she got poisoned.”
Pinky screamed, and it started my eardrum pounding. I pushed the phone away, as far as my arm would reach. After she stopped screeching, I switched the phone to my other hand and held it up to the ear that was still capable of hearing.
Pinky’s voice was shaky. “Cami, if that’s a joke, it is not even a tiny bit funny.”
“No, to both. It’s not a joke, and it is not the least bit funny.” I wandered back to the archway and leaned against the wall.
Pinky made a hiccup-like sound. “I can’t believe it. Tell me again, and maybe it’ll sink in.”
I repeated myself, adding a few more details. “And Clint told me to tell you that you can let Erin know, but nobody else. Oh, and don’t come down here.” My shop door opened, and a woman I recognized stepped inside. “Sorry, I gotta go. The coroner is here,” I told Pinky.
“Cami—” I heard Pinky say my name in a pleading way as I hung up, but I left it at that. We’d spend lots of time hashing out recent events later; that was a given.
I’d met Dr. Trudy Long the month before under circumstances that were almost as bad as these. I’d discovered the body of a man who had been killed in our town park. At least I hadn’t known him personally. Not like Molly.
Clint walked over to meet Dr. Long. They exchanged a few words, then he led the way to the bathroom. The coroner stole a look at me when she passed. “Ms. Brooks,” she said in a serious yet kind tone. I swallowed and nodded. It struck me that I’d been secretly hoping the doctor wouldn’t recognize me from the first time we’d met.
The flow of adrenaline that had been running through me since I found Molly suddenly stopped, making me feel like I was going to drop. I felt a measure of responsibility for Molly’s safety. After all, she was my employee and I was in the shop at the time she’d died. I inched my way to the checkout counter and sat down on the stool.
I caught a whiff of the to-go cup of coffee, partially full, sitting on the counter. Its distinct odor was unusual—similar to cherries or almond extract. I picked it up and leaned my face in for a closer smell. Very strange. Pinky had a recipe for almond syrup she made and used for one of her specials. But it hadn’t been on the menu for days. Plus, this blend had a completely different smell than her standard one. It’d be easy enough to find out if she’d changed her recipe.
I heard Dr. Long say, “In addition to her bright pink skin tone, I detect an odor associated with cyanide. It smells like almonds.”
I got to my feet lickety-split and moved in behind Clint and Mark in the gap between their bodies. “Umm, Doctor?” I managed.
Dr. Long turned away from Molly. “Yes, Ms. Brooks?”
“Umm, call me Camryn. I may know how Molly got the poison. Well, not really how she got it, but I think I know where she got it. Well, not really where she got it, but—”
Mark and Clint both turned and stared at me. “What are you talking about, Camryn?” Clint said.
“Spit it out, already,” Mark said.
“It might have been in her coffee, if that’s her coffee cup on my checkout counter.” I pointed back in that direction.
All three of them frowned at me. “What makes you think that?” the doctor said, and she took a few steps forward, filling the gap between us.
“I just heard you say cyanide smells like almonds and that Molly smells like almonds. Well, so does that cup of coffee.”
They all cautiously crept over to the counter like they were approaching the enemy. Maybe they were concerned about spilling it. Clint and Mark pulled on fresh vinyl gloves.
“Pinky’s new to-go cups have a nice, smooth surface, so the crime lab should have no problem pulling prints,” Mark said.
How could I tell them? “Sorry, but mine will be on there, too.”
Clint’s frown crease deepened. “Explain.”
“When I got a whiff of the coffee there, it smelled kind of weird, almondy, but not like Pinky’s normal almond syrup. I picked up the cup to see if I could identify it. She has that Almond Joy special with chocolate and coconut and almond syrups, and I wondered if it was that for a second. Then Doctor Long said she smelled almonds on Molly.”
Clint blew out a big puff of air.
“Cami had no way of knowing she was tampering with possible evidence,” Mark said.
When Clint didn’t answer right away, I had a feeling he was counting to ten. “I know,” he said.
Dr. Long was the first to bend over the cup to smell the contents. “I’d be confident saying this is the source, all right; the vehicle of delivery for the cyanide. The cup is about two-thirds full. Our victim likely ingested a lethal dose of poison in the first few sips.” She lifted her head and backed away.
“But where and how she got it in the first place is what we have to figure out.” Clint turned to me. “Do you or Pinky have a supply of cyanide in your shops?”
“No, of course not.”
“I asked so we could positively rule out accidental ingestion as the manner of death.”
Mark nodded. “And you can rule out natural, because what happened here is anything but. That leaves us with either a suicide or a homicide.” He stepped behind the counter and took a sniff. “I don’t smell almonds. It smells like coffee to me. One of Pinky’s medium blends is what my smeller is telling me.”
“That is the challenge of relying on the scent of almonds to diagnose cyanide poisoning, because only forty percent of people can actually smell it,” Dr. Long said.
Mark leaned over and took a second sniff. “Really?”
Dr. Long went on, “It’s genetic. Either you can or you can’t. I’ve only had a few cases of cyanide poisoning over the course of my career, but the ability to detect the odor has proved helpful each time. I’ve been called to assist other jurisdictions outside of Buffalo County.”
“Well, I didn’t notice the odor on Molly’s body, which I should have in that confined space.” Clint stepped in and did his own sniff test on the coffee. “Nope, I’m with Mark. Coffee is all I can smell.”
The bell on Pinky’s door dinged. I thought it’d be the Buffalo County guys until Pinky and Erin came storming in through the archway. Then I remembered Clint had locked that door, anyway.
Clint lifted his arm and pointed for them to halt right where they were. “You can’t come in here. We’re investigating a crime scene. Mark, get some tape from your car to cordon it off.”
Mark left to take care of it.
Pinky’s curls bounced around her headband with a life of their own when she and Erin stopped in their tracks. “Then what is Cami doing in there?”
“She found the victim and has been helping us. But you make a good point.” He turned to me. “Camryn, if you’ll go wait in the coffee shop until we’re ready to talk to you some more.” Clint switched his attention to Pinky. “And you, too. Hang tight until we get back to you.”
I was abruptly excused from being in the thick of things. And I had to admit it was intriguing watching how the officials worked to get to the bottom of it all. Once I got past the fact that Molly had died, and that someone had probably killed her. Molly and I had not been close friends by any stretch of the imagination, but I didn’t think she would have poisoned herself. It was obvious she was needy, but she hadn’t given any indication she was depressed enough to kill herself. She’d even mentioned wanting to start a family.
Mark returned with a roll of crime scene tape, and the next thing I knew I was being nudged into Brew Ha-Ha to join the other two Musketeers. Mark secured the tape to one wall then stretched it across the open span and taped it to the wall on the other side. Pinky, Erin,
and I stood back, just far enough.
“Thanks a lot for ratting me out, Pink.”
“Well?”
“If you had kept your mouth zipped shut, at least one of us would have had a front-row seat to watch what was happening,” I said in a whisper.
Pinky flicked her hand at a loose curl by her ear. “It just came out. I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.”
“I don’t blame you, really. It’s not easy to process something like this,” I said.
Pinky pointed into Curio Finds. “Could there be anything more awful?”
“As awful as this is, we all know there are a lot of things that could be worse,” I said.
Pinky, Erin, and I hovered in the archway. Erin was in the middle and reached over and grabbed my hand then reached for Pinky’s with her other hand. Two Buffalo County deputies wearing black polo shirts with “Crime Scene Team” embroidered above their hearts came through my shop door. One was a man around fifty, and the other was a woman somewhere in her early thirties. The man had a black duffel bag, and the woman was carrying a camera. They glanced up at us, no doubt wondering who we were and why we were there. We must have been a sight. Little five-foot-nothing Erin standing between Pinky, who was almost a foot taller, and me, who was a half a foot taller. I was a little surprised myself that we hadn’t been told to wait somewhere out of the way.
The crime scene team went about their business. Clint pointed out the coffee cup with its questionable contents. They took pictures of everything, it seemed, and put the coffee cup in a container to take back to their lab. Pinky, Erin, and I whispered back and forth.
“Pinky, I didn’t tell you this yet, but that’s the cup. They think someone put cyanide in Molly’s coffee,” I said.
“Oh my God! I don’t even remember her getting a cup of coffee from me,” she whispered back.
Erin squeezed my hand even tighter. “You’re cutting off my circulation,” I said.
“Mine, too,” Pinky said.
“Sorry,” Erin said. She eased her grip then dropped our hands altogether.
Mark walked over to the archway. “The deputies went to get the gurney from the medical examiner’s van, so Clint wants you girls to back away, maybe sit down at Pinky’s counter. Molly’s husband will be here before long, and he’ll have enough to deal with without gawkers, besides. Then we’ll talk to you and you.” He nodded at Pinky and me.
“I don’t know anything, I swear,” Pinky said.
“You might not think you do,” Mark said, then he turned around to get back to work.
We backed up and watched as the crime scene team came in, rolling the gurney. We heard bits and pieces of what the officials were saying then saw Clint and Mark carry Molly’s body out of the bathroom and lay it on the gurney.
Erin and Pinky each put an arm around me. We made sounds but couldn’t form words, not knowing how to adequately express ourselves. Seeing Molly the way she was now, not looking like the Molly we knew, was dreadful. Pinky and Erin were getting their first view of her since she’d passed on.
“The way her mouth is wide open, it looks like she was gasping for air,” the female deputy said.
“That would support my theory that she died from cyanide poisoning. Her body was crying for oxygen while she was asphyxiating,” Dr. Long said.
“Why didn’t she tell someone she needed help instead of going into the bathroom?” the male deputy said.
“Once it’s ingested, cyanide works very quickly. The victim probably felt dizzy, like she might faint. She may have headed to the bathroom because she was nauseated and thought she was going to be sick. She didn’t know she was in real trouble until it was too late, and she wasn’t able to call for help.”
Dr. Long’s details of what Molly had suffered through made it even worse. I nudged my friends. “Emmy and I were both here and had no clue. Golly, I feel bad for every negative thought I had and every not very nice word I said about Molly,” I quietly said.
“Me, too,” Pinky said as a tear rolled down her cheek.
“Even when you’re not the best of friends with someone, you still like having them around. And you surely don’t want them to get poisoned to death, that’s for darn sure,” Erin said.
“Pinky, can you think of anybody who acted suspicious around here this afternoon?” I said.
She shrugged. “When we were swamped, half the people could have been acting suspicious and I wouldn’t have noticed. Wait a minute. There was a guy who stopped by looking for you when you were out on your break. He seemed a little odd. And he described you, instead of asking for you by name.”
“Really? What did he say?”
“He asked if the blonde who worked here was around.”
“The blonde, huh? What did you tell him?”
“I said, ‘Oh, you must be talking about the manager of Curio Finds.’ And he sort of shrugged and said, ‘Yeah,’ and I said you were out but would be back later.”
“What did he look like?”
“Holy moly, let me think. He was a little taller than me. He had a stocking cap on. I think it was brown. He must have been pretty normal looking, because I can’t think of a good way to describe him.”
“Big nose? Small nose? Beard? No beard? Glasses? No glasses? Pale looking, or not so much?”
“He was a white guy, but he did not strike me as overly pale. I didn’t notice that his nose was overly big or especially small. No beard. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. He might have been someone I helped in the past who didn’t know my name. He should have asked Molly or Emmy if he was looking for something.”
“Maybe he did and they had no clue how to help him. That’s why he asked Pinky,” Erin said.
“Maybe.”
—
Will Dalton, a man we had never met, knocked on the Curio Finds door. Mark let him in. Will literally burst into the room and filled the whole shop with his presence. And it wasn’t because of his size. He was around five-ten and on the slim side. He had a worn-out look that added years to his face. A youngish, petite redheaded woman crept in behind him.
“What in the hell happened to my wife?” He seemed angry more than anything else. The way he said “my wife” sounded like she was his possession, not his partner in life like my mother was to my father.
Pinky started to visibly twitch and shake. The man’s tone had clearly frightened her. Maybe she thought the murder weapon, poisoned coffee from her shop, would come back to haunt her in the form of a lawsuit or worse. That’s what popped into my head listening to the man, a well-known, powerful attorney who was demanding to know how his wife had died.
I put my hand around Pinky’s waist for support, and we moved closer to the archway for a better view. I felt Erin’s shoulder touch the back of my arm as she settled into a spot behind me.
Molly looked like she was sleeping. The display area of the shop was better lit than the bathroom, making it more obvious her face was indeed an unnatural shade of pinkish red.
Will Dalton dropped to his knees by the gurney. It looked like he was about to dive headfirst into Molly’s stomach when Clint put a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, but we need to keep contamination to a minimum.”
Will turned and stared at Clint. “What?”
“This is an official crime scene. Every one of us has any number of particles on our persons that we leave behind here and there. Until we get to the bottom of what caused your wife’s death, it’d be best if you didn’t add to the mix.”
Will thought about that for a minute while he stared at Molly’s body. He stood, and tears finally formed in his eyes. My first impression of the man was that I was not impressed. There was something about him I didn’t like. Maybe it was the way he put everything else ahead of Molly, according to what she’d said, anyway. Maybe it was that he reminded me of the power-crazed people
I’d met in Washington.
And something about the young woman with him, his assistant, struck me as off. She looked like a Hollywood star with her flowing red hair and professional model body. Why on earth had she come into the shop with her boss? If I was in her place, I would definitely have waited outside out of respect for poor dead Molly. She had enough people studying her, including Pinky and Erin and me. But we had a stake in the tragedy and a good reason to be there. The officials wanted to question Pinky and me. Erin was there for moral support.
Okay, I’d give the assistant the benefit of the doubt. Will Dalton may have made her come into the shop with him. She looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights, unsure of what to do or which way to go. She hung back and then seemed to notice she was surrounded by snow globes. She picked one up, gave it a shake, then set it down and watched it snow. A distraction for her, and for me also as I watched her. My imagination was probably playing tricks on me, but it seemed I’d seen her somewhere before.
Dr. Long’s voice plucked me out of my daydreaming. “—and we’ll notify you as soon as we’re ready to release your wife’s body.”
“Release her?” Will said.
“For burial or cremation, whatever you choose. It’ll most likely be later tomorrow, after the medical examiner has completed the autopsy.”
Will looked a little dazed. “Autopsy?”
Dr. Long handed Will a card. “And after the exam and the tests, we should be able to positively pinpoint the cause of death.”
Clint cleared his throat and took out his notepad and pen. “In the meantime, Mr. Dalton, can you tell me, did your wife mention having any kind of trouble with anyone, or had she received any threats?”
He looked down then shook his head. “No.”
The Iced Princess Page 6