Review to a Kill

by Laura Durham

  “I know,” I said. “So much points to him. That’s why we need to find out what his role is in all of this.”

  Kate stopped pacing. “I thought you were sworn off this case.”

  “I am. I was. That was before we found out all this new information. It’s all starting to make sense. We just need to find out why Frank met with Tricia’s mom. That’s the last piece of the puzzle. I can feel it. Once we find that out, we can put this case and bridezilla behind us for good.”

  “Okay. How do we do find out what Frank knows?”

  “Can you ask your hacker friends to get Frank’s statement for us?” I asked Leatrice.

  She shook her wet head. “My guys are off-line for a while. They had to pull up their operation and go underground before the authorities found them.”

  I exchanged a look with Kate. “You said they were on the West Coast, right? Of which country?”

  “That’s a good question, dear. I’m starting to think they aren’t American.”

  Just perfect. Leatrice had probably gotten in bed with Russian hackers.

  “Then I guess we’ll have to ask Frank ourselves,” I said.

  Leatrice snapped her head up and hit Fern in the chest. “An interrogation?”

  Kate tapped her foot on the floor. “You do remember the part where he has guns, right?”

  I grabbed my purse from the floor. “He’s not going to shoot us. We’re just going to ask him a few friendly questions.”

  “We?” Kate and Leatrice both said.

  I pointed to Leatrice. “You stay here and finish your hair.” I motioned to Kate. “You’re coming with me.”

  Fern squirted some golden gel into a small plastic mixing bowl. “Call us if you need anything.”

  Kate snatched her purse from the couch and looked at Fern. “You know how you said being a maid of honor is the worst job? You forgot about assistant wedding planner.”

  Chapter 42

  “I don’t suppose it would help if I lodged a formal complaint regarding unsafe working practices?” Kate said as we walked up the concrete steps leading to Frank Ferguson’s porch.

  “Who would you be lodging this complaint with?” I asked, pushing my sunglasses to the top of my head. The sun sat high in the sky, the mild spring morning having given way to the midday heat. I knew our days of spring were numbered as I felt the humid air settle on my skin.

  Kate crossed her arms. “Isn’t there a league of wedding planners I could complain to?”

  I knocked firmly on the front door. “Wedding planners are not unionized.”

  “Well, maybe we should be. I for one, think we should get workmen’s comp for undue stress.”

  I imagined a thick-armed union negotiator sitting across the table from a bride and outlining all the things we could not be forced to do. Maybe Kate didn’t have such a bad idea.

  “I give you free reign to start a wedding planners’ union, Norma Rae.”

  Before Kate could respond, the front door opened and we stood face to face with Effing Frank. This was the man I’d seen meeting with Tricia’s mother the day she’d fallen to her death. He was tall with the bulbous nose I remembered, and up close I could see that he wasn’t bald but, in fact, shaved his head. He wore brown pants and a white button-down shirt, which he’d rolled up to his elbows.

  “Can I help you?” That deep voice. The same one I’d heard when he and Mrs. Toker had made their exchange.

  “I’m Annabelle Archer, and this is my assistant, Kate. We were Tricia Toker’s wedding planners.

  He nodded and stepped back, holding the door open wide. “Come on in.”

  Kate and I exchanged a look then stepped inside the house. A sparse living room held a matching tan sofa grouping and a round light-wood coffee table with nothing on it. The fireplace mantle boasted no frames or decorative items and the only art on the wall was a framed print of a landscape over one sofa. It looked like the entire room had been purchased from a furniture showroom.

  “I imagine you have some questions.” He motioned for us to sit on the couch.

  “It seems like you know who we are,” Kate said, following me into the living room.

  He nodded but didn’t elaborate.

  “I saw you with Mrs. Toker at the hotel the day she died.” I stood in front of the couch but didn’t sit. Even though this guy seemed cooperative, I didn’t feel comfortable letting down my guard quite yet.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  “We’re fine,” I said as Kate started to lower herself on the couch then stood back up.

  “Suit yourself.” His voice sounded weary, although I reminded myself that he had spent most of the previous evening at the police station.

  “What was your relationship to Mrs. Toker?” I asked.

  He sighed. “I might as well tell you. I already told the cops everything. All the Tokers are dead, anyway.” He leaned his forearms against the back of a tan chair. “I work security for Cogent.”

  “We know that much,” Kate said.

  He gave a small lopsided grin. “You’re pretty well informed for wedding planners.”

  “That tends to happen when you’re considered persons of interest in a crime you had nothing to do with,” I said. “We had to go looking for the real killer to clear ourselves.”

  “And you came up with me.”

  “Motive and opportunity,” Kate said. “You lived right next door, you hated the victims, and you had guns.”

  Another half smile. “I have guns because I’m former military and a licensed P.I. And who told you I hated Tricia and Dave?”

  “The maid of honor.” My voice came out as a whisper. “She’s the only reason we suspected you in the first place.”

  Kate nudged me. “She lied to us. She set this whole thing up.”

  I held up my hands. “Wait a minute. You’re telling me that it’s a coincidence that a security guy who works for Cogent just happens to move in next to the bride and groom.”

  “I’m not saying that at all. I was hired to watch them.”

  “By Mrs. Toker,” I finished for him.

  He nodded. “She wanted me to watch the groom and make sure there was nothing funny going on. Tricia was inheriting a huge fortune, and her mother wanted to be one hundred percent sure that the groom had the right motives.”

  “Anyone who could put up with that girl for as long as he did deserves a huge fortune,” Kate said.

  Frank made a face that said he agreed with her. “I don’t think her mother felt that way.”

  “So you watched them and discovered what?” I asked.

  “Nothing until after the wedding. The next day I followed the groom to the office after he’d left the house with an armful of wedding tuxedos.”

  “I forgot that the groom works for Cogent, too,” I said, more to myself than to Frank.

  “I’d been so focused on tracking his moves outside work that I hadn’t thought to track what he did when he was at Cogent. So I got into the system and found the email he sent to himself and Tricia from someone else’s computer. I did some more digging and pulled up his work phone records filled with calls to Madeleine.”

  “And that’s what you gave Mrs. Toker, and that’s what got her killed. Evidence that the bride’s husband and best friend planned her murder.” The pieces fell into place in my mind. Madeleine had been driving the mother’s car when it had gotten a ticket in front of Tricia’s house the morning of the murder because she was the killer. She’d fed us misinformation about Frank to send us off on a wild goose chase. She’d driven Mrs. Toker’s silver SUV when she threw a Molotov cocktail into my car. She must have been the person Mrs. Toker met on the roof of the hotel and who’d pushed her off.

  Kate sucked in air. “He was involved with Tricia’s maid of honor? After all these years? But I don’t get it. He was one of the victims.”

  “They set it up to look like he was a victim,” I said. “The threatening email. The false information about a feud with the neighbo
r. Dave being shot in the shoulder so he would be injured but not killed.”

  A muffled pop came from behind us, and Frank crumpled to the ground.

  “Not bad,” Madeleine said as she pushed the front door the rest of the way open and leveled a gun at us.

  Chapter 43

  “Is he dead?” Kate whispered to me, her voice shaking, as we walked across the grass that separated Frank’s house from Tricia and Dave’s.

  Frank had looked pretty dead to me when Madeleine shot him from the doorway, but I hadn’t gotten close enough to check before the maid of honor announced that we were moving the party next door.

  “Quiet,” Madeleine said from behind, the gun trained on us from the pocket of the cropped denim jacket she wore over a floral-print maxi dress.

  I glanced around me without moving my head but didn’t notice any neighbors walking dogs or doing yard work. I suspected that at this time of day most of the residents were at work and any children were at day care or school. I cursed our bad luck.

  The air seemed to have gotten warmer and stickier in the time we’d been inside Frank’s house. I tried to take a deep breath, but it caught in my chest, and I fought a wave of dizziness, remembering that I hadn’t eaten a thing all day. I clutched the metal railing as Madeleine nudged us up the porch stairs and into the yellow house.

  “Go on back to the kitchen,” she said. Her voice had lost every bit of its sweetness, and I had to remind myself that this was the placid girl who had been so devoted to her best friend.

  “How did you manage to pull this off without Tricia suspecting?” I asked, taking a seat on one of the barstools.

  “You want a full confession?” She pulled the gun out of her jacket without lowering it, and I noticed that her usually neat strawberry-blond hair looked unkempt. “All right. Why not? In less than three hours, I’ll be on my way to Brazil and you two won’t be talking to anyone.”

  Kate twisted on her barstool next to me and made eye contact. She looked as worried as I felt. Leatrice and Fern were the only people who knew we were here, but even they thought we were next door. The police might be looking for Madeleine, given the information Frank said he provided them, but I doubted they would look in Tricia’s house.

  “It was my idea. Have my boyfriend romance the rich girl. She had access to a world neither of us did, so it was perfect. As the boyfriend and the best friend we got to go with her to the beach house and on the ski trips.”

  “Tricia went skiing?” Kate asked.

  “Before she got ‘sick.’” Madeleine made air quotes with her fingers.

  “You knew her illnesses were fabricated,” I said.

  Madeleine rolled her eyes. “Of course. It started in college. She would fake a headache to get Dave to stay in the dorm with her while everyone went out. She was never good at socializing and getting people to like her. I guess when you’re that rich, you don’t need to be likable. When the headaches worked, she moved on to other things. By the time we graduated, she had me bringing her notes from class, and she barely left the room.”

  “She sounds like a treat,” Kate mumbled to me.

  “Yeah, it was a drag.”

  I thought the word drag was a massive understatement to describe Tricia. “So you put up with her for all those years for the money?”

  “It wasn’t so bad. If Dave and I wanted to be together, he’d just put a sleeping pill in with the pile of medications she took.” She leered at us. “Do you know how many times I had him when she was sleeping in the next room? We never had to sneak off to a hotel because we did everything right under her nose.”

  Kate shook her head. “Well, that’s just tacky.”

  “I did what I had to do,” Madeleine snapped. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. And make no mistake about it, Tricia was an enemy to everyone she came in contact with.”

  I couldn’t argue with her there.

  Madeleine took off the denim jacket, and I noticed that her face looked flushed. “Judge me all you want, but do you have any idea how much money she had?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t. Most of our clients were well off, but we never knew their net worth.

  “Millions.” She spread her arms out wide. “Hundreds of millions now that Dave will inherit the company.”

  I didn’t want to be the one to burst her bubble but since Tricia died before her mother, she didn’t inherit the company from her. That meant Dave wouldn’t be inheriting from Tricia.

  “Not when they find out he conspired to have his wife killed, Kate said.

  “They’ll never know,” Madeleine pointed the gun at her. “Everyone who knows anything is dead. Or will be.”

  “Wrong again,” Kate said. “Frank told the police everything he knew about you.”

  I shot Kate a look. Why was she antagonizing the woman with the gun?

  Madeleine’s face darkened. “So I was too late?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Dave already cleaned out their joint accounts. We’ll be set for life.”

  “You think you’re going to get away with killing your best friend and her mother?” Kate asked.

  Madeleine looked at us with a curious expression. “Mrs. Toker was an accident. We wrestled for the evidence, and she ended up flipping over the railing. But you think I shot Tricia in cold blood?”

  I didn’t have a bit of trouble believing she could shoot her so-called best friend in cold blood and the look on Kate’s face told me she didn’t either.

  I heard heavy footsteps coming down the wooden staircase. “It was Dave, wasn’t it? He shot Tricia, and then you shot him to give him an alibi.” I remembered the flecks of blood on Madeleine’s sleeve after the murder. “Then you touched Dave’s body and got blood on you to explain away the blood spatter. He must have been the one Tricia’s mom called when she got the evidence from Frank. ”

  “Not bad for a wedding planner,” Dave said as he entered the room. He looked like he was dressed for the golf course and held a black duffel bag in one hand. “But I think it’s time for us to go, Madeleine.” He handed her the duffel. “The car’s in the back alley. Go ahead and put this in the trunk. I’ll meet you there in a second.”

  She nodded, handed him the gun, and left through the back kitchen door. So he was the one tasked to do the dirty work. Before I could think too much, I lunged for Dave, knocking his arm up. The gun fired and Kate screamed. Dave released his grip, and the gun clattered to the tile floor. I dove for it, scratching at the groom’s hands as he tried to take it from me. Kate jumped on his back and pulled his hair back with both hands. He roared in pain and reached his arms over his head to yank her off.

  “Freeze,” I said, stepping back and leveling the gun at Dave.

  Kate rolled off him and joined me on the other side of the marble island. He stood up, breathing heavily, his expression murderous.

  “What do we do now?” Kate whispered to me. “Shoot him?”

  I didn’t know what to do since our cell phones were in our purses and those were still at the house next door. I focused on keeping my hands steady, but the gun felt heavier than I expected, and my arms begin to shake.

  Before I had to shoot the groom or lower the gun, the front door burst open. “Police! Drop your weapons and put your hands up.”

  Several uniformed officers rushed into the house as I lowered the gun to the floor by my feet. Dave raised his arms in the air.

  Detective Reese pushed past the uniformed cops as they snapped handcuffs the groom, pausing at the door of the kitchen. “Are you two okay?”

  I nodded and fought the sudden urge to cry. “How did you know we were here?”

  The corner of Reese’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Your neighbor called me. She said you’d come over to talk to Frank Ferguson, but you weren’t answering her calls. She said she would have come herself, but she was in the middle of a makeover.”

  My legs felt weak, and I leaned against the countertop. “But how did you know we were here at
Tricia’s house?”

  Reese walked over and picked up the gun from the floor while a uniformed cop led Dave out of the room. “We were walking up to the neighbor’s house when we heard the gunshot.”

  I put a hand to my mouth. “We need to call an ambulance for Frank.” I looked at Reese. “Madeleine shot him. I don’t know if he’s dead or not.”

  “We have an ambulance on the way already since we heard the gunshot over here,” Reese said. “If I run next door to check on him, will you two be okay?”

  “We’re fine.” I put my shaking hands on the rounded edge of the counter.

  “Look.” Kate pointed out the kitchen window. “Madeleine’s driving away.”

  I followed Kate’s gaze out the back kitchen window to the silver Land Rover careening down the alley. “Loyalty really isn’t her strong suit.”

  Reese directed one of the officers to chase down her car as he strode out of the kitchen. Once he’d gone, I allowed myself to slide down to sit on the floor.

  Kate sat next to me and put her hand over my shaking one. “We always say bridesmaids can be worse than the brides.”

  “Yes, but I never thought we’d have one threaten to kill us,” I said.

  “I know, right?” Kate shook her head. “I always thought you or I would snap and kill one of them first.”

  I gave a weak laugh. “Talk to me in another five years.”

  Chapter 44

  “Unhand me at once.” Richard’s voice carried from the direction of the front door, where a police officer was likely standing guard—and apparently holding Richard back. “You’re wrinkling my Thomas Pink shirt.”

  “How did Richard know we we’re here?” Kate asked.

  “I’m assuming the same way Reese found out. The Leatrice phone tree.”

  “Annabelle,” Richard called out. “Are you in there?”

  “Back here,” I yelled. “In the kitchen.”

  I heard more muffled arguing, then Richard rushed into the kitchen, his eyes darting around the room until he spotted us on the floor. His hand flew to his heart. “Are you hurt?”