Murder in the First Edition

by Lauren Elliott

  Addie tapped the chalk stick on the board and then wrote Marvin murdered and drew a line with a question mark to Patrick. “I guess maybe one of our theories might be right. Maybe it was a crime of revenge because of a business deal for the book gone wrong. Marvin was also at the hospital the afternoon Patrick was overdosed.”

  Marc frowned at her last words. “How do you know that?”

  “Because I saw him leaving in a taxi, and Simon got called in soon after to treat Patrick.”

  Marc’s jaw flinched. “Well, I, as a trained officer of the law, will continue to follow the trail of actual facts as I uncover them—”

  “You uncover them?” Addie crossed her arms and stared at him wide-eyed. “Obviously, I just told you something you didn’t know.”

  Marc’s nostrils flared. “Me? My money’s on Patrick being behind all of this. Jerry and the crime team are tearing his office apart as we speak, searching for any clues we may have overlooked before. We’ll find the evidence and the missing book, since it wasn’t with Marvin, and we’ll do it using traditional police work”—his eyes flashed—“by following the evidence. It certainly won’t be based on some fantasy, crime league theories.”

  Addie’s mouth dropped. She looked at Serena, whose face was much like hers, except covered in flaring freckled spots.

  He continued on. “The rest of what you have on here about Jonathan and Crystal is nothing but speculative crap.”

  “It’s not crap.” Serena shot to her feet. “I didn’t want to believe what Addie came up with, either, about Jonathan because I like him, but from what we’ve seen lately, she might be right. At first, I thought she was just trying to push him out of her life because he reminded her of David, the same reason she’s pushed you and now Simon away.”

  Addie hissed, “Serena, how dare you?”

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  Marc’s gaze caressed Addie’s face, and it took all her willpower to stay standing.

  Serena’s eyes implored Addie. “But now you have to tell him about the message on the board and what Jonathan said to you the night he broke into your house.”

  Marc’s head jerked, breaking their moment. “What message? And explain break in.” He looked from one to the other.

  When Addie refused to speak, Serena explained, “Yesterday, Addie brought me back here to show me the new information she’d come across about Jonathan having been in Australia, and when she took the cover off the board, it was wiped clean except for—”

  “This.” Addie shoved her phone under Marc’s nose.

  “This is your last warning!!! What the . . . ? This was written on the blackboard?” At her shrug, he shook her gently. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I told her to, but she said she knew it was from Jonathan so there was no point involving you.”

  “Snitch.” Addie scowled at her friend.

  “I’m glad she did snitch. This is serious, Addie. Someone, and it may or may not have been Jonathan, knew about your board and obviously felt something on here was getting too close to the truth. What does this mean”—his finger stabbed the photo—“your last warning?” He clutched her shoulders this time. “Have there been others? How long has this been going on?”

  “Including the night Jonathan broke into her house and threatened her? Something she only told me about yesterday, too.” Serena pouted and ignored Addie’s glare.

  “He actually broke into your house? Like in smashed a window, jimmied the lock, what?”

  “No, it was more like hot-wired the security system or something?”

  “Are you sure you didn’t just leave the door unlocked or the system off?”

  “No, I did not. He was waiting there when I got home, and everything was locked up tight when I went in.”

  “What did he want?”

  Addie relayed the story of her surprise visit, and when she was finished, Marc just nodded his head.

  “That’s it? You have nothing to say.” Serena moved to his side and glared at him. “He broke into her house and threatened her.”

  Marc crossed his arms and stroked the stubble on his chin. “Actually, if there’s no evidence that he broke in, I can’t really investigate anything. There’s no proof of a crime having been committed.” Addie knew by the burning on her face that she was turning the same shade of red as Serena’s hair. “And I’d say that anything he said to you wasn’t much different than I’ve been telling you. Stay out of it, you could get hurt. This warning”—he tapped on her phone screen—“is a good indicator of that. So, if you’re half as smart as I think you are, you’ll listen to at least one of us.”

  “And you wonder why I don’t tell you when things like that happen.” She grabbed the piece of chalk from the desk and threw it at him. “You condescending—”

  He ducked. “But assaulting an officer of the law is a crime, and I do have a witness.”

  “Think again, bro.” Serena locked her arm through Addie’s in solidarity.

  “So, that’s how it’s going to be?”

  Serena stuck out her chin.

  “You guys win.” He shook his head. “I’m definitely no match for the two of you when you’re united.” His phone alarm screeched. “Sorry, it’s Jerry. I have to get this.” He stepped out of the back room, leaving Addie and Serena staring at the empty spot where he’d been.

  “You know. Your brother is kind of a—twit? Loser?”

  “All the above . . . ?”

  Marc’s reappearance cut Serena off mid-word. “You can erase that line between Patrick and Marvin.”

  “Why, what did Jerry say?”

  “We managed to get a partial print off the break line, and it came back as a match to a Nicky Santoro, a well-known enforcer for the mob.”

  “What”—Serena grabbed his arm—“the mob here in Greyborne Harbor?”

  Addie erased the connecting line and wrote mob hit. “So, now we have this and an ecoterrorist known to have been in town. Maybe Teresa wasn’t just a small-town charity coordinator.” She looked over her shoulder at Marc. “Have you ever done a background check on her?”

  He shook his head. “But I’m starting to see that this might be bigger than we first thought.”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been saying and trying to prove.” Her hand swept across the board. “Will you listen to me now?”

  He shook his head and tucked his thumbs in his belt. “I think if you won’t listen to me, then you’d better listen to Jonathan. He cares about you as much as I do. So back off, and stay out of this. I think now you can see we’re not dealing with amateurs here. Whatever this is all about. Someone means business.”

  “Wow.” Serena’s mouth hung open. “Wait till I tell Zach about this.”

  “No,” Marc’s voiced barked. “This is confidential, and this information getting out could jeopardize the case and put both of you at more risk.”

  She shrank back at his tone and words and nodded. “But I do have to go and meet him now. We planned on grabbing a quick bite.” Serena made a zipper gesture across her lips. He rolled his eyes. She latched on to Addie’s hand. “When is a good time to come and see the apartment?”

  “Umm, I’d forgotten. How about tomorrow before work?”

  “Perfect,” Serena grinned. “See you then.” With a little finger wave, Serena waltzed out the door.

  “What’s wrong?” Marc moved toward Addie. “You’re pale all of a sudden. Did all this just sink in?” His hand cupped the side of her face.

  Her skin burned. “That’s not it at all.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “When you said Jonathan cares about me as much as you do, did you really mean that?”

  “Of course, I do.” His thumb traced the outline of her jaw, as his lips brushed across her forehead and lingered with his head pressed against hers. She closed her eyes remembering the taste of his salty-sweet lips on hers and unwittingly sighed. “I’ve cared since the day we met,” he
whispered, “but I see now and from what I heard you say earlier this afternoon, you’re not ready. Just like you’ve been trying to tell me all along, but now I think I finally understand.” His finger tilted her chin up, and his eyes caressed hers. “But you will be one day”—he kissed the tip of her nose—“and I’ll be here.”

  Her cell rang, and she stiffened.

  “Go ahead.” His hand dropped to his side.

  She checked the caller ID and frowned. “Hello? . . . Hi, Kate . . . no, it’s not a bad time.” She glanced at Marc, apologizing with her eyes. “What was that? . . . No, I haven’t sold the book yet, actually it’s gone—What? . . . When?” She looked back at Marc. “Say what? . . . Thanks for letting me know. I’ll be in touch soon.... Okay . . . thanks again, bye.”

  “Was that about the book?”

  Addie sank onto the edge of the desk. “A Christmas Carol just showed up for auction on an online auction, black-market website. What caught Kate’s eye and how she knew it was mine was because the authentication certificate had her association membership number posted with the book details.”

  “So it was stolen.” Marc softly whistled as he scanned the board.

  Chapter 29

  “What are you thinking?” Addie followed Marc’s gaze to the board.

  “Now that we know the book was, in fact, stolen. It gives us the motive we’ve been missing, and a better idea of who we are looking at in all of these jigsaw puzzle pieces.”

  “I guess whoever advertised the book, with a picture of the appraisal certificate, knew enough that it would give credibility to the reserved bid price, but not enough to know that the number on it could be traced back to the appraiser.”

  “Making them an amateur and not a professional book dealer like Marvin was.”

  “That would be my guess.” Addie looked back at the board. “So, who do we have on here who would be smart enough to know about the uses and handling of one of the deadliest sea creatures on earth but knows nothing about unloading a stolen book? Or are we missing someone who should be on here?”

  Marc sat on one of the book crates. “Maybe it’s more than one person.”

  “You might be right. What if Teresa was killed for some other reason than we’ve even considered. You said a complete background check was never run on her because she was the victim and all.”

  “We did run a routine check, and no red flags popped up, but maybe we need to dig deeper.”

  Addie sat down beside him. “Let’s just pretend it was her past coming back to haunt her and someone, a professional, killed her for whatever reason. Jonathan even said she was an old friend of his. Who knows what she was in a previous life? After all, a known ecoterrorist paid her a visit, too.”

  “I’m following your thinking. I think.”

  “What if someone else saw her unrelated death as an opportunity to snatch the book and make some money?”

  “Could be a possibility.”

  “Which means”—she picked the chalk up off the floor and drew one large circle around the information on the board—“we’re back to square one.” She stabbed at the board, chalk bits flying. “Dang it! That means every name on here is a possible suspect, in one or both of the crimes, again.”

  Marc came up beside her, his eyes fixed on the names. “If we look at it as two separate crimes, then you’re right.” He plucked the chalk stick from her fingers. “But if we look at them as related, then we have to find the one person who could have pulled off both of them.”

  “How are we going to eliminate any of them?”

  “By using good, old-fashioned police work and following the evidence on what we know about each one of them.”

  “I have that there already.”

  “But is it,” he grinned, a twinkle in his eyes, “enough for the process of exclusion?”

  “What have I missed?”

  “Be patient, and let’s run through what we know about each of these people.”

  “I’ve done that a hundred times already, here”—she tapped her finger on Jonathan’s name—“and here”—pointing to Patrick’s—“and here . . .” Marc clasped his hand over hers.

  “Okay, I get the picture, but going back to Jonathan’s name—” He ignored the low growl escaping the back of her throat. “Look, I know you want to believe he’s guilty of something, but think about it now that we have more evidence.”

  Addie folded her arms and glowered at him.

  “Jonathan is smart, and as you have on here, he was recently in Australia. He may very well have heard about the blue-ringed octopus and maybe even read a book where the toxin was used as a murder weapon—”

  “State of Fear.”

  “What?”

  “State of Fear by Michael Crichton. A terrorist used it as a weapon.”

  “Okay, maybe he even read that sometime, but”—he looked at her—“and this is a big but . . . Jonathan knows books and works in the same insurance retrieval field as your father and David did, right? So, he would know how to unload a stolen book on the black market, eliminating him.”

  Her eyes widened. “But only of the book theft, not of the murder if we’re considering that they aren’t related or carried out by one person.”

  “Yup, we’re back to square one. We need more hard evidence.”

  Addie let out a deep breath and sat on the desk. “There’s Patrick, who I consider to be a buffoon and the last person who should handle a deadly toxin because he’d poison himself, but right from the beginning it bothered me that he was so certain the book wouldn’t be found.”

  “Did he say why he was convinced it was gone?”

  “Nope, he avoided my questions about it completely.”

  “Yeah, but based on what we’re thinking right now, he couldn’t be guilty of poisoning Teresa because witness reports place him downstairs at the time the toxin would have been ingested.”

  “However, his run-ins with Marvin do suggest that he could well have been the one to see her death as an opportunity to get his hands on a rare book and make some extra money.”

  “That would explain the clumsy posting for the book on the Internet. With Marvin dead, he had no idea how to sell it.”

  Addie shifted on the hard desktop. “And there’s also the fact that he picked up three lunches that day, so he must have known Teresa was expecting company.” Her brow creased. “Maybe he knew a murder was going to be committed but wasn’t actually part of that, and his job was just to get his hands on the book after she was out of the way.”

  Marc’s eyes darted from one name to the next. “Then he would be in conspiracy to commit murder and not have simply acted as an opportunist. He could be charged with both crimes.”

  “But that still leaves us with no proof of who actually fed her the poison or who he was working with. It wasn’t Marvin or Jonathan. She had a drink with a woman because of the lipstick on the cup.” Addie groaned. “Did your friend at the FBI ever get back to you with information on this Amy Miller person? Is there a link to Patrick?”

  “Not as far as I know and nothing new yet from the FBI.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “They lost track of her last year and are trying to figure out how she got by their surveillance and ended up in Greyborne Harbor without them being aware she was even in the country.”

  “What if Serena and my theories about Crystal being Amy Miller’s sister and Jonathan being involved with one or both of them are right? It makes sense when you look at the big picture and break it down into possibly two crimes that are only connected by opportunity, allowing for the second one to occur.”

  “But we’ve only just discovered that the second was actually a crime, and not a case of Teresa having hidden the book somewhere.”

  She threw her hands up in the air. “This is getting us nowhere. We’re just rehashing the same old information.”

  “Maybe you are, but some of this is new to me.”

  “Really?”

  “You haven’t actually been doing what
I asked you to, have you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Bringing the information you come across directly to me, so I can investigate it?”

  She opened her mouth to retort but snapped it shut.

  He studied the board, his hands on his hips. “What does that mean?” He pointed to lipstick tube, Simon to have analyzed.

  “I’m sure I told you about that, didn’t I?”

  He folded his arms. “What else haven’t you told me?”

  “Nothing, I swear.” She held her fingers up in a scout salute.

  “Addie?” His steely eyes fixed on hers. “What lipstick tube is Simon testing, and why did no one make me aware of this?”

  “I discovered what the shade of lipstick on one of the coffee cups was, and one day at the hospital I saw Crystal applying it and . . .” her voice trailed off.

  “And what?”

  “And then her lipstick tube just kind of fell into my hands, and I gave it to—”

  “Fell how?”

  “Just fell”—she shrugged—“that’s all, just fell.”

  “Well, now that your partner in evidence concealment doesn’t appear to be part of your life anymore.” She flinched under the bite of his words. “You’ll become more forthright with me again and bring all evidence that happens to fall into your hands to me immediately and not bypass channels. Besides, evidence obtained without a search warrant isn’t admissible in court. I thought you knew that?” he snapped. “I can’t stress enough that I cannot conduct a thorough investigation if there’s another show being played out behind my back.”

  As much as she hated to admit it, he was correct. Just this once, though. “I’m sorry. Really, I am.”

  “Good, but I need to get back to the station and start looking at what evidence I do have. But”—he glanced at the board—“some of this may have been helpful.” A smile crept across his lips.

  “See, I can be useful.” She scrunched up her nose and grinned.