Mixed Malice

by Beck, Jessica

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Recipes

  Other Books by Jessica Beck

  JESSICA BECK

  THE DONUT MYSTERIES, BOOK 28

  MIXED MALICE

  Donut Mystery #28 Mixed Malice

  Copyright © 2017 by Jessica Beck All rights reserved.

  First Edition: December 2016

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Recipes included in this book are to be recreated at the reader’s own risk. The author is not responsible for any damage, medical or otherwise, created as a result of reproducing these recipes. It is the responsibility of the reader to ensure that none of the ingredients are detrimental to their health, and the author will not be held liable in any way for any problems that might arise from following the included recipes.

  The First Time Ever Published!

  The 28th Donut Mystery.

  Jessica Beck is the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Donut Mysteries, the Classic Diner Mysteries, the Ghost Cat Cozy Mysteries, and the Cast Iron Cooking Mysteries.

  To P, forever and always,

  for all the years, all the laughs, and all the love!

  During the remodeling of Donut Hearts after a big ice storm damaged the place, contractor Snappy Mack is found murdered inside the shop, and Suzanne and Jake must find the killer before he strikes again. As they search through the remnants of the contractor’s life, they soon realize that too many folks had a reason to want to see Snappy dead, and sorting it all out is going to be no easy task.

  Chapter 1

  “Hello? Is anyone here?” I asked tentatively as I peered into the darkness and put one foot inside Donut Hearts, my heart pounding in my ears.

  It was nearly pitch black inside my donut shop, which really wasn’t that surprising, given the hour. At three o’clock in the morning, I hadn’t been expecting anyone else to be there, since Emma didn’t come in until four, so I usually had the place to myself at that time of morning.

  So why was the front door standing ajar?

  Was it possible that Snappy Mack, my new contractor, had left the shop unlocked after he’d finished working for the evening? We were trying to fit two full-time schedules into a static twenty-four-hour day, and I wasn’t at all sure how it was going to work. I was there from three to a little after eleven every morning, while Snappy took over at one p.m. and worked until who knew when. Had he left to get new materials to repair the shop and not bothered to come back? Snappy was the bottom of the barrel for me, but at least my mother had been able to find someone to fix the place up after a large oak tree had smashed into Donut Hearts in the middle of the worst ice storm we’d had for as long as I could remember. I’d been expecting Snappy to get started on the job well before Christmas, but here it was the second day of a brand-new year, and I was beginning to wonder if it was ever going to get finished. My contractor was still working on the demolition stage, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually see real progress on restoring my donut shop to a shadow of its former glory.

  “Snappy?” I called out as I stepped all the way inside. “Did you fall asleep again?” It pained me to learn that our police chief, Stephen Grant, had discovered Snappy dozing off instead of working just the day before. “If you nodded off, it’s time to wake up. Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” I called out as I flipped on the lights.

  In a split second, it was clear that Snappy would never be getting up again.

  Someone had seen to that.

  The construction worker was lying facedown in the middle of the donut shop’s concrete floor with the handle of a screwdriver poking out of his back.

  At least the handle was the only part that I could see.

  I took a few quick photos with my phone out of habit more than anything else, then I stepped back outside quickly and called the police chief as my foot brushed against a faded old newspaper on the floor with traces of blood on it.

  It appeared that murder had just paid another visit to my not-so-quiet little town of April Springs, North Carolina.

  After I called Chief Grant and told him what had happened to poor Snappy, my husband was the next name on my list. I didn’t call Jake just because I needed his support in such a trying time, though that was true enough. The fact of the matter was that he also happened to be a retired state police inspector and the former interim police chief for our town before he’d handed the duties over to our current chief law enforcement officer, Stephen Grant.

  “Jake, it’s Suzanne,” I said, fighting to catch my breath and calm my rapidly beating heart.

  “Hey, Suzanne. What’s up?” I knew for a fact that he’d been sleeping when I’d left him ten minutes earlier, so how on earth did he sound so alert now?

  “I didn’t wake you, did I?” I asked him, a completely ridiculous question to ask any sane person at three o’clock in the morning.

  “I’m fine. Did you forget your keys?”

  “I wish it were something that mundane,” I told him. “I just found Snappy Mack dead in the middle of the donut shop.”

  “What happened? Did he have a heart attack?” Jake asked me, a legitimate question since Snappy had a spare tire around his waist big enough for a tractor-trailer.

  “Not unless he died of fright just before someone stabbed him in the back with a screwdriver,” I replied.

  “Are you still inside?” he asked, his voice now coming through loudly.

  “No, I stepped outside to call Chief Grant, and then I wanted to call you and bring you up to speed on what happened here,” I said.

  “Get away from the donut shop. Run! I mean right now!” His voice was strong and commanding, very hard to ignore.

  “Jake, whoever killed my contractor didn’t hang around to watch me make donuts,” I explained.

  “Do as I say, please?” he asked. The concern was thick in his voice.

  I wasn’t a big fan of taking orders from anyone, even my husband, but I knew that his reaction was out of love. “Fine. I’m leaving,” I said, not running but walking toward my Jeep, not that it would have offered me a great deal of protection if the killer had still been hanging around. It was a ragtop, and it would take something substantially less than a knife to get to me.

  “Why aren’t you running away?” Jake asked me as he approached less than a minute later.

  “I guess I just ran out of steam,” I explained.

  My husband raised one eyebrow, showing me that he didn’t believe one word of my excuse, as he started for the door. His service weapon was in his hand, but I noticed that he hadn’t even stopped to put on his shoes before he’d come to me, even though it was barely kissing thirty degrees
out.

  “Not to put too fine a point on things, but shouldn’t you wait for the police?” I asked him before he could go inside.

  “I’ll do just fine until they show,” Jake said. As he approached the front door, Chief Grant drove up and slammed his squad car to a vibrating halt within three inches of my Jeep.

  “Hang on, Jake. I’m going in with you,” the chief said as he leapt from his car.

  Jake merely nodded, and a moment later, the two men went inside, both their weapons drawn.

  It suddenly occurred to me that if the killer was still hanging around, maybe he was lurking in the bushes outside where I was, waiting for the men with guns to go away.

  If that ended up turning out to be the case, I really had better be ready to run.

  With every passing second they were gone, I kept glancing back and forth from the shop to the darkened park, until finally I heard Jake call out to me from the door, “It’s all clear, Suzanne. No one’s here.”

  “Except Snappy, you mean,” I said, still seeing the image of the man’s dead body in my mind. It was an image I knew I was going to have a hard time wiping from my memory, but I was going to do my best nonetheless.

  “I know you aren’t going to be happy with me, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to shut Donut Hearts down this morning,” Chief Grant said. “We need to secure the crime scene and analyze the evidence before any of it gets lost in the shuffle.”

  “I understand completely,” I said as I started to brush past him and head inside.

  “Whoa. Where exactly do you think you’re going?” he asked me, barring my way.

  “I need to at least make a sign for my customers,” I explained.

  “I think they’ll get the message that you’re not open for business when they see the crime scene tape and all of the squad cars out front,” Chief Grant said. Then he turned to Jake and added, “Thanks for the backup.”

  “I should be thanking you for letting me tag along,” he said. “Suzanne, how about a ride home? My feet are freezing.”

  “That’s what you get for running out of the house barefoot in January,” I told him as he got into the passenger seat of my Jeep.

  “You should feel lucky I took the time to put on my pants,” he said with a wry grin as he buckled his seatbelt.

  “I’m not sure who would have seen the show if you hadn’t, given this time of night.” I let out a deep breath, and then I added, “I wasn’t Snappy’s biggest fan, but who would want to kill the man, especially in my donut shop? It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “I have no idea, but I have a feeling we’re going to try to find out, aren’t we?” Jake asked as he stared at me. “Since Grace is out of town for a sales meeting, could you use a second-in-command?”

  “You know I could,” I said. “As long as you’re content with that and don’t try to lead my investigation for me.”

  “No worries on that count. I won’t make that mistake again,” he said with a smile. “Should we get started now, or do you want to wait until after the sun comes up?”

  “Well, I doubt anyone is going to want to talk to us at this hour,” I said, and then I suddenly remembered that Emma didn’t know what had happened at Donut Hearts. “I can’t believe I forgot. I need to call Emma and tell her what happened,” I said to Jake as I pulled into our driveway. It was just a three-minute commute, merely one of the many things I loved about my job.

  “I’ll be inside warming up,” he said. “Why don’t you chat with her as you come in with me?”

  “Jake, we’re in front of our own cottage. I’m sure that I’ll be perfectly safe here.”

  “Just to be certain, do it my way, would you?” he asked me.

  “I suppose I could,” I said as I dialed Emma’s number and started to follow my husband inside. My assistant picked up on the tenth ring, and at least she had the decency to sound as though I’d woken her.

  “Someone killed Snappy Mack inside Donut Hearts,” I told her. “We’re taking today off.”

  “Would it be okay with you if I woke my dad and told him?” Emma asked me, abiding by our strict rules of keeping her father’s newspaper and our donut shop completely separate. Her dad, Ray Blake, owned and ran the April Springs Sentinel, the town’s lone news-reporting medium, and there had been several instances in the past when our paths had crossed with unpleasant results.

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. After all, the entire town would know about Snappy’s murder by morning anyway, so why not give Ray a break and let him have the scoop?

  “Thanks. You’re the best, boss.”

  “So I’ve been told,” I said, but I was talking to dead air.

  Emma had already hung up.

  “So, what should we do now?” I asked Jake. “It’s too early to start knocking on doors asking questions about Snappy.”

  “We could always just stay inside and brainstorm for a while,” my husband said.

  “Is that code for taking a nap?” I asked him with the hint of a smile. There wasn’t much to be happy about at the moment, but having Jake by my side was at least something. I hadn’t wanted to linger at the donut shop. The image of Snappy being carted off in a body bag was not something I needed to see. I’d deal with the cleanup later, which reminded me that I had to find a new contractor as soon as possible. Was that callous, coming so soon after finding the last one’s body? Maybe, but I had to be pragmatic about it, too. “Jake, am I some kind of monster?”

  “Why would you ask me that?” he asked as he added a few logs to the fire to bring the fading flames back to life. “Of course not.”

  “One of the things I just thought about was that I was going to have to find a new contractor. Care to rethink your previous answer now?”

  “Not even a little bit,” he said. “The work still needs to get finished. Just not today.”

  “How long do you think the chief will keep my shop closed down?” I asked him as we settled onto the couch.

  “The best answer I have is as long as it takes,” Jake said.

  “Wow, what an illuminating response,” I said in a dry tone.

  “That’s not how I meant it, but it’s tough knowing something like that. If I had to guess, I’d say Donut Hearts will be yours again by noon, but like I said, that’s just a guess.”

  “Then it won’t do me any good today,” I said. I’d held out the slimmest of hopes that I’d get Donut Hearts back in time to at least knock out some cake donuts for my customers. It wasn’t about the money; I didn’t care if I had to give them away. I just wanted to wash the bad old memories of what had just happened there with some new, happier images.

  Evidently it would have to wait until the next day, though.

  “I can’t believe Snappy was murdered in my shop,” I said as I watched the flames start in on the fresh logs. “As far as I’m concerned, donut shops should be the happiest places on earth.”

  “I think someone else already beat you to that slogan,” Jake said with a smile.

  “If you can get donuts there too, then I agree,” I replied. Jake chuckled, and I added, “It may not make sense to the rest of the world, but it makes perfect sense to me, based on my own internal logic.” After staring at the flames for a minute, I asked my husband, “Do you happen to know anything about Snappy Mack?”

  “Just what I’ve learned since the renovation got started,” Jake answered. My husband had spent an hour or two at the donut shop after hours the day before, so it wouldn’t have surprised me to discover that he knew my contractor quite a bit better than I did.

  “Are there any suspects in your mind, then?”

  “Let’s see. Snappy’s been having problems with his girlfriend lately, and his business partner is breathing down his neck about increasing his monthly salary from the business
. Then there’s Snappy’s son, a bad seed if ever there was one, according to the contractor, at least.”

  “I didn’t even know Snappy had a son. What’s his name, Zippy?”

  “No, it’s Sanderson Wentworth Mack the Fourth,” Jake said.

  “If that were my name, I might have people call me ‘Snappy’ too,” I said. “How did you find out so much about the man’s life in such a short amount of time? I’m not criticizing you. It’s amazing.”

  “Suzanne, half the work I did as a cop was interviewing suspects and figuring out if they were telling me the truth or not. I find myself asking leading questions of just about everybody I meet these days. For instance, did you know that your flour supplier is thinking about getting engaged?”

  “Melissa? I didn’t even realize she was dating anyone steady.”

  “She’s not,” Jake said with a grin. “She came by when I was chatting with Snappy, and we started talking outside. It appears Melissa is envious of you and what we have together.”

  “Well, she can’t have you,” I said with a grin. “You’re taken.”

  “I don’t think she was implying that I should leave you for her. She was just lamenting the fact that there weren’t any good men left.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I gave her an old friend’s phone number,” Jake reluctantly admitted, clearly embarrassed about being caught matchmaking. “In my defense, the last time I spoke with Terry Hanlan, he said nearly the exact same thing to me, that he was getting frustrated by the absence of a good woman in his life. It just seemed like the right thing to do, putting them in touch with each other.”

  “So, matchmaking runs in the family,” I said, doing my best not to gloat. Jake had teased me in the past about my proclivity to set people up, and here he was doing it himself now.