Deadly Intent

by Camy Tang

A policeman moved to stand behind her. She wanted to step away from him, but she couldn’t move—her feet wouldn’t respond.

  Then the policeman grabbed her wrists—and handcuffed her.

  She stared at the detective’s face, willing him to look at her, willing that grim look to melt from his face. Please, God. Please help me…

  “Detective Carter?” A plea. A sob sounded behind her words.

  He took a deep breath, and then finally looked at her. His eyes were both hard and sad at the same time.

  “Naomi Grant, you’re under arrest for the murder of Eloise Fischer.”

  FIFTEEN

  The drive to the station was both short and long at the same time. She kept her eyes squeezed shut, hoping none of the people she knew in Sonoma would recognize her in the back of the squad car.

  She felt completely broken.

  She tried to boost her spirits with the thought that her family would soon arrive at the police station to help her out—as she was being led away, Devon had said he’d follow her, but she’d instructed him to instead get her aunt and bring her with him.

  The officers escorted her into the police station. She took her first few steps with her head down, mortified and terrified.

  But…what was she doing? She wasn’t guilty.

  She wasn’t going to walk into the building as if she were.

  She tossed her head back so hard, her neck cracked. She set her eyes ahead of her, walking like a blind woman. Except she wasn’t blind enough not to see the man walking out of the front doors.

  He was nervous. Really nervous. He had light eyes. Light blond hair. Light build.

  “That’s Bill Avers!” she screeched. “Why are you letting him go? Detective, you’re letting him go.” She whipped around to look at Detective Carter, walking behind her.

  “Miss Grant—”

  “Why are you letting him go? He’s the guy who came to the spa looking for Jessica Ortiz. He ran when he realized something was wrong. Why are you letting him go?”

  “Miss Grant—”

  “You have to tell me. You’re arresting me, but you’re letting him go. You have to tell me.” Random people around her turned to stare. She didn’t care. Her life was falling apart around her.

  “Miss Grant.” Detective Carter sighed. “He has an alibi for both murders.”

  All sound faded to a low-pitched buzzing. In slow motion, she saw Bill Avers scurry past her to the parking lot, avoiding her eye. Escaping. Escaping.

  They processed her and took her to a windowless room, seating her at an empty table. In a few minutes, Detective Carter came in and he removed her handcuffs. He avoided looking her straight in the eye, and she studied a tic in his jaw.

  She started to suspect that he didn’t want to do this.

  It didn’t ease the turmoil inside her, but it was a chink of light.

  “This is a nightmare.” She stared at the scarred tabletop.

  Detective Carter didn’t say anything at first. Finally, he pushed a piece of paper toward her. “Miss Grant, is this your credit card number?”

  She had to read it three times because the numbers kept swimming in front of her eyes. “I think so.” She’d need her wallet to be certain, but she bought so many things online and had to type in her number, she was fairly sure it was hers.

  “Did you purchase this lamp online with your credit card at 10:02 p.m. five days ago?” From a box at his feet, he pulled out the stone lamp base that had been used to kill Eloise Fischer. It was still in its evidence bag, still smeared with blood.

  “No! No, of course I didn’t buy that.”

  “You didn’t buy this lamp?”

  “No.”

  The detective sighed. “You didn’t have it sent to the spa?”

  “What? No.”

  “You didn’t receive a package two days ago? We have the UPS tracking number that indicates it was delivered that morning.”

  “No, I haven’t received any packages in a week at least. Shipping and Receiving never told me I had a package.”

  It was delivered to the spa.

  Someone had retrieved it from Receiving.

  It was now obvious that whoever had ordered it was a spa staff member.

  Her entire body shuddered, and she couldn’t stop.

  “Miss Grant?”

  “It’s one of my staff.”

  “Miss Grant—”

  “Someone rifled through my office five days ago.”

  The detective gave her a look as if to say, Too little, too late.

  “No, I’m serious. I didn’t have proof, so I never reported it. But you can ask my sister Rachel. She was there. I forgot to lock my desk, and my purse was in the drawer.”

  “Who has access to your office?” He sounded as if he were just humoring her.

  “Anyone. Anyone.”

  “So you’re saying…?”

  “Someone could have stolen my credit card number and the security code on the back and purchased that lamp online.”

  “It’s a handy coincidence that your office was rifled through.”

  “I’m not making this up. Could you find the ISP address of the computer that bought that lamp? Did you trace it to my computer? I’m guessing you didn’t. Because I didn’t buy it.”

  The detective removed the lamp and put it back in the box. “Miss Grant, can you account for your whereabouts between one and two o’clock on the day of Eloise Fischer’s murder?”

  “Yes,” she said, straightening. “Yes, I can. I took a last-minute appointment.”

  “You don’t have an appointment in the schedule we copied from the spa’s reservation computer,” he said.

  “It was last minute. Iona was manning the desk—she’ll remember. Moya Hillman arrived and demanded a massage. I skipped lunch to take her. Ask Aunt Becca—she was at the desk, too. Ask Moya.”

  Detective Carter was scribbling in his notebook furiously. “You’re certain of the time?”

  “Yes. Ask Iona and Aunt Becca. They put Moya in the Anise Lounge. I collected her a few minutes later. I had her until a little after two o’clock. And then I was busy with other clients until four o’clock.” When she’d found Eloise. “Their names will be in the schedule.”

  She hadn’t realized her chest had been so tight until it started loosening. Suddenly she could breathe more freely.

  She had an alibi for the murder.

  She had an alibi.

  But then…who killed Eloise?

  And why would they want to frame Naomi?

  Twenty-four hours later she was free.

  Even the air smelled tainted after her overnight stay in jail. It had been the most terrible, the most angry twenty-four hours Naomi had ever had, being forced to remain imprisoned despite knowing she had an alibi for the murder. The police had either had a hard time tracking Moya Hillman down to verify Naomi’s alibi or they’d decided to keep her overnight simply because they had already arrested her and wanted to keep her in custody just in case they found other evidence against her.

  The district attorney’s office had refused to press charges because she’d had three different people confirm her alibi. Regardless, her father and Aunt Becca had been livid, especially Aunt Becca, since she had been at the station harassing every man or woman in a uniform from the moment she’d heard that Naomi had been arrested. She gave Detective Carter a decidedly icy stare when she escorted her niece out of the station.

  Naomi still couldn’t prove that someone had gone through her office and stolen her credit card number. But the credit card and the package shipped to her name at the spa’s address involved her somehow with two murders.

  Her world had been upended. She’d been arrested. She was still under suspicion.

  One of her staff was trying to frame her.

  Devon had accompanied Aunt Becca and Monica when they picked her up from the police station. He enveloped her in a hug that tried to squeeze the shadow of her jail experience out of her bones.

  Bu
t on the road, she leaned forward from her seat in back. “I need to go to the spa.”

  “What?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Why?” asked Monica, calmer than the other two.

  “If the murderer is one of the staff, I need to look at the background checks Dad had done for each of the staff before they were hired. They’re at the spa.”

  “Dad had background checks done?” Monica turned in the front passenger seat to look at Naomi.

  Aunt Becca, however, was nodding sagely. “That’s a good idea. Devon, take us to the spa.”

  “Do you think it’s safe?” he asked even as he flipped on his turning signal.

  “The security guards are there. I would hope so.”

  “And so far, you’re the only one who’s been attacked,” Monica told him reasonably. “The murderer is trying to frame Naomi, not kill her.”

  The spa looked peaceful and elegant in the bright sunlight as they drove up. Aunt Becca unlocked the front door rather than the back one, and they walked inside. Devon led the way to Naomi’s office.

  Naomi smelled the scent a few feet from the office. Eucalyptus. Very, very strong. As if an entire bottle had been poured out.

  Devon’s step slowed as he smelled it, too. Because he led the way, he reached the office doorway first and halted a moment, blocking the rest of them. Then he whipped around. “Wait in the foyer.”

  “What?”

  “What’s going on?” Monica tried to push past him.

  “Don’t go in there.” His eyes had strain lines at the edges, and his mouth was grim and tight.

  Naomi knew she should feel something—shock, anger, sadness. But she felt nothing. “Let me see.”

  “No—”

  But she slipped under his arm and entered her office.

  Eucalyptus slapped her in the face as she stepped inside. Everything was overturned. Papers strewn everywhere. The filing cabinet drawers open and empty. The contents of her desk all over the floor, her chair. The shelves swept clear of statues and knickknacks. Candles and broken aromatherapy bottles at the base of a small table. That’s where the eucalyptus smell came from.

  She could hear Aunt Becca hyperventilating behind her. She turned to see her aunt, as white as snow, shaking. “Monica.”

  Her sister pulled her shocked eyes away from the destruction, saw her aunt, and immediately ushered her out of the office. “Naomi—first aid kit?”

  “In any of the therapy rooms. They should have whatever you need for shock.”

  Naomi said it so matter-of-factly. So calmly.

  No, not calmly. She wasn’t calm, exactly. She was stony. A thread of rage simmered below the surface. She took in the office with a certain dissociated observation. But calm? No. She wasn’t calm.

  She wanted to say, This isn’t happening, but a small flare deep inside cut the words off at her tongue. She was past denial, past the need to speak words to try to reverse the present.

  “This proves it was a staff member. No one else could get into the building.” She turned to Devon, whose eyes bored into hers like embers. She knew he was trying to find her, to find the Naomi he knew under this granite stranger. But that Naomi had hidden herself away.

  She moved through the mess, toward the locked filing cabinet in the far corner. The lock had been destroyed, the drawer hanging open crookedly. Papers had been tossed out, but most of the ones from that drawer were lying nearby.

  Except the background checks.

  She sifted through the papers on the floor. Paycheck information for the staff, private information on the clients.

  No background checks. They were completely missing, conspicuous in itself.

  “Call Detective Carter. I’m going to the security room.”

  “I’m going with you,” he said as he pulled out his cell phone.

  They found David and Neal manning the security desk. “Hello, Miss Grant.”

  “Have you watched the security cameras all morning?”

  “Yes. No one came in before you did.”

  “We need to check the cameras now, and quickly. Dr. Knightley has called the police, and we’ll need to turn over the video to them. But before we do, I want to find out who was in the spa last.”

  She sat in a chair. “Check the back-door video first. Where the staff come in.”

  Sure enough, they only had to backtrack a few hours to find the murderer who had entered the spa late last night. The hooded figure was hard to see because she kept to the shadows and moved slowly. If they hadn’t been looking for her, they wouldn’t have seen her.

  It was most definitely a woman and she most definitely used a key to open the back door.

  “Miss Grant,” David whispered. “She used a staff key.”

  “I know.”

  The woman on the video left an hour later. If she carried anything with her, it was hidden under her hooded sweatshirt.

  They never caught a glimpse of her face.

  “She didn’t park in the parking lot,” Devon remarked as they watched her walk off camera.

  “She probably parked her car along the highway and walked to the spa so the video wouldn’t catch her car.” Smart girl. But then again, she had to be to have killed two women. “I still don’t know what she wants. Nothing adds up.”

  “Miss Grant, Detective Carter’s at the front door,” David said.

  The look in the detective’s eye was unreadable. But Naomi couldn’t help remarking acerbically as she handed over the videos, “I hope you put more effort into catching whoever did this than you did in arresting me.”

  The muscle in his jaw flexed, but he didn’t reply.

  She didn’t care. She’d been arrested—booked, fingerprinted, photographed, searched. She’d spent the night in a jail cell, one of the most horrific experiences of her life.

  No, she wouldn’t think about it. She was amazed at how quickly she could shift her mind away from that experience, but then again, she was no longer the Naomi from a few days ago. She felt nothing now. She heard nothing.

  Not even God.

  SIXTEEN

  “Why did God let this happen to me, Poppa?” She hadn’t called him that since she was a little girl. Her sisters and Aunt Becca had been in the living room with them for a while, but he must have somehow communicated that he wanted to be alone with her, because they’d left silently a few minutes ago.

  He shook his head. “‘The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save.’”

  She’d remembered that verse earlier. Days ago. Years ago. “He’s not, Poppa.”

  “The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save.’”

  “I wish He’d save me soon.”

  The silence in the room wore between them for a few minutes. Finally he said, “I don’t know why, but all I can think about this is that verse from Zephaniah.”

  Her father had never been a terribly expressive man, especially about his faith. It was almost as if he wanted to be a counterpoint to Aunt Becca’s bold speech.

  To hear him speak like this, not in logical statements but in this tender voice, quoting Scripture, made tears spring to her eyes. “It doesn’t feel like He’s with me, Dad.”

  “When has faith ever been about feelings?”

  That silenced her, both her mouth and her spirit. Because she realized that for much of her life, her faith had been about feelings.

  Pressure to attend church with her family.

  Guilt if she didn’t do what her Sunday School teachers said she should do.

  Longing to please her father and Aunt Becca, to be a good daughter.

  Had she ever really come to God on her own terms? Just herself? Without her family in the background?

  And why did she only realize this now, when her heart was broken and she didn’t want to come to God, when she felt completely abandoned by the God she’d grown up knowing?

  But she had to admit, here she was, not going to Him because she didn’t feel like it. Wasn
’t that again putting her feelings before her faith?

  Did God want her faith despite her feelings? Or along with her feelings of betrayal and abandonment?

  The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save.

  Zephaniah 3:17. A Sunday School memory verse from years ago.

  She closed her eyes. You already know how I feel. But maybe You truly are with me. Maybe You are mighty to save.

  Paltry words. But, God, that’s the best I can do now. I will choose to try to believe You.

  And maybe, hopefully, that was all He wanted from her.

  “Dad, I found them.” Rachel’s voice broke her reverie as she entered the living room, carrying a box of papers.

  Her father’s face lightened as he caught sight of the box. “Excellent.”

  “Found what?”

  “When you called to tell us about the office being ransacked and the background checks being gone, I had Rachel start looking for some old files I’d kept in my office.” He pulled out a manila folder. “I thought I’d made copies of the background checks, but I wasn’t sure if I still had them.”

  “Copies?” She reached for a folder.

  “I don’t know if I have the most recent staff additions, however. But these should be most of them.”

  This was the best news she’d heard all day.

  Something to do. Something to keep her busy. Something that might help.

  Devon dreamed of Naomi.

  She had turned into a statue, and water was streaming out of an urn in her hands into the basin of a fountain. She turned blank eyes to him and opened her mouth, but only ringing came out of it. She opened and closed her lips, and each time, a shrill ringing would sound for a second before she closed her mouth.

  “What is it? What are you trying to tell me?” he asked her.

  Ring, she replied.

  Actually, it sounded a lot like a telephone…

  Devon cracked an eye open and saw only darkness. Then a piercing sounded through the hotel room, jolting his heartbeat. He fumbled with the phone on the nightstand. “Hello?”

  “Devon, it’s Martha.”

  “What is it? What time is it?”

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning. Devon, there’s been a fire.”