Figure Skating Mystery Series: 5 Books in 1

by Alina Adams

  And then she had another thought. Bex looked at the printout of Sergei's expenses again. This time, instead of just skimming to find the number he'd given her, she instead looked for a series of short, local calls. Ones that would indicate a computer being logged on repeatedly. She found nothing that would confirm such a pattern, leaving Bex to assume that Sergei had told the truth and that he didn't travel with a laptop.

  On the other hand, not traveling with a laptop didn't mean a total lack of Internet access. The hotel, for one, provided several computer terminals, complete with printers, for guest use. Not only could Sergei have sent an E-mail from there, but Silvana could have printed it out from the exact same location (which wouldn't explain the European-sized paper, but Bex couldn't have everything). If Bex knew her hotels and their fervent desire to squeeze guests' money out of the most basic transactions, both would have been charged for the privilege. And their payments—complete with day and time used—dutifully logged.

  Time to pull out that smile again.

  And the chutzpah.

  As it turned out, though, she could have saved both.

  The smile proved utterly unnecessary, as all Bex had to do was mention to the concierge that she needed to use a computer with an Internet connection, and he instantly directed her to a room left of the elevator banks. The woman on duty asked Bex's name and room number, and then handed her a clipboard to sign in on. The clipboard had a stack of pages on it, all with signatures and dates and times of those who'd come before her.

  All Bex had to do then was pretend to drop the clipboard and, when she bent over to pick it up, quickly scan through the pages underneath. It could hardly be considered chutzpah. More like a weak “I Love Lucy” sketch.

  For her trouble, she did see Sergei's name on the list several times, both before the ladies' competition and after.

  Silvana Potenza's name didn't come up once.

  Again, it was time for Bex to summarize what she knew.

  Silvana was dead. Either by accident (the official version). By suicide (the Erin Simpson fans' version). Or by murder (the version Gil Cahill would prefer).

  If it was an accident, then Silvana Potenza was obviously a very odd person with an even odder penchant for cold, wet rooms. If it was a suicide, then maybe Silvana really did fix the ladies' results and either couldn't live with herself or was afraid that the truth would be pried out of her in the course of an investigation. And if it was murder, then she was either killed by the Russians to keep from talking about the fix, or by the Americans as revenge for Erin's loss, or by the Canadians, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, and British because they weren't invited to the party, or by the fans from either side, or by a random psycho with a penchant for odd women who liked to spend time in cold, wet rooms.

  There. That was simple. Bex should have no problem straightening it all out in time for the live show on Sunday. Two days from now.

  While sloshing the facts she already knew versus the ones she didn't around in her head like an enthusiastic mouth washer prior to the spitting stage, Bex decided that she had picked on the Russians enough for one morning, and it was now time to hear from the American contingent. The one that, after all, seemingly got the short end of the stick.

  Short sticks tended to make people cranky, didn't they?

  Killing cranky?

  Fortunately, Bex reached her decision to switch targets right around the time she saw Erin Simpson and her mother, Patty, cross the hotel lobby. Well, all right, maybe actually seeing them came before the decision to question some Americans. But they were right there in front of her face, and Bex was a big believer in seizing the moment. Especially when it meant a chance to procrastinate getting back into the elevator and talking to Sergei again.

  Both of the Simpson women, Erin dressed in blue jeans and a pink belly shirt that showed off her amazingly toned abs and utter lack of cleavage and Patty in a green skirt suit that wouldn't have seemed out of place at a PTA meeting, were in the company of a rather tall—definitely over six feet—lanky man dressed in khaki pants, a neatly pressed white shirt, and matching khaki tie, and sporting clean-cut, straw-blond hair the same shade as both of theirs. Despite his towering height, he moved with the grace of an athlete, not slouching so much as an inch as he rested one hand on Patty's elbow and the other atop Erin's shoulder and gently escorted them through the lobby, weaving them through the throng of fans that descended on Erin like a puff of smoke.

  Bex waited for the mandatory autograph and picture-taking session to wear itself out, noting how gracious Erin was with each fan, asking their names, offering a friendly smile, and—in a wonderfully political touch—taking the time to compliment them on something personal, be it a cute barrette in their hair or the sparkliness of their pens. The girl was good. Very, very good. No wonder she inspired such excessive devotion. The fans in the elevator had looked ready to get into a fistfight for Erin. Would they have been willing to kill for her, too?

  Finally, when the last autograph had been signed, Bex stepped forward. "Hi, Erin. Hello, Patty."

  After a season of following them from continent to continent, Bex and the Simpsons were on a casual hello basis. Bex intended to milk it for all it was worth.

  "Hi, Bex." Erin's smile stayed permanently in its place, and her mother, realizing that media was in the house, forced herself to do the same.

  "Hello, Bex. How are you? Glad to be almost done?"

  "Well, we still have the exhibition show on Sunday."

  "Oh, of course, of course. I guess for us, with the competition being over, it feels like we're already on vacation. It's probably different for television. You still have to put on a show no matter what, right?"

  "Right." Bex turned her attention to the tall man in their midst. "Hi," she said, "I'm Bex Levy, the 24/7 researcher. I don't think we've met."

  "Jasper Clarke." His height and the tight knot of tie at his neck had brought to mind Disney's “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow “ and Ichabod Crane, and Bex had been expecting a high, reedy—okay, let's call a spade a spade, here—nerdy voice. What she heard instead was a deep and mellow baritone. If the center of a Milk Dud had a voice, this would be it.

  "Oh," Bex said, "You're Erin's Web master."

  He was a skating fan. But hardly a typical specimen. While female skating fans tended to fall into three categories—older women with free time on their hands to travel to competitions, middle-aged women dragging a reluctant spouse or child behind them, and perky teenagers on their way to becoming either of the above—the men tended to fall into a single classification: odd. Not only the Lolita factor, but how they dressed—as if, for them, fashion froze sometime in the 1970s. They usually crept about from place to place trying to blend into the woodwork until the competition actually started, at which point they commenced whooping and hollering, "Go for the gold! Go for the gold! Go for the gold!" from the moment their skater stepped onto the ice until she or he or they stepped off. Some carried around photo albums of their favorites, or chatted up the skaters' parents, or built Web sites and tried desperately to have them declared official.

  Jasper Clarke seemed to fit the typical profile on the surface, but there was something different about him. Maybe it was his body language. He moved alongside Patty and Erin like an equal, not a supplicant. Maybe it was his laid-back manner. He didn't seem to be doing the usual dance of currying Erin's or Patty's favor, sniffing around like a mutt hoping for a stray crumb of approval to fall from the big table. Jasper Clarke looked utterly confident in his own skin, like he'd never beg anyone for anything. Or maybe it was simply the fact that tall, confident, athletic blond men with mellow voices were seriously Bex's type, and she thought he was adorable.

  Yeah. That last one. That may have been it.

  Of course, Bex reminded herself, she had no time for this digression right now. She was investigating a murder, and she had questions to ask and clues to piece together and a live show on Sunday. And besides, Jasper was o
ld. He was like, ten years older than her, she bet.

  So, in the end, all Bex said was, "Nice to meet you, Jasper. I hear the petition on your site is doing really well."

  "We broke ten thousand signatures a half hour ago. We're very pleased."

  "People are so nice and supportive of me," Erin chirped in, even though Bex didn't recall asking her.

  Patty said, "Gil has already asked Erin if she will skate an extra number at the exhibition. He can't get her the gold medal spot, of course, that's the ISU's call, but he asked if Erin would skate to close out the show, after Xenia and after the finale, so our last image can be of her."

  "Wow," Bex said, truly impressed. "That's pretty major."

  "Well, everyone knows Erin should have won the gold. This just concludes the show the way it should have been in the first place."

  Bex used every second of her high school drama class to try to sound nonchalant and casual as she asked, "It must be tough for you, with Silvana Potenza dead, to know that you'll never get the whole story about what happened."

  Patty said, "Francis and Diana Howarth told the whole story on the air the night Erin lost. Everything else would just have been more lies."

  "We'll be sending our petition to the ISU tonight," Jasper said. "That gives them two days to change the results."

  "You really think they will?" Bex asked, thinking back to the passage in the rule book that said official results could never be overturned by anyone for any reason.

  "What choice do they have? There's certainly enough evidence to launch an inquiry."

  "Really?" Bex wondered if she'd missed something. "What evidence would that be?"

  "Francis and Diana, for one thing," Patty snapped, her fondness for Bex diminishing like an ice cube melting in warm vodka. "They're skating experts; their testimony can't be ignored. And then there's the block voting. The entire Eastern bloc voted for Xenia. Tell me that's not an obvious bias. Erin would have won if Silvana Potenza hadn't sided with them."

  Bex felt like she was in the middle of some never-ending scratch spin, having the same conversation over and over again. She considered pointing out the obvious flaws in their theory but, to be honest, she was sick of it.

  "Actually," Bex said, "I did want to talk to you both about Silvana. You and Erin were at the rink practicing when she died, right? We're doing a special on her death, and I wanted to—"

  "We'd love to do an interview," Patty said, "but now is not a good time. Erin needs to take a nap before tonight's practice."

  "Well, when would be a good time to—"

  "We'll call you," Patty said. She placed a protective arm around Erin and, guiding her with sheer body weight, like a bicycle, pointed her toward the elevator. "Jasper, we'll see you at the practice. It was nice seeing you, Bex. Let's talk more later."

  And they were gone, leaving Bex with Jasper.

  Still tall. Still cute.

  He said, "Looks like we both got blown off."

  Bex shrugged. "I'm a researcher; I'm used to it. I had a skater once give me the totally wrong elements for his program. On purpose. He thought it would be funny. So there we are live on the air, and Francis and Diana have all the wrong info. Francis says, "Now he's setting up for a triple Salchow," and the guy does a triple flip."

  "You'd think that's a problem that could be avoided if your announcers actually looked up at the person on the ice, instead of at the cheat sheet."

  "You'd think that," Bex agreed.

  "But you would be wrong, I take it?"

  "Oh, so very, very wrong."

  "Sounds like a tough gig."

  "Well, that's why they pay me the big bucks."

  "I see." He was smiling at her. He had a nice smile. Unlike Erin's on-ice portrayal of Happiness, this one actually had some sincerity.

  Bex said, "I'm guessing you must make the big bucks, too, doing Erin's site."

  "Actually, I do it for free."

  Of course. He may have been taller and smoother than the average fan bear, but, in the end, Jasper was just another fanatic, obsessed with an admittedly legal but still prepubescent-looking girl to the extent of spending his own money to follow her around the world and build Flash-based electronic shrines, all for the return thrill of having her mother blow him off in a hotel lobby. How disappointing.

  Jasper said, "I'm retired. I've got nothing but time on my hands, and I love the Web."

  "Retired? How old are you?" -

  "Forty two."

  "Wow." As in Wow, you look good for your age, and Wow, you're already retired, and Wow, how do I get me some of that action?

  "Like I said, the Internet has been very, very good to me."

  "Wait, are you actually one of those real-life guys who got in at a good time and out at an even better one?"

  "Yup." There went that smile again. "I started a software company fifteen years ago, sold it five years ago. And then there I was, newly retired, newly rich, no need for money, and nothing at all to do."

  "So you decided to become a professional skating fan?"

  "Something like that."

  Intriguing. "And you've been working with Erin and Patty ever since?"

  "Give or take."

  "I bet you know them pretty well."

  "More or less."

  "Jasper," Bex asked, "Would you like to have lunch with me?"

  "I'd be delighted."

  He proved to be a man of multiple surprises. The first one came when Bex took his acceptance of her lunch invitation to mean what a skating event lunch invitation always meant. She turned right, confidently heading for the hotel restaurant. Jasper turned left, heading for the outside world.

  He said, "The restaurant at the Cliff House is really excellent. Have you ever been?"

  Bex gulped. Outside? Eat outside? Go outside? Was that even allowed? Since the day they'd arrived, the 24/7 crew had eaten their every meal either at the hotel restaurant or while sitting on the floor of the production trailer, scarfing takeout from the hotel restaurant. After two weeks, Bex had sampled every item on the menu and could with confidence report that the ideal dinner was honey-baked salmon with the side order of fries, steamed broccoli, carrot wedges, and lemon slices. She'd had it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for the past four days. Any minute now, she expected to grow honey-baked gills.

  Bex said, "I've kind of been busy, here…."

  "Well, that's a crime, then. Visiting San Francisco and not sampling at least some of the restaurants. You wouldn't do that in Paris, would you?"

  Actually, she had. In Paris, she'd subsisted on hotel steak with a side order of spinach, and then crème brulee for dessert. Paris had been a fun, if fattening, time.

  "Uh, no?" Bex answered his question with a question.

  "Come on. I'll show you the town."

  In all the mystery stories Bex had ever read, it seemed to her like the detective spent an awful lot of time narrating their travels. She couldn't pick up a whodunit without encountering pages-long descriptions of "and then I took this freeway to this freeway to this freeway, and then I got to this neighborhood and boy, wasn't it picturesque and filled with colorful locals full of charm and anecdotes."

  As a reader, Bex had assumed the technique was nothing more than filler. After all, she'd been a student when she did the bulk of her reading, and at the time, Bex certainly knew all about papers with word count requirements and the padding inspired therein. Later, when she worked as a freelance writer and was lucky enough to snag an assignment that paid by the word, she got really good at using six when one would have done. However, now that she was a sleuth herself, Bex decided to give all those poor, maligned writers the benefit of the doubt and guess that the interminable itinerary listing was actually a sensible way of organizing their thoughts in a linear fashion, the better to make sense of the knotty puzzle before them.

  Riding shotgun in Jasper Clarke's cool blue Ferrari (another way in which he diverged from the average skating fan; this was Bex's first Ferrari
ride), she decided to give the strategy a try. She looked out the window. She noted that they seemed to be driving down Nineteenth Avenue. The street was ... street colored. Concrete colored. Gray. The houses whose windows looked out onto the street-colored street all looked the same; like Monopoly houses painted shades ranging from a tasteful white with green shutters to, she kidded not, a hot-pink facade with neon-orange windows. There were several gas stations on the street. Also a few outdoor flower stands, bus stops, and, periodically, trolley car tracks. The trolley cars were green. The people on them were mostly Asian. All of whom, Bex reminded herself to think, were individuals, not a clichéd mass. She was confident that they worked in many different professional fields, and she bet some of them were probably not even that good at math.

  There. That ought to be mea culpa enough for her earlier, inadvertent ethnic slight.

  And anyway, now they had left Nineteenth Avenue and were driving through Golden Gate Park, which was pretty and green as parks were wont to be. Finally, they pulled out of the park and alongside the Pacific Ocean. It was blue and big and, presumably wet.

  Well, that certainly was an instructive exercise.

  Bex felt no closer to figuring out who killed Silvana Potenza than before she left the hotel, but at least her adjectives had gotten a heady workout.

  Naturally, along the way, as she'd been narrating her internal travelogue, Bex had been acting the good guest and keeping up her end of the conversation with Jasper.

  He'd started by asking Bex all about herself, her pretelevision career, how she'd come to work at 24/7, all of the usual pleasantries. Bex dutifully replied, hoping that her own openness would inspire reciprocity on his end.

  It seemed to do the trick as, sitting down at their table at the Cliff House restaurant (description, just in case it really was programming her brain in the right, crime-solving direction: white tablecloths, brown plush chairs, crystal glasses, off-white china, sea-themed ambiance, big windows looking out over the ocean, and a jutting, black, slimy rock covered in barking sea lions), Jasper quite happily answered Bex's questions about his own past.