Figure Skating Mystery Series: 5 Books in 1

by Alina Adams

  Bex said, "Well, right now he's claiming he helped you perpetrate a fraud."

  "He's lying."

  "Yes, I believe you've already mentioned that."

  "You don't believe me?"

  "I've heard a lot of stories the last few days. And most of them have turned out to be crocks of the first, second, and third degree."

  "Why would I lie?"

  "Because you killed Silvana, and that's considered a crime in some bizarre jurisdictions?"

  "Be serious. Why would I kill Silvana? I needed that woman. I needed her to admit that she cheated her vote and Erin was the real world champion."

  "But Jasper says she didn't cheat. That you two were the ones who cheated by making it look like she had."

  "Jasper is a liar."

  "Patty, it may be acceptable in skating to do the same routine over and over again. In conversation, it's called redundant."

  "You think you're pretty smart, don't you, Bex?"

  Well, yes, as a matter of fact she did. But she'd been raised to believe it was in bad taste to just blurt it out like that. Instead, Bex shrugged. "I did okay in school."

  "School," Patty snorted. "Yes, I remember hearing that a lot when I was competing: 'But don't you want to go to school, Patty, get a real education?' I did fine getting tutored. I thought I was smart enough. But people kept nagging me, telling me that I'd regret it the rest of my life if I missed out on the college experience. So, what the hell, when I finished competing, I thought I'd give it a try and enrolled in Stanford. Turned out school, Miss Smarty Pants, wasn't all that. I didn't learn anything there I needed. I didn't finish, and I'm not sorry. School doesn't make you smart. Living makes you smart, and I've done plenty of it both before and after school. So don't you go patronizing me. I know more than you think I do."

  "That was exactly my point," Bex said smugly. And, for the record, Bex knew more than Patty thought, too. For instance, Bex knew that Patty didn't just quit Stanford for no reason. She quit because she obviously couldn't do the work (her grades were below C level), and, oh, yeah, she was pregnant with Erin. "I do think you know more than you're telling me. I think you know all about this E-mail of Jasper's."

  "You're really getting on my nerves, Bex."

  "Jasper made an accusation. I have to follow up."

  "Fine," Patty snapped. "You think I have this E-mail on disk? Go ahead, be my guest, look for it." She went to the dresser, opened a drawer, and pulled out a computer carrying case. She unzipped it, revealing a laptop and, in the side pocket, a handful of multicolored discs.

  Bex knew the defiant gesture was probably supposed to shame her into leaving quietly. But Bex never did anything quietly, and she suspected now would be the wrong time to start.

  Bex powered up the computer and systematically went through every file on each of Patty's disks. She found travel itineraries, costume and music notes, text for the "Erin Excitement" on-line journal, downloaded E-mails from fans, Patty's coaching schedule and billing system. She found all sorts of things. Just no E-mail.

  "Happy?" Patty asked.

  "Not really," Bex admitted.

  "Get out."

  Bex did. And Patty followed. As soon as Bex was out of the room, Patty tore down the hallway in the opposite direction. She banged on Jasper's door.

  "Erin!"

  Her daughter peeked out. "Hi, Mom."

  "Let's go. We're leaving."

  "But I thought you wanted to talk to Jasper about the pictures."

  "Later." Patty grabbed Erin by the arm and dragged her down the hall, managing to somehow glare both at Jasper to her right and Bex to her left, simultaneously. She told Jasper, "I will definitely talk to you later."

  And then she disappeared behind her own door.

  Bex walked over to Jasper. She said, "It didn't go well."

  He sighed. "I knew she'd be angry. She probably thinks I betrayed her. Did you explain that I only told you about her having the disk to protect her and Erin? I wanted Patty to tell you the truth about what she did with the E-mail so you

  wouldn't think she was involved in something worse. Did you explain that to her, Bex?"

  Was that how Jasper remembered their conversation? Because that certainly wasn't how Bex remembered it. Her recollection leaned more toward: I'm trying to save my own butt, so go bother Patty, why don't you? Sure, Jasper had said a few words in Patty's defense, but only after he'd made sure to cover his own hide backward and forward. Bex wondered if he'd spent the last hour coming up with this rationalization so that he could sleep easier, or so that he'd have something to defend himself to Patty with. In either case, it didn't matter.

  "Patty," Bex told him, "denied the whole thing."

  "You mean about killing Silvana?"

  "I mean about knowing anything about any E-mail."

  "She's lying! She's probably scared of what this will mean to Erin, and so she's lying."

  "Well, one of you definitely is."

  "And you think it's me?"

  To be honest, Bex really wished that she did. She would love to turn Jasper and his E-mail confession over to the police and let them deal with it. But, the fact was, she kinda, sorta, baby blue eyes and all, believed him.

  Well, there was that, and the fact that he'd only made his confession to her, so she really had nothing but Francis and Diana's word, and who knew how they might change their story and God knew they were famous for turning on a toe-pick, so, really, she had nothing. Nothing the police would be interested in, anyway. And, until she got something solid, Bex was stuck. Both with the police and in her report for Gil. She figured she might as well stick with Jasper for now, since, at the moment, he was the only one telling her anything instead of just denying everything.

  Bex said, "I don't know what to think. Patty let me look at all of her disks, and there was no E-mail to be found."

  "So?"

  "So. That kind of puts a little dink your story, doesn't it?"

  "Not really. Patty probably just erased it."

  "Maybe," Bex conceded. "But what good is that to us? We need to catch her with it red handed to actually have a shot at proving anything."

  Jasper shook his head. "Bex, Patty may have been smart enough to erase the file, but I doubt she was smart enough to delete it."

  Bex stared at Jasper. "What?"

  "Most people don't realize this, but when you erase a file, you don't actually erase it forever. It's still there on the disk, until it's overwritten. And since Patty just deleted it a few days ago at most, I doubt she's had a chance to overwrite it."

  "You mean it's still there."

  "In computer-speak, yes."

  "And you could retrieve it?"

  "Probably."

  Bex said, "I wish I'd asked Patty if I could take the disks back to the production truck to look them over, instead of doing it right there in her room. Then I could have just held on to them a little longer or something."

  "Yeah," Jasper said. "Now we'll have to steal them out of her room, I guess."

  It may have been, like she told Patty, redundant, but nevertheless, Bex went ahead and asked Jasper, "What do you mean 'we,' Computer Boy?"

  "Once again, Bex..." Was she mistaken, or did he actually look like he was enjoying this somewhat? "I suppose I mean you."

  "Okay. And how do you propose I do that?"

  "Well, since you know where Patty keeps the disks, I suppose just going in and taking them would be the straightforward approach."

  "Uh-huh." Bex's head bobbed yes, while her tone screamed no. "Taking them. From where she keeps them. In a computer bag. In a drawer. Of the dresser. In her hotel room. Which is locked. With a card key. Which only she and Erin have."

  Jasper said, "Don't get Erin involved in this."

  And suddenly, he didn't look to be having any fun at all. Bex, on the other hand, perked right up at the sudden change in mood. Because, when Jasper got serious, Bex got a thought: Jasper had been so quick to point the finger at Patty as his accompli
ce. But Patty wasn't the only one with access to those discs and that computer. And she certainly wasn't the only one with a motive to print the E-mail and/or kill Silvana.

  Bex had assumed that Jasper was protecting himself by dumping everything on Patty. But, as they'd learned from her fruitless snooping around after Sergei and Xenia and Igor and Gary, Bex had most certainly been wrong before.

  She asked Jasper, as casually as she'd once approached him in the arena, "Why not?"

  "Because she's just a kid."

  "She's a legal adult."

  "Which, in skating, counts for absolutely nothing. Come on, Bex, you know how these kids live. Their lives are totally orchestrated by someone else. They're pampered and they're taken care of so that they never have to make a simple decision or think about anything other than skating. Patty still picks out Erin's clothes. She tells her what to order in a restaurant. She braids her hair and she writes out her answers for interview questions in advance. Erin may be over the legal age of consent, but, emotionally, she's a little kid."

  "Little kids," Bex pointed out, "often act first and ponder the consequences later."

  "My God, are you now putting Erin on the suspect list?"

  "She was off the ice when Silvana was killed. And I have a witness who saw her using the phone. The same phone someone called Silvana from, right before she died."

  "Is this witness reliable? How do you know they weren't using the phone themselves and didn't just finger Erin to cover it up?"

  "I don't."

  "There, you see?"

  "I'm just trying to cover all the angles."-

  "Erin would never, in a million years do something like that. Patty didn't even tell her about the E-mail, because she knew Erin would never go along. She's a sweet girl, and she works very hard, but she also wants to win fair."

  "But maybe she thought it was fair. Maybe she really believed what Francis and Diana said on the air; she deserved to win. I mean, come on, a kid trains all her life for one moment, and then she skates great, but she doesn't win. Except everyone says she should have. How easy is it to convince yourself that the public is right and the judges were wrong? Skaters do it all the time. 'I drew the wrong panel,' they say. Or: 'They're making me wait my turn.' Or: 'They didn't want one country to win all the medals, so they deliberately marked me down.' Or: 'I skated too early and they were holding back marks.' There are a million excuses, and we've heard all of them. What happens, though, when it isn't only you saying it to yourself to keep your spirits up? What happens when it's the couple considered the ultimate skating experts who are saying it, and they're saying it loudly? If the Howarths say you should have won, then you should have won. If the Howarths say there was a fix, then there must have been a fix. Unfortunately, there's no proof. Well, if a smart person makes their own luck, why can't they make their own proof, too?"

  "You're just making it up now. You have no proof that Erin was involved in any way in this, and I'm telling you she wasn't."

  And Bex was listening. She just wasn't believing.

  Bex realized that before she attempted breaking into Patty's room and grabbing a handful of floppy disks, she needed to talk to Erin.

  Their only other face-to-face had been the team tag with Patty, and Bex doubted either one was going to be straight with the other listening. So Bex needed to talk to Erin alone.

  But first, she needed to do the impossible and actually get Erin alone.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Bex’s 1.0 version of a clever plan to get Erin alone, away from Patty and Jasper, was simply waiting. She reasoned Patty had to be champing at the bit to blast Jasper for telling Bex about the E-mail, and she would come tearing out of her room any minute, banging on his door and demanding an explanation. Bex figured all she had to do was lurk in the hallway for a bit, and she would see the scenario played out, giving her ample opportunity to both chat up Erin and gain access to the Simpson hotel room.

  So she lurked.

  Only to discover that it was harder than the horror movies would lead you to believe.

  For one thing, lurking was very tiring. She couldn't just sit down in a hotel hallway; it would look too suspicious. So, instead, Bex paced up and down from the elevator, covering the area to the cul-de-sac where Patty and Jasper's doors faced each other, and back again. Lugging her overstuffed research binder every step of the way. About ten minutes into the exercise, she started to sweat. Twenty minutes, and she could feel both her pinkie toes chafing against shoes that had suddenly grown a size too small. Half an hour, and her neck stiffened up from constantly swiveling to check out every door opening and every floorboard creaking.

  Another thing Bex discovered was that lurking proved rather dull after the first few minutes of Ooh, look at me, I'm a Charlie's Angel. A hotel hallway wasn't exactly a bustling metropolis of things to look at. There were the tiny numbers above the elevator doors, lighting up and counting down, then up again. There were the prints on the walls, all standard-issue masters, already faded from constant exposure to the sun. There was the pattern on the carpet, brown diamonds in an interlocking pattern, surrounded by scuffed and over-shampooed generic green. And then there was the periodic maid coming out of a recently cleaned room or a food service delivery person with a silver-domed tray. After an hour, Bex got tired of looking at them. They, however, did not feel the same way about her.

  Apparently someone on the staff found Bex interesting enough to alert the management, because, on her umpteenth trip down the hall, Bex was greeted by a smiling yet unquestionably firm fellow in a hotel maroon blazer, wearing a little plastic tag on his lapel that identified him as Joseph from Security. And Joseph from Security wanted to know what exactly it was that Bex thought she was doing.

  Luckily, an hour's worth of pacing in painful shoes with nothing to look at had given Bex plenty of time to come up with an answer to just such a query.

  "I'm waiting for a friend," Bex announced brightly. "We were supposed to meet, but I guess he forgot the time. I'm sure he'll be here any moment, though."

  "I see. And which room is your friend staying in, miss?"

  Bex pointed to Jasper's door. "Right there. Jasper Clarke is his name."

  She was feeling pretty good. After all, the best cover story meant sticking as closely to the facts as possible. If Joseph checked out her story, he would find that Mr. Jasper Clarke was indeed registered in said room.

  "Have you tried knocking on the door?"

  "Of course, I have. He's not in there."

  "Let us try again, shall we?"

  Uh-oh. Bex hadn't counted on that possibility. After all, weren't they worried about disturbing their guests or anything, here? On the other hand, she'd claimed the man wasn't in, so who was there to disturb?

  Good going, Bex.

  Joseph strode up to the door and, with a look that might have been heading smirkward at Bex, knocked confidently on the door. "Mr. Clarke?"

  "One minute..." Jasper shuffled to the door. "Who is it?"

  "Hotel Security, sir. There's someone out here to see you."

  Jasper opened the door.

  Joseph told him, "This young lady says she is waiting for you to meet her."

  "Jasper!" Bex improvised on the spot, wincing at how phony her voice sounded, but reasoning that Joseph had never heard her under nonpressure circumstances, so what did he know? "You're here! I knocked on the door, but no one answered. Were you taking a nap, maybe? Or a shower?"

  Jasper looked from Bex to Joseph, obviously weighing the consequences of getting her into trouble against the trouble she could still cause him.

  Self-preservation apparently won over the momentary thrill of watching her get knocked down a few pegs, and Jasper said, "Yes. I was."

  Bex fought the urge to ask him, "What? Napping in the shower?" But wisely decided that this was not the arena in which to flaunt her idea of wit. Instead, she took her satisfaction in seeing how disappointed Joseph looked not to be getting the chance to drag her
downtown, or, in this case, probably down to the lobby. She gave him her brightest smile and said, "Thank you so much for your help. Who knows how long I may have been standing here if you hadn't come along and rescued me?"

  Bex could see that Joseph really wanted to grunt. But, instead, he mirrored Bex's brightest smile with his own, gave a polite little bow, and shuffled off toward the elevator.

  Jasper waited until the doors closed and their floor number overhead dimmed, before asking Bex, "And what was that all about?"

  "I was just staking out Patty's room," Bex half-lied. "Waiting for her to leave so I could search for the disk."

  "Oh. Well, I doubt she will. Erin is performing tomorrow. They always stay in the night before to pick out clothes and do her hair and nails and such."

  Bex thought fast. "In that case, maybe you could call her or something and get her out of the room for a bit? This really is our last chance. I'm in the booth all day tomorrow for the show. It's not like I could just excuse myself from the arena. I have to keep Francis and Diana under control. Besides, we need our info before the broadcast starts. At least I do. I've got to close the books on Silvana before we're off the air at four p.m. After that, I've got no more reason to be snooping. Not to mention I'm booked on a seven p.m plane back to New York."