A Sampling of Murder: Cupcake Truck Mysteries

by Emily James

  “I’ll do it.”

  I arrived at the police station an hour before Devon Glover had been told to arrive so that Detective Austen could give me a long list of things I wasn’t supposed to say or do. Don’t bring up the Glover case. Don’t ask him directly whether he’d attacked me.

  At first, I gave her an I’m not stupid eyebrow raise. By the end, I gave up and just nodded.

  Looking at the positive side, coming to the police station and speaking with the police was becoming easier each time I did it. I’d never be as comfortable as my friend Nicole was with stopping by the local police station, but at least I didn’t expect every officer to turn me over to Jarrod anymore.

  Though, the clothes Austen and Dan wore probably helped. Dan wore mismatched clothes with tattered hems and holes that showed the layer beneath. He hadn’t shaved, and his face had dirt smeared across it. He also smelled like he’d used beer as a cologne.

  Austen had aged herself. Instead of the pant suit she’d been wearing the first time I met her, she’d put on a floor-length, shapeless peach-toned dress covered in paisleys. She’d pinned her hair up under a gray wig, and someone had applied make-up to her face in such a way that her eyes looked sunken and her skin looked weathered.

  I probably wouldn’t have walked past Dan on the street without recognizing him because of how close we were. I definitely would have overlooked Detective Austen, though.

  Austen glanced at the clock on the wall. “Show time.”

  Dan stumbled out into the waiting room first, playing his part the second we left the interview room. The transformation was so complete that I wouldn’t have known he wasn’t homeless—and I’d interacted closely with the homeless population in the last town I’d stayed in before coming to Lakeshore.

  Dan signaled that Devon Glover hadn’t arrived yet. Austen and I took our seats.

  I pulled out my phone and pretended to read. That seemed like a more natural way to be when he came in rather than staring at the door waiting for him.

  The entry door swished open, and a man stepped inside.

  He matched the social media profile picture that Dan and Detective Austen showed me. Average height. Average build. Just like the man who’d attacked me.

  None of his features said murderer. They all said average guy. He had a normal-sized straight nose, eyes that weren’t shrunken or shifty, and a slightly weak chin.

  He gave his name to the desk clerk and turned toward the room.

  His gaze slid over Austen, then past Dan. His nose twitched slightly as if he could imagine how unpleasant sitting anywhere near Dan would be. His gaze stopped on me, but his expression didn’t change. He seemed more like a man who was trying to decide the best spot to sit, and I looked the least problematic.

  He picked a seat two down from me, using me as a buffer between him and the other two.

  I was now supposed to engage him in conversation to see if I recognized his voice. “Excuse me?”

  The words came out a lot more hesitantly than I’d expected. My heart felt like it was beating in my throat rather than down in my chest where it belonged.

  He didn’t look in my direction, as if he thought I must be speaking to someone else.

  “Excuse me?” I said, forcing my voice to be louder than I was normally comfortable speaking. “Did you notice if any of the cars out front had parking tickets? It seems ridiculous that the only parking spaces they have for the public are out front, and they’re metered, don’t you think?”

  Austen shot me a quick stay with the script glare.

  Devon Glover finally looked in my direction. “Which car was yours?”

  An uncomfortable tingle ran down my neck and down my back. His voice was close to that of the man who attacked me, but it wasn’t identical. The problem was that meant he might have tried to disguise his voice when he broke in to threaten me. Whoever had broken in had taken the time to find a ski mask to wear. It wasn’t a stretch to believe he might have thought about his voice as well.

  He was looking at me with his eyebrows slightly raised.

  “The one out front,” I blurted.

  Technically all the spots were “out front.” Since I didn’t know the make and model of the cars out there, I couldn’t even pretend one was mine. Dan had parked in the back parking lot reserved for officers’ cars.

  Devon Glover’s forehead tightened in the way that it did for people who couldn’t lift a single eyebrow at a time but only two together. “Which one out front?”

  “The little one.” I sounded like only half my brain was working. Maybe I should have stuck with Austen’s idea of commenting on the weather, but that’d seemed forced. Very few people would strike up a conversation about the weather while in a police station.

  Devon huffed out a breath and leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed over his chest. “Well, I didn’t see any tickets on the cars out there if that helps.”

  His voice was so similar to what I’d heard, and yet different enough that I couldn’t say for sure that it’d been him. Maybe if we’d been able to trick him into saying the exact words my attacker had without him knowing what we were doing. If he knew what we were doing, he’d disguise his voice more. Or maybe if my attacker had said more. But neither of those were going to happen. One of the reasons Dan and Detective Austen chose to have this staged meeting between us was so Devon would be less likely to know and try to hide his voice. That didn’t help if he’d chosen to disguise his voice during the attack, though.

  He stuck his feet out in front of him.

  Red speckles covered the tops of his shoes. My pulse kicked up so high that I could feel it in my throat.

  The red spots weren’t the right color for old blood. Old blood would have had a brownish quality to it. And after all the steps my attacker took, I couldn’t imagine he’d be stupid enough to wear blood-covered shoes to the police station.

  These spots were brighter, almost orange, like the spray paint across our windows. There weren’t many spots, and they were faint. Had he not called attention to his feet by sticking them out, I wouldn’t have seen them. Any detective who interviewed him wouldn’t have been able to see them either, since his lower half would have been hidden by the table.

  I shifted in my seat as if I were bored and antsy about waiting so long for my turn. I wanted to clue Dan and Detective Austen in on what I’d seen.

  I nodded toward Detective Austen’s feet. They were swathed in the kind of slip-on orthopedic shoes favored by the elderly. “Are your shoes comfortable? I do a lot of walking, and I’m looking for a new pair.”

  Devon made a noise from the other side of me as if he thought I was an overly-talkative person who couldn’t stand to sit in silence.

  Detective Austen’s expression said she also clearly thought I’d lost my mind.

  But Dan slid sideways onto the seats. To anyone who didn’t know what he was doing, it would have looked like he was a homeless drunk preparing to take a nap where he could get one.

  But I saw his gaze go directly to Devon Glover’s shoes.

  21

  “Do you really want to make that icing with brown sugar?” Claire asked.

  I glanced down at my measuring cup. I had almost poured brown sugar into my Swiss meringue buttercream. Maybe it would have still worked, but it wasn’t a way I’d ever tried before.

  Claire took the measuring cup out of my hand and poured the sugar back into the proper container. “I burnt myself this morning because I forgot to put on an oven mitt.”

  I took the measuring cup back from her, scooped out the granulated sugar, and added it to my egg whites. “Okay…”

  Claire gave a you’re-smarter-than-this sigh. “Why don’t you call Dan and ask him about that Glover woman’s brother? That way we can keep from damaging ourselves or our business because we’re distracted.”

  I’d avoided calling Dan and pestering him. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who couldn’t wait patiently for someone else to do
their job.

  “He said he’d call if they made an arrest.”

  I turned on the mixer to drown out any more arguments from Claire. Maybe I was being obstinate for no reason. If Dan didn’t have answers, he’d simply say he didn’t have answers yet.

  My reticence made no sense in the present. It was just that every time I reached for the phone to call Dan, I remembered how Jarrod hadn’t wanted me to call him. He’d called me clingy and needy, even if I had an urgent situation.

  My meringue formed stiff peaks. I dropped in my butter piece by piece.

  Dan wasn’t Jarrod. Dan was nothing like Jarrod. I had to keep reminding myself of that so that the things that had happened to me in the past didn’t unintentionally affect my relationships in the present.

  Still, shouldn’t I trust Dan to call me when the time was right? My knowledge of even friendships was so limited that navigating the lines made my head hurt like I’d eaten something too cold and given myself a brain freeze.

  My Swiss meringue buttercream turned silky. I’d always been a fan of traditional American buttercream. I even liked the little crust it formed over time. But Swiss meringue buttercream tended to be more popular among customers.

  I shut the mixer off.

  “Finally.” Claire held up her phone. Dan’s contact information was on the screen. She tapped it and then hit the speaker button. “If you won’t call him, I will. I want to know if we have to keep acting like we’re kids on a field trip who are supposed to stay with their buddy.”

  An image of Claire and I strolling everywhere with our hands linked and tiny backpacks on our backs flashed into my mind. I grinned.

  Claire scowled at me.

  “Holmes,” Dan’s voice said from the other side of the phone. He clearly hadn’t checked his screen before answering.

  “It’s me,” Claire said. “And Isabel. We’re hoping for an update.”

  Of course she’d say we.

  “I was just about to call, so your timing is good.”

  Claire shot me an I-told-you-so look.

  I pursed my lips at her.

  “You’ll be happy to know that we arrested Devon Glover for vandalism. His fingerprints matched the hand print officers took off your glass. We were also able to check his credit card records, and we found a purchase he made from a paint store the day before. Forensics are working on matching the paint from his shoes with the sample scraped off your window, but since he confessed, it’s semantics at this point.”

  “He confessed to everything.” Claire’s voice was almost a screech.

  “To the vandalism only.” Dan’s tone held a resignation that made my stomach clench. “Once we presented him with the evidence against him, he admitted to spray painting keep your mouth shut on your windows in an attempt to intimidate Isabel.”

  Keep your mouth shut made a lot more sense than the garbled message we thought had been written there. If this was Devon’s first attempt at spray painting a message, it was no wonder his words had been about as legible as a kindergartener’s first attempt at writing their name.

  “He says he’d have no reason to kill someone,” Dan said. “His words were ‘I’m not a killer. You’re trying to frame me like you framed my sister. All I did was spray some paint.’”

  Claire made a grumbling noise.

  Tension pooled in my forehead, and I rubbed the line across the top of my eyebrows. “That’s not exactly reassuring considering I know his sister is guilty of both murder and attempted murder of more than one person, including me.”

  Dan made a confirmatory sound. “Detective Austen and DA Hall agree with you. They think it’s too much of a stretch to believe two separate people were targeting the store. They have him on the vandalism, but he’s also being charged with murder, assault, and breaking and entering.”

  The assault would have been against me.

  Claire grinned in a way that would have put a Cheshire cat to shame. “That makes the most sense. Devon Glover must have been waiting in the store to ambush Isabel. Mr. Jenner showed up first, tried to take the gun away from him, and Glover killed him accidentally.”

  Dan and Claire said something else, but my mind tuned it out. If that were what had happened, it would certainly explain everything in a neat and tidy way. Scott would have closure. Claire and I could be safe in our business again.

  I should feel the same sense of relief that Claire was radiating. I’d been the one to spot the paint on his shoes, after all.

  But his voice hadn’t been a perfect match, and he hadn’t smelled the same.

  “Does this mean they won’t be investigating anyone else?”

  “Of course they won’t,” Claire said before Dan could answer. “They have the person who did this. Right, Dan?”

  “That is the situation at present. The investigation is considered closed.”

  22

  The first thing I did once we disconnected with Dan was go to my office and call Scott.

  Detective Austen would place an official call to him now that they’d arrested someone for his father’s murder. She might have already done so.

  But, in a small way, this was my fault. His father died because someone wanted to hurt me. I needed to apologize to him. Hopefully he wouldn’t be the kind of person who would loath the sight of me so much now that he’d want us out of the building.

  That was a risk I had to take. Despite my reservations, the police and DA Hall were sure Devon Glover was behind all of this. That meant I’d played a part, however unintentional.

  Intentions mattered, but pain wasn’t erased simply because someone didn’t intend to cause it. If I wanted to be able to continue liking myself even a little, I’d need to make things right with Scott.

  The call rang twice. Three times. I pulled the phone away from my face to hang up before his voice mail picked up. He’d see my number on his phone and call back. This wasn’t something I wanted to leave with a machine.

  “Hello?” Scott’s breathless voice came through the line.

  I mashed the phone back to my ear. “Has Detective Austen called you?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  Dan must have waited to call us until after the official notification had been made to the family.

  The rattle that came with wind across a phone speaker filled Scott’s end of the line and then passed. “Sorry if there’s background noise. I went out for a run afterward to clear my head.”

  “I use baking the same way.” Putting this off wouldn’t make it any easier. “I wanted to apologize to you.”

  There was a sound on Scott’s side like footsteps on gravel. He must have started walking again. “For what?”

  For what? I would have expected him to either acquit me or tell me it’d take him awhile before he could stand to speak to me again. I hadn’t expected him to seem to not even know what I was talking about.

  “For the part I played in all of this.”

  The whoosh of a car and more footsteps but no words.

  “Scott?”

  “I think you need to start from the beginning. How, exactly, did you play a part in this?”

  Shoot. He must think I meant I’d been arrested too as an accomplice. “The man who killed your father was there to hurt me. Didn’t Detective Austen tell you that?”

  “No.” The pause before he spoke was long enough that it made me think he’d shaken his head, only to realize belatedly that I couldn’t see him. “All she told me was that they’d charged someone for the murder of my dad, as well as for the vandalism to the shop and the attack on you.”

  Maybe not giving the victim’s family details was standard procedure. I wasn’t sure. Jarrod had liked to tell me about all the ways he interrogated suspects. He never talked to me about the victims or their families. Maybe that should have been a clue to his real character had I been paying attention early enough.

  “The words spray painted on the windows were keep your mouth shut. I witnessed an attempted murder in the sprin
g, and I’m supposed to testify in December. The man they arrested for your father’s murder is the brother of the woman I’m testifying against. They think he was waiting for me, your dad stumbled across him, and he ended up collateral damage.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  Had I not explained it clearly enough? It was possible I’d jumbled my words because I wanted to get it all out. “What part? I’ll go over it again.”

  “Not what you said. What the police believe. What did that woman’s brother achieve by killing my dad?”

  I didn’t have a psychology degree, so I didn’t know if it was normal for a person to have to move through the stages of grieving multiple times. This sure sounded like the denial stage, though. Maybe once Scott accepted that they’d found his father’s killer, he’d have to fully accept that his father was gone. That would be a hard step. The least I could do was walk through it with him.

  “He didn’t go there intending to kill him. He went there intending to scare me into leaving town. Your dad must have gotten there before Claire and I, got into a struggle of some sort with him, and was shot accidentally.”

  “Yeah, here’s the thing. He didn’t leave you a message.”

  The bell on the front door jingled, signaling customers entering. I slipped from my chair and closed the door. This was the kind of conversation that definitely needed to stay private.

  “He left a message in spray paint on the window.”

  “Like a week later.” Scott’s voice had gotten louder and more animated. “How were you supposed to know that my dad’s death was a message for you. He should have written leave town, Isabel in his blood or something.”

  A shudder ran through my arms. Thank goodness he hadn’t. I might have actually done it, despite my promise to Dan.

  “Do you see what I’m saying?” Scott continued. “If my dad’s murder was connected to this other case, the killer didn’t gain anything if he didn’t make it clear. He had the perfect opportunity to scare you away. He’d killed once, and you would be next if you didn’t do what he wanted. But he didn’t tell you what he wanted. That message I washed off the window was too little, too late.”