Killer Deadline

by Lauren Carr

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Wyatt had to be lying when he said he didn’t kill Ashleigh,” Julie said. “He had motive—”

  For the second time that week, Julie had rushed over to her mother’s home upon learning the news that they had solved her father’s murder. This time was more traumatic. No one could believe that Ross’s killer was a trusted family friend.

  Even though it was late at night, Trudy delivered her world-famous (world-famous in Pine Grove) Southern-fried chicken, potato salad, refrigerator salad, and chocolate cake for dessert. The family feasted in the formal dining room to celebrate the closure of a traumatic family chapter. Dinner also included a huge pitcher of sweet tea.

  “I remember Wyatt leaving the party.” Harrison moved around the table to refilled Kathleen’s glass. “Suzanne had gotten drunk and was picking a fight with Jason’s date. I helped Wyatt get her into the car and saw them leave. He wasn’t here when Ashleigh made her announcement.”

  “I hate to say it, but I believe Wyatt,” Nikki said.

  “Then who did kill Ashleigh?” Kathleen asked. “Have the police been able to find out who made that threatening phone call to Becca? They did bring up Ashleigh’s murder. Maybe it’s a sicko with a thing for television journalists.”

  “I don’t think Becca ever reported it,” Nikki said. “If I reported every threatening email and phone call I got to the police, I’d be filling out complaints every single day. I’ve gotten to the point that I assume I’m doing something wrong if I’m not being threatened.”

  “But she seemed so rattled when she told us about it,” Kathleen said. “It doesn’t make sense that she just let it go like that.”

  “Does the lab have anything from the skin found under Ashleigh’s fingernails?” Nikki asked Ryan who sat next to her. She couldn’t resist favoring him with a soft smile.

  “That can take another week.” Ryan quickly brushed his fingertips across the back of her hand.

  It was a subtle movement, but Julie, with her sharp eyes, noticed it from her seat while picking up a chicken thigh from the platter. She was so startled that she dropped the thigh onto the table. It bounced and landed between Elmo’s front paws.

  The dog couldn’t believe his luck. Before anyone could react, he swallowed the chicken piece practically whole.

  “What was what?” Kathleen jerked her head around to see what had possessed her elder daughter.

  Her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open, Julie slowly lowered herself into her chair. Nikki looked at her with narrowed eyes. Ryan smirked.

  “Nothing,” Julie said. “I just … I just remembered that I left my curling iron plugged in.”

  “It does have an automatic shut off, doesn’t it?” Harrison asked.

  “Yes. But I forgot about that. Now, I remember.” Julie jumped to her feet and grabbed her plate, which still had food on it. “I want cake. Nikki, will you help me in the kitchen?”

  “You need Nikki’s help to cut a piece of cake?” Kathleen asked.

  “I have no self-control. I need Nikki to tell me when to stop.” Julie dragged her sister by the arm from the table and into the kitchen. “Besides, the kids will riot if they find out Trudy made her chocolate cake and I didn’t take any home for them.”

  Kathleen turned in her chair to watch her daughters leave the room. Puzzled, she turned back to regard Ryan on the other side of the table. Ryan watched Nikki rush away with a soft smile on his lips. “What are you smiling at?”

  “Nothing.” Ryan wiped the smile from his lips.

  “They want to do some girl-talk,” Harrison said while eating the last of the potato salad on his plate. “Under the guise of getting cake. I hope they don’t get so involved in their discussion that they forget to bring out the cake.”

  “I’m a girl. Why didn’t they invite me to join in their girl talk?”

  “Maybe they’re talking about you,” Harrison said.

  “Nah,” Ryan said. “They’re talking about me.”

  “What’d you do now?” Harrison asked.

  The corners of Ryan’s lips turned upward.

  “When did it happen?” Julie demanded while Nikki took the cover off the chocolate cake. “Though I must say I’m not surprised. You’ve had a thing for Ryan ever since you stole his crayons in kindergarten.”

  Coyly, Nikki held up the cake knife. “Do you mean my brother?”

  Julie took the knife from her. “He’s not your brother.”

  “Mom and Harrison said he was.” Nikki flashed her a wicked grin.

  “Blended families can be so complicated,” Julie said as Lucy and Ethel shrieked and hopped across the length of the kitchen after Elmo chased them away from his food dish. During the melee, the cats knocked over the water bowl.

  “Tell me about it.” Nikki got the mop out of the closet to clean up the water.

  Julie proceeded to cut the cake. “We’re all going to be needing therapy—starting with Lucy and Ethel.”

  “Those two are beyond help.”

  The sun was just starting to rise when Nikki opened the back door and Elmo, leash clutched in his jaws, flew out the door. The boxer seemed to take flight from the top step of the back porch to land in the garden. His paws sent dirt flying as he ran to where Ryan was stretching before his run.

  While zipping up her running jacket, Nikki noticed that the leaves which had been green only the week before were slightly red along the edges. What a difference a week makes?

  Cell phone to his ear, Ryan gave Elmo a quick pat on the head before turning to wave a greeting at Nikki. A grin crossed his face when he saw that she was dressed in her running gear to join them.

  “That’s great,” Ryan said into his phone as she drew closer. “I am really thrilled that I was able to help.”

  Nikki took the leash from Elmo and attached it while Ryan ended the call. “Sounds like you got some good news.”

  “Pretty good.” Ryan fell in step with her as Elmo dragged her out into the street and down the hill toward town. “Remember Dr. Grissom, the forensics investigator from the counterfeit case.”

  “Your mentor,” she called over her shoulder.

  “Well, I finally helped him. He was stumped on a case and wondered if just possibly I could see something in it that he had missed. He sent me the forensics reports and files and—” He broke into a broad smile that displayed both of his dimples.

  “You busted the case wide open,” she said with a laugh. “You’ve helped the feds. Now there’s no living with you.”

  “Well, it feels good to help out your mentor. Usually, it’s the other way around.” Ryan took the leash from her hand and called to Elmo to ease up his pace. “When I first started, I was double-checking everything through Dr. Grissom. I felt like such a pest.”

  “Well, NerdyGuy, maybe you can put your forensics expertise to work to find out who really killed Ashleigh. Tanya is planning to make a case against Wyatt for her murder,” Nikki said as they hit the bottom of the hill and crossed the street marking the heart of Pine Grove. “She’s missing the point of the case. If Ashleigh believed Sam killed Dad, then Wyatt didn’t have motive to kill her.”

  “Unless it’s Wyatt’s DNA under Ashleigh’s fingernails, the prosecutor won’t have any evidence to make a case against him,” Ryan said. “He’ll drop the charges.

  “If it wasn’t Wyatt, then that means there’s another killer out there—a killer who could be working at my station. If Ashleigh didn’t have anything on Dad’s murder, then what big breaking news story could she have information on?” She realized that she was running alone. She stopped and turned around to see that Ryan and Elmo had stopped several feet back. She trotted back. “What are you doing?”

  Ryan was stripping off his running jacket. “Taking off my jacket.” He tied the sleeves together around his waist.

  Struck w
ith a thought, she asked, “You take off your jacket after you start running?”

  “It’s usually chilly when we start out. But then after my heart rate goes up, I get hot. So I take it off. That’s what most people do.”

  “Do you put your jacket on after you’ve finished running?”

  Ryan shook his head with a chuckle. “Not really. It takes a bit for your heart rate to slow down. By then, it’s warmer—” He squinted at her. “Is this your first time running?”

  “Most people don’t wear jackets after they’ve finished running—especially when in the heat of the day.” Her eyes narrowed. She cocked her head at him. “When you started out, you ran everything through your mentor.”

  “That was how I learned.”

  “That’s it! I knew it!” Nikki threw her arms around his shoulders and kissed him on the lips. She ran back up the hill. “Come on, we have work to do.”

  Elmo dragged Ryan up the hill to follow her.

  “Do you know who killed Ashleigh? Are you sure it wasn’t Wyatt?”

  “I know it wasn’t Wyatt,” she called to him over her shoulder. “But we have a lot of work to do to prove who really did it.”

  Nikki was working with Ryan behind her desk when Becca Cambridge arrived at her office.

  Achieving the position of evening news anchor had bestowed the young journalist with newfound confidence. She was dressed in a turquoise sheath dress with a long-sleeved net overlay with matching pumps.

  “I was told that you wanted to see me.” Becca cast a glance at Ryan’s position behind Nikki’s desk.

  Leaning against the edge of her desk, Nikki picked up the remote for the television and gestured for her to sit down. Wondering if this was yet another potential attack, Elmo watched Becca take a seat in the chair across from his human.

  “Ashleigh Addison’s memorial service is tomorrow,” Nikki said. “Her mother is a good friend of our family and she’d asked me to say a few words. Since I’ve been gone for so long, I really have no idea what to say. But then, I remembered you saying at the party that she’d been your mentor.”

  Becca hesitated before slowly nodding her head. “Yes, Ashleigh did take me under her wing when I first started here.”

  Nikki picked up a notepad and placed a pen to the page. “Then tell me what it was like being Ashleigh Addison’s protégé.”

  Becca flashed her a broad grin. “Oh, Ashleigh was great. Wonderful.”

  “Generous with advice?”

  “Very generous.”

  “Willing to give credit where credit was due?”

  “Always.”

  “I’ll bet she was obsessive when it came to chasing down a lead, wasn’t she?” Nikki eyed her for her response.

  Slowly, Becca nodded her head. “Of course.”

  Their eyes locked.

  Ryan laughed. Upon seeing Becca glance in his direction, he apologized. “I was just remembering when we were all in school. Ashleigh talked me into being her science fair partner. I ended up doing all of the work and she took half of the credit.”

  “School was probably a long time ago for you guys,” Becca said. “I’m sure Ashleigh had changed since then.”

  “Not that much,” Nikki said with a shake of her head. “At least, that’s not what they were saying at the party last week—the night before she was killed. The general consensus was that Ashleigh Addison was a talking head. She never chased a story. She happened onto a cover up of Sam Hill killing my father, and she didn’t pursue even that. She was too lazy.” She peered at Becca. “Which is why when a source gave her the evidence for Bob Wheeler’s boondoggles, she gave the story to you.”

  “That was my story!” Becca said. “It was left on the windshield of my car.”

  “No, Becca. It was left on Ashleigh’s windshield. I’ve found the source for the story. She had slipped the envelope with the travel reimbursements under the windshield wiper of a Lexus during the art museum’s Fourth of July gala. Ashleigh covered that event and she drove a red Lexus. That was her thing. Galas and benefits. She relished being part of Pine Grove’s high society. When she found what was in the envelope, she passed it on to her protégé.”

  “That was you,” Ryan said.

  “And since you considered Ashleigh to be your mentor, you ran every angle, every discovery, every stop along your paper trail through her,” Nikki said. “So she knew everything about the scandal that you were uncovering at the board of education.”

  “It was my story. I did all of the work,” Becca said forcibly.

  “Oh, we believe you there,” Ryan said.

  “Unfortunately, you were also naïve. You had no idea that Ashleigh was using you until she announced that she had a big news story that she was going to break on Monday night,” Nikki said. “It probably didn’t dawn on you that you were being used until you’d heard Ashleigh’s own husband and mother talk about how she didn’t do investigative journalism.”

  “I was out running when Ashleigh was killed,” Becca said. “You saw me arrive with the rest of the news crews. I had just come in from running when I heard the police call on the scanner and they listed Ashleigh’s address.”

  “You were there before any of us.” Nikki pressed the remote to display footage from the security camera of the entrance to the gated community. “Ashleigh lived in a gated community. They have security cameras at the gate. The dates and times are recorded. I got there at fourteen minutes after eleven.”

  “I arrived right after the EMTs,” Becca said. “Remember I ran up to question you on the porch as they went inside.”

  “That was when you came out of hiding.” Nikki played the security video to show a light-colored small SUV drive through the gate. She froze the frame. The time on the frame read ten-fifty-six. “You arrived over fifteen minutes ahead of me. You realized that after doing all of the work on the board of education story that Ashleigh was going to air it without giving you any credit. I don’t think you went there to kill her. You went to talk to her about it.”

  “She laughed at you, didn’t she?” Ryan asked.

  “You got into a fight. She scratched you. That’s why you’ve been wearing long sleeves all week even though the weather has been warm.”

  Becca slumped as if the air had been sucked out of her.

  “When I got there, you grabbed her laptop because you knew that the drafts of your story that you had been giving her to critique were on it.”

  “We got a warrant to search your car and apartment this morning,” Ryan said. “We found Ashleigh’s laptop hidden in the far corner on the top shelf of your closet.”

  “When I found Ashleigh’s body, you ran out the back door and around the side,” Nikki said. “My attention was on the man next door leaving for an ice cream run. You knew you couldn’t leave because that might attract attention. So, when I went back inside while waiting for the police, you hid in your car. After the emergency crews started arriving, you jumped out of your car minutes ahead of the rest of the media—quick enough to break the story, but not so early as to attract suspicion.”

  Becca lifted her eyes to hers. “You think I killed Ashleigh just because I’ve been wearing long sleeves?”

  “You had to offer some sort of explanation for wearing your running suit for an on-the-scene interview. So, as soon as you saw me, you rattled off a lie about hearing the call on your police scanner when you got home from a morning run. The story sounded off. Something was nagging at me in the back of my mind. I didn’t realize what it was until I saw Ryan take off his jacket in the middle of our run.”

  “My increased heart rate made it too hot for a jacket,” Ryan said.

  “It was late morning on a warm day when the call went out,” Nikki said. “If you had just come back from running, your heart rate would have still been up. Between the two, you would have been sweating like a pig in a
jacket. But you had to put on something to cover up the scratches and blood you got in your fight with Ashleigh.”

  “We found skin underneath Ashleigh’s fingernails,” Ryan said. “Enough to get a DNA profile. Care to give us a DNA sample to prove that it isn’t yours?”

  “I didn’t mean to kill her,” Becca sobbed. “It was an accident.”

  “You pushed her into the entertainment center,” Nikki said.

  “After she attacked me!”

  “You were so enraged that you stabbed her in the throat with a shard of glass after she had climbed out of the case,” Ryan said. “That’s not an accident.”

  Becca remained silent.

  “You were the first one to say Ashleigh had been murdered.” Nikki clicked the button on the remote to play a segment of Becca conducting an on-the-scene interview with Nikki on the steps of Ashleigh Addison’s house.

  “Ms. Bryant, I’d just walked in from my morning run when I heard the call come across the police scanner. Do you believe Ashleigh Addison’s murder could be connected to your father’s cold case?”

  Nikki paused the recording. “We have the recordings from 9-1-1. When I called emergency, I said we had a DB, dead body and the address. I said nothing about a murder. Nor did the dispatch operator indicate that there had been a murder when they sent out the emergency crews. There’s no way you would have known based on the call across the police scanner that Ashleigh Addison’s death had been a murder unless you’d been involved.”

  “As far as anyone listening to the scanner would have known, Ashleigh’s death was simply an accident,” Ryan said. “It wasn’t classified as murder until the next day.”