Али Брэндон - Double Booked For Death

She gave James a significant look, waiting for him to pick up the hint. When he merely looked at her expectantly, she clarified, “Morris and Mavis are one and the same.”

“Indeed?” James raised both brows. “I must admit, I was not expecting that. Intriguing family dynamic.”

Before Darla could continue her story, one of their regulars walked in to pick up a special order. Leaving further conversation for later, she left James to wait on the woman and went to the computer to check her email.

Along with the usual store-related correspondence and a few personal messages, she found the pictures from Callie. She immediately saved them to the hard drive and was in the process of pulling up the first when she heard the door jingle again.

Jake entered, carrying a tiny, pink-lace printed bag that starkly contrasted with her uniform of boots, black jeans, and black sweater. She seemed unaware of the incongruity, however, as she hurried over to join Darla at the computer.

“Did you get the photos?”

“Yep. Just looking at them now.”

On a full-sized monitor, the figures were grainy, but far easier to distinguish. Even better, Callie had had a surprisingly clear view of the action from her vantage point, which included the autographing table and the back door leading to the courtyard.

In the first photo, Valerie was seated at the table, visible behind a line of fans wearing similar capes to hers. Her own hood, however, was draped over her shoulders, her dark hair spilling in a heavy waterfall down her back. The figure directly behind her appeared to be Lizzie, for a bit of brown bob peeked out one edge of her hood. Hillary stood to one side, distinguished by the glint of her glasses. The fourth figure had to be Mavis, though the hood made it difficult to tell for certain.

Scrolling through the series a second time, Darla was now able to pick out who was missing from each subsequent shot. First, Valerie vanished, then Lizzie. In the third shot, Hillary was gone, presumably leaving only Mavis remaining. But it was the fourth shot that held Jake’s attention.

“Zoom in,” she commanded. “Now, scroll over to the right. Okay, zoom again. Again. To the right again, and zoom one more time.”

What filled the screen now was a blur of black, the images so pixilated that the details were fuzzy. But Jake was smiling in satisfaction.

“Look,” she said and pointed to what appeared to be Mavis moving toward the back of the store. “See his—her—hand? She’s holding something white with streaks of red on it. Morris has the lipstick note.”

TWENTY-TWO

DARLA STARED AT THE INCRIMINATING SHOT FOR A LONG moment and then met Jake’s triumphant gaze. “It does look like the note,” she agreed, “but that still doesn’t tell us if Mavis—or, rather, Morris—only received it, or if he was the one who wrote it. And there’s something else.”

She reached under the register for her purse. Just as with the lipstick letter, she had thought that Reese might confiscate Morris’s business card as possible evidence, so she had scanned it and stuck the copy into her purse for safekeeping. Now, she retrieved that folded page and set it on the counter, and then pulled out one of the autographed copies of Ghost of a Chance she’d hidden away. Setting the book beside the note, she flipped it open to the title page where Valerie Baylor had signed it.

“I thought about this when Morris pointed out that it was hard to match lipstick to ink. We all agreed that the lipstick writing looks a lot like the writing on the back of Morris’s business card . . . but doesn’t it look a lot like Valerie’s handwriting, too?”

Jake took a look at the similar sharp pen strokes and then muttered a choice expletive. “I see your point,” she conceded.

Feeling a bit odd to suddenly be arguing the opposite point, Darla went on, “And aren’t we forgetting that little thing called a motive? Why would he kill his own sister?”

“Sibling rivalry . . . he got tired of her snide comments . . . she threatened to reveal his secret hobby of cross-dressing,” Jake said, ticking off the possibilities on one hand . . . the same possibilities that previously had occurred to Darla. “Maybe Valerie did something that finally sent him over the edge after years of putting up with her bull, and he snapped.”

“Ahem.”

The sound made them both jump. James had come up behind them and now stood there shaking his head.

“Really, Jake, I realize you are bored with your forced retirement, but you should know better than to jump on Darla’s bandwagon and try to make a murder out of a molehill,” he said, his expression disapproving.

When Jake opened her mouth to protest, he raised a silencing hand and went on, “And both of you should keep in mind that your would-be suspect and his supposed victim were fraternal twins. I have done a bit of research into the psychology of siblings, and I can assure you it would be almost unheard of for one twin to deliberately kill the other. The symbiotic relationship between fraternals is almost as close as that of identical twins. When one of the pair dies, the other is left feeling half a person. Indeed, the research on surviving twins and their stages of grief makes for interesting—”

“Thanks, cowboy.” Jake cut him short with a sour look. “Here, I had just joined Team Darla, and now you’re shooting holes in my theory.”

James raised a brow and, indulging in a rare bit of whimsy, blew imaginary gun smoke from his finger pistols a la Ted the security guy.

“Call me Sheriff James. But now, if you will excuse me, I have a few special orders to finish up before day’s end.”

He left the two of them staring at the picture on the monitor. Darla was the first to break their mutual silence.

“We might be trying too hard, but to quote Callie, I still think there’s something sneaky going on with Morris,” she said in a determined tone.

Jake shrugged. “Yeah, but much as it pains me to admit it, James is right. Sneaky doesn’t equal motive or evidence.”

“So what you’re really saying is that we’ve hit a dead end.”

“No, I’m saying that we need to step back and see if we’ve missed anything. Because Professor James was wrong about one thing: swapping theories with you has nothing to do with me being bored.”

Jake’s tone took on a hard edge. “No matter how it happened, your author ended up dead on my watch. If Valerie was deliberately pushed, no way am I letting the person responsible get away with it. Even bitches deserve justice.”

“Sounds like a T-shirt slogan,” was Darla’s wry reply.

Before Jake could comment, her cell phone went off, the ring tone sounding suspiciously to Darla like the first notes of that old Bee Gee’s song from Saturday Night Fever . She wasn’t too surprised when the other woman announced, “It’s Reese,” before taking the call.

Jake’s end of the conversation was maddeningly cryptic. Certain it had to do with the Valerie Baylor situation, Darla waited impatiently for her to hang up and share whatever news she’d learned from the detective.

Jake, however, wasn’t doing any sharing.

“Sorry, kid, I need to help Reese out with something,” she said as she ended the call. Heading toward the door, she called back over her shoulder, “Do me a favor and forward me those pictures when you get a chance, okay?”

“Sure,” she agreed, trying not to let curiosity consume her over whatever “something” it was that Reese needed. She’d simply have to go on the assumption that, if she needed to know, Jake would make sure that she did.

James was taking care of the customer who’d just stopped in, so Darla took the opportunity to scan through the photos one more time before sending them to Jake’s email address.