Fugitive Filling Read online

“Just answer the question,” I insisted, still determined to get to Teresa as quickly as I could manage it. If my Jeep had been handy, I would have driven there, but the office was closer than my transportation. Besides, I probably couldn’t be trusted to drive at the moment. The town of April Springs deserved better than to have me on its streets in this state of agitation. No one would be safe.

  “I’d kill him,” Jake replied softly.

  “Well, don’t worry. I’m not planning to commit homicide, but I’m going to come as close to it as I can without actually doing it,” I said.

  We got to Teresa’s office building, and I tried the front door.

  It was locked.

  “Let me in, Teresa,” I said as I banged fiercely on the door. “We need to talk.”

  There was no reply, but then again, I couldn’t blame her. She was probably acting quite prudent keeping something solid between us at the moment.

  I had a surprise for her, though. As the landlord, I had a key to the place, and I wasn’t afraid to use it.

  “Take it easy, Suzanne,” my worried husband said as I fumbled with the key.

  “Don’t get in my way right now, Jake. I’m going to deal with this.”

  “Just don’t do anything you’ll regret later,” he said. “If I learned one thing in all of my years in law enforcement, it’s never hit a lawyer. She’ll end up owning Donut Hearts by the time she’s through with you if you so much as lay a finger on her.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said as I finally managed to open the building’s front door.

  “Suzanne,” Jake warned me yet again.

  I wasn’t in any mood to hear it. “Teresa, I’m coming in, whether you like it or not!” Keeping Jake’s advice in mind, I added, “This is a surprise inspection of the property. It’s allowed in the lease you signed, so I have every right to come in.”

  Momma had insisted that I use one of her attorneys in Charlotte to draw up the lease, and now I was glad that I had. It had provided me with the perfect excuse to do what I was going to do anyway.

  Teresa Logan wasn’t in the outer office.

  That meant that she must have been cowering in the back area, if she was even in the building at all.

  That wasn’t going to stop me, though. I was going to search the place from stem to stern, and if she weren’t in her office, then I’d find her no matter where she might be hiding.

  There wasn’t even a lock on her inner office door.

  Grabbing the handle, I threw the door open as I shouted, “Teresa Logan, prepare yourself for a world of hurt.”

  My warning fell on deaf ears, though.

  The attorney was there all right, but clearly someone else had gotten to her before I could.

  From the look of things, as I took in the body on the floor, I realized that she’d crossed someone else besides me, and it had most likely cost her her life.

  Chapter 2

  “Is she really dead?” I asked Jake as he leaned over the body and searched for a pulse. Teresa had been dressed for work in a nice suit, and she even still had her shoes on. I knew instinctively that they were expensive, though I didn’t recognize them. It was pretty evident that we shopped for clothes in different stores, but I was sure that Grace would immediately recognize the brand.

  “I’m afraid so,” my husband said as he stood back up. “Suzanne, she’s cold to the touch. If I had to guess, I’d say that she was killed sometime last night, but the window’s cracked and it feels as though the heat’s been turned off in here, so I could be wrong about that.”

  For some reason, I felt the need to do something, anything, so I went over to close the window when Jake stopped me. “I’m sorry, but you can’t do that. This is an active crime scene, so it’s important that we don’t touch anything.”

  I nodded. I must have been in shock, trying to do anything as mundane as closing a window. I’d conducted enough investigations of my own to know that, but I wasn’t exactly in a good frame of mind at the moment. “What do you think happened to her?”

  Jake pointed to what appeared to be a heavy bookend in the shape of a pine cone off to one side of the body. How had I missed that? As I got closer to it, I saw that there were obvious traces of blood and hair on it, and that was when I noticed the blood on the crimson carpet, as well. I’d been planning on changing all of the flooring earlier, but Momma had insisted that cleaning it would be good enough, at least initially. After all, it didn’t have to be my taste; it just had to be good enough to satisfy the renter, which it had been.

  Jake pulled out his cell phone, and a moment later, he said, “Stephen? This is Jake. You need to get over to Suzanne’s building on Viewmont Avenue. There’s been a homicide.” After a pause, he said, “It’s Teresa Logan.” He paused for another moment, and then he added, “Yes, I’m sure. You can skip the ambulance and send the wagon instead. She’s cold to the touch. We’ll be here. Yes, Suzanne is with me. No, we won’t.”

  Jake hung up, but he didn’t put his phone away. Instead, he began snapping photos of the body, the murder weapon, and anything else he could see of any interest in the slightest.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him. “You realize that you’re not a cop anymore, don’t you?”

  Jake paused taking pictures long enough to frown as he answered me. “Suzanne, at least three people saw me screaming at this woman last night, and today she’s dead. I need to dig into this, with or without Stephen Grant’s permission. Now, do you want to just stand there, or do you want to help me and start taking pictures with your phone, too? We don’t have much time.”

  “We both need to investigate this murder, not just you,” I said as I did what Jake suggested and started taking photos of everything and anything that might be of use to us later.

  “I don’t want you involved in this. You aren’t going to be a suspect,” he said.

  “You’re kidding, right? Everyone in town knows how I feel, felt, about Teresa. You’d better believe my name’s going to be on that list right under yours. We both need to figure this out.”

  “Okay, I get that.” Jake punched the button on the attorney’s answering machine with the edge of his pen, and we listened as we worked. Two of the messages were pretty mundane, but the last one was chilling. “Do you think you can bully me into settling? It’s not going to work, and if you don’t back off, you’ll be sorry.”

  “Who was that?” Jake asked me.

  The voice sounded vaguely familiar to me, but I wasn’t at all sure who it might be. “Play it again.”

  “Why, did you recognize the voice?”

  “Maybe, but I can’t put my finger on it. That’s not why I want you to replay it, though. I want to record it on my cell phone so I can play it back later.”

  He hit the play button, and we both remained silent while I recorded the threat on my phone. After it finished playing, Jake asked, “Did you get it?”

  “I think so,” I said, “but I’m not going to try to figure it out until later. I know we don’t have a second to waste right now.” I walked over to the desk and found an old-fashioned appointment book sitting on it. Funny, I would have pegged Teresa for someone who kept all of her appointments on her cell phone. It just went to show how little I really knew about the woman. The book was closed, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

  “Don’t touch that!” Jake ordered as I leaned over it.

  “I wasn’t planning to, at least not with my fingers.” I pulled a pen out of my pocket to use exactly as Jake had just done earlier. It was the one I’d used to make out the deposit slip, and as I edged it under the front cover, I was glad I had it. My technique was a little awkward, but in twenty seconds, I had the book open to last night’s appointments on one side and today’s on the other. I took shots of both pages when I heard the first cruiser pull up outside. Jake came over and took a few photos of th
e entries himself, and then he said, “Wrap it up, Suzanne. We’re almost out of time.”

  I had trouble closing the appointment book, as my pen kept slipping off to one side. I was about to just shut the thing by hand when Stephen Grant burst into the office. Oh, well. I wasn’t going to be able to leave everything exactly as I’d found it, but hopefully, that wouldn’t matter.

  The police chief took one look at the body, then his gaze slid over to the murder weapon, and finally it landed on my husband and me. I was slow putting my phone away, hoping that he didn’t suspect what Jake and I had been doing, when he frowned and said, “I need you to wait outside.”

  “I’d be happy to consult with you on this,” Jake offered.

  Stephen Grant shook his head. “Thanks, but I’m the chief of police now. If I’m going to prove to the town that the mayor made the right decision, I have to do this on my own.”

  “I understand completely,” Jake said. “Come on, Suzanne.”

  “We’re really not staying?” I asked. No offense to Stephen, but my husband was ten times the police officer Stephen Grant was, and everyone in the room knew it.

  “We’re really not,” Jake said. “Let’s let the man do his job.”

  Once we were out in front of the building, I asked, “Do you really think that he can handle this?”

  “I don’t really have any choice in the matter, do I? After all, I’m the one who told the mayor he was up to the job,” Jake asked after a moment’s hesitation. “I think he is, but we’re not going to just leave it in his hands. No matter how you cut it, this is going to lead straight back to us; I guarantee it. If we just stand idly by, we could both be in real trouble.”

  “We have the satisfaction of knowing that we didn’t do it, though,” I reminded him.

  “That will be little consolation if folks start avoiding Donut Hearts because they think one of us is a cold-blooded killer,” he said. “Don’t take my word for it. You know this town far better than I do. As soon as word gets out that Teresa Logan was murdered, how long do you think it will take most folks to connect it to the two of us?”

  “It will be quicker than making bread,” I said, knowing that Jake was dead on the money.

  “What’s that take, three hours?”

  I nodded. “About that.”

  “Then we need to do something to solve this case before that happens,” Jake said. “Should we ask Grace to help us, too? I know you two usually work together, and I don’t want to butt in on her turf.”

  My best friend and I had solved a few murders in the past, and it was sweet of my husband to consider her feelings, even during such a troubling time. “There’s no need to. She’s away on another retreat for business,” I said. I’d accompanied her on one the last time she’d gone, and we’d walked right into a buzz saw, so this time, she hadn’t even invited me. Not that I could blame her. “She’ll be gone all week.”

  “So then, it’s just you and me,” Jake said as he nodded.

  “The good news is that I’ve got the next two days off from the donut shop,” I reminded him. “It’s part of our regular schedule now.”

  “I know. I had a surprise in store for you before all of this happened.”

  “What were you going to do?” I asked.

  “Not that it matters much now, but I’d been hoping to sneak away to a cabin in the Smoky Mountains for a few days with you,” Jake answered.

  “That sounds lovely. I’m sorry we won’t be going. We’ll have to save that for my next break when we’re not investigating a murder,” I said as the wagon used by the hospital to transport dead bodies showed up, just as some of Stephen’s crew arrived on the scene as well. Without exception, every last one of them made it a point to say hello to Jake on their way inside, and more than one nodded at me as well. I knew that my husband had been well loved when he’d been running the police department, and I hoped that Stephen Grant didn’t get too much pushback for taking over. Then again, if we were lucky, maybe we’d be able to use that to our advantage in our investigation.

  “Do we just stand out here in the cold and wait for him to call us in?” I asked as I rubbed my hands together. It wasn’t really that chilly out at the moment, but a cold front was supposed to come through in the next few days, a way for winter to take one final opportunity to stick its tongue out at us before it was done for good. We’d had a relatively mild winter so far, but they were predicting up to half an inch of freezing rain, which had the potential to be deadlier than a foot of snow would be. When that much weight accumulated on power lines and tree limbs, I knew that we were in for a nasty storm, and I hoped they were as wrong as they usually were about our weather. I’d take the snow, or even sleet or just plain rain, but freezing rain was something to fear in our neck of the woods.

  “We don’t have any choice but to do as he asked us to,” Jake said patiently. “You heard the man. There’s a great deal of things he and the team have to do before he’s going to be free to speak with us. They’ll need to get still photos and video of the crime scene, dust for prints, and then inspect the body before they remove it. If I had to guess, I’d say that we’ll be here at least another hour, probably longer, before he gets around to us.”

  “I should have brought coffee,” I said, rubbing my hands together, “not that I needed anything to keep me warm on the march over here. I’m sorry Teresa’s dead, but I still can’t believe that she tried to kiss you.”

  “Tried, and failed,” Jake reminded me. “I’d like to apologize in advance for what you’re going to have to put up with because of what happened between the two of us.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re innocent, and that’s all that matters to me,” I said. I knew in my heart that my husband hadn’t reciprocated Teresa’s affection. Max may have cheated on me while we’d been married, but Jake would leave me long before he’d ever dream of doing anything with another woman, and oddly enough, I took a great deal of comfort in that fact.

  One of the deputies came out and joined us twenty minutes later. “The chief said that you should both wait for him at his office, Chief.” It was confusing sentence structure, but we knew what the officer had meant. “There’s no use you two standing out here in the cold.” He glanced around and didn’t see either of our vehicles. “Do you need a ride?”

  “It’s five hundred feet away, Rick,” Jake said with the hint of a smile. “I think we can both manage it on foot.”

  “Okay, just checking,” the officer replied, and then he saluted Jake with two fingers before he retrieved a kit from the trunk of his squad car.

  “Thanks for letting us know,” my husband said.

  “You bet, Chief.”

  “I’m not the chief anymore, Rick. You can just call me Jake.”

  “Sure thing, Chief,” Rick replied with a grin. If he was disturbed about the thought that there was a dead body twenty feet away from us, he didn’t show it. Then again, Jake wasn’t all that shaky either. I, on the other hand, was a bit of a wreck. No matter how many times I managed to stumble across a corpse, it was still very upsetting to me, and I hoped that I never got used to it happening to me.

  “You heard the man,” Jake said after the officer was gone. “Let’s go get out of the cold.”

  “Does it bother you that he kept calling you Chief?” I asked Jake as we walked over to the nearby police station.

  “No, I understand the habit. I’ve done it myself more than once to former bosses of mine. It kind of goes with the territory.”

  “You miss it, don’t you?” I asked him.

  “Parts of it,” my husband admitted, “but mostly I’m glad to just sit at home and stoke the fire with you by my side.”

  “Only I’m not there with you a lot of the time. I’m still working, and I don’t plan on shutting the place down anytime soon.”

  “Then I’ll be grateful for every sec
ond I get with you,” he said with a smile.

  “Thank you. That might just be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  “Oh, I can do better than that, but you’ll have to give me a little time to come up with something,” Jake said as he took my hand in his and we walked the rest of the way to the police station together. I knew that I’d miss Grace on this investigation, but I also realized with all of my heart that I couldn’t have a better partner working alongside me, as long as Jake and I worked out some ground rules first. My husband was used to being in charge, and I didn’t have a problem with that per se, but we were going to be equal partners in this investigation, or it wasn’t going to work at all. I deserved as much of a voice as he did, and I was going to make sure that he knew that right off the bat, or he and I were going to have a problem. I just had to be sure to do it delicately and bring it up with some subtlety.

  “We’re equal partners in this, right?” I asked him, instantly abandoning my former strategy and getting it all out on the spot at once. I never was all that good with nuance anyway.

  “Of course we are. Why wouldn’t we be?” He looked surprised that I’d even asked the question in the first place.

  “I just want to be sure we’re clear right up front. Jake, I know that you’re a great cop, but I bring certain skills to the table myself.”

  “That’s why we’re going to make such a good team,” my husband answered. “We have complementary skill sets.”

  “You do look really nice today,” I said with a grin.

  “Not that kind of compliment,” he said.

  “I know that, you big dummy,” I said as I playfully let go of his hand and smacked his arm. “I just wanted to be sure that you were okay with me contributing to this investigation, too.”

  “You’re kidding, right? Okay with it? Suzanne, I’m counting on it.”

  “Good. I’m glad that’s settled.”

  As we walked into the police station, Jake nodded to the desk clerk and began to walk past him after he greeted us both.