Lethal Lifestyles (A Headlines in High Heels Mystery Book 6) Page 3

  “Yeah, yeah.” Shelby put the glass on the table and shook her head, a wry smile touching her full lips. “Can’t say it doesn’t smart. I might’ve spent a few teary Jose Cuervo and Ben and Jerry’s nights telling myself Grant Parker wasn’t the long-term relationship type when he dumped me. I never would have pegged quiet and brainy for his undoing, but good for her.”

  The band launched into another song, and Parker and Mel threaded their way through the dancers toward us. Mel sprawled across the empty chair, Parker leaning on the back of it. I signaled the waitress and asked for two waters, which arrived just as Bob returned from the men’s room. Parker downed his in three gulps, laying a hand on Mel’s back when she folded her arms on the table and flopped her head onto them.

  “I think we’re ready to sleep this off,” he said.

  I pulled out my phone and checked the time, ready for a few winks myself. Almost midnight. Hopefully their perfect wedding wasn’t on the verge of turning into a pumpkin.

  3.

  No such luck

  All was quiet in the driveway, though I’m pretty sure I didn’t take a breath until we rounded the lodge and the guest houses came into view.

  Not a squad car in sight.

  Phew.

  I walked Parker and Mel to the largest cottage and hugged her while he opened the door. “Sleep well, doll,” I said as he flipped the light on.

  Waving to Bob and Larry as they disappeared into the cabin they were sharing, I glanced around. Because Parker knew the owner, a handful of us had been offered guest houses on the property. Mel and I had booked everyone else into a few nearby bed and breakfasts, holding the last two cottages for the parents.

  Convenient under normal circumstances. Downright handy for snooping with a dead guy on the premises. I half-jogged back up to the lodge, hoping to find Jinkerson in his office. Strike one. The building was pitch dark, the doors locked. Turning back toward my cabin, I spied the trio of big barns spaced across the south end of the property. I knew one was for horses and two were for wine, but couldn’t remember which was what. I climbed into my car and let it idle down the hill toward them.

  Putting the windows down, I listened as I rounded the back corner of the first barn. A hoof stomping followed by a colossal snort said the thoroughbreds didn’t care for me disturbing them so late. “Sorry, buddy,” I whispered, killing the engine as voices carried through the midnight chill. Bingo.

  I reached into my bag and fished out a pinkie-sized flashlight before I hopped out of the car.

  Careful to light only a foot or so of the path in front of me, I tiptoed through the dirt and grass, ears pricked for any signs of non-equine activity.

  Behind barn number two, I found Jinkerson, Hulk, a Sean Connery lookalike I recognized as the vineyard’s owner, and a shorter, rounder man with a shiny badge pinned to his starched beige shirt. Judging by the size of his Stetson, I pegged the latter as the local sheriff.

  Noncity law enforcement was kind of like the Catholic Church in that the more important you were, the bigger your hat. The camel-colored ten-gallon that topped off this guy’s uniform said he was in charge, or very close to it.

  I stayed hidden behind the corner of the building, killing the light and leaning against the cool wood siding.

  “Now, Dale, I can’t say anything for certain until we have lab results, and even with pressure that’s gonna take a few days to get from Richmond—maybe more because of the wine and the condition of the remains. But off the record, the clothes and the ring are pretty clear identifiers.” The lilting Virginia accent and booming bass combo had to belong to the cop.

  “I don’t have the time or the desire for any unpleasantness clinging to my name with the Governor’s Cup so close, Jim.” This voice was more assured—and held an edge of annoyance. Dale Henry Sammons owned the property my Manolos were sinking into—as well as the Richmond Generals baseball team, the nameplates on a couple of buildings at UVA, and probably a hefty handful of politicians from every level one could find. Not the kind of guy who’d want this publicized—or dragged out. I resisted the urge to peek around the corner again, focusing on his words. “I’m sure you understand when I say I want this taken care of quickly and quietly.”

  Me too. I held my breath as the sheriff’s voice floated to my ears again.

  “There are two different types of marks on the barrel lid, both pretty fresh in the wood, which means it was opened twice—recently. We’ll need to talk to everyone who had access to this barn this week. Assuming Burke is our victim, I’m going to need to interview your people in Richmond too.”

  Crap hell. That didn’t sound anything like open and shut.

  “The less police presence we have here, the better,” Sammons said. “Jinkerson, you’ll arrange for the staff to go to the sheriff for interviews. And Jim, why don’t you come up to Richmond on Monday?”

  “Whatever you need, sir.” Jinkerson’s tenor still held the high squeak of stress.

  “When did you say your guests arrived?” Sheriff Jim asked.

  “Most of them this afternoon, I believe,” Sammons replied. “I had business in DC that prevented me from being here to greet them.”

  “We may need to talk to them too, then?” The sheriff tried not to sound like he was asking, but his voice went up on the last note anyway.

  “I’d really prefer if you’d wait on that until we’re sure it’s necessary.”

  “Who’d you say was here?”

  “I don’t believe I have. What kind of host am I to bring people out for the weekend and then run them through the Virginia inquisition?” Sammons said smoothly. “Let’s focus on the big things first. If you need anything else later, we will, of course, be happy to oblige.”

  Retreating footsteps said they’d started back toward the lodge. I stayed still until they were out of earshot, then scrambled back to my car and dug out a notebook and pen, scribbling as fast as my hand would fly over the paper.

  Burke.

  People in Richmond. Baseball?

  Governor’s Cup. Horses, boats?

  Thief. The big guy said something about a theft earlier.

  And the question of the moment, which got a double star: Why was Dale Sammons keeping us a secret from the sheriff?

  Back in my adorably posh guest cottage, I double-bolted the door and flipped on the crystal-drenched chandelier, too focused on finding some answers to fully appreciate the careful attention to shabby chic detail as I pushed a gel-planted fishbowl of roses to one side of the distress-painted flute-footed round coffee table and opened my laptop.

  Laying my notes next to the keyboard, I clicked into my search bar and started with Dale Sammons.

  Seventeen-hundred-plus results. I scrolled through the top five, highlighting and copying passages about his education, work, and hobbies into a word-processing document.

  Forty-five minutes later, I sank back into the overstuffed pastel loveseat, pulling the computer into my lap and staring at the words I’d just saved.

  Pretty standard privileged family upbringing, rowdy but not serious college mishaps, a falling out with his old man, and a few brushes with the law, followed by a solid career in baseball ownership with the Generals looking for their fifth pennant in seven years. The vineyard, which he’d inherited when his father died, seemed to be his latest fascination. Not famous, but it had a good reputation and steadily increasing name recognition and revenue.

  All fine, in the most mundane sense of the word.

  Journalism in the Age of the Internet 101: Nothing curious usually means nothing helpful. But not always, so I saved the file to a folder labeled Calais and went to the next item on my list: the victim.

  The cop hadn’t given a first name, but his comment about talking to people in Richmond and a ring made me wonder if the guy was a ballplayer.

  Typing Burke+Richmond Generals into my search bar, I clicked enter and held my breath.

  Almost five hundred hits.

  The images s
howed me snapshots of a good-looking guy with dark hair, blue eyes, and a straight nose—and he was wearing a baseball uniform in many of them. Damn.

  He didn’t look much older than me, and his smile dripped confidence. I blinked away a pricking in the back of my eyes, focusing on research. Getting bogged down in the sadness that goes with covering crime is a dangerous road.

  Just the facts. I opened a file and started typing what I knew. One—my hopes of keeping Parker and Mel insulated were screwed, because any kind of celebrity plus the location of the body discovery meant the guy’s death would be news. Shortly, anyway. The local newspaper had shuttered the summer before, which meant I had until word of Burke’s death made it out of the sticks to come up with a way to break it to the bride and groom. And my readers—I might end up with a story out of all this, after all, if the sports desk didn’t snatch it up.

  My fingers stilled over the keys. The sports desk.

  Parker.

  Baseball.

  What if Parker knew this guy?

  Clicking a photo of Burke (his first name was Mitch, said Wikipedia) up to full size, I squinted at his uniform.

  Huh. It was an older style, and that wasn’t a Generals logo on his shoulder.

  I went back to the text results and found a bio.

  Pitcher out of Virginia Tech, drafted by the Generals farm program a decade ago. I jotted that down, hoping my slightly manic Tech fan editor might remember him.

  Scrolling past the childhood and college info, I clicked expand on his career section.

  He played five seasons, never made it out of the minors, and became the assistant PR director for the Richmond Generals.

  Crap.

  Parker had to know him. Sammons probably hadn’t mentioned Parker’s name to the sheriff because he wanted to break this news to Parker himself.

  I checked the clock: coming up on three. Chances were slim that Sammons would’ve bothered Parker after the sheriff left, and I couldn’t wake my friend in the middle of the night to tell him someone he knew was dead and the guy’s murder could throw a monkey wrench in his wedding as a bonus.

  Closing the computer and pulling my dress off, I killed the lights and crawled between the zillion thread-count sheets on the canopy bed. Setting the alarm on my phone for four and a half hours in the future, I laid it on the other pillow and flipped onto my stomach.

  My eyes fell shut, Mel’s happy smile and Mitch Burke’s aristocratic features flashing across the backs of the lids. Maybe my subconscious could come up with a way to avoid completely trashing the bride and groom’s Saturday.

  4.

  Tidal waves

  Knock knock.

  “Nicey?”

  I lifted my head from a cloud of goose down swathed in silk and tried to blink.

  “Nicey?”

  Knock knock knock. “Anyone home?”

  Bob. Why was Bob at my door?

  Knuckling sleep and last night’s mascara from my lashes, I glanced around the plush little bedroom. Cottage.

  Wedding.

  Dead guy.

  Aw, hell.

  I snatched up my iPhone, cursing the alarm before I saw that I’d only been asleep for three hours and change.

  My editor was a morning person.

  I myself was usually pretty chipper as long as the sun was up, but not on less than four hours of fitful, how-do-I-avert-this-tidal-wave-of-disaster half-sleep.

  “Coming,” I mumbled, grabbing the dress I’d dropped the night before and tugging it back on.

  I flipped the lock and cracked the door open, swinging it wide when I saw the tray he had balanced on his left arm.

  “I come bearing coffee.” He grinned as he walked in. “Wow. It looks like Barbie’s dream house in here.”

  “Yours doesn’t?” I asked.

  “Entirely different theme—think Pacific northwest hunting lodge.”

  “Ah. I prefer my girly girl room.”

  “They chose wisely all around, it seems.”

  He crossed the perfect pincushion living room and set the tray on the bar, pouring a cup and offering it to me. I rounded the end of the counter and snagged the little bottle of white mocha syrup I’d brought from home, tipping a few drops into the cup and adding milk from a pitcher on Bob’s tray.

  “How’re you this morning?” His brows drew down as his blue eyes swept the living room, coming to rest on my laptop and notebook, still on the table. “Find out anything interesting last night?”

  I waved him toward the dusty lilac and pink sofa and took the tufted cream wing chair catty-cornered from it, sipping my coffee. Bob knew everyone (and sometimes, it seemed like, everything)—him waking me suddenly seemed like more of a gift from the guardian angel of weddings than an annoyance.

  “Nothing good, I’m afraid. Local law enforcement says foul play. And Sammons doesn’t seem to want the cops knowing what’s going on here this weekend.”

  Bob tipped his head to one side. “Why not?”

  I raked my teeth across my bottom lip. “I think I might know. But I want to think I’m wrong.”

  Uh oh. “Do I want to hear this?”

  I sighed. “I think Sammons doesn’t want Parker in this because the guy might be his friend, Bob. I heard the sheriff talking about a ring they found on the body, and he mentioned a last name. Google tells me our likely victim did PR for the Generals, and used to play ball…” I let the words trail off as every drop of color drained from Bob’s face.

  “Not—” He cleared his throat. “Not Mitch Burke?”

  Hell and damnation. I’d rather trade my entire shoe closet for Birkenstocks than have to tell Parker his friend was dead a week before his wedding.

  For the first time, my stomach clenched around an even more horrifying thought. “Oh, shit. Was this guy on our guest list? I assumed he was here because he worked for Sammons, but…damn, chief. What are we gonna do?” I covered my face with both hands, resting my elbows on my knees.

  “Grant would fling his College World Series ring into the James before he’d invite Mitch Burke to anything.” Bob pulled in a deep breath. “We have much bigger problems this morning than the guest list.”

  The resignation in my editor’s voice pulled my head up and sent my heart into my stomach. “Huh?”

  “You know better than anyone how a murder investigation works. It’s going to take the sheriff a bit of poking around to come up with a list of people who disliked Burke. And our groom will be at the top of it, I promise you.”

  My eyelids dropped. Not a tidal wave of disaster. A freaking tsunami.

  Think, Nichelle.

  I blinked a few times, meeting Bob’s gaze. The grim line where his mouth should’ve been told me he was worried.

  Worried Bob was never a good thing.

  “I think I need to get caught up here, chief. Tell me the story.”

  Bob sat back and steepled his fingers under his chin. “It’s a long one. I’ll try to hit the high notes. Burke and Parker had roughly the same amount of talent on a pitcher’s mound.”

  The road this tale was about to take—potholes and all—sprang to life in my head. Triple mocha with whipped cream damn. I swallowed hard. “Old rivals?”

  “In pretty much every sense of the word, the way I’ve heard it.” Bob nodded. “All the way back to the state championships in high school.”

  “Did they go to the same school?” I sat back in the chair, picking up my coffee and trying to focus. My brain wanted to sprint in sixty different directions.

  “Not even the same county. They didn’t see each other until the state finals, as a matter of fact.”

  “No pressure there.” I shook my head.

  Bob leaned forward and sipped his coffee, his eyes taking on the faraway look that meant he was running through old memories. For all the total recall my own brain could play, I didn’t understand how Bob’s head wasn’t utterly cluttered with all the millions of things he’d done and seen and heard or read about. “Our old s
ports editor was a baseball nut. Couldn’t get that guy to give a whit about football or basketball, but baseball season rolled around and he was in my office demanding more editorial space for the foreseeable future. He pulled in stringers from all the colleges and covered every game in the area. Even the big high schools.”

  “Wow.” A page count that would allow for such things was more foreign to me than wood-soled clogs.

  “Things were so different back then. Some ways better, some ways not.” Bob smiled. “When I first took over as editor-in-chief, Landon swore we’d see an increase in sales if I gave him the space, so I shuffled pages out of business—they’re always light on news in vacation season anyway. And our subs and rack sales did spike. Parents love seeing their kids in the paper. It became an annual thing.”

  I nodded, willing him to get on with it.

  He took the cue. “The first time I laid eyes on Grant Parker, I was approving a sports front. Larry had a hell of a shot of him hurling a fastball that took up a third of the page, and Landon popped ‘Superstar Material’ in ninety-six point block letters above his head. The story was the high school regional tournament, in which Parker—who was just a junior—pitched two shutouts.”

  “Damn.” I knew he was good, but that good, that young? It was hard to get the Grant Parker I knew to talk about his playing days.

  Bob nodded. “On page two was Mitch Burke, the pride of the Shenandoah Valley, leading his school to their first regional title in thirty-seven years.”

  “So they played each other in the state tournament? Who won?”

  “Always racing ahead of the story.” Bob chuckled.

  “I have a wedding to save here, chief.”

  “Parker did. But it was ugly. They faced off in the last round, the one for all the marbles, and both games were hard. A pitcher’s duel for the ages. Eighteen innings. Four hours in, Burke threw one grapefruit off a tired arm to this kid from Parker’s school who could run like the wind. He didn’t even hit it over the fence. Inside-the-park homer. Parker got carried out of the dugout, and Burke walked off the field bawling like a baby. Sleeper sports story of the summer—we sold out every rack in the city the next morning.”