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“What’s wrong?” she asked him right off. “Is it something at work?”

  He was such a handsome man. Tall and strong, and he cut such a delicious figure in his police uniform. His thick hair was as white as Cookie’s. He usually wore a smile that would lift her heart whenever he saw her. He wasn’t smiling now.

  In slow motion, she watched him walk across the floor and come over to her, and then take her hand. “Cookie… come sit with me.”

  “Jerry, please. You’re beginning to worry me. Just tell me what happened.”

  He upended two chairs at the nearest table and insisted she sit down with him, and then he took her hand again. “I wanted to be the one to tell you. Cookie, it’s Sheila Tucker. She’s dead.”

  Those words hit her like hammer blows. Dead? Sheila Tucker was… dead? “I was just thinking about her,” she said, her mouth suddenly dry. Her blood was rushing in her ears so that she could hardly hear herself talk. “Jerry, I swear to you I was just thinking about her while I was in the kitchen. She wasn’t all that old. Not much older than me. Oh, this is so sad.”

  His hand squeezed hers. “That’s not the worst of it, Cookie. You need to know this, because you’ll be hearing it around town soon enough, and I wouldn’t want someone to keep this from me if I was in your place. Sheila didn’t just die. She was murdered.”

  For a moment the world stopped. Cookie felt like she was watching herself from the outside, wondering why she wasn’t telling Jerry he must be wrong. Surely no one could have hated Sheila enough to kill her. Of course not. Sheila didn’t have an enemy in the whole wide world. She was a dear person who always gave money to charity and was kind to everyone she met. What Jerry was telling her just couldn’t be true.

  Only, she knew it was. She knew that Jerry would never play such a mean trick on her. If he was here, telling her about this, then it had to be so. Cookie had seen dead people before. She’d even known a few people who had fallen victim to murder, including Joseph, her son-in-law. She had even thought that maybe she’d grown jaded to it all and that she just wouldn’t be bothered by such things as death and the darkness of the human heart anymore.

  She was wrong.

  It was a long moment before she could even remember how to breathe, let alone find her voice. Perhaps it was worse this time because she was friends with the victim. That certainly changed things. Now she would never get to talk to Sheila again. They would never play cards or dominos together. They would never talk to each other over email. She had waited too long to go and spend time with Sheila. Now the chance was gone forever.

  “How?” she finally croaked out. “Tell me. How was she killed?”

  “I don’t think you need to worry yourself about—”

  “Jerry Stansted, you may be a police officer and you may know all about investigating crimes, but I was Sheila’s friend. That trumps your badge any day. Now. You know I’m not going to start blubbering and fall to pieces. I simply need to know.”

  “Oh, no,” he said mildly. “Don’t even think about it. I know that look. You’re going to start investigating your friends death whether I give you any information or not, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe,” she admitted. He knew her so well. When she was determined, there was no stopping her.

  “I doubt there’s any ‘maybe’ about it,” he grumbled.

  “Well then. Wouldn’t you rather help your fiancé?”

  He looked at her with his head tilted to the side, obviously trying to decide if there was a way around her avid curiosity. Finally, he just shook his head and gave in. “All right, Cookie, all right. You just need to prepare yourself for what I’m about to say. Her death wasn’t pretty. Someone threw her off the second floor balcony. She didn’t stand a chance.”

  Putting her free hand up over her mouth, Cookie concentrated on taking slow breaths as the tears came. She didn’t try to stop them. There was no reason to. It was just her and Jerry here and she had just lost a good friend and she needed to let her emotions out.

  “How do you know?” Her voice was thick and heavy. “How do you know she was thrown off? She could have fallen, couldn’t she?”

  “The angle is wrong,” he answered truthfully. “She would have had to stand on her railing and jump to land where she did. I don’t think your friend did that. Do you?”

  No, she did not. Sheila would never kill herself. She enjoyed living far too much to ever do that.

  Jerry got down on his knees and wrapped his arms around her to hold her close with his head resting against her shoulder. “It’s all right, Cookie. We’re on the case. We’ve already got a suspect. The chief called everyone in on this and a group of the guys are on their way over to the guy’s house to make an arrest. With any luck, we’ll have a confession down on paper and the bad guy gone off to jail before sunrise tomorrow.”

  In spite of the situation, Cookie found she was very intrigued. “How did they get a suspect already? Did they leave something at the scene?”

  Jerry chuckled, but there wasn’t much humor behind it. “Sort of. The retirement home has security cameras and he parked right in front of one. What he left behind was the image of his car and his license plate, captured on video.”

  That at least made Cookie feel a little bit better. Anyone who took someone’s life shouldn’t be able to just walk away from it. They should make stupid mistakes like putting their car in front of a surveillance camera. They should be caught swiftly and punished harshly. It wasn’t justice if killers walked free.

  Then again, that was a very stupid mistake to make. Getting caught on camera? When you were about to kill someone? Maybe it was a crime committed in the heat of the moment or maybe the killer really was stupid. She supposed that was possible…

  “Are you sure?” she asked Jerry, holding onto him tightly while her mind spun. “This is the man who killed Sheila?”

  He didn’t exactly shrug, but she felt his body shift. “I’m pretty sure. He got to the retirement home just before Sheila died. You can see him on the video running out right after it happens. Plus, he knows Sheila. It all fits. When we find him, then we can ask him ourselves.”

  “He knows Sheila?” Cookie knew that if the killer knew Sheila, there was a pretty good chance that she knew him, too. “Who is this person?”

  “Cookie, you know we aren’t supposed to give out that sort of information to anyone not connected to the case.”

  “Oh?” She couldn’t help the sarcasm that slipped into her voice. “My goodness, I’ve been living with a police officer for months now and I never knew there was such a thing as police procedure. No, I certainly did not know that.”

  “Cookie, come on, now. You know I can’t say anything. I have to follow the rules of the department.”

  “Rules of the department,” she scoffed. “You mean your new chief’s rules.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Jerry, you tell me when has that ever mattered between us. Especially now that it’s my friend who is dead!”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, relenting. He sat back up in his chair, crossing his arms and almost smiling at her. “I never could say no to you.”

  “Really?” She raised an eyebrow, her sarcasm sliding toward anger. She was angry at Sheila’s death, and at Jerry’s insistence in sticking to police rules and regulations all of a sudden, and maybe even at God for letting all this happen. “Seems to me you can say no just fine, Jerry Stansted. You’ve said ‘no’ to getting married to me any number of times.”

  She knew that wasn’t fair, and she knew it hurt him just by the way his expression twisted up. He cleared his throat, and eased back away from her just a little bit. “I thought we were both on the same page with that.”

  Cookie patted her hand against the table top. “Maybe we are, and maybe we aren’t, but right now I don’t care about why we’ve been engaged for more than a year. I only care about what happened to Sheila. Who was in that car? Who?”

  He looked like he wanted to continue the discussion ab
out their perpetually impending nuptials. There was certainly more to say, and no doubt about it. He took a breath, and then lifted a hand, and then dropped it again. He let that discussion go for another time and instead, he gave her the answer to her question. “Grayson DeBeers. That’s the name of the man they caught on the security cameras. He’s apparently the boyfriend of Sheila’s daughter.”

  Cookie nodded to that, although she didn’t know what to say. She’d heard Sheila talk about Grayson any number of times. Sheila had never liked the young man her daughter had chosen to love. In fact, she hated him. From the few times she’d seen him in the company of Sheila, Cookie thought the feeling was mutual. Sheila had tried to break her daughter and Grayson up several times before, in fact, and that kind of friction could motivate people to do a lot of bad things.

  Even murder.

  With a heavy sigh, she stood up. “Well then. Let’s go and have a talk with Grayson DeBeers.”

  He stared at her in surprise. “Huh? Cookie, you heard me just now, didn’t you? We’re still looking for him. There’s no permanent address for him, and the address the vehicle is registered at actually belongs to Sheila’s daughter. Her name is Amanda.”

  “I know her,” Cookie said. “We’ve had lunch together a few times. Oh my, that poor girl. Has anyone told her about her mother yet?”

  “Yes, Cookie, that’s been taken care of. One of the other officers sat with her for a while to make sure she would be okay. That’s how we found out her boyfriend stays with her. He’s not there now, though, and Amanda claims she doesn’t know where Grayson is.”

  “I know her boyfriend too, although not very well. He didn’t come around Sheila’s place much and when he did it was usually only to ask for money. She resented him for being with her daughter, and Grayson resented Sheila for having money when he didn’t.”

  “Was she rich?” Jerry asked, using his cop skills to glean information from what Cookie was saying. “Bank accounts, stocks and bonds, that sort of thing?”

  “Hardly,” Cookie told him. “Sheila lived comfortably, and of course she’d set an amount aside for Amanda for when she… when she passed away.”

  That time was now, Cookie realized. Sheila was gone, and now everything that Sheila had would go to her daughter.

  She supposed that gave Grayson a motive for murder. The man was lazy, according to Sheila, and couldn’t hold a job. That’s why he was always asking Sheila for money. Had he killed her to get his hands on her inheritance?

  People had killed for less.

  Well. No sense guessing and asking endless questions. Jerry was right. There was only one way that they were going to solve this crime. They needed to talk to Grayson directly.

  “Come along,” she told Jerry again. “Let’s go find your suspect.”

  “Cookie, I already told you—”

  “I heard you. The police don’t know where to find him. Lucky for you, Jerry Stansted, you have something the rest of the police don’t have.”

  “Oh? And what would that be?”

  “You have me, dear boy,” she told him. “I know exactly where to find Grayson.”

  The reason the police couldn’t find Grayson was because they lacked one vital piece of information. Cookie knew it, because Sheila had confided it in her over tea one day.

  Grayson went to a card game with friends most nights at a local bar. The only bar in Widow’s Rest. He was a creature of habit, some might say.

  Sheila had always preferred to call him useless.

  Whether Sheila was right or not, Cookie had always gotten an odd sort of vibe from Grayson. Nothing she could put a name to. Just the sense that his smile masked deception. His laughter was never quite genuine. The few times she had seen the man, Grayson had seemed like a shell hiding the real man underneath. In other words, no one really knew the real Grayson DeBeers.

  Cookie was aware of how late it was getting. It was clouding over too, and there was rain on the way. She would still need to get up early in the morning and get the bakery ready for her customers but she couldn’t care less about that right now. Right now, in this moment, she only wanted to find Sheila’s killer.

  So, with Jerry at her side in his uniform, they walked into the Old Crow Bar together. She smiled at the bartender. Not that she much felt like smiling, but it was the polite thing to do when you saw someone that you knew. Baxter was a quiet and heavyset man who kept mostly to himself. He had a sweet tooth for chocolate-coconut donuts and Cookie always made sure to keep some in the case on Thursday mornings for when Baxter came in. He gave her a cautious nod. He knew this wasn’t her kind of place. Cookie could see him wondering what she was doing here.

  She could see the way he looked at Jerry, too. He wasn’t thrilled about a police officer being in his bar.

  The bar itself only had a few people on stools at the serving counter, nursing longneck bottles of beer or shot glasses. The tables were empty except for the one at the far back corner where five men held their cards close in their hands while they added colored poker chips to the growing pile in the middle.

  “There,” Cookie said in a low voice. “The one with his back to us. That’s Grayson.”

  The man she pointed out for Jerry was slim and deeply tanned, his slick black hair curling at the ends where it fell over the collar of his pink button up shirt. Gold bracelets sparkled on his left wrist as he rolled his hand back and forth. It was a nervous habit that Cookie had noticed before. She supposed that’s why the pile of chips in front of his seat was so small. Everyone else at the table could tell when he was lying just as easily as Cookie could.

  One of the other players lifted his head up when they noticed Jerry standing there. Then another player did the same. Police officers weren’t a common sight in the bar, after all. This was Widow’s Rest, and even places of entertainment like the local bar didn’t often cause problems that would attract the attention of the cops. The men at that table were only playing a quiet card game together and drinking their beer. They were even being careful enough, Cookie noticed, to use plastic poker chips instead of cash. No doubt they would settle up for real money later on, but for now it was all very innocent and legal. There was no reason for anyone to be nervous about attracting the attention of the police.

  Which was why Grayson’s reaction could be considered suspicious when the man to his right nudged his elbow and leaned over to whisper in his ear about the two newcomers standing over by the door.

  Very slowly, he set his cards face down in front of him.

  Then he braced his hands against the edge of the table and shoved his chair back as hard as he could, making a mad dash for the back of the building.

  As Grayson’s chair clattered to the floor Jerry took after the man, weaving through the tables and past the interrupted card game. The men there all stood up and backed away, although one of them managed to back into Jerry’s path. He was short and his blue high-top sneakers were untied. It was a simple thing for Jerry to turn the man aside and keep going.

  But by then, Grayson had made it to the back door by the bathrooms and had fled outside.

  Cookie watched Jerry growl and curse and speed off through the back door, too. Then she very calmly turned around, and with a wave to Baxter, she headed for the front door.

  “Hey, Cookie?” Baxter called after her. “Tell that boyfriend of yours I don’t mind cops in my bar, but I don’t want no trouble in here, okay? Tell him I want his buddy at the department to pay up his tab, too. That Mason McLear owes me quite a sum. I ain’t running no charity here.”

  Cookie frowned. She knew Mason, but not well enough to give a message like that to. He was one of the new chief’s hires. Someone else from outside Widow’s Rest. Well. She could pass the information to Jerry. He’d know what to do with it.

  Outside, the security lights on their tall poles lit up the parking lot well enough for her to see all of the cars. There was only eight of them, including the patrol car that Jerry had driven them here with. I
t didn’t take any time at all to pick out the orange PT Cruiser where it sat. Humming to herself, she went over to it, and stood by the driver’s door.

  She had mentally reviewed the ingredients list for three different kinds of cakes before Grayson came rushing up out of the dark. He wasn’t coming from the direction of the bar. Just like Cookie had expected, he’d circled around under the cover of night trying to lose Jerry. He still had to come back for his car, though, and here he was.

  His pinched, narrow face registered his surprise. His eyes went wide, and his mouth dropped open. He sputtered several times before he could make words come out. “Uh, Cookie? Er, hi. What are you…? No, never mind. I don’t have time to talk right now. I’m, um, I’m in a hurry, I guess. I mean, yes, I’m in a hurry. I can’t talk right now. So, uh, goodbye.”

  He went to reach past her for the door handle. She slapped his hand away.

  “I think,” she said to him, “that we should wait for Jerry to get here, don’t you?”

  Chapter 2

  The Widow’s Rest police department was housed in a one-story building, brick and mortar, with a frosted six-pointed star design on the glass of the front door. It had always seemed to project an image of strength and stability. The inside was a mix of modern convenience and design features that were decades out of date. Fluorescent lighting, stick on floor tiles, and plumbing that was straight out of the 1940s. There was only enough room inside for a few offices and storage rooms and the bigger area up front where the members of the police force did their work. The two holding cells at the back took up the remaining space.

  Down one of the hallways, Cookie stood in front of a large one-way mirror. The two people in the room couldn’t see her there, but she could see them.

  Jerry and Grayson sat on opposite sides of a metal table. Other than the camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling, the rest of the room was bare. White walls and white ceiling and more cheap tiles for the floor gave Grayson nothing to concentrate on except Jerry’s questions.