Chapter 31
As I drove along, I replayed Tad’s words in my head. I thought they were true, but were they? And could Lidia have come into town a day earlier than we thought and killed her sister? He’d called her at home, though, so she must have been there. My cell phone rang and I picked up.
The voice on the other line wasn’t familiar. “Hi, Tess, This is Lois Hardcastle. I heard you were opening a bakery and I wondered if I could book a cake for my parents’ anniversary party next month.”
I felt my heart leap with excitement. I wasn’t even officially open for business and this would make two major events—assuming she came up with the deposit. “Sure, what’s the date?” I asked and pulled over to the side of the road to check my planner. The date would work well, as it was the week after Easter and I should have everything ready to go in time. “How about if you stop by in the next couple of days and we’ll talk about budgets and the number of people you’re feeding and what kind of design you want.”
“I’ll swing by this evening, if it’s okay by you.”
“Great.” I penciled in a note on the date she wanted, already excited.
“Is this the best number to reach you? Are you going to add another line for the business once you open?” Lois asked.
It occurred to me that I didn’t know how she’d been able to reach me. “How did you find this number?”
“You’ve never taken the line out of your grandma’s name. It’s in the phone book. That’s okay, isn’t it?”
I’d forgotten that I’d forwarded the house line to my cell. “That’s fine. I appreciate you thinking of me for this special occasion. This will be a cake to remember, I promise.” I jotted her name and number, and made a mental note to call her back the next day if she didn’t pop by that night.
When I hung up, I realized the only way we knew Lidia had been in California the previous weekend was because Tad said he’d called her at home. But if she’d forwarded her home calls to her cell as I did . . . I pulled back onto the road. I had no idea how I was going to discover if Lidia was in Silver Springs on Friday night, but I’d figure it out.
Of course I found Honey at home, pounding away on someone’s website while the kids ran amok around her.
“How do you get anything done?” I asked as I lifted my arms to prevent them from being taken off by Chance and one of his friends as they zipped around me in a game of tag.
“I mostly do this at night, but I have a deadline. George is supposed to be here to corral them, but he got called down to the store on a bottled water emergency.” She rolled her eyes, giving the impression that he responded to a lot of emergency calls from work. The joys of running a business.
“There are emergencies about bottled water?” I was amused, despite my brimming excitement.
“Apparently.” She hit a couple more buttons, then slid away from the computer desk and looked up at me. “So what did Tad say?”
I pulled over the soft, cushy ottoman that matched the sofa and sat on it. When Zoey toddled over, I scooped her up, covered her face in kisses, then released her to run off again. During this, I filled Honey in on all the details.
“So you think Lidia came up Friday and killed her sister that night, then holed up somewhere and waited to be notified of her sister’s death?” Honey scribbled notes on a piece of paper—she’d always done that, claiming it helped her process information.
“That’s what I think. She probably headed for either Prescott or Phoenix, though the second choice would be smarter, since she’d have less chance of running into someone she knew. The problem is proving she wasn’t in California when they called her.” What did I know? Maybe I was headed in the wrong direction. Millie had the jewelry—maybe she did kill Valerie. Would Lidia really kill her own sister?
“You should tell Detective Tingey. He can subpoena cell phone records and stuff.”
“True.” I sighed. The detective would have a fit when I told him I was still digging. At least I’d be able to diffuse things somewhat, telling him that I was voluntarily turning over what I knew. I pulled out my cell phone and asked him to meet me back at my apartment, and said goodnight to Honey.
It wasn’t long before the detective showed up, though he wore blue jeans and a T-shirt with the Phoenix Suns logo on it instead of his usual dark suit. “What can I do for you, Miss Crawford? You do realize we’ve caught the murderer, so you don’t have to keep calling me anymore.”
In that case, I was surprised he’d bothered to see me instead of taking the information over the phone. I let him into my apartment and we took seats, then I threaded my fingers together on my lap. “I wasn’t sure if you knew and decided I needed to tell you, just in case. Lidia is actually Dahlia’s mother.”
His brows lifted. “That’s an interesting tidbit. How do you know that?”
“I’ll tell you, but you have to promise you’ll keep Dahlia’s parentage secret unless it’s important to your case.”
He gave me a look that asked if I was for real, and who did I think I was fooling, anyway? He was a detective, I was a peon. A peon who had information he hadn’t gathered himself. “Demanding an awful lot, aren’t you?” he asked. “Do you know the consequences for impeding a murder investigation?”
“I’m not trying to get in your way.” I paused to scowl at him when he snorted in response. “Look, Valerie, Lidia and the father went to a lot of trouble to keep this a secret. If it’s important to the case, that’s fine, but if it’s irrelevant, I don’t want to mess up all their lives. It may come out anyway, but that should be their choice.”
He nodded. “I understand, and I promise to be discreet.” His notebook appeared almost out of thin air and he poised a pen on a page, looking at me for the news.
I nodded and filled him in on what I’d learned in my conversation with Tad, and on my conjectures about Lidia.
“That’s a nice thought, and it would tie it all up in a nice bow. She’s sick of paying child support—and I use that term loosely since it’s more like extortion—and wants to raise her own kid, so she offs the sister, who’s in the way. No one’s looking at her because she’s in another state, and she ends up with custody, clearing the way for her to introduce her husband to Dahlia.” He tucked the notebook back in his pocket without writing anything on it. “There’s just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“We didn’t call Lidia to tell her about Valerie. We sent a couple of uniforms to her house to tell her instead. She was in Long Beach.”
My heart sank. “What time was that?”
“You didn’t even find the body until after ten, and it was a good hour or more after that before we sent someone to tell Lidia. So eleven o’clock our time.”
I tried to figure out how she could have done it, my mind racing through the options. “That’s ten hours after Valerie died, plenty of time for Lidia to hurry back to her home in Long Beach before the police arrived.”
He gave me a disbelieving look. “I think you’re stretching, but I’ll look into it.” He stood. “Now, if you don’t have anything else to tell me, I have to get back to my family.”
He didn’t believe me. He thought I was ‘stretching.’ Apparently nothing I’d told him so far had been worth consideration—well, except for Millie having the jewelry, which was purely circumstantial. “No, that was it.”
“Fine. Try to stay out of trouble, will you? You’ve had enough problems the past week without digging even deeper into this.” He crossed the room to my door.
“Yeah. Okay,” I lied. There was no way I’d leave it to him, not when he didn’t believe me.
The bland expression on his face said he saw the lie. “Sure, you’ll totally stay out of things. Because you’re smart like that.” He walked out, pulling the door shut behind him.
I retrieved my cell phone and called Honey to fill her in while I double-checked the doors and windows. The chances of being bothered again tonight were slim, but I wasn’t going to take a chance.
“Do you know how far it is to Long Beach from here?” she asked when I told her everything.
“No. I guess I could check.”
“Give me a minute.” There was silence on the line for a long moment, and Honey came back. “The online mapping program says six and a half hours.”
“So she could easily have gotten back home again.” This was my strongest lead so far.
“Yes, but can you believe she’d do this? She seems so nice.”
I had to agree that it was hard to believe, “But, the jails are full of people who seemed way too nice to be pedophiles and serial killers.”
“I know.” Honey sighed. “I hate that we’ve been suspecting everyone we know of being murderers.”
“Not everyone we know,” I suggested. “I don’t think George had anything to do with it.”
“Give me a break.”
“Sorry. Hopefully it won’t be a problem much longer.” I grabbed some crackers from the cupboard to soothe my hungry stomach, then paused with one halfway to my mouth. I had an image of the oil change sticker in Lidia’s windshield. What had it said? “I have an idea. I need to go check something on Lidia’s car. I may have proof that she’s made the trip twice.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Honey asked.
“Doubtful. I’ll call when I get back.” I grabbed a Dr. Pepper from the fridge and headed out the door with my snack.