Alibis and Amethysts (10 page)

Chapter 13

Theo Brock and Cal Anastos walked into Crystal Clear an hour after Jaye returned from
Tuba City. Bryn was ringing up a customer’s purchase, and Jaye had started working
on the monthly inventory to see what she needed to reorder. It was her least favorite
part of owning the shop, but on a scale of one to ten it still beat out talking to
the detectives by a huge margin. Unfortunately, no one had asked about her preference.

Busy counting the pink quartz, she didn’t see them at first. When she finally looked
up, they were easy to spot in their detectives’ finery. Sedona was definitely not
a suit and tie kind of town. Jaye had a couple of thoughts in quick succession. They’d
either come to impart the good news that she was no longer a suspect or, conversely,
to arrest her and bundle her off to jail. As it happened, she was wrong on both counts.

“Long time no see,” she said, thinking it wasn’t nearly long enough. She checked their
hands. At least they weren’t holding handcuffs.

“Can we speak to you in private?” Brock asked somberly.

Since that seemed like a far better idea than having her rights read to her in front
of a store full of customers, Jaye led the way upstairs. As she unlocked the door,
she prayed that Raffles would be out answering nature’s call. It had been a long day,
and she was clean out of creative ideas that might explain a not-a-cat.

Some days it just didn’t pay to get out of bed. Raffles was in the kitchen, directly
in their line of sight, standing as upright as any two-legged mammal and browsing
in the pantry. All that stood between her and her society debut was one of the pantry
doors. Jaye flew toward her, batting her arms around to further block the detectives’
view. When she was close enough, she sprang at the animal and tackled her to the floor,
trying to hide as much of her as possible. Raffles was so taken by surprise that she
went into defensive mode. In an instant, the job of trying to conceal her became infinitely
harder, and Jaye learned firsthand how rigid those hackles were beneath their fur
covering.

After the initial hectic seconds, Raffles realized that she wasn’t actually under
attack, but by then Jaye was sure she’d have some dandy black-and-blue marks to show
for her efforts. When she finally had the not-a-cat under control, she picked her
up and hurried off to the bedroom. She set her down on the bed and ordered her to
stay put with as much authority as she could muster. She really had to buy a lock
she could bolt from the outside. Before leaving the room, she checked to make sure
she wasn’t bleeding enough to scare the detectives into calling animal control. Then
she planted an embarrassed little smile on her face, stepped out of the bedroom and
closed the door behind her.

The detectives were still in the entryway where they’d apparently remained during
the whole kerfuffle. Judging by their expressions, they hadn’t witnessed anything
more disturbing than a crazy woman doing battle with a stubborn cat. Maybe the gods
hadn’t forsaken her after all. “Sorry about that,” she said.

“We know,” Brock said dryly. “She’s shedding.”

Jaye realized she would have to come up with a better excuse for sequestering Raffles
whenever they were around or risk courting more than their curiosity. “So, detectives,
what can I do for you tonight?”

“Do you mind if we sit down?” Anastos asked.

Jaye had been hoping they could conduct their business with her, or issue whatever
new threat they’d concocted, right there at the door. “Oh, sure,” she replied, since
she needed all the brownie points she could get, being a murder suspect and all. “Is
this going to take very long?”

“Hard to say,” Brock replied as he and Anastos headed to the love seat they’d occupied
the last time, leaving Jaye little choice but to follow and sit across from them.

“Where were you this morning around nine?” Brock asked, forgoing any pleasantries.

“On my way to Tuba City,” Jaye responded, more perplexed than ever.

“Can anyone corroborate that?”

“I was with Daniel Yazzi. In fact, he was driving.”

“Then you wouldn’t mind if I called him right now and asked him?” Anastos said. He
was looking at her hard, as though with enough effort he might be able to divine the
truth.

“Not at all,” she said. “I have nothing to hide. In fact, I’ll give you his number.”

Anastos pulled a cell phone out of his jacket pocket and plugged in the numbers Jaye
recited. Once he had Daniel on the line, he got right to the point. After a brief
exchange, Anastos thanked him and ended the call. “Her alibi checks out,” he said
to Brock. Jaye thought they both looked deflated by the news.

“Exactly why is it I needed an alibi?” she asked, feeling a bit self-righteous.

“There was a robbery this morning at Crystal Powers,” Anastos told her.

“So naturally you assumed I was the thief.”

“No, we thought you might be the thief given the evidence we found at the scene,”
Brock said.

“Evidence?” She’d never set foot in her competitor’s shop. How on earth could they
have found evidence that she’d been there unless someone had planted it?

Brock reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a business card that he held out
to her.

Jaye took it from him even though she knew immediately that the card was hers. “I
don’t understand,” she said. “If I’ve never been in there, how . . .” Her mouth snapped
shut as she realized the answer was lounging on her bed a few yards away. “I mean,
what was stolen?”

“An amethyst ring,” Anastos said.

Jaye had a pretty good hunch where she could find the missing merchandise, but she
had no intentions of telling them. “You know it’s also possible that whoever took
the ring either dropped my card by accident or left it there to frame me.”

“Again?” Brock sounded bored and annoyed. “First Peggy’s murder and now this? Are
you going for the Guinness World Record for most framed?”

Jaye realized she hadn’t thought that through too well. “You’re right,” she said with
a laugh. “It must have been dropped by accident and maybe not even by the thief.”

Brock stood up with a grunt of disgust, Anastos bobbing up a second later like a tardy
shadow. “You might want to remind your friend Daniel that there are serious consequences
for lying to the police,” Brock said as they walked to the door.

“Obstruction of justice,” Anastos tacked on.

Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Jaye wondered. The detectives didn’t
appear to be big fans of the concept. “Any progress finding Peggy’s killer?” she inquired,
trailing behind them. She knew it wasn’t smart to ride them about it, but she couldn’t
stop herself. After all, she had a vested interest in the case.

Brock opened the door and turned to her. “We can’t talk about an active investigation,”
he said, “but I imagine you and Sierra will be hearing from us sooner than later.”

Touché. She should have kept her mouth shut. Now she didn’t know whether the detectives
had found more circumstantial evidence pointing to them or Brock was just enjoying
some payback.

***

Sierra and Frosty arrived at Jaye’s apartment at six o’clock with a mushroom pizza.
For the sake of efficiency, the women had decided to combine dinner with a mutual
debriefing about the day’s events. Of course, Jaye now had the additional surprise
visit from the detectives to add to the agenda. Distracted by the smell of dinner,
Raffles and Frosty put aside their lingering distrust of each other to better concentrate
on begging for their share of the pie.

“So Raffles had it?” Sierra asked after hearing about the missing amethyst.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Jaye said. “An amethyst ring in exchange for my business
card. A lot of little things have gone missing since she’s come into my life. I should
probably be grateful she’s not bigger or my TV and computer might have vanished by
now.”

“Did you check her pouch for the ring?”

Jaye nodded as she worked on a mouthful of gooey cheese. “No sign of it,” she said
after swallowing. “And Raffles took rather strong exception to my rummaging around
in there. I’m lucky I still have all ten fingers.”

“You sound surprisingly calm about this. Are you really okay?”

“After Brock and Anastos left, I got myself all worked up over it. Then I decided
I could only obsess about one disaster at a time—Peggy’s murder won hands down.” Jaye
paused long enough to drink her orange soda before launching into a condensed version
of her trip to Tuba City.

“Are you sure you weren’t misreading their reaction to Raffles’s picture?” Sierra
asked.

“No, Daniel saw it too.”

“You are becoming more and more of a mystery,” Sierra said to Raffles as she handed
bits of the crust to her and Frosty. The dog took it with a quick slurp of his tongue,
but Raffles used her fingers to transfer the food to her mouth in a ladylike manner.

“And more and more of a problem.” Jaye pulled another slice out of the box and onto
her plate. “Okay, it’s your turn,” she said to her friend. “Tell me about your first
day as Nancy Drew.”

“Interesting,” Sierra said with a coy smile. “I think you’ll be proud of me.”

“Details—I want details.”

“Well . . .,” she said, slowly plucking a mushroom off her slice.

“You’re going to be wearing that pizza in a minute unless you start talking,” Jaye
said, making a grab for it.

Sierra pulled it away in the nick of time. “Okay, okay. First thing in the morning
I stopped in to chat with Hallie and Peter.”

“The jewelry store on the other side of Peggy’s bakery?”

“Right. I said I was looking for a silver chain for a pendant. That way if I felt
obligated to buy something I wouldn’t break the bank.”

“Would that by any chance be the necklace you’re now wearing?”

“It happens I really did need it,” Sierra said defensively.

Jaye laughed as she broke off two pieces of pizza for the animals. “I’m glad I didn’t
send you to see Adam Grayson. You can’t touch anything in his gallery for less than
four figures.”

“May I go on?”

“By all means.”

“I was saying how awful it was that Peggy had been murdered and that I hadn’t thought
she had an enemy in the world. That’s when Hallie told me that Peggy complained to
her all the time about the smells from Finnegan’s kitchen seeping into her baked goods.
Seems she’d talked to the landlord about it, but he’d insisted that his buildings
were up to code and that he had no intentions of throwing money away to appease a
nutcase. Peggy was sure he and Finnegan were ‘out to get her,’ as she put it.”

“She sounds paranoid,” Jaye said. “She also assumed you opened your shop for the sole
purpose of putting her out of business.”

“Exactly. That’s why I started wondering if she suspected other people of being ‘out
to get her’ and what she might have done about it. Which led me to visit our men in
blue.”

“Tan,” Jaye corrected her. “They wear tan uniforms here.”

“It’s just a saying, professor. Let it go.”

At that point, Frosty whined softly and, not to be outdone, Raffles produced a soulful
trill, as if to remind their humans they still hadn’t had their fill of the goodies.
Their performances netted them each another bite of pizza crust.

“Who did you talk to there?” Jaye asked, wondering why she hadn’t thought of checking
the police files herself. Between the two of them they nearly made one decent investigator.

“Anastos and Brock were unavailable, so I had to make do with the cop who’d pulled
desk duty—Bob Coster. He tried to tell me I couldn’t have access to that kind of information,
until I told him I’d have my attorney there in five minutes to explain that he was
wrong.”

“We don’t actually have an attorney,” Jaye said, “unless you mean the jelly bean–popping
Lasko.”

“I was bluffing,” Sierra said. “I got the feeling Coster didn’t want to be bothered.
As it turns out, I’ve got a better poker face than he does.” She seemed hugely pleased
with herself.

“So let’s have it.”

“Peggy filed a complaint against one Lester Dinkins, landlord, for failing to properly
maintain the space she rented and for conspiring with Quinn Finnegan to destroy her
livelihood, although the complaint doesn’t actually mention how. That was followed
by a countercomplaint filed by Dinkins for libel and general insanity.”

Jaye laughed and nearly choked on a thick lump of cheese. “C’mon, it didn’t say that,”
she sputtered.

“I can’t make these things up.”

“Did Peggy lodge any other complaints?”

“What do you think?” Sierra gave each of the animals a last morsel of pizza. “On several
occasions she filed complaints against the Newirths, who live next door to her, alleging
that their chocolate Lab, Hershey, kept leaping the wall into her yard and leaving
waste that she had to clean up. There was no countercomplaint until recently, when
the Newirths claimed Peggy opened the gate to their yard and encouraged the dog to
take off.”Jaye had taken one of the napkins thoughtfully provided by the pizzeria
and was writing down the names as Sierra mentioned them. “Great job—between the people
we’re interviewing and those complaint files, we have a real shot at finding the killer.”
She gathered the detritus of their meal and deposited it in the garbage, the animals
watching in disappointment.

“I just wish we could get inside Peggy’s house and look around,” Sierra said. “I
have the feeling we’d find something useful.”

“Not likely. I’m sure the cops tossed the place and took everything that could be
even vaguely related to her murder.”

Sierra didn’t appear to be listening. “The police tape is gone. Technically the house
is no longer a crime scene. I’ll bet we can get in. I mean—how hard could it be?”

Jaye cringed. Sierra’s words were a sure sign that her friend was already committed
to the project. The only thing in question was the extent of her own participation.
“You realize if we’re caught, we can be charged with breaking and entering, criminal
trespass and lord only knows what else,” Jaye said, although she didn’t have any real
hope of changing Sierra’s mind. “And exactly how did you expect to get into the house?
By breaking a window or shimming down the chimney like Santa Claus?”