Laina Turner - Presley Thurman 06 - Tiaras & Texans (9 page)

“Hi, Katy. Long time no talk.”

“Hey, chicky. What have you been up to?”

“Just trying to stay busy and out of trouble,” I joked. “You know how it is.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“How’s the salon?” I asked her. Katy owned a beauty salon in Alkon where we both grew up. I had moved away the first chance I got, whereas she had stayed. We were just different like that.

“It’s doing great. It keeps growing and I even have some people coming from other towns to get their hair done by some of my girls.”

“That’s wonderful!” We chatted for a few more minutes, and I sensed Katy had something to tell me, but she just wasn’t coming out and saying it. Finally, I called her out on it. “Katy, I love talking with you, but is there a specific reason you called me? I mean, I’m not trying to rush you or anything; it just seems like there is something bigger on your mind than chitchat.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line like she was working up the nerve to say something big. It was starting to make me worry. Hopefully, this wasn’t bad news. I started running scenarios through my mind of what it could be.

“Katy, are you still there?”

“Chris and I are getting married,” she said in a rush.

Now it was my turn for the long pause. Katy had a long history with Chris, and it wasn’t all that great. I was shocked, to say the least.

“I know you don’t approve, but please hear me out,” she said.

“Katy, it’s not that I don’t approve. I just want you to be happy, and Chris has hurt you so much in the past.” Chris and Katy had been on again off again since middle school, and not so long ago he had been having an affair with a senator’s wife. A senator that was killed in our hometown, which was how I reconnected with Cooper. But I digress.

“Presley, he’s changed. He really has.”

Like I hadn’t heard that before.

“This is what I want, and it makes me so happy you can be happy for me!”

“So, don’t hold back; tell me the details,” I asked in an effort to be a good friend. This was an idea I would have to get used to.

“We are getting married July 1st.”

“Make sure to let me know what I can do to help,” I told her.

“First, I hope you will help by agreeing to be my maid of honor.”

“Of course! I would love that,” I said with false excitement. I couldn’t help but think she was making a terrible mistake, but I had to be supportive.

“Yeah! I’m so excited. This is going to be so much fun. Listen, I need to go rinse out Mrs. Parker’s color, but I will call you later in the week and we can talk more about the details and set a game plan.”

“Sounds great, Katy. Congratulations. Tell Chris congrats, too, for me.”

“I will. Talk soon!”

Cooper wasn’t going to believe this.

Chapter 12

D
id you hear the news?” I asked Cooper after I had filled him in on all the pageant-related happenings. We were in downtown Dallas at a restaurant across from the police station, waiting to meet a Sam Devon, a chemist Cooper had found to talk to about the poison Hollie ingested. It was information he hadn’t been able to get from Detective Miller. Cooper had asked me to take a taxi down here, thinking that after we were done with Sam Devon we could maybe see a few of the sights. It was hard finding any time for pleasure while working. But we’d come here for work, not play, and I understood that.

“What news?”

“Chris asked Katy to marry him.”

Cooper raised his eyebrows. “Really? Well, I guess congratulations are in order.”

“Yes. Really,” I sighed.

“You don’t seem too happy about it.”

“Why would I be? She’s my best friend and you know how he treats her. How can I be happy about that?”

“If she’s happy, you should be happy.”

“You men just don’t get it!”

Cooper laughed. “No. You women make it so difficult. It’s not your life. You need to let her live hers. Let her make her own mistakes.”

“Even when I know she’s making what could be the biggest mistake of her life and setting herself up for another heartbreak?”

“Even then, Pres. You are her friend and you will be there for her if she needs you, but you can’t tell her what to do.”

“I just don’t…”

“Hi, Dr. Devon. Thanks for meeting us,” Cooper said, interrupting me and standing up to greet the chemist. “Please. Have a seat.”

Sam Devon sat down and looked over at me.

“Hi, Dr. Devon. I’m Presley Thurman, an associate of Cooper’s,” I said, reaching over to shake his hand. He didn’t look like a typical science guy. He had on a short sleeved polo and I could tell by his biceps he must work out a lot.  He didn’t look like someone who spent his days in the lab.

“Nice to meet you, Presley. Please, both of you, call me Sam.”

Cooper turned to me and explained, “Sam is a chemistry professor at the University of Texas.”

Sam nodded and looked at Cooper. “When you called, you said you wanted to know about the process of synthesizing the tassel flower into a liquid poison?”

“Yes,” Cooper said. “We know the victim ingested the poison, and the medical examiner said it had been ingested in liquid form, but I thought maybe if I had a better understanding of how that process happened it might give us a direction to go in.”

“Sure. It’s a rather simple process, simpler than you might think. You can just use a steam distillation process. In steam distillation, the plant material, which in this case is the tassel flower, is placed on a screen above or away from the water and heat. Steam alone is passed over the petals. The steam process extracts oils from the natural materials and passes it through the top of the distillation dome, into the condenser to liquefy, and into a receiving tank where the essential oil, once cooled, is separated from the water. You bottle that up and, voila, you have the extract. ”

“But you would have to have a basic knowledge of chemistry and how this works, right? And equipment?” I asked.

“Yeah, but really anyone who had high school chemistry would be able to figure it out, and a distillery can be cheaply made with parts bought at Home Depot.”

I had chemistry in high school, and I didn’t see myself being able to do this. Sam noticed the look on my face and started laughing.

“You have the same look on your face as many of my students. Listen, you can look up the step-by-step process on Google, much like anything these days. If you can follow directions, you can do this. It’s no different from basic perfume making, and people make that in their kitchens all the time. Even easier, since you don’t need to worry about the smell. Just the extract. And with a tassel flower it doesn’t take much to create a fast-acting poison.”

“If you say so,” I said, joking back.

“Listen, I have to run, but you have my number if you have any more questions,” Sam said, standing up.

“Thank you for that explanation, Sam,” Cooper said, shaking his hand. “It was helpful.”

“No problem. Take care.”

As Sam walked away, I looked at Cooper. “Okay, that helped not at all. Now all we know is your average high school student could do this. Doesn’t exactly narrow the field.”

“Look at it this way. We know you need a distillation machine to get the poison out of the flower, and it’s fast-acting. Those are both positives.”

“We also know that I didn’t learn anything in high school chemistry.”

Cooper laughed. “I could have told you that before we met with Sam.”

“So, moving on,” I said, not wanting to talk about high school grades, “how do you suppose Hollie was poisoned anyway? Unless Candy did it, and I don’t think she did.”

“Me, either. We need to retrace all of Hollie’s steps that night.”

I looked at him and sighed. “I guess seeing some of the city can wait until another day. Let’s go back and figure this out.”

“I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”

“I’m going to hold you to that.”

Back at the hotel, we tracked Candy down and asked her to take us through that night. Cooper had talked to her a few times, but I hadn’t yet.  So I was looking forward to what she had to say. We interrupted her pedicure, but she was willing to forgo fresh polish to help find Hollie’s killer. Not something I was sure all the girls would have been willing to do.

“You finished practice, went back to your rooms and got ready for dinner, and then what?” Cooper asked her.

“We met at the Salad Connection. It’s not in the hotel, but you can get to it through the garage. So it’s not like you’re really lazy. We just took the elevator down to the garage level and walked across the lot to the back door of the restaurant.”

“Then what?” I asked.

“We both had the garden salad, no dressing, and came back to the hotel. We both ran up to our rooms with the plan to meet in fifteen minutes and take a walk in the gardens to work off our dinner.”

Working off a garden salad? Really? Candy was making me feel very guilty for not walking off the big dinner I had last night, much less the bagel and cream cheese this morning and the Take Five bar that had just been screaming my name earlier. She probably never let carbs touch her lips, much less chocolate and alcohol.

We reached the atrium and Candy started to choke up, saying, “When I came down to meet with her, she was just lying here, and you know the rest.”

“So she had to ingest the poison sometime between going up to her room and coming back down.”

Candy nodded at Cooper. “She was fine when I left her. We both had the exact same thing to eat at the Salad Connection and I’m fine.  So it couldn’t have been that.”

“Thanks, Candy. You can go back now,” Cooper said.

Candy nodded tearfully and headed down the hall.

“Nothing we do seems to give us any more information,” I said, frustrated. “Is it always like this?”

“It’s very slow and steady.  You have to have patience in this business. We know that the poison is fast-acting, and since Hollie was fine when she went up to her room to change and when she made it down here she was in her workout clothes that she either ran into someone who gave her the poison after changing or it was in her room.”

“If it was in her room, the killer couldn’t be sure she would drink it,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“So all we have to do is find out who met her in that fifteen minutes and got her to drink something without Candy seeing them. So she must have known her killer.”

Cooper started to say something and then his phone rang. “Sands here,” he answered. “You do. Great. Okay, we’ll be right there.” He snapped his phone shut. “That was hotel security. They pulled the tapes from that floor for us to look at. Maybe we can see who Hollie ran into.”

A few minutes later we were sitting in the security office, waiting for them to cue up the tape from Hollie’s floor the night she was murdered.  The police had had them up till now and had just returned copies to the hotel.  Cooper had been anxious to see them.

“We have it cued up to when she got off the elevator,” the security guy, Jim his nametag said, told us. “Here you go. I’m going to go grab a cup of coffee. I’ll be back in a few if you need me.”

“Thanks, man. Go head and push PLAY, Pres. Let’s see what’s on there,” Cooper said.

I was excited, hoping this would be the break we were looking for. It was surreal to be watching Hollie as she got off the elevator and walked toward her room, knowing she was now dead. It almost felt a little creepy. We watched as she slid her key card through the reader on the door and opened it to walk through. A few minutes later she reappeared in her workout clothes and headed toward the elevator.

“Damn it. I was hoping…” Cooper trailed off as we both sat fixated on the screen. As the elevator door shut with Hollie on it to go back downstairs, her hotel room door opened. Someone, it looked like a woman dressed in a maid’s uniform, slipped out and headed in the opposite direction of the elevator to the stairwell.

“Figures we can’t see her face. If it is even a her,” I muttered. “Why can’t we catch a break?”

“She knew there were cameras and was bowing her head to avoid them,” Cooper said. “She planned this.”

“How do you even know it’s a she? It could be that creepy maintenance man wannabe dressed up in a maid’s uniform. Or maybe just one of the maids.”

“No. If it was regular maid service, the person wouldn’t be trying to dodge the cameras and I know it’s a female. Look at her ankles,” Cooper said pressing the rewind button for a few clicks and then pressing PLAY again.

“What am I looking at?” I asked, confused.

“Her ankles. Those are definitely female ankles, not male ankles.”

He was right. “I wouldn’t have thought to look at the ankles.”

“Stick with me, kid. I’ll teach you everything I know.”

“Sure,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Now what, master?”

“For starters, you can answer your phone. Your purse is vibrating against my leg.”

I looked to the floor and he was right, my Prada purse was buzzing. I felt around in the side pocket for my phone. Another number I didn’t recognize, but it was an 817 area code, so I knew it was local.

“Hello?”

“Is this Presley?”

“Yes.”

“Hi, it’s Jeff. From the Greenhouse?”

“Hi, Jeff,” I said, hoping he was calling because he had some helpful information for me. It would be nice to feel like we were making some sort of progress.

“I asked my grandfather if anyone had ordered tassel flowers recently and he said someone came in about a month ago wanting to buy some, and he said we didn’t sell them. He said it wasn’t a flower he worked with much and the order was small enough that it wasn’t really worth his time from a business standpoint so he turned the business away.”

“Did he remember what the person who came in asking looked like?” I asked, excited.

“He said it was a woman, young, early-to-mid-thirties, with red hair.”

“Did he happen to get her name?” I asked hopefully.

“I’m sorry but no. He said she didn’t offer it, and since he wasn’t going to grow them for her he didn’t ask.”

“That’s okay. I appreciate you asking him and letting me know.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, and then paused as if he had something else to say. I just sat on the other end of the phone waiting. An old HR trick I had perfected. It’s the natural tendency of a person to want to fill the silence by talking. When I interviewed people or conducted an investigation I always made sure to stay silent for a minute after the person stopped speaking to see if they would continue in an effort to not feel the uncomfortable silence. It would often push them to telling me things they had not intended on telling me. As usual, it worked.

“Listen, Presley. I was wondering if you might want to have a drink with me sometime?”

I was startled. I hadn’t been expecting that. Now I regretted using that little trick because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “Jeff, I’m flattered, and would love to take you up on it, but I’m involved with someone.”

“Figures. The good ones are always taken,” he joked.

“Thanks again for calling and letting me know what your grandfather said. I really do appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome. Call me if you need anything else.”

“Thanks, Jeff,” I said and hung up. I looked back to Cooper. “That was Jeff. From Thompson’s greenhouse. He said he talked to his grandfather and someone did inquire about tassel flowers. Same description as Izzy and Maddie gave me. Youngish, redhead, but not much more than that.”

“Did she give them a reason for wanting the tassel flowers?”

“I didn’t think to ask. Want me to call him back?”

“If you don’t think it will give him the wrong impression. Don’t think I couldn’t tell he was asking you out.”

I stuck my tongue out at him and dialed the phone. “Jeff. It’s Presley again. Sorry to bother you, but did the woman tell your grandfather why she wanted to flowers? Sure. I’ll wait.” I covered the phone with my hand. “He’s going to go ask.”