Laina Turner - Presley Thurman 09 - Romance & Revenge

By

Laina Turner

Presley Thurman Mystery #9

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Copyright 2014 Laina Turner

Laina Turner

Five Seas Ink Publishing

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Chapter 1

“Yay, you’re here,” I said to my best friend, Katy, who had just arrived at my condo in Chicago to spend a week with me. It was December 27th and we were going to hang out and usher in the New Year together with my other best friend and roommate, Jared.

I hadn’t seen
Katy in a few months, since we planned her wedding and then unplanned it when she called it off after finding out her fiancé was involved in an escort ring. I often marveled at the twists and turns my life took. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. The silver lining of that crazy mess was our other friend Dirt—real name Derek, who had earned the nickname Dirt as a child and it never left—had been released from jail in a chain of events that put the real killer behind bars. Thank goodness. It was hard to believe one of your childhood friends was a murderer. Dirt had been in prison after confessing to a murder he didn’t actually commit.

Dirt
had escaped from jail in order to prove his innocence, which he eventually did. I knew Katy had been spending a lot of time with him since all that had happened so I was very curious to find out what was really going on. They wouldn’t have been a couple I’d have put together, but sometimes those most unlikely ended up being those who were the best together. They had been friends for years, and friendship was often the best foundation for a good relationship. Plus I wanted to hear about a relationship that was going well. Not the train wreck that was currently mine.

Let me introduce myself
: I’m Presley Thurman, thirty something redhead, lover of coffee, wine, and food—eating it, not cooking it. Meaning I was more often in my size tens than my size eights because exercise was also not one of those things in my top ten “like to do” list. Like most women I knew, I had quite the variety of sizes in my closet as my weight tended to fluctuate. I couldn’t help it. I liked food.

I
put Katy’s things in the guest room and we went out to the kitchen where I poured us each a cup of coffee. I pulled a fruit tray out of the fridge for us to snack on and sat down next to her at the kitchen table.

“What
is going on with you and Dirt?” I was dying to get the scoop having waited to ask her in person, but it was going to have to wait just a little longer as I heard the door open and saw Jared walk in. “What are you doing home?” I asked with a confused look on my face. For him to come home a couple hours after he had left was odd. His office wasn’t close enough to our place for him to just pop home for a few minutes, and it wasn’t even lunchtime.

He threw his things up on the counter and I could tell something was wr
ong, really wrong by the look on his face.

“What is it, Jared? Did you get fired?”
Hoping that wasn’t the case, but I couldn’t think of anything else that would bring him home at this time and this upset.  “Not even close,” he said, walking to the liquor cabinet, pouring a shot of vodka and downing it before getting some coffee and sitting down.

Katy and I just stared. I didn’t know what to say. He was acting bizarre.

“Jared, what is going on?”

“Remember Becky I work with? You met her when we went for drinks to celebrate Sally’s birthday.”

“Petite brunette. She does the books.”

“Yep, that’s her. Or was her. She’s been murdered.”

“Oh my God,” I said. No wonder he looked the way he did. “What happened?”

Jared ran his hands through his hair, clearly distressed.

“John had called an emergency meeting because someone is stealing company information.”

“What
?” I interrupted.

“Oh
yeah, it’s been quite the morning. I’ll get to that in a minute. We were all there but Becky. John called Becky’s phone to see where she was and the police answered. They said she had been found murdered and got all our contact information from John saying they would need to talk to all of us.”

“That’s horrible, Jared. How’s everyone taking it?”

“Not well. Things have already been a mess these last few weeks.”

“What else is going on?” I asked.

“We initially were meeting because we have a leak in our office and John doesn’t know what to do about it.”

“What?” I asked.
“Can’t he just call a plumber?”

“Not that kind of leak.”
He looked at me and rolled his eyes.

“
Sorry, I was trying to lighten the mood.”

What kind of leak?” asked Katy.

“We’ve been working on this really big branding campaign.
One of the biggest all year. We showed it to the client yesterday and when we did, they had already seen it. Or rather something similar the day before by one of our competitors,” he said. “Needless to say, they weren’t very happy with our pitch and almost seemed accusatory. Like we had stolen the other company’s ideas. John was already pissed over that. I mean it not only loses us the client but makes us look like idiots and tarnishes our reputation.”

“Jared, you always tell me that there are only so many original thoughts. Could it just be a coincidence?” I asked.

He shook his head. “There are too many similarities for it just to be the odds of two designers thinking alike. Similar colors or shapes, yeah. Those are influenced by the trend in fashion and stuff like that, but this was really, really close. Down to the tag line and the font. Same design with a couple minor element changes. And it’s the third time this has happened this year, where one of our competitors has beaten us to the punch. Happening once, maybe. Happening now three times? Not a chance this is a coincidence. Someone is trying to make our company look bad. Someone in our office has to be sharing our information to our competitors to make us look incompetent and eventually put us out of business, or at least that’s what it looks like. That’s the only logical explanation. John, our boss, and some of the others agree with what I said after the last time this happened. This is not coincidental, it’s intentional.”

“Who would do that?”

“I don’t know, Presley. Mr. Stuckey stepped down at the end of last year and his son replaced him as managing partner. That’s when all these issues started, but John is a good guy and we all like him. He actually worked his ass off to get where he is. His dad did not play favorites. If anything, he expected more out of John. All of us have a healthy respect for him and he wouldn’t sabotage the company his family owns.”

“Maybe someone felt they should have had that job and so now they’re trying to make John look bad?” I asked.

“Well, that might make sense if someone else had been up for that spot, but there wasn’t. Everyone in the company knew it was going to be John or his dad probably wouldn’t have retired. I mean, as much as I would love to be a partner I don’t get all the business end. I’m simply a creative person and most of us are that way. We just want to make pretty, meaningful designs. Not to crunch numbers, and besides, family-owned businesses usually promote family over non-family and that’s just the way it is. We all understood that.”

“What are they going to do about it?”

“I’m not sure, Presley, and now that poor Becky’s been murdered, he sent us home and told us to take the rest of the year off because I’m not sure he knows what to do. So I think we need to figure this out or I could soon be out of a job.”

“What are you talking about?
‘We’ need to figure this out?” I asked, not sure what he was getting at. “Who killed Becky?”

“You and Katy aren’t doing anything the next few days and now I’ve got some unexpected free time. So, we need to figure out
who killed Becky and is trying to take my company down,” he said, pounding his fist on the table in an exaggerated gesture. Jared had a flare for the dramatic and when he was upset about something, watch out. Though I didn’t blame him at all. He had worked with Becky and to have someone with whom you were close to murdered, it was horrible.

“Jared, I would love to help you out, but what makes you think we can do anything?” I asked.

“Because you’re nosy, ask a lot of questions, and because of those two things you tend to find out a lot of information that us less nosy people don’t. Just think—we could be our own Mystery, Inc.”

“Are you going to be Scooby Doo?”
I teased.

“Funny! But what I’m saying is true.”

I frowned. “I don’t know if I should take that as a complement or an insult.”

Katy laughed. “I think it’s probably both but, seriously, he’s right. Why not try? It’s not like there’s anything to lose and there could be a lot to gain. It can’t hurt.”

I thought for a moment and she was right, though it was such a departure from her normal attitude. She usually didn’t want me to be involved in what she called “other people’s business.” Even growing up Katy had been the conservative one, whereas I had been more reckless and yeah, I admit, nosy. So it surprised me she was so willing to stick her nose in Jared’s issue, but who was I to argue? I did like a challenge and had to admit this intrigued me. Plus, if I could help I would like to.

“Why not? But you’re going to have to help, Jared. We’re going to need to talk to the people you work with and you’re going to have to smooth that over. So they don’t find it odd
we are being so nosy and more so they’re willing to talk. I would hate for people to think they were being accused because we’re asking them questions.”

“I can do that. I think most of them will be more than happy to talk with you, especially since they already know you.” Since Jared was seldom in a long-term relationship, I was often his plus one at work functions, so I did know the people he worked with pretty well.
“They want to know what happened as much as I do.”

“How do you plan on getting information on Becky’s murder,” Jared asked.  “That’s a whole different issue than someone stealing designs.”

“And I’m sure the police aren’t going to just share their info with you,” Katy said.

“
Seriously, you just dropped this on me five seconds ago. But I guess I will start where everyone else starts - with the Google.” I got up and grabbed my laptop and more coffee, then sat back down.”

“Becky’s last name was Palmer, right?”

“Yep,” said Jared.

I typed in
“Becky Palmer, Chicago, murder” and hit search.

“You think something will already be posted?” asked Jared.

“Are you kidding? Probably within an hour of the murder a reporter had it posted.”

“Really?”

“Yep. See this article was posted at nine thirty and it says in the first sentence that, ‘at approximately eight a.m. police were called to the scene of what appears to be a homicide.’ See, an hour.”

I read on to see there wasn’t a lot of known information at the time this was written. It said that
thirty-six-year-old Becky Palmer, was found dead at the scene. Her home was located in a secure complex north of downtown Chicago and there was no sign of forced entry. Cause of death hadn’t yet been determined but police suspected an overdose.

I repeated a condensed version of this back to Jared and Katy
, and Jared immediately exclaimed, “There’s no way she overdosed. Becky barely drank alcohol when we all went out. She said she didn’t like how it made her feel. There’s no way she did drugs.”

“It might just be there isn’t a visible gunshot wound or knife wound so it has to be something less obvious like drugs,” Katy said and Jared and I stared at her.

“Since when did you become so knowledgeable on the different ways people could be murdered?” I asked.

“Since hanging around you
, lady,” she said and then laughed.

“Hey now,” I protested.

“Well, it’s partly that and partly the fact I’m dating a former cop who likes to watch investigative reports and talk about how he would have done it differently.”

“Dirt! Now why didn’t I think of him
? He can help us figure out who killed Becky.”

“Presley,” Katy said. “He needs to not get involved in anything right now other than clearing his name.”

“I know, but it can’t hurt to get his input, can it?”

“Fine, I’ll ask him when we talk tonight, but that’s it. No involvement,” she said and wagged her fingers at me.

“OK, OK. There are a couple other articles that were posted about the same time and none of them have any different information. Probably the first reporters on the scene.”

“So now what?” asked
Jared.

“We keep checking back until we think of something better. In the meantime
, maybe work on the design theft. Who should we start with then?”

“I would start with Sally. She’s been with the company the longest, except for the partners. She’s even been here longer than John and knows more about how this company works than the rest of us put together. If anyone
was out to hurt us, she might have an idea of where the skeletons are buried and who holds grudges.”

”Well then, you need to get busy making phone calls and paving the way and I need to finish catching up with Katy,” I said, shooing him away and turning back to Katy.