Sweets Forgotten (Samantha Sweet Mysteries Book 10) (5 page)

By the time she had completed her
little nightly routine, Beau was in the bedroom peeling off his undershirt. She
spent a moment enjoying the view of his rippling muscles.

“You know why you’re so tired
this week?” he asked. “I think you’re not busy enough. You’re between seasons
at the bakery and your crew handles everything there really well.”

She wiggled her eyebrows at him
as he crawled in bed beside her. “I can think of one thing that would keep me
busy for awhile right now.”

His sexy smile still melted her
heart. “Well, that too. But what I was going to suggest is that you help me
with this murder investigation.”

Sam ignored that suggestion and
reached for his elastic waistband.

Chapter
6

Sam pulled her bakery van into
the alley behind the shop and gathered her pack and the now-empty bank deposit
bag. When she looked up, Kelly’s car sat nose to nose with hers, directly
behind Puppy Chic. Her daughter had a big smile and her eyes sparkled. Sam
hoped her own sexual afterglow wasn’t quite so evident.

“So … I’m guessing that the big date
last night went well?” Sam teased.

“Yeah. Yeah, it did.”

“You gonna tell me his name?”

“Not just yet. I don’t know if
it’ll last. We’ve only had two dates, Mom. And no sex yet. Really, I’m not
jumping into a new relationship
that
quickly!”

“Okay, fair enough. When it comes
to a serious guy, I trust you to pick someone who’s good for you, someone I’ll
like, and who’ll produce beautiful grandchildren for me.” Sam laughed and
shifted her pack to the other shoulder. “I’d better be getting to work. I’m sure
the crew has been at it quite awhile already.”

Kelly’s gaze slid over to where
Julio’s Harley was parked near the bakery’s gas meter. She gave that dreamy
little smile again and headed for the back door of the dog grooming shop.

Julio? Oh my god, could he be—?

She shook off the thought and
stepped into the bakery kitchen. “I just saw Kelly outside. She seems pretty
happy today.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Becky said.
“Kelly had a big date last night, didn’t she?”

“Apparently so,” Sam said with a
smile as she hung up her pack and slipped on a clean baker’s jacket.

Julio gave his usual quiet “Good
morning” and started measuring butter and sugar into the Hobart. She turned off
her Mom Radar and decided she better relax about this. Kelly’s bouncy demeanor
was nothing new, and the sweet smile this morning might have been aimed at
something entirely other than the bike. It had to be. Kelly and Julio, a
couple? Nah, their temperaments were so different. Sam just couldn’t see it.

She chided herself as she picked
up the stack of order sheets for the day and spread out the orders to
prioritize them. Beau was right—the shop certainly wasn’t overly busy right
now. Between now and the weekend there were only three weddings and six
birthdays. Becky had the autumn flower wedding cake well under way, as
evidenced by the dozens of sugar flowers which hung upside down by their stems
to dry. One of the other weddings was a very traditional cake with lots of
piping and string work. Strings got tricky and Becky hated doing them, so Sam would
handle that one herself. The third was a simple fondant-covered two tiers, with
satin ribbon and fresh flowers. The bride had ordered the flowers, which would
be delivered by the florist on Saturday, then Sam would quickly put the cake
together and deliver it Saturday for the Sunday afternoon ceremony.

She made certain the cake flavors
were noted and that nothing required a special topper or decorative element she
didn’t have on hand. Everything seemed well under control. Maybe she really
could be helping Beau in some way. She was nibbling on the cap of her pen when
her phone rang.

“Hey, girl, what’s up?” Her best
friend, Zoë. They hadn’t seen each other in a couple of weeks.

“We need to get together, maybe
‘do lunch’,” Sam joked.

“Just say when.”

“Actually, lunch might be tricky
but how about if I pop by for a cup of tea after work today?”

Zoë seemed delighted with that
idea. “I have a special Assam that’s waiting to be opened.”

With a plan in place, Sam set her
phone down and picked up the nearest order form. Five minutes later she was
happily piping brightly colored frosting onto a five-year-old’s birthday cake,
turning a square cube of layers into the backdrop for the latest popular
cartoon characters, some little munchkins who lived in a cave world and came
out often enough to fight off criminals in the way only preschoolers can
imagine that they would. That one went into the fridge and she’d just begun a
fairy princess castle, complete with sugar cone turrets, when she heard
animated voices out front.

Jen’s voice came through, asking
someone to wait, only moments before Jane Doe came walking through to the
kitchen. Evidently, Beau’s Colorado lead had not worked out.

“Hi, Sam.” Jane wore the same
clothing as yesterday. She or someone else had taken the time to sew her ripped
sleeve seam back together and the blouse had been laundered. “Melissa took me
by the sheriff’s office but I guess they didn’t have any news for me. They
wanted me to go back to the shelter but there’s nothing to do there. A lot of
the women have jobs and leave during the day or else they are out on interviews
or appointments with their counselors. I thought maybe I could help out here?”

Sam stuck a smile on but wasn’t
feeling the love. Just because Jane had saved a batch of chocolate from
destruction yesterday didn’t mean she had to adopt the woman and keep her
around all the time, did it? She brought herself up short. This poor lady was
lost and hurt and no doubt feeling completely disoriented. The least Sam could
do was to be hospitable.

“Let’s get you a cup of coffee
and something to eat first,” she suggested.

Jen took Jane’s elbow and subtly
steered her back to the front room.

“Okay, now what can we do to keep
her busy?” Sam said quietly to Becky.

“She wasn’t much good with the
sugar flowers,” her assistant whispered. “I had to redo a bunch of them. Her
skill seems to be with chocolate.”

Sam paged through the order
sheets once more. One customer wanted a ganache-covered cream cake and another
had requested “something creative” in chocolate to serve with afternoon tea.
She could mention those to Jane and see if the woman’s interest piqued. If so,
maybe she really could be of help. Meanwhile, she would call Beau while Jane
was finishing her cheesecake out front.

“That Albuquerque homicide
detective is on his way up here,” Beau said, “and no, I haven’t had any results
on your Jane Doe. The one in Pagosa Springs wasn’t a match.”

“Last night you mentioned having
me help with your investigation,” Sam said. “I don’t know about a homicide—the
pictures always make me queasy—but maybe I can do some of the computer work
that’s involved in finding Jane’s real identity.”

He leapt on that suggestion.
“You’ll have to come to the department. Our computers are on a separate secure network
and you can’t get into them from yours. But that would be great. Dixie said
we’ve had a bunch of email responses to the notice we sent out, but we haven’t
had anyone with the time to go through them. How soon can you get here?”

Sam heard Jane’s voice again, her
coffee break almost done. “Let me assign her something to do and I’ll come
right away. Say, fifteen or twenty minutes?”

“The sooner the better. I’ll have
to set you up with access and I have a feeling Detective Taylor will be here
any minute and I’ll be tied up with him the rest of the day.”

Jane’s smile lit up when Sam
presented her with the idea of making something chocolate for a ladies tea. “Do
you have any Grand Marnier? I remember a certain type of truffle …”

Sam scanned the supply shelf and
came up with a bottle of the rich liqueur. “Go for it. Truffles sound like just
the thing.”

She sent a little cautionary
glance toward Becky. Translation: taste one before they go out to the customer.

“Oh, Sam,” Jane said. “I came
across something that might be meaningful.” She reached into the pocket of her
skirt and came out with a small slip of paper, which she handed to Sam.

The scrap appeared to have been
torn from a pad of generic white paper. It contained a string of numbers,
handwritten in blue ink—3679854. Sam studied Jane’s face.

“I think it’s my writing, but I
have no idea what they mean.”

“Seven digits—it could be a phone
number, but it’s not a local one.”

Jane simply shrugged. It could
take days to dial it with every area code in the country, and even if she
reached someone, Sam had no idea what to ask. Are you missing a slender, dark
haired woman? Surely Beau’s department had access to quicker ways of checking.
She told Jane she would take it to him.

Ten minutes later she had found a
parking spot on the side street near the Sheriff’s Department office and walked
in to find Beau talking with a man in his fifties whose sport jacket looked a
little rundown at the elbows. He had receding hair and tired lines around his
eyes. Beau introduced him as Kent Taylor, APD Homicide.

Taylor gave her an almost surly
hello that Sam chalked up more to an attitude of ‘let’s get on with it’ than
rudeness. Beau pointed Taylor in the direction of the office coffee machine and
excused himself, leading Sam into his private office.

“I’m going out with the detective
to see if Robinet’s wife is home now, and then to interview his business
partner again. Here’s the file with Jane Doe’s photo and information. I’ve set
you up with a user ID and password, written down here.”

Sam looked at the
incomprehensible jumble of letters and numbers. While she would have preferred
an easy password such as Iluvchocolate, as long as she had the little note at
her side she supposed she could handle this one.

“I’ve already got you logged in,”
he said. “If you leave the desk you need to log out and lock the door.”

“Really? Even in your own
department?”

“It’s a rule. Not that the guys
would do anything dishonest with the information but people are always closing
out someone else’s file and losing information that wasn’t saved. It’s simpler
if we all follow the log-out protocol.”

“Got it. So, what am I looking
for?”

“Go through these emails. A lot
of them will be negative—just saying they don’t have our Jane Doe in their
files. If they ask for a courtesy check on their own missing persons cases,
save those for one of my guys to work later. What you’re looking for would be
some other department who thinks the MP they’re looking for could be your Jane.
Compare the photos they will have attached and see if it’s remotely possible.
Print out any promising ones, file the others.” He showed her how he had
already set up folders to save the other messages.

“Don’t delete anything. You never
know how or when something might be of use. Just file them for now.”

She showed Beau the paper with
numbers Jane had found in her pocket this morning and mentioned their theory
that it could be a phone number.

“Pretty generic, but if it’s a
telephone, Dixie can do some things to cross check it.” He took the slip and walked
toward dispatch before leaving the building.

It took only a half hour of
click-and-drag tedium for Sam to decide that piping roses on birthday cakes was
thrilling by comparison to law enforcement work. She felt her eyes glazing over
and decided to log out for awhile and stretch. At the coffee machine she poured
a cup but it turned out horrendously strong and tasted like the janitor might
have made it two days ago. She realized she was spoiled to her signature blend
at the shop and the fact that Jen kept the pot refreshed throughout the day.
She trudged back to the desk and pulled her login information from the slip of
paper in her pocket.

Two hours later she had organized
the responses into folders as Beau wanted. Although a couple of them showed
dark-haired women of about the right age and build, none pictured the Jane Doe
sitting in Sam’s shop right now. It looked fairly certain that she would have
to spend another night in the women’s shelter.

*
* *

Beau negotiated Goldenrod Lane, remembering
the exact turn to the Robinet house only a moment before he reached it. Kent
Taylor looked around with the wonderment city folks showed when they
encountered high-dollar homes in remote rural places. The Albuquerque cop was a
man of few words, Beau was discovering. Beyond the initial greeting when he
arrived in Taos this morning, he’d not said much. In fairness, what was there
to say? Reports had been emailed and Beau had read them all—the autopsy, the
crime scene details, what little information had been obtained from employees
at the Kingston Arms. He pulled into the Robinet driveway, seeing no changes in
the house or acreage since his last visit.

Taylor got out of the passenger
seat and automatically walked to the roadside mailbox, opening it and pulling
out a sheaf of envelopes.

“Looks like no one’s checked mail
in a few days,” he said, flipping through the stack as he returned to Beau’s
cruiser. “Couple bills, bunch of junk. This one looks like some kind of
greeting card. Addressed to Josephine Robinet. Maybe it’s her birthday and she
took a trip somewhere.”

“Anything’s possible.” Beau
scanned the front entry where a skim of dust covered the deck, not mussed by a
single footprint. He would look through the mail later.

“Here’s something from the
Holbrook Academy,” Taylor said. “Looks like a billing statement. They got a
kid?”

“Yeah, Zack’s parents mentioned a
grandson.”

“That’s someone else to notify.
Poor little guy.”

“I get the impression he’s a
teenager. Hard to tell how they take news like this. I’ll check with the
grandparents. They’ve probably already made the call or gone down to visit.”

Taylor stared at the large house.
“Looks like these folks have the money to afford sending a kid to Holbrook.”

Beau thought about the luxurious
office furnishings at ChanZack Innovations and the trendy clothing the business
partner wore. Appearances didn’t always mean a lot but it was entirely credible
that they could send their kid someplace like Holbrook Academy.

He walked up to the front door
and pressed the doorbell. Again, the hollow-sounding chimes inside. There was a
film of grit on the doorknob. Of course, owners would likely come and go
through the attached garage. He walked toward it. Kent Taylor had pocketed the
mail and followed along.