TWELVE
“LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT, DARLA.
YOU CHASED A strange girl because your cat gave her a funny look?”
Reese was giving her a funny look of his own, and Darla bit back a frustrated groan.
She knew her instincts had been right.
The problem would be convincing Reese.
The detective had shown up on her stoop not long after she had dragged herself, sweating and gasping for breath, back to the store after a fruitless sprint down Crawford Avenue.
Her quarry had looked up from the wall of flowers just in time to see a determined Darla advancing on her.
Either the girl had recognized her, or else she’d seen the purpose in Darla’s expression.
Either way, she had promptly fled the scene with Darla in hot pursuit, but had managed to put sufficient distance between them long enough to catch one of the borough’s few cabs and make good her escape.
Watching the taxi speed off with the girl inside, Darla had made an immediate vow to join a gym and get back into shape.
Now, back in her apartment, she was fortifying herself with a tall glass of sweet tea as she related the details of her missed encounter to the detective and Jake.
Both were perched on the prickly horsehair couch while Darla paced impatiently about the small room.
Reese had exchanged last night’s head-to-toe black for a fashionably tight and faded pair of jeans topped by a short-sleeved, navy Henley.
He’d stripped off the black motorcycle jacket that he’d walked in wearing—a jacket that looked like it had seen the asphalt at some point—giving her a good look at the bulging biceps she recalled from the previous evening.
Remembering, too, that she was still ticked at the guy for his attitude last night, she made a point of not paying attention to said muscles, or the fact that this vaguely retro look suited him.
To her credit, Jake hadn’t yet cracked a smile over the situation, though she was surveying Darla with a tolerant expression that spoke volumes.
She set down her own tea glass on the coffee table and propped her Docs-clad feet beside it.
“All right, kid, let me catch up here, since I came to the party late,” the older woman began.
“You say you saw this girl from a third-story window half a block away, but you’re sure she’s the same girl from the other day who you also saw only from a distance.
No offense, but that’s pretty thin as far as eyewitness testimony goes.
How could you be sure it was her?”
“Right,” Reese interjected, jabbing his pen in the air for emphasis.
Though technically off-duty, he had whipped out a notebook and was scribbling in it as she described her encounter.
“I was there last night and saw the same girl, too—except I didn’t really see her face, because she was wearing some sort of hood.
No way could I pick her out of a crowd.
Jake’s the only one who actually ever talked to her, as far as I know.”
“I know it was her,” Darla insisted.
“I could tell from her body language, from the way she stood.”
When the pair merely looked at her expectantly, she shook her head.
“Look, back in high school I had a friend who was nearsighted.
She couldn’t wear contact lenses for some reason, and she was too vain to wear glasses.
But it didn’t matter.
She told me she could see someone clear down the hall and tell who it was, even though they were blurry, just by the way they moved.
Same principle here.
Besides, isn’t it telling that the girl took off running when I tried to talk to her?”
“Uh-huh.”
Reese flipped his notebook shut.
“Which is what I’d do if I had a crazy woman chasing after—ouch!”
Clapping a hand to his neck, he swung around to glare at Hamlet.
The feline lay sprawled atop the sofa back, conveniently within paws’ reach of the man but with both those appendages neatly tucked against his chest.
“Your damn cat scratched me,” the detective claimed in an accusing tone.
Hamlet stared back at him, green eyes unflinching and round with innocence.
Darla knew from experience that this likely meant the hardheaded feline indeed was guilty as charged, despite none of them having actually witnessed the supposed attack.
She suppressed a smile as she fleetingly reflected on the concept of instant karma as it applied to Reese.
Hamlet was owed a nice treat for that one.
She and Hamlet might not be bosom buddies, but apparently he didn’t care for a stranger dissing his human roommate.
Aloud, however, she made the appropriate noises of concerned dismay.
“Bad kitty!”
she declared and shook a finger in the cat’s direction.
Then, to Reese, she added, “Are you bleeding?
Here, let me take a look.
I’ve got bandages if you need them.”
“Don’t be such a big baby, Reese,” Jake said before he could answer.
“I can see from here it’s just a nick.
Hell, I’ve had worse paper cuts than that.
Believe me, you’ll live.”
From the expression on the detective’s face, Darla guessed he was counting to ten.
After a few seconds of silence, and through gritted teeth, he said, “Thanks for everyone’s concern .
.
.
and yes, I’ll live.
But that spawn of Garfield better hope I don’t come down with cat scratch fever.”
The detective shot the spawn in question a cold look and removed himself to one of a pair of ladder-back chairs situated a safe distance from the feline.
Straddling it—chair, not cat—and tapping his notebook against his knee, he said, “So let’s assume the girl you saw
is
your Lone Protester.
That could be interesting in light of some things I found online last night.
Problem is, your sighting doesn’t do us much good, not unless you got the cab number.”
“Gotcha covered.”
Darla rattled off the information, which she had taken care to memorize as soon as she realized that the girl had escaped her.
While Reese scribbled that down, Jake gave her a smile of approval.
“First-rate work, kid.
Now, I don’t suppose your girl conveniently dropped her wallet or anything, did she?”
“Not her wallet .
.
.
but I have something almost as good.”
Setting down her tea, Darla went over to her old-fashioned rolltop desk.
Propped atop it was a large white note card illustrated with a single red rose.
Careful to hold it by one corner, she handed off the note to Jake, who’d dragged herself up from the couch to follow.
“I saw her put this on a pile of black carnations along with a bunch of other cards,” she explained, trying to sound blasé, though in fact her discovery had only bolstered her earlier suspicions.
“I stopped to pick it up, and that’s how she got away from me.”
Which sounded better than admitting she’d been outrun.
Jake squinted at the card a moment and then read aloud,
“Sorry for what I did, I needed the money
.
”
“I told you there was something fishy going on,” Darla exclaimed.
“Maybe everyone was wrong about Marnie and her gang being innocent victims, too.
Maybe the Lord’s Blessing Church paid her to help bump off Valerie.”
Her enthusiasm for her hypothesis building, Darla rushed on, “It all makes sense now.
The girl lured Valerie outside with the whole protest act, waited for the right moment and,
pow .
.
.
off the curb Valerie went.
Marnie and her van do the dirty work, the girl vanishes into the crowd of fans, and the police chalk off Valerie’s death as an accident.
Case closed.
So what do you think?”
“I think you need to take a deep breath and leave the investigating to the professionals,” Reese answered her, not bothering to suppress a dismissive snort that promptly burst Darla’s sleuthing bubble.
“There’s a little thing called evidence .
.
.
and a random Hallmark card isn’t enough to convict someone with.”
“Whatever,” Darla muttered.
“But you have to admit, that card is more than the police have.”
“Now, now, children .
.
.
play nice,” Jake said with an absent frown, still studying the card in question.
Darla noted that she, too, was taking care not to touch more than a corner of it.
She reviewed it a moment longer and then looked back up at Darla.
“I hate to ask, but how about we take a look at the lipstick note that Hamlet found?”
While Jake explained to Reese how Hamlet had found the discarded paper, Darla opened the desk’s top drawer and triumphantly handed over the page, still in its plastic protector.
Jake scrutinized both documents side by side before walking them over to Reese.
“Doesn’t look like the same handwriting, but it’s kind of a coincidence that we found this, too.
Take a look.”
Reese did as ordered, and a flicker of interest replaced his previous expression of forced tolerance.
“Okay, let’s see if we can track down that cab.”
He pulled out his cell phone and dialed.
His muttered conversation with the person on the other end took only a few seconds before he hung up and addressed the women again.
“I’ve got a buddy at the cab company who’ll call me back in a minute.
Now, don’t get your hopes up,” he cautioned as Darla allowed herself a celebratory fist pump.
“Even together, all this isn’t exactly what I’d call a confession, but maybe your hellcat over there”—he gestured at Hamlet, who responded with a yawn—“has a knack for police work.
Darla, do you have a computer here with Internet access we could use?”
“Sure.”
Feeling vindicated, Darla slid up the rolltop’s slatted panel to reveal a sleek laptop within the oversized cubby.
She booted up the computer as Reese abandoned his seat and headed in her direction.
“I assume you want to drive?”
she said with a deliberately bright smile, vacating her seat.
Appearing not in the least chastened, he simply nodded and sat down.
While Jake and Darla both peered over his shoulders, he entered the address of a popular video-upload site.
“Like I said before, with all the kids and their camera phones, I figured there’d be plenty of video from the autographing floating around.
I checked when I got home last night and found at least fifty new Valerie Baylor clips that had been uploaded to YouTube.
I must have watched forty-nine of them before I found something.”
He typed in a search string, and a series of tiny screen shots appeared on the page.
He clicked on one, which pulled up a black rectangle tagged at eleven minutes, seven seconds that was labeled “Me and Alexa and Bridgette and Emily waiting for Valerie Baylor.”
The clip loaded to focus on a red-lipsticked, braces-filled mouth that presumably belonged to the “me” of the title.
The lips pursed in a series of air kisses, while girlish shrieks and giggles served as an audio backdrop.
After a few seconds, the amateur videographer turned her camera from her dental work to the grainy, close-up faces of several other shrieking teens, equally red-lipped and grinning.
Wincing a little, Reese dialed down the volume.
Now, the clip was a silent show of black-caped girls chattering, dancing, and mugging for the camera.
Despite the nighttime venue, however, the ambient light along the street had provided a surprisingly decent view of the action.
While Darla and Jake watched expectantly, Reese took on the role of voice-over narrator.
“You’ve got the one girl filming her three friends”—he pointed out two blondes and one brunette, all of whom appeared about fourteen years old—“and you can see the antique store behind them.
That’s our establishing shot.
Now, the girl with the camera phone swings around to show the steps leading up to Darla’s store, and then goes back to her friends.”
“Ugh, I’m getting dizzy,” Jake complained as the video swirled just as he predicted.
“Another Spielberg, the kid ain’t.”
“It goes on like this for a while,” Reese said.
“Now, around the nine-minute mark is where we get down to business.
You’ll see Ms.
Baylor walking toward us in a minute.
Watch.”
Darla and Jake obediently leaned closer as the camera girl apparently ducked beneath the barricade.
The video jumped about again for a few dizzying seconds, and Darla felt a bit of momentary queasiness herself.
Then the camera focused in again, showing a long view of the street leading away from the store.