Murder Has a Sweet Tooth - By Miranda Bliss Page 0,35
I will.
I got the message. “It’s so sweet,” I said, and really, it was. “But Jim and I, we want to keep things low-key, and you know, giving a favor that cute, it’s going to upstage the rest of the wedding.”
Eve hadn’t thought of this. Her enthusiasm melted in front of my eyes. “You mean—”
“I mean, Doc is so adorable. And all the pictures of him are adorable. But—and don’t take this the wrong way—but I—”
“You want to be the center of attention that day! Of course.” Eve couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of this sooner. “And Doc is so cute—”
“He’d take all the attention away from me. Away from us.” I wasn’t going to let Jim off the hook. I grabbed his hand and dragged him over to stand beside me. “You understand, don’t you?”
“Of course I do, honey.” After another quick flip through the pages of the calendar, Eve tucked it back in her purse. “It was silly of me not to think of it in the first place. You’re the bride. Everyone should be watching you. Once Doc walks in with the ring on a little satin pillow—”
“No.” I couldn’t be clearer. I’d already tried beating around the bush, and Eve wasn’t listening. “No Doc. No pillow.”
“But, Annie—” Luckily, we heard a pounding on the front door, and Eve went to answer. When she swooshed back into the kitchen, she had Tyler with her.
We exchanged hellos and Jim got back to work. There’s a lot of cleanup and organization that goes on in a restaurant when the doors close for the night.
Left to my own devices, I closed in on Tyler. There were some things I’d been meaning to ask him, and yeah, I realized the chances of him giving me a straight answer were slim to none. But like I said, I don’t give up easily.
“I hear there was an anonymous tip and that’s how you found Vickie Monroe’s body in that alley.”
He wasn’t surprised I’d ambushed him with the comment. Tyler rolled back on his heels. “You did your homework.”
“But I don’t have the answers to all my questions. Like who made the call.” Pleading, I looked at him. “If we knew that—”
“If we knew that, we’d know a whole lot more about what happened in that alley.”
Encouraged, I jumped on his comment. “Which means you don’t think we do know what happened in that alley. Not all of it, anyway. You think we’re right, don’t you, Tyler? You don’t believe Alex killed that woman any more than we do.”
One hand out flat and at the level of my nose, he distanced himself from the thought. “I never said that. I just said I’d like more answers.”
“And you’re not getting them.”
“It’s not my case.”
It wasn’t what he said, it was the way he said it. I looked at Tyler hard. “You don’t think the detective who’s handling the case is doing a good job.”
“Derek Harold never does a good job.” It was more open than Tyler usually was with me. That told me how frustrated he was by the situation. So did the way he twitched his shoulders, like just thinking about Derek Harold made him want to hop right out of his skin. “Harold takes everything at face value. The man has no imagination. He can’t see past what’s right in front of his nose.”
“Like Alex being in that alley with the victim.”
“Well, it is a little hard to ignore that fact.” Tyler scraped a hand through his short-cropped, sandy hair. “And yes, the whole thing is driving me crazy. That’s why I made some inquiries. I heard talk around the office about the tip, see, and it got me to wondering. Seems the call was made from a public phone a couple blocks away, over at the corner of North Glebe and Seventh Street North.”
“Which means some well-meaning passerby may have seen Alex and the victim, panicked, and ran. Then once he—or she—came to his—or her—senses, and he—or . . .” Tyler knew what I meant; I didn’t have to elaborate. “Once the person who saw Alex and Vickie in that alley realized what had happened, he called in the tip.”
“That’s the simplest explanation. And it’s probably what happened, but—”
That one little word raised my hopes higher than they had been since Jim got that first call from Alex. I took a few steps closer to Tyler. “But?”
He breathed a sigh of surrender, and I knew why. Tyler doesn’t like showing any signs