kneeled down and peered into her eyes. “I can’t promise this won’t get out, Mimi, but we need to know who was there.”
With a heavy sigh, she said reluctantly, “Kyle Kirsch.”
Her answer knocked the wind out of me. “You mean, Kyle had nothing to do with Hana’s death?”
She seemed surprised. “No, not at all. They treated Kyle almost as badly as they treated me. Only he was the son of the sheriff, so they didn’t go quite so far with him.” She gripped my arm, her fingernails sinking into my sleeve. “You would have to know Jeff Hargrove. He’s crazy. Sheriff or no sheriff, he would have killed us both.”
I fell back on my heels. “Okay, so then what?” I asked, thinking aloud. My incredulous gaze landed on Cookie. “Kyle, what? He didn’t want all of this surfacing, so he’s killing everyone?”
“What?” Mimi almost screamed, her fingernails digging in, setting up shop. “Kyle would never do that. He would never hurt anyone.”
“Mimi,” I said, my voice sympathetic, “everyone started dying about two seconds after Kyle Kirsch announced his intention to run for a seat in the Senate. That’s a little hard to explain away.”
“I know everyone started dying, but nobody knows who’s doing it. Even Kyle. He’s scared shitless.” She glanced at Cookie. “Hired all kinds of bodyguards.” After a moment lost in thought, she shook her head. “It has to be Jeff Hargrove. He was always nuts.”
Cookie leaned forward. “Mimi, Jeff Hargrove drowned in his swimming pool two weeks ago.”
Pure, unadulterated shock overtook Mimi’s features. She was just as confused as the rest of us. And I was utterly lost.
“And Nick Velasquez allegedly committed suicide three weeks ago.”
“I knew that. Anthony Richardson did, too, but I didn’t know about Jeff.”
“Sweetheart, they’re all dead, everyone who was in that room, except for you and Kyle. There’s no other explanation.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head in denial, “that’s just not possible. If you knew Kyle.”
“Were you two involved?” I asked her. Love was not only blind, it often careened into Blithering Idiotsville as well.
She cast me another one of her looks of incredulity. She was really good at those. “No, we weren’t … You don’t understand.” She stopped and bit her bottom lip, then said with an acquiescent sigh, “Nobody knows this, nobody, but Kyle is g*y. We were in the bathroom talking about boys.”
Oh, for the love of hush puppies. This just got better and better. “Okay, let me think,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “Tell me again, why did you have dinner with Tommy Zapata the other day?”
Her brows crinkled. “He asked to meet with me. I was kind of scared not to. He said he was being blackmailed and he just couldn’t live with himself any longer.”
Blackmail tended to convince people they could no longer live with what they’d done. It was amazing.
“He said he’d met with Kyle and told him he was going to step forward and confess everything, take responsibility for his part in all of it. He asked me if I would back him. He was going to tell the authorities how they threatened Kyle and me, how they forced us to go with them.”
This was still not making a lick of sense. “Kyle’s family has money and you are married to a wealthy man, yet neither of you were being blackmailed?” I asked, incredulous.
“No, but we think we know who was doing it.”
“Really?”
“Tommy thought it was Jeff Hargrove.”
“Wait, the guy voted most likely to go to prison for rape and murder? That Jeff Hargrove?”
“Yes. Tommy thought he’d gotten into some financial trouble and decided Tommy, who owned a car dealership, would be an easy target. And Tommy was right. I checked into Jeff’s financial records—”
Dang, she was good.
“—and he’d made deposits on the same days as Tommy’s drops. Three of them.”
Wow, and yet both Tommy and Jeff were dead.
“Kyle called me later,” she continued. “He told me Tommy had actually apologized because he was likely going to ruin his political career.”
“That’s a pretty good reason to kill, Mimi,” Cookie said.
“No, Kyle didn’t care. He was going to step forward with Tommy. He was going to give a speech today with Tommy by his side and announce what happened.”
Gutsy. “Maybe he changed his mind.”
She sighed in frustration. “You would have to know Kyle. What you’re implying is so against his character, it’s unreal. He felt like he was living a lie anyway, hiding his homosexuality.”
I ran a hand down my face. My head hurt and