Sugar Coated Sins by Jessica Beck Read Free Book Online Page B

just bow out now.   “I’ll tell you what I am willing to do.   I’ll be careful, and so will Grace.”
    “Good.”
    As I started to leave, Jake caught
Stephen Grant’s attention, which wasn’t hard to do, since the officer was
hovering around outside the office.   As
Stephen headed for the door, I left, giving my husband one last smile before I
was gone.
    It was time to find Grace and see
what we could uncover about the murder victim.   The trail was the coldest we’d ever tackled, but between the two of us,
I had a hunch that we’d be able to come up with something that would help track
down a killer.

 

 
    Chapter
8

 
 
    “Hey, partner.   Are you up for a little digging?” I asked Grace
after she let me in through her front door.
    “I’m raring to go,” she said.   “How did things go with Gabby?”
    “How do you think?”
    “Did she make you beg for
information?   I hate when she does that,”
Grace said as she grabbed her house key.
    “As a matter of fact, she couldn’t
wait to tell me all about Benjamin Port,” I said as we walked outside.
    “How did you manage that?”   Grace looked suitably impressed, but I wasn’t
going to spoil it with facts.
    “Let me have a few secrets of my
own,” I said with a grin.
    “If you’re willing to tackle that
woman head on, you’re entitled to whatever you want.   What did she tell you?”
    “As far as Gabby could come up
with, there were three people who might have wanted to see Benjamin dead, but
after I left, I had four people on my list.”
    “Are you including Gabby herself?”
Grace asked.   “If you haven’t, we have to
at least consider her a potential killer, no matter how unlikely it might feel
to us.”
    I tried to hide my
disappointment.   “I feel the exact same
way.   Are we both brilliant, or do we
just think along the same lines?”
    “Why can’t it be both?   I’ve been around you a lot when you’ve been
investigating murder, so it makes sense that great minds might think alike,”
she said.   “Do you really believe that
Gabby might have poisoned him?”
    “I don’t like to admit it, but
it’s something we have to consider.   She
was awfully forthcoming about her own list of suspects.   She told me about Hilda Fremont from the
Boxcar Grill, Benjamin’s own sister, and Judge Hurley, of all people.”
    “You act surprised.   I don’t have any trouble seeing him doing
it,” Grace said, shocking me a little with how confident she sounded.
    “Honestly?   I couldn’t.”
    “That’s because you’ve never been
judged by him in court.”
    “Oh, that’s right.   He tried your speeding ticket case, didn’t
he?” I asked.   I remembered that it
hadn’t gone well for Grace, and she’d lost her license for three months for
driving forty-five miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone.   The new limit signs had just been placed that
morning, and her attorney had asked for mercy.   What Grace had gotten was the harshest penalty the law allowed.   She would have lost her job, but one of her
coworkers had broken her left leg just the month before.   She could manage driving well enough, but
climbing in and out of the car had been too difficult for her on a daily basis,
so they’d balanced each other out, though the company had docked each of them
half their pay during their time together.
    “The man’s a sadist,” Grace said,
her voice suddenly filling with anger.   “Let’s go tackle him first.”
    “Slow down.   Now that Jake is in charge, we aren’t going
to speak to any of his suspects until he’s had a chance to interview them
himself.”
    “Then what are we going to do, dig
around the edges again?”
    “We don’t have much choice.   If it’s any consolation, Jake has Phillip
doing the same thing, only in the past.   Everybody’s been relegated to second team on this one.”
    “Even Stephen?”   Because he was her boyfriend, there had been
some friction between them