Killer Pancake

He nodded. “And our one eyewitness,” he said, “or the one person who thinks he might be an eyewitness, observed a dark green truck veer out of the garage.” He stood up to check on his sauce. “We found an eighty-seven green Ford pickup parked by the outside entrance of Prince & Grogan. Stolen. Dented on the grille where it could have hit someone. Coroner’s office will match that up with impact marks on the victim.”

I said weakly, “Impact marks? You mean bruises? And wasn’t there any blood on the grille?”

“The body doesn’t have time to bruise.” I closed my eyes. “Sometimes there’s blood on the vehicle, sometimes there isn’t,” he went on. “This time there wasn’t. The only blood was on the garage floor, from when her head hit the pavement. Unfortunately, there’s not a single discernible hair or fingerprint inside the truck. At least so far. Our guys are working on it. We’re grasping for anything.” He paused. “But here’s something. You were the closest person that we know of to the scene of the crime. Relatively near the body, you found that flower.”

“You don’t think—”

“I have no idea, it’s probably nothing. But every now and then you get a hunch. When a flower so perfectly fresh is found by the scene of what we’re now realizing was a homicide, we have to get it analyzed. So I took a picture of it and sent it to the American Rose Association.”

“Sheesh, that is grasping for straws. What do you mean, our guys are working on the truck?”

He measured out white wine and stirred it into the bubbling crabmeat mixture. “As I said, we’re now treating Miss Satterfield’s death as a homicide. State patrol’s out, we’re in.” His big body sighed. “So. Now all we have to do is figure out who would want to kill her. That’s why I’m going to have to talk to Julian as soon as he’s feeling a little better. The team’s working on the evidence too. We need to figure out who could smash into her like that and then leave. Without being seen. We’re thinking the perp either had another car right there, or went right back inside the mall.”

“I don’t believe somebody could do that without anybody seeing.”

“Believe it. People usually are just minding their own business.” He swirled Parmesan cheese into the sauce. “Poor Julian.”

“What about those demonstrators? Think this could be something they’d do out of spite against Mignon Cosmetics? Because Claire worked for them?”

“At this point, nothing can be ruled out. We’re getting the demonstrators’ names and addresses. The usual drill.”

My glass was long empty. I needed something else to do with my hands. So I set about assembling ingredients for a fruit cup—luscious, ripe cantaloupes, strawberries, grapes, bananas. I chopped and sliced and arranged the fruit in concentric circles, trying to bring a similar order to this chaos of news.

At length I poured myself another glass of cider and said, “Remember the guy I dumped the vegetables on?”

Tom’s smile was enormous: back to his old self. “One of your better moments, Miss G. What about him?”

“And remember Frances Markasian?”

“Goldy, how could anyone forget a reporter who looks like a Caucasian Bob Marley and dresses like a class in salvage?”

I told Tom that Frances seemed to have ferreted out the activist to interview him and that his name was Shaman Krill Not only had Frances somehow learned that Julian was only the most recent of Claire’s many boyfriends, but she also seemed, like Tom and the state troopers, to believe Claire’s death was no accident. Tom turned the stove off, held up one hand, and dug out his trusty spiral notebook.

“Other boyfriends. Thinks Claire was run down. How’d she come to these conclusions, did she say? Maybe I should give her a ring.”

“Right, and get an earful about her First Amendment right to protect her sources. Then she’d never tell me a thing. You should have seen her: I hardly recognized her this morning, all decked out in an expensive new dress and tame hairstyle.”

He snorted with disgust. “Why was she at the Mignon banquet? Since when is southeast Furman County the beat of an Aspen Meadow reporter?”

I shrugged and sipped cider. “She said she’d heard rumors about Prince & Grogan having problems. How that translates into attending a cosmetics lunch I don’t know. And please, don’t ask what kind of rumors, because I already asked her and she’s not saying. But I’m going down there day after tomorrow for the food fair, and tomorrow I need to pick up my check from the Mignon people—”

“Oh, Goldy, no—”

“I’m just going to ask—”

“Okay, ask.” He reached over and took both of my hands in his.

“You know I think you have a great mind for these investigations. That’s why I like to talk to you about them. I want your ideas.”

“Sure.”

He kissed my cheek. “I do, doggone it. You love to talk to people and they love to talk to you. Great. You have insights. Also great I just don’t want you getting into danger.”

“You act as if I’m trying to take over your job or something.”