A Berry Cunning Conman_A Laugh-Out-Loud Cozy Mystery Read online

  Finally I’d opted to make a tried and true dish that I’d gotten pretty good at. I made a broccoli, cheddar and bacon frittata. To serve with it, I made a potato, onion and bacon hash and homemade biscuits. I’d gotten decent at making biscuits, and they kept well. Everything I’d made kept well, and that allowed me to revert to operating on autopilot once it was all done.

  The bell on the café’s door chimed, and I looked up to see a group of teenage girls snickering as they looked at me on their way out. I glanced around the café, and there were a lot of furtive glances my way, but no one was brave enough to say to my face the thing that was on their mind.

  That is until he walked in…

  Brad glared at the girls on their way out, and their giggles and incriminating looks ceased. Then, he turned his glare on me.

  “Berry,” he barked, and I knew that I was in for it. He tended to only call me by my last name when he was upset. As always, his uniform was crisp perfection. His dark brown hair was cut close to his head, and he had all of the paraphernalia of his position strategically positioned. There was a radio clip on his shoulder, and a gun, pepper spray and handcuffs on his belt, as well as other things I couldn’t begin to name.

  Everything was in its place. Everything was perfect. Everything, that is, but the way he looked at me.

  “Really, Berry? A severed hand this time? What, you working your way up to a whole family of severed heads?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” I complained as he took a seat at the grill counter. “You should know that.”

  “Uh uh. What I know is that you—you—found a needle in a haystack. You drove over forty minutes out of town, you walked around in some field that I’d have had trouble finding with the help of a master map maker, and you found a dismembered body part. You, Berry. You.”

  I almost pointed that I hadn’t been the one driving, but decided it was better to keep that thought to myself. I didn’t want to unnecessarily incriminate my best friend. It wasn’t like the police didn’t know the facts of who was driving.

  “And Zoey! Don’t even get me started on her,” Brad said.

  So much for not bring up her name. It hadn’t done any good.

  “But forget about Zoey,” Brad said.

  Phew…

  “I want to talk about you.”

  Oh no… “What about me?”

  Brad leaned forward and jabbed the end of his finger at the counter top. “You wanna know where I’ve been for the last hour and a half?”

  I knew it wouldn’t do me any good, but I shook my head no.

  “I’ve been in my captain’s office, talking him out of calling in a special unit that specializes in the investigation and interrogation of serial killers.”

  My eyes got big and my heart skipped a beat. “There’s a serial killer in Camden Falls? Who does he think it is?”

  “You, Berry. You.”

  Oh snap…

  I vehemently shook my head. “But I’m not. I haven’t killed anyone… I mean, no one on purpose, I mean, that one time. You were there. You saw. It wasn’t me.”

  Brad groaned and hit his forehead against the counter. “Uhhhh, I’m getting a headache.”

  “Well of course you are. You’re hitting your head on the counter.”

  He lifted his head and looked at me. “No, Berry.”

  He didn’t need to finish the rest of that thought for me to know that there was an implied “you” at the end of it. It was me who was giving him the headache.

  “Is it true you were acquitted for arson on a technicality?” he asked, his expression pained. “And that you were arrested for prostitution four times, drove the getaway car for a bank robbery, and assisted in the planning of a prison escape?”

  My heart sank. “You looked up my record.”

  “Not me, my captain. He claims that you are an escalating career criminal and that if you aren’t a serial killer, then you’re a hitman.”

  I reached for Brad’s hand and curled my fingers to hold onto him. “Those things were my husband’s doing.”

  Brad’s brows shot up. “Your husband prostituted you out?”

  “No, no! He was mad about the divorce. I think he paid someone off to have an arrest record made on me. He wanted to ruin me, make it so that no one would hire me. But… I didn’t do those things. And I haven’t killed anyone. I haven’t even tried to kill anyone.”

  Brad didn’t say anything for a moment, and I reluctantly released his hand.

  “You stay out of this one, Berry,” he finally said. “You stay clear of it. I got the captain to back off, but if this keeps up…” It was his turn to shake his head. “I’m not going to be able to continue to protect you.”

  I needed him to understand. I needed him to believe. I was innocent. I hadn’t done anything. “Zoey was just—”

  Brad held up his hand, cutting me off. “No, I don’t want to hear what ‘Zoey was just.’” He started back in with the finger tapping. “You wanna know what I did after I got done talking the captain out of calling in a special squad to investigate you?”

  I very hesitantly nodded.

  “I spent another thirty minutes trying to get him to investigate Zoey. You know what he said?”

  I shook my head.

  Brad leaned forward. His eyes were as intense as burning coals. “He said no.”

  “Oh…” I got the impression that the captain’s answer of no wasn’t as shocking to me as it was to Brad. To me, it was really great news!

  “Zoey’s got something on the Captain, I know she does. She’s got him threatened or leveraged in some way.”

  “Just because he wouldn’t call in a special squad to investigate her as a serial killer? Does, um, Zoey have a criminal record?”

  Brad’s face hardened and his lips tightened. “No. None.”

  “None at all?”

  “Squeaky clean.” I hadn’t imagined it possible, but his glare intensified.

  I had to admit, Zoey having a spotless police record was even a little surprising to me.

  I pressed Brad further. “Then doesn’t it make sense that if she doesn’t have a record that he would be less inclined to call a special investigation of her?”

  “You would like to think so.”

  The door chimed, and Zoey clomped in atop her black, platform-heeled combat boots. Brad’s jaw clamped shut, and I could see its muscles bunch.

  He turned to me before getting up. “You stay clear of this, Berry.” Then he headed for the door.

  “Calderos,” Zoey said, greeting him by his surname as the two passed.

  “Jin,” Brad responded in kind.

  Brad headed out the door and Zoey took up the vacant spot he’d left.

  “We gonna investigate this?” she asked.

  I was going to get whiplash. “Brad says I should steer clear of it.”

  “Since when do you do what Brad tells you to?”

  Never, at least not so far. Yet, even if Brad hadn’t told me to stay out of this murder investigation, I wouldn’t have wanted in. “We don’t know who it was, do we? I mean, it’s not someone we know, right?” I had no idea who had even been killed… or if someone had even been killed. “Was there even a murder?”

  “Yeah, there was. I’ve been monitoring the police radio bands. The guy’s wrist was smashed with blunt force trauma until it simply came off.”

  “Ewwww.” I couldn’t help but make a face.

  “The leading theory is that the guy’s wrist was slammed in a car door and then dragged until the hand separated itself from the rest of the body.”

  I needed to sit. Why didn’t I keep a stool behind the counter? I fanned myself with my hand in the hopes that it would get more oxygen into my bloodstream, and then stared at what I was doing—waving around my hand—and shoved them both deep into my jeans pockets.

  “Do they have a name? Have the found, uh, the rest of him?”

  “Yeah. Word is he was messed up, trapped-under-the-ocean
-and-picked-over-by-crabs messed up.”

  “Ohhhh, you can stop talking now.” I was still feeling a little lightheaded. I really didn’t need the images of what the rest of him had looked like. I had seen his hand, after all.

  “Morgan Bleur.”

  “Huh?” I asked, trying to keep up.

  “That’s who it was. Morgan Bleur.” Zoey pulled out her cell phone, scrolled, and then held the face of it up to me. It had the picture of a man on it. “That’s him.”

  “Oh my God. I’ve met him. He’s been here before.” I was having trouble catching my breath. “He came on to Agatha and Agatha dumped a bowl of noodles in his lap.”

  Zoey made a face like she was impressed. “Go, Agatha! I can create a false ID for her—passport, the works—and design a path out of the country. The rest will be up to her.”

  “Agatha didn’t kill him!”

  Zoey humphed. “Whatever you say… So, we investigating this?”

  “No! Agatha didn’t do it. The cops aren’t even looking at her, are they?”

  “Nope.”

  Zoey didn’t say anything more, but I could tell that there was more. Suspicion crawled its way up my spine, giving me shivers. “What?”

  Zoey shrugged. “You’re right. They aren’t looking at Agatha, but they are looking at Joel…”

  Chapter 5

  “Thank you for coming today,” I told Patty. She was piping a big swirl of icing on top of red velvet cupcakes. We’d made them together—that is to say that she’d made them and I’d done everything she told me to do along the way. Baking was very different from cooking. Everything had to be so exact! I felt as though I’d just been tutored on how to complete a science experiment.

  “Weren’t nothin’,” Patty said. “Now see here. See how I’m keepin’ firm pressure at the back of the piping bag?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, now you try.” She handed over the bag.

  I twisted the back of it like she’d shown me, yet it didn’t look the same as when she’d done it. Everything she did looked incredibly easy to do, right up until the moment she’d pass the wooden spoon to me and ask me to do it. That’s the way it had gone all evening.

  “How did you manage to keep your hands so steady?” I asked. My hands were all over the place as I squeezed the bag and tried to hold the tip at just the right height. But I wasn’t holding the bag tight enough, and when I adjusted my grip, I sank the piping bag’s nozzle right into the cupcake. The delicate sponge was torn to shreds.

  Patty handed me a rag. “Wipe the tip clean, then try again. Here. Do a frosting swirl on this wax paper first.”

  I poised the bag over the wax paper she slid in front of me and squeezed the bag. My hands were getting tired and starting to shake. I squeezed with all my might. But I guess I squeezed too hard, at least with the wrong part of my finger and in the wrong place. My fingernail went right through the seam of the bag. When I pulled it out, a thick, angry curl of frosting followed.

  When Patty had told me to pick up piping bags, I’d gotten what had been marked down at a special price at the store. They were made of thin plastic with a seam that looked as though it had been fused together by heat. When I’d shown them to Patty, she’d stared at them with dismay. Now I understood why.

  “Hard to do what you gotta do without the right tools,” Patty said, taking over the bag. She slipped the punctured piping bag inside a second one and tightened up her grip. She was back to topping off the cupcakes and close to finishing them off by the time I finished washing my hands.

  “Patty, any way I could talk you into coming tomorrow?”

  “Mmm, your girl Brenda still not come back yet? I heard her grandma was in a bad way.” Patty was talking to me, but her hands were moving with the sure confidence of a surgeon.

  “No, she’s not made it back yet… and I hate to say it but I’m drowning.”

  “I’d like to help,” Patty said, “but I don’t want to wake the voices. If I don’t bake too much, they stay quiet. They like Aunt Bella. They’re quiet around her.”

  Up until recently, Patty had been homeless. In fact, she’d been homeless for several years, as is what happens to many people who struggle with mental illness. Prior to that, though, she’d worked in an award-winning bakery in New York City. They were closed and gone now, but Patty and I were here, and I was more than willing to put Patty’s talents to use to whatever degree she would rent them to me.

  “I understand,” I said, giving the older woman a rub between her shoulder blades.

  “You need help,” Patty said, “help that’s not me. I can ask around some of my old associates. See if anyone’s got the stuff.”

  “You mean ask some of the homeless people you know?”

  “Yep, them’s the ones.”

  “Uh…” I didn’t want to insult Patty or make her angry and unwilling to work with me by saying the wrong thing.

  Patty stopped piping. “You don’t want to hire no-one that’s homeless?”

  “Uh, it’s that, not exactly. I, um, they gotta be clean. I mean… well, yeah, they gotta be clean, cleanly, but, you know, they gotta be clean, too.”

  “Drugs? Pills?” Patty asked.

  “Yeah. And even if they’re clean, they can’t run drugs out of here.” I knew that at least one person with whom Patty had been friends was an addict. He’d even stolen drugs from a friend of his who had been selling for somebody up the drug chain, even though that theft put his friend’s life in danger.

  “I’ll think on it. Don’t worry. I won’t ask just anybody.” Patty went back to piping. Then she stopped, lifted her head, and stared out in front of her. She grunted like she’d had a thought—or heard a voice—and then went back to piping.

  No way, no how was I going to pressure Patty to give more of herself than she was ready to give. Her creations were heavenly—and they were saving my café. Whenever she came to bake, I got triple the customers the next day and then some. They kept coming until her baked goods ran out.

  “You go to bed. You look bad,” Patty said, never one to mince her words.

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, pale. Shaky. Take that cupcake you ruined with you.” She stopped her work and looked at me. “They want you to fix yourself a chicken breast and some veggies for dinner, then they want you to eat the cupcake. They want you to take it easy. Rest. Read in bed. Wash your dishes tomorrow. And no wine tonight.”

  I got goosebumps. I’d never told Patty that I liked to drink wine at night. It often helped me unwind from exhausting days that went longer than I thought possible. Owning a café was mind-numbing, hard work that never seemed to end.

  “Um, sure, okay.” I took the cupcake she handed over.

  “Drink it with milk if you’ve got it,” she called after me as I headed for the door to the upstairs apartment. “I’ll stay here and bake some more.”

  I paused at the door, holding it open as Sage stretched herself awake before strolling my way. But in true Sage form, she burst into a torrent of speed a few steps in and disappeared through the door and up the stairs.

  “Good night,” I called to Patty, and then added a silent “good night” to the people inside Patty’s head.

  Chapter 6

  The next morning was hard. I crawled my way up from my floor mattress with a fatigue headache. I felt rough. I’d been up late for Patty’s baking lesson after the café had closed. Now it was a good hour and a half before dawn, and I was once more awake and forcing myself to push on with my day.

  There was no getting around it. I was worn out. I had no idea how long I could keep operating on four to five hours of sleep a night. I was an eight hours a night girl. But I had a café to run.

  So I stood under the stream of a cool shower, reached down deep, and forced myself to wake up.

  It didn’t work. Instead I sat down in the tub and rested my forehead on my knees. It wasn’t until I slipped sideways into the tub’s cold porcelain that I came to with a start. I’
d meant for the cool shower to wake me up, but the only thing it had done was chill me to the bone!

  I staggered to my feet, finished my shower, then got out. When I did a doggie shake to dry, the room kept spinning a couple of seconds after I’d stopped.

  “Meeeow,” Sage said, looking up at me from on top of the sink.

  “I’m okay,” I reassured her, then tickled her behind her ear. She must have been satisfied with that answer because she folded her front paws under her, mostly closed her eyes and did her sleeping purr trick.

  “You do you, babe,” I told her as I finished drying off with a shirt that desperately needed a trip to the laundromat. Next I pulled my long, red tresses back into a ponytail and dressed in a pair of jeans and a baby-blue scoop-neck T.

  I didn’t really have the energy for makeup this morning, but I did it anyway. I put on a super light coating of SPF-proof foundation, a touch of mascara, and a little bit of color for my lips. Even though I still felt awful, I didn’t look like I felt awful.

  “Come on, Sage,” I called and watched as she dashed down the stairs ahead of me.

  I opened the door to the kitchen and almost did a Homer Simpson drooling groan.

  “Sage, do you smell that?” I checked the counters and found where Patty had stashed the cupcakes in covered pans. “She made German chocolate cupcakes, too! Ha!”

  The sight gave me my first big smile of the day, but then it quickly faded. Next to the pans of cupcakes was a note scribbled on a napkin. That napkin sat on top of other napkins. In big block letters, the top napkin said, “HOMEWORK.”

  “Ahhhh!” I complained to sage. “No fair!”

  Patty had left me instructions on how to make muffins and had included the recipes for orange poppy seed and blueberry. Last night we’d made cupcakes, not muffins.

  I looked over the recipes. The ingredients were simple enough, and the process seemed a tad bit simpler than making the moist, light sponge of the cupcakes.

  “Okay, I can do this.”

  I pulled over a kitchen stool, fired up my phone, and spent the next thirty minutes planning out my food day, which is to say that I spent the next thirty minutes looking at pictures and recipes online.