White Colander Crime (26 page)

Valetta had been flipping through the dating profiles and frowned suddenly. “Wait, I saw
this
picture in the DM Models.”

“Yeah, you already figured Delaney was culling photos to do a romance scam on guys using the model photos.”

“But this one,” Valetta said, flapping it in the air, “happens to match up with someone you know.”

Jaymie snatched it away from her friend. “That's Natalie Roth!” she said, “But the profile name is Ashley Nash. And it says . . . it says she had been corresponding with a guy named—”

“What are you doing in my office?”

Jaymie gasped and almost fell off her chair as she looked up to find Delaney Meadows standing in the doorway. The noise she had heard must have been him letting himself into the office! There was no clever way out of this. She stood and faced him, shivering, the nerves hitting her in a wave. Valetta looked scared out of her mind, too. “I'm trying to find out what happened to Shelby Fretter.”

He looked startled, and she worried that she had stupidly tipped her hand. If he killed Shelby, he was dangerous. If he didn't, then he should have no reason not to let them walk out of there, or call the police to charge them with trespassing. But he wasn't going to do that; they had uncovered enough already to at least know he was involved in a scam. She was paralyzed by fear as she watched him slip his hand in his trench coat pocket.

He brought out a gun. “You just had to keep being snoopy, didn't you?” he said, shaking his head. “You just couldn't leave me alone. I'd hoped I had at least until the New Year before everything went belly-up.”

“Meaning before you were caught?” Jaymie asked, her voice trembling.

He nodded. “You're worse than Shelby,” he said. “You,” he said, pointing the gun at Valetta. “I know you. You're that gabby pharmacist, aren't you? Lily goes to you all the time for her meds.”

Valetta nodded. “She needs them to cope with
you
.”

“Me? She's the one who's impossible, demanding, whiny . . . Anyway, shut up and get down on the floor with your back to the wall. Sit cross-legged, hands where I can see them.”

She obeyed.

“And you, Miss Troublemaker, you I don't want anywhere near her.” He looked around his small office. “Just sit over there,” he said, waving the barrel of the gun toward the other wall. “And take that wheeled stool, turn it upside down and hug it.
Now
!
”

Jaymie did as she was told, sitting across the office from Valetta, hugging the small upside-down stool. She thought his next move would be to tape her wrists together, but instead, he paced the office for a long minute, silent. What was his game plan? He didn't seem to have one.

He looked panicked, his eyes darting from Valetta to Jaymie and back and around the room. Nothing made sense yet, as much as she tried to figure it out. It was like a collage of random facts sewn into a crazy quilt of happenings with no discernible pattern. Except for what she had just learned about who Natalie was supposedly dating, matched on the dating website.

“What are you going to do?” she asked Meadows as he paced.

He turned to her, wild-eyed. “I don't know. Everything is a mess now. And all because of you,” he said, pointing the gun at her. It trembled with every movement of his hand.

Almost fainting with fear, Jaymie met Valetta's gaze, her eyes wide.

“Delaney, it's okay,” Valetta said, her voice calm and steady. “Should I call Lily for you?”

He whirled and pointed the gun at her. “Good
God
, no! Why would I want you to call that impossible drag? I know what I have to do now,” he said, his voice becoming steadier. He pointed his gun at Jaymie. “You, get up.”

Twenty-four

“G
O INTO THE
drawer,” he said, pointing the gun at Jaymie as she set the chair aside and stood, then at the desk drawer. “And get out a file that says ‘Plans.'”

“Plans?”

“Yes,
Plans
! Get it!” He was almost shrieking with tension, his face a sickly color under the fluorescent lights.

Her hands shook from the surprise of his screeching at her, but she leafed through, found the file and pulled it out.

“Give it to me,” he said. When she went to hand it to him it dropped instead and spilled its contents on the floor. There was a passport and some other cards that looked like pieces of identification. “Idiot!” he fumed. He had lost his cool manner, and was now a nervous bundle of furious energy, his movements jerky and uncontrolled, his sallow cheeks starting to blotch with red patches.

The gun waved wildly, his trench coat flapped open, exposing the silky lining, and Jaymie remembered the fragment of silky fabric she had seen in the workshop. Coat lining; why hadn't she thought of that before? She exchanged frightened looks with Valetta. But feeling afraid made her angry, and being angry made her want to get to the bottom of everything she had been investigating in the last week. “So did Shelby come right out and ask you if you had anything to do with Natalie's disappearance?”

He pushed the last papers into the file and straightened, staring at Jaymie. “She threatened me! Told me that she was going to tell Natalie's dad I killed her.” He shivered, and it was clear that Clutch terrified him. “I never did anything to that girl and I told Shelby that. Natalie was doing some work for me, learning the ropes, setting up a mark. She had a great phone voice; sexy, sultry. She was ambitious and saw the benefit of what I was working on and how quick we could make some money. Not like Shelby, who was a little prig!”

Jaymie was taken aback; she had never thought of Shelby as a prig. He didn't seem remotely aware of her plan to take off, but she couldn't be sure yet. “So you were grooming Natalie to take part in your con?”

“I was already doing pretty good, but just on the email aspect, you know, getting stupid lonely hearts to send me money to come see them.” He paused in his jerky movements. Talking about the business appeared to calm him, and he took a deep breath. “She had some new ideas to expand,” he said, as if he was talking about a legitimate business venture. “I used her for catfishing a couple of times when I needed a female voice on the phone. She was going to try a little romance scam or two of her own on the side. For her the scam cash was just to live on while she established herself in modeling. I tried to tell her she could make more money on the romance scam than modeling would ever bring her, but . . .” He shrugged, seemingly puzzled why she'd want to work a legitimate job when she could make a living conning lonely men. “I set her up on a legit modeling job. Last I knew, she was supposed to be boarding a plane for Korea.”

A romance scam of her own . . .
hmmm
. Jaymie was intrigued, especially given what she saw in his files before he caught them. “But Natalie never got on the plane. We know that because her passport was still in her apartment.”

“Maybe she got scared and took off,” he said, looking uneasy. “How do I know? That's what I told the cops when they came sniffing around a month ago.”

“Did Shelby confide her own plans to you?”

“Plans?” He stared at her, brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

Jaymie thought he was either telling the truth or he was an extremely good liar. He
didn't
know about Shelby's plan to take off and finger Cody as culpable in her disappearance.

“You,” he said, pointing the gun at Jaymie. “Sit back down on the floor, grab that stool again and shut up. Everything's gone to hell now because of Shelby. It was such a sweet setup!” He leafed through the reassembled file, pocketing the passport and some other papers.

The gun was wavering in his hand, and Jaymie was afraid it would go off while he was not paying attention. She sat back down on the floor and grabbed the stool, wrapping her arms around the cold steel base, wondering if she had the nerve or strength to throw it at him and dislodge the gun. It was too risky. “So did the romance scam work? Did people actually send you money?”

He eyed her uneasily as he tossed the empty file aside and shoved the ID in his coat pocket. “You'd be surprised what people will do if you tell them what they want to hear. If dopes will give money to a complete stranger for a few kind words, then I'm willing to profit. Natalie agreed. There was a fortune to be made.” He stomped his foot. “
Damn
Shelby for getting in the way!”

“How did she get in the way?” Jaymie asked.

“None of your business. I gotta get out of here.”

“But you didn't kill Shelby, did you?” Jaymie said.

“
God
, no! How many times do I have to say it? I'm a lot of things, but I've never laid a finger on a person, man or woman, in my life.” He glanced at Valetta, then Jaymie. “Okay, look . . . you want to know so bad why I'm in trouble? Shelby, damn her, called the IRS and the FBI about what she found in my files.”

“The IRS?” Jaymie said. “Why them?”

He shrugged. “There may have been some . . . irregularities in my bookkeeping. That's why I do all my own accounting, but Shelby just
had
to snoop! Of
course
the IRS paid attention. Those guys are worse than the feds! I think that's what she was going to tell me that night, that she had turned me in to the IRS.”

“Did you meet her in Queensville like you planned?”

He shuddered, then shook it off. “No, we, uh . . . we never met, but I'd bet she was going to blackmail me some more. I already gave her cash to get her off my back, hoping it would buy her silence. Fat chance!” He snatched up a few things from his desk, including a cell phone and notebook, and stuffed them in his pocket while keeping the gun trained on them. “I'm getting out of here. Have a ball going through my files, because you're going to have all night to do it.” He thrust out his free hand and snapped his fingers. “Hand over your cell phones.”

“I don't have mine with me,” Jaymie said, as Valetta reluctantly gave him hers.

“You expect me to believe that?” he snarled.

“You can believe it or not; I don't have it.”

He glared at her and she steadily returned his stare.

“Fine,” he said, pocketing Valetta's “I'll leave this one outside. Have fun overnight, girls. The cleaners come in at six in the morning; they'll let you out.”

He backed out of the office and closed the door after him. Jaymie heard the lock snick into place as she stood and set the chair aside. She tried the door but it was indeed locked. Valetta got up and shifted her sweater back down around her hips.

“So call the cops,” Valetta said.

“I told the truth,” Jaymie said with a grimace. “I didn't bring my cell phone. It's in my purse.”

Valetta sighed, but then brightened. “Well, duh! We'll just use the office phone. How dumb can he be to lock us in with a landline?” She sat down at the desk and picked up the phone, then made a face. She looked over at Jaymie and waggled the silent receiver in her hand. “It's dead.”

“He must have had a way to turn it off at the reception desk.”

“Now what?” Valetta said.

“We can shout? Bang on walls?”

“We already made sure there was no one else in the building. I guess we're stuck here until the cleaning crew comes, unless you've developed a skill for lock picking?”

“I can try,” Jaymie said. “They make it look so easy in the movies.”

She tried to pick the door's lock with a straightened paperclip but gave up after ten minutes. Resigned to their fate of spending the night in the office, she and Valetta then searched the dating and modeling files, both on the computer and in paper, compiling the information they needed to prove their case.

“I think that Shelby Fretter went through these files herself and discovered what we did, that Natalie Roth had gone out with one of the guys who signed up with the dating website, but not as Natalie, as Ashley Nash. Now we know Natalie was running her own little scam.” Jaymie shook her head. “I just can't figure Shelby out. On the one hand she was planning to nail Cody to the wall by disappearing, leaving evidence behind that would point to him murdering her.”

“Like
Gone Girl
; that was a creepy book.”

“Exactly. But on the other hand she was going after Delaney, first when she maybe thought he had something to do with Natalie's disappearance, and then for tax evasion and illegal practices. I'm pretty sure she was also going after the guy she suspected did something to Natalie Roth.” She heard a noise and jumped up. “What is that? Do you think Delaney's coming back?”

“Jaymie?”

“That's Jakob!” She ran to the office door and rattled the doorknob. “In here, Jakob!” she said, slapping the office door with her open hand. “The inner office labeled Delaney Meadows! He locked us in.”

“Stand away from the door,” he said.

They moved back to the desk and heard a smash as the door shuddered. The doorknob on their side fell to the floor and the door swung open. Jaymie rushed into his arms, feeling the enveloping hug like a balm to her heart. “How did you know where we were?”

“You didn't meet me at the band shell. I asked the ladies at the booth, who said you didn't show up to do your Dickens Days walk. Everyone was worried. They said you
never
miss an appointment. I called your house, I went by there, and called your cell phone . . . nothing. I remembered that you talked about Delaney Meadows and some of your suspicions. I figured you may have wanted to snoop around his office, so I came by here and found Valetta's cell phone on the top of the garbage can behind the building.” He pulled it out of his pocket and handed it back to Valetta. “Sorry, I had to look into it to see whose it was. Once I figured that out, I knew you two
must
be inside, so I took a chance and busted in.”

She heard more voices. “Who's that?”

“I called the police, too, but I didn't want to wait for them. Not when you might be in danger.”

“I sure am glad you thought of it!”

Chief Ledbetter arrived, along with Detective Vestry. “Now, Jaymie, you're going to tell me everything you know or suspect.”

Jumping from foot to foot, agitated, Jaymie said, “Yes, I will, I will, but Delaney Meadows is on the run, so I'd advise you to get him as fast as possible. The IRS is after him, but he's also broken probably a dozen laws that I know of.”

The police chief huffed and squinted his eyes. “He's one of our prime suspects for killing Shelby Fretter. He was in the right place at approximately the right time.”

“I don't think he did it, Chief,” Jaymie said, taking a deep breath and calming herself as the detective looked on with a disapproving stare. “But I think I know who did. I can give you his name, his address, even his phone number.” And she did just that, writing it on a piece of note paper and handing it to him.

Detective Vestry had stiffened. “We can't just—”

“I'm going to trust you on this and take the guy in for questioning,” Chief Ledbetter said, interrupting his detective and sending her a warning glance. “I want to see you later to answer some questions.”

“Anything you say, Chief,” Jaymie said, as Jakob stifled a smile and Valetta chuckled.

“You say some of the information is here, in this office?” He turned to Vestry. “We need to seal this up and get a search warrant. Have Ng handle it. But first, get on the radio and put out an APB on Delaney Meadows. And we'll have to find
this
guy and figure out how we can detain him until we get a warrant,” he said, waving the piece of note paper with the culprit's name and address on it.