Cream Puff Murder (Hannah Swensen, #11)(78)

“I’m going to see if I can farm out the tapes. Another night of staring at empty hallways and closed doors is going to drive us crazy. What are your plans?”

“I’m going to avoid getting any more instructions from anybody,” Hannah said. “I’ve been thinking it over, and the advice I’ve been getting from Mike, and Lonnie, and Rick, and Bill just isn’t very helpful. It’d be fine if I had a whole team of detectives to send out for this and that, but I don’t. I can’t run their investigation, so I’m going to concentrate on my investigation. I’m just going to trust my instincts about what to do next and hope I end up catching Ronni’s killer.”



She hadn’t been home for more than five minutes when the phone rang. Hannah said a few choice words she’d never utter around her young nieces and plucked it from the cradle. “Yes?”

“Hannah!” It was Mike’s voice and he sounded worried. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling you every hour since midnight!”

He’d called her at midnight. Again. Mike wasn’t concerned that she hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since Ronni was murdered. He’d probably wanted her to meet him in the garage again with a thermos of coffee and cookies so that he could give her more instructions on investigative procedure.

“So where were you?” Mike asked, sounding more than a little irritated.

Here was the acid test, and it wasn’t even difficult. “I spent the night at Norman’s,” she said.

“At Norman’s?”

“Yes.”

“I should have known somebody would tell you, but I didn’t think you’d run to Norman on the rebound.”

You should have known somebody would tell me what? Hannah felt like asking, but she didn’t. It was better to let Mike hang himself with his own rope.

“It didn’t mean anything, Hannah. It was just…convenient, you know? She was right there across the hall from me and…these things happen. You’re an adult. You know that.”

So that’s what an adult was. She had to remember to share that little gem of knowledge with her sisters.

“Well, anyway…now we’re even, and we can start over. I’ll call you tonight, okay? I’ve got to get off the phone now. Herb’s going to call and tell me where to meet him. He said he needs to talk to me about something important. Talk to you later, Hannah.”

There was a click and the line went dead, just as dead as Hannah’s respect for Mike. He’d lied to her about being involved with Ronni, and then, when he thought she’d found out about it, he’d tried to explain his behavior away by saying it meant nothing. Even worse, he’d jumped to the wrong conclusion about the night she’d spent at Norman’s house.

There was a sound from the top of the couch, a low growl. Hannah glanced up to find Moishe standing there with his fur bristling. He gave another low growl, just like he did when he spotted Delores coming up the stairs, and then he jumped down to the cushions and hopped on her lap to lick her cheek.

“It’s okay, Moishe,” Hannah said, petting her loyal friend. And then she settled down again to watch the tape she’d decided she’d view before she headed off to The Cookie Jar to meet her sisters.

The tape was clearly labeled with the date and camera number. The mall security staff was well organized. She didn’t have the list of camera numbers and their locations that Andrea had written up for them, but it took Hannah only a second or two to realize that the outdoor camera had generated this tape. There was a quick pop of the parking lot by the backdoor to Heavenly Bodies. It lasted a minute or two, showing nothing but parked cars and no movement. Hannah recognized several of the cars. There was Mayor Bascomb’s new Saab, Roger’s black Jeep, and Ronni’s old green wreck. Then horizontal lines began to stretch across the screen, and the image deteriorated until it was nothing but what her Grandmother Swensen, who’d had less than adequate television reception on her antenna out at the farm, had called “snow.”

Hannah hit the fast-forward button, but the snow remained snow. This must be the camera that had malfunctioned and failed to record Lonnie and Mike leaving the area, thereby causing them to be considered as suspects. Even though Hannah doubted that the camera would suddenly heal itself, she watched the tape until the end.

Something niggled at the back of her mind, something that wasn’t right. Hannah thought back to the beginning of the tape when the image had been clear, and she realized that Ronni’s old car was the problem. Mike had told her that the car had been sitting untouched on the street in front of the apartment building for at least two weeks. But that wasn’t true. There it was in all its dubious glory, on the security tape from the night Ronni was killed.

Had Mike lied to her? Again? It was certainly possible, but Hannah couldn’t think of any reason he’d lie about something like that. And perhaps it wasn’t a lie. Perhaps Mike simply didn’t know that Ronni had taken her car to work the night of her death. But there was an even more puzzling question. How had Ronni’s car gotten back to the same parking spot on the street in front of the apartment complex? Had someone at her birthday party driven it home for her? Or had the sheriff’s department gone through it for possible evidence and then towed it back to The Oaks?

It was something she had to check out, but there wasn’t time to do it now. One glance at the clock and Hannah knew she had to leave. She was expected at The Cookie Jar at eleven. After a quick scratch under the chin for Moishe and four of his favorite salmon-flavored treats, she flicked on the surveillance camera and went out the door.