Raspberry Danish Murder (Hannah Swensen #22)(105)

Soft dining music was playing, but Hannah didn’t hear it. Waiters and waitresses in stylish uniforms were serving their guests, but Hannah barely noticed them. Behind the plate glass windows in the front of the dining room, kitchen workers were busily stirring, pouring, and mixing the contents of various-sized cooking pans over huge, professional stoves. Hannah noticed none of it. She was too focused on saving her life.

She was almost ready to drop from exhaustion when she spotted a table in the center of the room and recognized Bill and Andrea. She rushed toward them, too out of breath to shout, and grabbed the first thing she saw on their table, the silver cover that their waiter had just removed from Andrea’s entrée.

Hannah turned to see Gary coming at her, the hammer raised high in his hand, and she jammed the silver entrée cover into his face.

Things happened very fast as the waiter stepped out of the way and Gary fell backwards to the floor, dropping the hammer as he clawed at the silver cover that was jammed over his face. Hannah grabbed the heavy hammer and hit the entrée cover as hard as she could.

Andrea gasped. “Hannah! What are you . . . ? Oh!”

“Cuff him!” Hannah managed to gasp out, hammering away to keep Gary on his back on the floor. “Hurry! He killed P.K.!”

Bill motioned to two of his off-duty deputies who were sitting at a neighboring table, and they sprang into action to flip Gary over on his stomach and cuff him. Bill relieved Hannah of the hammer and slipped an arm around her shoulders. “He killed P.K.?” he asked her.

“Yes! He sent that drugged candy! I’ve got his whole confession on . . . on my phone!”

“Deputies?” Bill motioned to them. “Does either one of you have a phone like Hannah’s?”

“I do,” one of them said, examining Hannah’s phone.

“Do you know how to send that taped confession to me?” Bill asked him.

“Sure. It’s an app. I can do it right now, if you want me to.”

“Yes,” Bill told him.

“There’s an unsent text with photos. Do you want me to send that, too?”

“That’s up to Hannah.” Bill turned to her. “Do you want him to send it?”

Hannah nodded, too shocked to speak. She hadn’t sent the photos of Gary’s car to Mike. No wonder he hadn’t responded!

“Hannah?” Bill prompted her again.

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter now,” she managed to say, glancing at Gary, handcuffed on the floor. “Everything turned out all right in the end.”

A moment or two later, the confession arrived on Bill’s cell phone. “Good work,” he said, glancing at the display. “Take him down to the station. Leave the cuffs on, lock him up, enter that hammer and entrée cover into evidence, and I’ll take it from there. And then come back here and have a nice dinner on me, anything you want.”

Once the deputies had left with their prisoner, Bill leaned down to kiss Andrea. “Sorry about date night,” he said. “I know you were looking forward to seeing that movie.”

To Hannah’s surprise, instead of looking disgruntled or disappointed, Andrea just laughed. “It’s okay, honey. I’m glad we both drove. Right now, all I want to do is go home and have a glass of wine. I’ve already had all the entertainment that I can handle for one date night.”





Chapter Thirty-two


As Hannah took the familiar road home, she began to relax. P.K.’s killer was behind bars, and now they could work on finding Ross’s second storage locker. Except for missing Ross and wishing that he would come home, everything was back to normal again. They’d lucked out and caught P.K.’s killer, the daily profits from selling cookies at Sally’s convention had netted at least three times the daily profit they made at The Cookie Jar, and they had found one of Ross’s storage lockers and rescued the contents before they’d gone up for public auction. On the whole, it had been a good outcome. And to cap it all off, Andrea wasn’t even upset that Bill had cut their date night short. She’d been too busy laughing about the sight of Hannah straddling Gary and hammering away at the entrée cover that was stuck on his face.

Snow was gently falling as Hannah turned into her condo complex, used her key card to open the wooden slat that served as a gate, and drove down the pretty lane that led to her condo building. If Ross were here right now, they’d put on their parkas and walk down the path that led around the man-made lake inside the condo complex. They’d hold hands to keep warm, and they might even stop under one of the tall pines and share a kiss.

As she imagined that kiss beneath the sheltering branches of the pine, a phrase popped into her mind. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Would it have been better if she’d never seen Ross again and fallen in love with him? Or was it better to have experienced his love, even for such a short while? Hannah wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she’d never felt so alone and abandoned.

As she passed the guest parking lot, Hannah noticed Mike’s car. And a little further down, she spotted Norman’s car, too.

She smiled. She might have known that Mike would be here. His food-dar had probably told him the moment Norman had called to order the takeout pizza. Since neither Mike nor Norman had been sitting in their cars, Hannah continued to the end of the lane and drove down the ramp into the garage she shared with the other condo owners. Since Norman had a key, they must be inside.