I sat at the table in the conference room, again, in the Palm Hills Police Department, trying to keep anybody from seeing that my right hand was shaking.
“You seem to be at the center of every dead body inside that HOA!” Javier finally stated.
“Is that an accusation?”
“It’s not a compliment!”
“I’ll have you know, Javier Mendez, that I’m actually trying to solve this case and not just sitting on my ass hoping the person in custody will confess!”
His face became red with fury, and several officers outside the conference room stopped what they were doing and stared.
“We don’t know that these two crimes are related!”
“Of course they’re related! It’s the killer trying to cover his tracks! What we need to do now is figure out what Nick knew that caused him to be murdered.”
Javier set his hands down on the back of an empty chair and took a couple of deep breaths. He knew I was right. I’ve never known Javi to be lazy, so I had to assume he genuinely believed Felyne was guilty. I could buy that Felyne might have hired one of her many contractor “friends” to wire a house to set fire to it, but there was no way the same person would kill a man by stabbing him as a favor to a woman he was giving kickbacks to. It occurred to me that Felyne might be sleeping with one of her contractors, which would give him more reason to kill, maybe, but that just didn’t make sense in the long run. Felyne was guilty of greed, not murder.
Dayna came into the room from her office, her face ashen.
“I just got off the phone with Nick’s ex-wife,” she said. “She took it hard. She said she’d call their kids.”
I didn’t even know Nick had children. “Did he have grandkids, too?”
Dayna nodded. “He had two sons, one of which has twin five-year old girls.”
I’d been holding the grief back, trying to keep it at bay until I was alone with my pets, but knowing Nick had granddaughters gutted me. “I bet he was an excellent grandfather,” I said. Tears formed in my eyes, and I blinked them away, desperately trying not to let Javier see me so upset. I couldn’t handle another funeral so soon after Angie’s. I was supposed to be this tough CEO, but apparently I was just a big puffy marshmallow on the inside, except that marshmallows were apparently more resilient than I was.
So much loss. First Angie, now Nick. Why? It had to be the HOA. It could not be a coincidence that both the President and the Vice President of the Sunhaven HOA were now dead.
You know the expression “seeing red?” I’d always assumed that was a figure of speech. Hyperbole. But today as I sat in my car, I really did see red. I pounded on the steering wheel in frustration and even let out a little scream.
The truth was apparently a rare commodity in Sunhaven. I couldn’t talk to Felyne, as she was still behind bars, and I knew Beatrice would never let me into her home.
I needed answers, and I needed them fast. Maybe I could strangle them out of Cynthia or wrestle them from Brady Bug Guy Strong. What I couldn’t do was sit back and do nothing and hope nobody else in the neighborhood was murdered in their sleep.