A Beeline to Murder

“How did someone like Eva know a thug like Harlan Sweeney?”


“Mutual associates. The night the chef died, Eva met Harlan in the alley behind the bar and the pastry shop, where they sat in her black Mercedes and hatched their plan to kill the chef.”

Kat opened the cruiser door and slid into the driver’s seat. Abby climbed in on the passenger side and waited as Kat scrolled to an image on her laptop. “Do you know what this is?”

Abby looked closely at a picture of a gold medallion hanging from a chain. “Looks like a man’s necklace. Saint Honorius, I think. Where did you get it?”

“Harlan Sweeney had it in his pocket, along with Eva’s credit cards, when I took him in.”

“That looks like the medal the chef always wore.”

“That’s what I thought. And it has a nice fat fingerprint on it that could be Sweeney’s.”

“Assuming Jean-Louis was wearing it when he was killed—and Harlan Sweeney removed it from the body—this could be the proof that you’ll need to prove he’s a murderer, just in case he tries to retract that confession.” Abby studied the medallion closely. “See the imagery there? It tells you that this man is Honorius, or Honoré, as they say in French. In his right hand, he holds a paddle for sliding loaves of bread into the oven. On the table are the loaves. He’s the patron saint of bakers.”

“I figured there was no need to research this, since you’d probably know what it is. You’ve got more trivia in your brain than anyone I have ever met.”

“Why, thank you.”

“So, this is how we think it played out,” Kat said. “Eva Lennahan paid Harlan Sweeney five thousand dollars to help her murder the chef. The Black Witch was about to close when Eva sent Sweeney back in to buy a couple of glasses of brandy. Eva—who suffers from asthma and carries capsules of diphenhydramine around with her—heavily spiked one of the drinks. She knocked on the pastry shop back door, told the chef that she wanted to talk and that she’d brought drinks in honor of his upcoming birthday.”

“Okay. I’m with you so far.”

“According to Sweeney, Eva told the chef she wanted discuss the upcoming Caribbean trip her husband had scheduled. Of course, she knew that Jean-Louis would be going with him, and that infuriated her. Once inside the pastry shop, Eva made small talk until the chef could no longer fight off sleep. She had used several high-dose capsules, and it took only about twenty minutes, Sweeney said. At some point, she motioned for Sweeney to come in. He overpowered Jean-Louis, then strung up the chef with a long piece of twine that Jean-Louis kept in a bucket in his shop kitchen. Apparently, he recycled the twine taken from the daily newspaper bundles.”

“What about the messy kitchen? It was so unlike Chef Jean-Louis to have his work area in such disarray.”

“All part of the staging, during which Eva lost her earring.”

“Dora must have arrived at the back door for her coffee shortly afterward,” Abby said. “Poor woman. I can only wonder what she must have been thinking as she cut the body down and removed the twine from around his neck.”

“As I told you already, we found the chef’s apron and the rest of the twine in a plastic bag in Dora’s shopping cart.”

“I cannot even imagine how she must have felt seeing him like that. It had to be traumatic for her,” Abby said, reaching back to adjust her ponytail. “If money was Sweeney’s motivation to murder the chef, what motivated him to kill Eva?”