Before he could even finish, I turned on my heel and made a beeline for Jodi’s booth, but she was surrounded by fans waiting for her autograph and Flora was nowhere in sight. Hovering nearby, I watched for Jodi’s line to dwindle down, but more people just kept coming. Finally, I decided to interrupt. “Do you have a couple of minutes, Jodi? It’s important.” But as I spoke, I noticed the female officer I’d met yesterday making her way down the aisle toward us. She was accompanied by another officer whom I didn’t recognize. They both looked like they meant business.
“Ms. Jodi Lee,” the lady cop said as they reached the booth. “You need to come with us. You’re wanted on suspicion of murder in connection to Chuck Richards’s death.”
Chapter 9
The mood in the conference room was bleak Wednesday morning as we rehashed the events leading up to Jodi’s arrest. After being taken in yesterday, Jodi was officially charged with murder. Apparently, the police had searched her room and found a strip of pneumatic nails, the same type that were used to kill Chuck.
“Jodi’s waiting for her arraignment,” Bentley was telling us. “Hopefully the attorney can get her out on bond. But I’m afraid the news of her arrest will do irreversible damage to her career.”
Flora, who was devastated by the arrest of her longtime client, had called in ill this morning, saying she’d try to catch up with us later at the expo. As for the rest of us, we were all shocked by the latest turn in the case, each of us reacting in our own unique way: Franklin stared off with a pensive expression, Jude absently doodled on his legal pad, Zach bounced his knees and tapped his pen annoyingly, and Vicky . . . well, Vicky kicked her sleuthing mind into high gear.
“This doesn’t make one iota of sense,” she declared, pushing back her chair and standing to straighten her skirt. She stepped around Olive and made her way to the whiteboard. “Let’s reexamine the facts,” she said, uncapping a dry-erase marker. “Starting with any new information pertinent to the case.”
Zach stopped tapping and sat a little straighter. “You don’t think Jodi did it? I mean, they found the same type of nail in her room. And that lady who runs the inn, what’s her name?”
“Cora Scott,” I supplied.
“Yeah, Cora. She said she saw Chuck leaving Jodi’s room early that morning.” Zach’s gaze danced around the table. “Y’all know what that means, right?”
Franklin cleared his throat and straightened his bow tie. “Actually, Zach, it could mean any number of things, not just what you’re insinuating.”
“Exactly,” Bentley agreed. “We haven’t even heard Jodi’s side of the story yet. Let’s hold off on making any presumptions.”
Vicky tapped the dry-erase marker against the board. “Any new information, people? We were supposed to be keeping our eyes and ears open.” She gave us “the look” that told us we’d better have something for that board. I wasn’t sure at the moment who was the most formidable to answer to: Bentley or our all-too-able Vicky.
I spoke up, telling the crew everything I’d learned yesterday at Machiavelli’s. Well, not everything. I left out the part about discovering that my own son had left school, hid out at my mother’s for over a week, and started a new job, all without consulting or even saying a word to his own mother. But I did tell them about the second-rate job Chuck did when he renovated Belmonte’s restaurant. “The granddaughter said he was really angry about it.”
“That’s a great point, and Oscar Belmonte had been present immediately after the murder as well,” Jude concurred. “But it brings up another factor: There could be others out there like Belmonte, too. People who are out big money because of Chuck’s shoddy work.”
Vicky wrote Belmonte’s name under our list of suspects and then added yet another name.
“Matt Reynolds?” I gasped. “The pet store owner?”
Vicky nodded smugly. “Yes, I’ve been spending a lot of time at the pet store lately, picking up things for Ms. Duke’s new friend.” She cast a dubious look Olive’s way. “Yesterday, I overheard Mr. Reynolds talking on the phone with an insurance agent about a recent loss he incurred.”
“What type of loss?” Jude asked.
I already knew the answer to that question. It was the large saltwater aquarium that had fallen and crashed to the floor. Matt had blamed Olive for causing the accident. And was he ever angry about it.
“A large aquarium,” Vicky answered, confirming my thoughts. “He was telling the person on the phone that he’d discovered that the cause of the accident was an inadequate support structure. Meaning the aquarium stand wasn’t built correctly,” she clarified, looking to us with a hint of triumph in her tone.
I was starting to put the pieces together in my mind. “Did Chuck build it?”
“I can’t say for sure,” she answered, removing a tissue from her sweater pocket and dabbing an ink smudge on her hand. “I couldn’t think of a prudent way to ask such a question, so instead, before I left the shop, I casually asked Mr. Reynolds if there were any contractors in town he could recommend. I told him I needed some work done in my home.”