While she was waiting, Hannah reviewed what she knew about the murder case. The suspects who had strong motives were already eliminated. Every one of them had an alibi. And the genetic marker on the hair Doc had found hadn’t turned out to be the important clue, now that Brooke had revealed that she was Chef Duquesne’s daughter. When they’d met with Loren at the breakfast buffet, he’d given Brooke an alibi.
Hannah was out of both motives and suspects. That meant no one with an ax to grind was left, at least no one that Hannah had discovered. There was only one thing that made her slightly suspicious, one thing that didn’t fit the pattern. That was why she’d stayed to talk to Rodney.
Although she really couldn’t think of a possible motive, Hannah knew that Rodney had lied to her about going for a drive on the night that Chef Duquesne was murdered and coming back in through the door. Rodney didn’t have the code to the door. Why had he bothered to lie about something like that to her? It was almost as if he had tried to provide himself with an alibi, and he wasn’t even on her suspect list!
Hannah drew the murder book from her purse and reviewed the list. Everyone on it had an alibi for the time of the murder. There was only one name remaining and that wasn’t even a real person. As always, when she wrote notes to herself on a murder case, she added that mythical suspect. It was Unidentified Suspect with an Unknown Motive.
Hannah glanced at the clock. It was almost time to do something to shake things up. She’d done everything according to the guidelines in Mike’s detective manuals. She’d eliminated all the reasonable suspects who could have had a motive for killing Chef Duquesne. And since that hadn’t shown any positive results, she’d decided to think outside the box, to concentrate on someone previously unsuspected who had done something that appeared to be totally unnecessary to provide himself with an alibi. This was why she was sitting in Sally’s kitchen at the Lake Eden Inn, watching the minutes tick by on the eve of her wedding, and waiting for Rodney Paloma.
“Hannah!” Rodney came in the kitchen door and stopped short when he saw Hannah. “I thought you were getting married!”
“I am.” Hannah glanced at the clock. It was one minute before seven, and she had thirty minutes to clear this up with Rodney. “Why did you lie to me?”
“Lie to you?” Rodney looked genuinely confused. “About what?”
“About going for a drive on the night that Chef Duquesne was murdered. You didn’t go for a drive at all, and you certainly didn’t come in the back way. The reason you got back to your room so late was because you killed him!”
Mistake! Hannah’s mind shouted. Rodney was staring at her with narrowed eyes, and Hannah felt chills run up and down her spine. His eyes were trained on her like a bird of prey that had just spotted a field mouse, and they were as cold and hard as lumps of coal in the belly of a mine shaft. Hannah moved back a step, involuntarily, and shivered in dread.
“He did not deserve to live!” Rodney said, and his words were icy as his eyes.
“What did he do to you?” Hannah asked, terribly afraid, but desperately attempting to maintain a conversational tone. “I agree that he was not a nice man.” And all the while she spoke, her mind was racing and her eyes scanned the room for something she could use to defend herself.
“Not nice? Not nice?!” Rodney gave a snort of derision. “He was the very essence of evil. He didn’t care how many lives he ruined by his own self-indulgence. He killed my mother!”
“He killed your mother?” Hannah hoped she sounded reasonable, even though she was afraid that Rodney had slipped from the brink of sanity into the abyss of madness. “How did he do that?”
“She tried so hard to please him, and every time she tried, he told her she just wasn’t good enough. If he’d thought she wasn’t good enough, he should have fired her. At least then she would have had a chance to start over in some place that she was appreciated. But he didn’t do that. He wanted to control her like a puppet master. He wanted to pull the strings and watch her jump.”
“Your mother worked for Chef Duquesne?”
“She worked for the devil!” Rodney paused to take a breath. “He was the devil incarnate! And she couldn’t quit because of me. She was alone, and her paycheck was the only thing that kept us alive. It was just enough so we couldn’t get welfare and so little that we fell behind every month. We scrimped and saved, but we just kept falling further and further behind. But the bills kept piling up until there was no way out, but I never knew! I was just a boy and she kept it from me. She did it to protect me! She was living in hell, and I never knew it!”