New Mexico zia symbol of gel and then surrounding it with the red and yellow roses Becky had made yesterday. She finished it with Elena’s chosen wording “Tafoya, THE Answer for New Mexico,” glad that she didn’t have to write Congratulations.
Elena. How could anyone have known that the woman who ordered this cake such a short time ago would never live to eat a slice of it, to be at the very party at which the beautiful cake would serve as centerpiece? Sam worked with the frosting carefully, giving the confection her special touch, in memory of her friend.
“That’s amazing,” Jen said, standing back to look at the cake as Sam put her tools away.
“Very New Mexican, isn’t it?” Sam said.
“Just what the customer wanted.”
“I hope so.” Sam considered the finished cake. “I really hope she would have liked it.”
Jen put an arm around Sam’s shoulder. “She would have loved it.”
Beau called as Sam was pulling into her driveway at home.
“Hey there,” she said. “I was thinking of calling you tonight. What’s up?”
“Just saying hi. And, uh, wanting to apologize for being kinda short earlier in the day.”
“What—a guy can’t be grumpy when his boss is crawling up his rear?”
“Well, you know.”
“It’s fine, Beau. Really.” She unclipped her seat belt and gathered her pack. “Did you get a chance to look over those journal entries that I mentioned?”
“Yeah, briefly. I’d have to agree with you. Carlos Tafoya’s political career could have been toast if Elena had followed through on her threat.”
“So, does that give you enough evidence to question him?”
“Probably. But there’s no way Padilla is going to let me do that right now. Election’s tomorrow. If Tafoya loses, it’ll be no problem. I’m sure we can bring him in and there would hardly be a flicker of interest. If he wins, that’s going to be a whole other story. The new governor . . . a murder investigation . . . hell, at this point Padilla isn’t even letting us release the news that Elena was murdered. He’s letting the press and the rest of the world believe the original suicide story.”
Sam set her pack on the kitchen table and shrugged out of her jacket, maneuvering the cell phone from one ear to the other.
“Beau, there’s something else I forgot to tell you earlier.” While she filled the tea kettle, one handed, she told him about the phantom man she’d seen in the Adams house that morning. Bless him, he didn’t laugh.
“You said he was standing in front of the closet in the master bedroom?”
“I heard the scrape of hangers against the rod. That’s what made me look into the room in the first place.”
She could hear him take a deep breath and imagined that he was wrestling his unfailing common sense against the fact that he knew from the past that she sometimes saw things other people couldn’t see.
“And he just vanished, right before your eyes?”
“I didn’t believe it either. I rechecked the whole house.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“No. I only saw him from the back. He was about my height, kind of pudgy, wearing dark clothing and some kind of cap. Just when he started to turn toward me is when he disappeared.”
Again, a long pause. “I’m not quite sure what to do with this information, Sam. I can’t very well put a bunch of people in a lineup based on this, can I?”
She laughed. “I guess not.”
“At least you still have your sense of humor about it.”
“At least you’re not calling me a nutcase or sending the psych ward folks after me. Are you?”
This time he laughed. Turning serious again, he said, “I just wish we had some idea how the evidence—the bootlace, the journal, the bloody coat—ties together.”
“And how to build the case against Carlos Tafoya.”
“As much as I think that’s how it’s going to go, remember, Sam, we can’t pick our suspect and then make the evidence fit.”
“But who else could it be?”
“Elena admitted to you that she’d had an affair. What about the lover? A jealous rage because she wouldn’t leave Carlos? We still don’t know who this mysterious D is. We just don’t have a lot to go on.”
Sam pondered that after Beau hung up. Clearly, no matter how closely he might be tied to Elena’s or the private investigator’s deaths, making a strong case against the leading candidate for governor wasn’t going to be easy.
Chapter 23
Kelly brought dinner home that night, leftover stew from Beau’s house. “They’d eaten it three nights in a row over there,” she explained. “Iris practically begged me to take the rest of it away.”
Sam checked her email and found two new bakery orders from the website that Kelly had designed for Sweet’s Sweets. She sent them to the printer queue and the little machine was chugging away when her phone rang again.
“Sam, please take me seriously on this,” Beau said. His earlier playful tone was completely gone. “I know I should not be giving you inside information, but someone has to know and impartial people in this department are scarcer than hen’s teeth, as I discovered when I tossed Tafoya’s name into the suspect pool today. Looks like everyone in the this office is planning to vote for the man.”
“Beau, what’s going on? What aren’t you supposed to tell me?”
“I got a call from the technician I’ve been talking to at the state crime lab, the one who said he would expedite the DNA test on the bootlace. The markers are very close to Carlos Tafoya’s.”
“So that’s the evidence you need! That’s a good thing.”
“They’re close. But not an exact match. It’s someone related to him.”
“And you don’t want to make a huge issue of this because of the timing?”
“Well, yeah. Plus, I think the evidence is right. It’s not Carlos. I’ll probably have to start looking at his extended family. It’s male, so a brother or his father . . .”
Sam flashed on an image of Victor Tafoya, her landlord. The crusty old man was known for being fairly ruthless in business, but he had to be in his seventies. She couldn’t picture him strangling Elena and then managing to hang her body to look like a suicide. Maybe he helped, though. Handled the bootlace or something.
“Beau, that’s not all though, is it?”
“No, it’s not. I got a threat.”
“What! Personally? Who’s threatening you?”
“I don’t know. An anonymous call.”
“Because of the call from the crime lab?”
“Probably. I
“Oh boy.”
“Yeah.”
“What did the anonymous caller say?”
“Just that I better back off and stay out of this.”
“Isn’t that essentially what Sheriff Padilla said earlier today?”
“Yeah, but not exactly in the same words. And it definitely wasn’t his voice.”
“Beau, remember how I told you to be careful? Well, that wasn’t just idle conversation. I had a warning.” She didn’t mention the source. “It was a warning to ‘the seekers’. In this case, I think that might mean anyone who is trying to solve this crime.”
“Maybe the warning was meant for you, Sam.” He paused. “Damn it, I shouldn’t be involving you in this thing at all.”
“Don’t think that way, Beau. You’re the visible one on the case. And now you’ve gotten this threat.”
He assured her that he would take extra precautions, but she hung up uneasily. It felt like something bad was
