Chapter 5
Tori Mitchell was infuriating.
The AirPods bounced when they hit the table, the tinny sound of the podcast continuing from the earpieces.
If Victoria Mitchell was dumb enough to tell the world her plans, it made sense to take advantage of her stupidity. And at least the last call had been interesting—it sounded as though not everyone agreed with Ms. Mitchell.
“What if getting Prescott off puts you in the killer’s crosshairs? You or someone you love could pay for your meddling in the case.”
Interesting choice of words, and if something happened to Mitchell, those words spoken live on air would send the police in a different direction.
An excellent red herring. But was Jenny telling the truth when she’d said that she mailed Victoria Mitchell the data drive?
It was hard to know, but it was very possible she was.
Jenny. Life turned on a dime . . . or ended. Had it really been less than a day since Jenny had died? Killing someone didn’t leave one as dispassionate as TV would have their audience believe.
It left extremely tight muscles in the neck. Massaging the tense jaw muscles felt good until a sharp twinge shot from a pressure point. Even moving on down into the muscles in the neck and shoulders didn’t bring relief.
Victoria Mitchell had to be dealt with. There was a chance she had the data drive. And that blasted Dark Deeds Unraveled podcast would put Livingston Oil Corporation on the news and on every social media platform. What if the offshore accounts were discovered?
But how to shut the podcast down? It had a huge following. Cases that might fall through the cracks were pursued because her rabid fans stirred up so much publicity the cops were forced to investigate.
The podcaster lived in Knoxville. It hadn’t taken a private investigator to find that out.
What to do next? Listening to the podcast had given insight into the way Mitchell’s mind worked. It didn’t take a degree in psychology or any other degree for that matter if you had street smarts and you knew people.
Before ending the podcast, Victoria Mitchell always teased her audience with the general topic of her next podcast. While she didn’t always follow through on the teaser—often something else caught her attention—Mitchell had been pretty vocal about investigating Walter Livingston’s death.
The decision now was whether to kill her before she left Knoxville or wait until she was in Mississippi. She would probably make Logan Point, Mississippi, her base—it’s where she’d stayed while investigating the Huey Prescott case.
Much smarter and stronger people than Tori Mitchell had been crushed when they stuck their noses where they didn’t belong.