Chapter 20 #2
“Or the attacker was already in the restaurant. The pub was still open, remember? Just because they worked the pub, that doesn’t mean they didn’t know about the prep kitchen or how to gain access to it.”
He considered her, then looked around the kitchen and nodded. “That’s possible and would likely lend credence to the theory of Barry knowing his attacker.”
“Exactly,” she declared, then pulled out her phone and called Jillian.
Barry’s fiancée answered, stating, “I can’t help you.”
“We’re in the restaurant, taking a look right now,” Doreen began. “So we do have a couple of questions.”
“Agh. What is it now?”
“One, what counter would Barry have been working on?”
Following Jillian’s description, Doreen stepped back up to the one she had assumed was it.
“Okay, good. Now was there any chance that somebody could have stayed inside the restaurant after it was closed? Or is there a way to come from the pub, which was still open, and gain access to the restaurant’s kitchen, which was already closed for the evening? ”
“The pub and the restaurant share a wall, and a door connects the two, but it’s marked For Employees Only. So, anybody still in the pub or the restaurant could have been there the whole time we were,” she protested, “but we were there for hours.”
“So, they would have to stay quiet, so you two didn’t notice.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. We didn’t know anybody else was there, and, if I’d stayed with Barry—instead of going to the restroom to get over my pout,” she snapped, “then maybe he would still be alive.” And, with that, she burst into tears again.
After Doreen ended the call, she looked over at Mack and shared, “It really does seem as if whoever came in was somebody Barry knew.”
“Then how many people could that likely be?”
She sighed. “I know this is not a popular opinion, but I’m leaning toward the idea that Jillian’s Aunt Alice killed him.”
Mack slowly grimaced. “Do you have some working hypothesis as to why?”
“I’m not sure on the why, but I am a little concerned that maybe the killer got the wrong person.”
“That makes no sense to me. Alice, as the boss, knew Barry and Jillian were working late right here that night. So, if Barry was the wrong person, then Alice intended to kill her own niece? If so, Alice would have heard that Jillian was in the bathroom—especially if Jillian was playing music on her phone in there, as she told you. So, when Jillian stepped out of the bathroom, Alice could have killed her, if Jillian was, indeed, Alice’s intended target. ”
“I know, so why didn’t she? What would have been her motive for that? What stopped her?”
“I don’t know,” he grumbled. “I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“At least I have a tree to bark up.” At that, Mugs gave a woof.
Mack burst into laughter at that and gave Mugs a quick scratch behind the ears. “Just remember …”
“I know. I know. I know.” Doreen groaned. “We’re back to that having real proof thing.”
“Yeah, you’re not kidding,” he muttered, then went about doing what he was doing.
She watched curiously as he took pictures for his own records. “What is it you came here to look at?”
“A couple things,” he replied. “One, I wanted to confirm that nobody was in the walk-in freezer.”
She stared at him in surprise. “But how do they get out of it?”
Mack smiled. “There is a safety latch for just those times.”
Doreen shook her head. “But how could anyone have stayed in there for hours though?”
“Hard to say,” Mack conceded, shaking his head. “Yet I do have to entertain the possibility that somebody was here from the beginning. The walk-in cooler would have been a good place to hide. And, if the killer had come prepared, with winter coats and gloves, it’s plausible.”
“Would they have been able to stay there for hours though?”
“As I mentioned, with enough preparation, you can do anything.”
“Ha, I never even thought of that.”
“Oh, wow,” he said, looking over at her. “I came up with something you didn’t?”
She rolled her eyes. “No need to gloat,” she said. Then she stepped into the cooler, gasped, and raced back out. “It must be a great winter coat to withstand hours of that,” she exclaimed. “No way anybody can stay in that freezer for a long time.”
“Maybe,” he replied, as he studied it. “It’s set at a fridge temperature, not like the walk-in freezer, but I want to check that out too.
” When she stared at him, shaking her head in disbelief, he added, “What if the walk-in freezer’s not working?
What if it hasn’t worked in a while? You have to continuously look at all options. ”
“Then we get to knock them all off the list for being silly,” she declared, with a nod. “This was a restaurant, and they would need their freezer.”
He shook his head and smiled. “Hey, … have a little faith.”
“Hey,” she responded, “I’m happy for you to do all these checks because it makes it easier on me as I get to knock them up and down against my hypotheses. And hopefully, at the end of the day, we’ll have something that fits this crime—or all three of them.”
He gave her a one-arm shrug as he took several photos from inside the fridge.
She frowned. “They would have to hold an awful lot of veggies to make this purchase worthwhile.”
“They would,” he agreed. “I was thinking about that because there’s an awful lot of room in here for a body to be stored.”
She gasped. “Meaning?”
He turned to face her. “What if Barry had been killed a lot earlier?”
“Oh no,” she muttered, staring at him.
He shrugged. “Again, I just need to know that it wasn’t possible.”
“But how can you make that not possible, when one look at the size of the walk-in cooler tells us that it is definitely possible. But then why would somebody kill him earlier and then put him back in position in the kitchen? Wouldn’t he be cold to the touch?
” she asked. “Plus, no blood is in here, so, even if they did kill Barry earlier, there would be signs, right?”
“Absolutely,” he agreed, “there would be signs. Even if they attempted to clean up Barry’s blood pooling in the walk-in, our forensics team would have still found traces.”
She frowned at him and sighed. “So you’re just joshing me, aren’t you?”
He chuckled. “Mentally, I’m just running through all options, and if that were the case—”
“He would have been drugged first,” she interrupted him, her mind racing. “Then positioned in the kitchen and killed there, leaving his blood in the kitchen.”
He nodded. “That’s very true.”
She visibly shook. “I’m not so sure this was good idea to have my animals walking around here.”
Mack suggested, “We’ll give their feet a good scrub when we get back home.”
“Or they were both drugged earlier,” she suggested, her eyes widening.
“Oh, I hadn’t considered that.” Then she stopped and shook her head.
“But it would be so hard to move them. There’s that extra weight somehow when the person is not conscious.
So that’s an awful lot of physical exertion, especially for an older woman like Alice. ”
“But it’s not very far to move them,” he pointed out.
“But if they weren’t in the fridge for very long, what would be the point?”
“Delaying timelines,” he replied.
Her shoulders slumped as she thought about it. “Good God,” she muttered. “Of course Alice’s husband is big enough—and angry enough.”
Mack laughed. “Just because you don’t like him doesn’t mean he’s guilty.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Because I’m really liking the idea of him being guilty.”
Mack just smiled and didn’t say anything.
She kept running things through her brain, trying to figure out what the logistics would look like to drug two people, then move them into a cooler, changing the timeline enough that Barry could be put out on the kitchen floor and then stabbed.
Jillian would then be placed in the hallway outside the bathroom.
“That’s a little disturbing,” she shared.
“What is?”
“In order to stab him in the back, the killer would have to prop him up against this counter, then stab him, and drop him.” She visibly shook, her mind working over the logistics of moving them and whatnot.
“Maybe the killer used drugs that pass through the system very quickly,” he suggested. “They might not show up on a tox report that way. That might make them easier to move, if they were somewhat coming to as well.”
“On the other hand, I almost prefer this drugged theory,” she admitted, “because it’s a much kinder way for Barry to die.
” When Mack looked at her, she shrugged.
“He wouldn’t have known that he was being stabbed, and he just would have gone from a drug-induced sleep to …
a permanent sleep,” she offered. Mugs gave another woof, as if agreeing. She gave him a snuggle.
“I’m not seriously considering this theory though,” Mack told her. “I don’t think that’s what happened.”
“But it could have happened,” she noted. “That’s the thing about coming here. Now we’re seeing other possibilities.”
He winced. “But not great ones.”
“Maybe not,” she admitted, “but it is something that I have to ponder.”
He shrugged. “You ponder away. I have a lot of other work to do.” And he kept walking back and forth, all around the kitchen.
She watched him until she got frustrated and asked, “Will you explain what you’re doing?”
“I’m going through the kitchen again, this time with Alice’s murder in mind. This is what I often do because I need to satisfy my own mind that something is possible or not.”
“All you did was open up the reality that there are far more possibilities than I had really expected.”
He tilted his head. “That’s what this is all about,” he stated. “It’s about figuring out what’s possible and then making sure we prove it didn’t happen that way because the defense will say most of the evidence we are presenting is circumstantial.”
“That would be foolish on their part,” she stated. “But, then again, you know lawyers, so who knows what they’ll say.”
“Exactly,” he said, with a smile. “And they aren’t dumb bunnies, no matter how much you like to knock the profession.”
“I’m not trying to knock them all,” she clarified. “I just have an innate bias against lawyers.”
“Except my brother.”
“Right,” she agreed, with a chuckle. “Except Nick.”
“Glad to hear that,” Mack noted.
She wandered around with her animals now too, contemplating the walk-in fridge concept for a long moment. Unfortunately, it was possible in her mind, but she wondered what it would do in terms of delaying the timeline. And, with that thought in her mind, she phoned Jillian again.
“Seriously?” Jillian snapped at Doreen. “I do have other things I’m trying to deal with, without having this constant reminder.”
“I understand that,” Doreen acknowledged, “and I’m sorry to keep bothering you, but, if I can’t get answers this way, it’s much harder for us.”
“Fine, what is it?”
“Did you wake up with a headache?”
“Of course I woke up with a headache. What kind of a question is that? I got knocked out.”
“And did you have a bruise or swelling?”
“I presume so. … I wasn’t too worried about my head. I was more concerned about the fact that Barry was on the floor, … dead,” she muttered. “I know they checked me over on the scene and told me that I was fine to go home. They just told me to keep an eye out for my head.”
“And did you have a dry mouth or anything?”
“You mean, outside of a dry mouth from all the screaming?” she cried out. “You do realize that I came to and found him dead on the floor, right? And that’s not exactly a normal scenario for anybody. I was just completely overwhelmed by everything.”
“And I get that,” Doreen replied. “That night, did anybody come to the restaurant after closing?”
“Sure, Aunt Alice did, but it was her place.”
“Of course. Anybody else?”
“Yeah, a couple men she was supposed to be doing business with, though they were not impressed that we were there. We told her that we could leave, but she told us to go sit in the other room and wait, have some tea, while she did her business with the men. She even brought out the tea and told us to stay there. She mentioned that these men weren’t very happy about anybody coming into the restaurant. ”
“So, after the tea, what did you do?”
“She told us it was all clear, and we could get back to work, and we were to stay here until everything was done.”
“And when was that?”
“I don’t know, a couple hours. It wasn’t very late at that point, but we still had a lot of prep work to do. Honestly, we had an awful lot of work to do, and we just weren’t feeling good.”
“But you and Barry had a nap, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, we did,” she muttered. “How did you know?”
Doreen had no idea what to tell her. She herself had no idea what to make of it. The mess just got worse. Even with Doreen poking at her, Jillian hadn’t shared everything. “What happened next?”
“We woke up, still not feeling very well at all, but Barry was very conscientious. That was why I wanted to go home because I was feeling sick. I had texted Aunt Alice how we weren’t feeling well and that we needed to leave, and she told us that we had to stay and finish.”
“Even though you were sick?”
“Yeah, even though we were sick. Which is … that was when the argument between us happened,” she muttered.
“Any chance you were drugged?”
A shocked gasp came on the other end. “What?”
“Think about it carefully,” Doreen added in a cautious tone. “Is there any chance you and Barry were drugged?”
“But when? How?”
“I’m wondering about the tea that Alice served you.”
There was a long sigh at the other end. “I know that Aunt Alice had some issues, and she really didn’t like us being here in the first place, but I can’t imagine she would ever do anything to hurt us.”
“No, but if these two men she was meeting with were people she didn’t want you to have any knowledge of, would she have done it?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Jillian repeated. “I think you’re completely out in left field on that. We still did all the work, which we wouldn’t have been able to do if we were drugged.”
“That makes no sense too, when you could have easily done all this the morning before the luncheon,” she stated, shaking her head. “Okay, I was just working on a theory.”
“You’ll have to find another theory,” Jillian declared, “because that one doesn’t fly. We were talking and quite normal. Maybe irritated but normally irritated,” she explained.
“Okay, that was just a possibility. Any idea who was there that Alice wanted to talk to so badly, yet didn’t want you around them?”
“Don’t know who the second guy was, but one was her husband, I think. I really don’t like him and want nothing to do with him, so we were happy to stay away from him. He is just plain mean.”
“Why was he there?”
“He came in for money, but I don’t know the whole story. If you’re looking for somebody who may have killed Aunt Alice, I already told the cops about Randol.”
“Good enough,” Doreen replied, and, with that, she ended the call.