Free Die Buying by Laura Disilverio Page A

she was. His gaze flicked between me and Kiefer, and I got the feeling he noticed a lot. He looked more like a firefighter or a soldier—someone active, used to making decisions—than a baker, and my cop antennae went up.
    “You must be the new Lola,” I said, offering my hand.
    “Oops, sorry,” Kiefer said. “EJ, this is Jay Callahan. Jay, EJ Ferris, our own supercop.”
    “Nice to meet you,” Jay said with a strong handshake.
    “What brings you to Fernglen?” I asked.
    “A good business opportunity,” Jay said, gesturing at the display case filled with a dozen kinds of cookies. The glass-fronted oven behind him showed multiple tins of browning cookies, and the smell of vanilla and cinnamon made me realize my breakfast had consisted of nothing more than a stolen bite of sticky bun.
    “Have you been in the cookie business a long time?”
    “Long enough.”
    Was he deliberately dodging my questions, or was he just taciturn? I couldn’t decide. I turned back to Kiefer just as he bit into the huge chocolate chip cookie.
    “Did the Vernonville cop ever show up?”
    Kiefer swallowed and flashed a crumby grin. “Yeah. Dude showed up about closing. Bought a corn snake from me.”
    I rolled my eyes. “Did he do anything more useful than that?”
    Kiefer shrugged. “Wrote it up. Gave me a report for my insurance.”
    “Well, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the rest of the escapees, especially Agatha.”
    A worried look clouded Kiefer’s brow. “I just don’t know where she could be.”
    My mind flashed to the Harry Potter movie where the basilisk lives in the plumbing at Hogwarts; there were miles of ductwork and pipes in the mall. I hoped Agatha hadn’t found her way into them. “I’m sure she’ll turn up,” I said optimistically. “She’s probably found some place nice and cozy to curl up.”
    Waving good-bye to the two men, I resumed my patrol, making a mental note to see what I could find out about Mr. Jay Callahan, cookie-meister. I followed my usual route but found myself in front of Diamanté a few minutes earlier than usual. The grille was down, and yellow crime scene tape was threaded through it. The mannequins still sprawled where they had fallen, a poor advertisement for the expensive swimsuits they wore. They looked like co-eds who’d overindulged on a spring-break spree and collapsed in a drunken stupor. Poor Finola.
    I was just debating whether to call Finola to see how she was doing, and maybe see if she knew the name of the woman Jackson Porter bought the cocktail dress for, when Grandpa Atherton came around the corner wearing a gray tracksuit and sneakers. An Orioles baseball cap partly covered his snowy hair.
    “Emma-Joy!” he hailed me. “You didn’t tell me about the murder.”
    “Good morning to you, too, Grandpa,” I said.
    He waved aside the niceties. “You weren’t trying to keep me away from the action by sending me off on that lizard hunt yesterday, were you?” His sharp gaze fixed on my face.
    I concentrated on looking innocent and added a soupçon of affront for good measure. “Of course not. But the police have that case well in hand. Kiefer tells me you did a fabulous job finding his stock.”
    “Nothing to it with the right equipment. Fill me in on the murder.”
    Accepting the inevitable, I gave Grandpa a brief rundown on the Porter case. “The police have a viable suspect,” I finished. “And they don’t want anything from us except access to personnel records and the security-camera data.”
    Grandpa snorted. He didn’t have a high opinion of Fernglen’s security technology. “The dpi on your cameras is so poor, you’d be lucky if you could tell a sumo wrestler from a burlesque dancer.”
    “Well, I don’t think the cameras showed any wrestlers, dancers, or murderers,” I said.
    “An inside job,” Grandpa said immediately. “They knew how to avoid the cameras.”
    I’d already thought of that. “It could be,” I admitted, “but it could also