Barbecue and a Murder Read online

  Barbecue and a Murder

  A Rainey Daye Cozy Mystery, book 4

  by

  Kathleen Suzette

  Copyright © 2018 by Kathleen Suzette. All rights reserved. This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  Books by Kathleen Suzette:

  Clam Chowder and a Murder

  A Rainey Daye Cozy Mystery, book 1

  A Short Stack and a Murder

  A Rainey Daye Cozy Mystery, book 2

  Cherry Pie and a Murder

  A Rainey Daye Cozy Mystery, book 3

  Barbecue and a Murder

  A Rainey Daye Cozy Mystery, book 4

  Books by Kate Bell, Kathleen Suzette

  Apple Pie A La Murder,

  A Freshly Baked Cozy Mystery, Book 1

  Trick or Treat and Murder,

  A Freshly Baked Cozy Mystery, Book 2

  Thankfully Dead

  A Freshly Baked Cozy Mystery, Book 3

  Candy Cane Killer

  A Freshly Baked Cozy Mystery, Book 4

  Ice Cold Murder

  A Freshly Baked Cozy Mystery, Book 5

  Love is Murder

  A Freshly Baked Cozy Mystery, Book 6

  Strawberry Surprise Killer

  A Freshly Baked Cozy Mystery, Book 7

  Pushing Up Daisies in Arizona,

  A Gracie Williams Mystery, Book 1

  Kicked the Bucket in Arizona,

  A Gracie Williams Mystery, Book 2

  Candy Coated Murder

  A Pumpkin Hollow Mystery, Book 1

  Murderously Sweet

  A Pumpkin Hollow Mystery, Book 2

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  “This is going to be a killer trip,” Brent said from the backseat.

  I looked in the rearview mirror at my fourteen-year-old nephew as he stared intently out the side window of the van, his blond hair tousled and uncombed.

  “You like swimming a lot, don’t you, Brent?”

  “I like it better than anything else in the whole world,” he said and pressed his forehead to the window, watching as the trees flew by.

  “I like swimming, too,” Bonney, his seven-year-old sister said from the very back.

  I smiled. “I don’t want to see anyone going out into the water without life jackets,” I reminded them. “Especially Lizzy and Bonney. I’m relying on you older kids to help out with them.”

  “We know, we know,” Curtis said, sounding bored. His thirteen-year-old nose was pressed into a book and I suspected that my twin sister, Stormy, had coerced him into coming. Curtis was a bookworm and an indoor person. The allure of the great outdoors seemed to escape him.

  It was a hot summer day in July and I was taking my three nieces and two nephews to the Snake River for a picnic lunch and a swim. I had intended to take them earlier in the summer, but things kept getting in the way. I loved taking the kids out without Stormy or her husband, Bob. It helped make up for the fact that I didn’t have any kids of my own. Stormy had loaned me her minivan, and although I didn’t fancy myself a minivan driving woman, for today, I was. There was no way all these kids would fit into my Toyota.

  I had pulled my long blond hair up into a bun on top of my head and wore a swim suit beneath my red tank top and cutoff jean shorts. It was going to be a great day, I could feel it all the way to my toes.

  “I want to swim all the way across the river,” Bonney said excitedly from her booster seat.

  “Oh no, you won’t be doing that. I don’t want to hear anything of the sort. The river is much too swift in the middle,” I warned, glancing into the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah, you’re too little to do that,” Brent said. “But I can do it.”

  “Brent,” I warned as he and Bonney argued over whether she was big enough to swim the river. I glanced over at my niece, Natalie, in the passenger seat beside me. She had just turned eighteen and was about to face moving away from home and starting college in California. Her blond hair was braided into two braids the way she used to wear it when she was little. It was hard to believe she was old enough to leave home. The years had gone by so fast.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked her as she gazed off into the distance.

  She turned and looked at me with a smile. “Just mentally going over my list of things I need to do and buy before I leave for college next month.”

  “How’s your mom doing with this? Any better?” I asked, already knowing she wasn’t. Stormy was struggling with the fact that her first child was an adult and ready to face the world on her own.

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t think she’s going to get over this until I actually graduate college and move back to Sparrow.”

  I chuckled. “You’re probably right, but by then you may decide Sparrow isn’t big enough for you. Moving away does that to a person sometimes.” We lived in Sparrow, Idaho, population just slightly over six-thousand. A beautiful place to live, but sometimes the big cities drew our young people away.

  “You moved back after living in New York for ten years,” she pointed out.

  “That’s true, but that was because of the divorce and not having any place else to go.” I was surprised those words didn’t make me sad. It was probably the first time since I had moved back home that mentioning the divorce didn’t cause me to break down. I had gone through a nasty divorce the previous year, lost my job on a New York morning talk show, and my publishing career was down the toilet. At the time, I decided my only options were to move back home and try to get my life together. Unfortunately, my ex-husband had recently decided to follow me to Sparrow and had shown up a few weeks earlier.

  “I’m coming back to Sparrow,” she said quietly. “I don’t think I want to live anyplace else. And to be honest, maybe going away to college in California isn’t such a great idea. Maybe I should have applied to the University of Idaho. I could come home on the weekends.”

  Her voice sounded close to cracking as she spoke, and it broke my heart. “It’s just freshman jitters. I think once you get out there and meet new friends, you’ll be fine,” I promised.

  “You’re probably right,” she said with a sigh, gazing out the window again.

  I wasn’t really worried about Natalie. She was a trooper, the oldest child in a large family. She knew how to take care of herself probably better than most kids her age did as well as take care of the smaller ones. I was just going to miss her.

  The Snake River flowed across Sparrow’s backdoor and as a result, we saw a large number of tourists in the summer. I knew of an area that was usually more secluded from the crowds and tha
t was where we were going to spend our day. The sun was beating down on the windshield of the minivan and I was looking forward to getting into the river and cooling off. I hadn’t been there in months and I was ready for some rest and relaxation.

  Up ahead I could see a faint column of gray smoke rising into the air and I wondered if someone had built a campfire in the woods. I hoped they were being careful and had built it in a designated area.

  “What’s that smell?” Brent asked. His fourteen-year-old nose had picked up the smell of something burning before mine had, but as soon as he said it, I smelled it too as it was dragged into the van by the air-conditioning system.

  “That doesn’t smell like a campfire,” I said and squinted my eyes, scanning the horizon. The road curved around and I saw more of the smoke column. It wasn’t big enough to be worrying, but it had a distinct plastic smell to it.

  “Yuck, that stinks,” Lizzy cried from her car seat behind me. She put her feet on the back of my seat and kicked.

  “We’ll have to see what’s up ahead,” I said and continued driving up the road. It was early in the day yet, and I’d only passed a couple of other cars. With summer in full swing, I knew the traditional tourist areas would be packed with summer visitors, and I didn’t want to have to deal with a bunch of loud, possibly drunk, people so I was driving the kids further down the highway, away from the well-known tourist areas.

  “I wonder what that is?” Natalie asked peering through the woods at the column of smoke.

  There was a well-worn dirt road that led off the highway and through the woods to the river that I had traveled many times, and as I pulled off the highway now, I realize the smoke was coming from that direction. I drove slowly down the dirt road and as it curved around, we came into sight of what was burning. It was a white sports car that had crashed into a tree. I stopped the minivan in the middle of the road, surprised by the sight of the smoking car.

  “Oh, my gosh,” Natalie said, leaning forward in her seat. “I wonder what happened?”

  “That’s Pamela North’s car,” Brent announced, peering between the two front seats.

  So much for having a great day.

  “Pamela North? Is that the girl that’s in all those beauty pageants?” I asked, searching my memory for where I had heard the name.

  “Yes, that’s her,” Brent said. “We need to go and see what happened. She might need help.” He opened his door and unbuckled his seatbelt.

  “No, you hold on Brent,” I said. I bit my lower lip, trying to decide what to do. From where I sat I couldn’t tell if there was anyone in the car, but it looked like the fire had gone out and it was just smoking now. I let the van roll forward about ten feet, squinting my eyes at the car. When I caught sight of what looked like the top of somebody’s head in the driver’s seat, I slammed on the brakes.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Natalie whispered looking at me wide-eyed.

  I turned to look at her. “I think it might be.”

  “We need to call someone,” she said.

  “What?” Brent asked. “What did you say?”

  “What’s going on?” Curtis asked, leaning forward from his seat in the third row.

  I glanced back at the younger kids in the van. “Natalie, you take the kids home, and I’m going to get out of the van and give Cade Starkey a call so he can come and check it out.”

  “We need to go see if she’s okay,” Brent insisted. “We can’t wait for the police.”

  I kept my foot on the brake and turned back to him, “you sit right where you are Brent. Natalie’s going to take you guys home, and I’m going to call the police. I don’t want any of you getting out of this van. Do you hear me?” I said in my very stern aunt’s voice that I rarely had to use with any of them. I couldn’t have Brent jumping out of the van and going to see what might be in that car. If Pamela North was still in it, she wasn’t making any attempt to get out and there was a very good reason for that.

  He sighed and his mouth formed a tight line. “Fine. But she might need help.”

  “I will get her help,” I promised.

  I put the van into park and Natalie got out and came around to my side. I got out of the van and waited until she turned the van around and was out of sight, then I turned back to look at the little white car, and considered what I should do. From where I stood I could tell the inside of the car was burned up. If Pamela was in there, she wasn’t getting out on her own. I squeezed my eyes closed and hoped I wasn’t seeing things correctly. There was a chance it was something else in that car, wasn’t there? I sighed and opened my eyes. The chances that wasn’t a person in that car were pretty slim.

  Chapter Two

  I pulled my phone out of my purse and quickly dialed Detective Cade Starkey. Cade was the only detective on the Sparrow police force and I hoped he was somewhere nearby. “Cade, this is Rainey,” I said when he answered. “I need you to come out here to the Snake River. I think there’s a body in a burned up car out here.”

  “Seriously?” he asked. “You seem to have a knack for finding dead people, don’t you? Why is that?”

  “Cade, I’m not kidding around. Please come out here.” I glanced behind me at the dirt road and hoped no one decided to drive down it before he got here. We didn’t need lookie-loos out here.

  “What do you mean you think there’s a dead body? Do you see one or not?” he asked, sounding bored.

  “I didn’t get that close, but there’s a white sports car that caught fire and it looks like someone might be inside. Are you going to come out here or not?” I asked, failing to keep the annoyance out of my voice.

  He sighed. “I’m confused as to why you’re confused whether there’s a dead body in the car.”

  Stop being a smart alec.

  It was my turn to sigh. “Because I do not want to look at a dead body if there’s one in there. I might have nightmares. But, if I look at it out of the corner of my eye, there seems to be someone in there.”

  There was a pause. “Okay, I’ll be right there. Where are you at?” he said. “And I don’t want you going anywhere near the car.”

  I rolled my eyes and gave him directions to find the dirt road and hung up. Ignoring his instructions not to go near the car, I tiptoed just a bit closer. From where I stood now, it was clear there was someone in there. Whoever it was, they were slumped down in the driver’s seat and I could just see the top of their head. I hoped it wasn’t the beauty queen. I hated to think of someone so young dying like this.

  I kept my eyes averted from the car as I moved closer. The smell of burned plastic, heavy in chemicals, and something else I couldn’t put my finger on, hung in the air. I tried to keep that something else off my mind. The driver’s side window was open a couple of inches and the smoke was coming out through that open window. A cool breeze blew across the car and the column of smoke dissipated a little. I coughed and covered my nose and mouth with the front edge of my t-shirt.

  The car was an expensive foreign model any teenager would give their eyeteeth for. It was something only people of means would dare buy for their teenaged daughter if the person in the car was the teenaged beauty queen that Brent said owned the car. If I remembered right, Pamela North was a little older than Natalie, but I hadn’t thought to ask her.

  The front of the car had very little damage, and I was surprised by that. The right side of the bumper hung from the car, and the right headlight was busted, but it seemed like an accident someone would walk away from with nothing more than a scratch. From where I stood, I couldn’t see that the engine had caught fire and I wondered why only the interior of the car was burned.

  I made a wide circle around the car, keeping my eyes on the ground. There weren’t any skid marks in the dirt and I wondered if the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. I stopped in front of a nearby pine tree when my eyes landed on bare spots that looked as if thin branches had been cut off from the trunk. There were six bare spots on one tree and three more on the one
next to it. I ran a finger over the small bare spots and felt tacky sap there. What happened here? I stared at the tree, my mind trying to come up with an explanation. When it came up blank, I continued walking slowly around the area near the car, still trying to keep my eyes averted from the interior.

  I had an uneasy feeling about this whole thing. What was she doing out here in the woods by herself? How long had she been here? It was 9:45 a.m. on a Saturday. What would a beauty queen be doing out here at all? The ground around the car was disturbed as if someone had kicked up the surrounding dirt.

  I spotted something under the front of the car and I moved in for a closer look. I knelt down and squinted at the branches on the ground there. The ends were cut off, and some of the pine needles had superficial burn marks. Again, had a sick feeling about this whole thing. Tucked into the branches was something pink and purple. I poked a finger into the branches and picked it up. A short black leather string of tiny plastic pink and purple beads formed a bracelet. It looked like something a child would wear. The sound of an approaching vehicle made me jump, and I tucked the bracelet back into the pine branches and stood up. I wrapped my arms around myself and walked back in the direction I had come from.

  Chapter Three

  Cade pulled up next to me, rolled down his window, put his car in park, and turned the engine off.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asked, his eyes going to the burned-out car.

  “I was taking my nieces and nephews to the river to swim. There are fewer tourists out this way,” I explained, folding my arms across my chest.

  He nodded. “The kids didn’t see anything did they?”

  “They did see the burned car, but I didn’t let them get close to it. I think there’s someone in there, but I didn’t get that close,” I lied.