Murder, Money & Marzipan Read Online Free

do you know that you didn’t want to tell them?” Lexy asked.
    Janice looked down at the floor. “They asked me to verify what time Aurea and I left the room in the morning. Apparently she had told them she left at 5 am. I told them I got up at 5:30 and left around 6 and that Aurea had left before me.”
    “That sounds about right., I don’t see the problem.” Corinne said wrinkling her brows together.
    Janice bit her lower lip. “Aurea made a lot of noise when she got up and it woke me. I looked at the clock when she left and it wasn’t 5 am like she said…it was 3:25 am - shortly before Saunders was murdered.”

    ###

    “How long until you can get all these surveillance tapes looked at?” Nik perched herself on the edge of Detective Jake Ryan’s desk.
    “Days, boss.” He shrugged up at her. “The bakers’ rooms are on all different floors and not all of them are staying in the hotel. It’s gonna take a long time.”
    Nik chewed on an already stubby thumb-nail. They had questioned all the bakers in the competition and they were proving to be a tight lipped bunch.
    “It’s too bad they don’t have cameras right in Bakery Battles Stadium. That would make our jobs a lot easier,” Nik said wistfully.
    “That’s for sure. Unfortunately, the contestants wouldn’t hear of it. They didn’t want any cameras spying on their secret recipes.”  
    Nik nodded. “Well, you know how I love a challenge. What do we have so far?”
    Jake hit a few keys on the keyboard, then swung his monitor in her direction. “We have a dead bakery contest judge - TOD about 4 am. We have a bunch of contestants who hated her - they might all have had a motive. We’ve been able to verify that about half of them were in their rooms at the time of death so they can be ruled out. We have reports that the judge and her husband were fighting quite loudly the day before. That’s about it.”
    “The husband…does he have an alibi?”
    Jake shook his head. “He was in their room alone at the time of the murder. He did seem upset when we first informed him of his wife’s death, but when I went back to question him later, he was in the casino drinking and didn’t seem upset at all. He did say they were having troubles, but to tell you the truth he was so drunk it was hard to get anything concrete out of him. I have a note to go back and question him again.”
    “What about Lexy Baker, the one who found the body? Saunders was strangled with her apron. Do you think she is involved?”   Nik remembered the call she had put into Jack Perillo to check up on Baker. She pulled out her cell phone. No messages. Same old Jack, gets so involved in his cases he forgets to look at his messages .
    “I’m not sure about her,” Jake said. “She doesn’t have much of a motive, even though the evidence points to her. Someone could be trying to frame her, or it could be co-incidence. Murder is pretty serious; most people don’t kill someone over losing a contest…unless they have another reason.”
    Nik glanced at her watch. “We need to get more answers before the trail gets cold. It’s too bad the contestants aren’t more forthcoming with their information.”
    “They don’t want to do anything to get the contest shut down. Maybe we should threaten them with pulling the plug on the whole thing unless they start coming forward with what they know,.” Jake offered.
    Nik screwed up one side of her face while she thought about it. It might work, but then again, it could also backfire on them. What they needed was a way to get them to open up…to gain some sort of an “in” with the bakers.  
    A sudden inspiration hit. She snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it!”
    Jake raised his eyebrows for her to continue.
    “The bakers won’t talk to us , but they will talk to each other , especially Lexy Baker. What if we could get close to her and let her do the work for us?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Make friends with her, maybe feed her