Page 79 of Summers at the Saint
“That would be a help,” she admitted. “Of course, I’d pay you.”
“Then, it’s a done deal? I swear, I won’t steal your car, or take it joyriding.”
She laughed. “Well, if you were to take off with it, I’m pretty sure we have your personal information in our employee database, so we’d know where to find you. And also, Ray Bierbower, our head of security, is pretty darn good at what he does.”
“Duly noted,” Whelan said.
She reached into her pocketbook and retrieved a set of keys. After a moment, she removed a black plastic fob from the keychain. “It’s a silver Mercedes, parked on the street near the Chapel by the Sea.”
“Tag number?” he asked, and jotted down the number she gave him on the pad of paper he kept on the Tahoe’s front seat.
“Good night, then,” he said. “I’ll drop the car off by seven tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 40
On Thursday morning, Ray Bierbower poked his head inside Traci’s office door.
He placed a key fob on her desktop. “One of your landscapers dropped this off at the front desk earlier, and I told the new girl I’d get it to you.”
“Thanks.” She looked up from her computer, where she’d been staring at the latest depressing booking figures. Cancellations had been dribbling in since the news of Parrish’s death had broken.
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, actually there is something else.” He sat in the chair opposite her desk, and for the first time she noted his grim expression. Her stomach clenched.
“What is it?”
“I just got off the phone with the sheriff’s office. They’re about to release Parrish’s cause of death and he called to tip me off, as a favor.”
“Go on,” Traci said, steeling herself.
“They found traces of alcohol, which is no surprise. Plus, marijuana and fentanyl. The official cause of death will be drug overdose.”
“Fentanyl?” She’d read all the headlines over the past few years about the growing number of deaths and accidental drug overdoses attributed to the synthetic opioid.
“How is that possible? Parrish wasn’t some cokehead or pill popper. If there was fentanyl in her system, someone intentionally did that—to harm her.”
“That’s what the sheriff thinks too,” Bierbower said. “So, now this is officially a homicide investigation.”
She nodded, her mouth suddenly too dry to speak.
“Does Ric know?”
“Yeah. I just came from his place.”
“And he still blames me,” Traci said bluntly.
“We didn’t get into that,” he said. “The sheriff’s investigators are headed back out here, now that it’s officially a homicide investigation. He wanted me to let you know. I’ll have a couple of my guys ‘assisting’ them, just to make sure they don’t, you know, alarm the guests and members.”
“Okay,” she said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“They want to talk to you again. I think it might be a good idea for you to have your lawyer sit in on any interview.”
“Jesus, Ray. Am I a suspect?”
“He didn’t say that, and I don’t think he has any reason to suspect that you were involved in any way in your niece’s death. I just think, out of an abundance of caution…”
She felt numb. “When are they coming?”
