A Berry Caffeinated Crime: A Humorous Kylie Berry Mystery (Kylie Berry Mysteries Book 15) by A.R. Winters

Author:A.R. Winters [Winters, A.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2026-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Isat on the hallway floor with my back pressed against the wall, my legs stretched out in front of me like some kind of broken marionette. Listless. Forgotten. Every breath ached—not the kind of ache that comes from running too hard but the deep, burning kind that made me wonder if my lungs would ever feel normal again.

Sarah’s body lay just a few feet away, covered with somebody’s couch blanket. Jasper had stopped his chest compressions the moment the paramedics arrived. They’d worked on her—methodical and tireless—for close to thirty minutes while a crowd had slowly formed, clogging the hallway, phones high. Thirty minutes of effort, and time of death was called.

Sarah was gone.

I felt cold and drained, sitting so near her. So close, yet she was somewhere I couldn’t follow. Wouldn’t hope to follow.

Another girl. Another death.

The police had arrived while the paramedics still worked. They kept the looky-loos at bay as best they could, but there were too many of them. Curious faces peered over shoulders. Phones stayed high, recording, capturing whatever glimpses they could steal. The murmur of voices filled the hallway, growing bolder, louder, until questions broke above the hushed buzz demanding to know what had happened and what would happen next.

One of the paramedics had checked me over earlier, shining a light in my eyes and asking me to follow his finger. He’d checked my blood oxygen, too. Satisfied I wasn’t about to keel over, he’d pressed a small paper cup of water into my hands. I’d drained it in two swallows and choked back a cough from the scratch still clawing at my throat.

The detective in charge had questioned me not long after that—a woman with steel-gray hair and a face made for playing poker. I’d told her everything I could remember. The sounds through the door. The crash. The desperate sprint to find Jasper. The acrid smell that had burned my eyes and throat the moment we’d gotten Emily’s door open.

“You’re sure the apartment belongs to this Emily girl?” she’d asked, pen poised above her notepad. I noted, with a flicker of dry humor that surprised even me, that she didn’t use a pencil the way Gregson had when he’d been a detective on the force.

“Yes.” My voice had nearly failed me. It felt like someone had taken sandpaper to my vocal cords. “Emily Romder. She’s a student. She works for me.”

“And where might we find her now?”

“I don’t know.”

That had earned me a look. Disbelief, maybe. Or distrust. Hard to tell with a poker face like hers.

Now I just sat and watched as the investigators did their work. They’d taped garbage bags over Emily’s apartment door until the hazmat team arrived, then the bags came off. I caught fragments of their conversation—words such as “possible chlorine gas” and “drowned” and “anyone could’ve.” The clinical detachment in their voices made my stomach turn. They were discussing Sarah’s death like it was a mechanical problem to be solved.

I can’t do this.

I pushed myself up off the floor on legs that didn’t want to hold me.

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