The Tell Tail Heart by Cate Conte

Author:Cate Conte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter 31

I figured Becky would be at her desk—she’d sleep there if she could—so I called that number first. “I may have a scoop for you,” I said when she answered her desk phone, sounding distracted.

“Please tell me it’s about the writer and not something about the storm.” I could sense her leaning back in her chair, maybe sticking her pen in the loose bun she’d probably wrapped her hair in to keep it out of her face while she barked orders at her reporters to get more on this dead-writer story. She would’ve been perfect in the “old days” of journalism. Granted, she wasn’t an aging white guy chomping on a cigar and pounding on a typewriter with a glass of whiskey beside her, but her mind and her approach were completely aligned with the journalists of old. And she’d been known to prefer whiskey on particularly rough days.

“Definitely the writer.” I filled her in on everything that had happened since I’d left her yesterday—Ava-Rose’s stories about Drake and Holt, my visit to Drake’s office, finding out Thea Coleman’s name and virtually nothing about her online, my car chases, and Thea’s latest antics of trying to break into Jason Holt’s hotel room. “Maybe she thought he stole her dog,” I said, trying to make a lame joke. “And then Holt’s almost ex-wife showed up. And Ellory, which kind of ended my ability to try to participate in any way.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Would I kid you? Well, I was kidding about stealing the dog. But listen, Beck, don’t you think all of this is weird?”

“Of course it’s weird. The guy died under really weird circumstances,” she said.

“So don’t you think we should check it out?”

“We?”

“Yeah. I can help. I want to help. The cafe is pretty dead right now. You know I need another project,” I said.

“Check it out how?” she asked.

I blew out an impatient breath. “There are so many angles here. The vet, the mystery woman, the wife. We need to figure out what the deal really was with our illustrious writer. Why he was here, what he was doing, who Thea Coleman really is and what her connection to Holt is, why he’d be fighting with our new vet the night he got killed. I mean, where do you start?”

“Maddie. Are you looking for a new gig as an investigative reporter?” She sounded amused. “Because I don’t have the budget.”

“Ha. Did you know Holt started out as an investigative reporter?” I leaned forward in my chair.

“I did read that. So Holt fought with Drake, huh? How did Ava-Rose come by that information?”

“She was spying on the yacht club. That’s a long story. But she totally saw them having words. Holt walked away alive, but still. It was right before he got hit.”

I could hear Becky scratching notes in her pad. “Why, though?” she asked, when the scratching of her pen stopped. “How would Drake even know Holt?”

“No idea,” I said. “I’ve been trying to work on that. I did a Google search and didn’t find anything linking them.

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