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“Thank you, Reverend.” I simply couldn’t stop myself. “Were you named after the Marlboro man on the billboards?”

  His response was a smile. “Everyone asks. The answer is yes, but the irony is neither of my parents smoked. They liked cowboys. I wish they’d named me Wyatt or Bat or even Marshal. But they liked the mountains, and every time they saw the billboard, the dream came to life for a little while. They said I was part of that dream, so they named me Marlboro.”

  The story touched me more than I wanted to show.

  He extended his hand. “I hope you and the chief get to the bottom of this. And soon.”

  The logical next step was to look into the past of each girl. Both deaths had been extreme and awful. That implied a personal touch—someone who’d constructed painful deaths deliberately. Had Brook and Janet shared some place or person or event? Babs, who was still alive and kicking, might be my best source.

  I turned Tinkie’s Caddy back toward the hotel. Perhaps I could catch Babs before she got all involved with preparing for the next leg of competition.

  After checking at the desk, I went straight to Babs’s room. After the pepper incident, she’d opted for a private room, and she answered my knock on her door. The tallest of the contestants at nearly six feet, Babs was a striking redhead—or she had been. Now her hair clumped in dull tufts that brought to mind Bozo the Clown.

  “Welcome to Bedlam.” She waved me into the room.

  Clothes, shoes, at least twenty bald Styrofoam wig heads, suitcases, and what appeared to be small dead, red creatures littered the room. Babs took a seat at a specially lit vanity and picked up a wig styled in a long shag. A half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s rested beside her elbow, along with more small vials filled with crushed herbs and spices.

  “The judges voted unanimously to allow me to wear a hairpiece,” she said, watching my reaction in the mirror.

  I wanted to say, “Thank god for that because your head looks like a Chernobyl site,” but I only nodded. “That’s good.”

  “What do you think of this one? It’s called Candy.” She fluffed out the long, red tresses.

  “Too . . . whorish.” I couldn’t think of another way to say it.

  She pulled off the wig and tossed it on the floor by the other rejected styles. “You’re right. I just wanted to see if you’d tell the truth or not.” She batted the empty wig head with the back of her hand and it sailed across the room, crashing against the wall and then into a heap on top of two dozen others.

  “Mostly I do. Tell the truth. Sometimes I don’t.” I picked up a short black wig and handed it to her. “As fascinating as hair choices are, I need to talk to you about the two dead women.”

  “Brook was nice but naïve. Janet”—she pulled the dark wig on—“I don’t really have a read on her. She stayed to herself and she was rooming with that creepy goth Blackledge gal. Speaking of goth, this hair color doesn’t work for me at all. I look like a vampire.”

  She was correct. The black wig with her fair coloring made her look dead. It even changed the contours of her face.

  “Yuck!” she said, flinging it into the reject pile.

  “Why do you believe Hedy Blackledge is goth?”

  She waved me toward a chair. “Let’s see, could it be that she never wears anything but black, she plays funeral dirges on her violin, she wears red lipstick, and her skin hasn’t seen sunlight in the last twenty years. Her family has some weird voodoo connection, and she plays to that. She enjoys being dark. That pretty much puts her in the goth category for me.”

  Everything she said about Hedy was true, up to a point. She had translucent pale skin, wore red lipstick and black clothes, and the violin pieces I’d heard were hauntingly sad. But that didn’t make her a goth. “How did you know about Hedy’s family?” I was sure Hedy hadn’t told her.

  She thought a moment. “One of the other girls was talking about her.”

  “Which one?”

  She hesitated. “I can’t be sure.”

  “Karrie?”

  Amusement crossed her face. “Good guess, but I think it was Crystal Belle. I don’t think she meant any harm by it, just a bit of gossip.”

  Motives were seldom that pure, but I let it go. “Of all the contestants, why do you think someone would go after Brook and Janet?”

  Babs swung her legs around to face me. “Rumor has it that Brook, Janet, Karrie, Hedy, Amanda, and moi are the front-runners. Most of the girls thought Brook and Janet went into the talent competition as the top two contenders based on academics and originality in cooking.”

  She poured herself a straight shot of Jack. “Now that they’re out of the way . . .” She remembered her manners and poured a drink for me without even asking. “I’m dying to have a cigarette,” she said, glancing around the hotel room. “Do you think they’ll be able to tell if I smoke in here?”

  “There’s a courtyard outside.” If she lit up, I might have to join her. I’d quit smoking, but the temptation was on me hard.

  “And if we go into the courtyard, it’ll be just my luck a judge will walk by and catch me smoking. I hate this eighth-grade shit. You know, it would be better to have leprosy than to be a smoker these days.”

  I couldn’t argue that, so I didn’t try. “I wouldn’t smoke in the room.”

  She sighed and took a big swallow of her Jack. “I can’t wait until they start fining people for eating potato chips. They’ll call it a health penalty. Soon only elegant people wearing the right designer labels will be allowed out in the daylight.”

  I pulled her attention back to the task at hand. “If you had to name someone who might want to harm Brook and Janet, who would it be?”

  “None of the contestants really like each other. We all want to win, so we haven’t bothered pretending to be perky and impressed with each other like we did back in our younger days.”

  Babs was twenty-five. It was peculiar to hear her talk about her “younger days.”

  “Was there anything about Brook or Janet that would make someone personally dislike them? Enough to harm them?”

  She’d picked up a short, auburn wig and adjusted it on her head. Staring at herself in the mirror, she answered, “To me, they were two of the least objectionable contestants. If I were going to take anyone out, it would be that bitch Karrie Kompton.”

  Karrie had no dearth of folks who didn’t like her, but acting like a horrible human being didn’t make her a killer. “Do you know who sent the chocolate-covered roaches to Karrie?”

  She shifted so that our gazes didn’t meet in the mirror. She knew.

  “Was it you?” I asked.

  She busied herself putting on shoes.

  “I’m not going to tell anyone, Babs. There’ve been a lot of strange incidents at this competition. I need to know who’s behind what.”

  “I sent Karrie the flowers and the roaches.” Her chin lifted in defiance. “She deserved a whole lot worse. And she got even by peppering my hair spray. At least my prank didn’t do any permanent damage.” She pointed at her hair. “This will take months to grow out.”

  “How do you know Karrie was behind the pepper incident?”

  “She saw a chance to ruin me and frame Hedy, and let me say she hates Hedy even more than she hates the rest of us.”

  “Go on.”

  “Hedy prepared a delicious dish using spices, specifically habanero peppers. Some of the peppers were left over, and the next morning, they’d disappeared from the countertop. Hedy assumed the cleanup crew had thrown them away, but I’d seen Karrie hovering around them. They were there, and then they were gone.”

  “But would Karrie call such attention to herself if she planned to use the peppers to harm you?” Karrie was egocentric, but she was also smart.

  Babs tapped her long, elegant fingers on the vanity top. “Karrie is capable of anything.” She shrugged.

  “How did she get the peppers into your hair spray?”

  “I use a pump bottle and the top unscrews. You k
now, environmental issues and all. Every little thing counts, and if a judge is eco-friendly and sees that in my dressing room . . .”

  “So you leave your makeup and stuff in the dressing room?”

  She nodded. “We all do.”

  “Even Brook?”

  “Her too. That was awful. She practiced her fire baton routine every day. Who would have thought her costume would catch on fire like it had been doused in kerosene? And the way she just stood there, rooted to the spot, and didn’t even run or scream or try to save herself.” She tried on another wig.

  “The last one looked better,” I said.

  “Ah, the Cassandra, as it’s called. I agree.” She switched wigs again. As she pulled a few curls to frame her face, she said, “Do you really believe Brook and Janet were murdered?”

  “The autopsy reports aren’t in yet. It won’t officially be murder until a cause of death is established.”

  Babs took one last look at herself in the mirror. The Cassandra was a good choice. “I’m sorry to rush you out, but I really have to prepare for the cooking event. Tonight is family barbecue. We’re demonstrating the versatility of the different cooking ranges and our personal recipes for sauce. I’m going to take top honors on this.”

  She showed me to the door, and I was halfway down the hall when she called out, “I heard Hedy was arrested. Is she out of the competition?”

  “She wasn’t charged. She’ll be there tonight.”

  “Too bad.” Babs laughed. “Killing the competition is rather extreme, but it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if several of the contestants ended up in jail until the winner is declared.”

  9

  Walking the quiet corridor of the hotel, I almost jumped when my cell phone rang—Tinkie summoning me. “Yes, ma’am,” I said as I punched the elevator button to go down to the lobby.

  “Don’t dawdle. Hurry,” she said.

  I pushed the up button. Tinkie was not bossy. Far from it. But when she issued an edict, she expected obedience. I wondered what tricks Oscar performed, and the thought put a smile on my face.

  Inside our room I discovered Tinkie had wrangled the use of a laptop computer from somewhere—I didn’t even ask. Tinkie had her ways, and I’d find some poor fool wandering the hotel lobby, still enchanted with her flirtatious gambits.

  “Look at this.” She turned the computer screen so I had a better view. “That’s the talent competition.” I recognized the picture and realized Tinkie was reviewing the photos she’d taken for the newspaper the night before.

  “Nice work, Tink. You’re the Ansel Adams of pageant butts. That’s a striking derriere hanging on the back of Crystal Belle Wadell’s backbone.”

  “Look!” Her index finger pointed at the blurred image of a man lurking in the far corner of the building. “Lurk” was the only verb to describe his stance. Hat pulled low, shoulders hunched, he wore an expensive suit.

  “Who wears a hat this time of year?” I asked, proud that I’d recognized the fashion faux pas right off the bat. Normally, Tinkie had to coach me in such matters.

  “I’m not making a fashion comment,” Tinkie said. “Don’t you recognize him?”

  I hadn’t, but I inspected more closely. “It’s Marcus Wellington, isn’t it?”

  “I’m positive it’s him.”

  “Now that opens a can of worms,” we said together. Tinkie held out her pinkie, and I hooked mine with hers.

  “This trip to Greenwood has a Twilight Zone element,” I warned her. “We’re regressing, and it isn’t going to be pretty if you ask to borrow my training bra.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Sometimes, Sarah Booth, you act as if you were never a young girl.” For a moment, she looked stricken, remembering that a large chunk of my childhood had been stolen by the tragic death of my parents.

  “It’s okay.” I gave her a hug. “So what do you make of Marcus Wellington attending the beauty pageant?”

  “Two possibilities.” She was all business. “He might have been there to watch Hedy. Maybe he still carries a torch for her.”

  “Maybe, but the Wellingtons aren’t the kind of people to set aside their desires. If he wanted Hedy, don’t you think he’d demand her? Make her an offer she couldn’t refuse, so to speak.”

  “She thwarted him once.”

  “To hear her tell it,” I reminded Tink. “The second possibility is that he’s behind all of this to frame Hedy. No matter what papers she signed, she’s still Vivian’s natural mother and she stands a good shot at partial custody. Marcus may be cutting her off at the knees.”

  Now that sounded more like the Wellingtons I knew and loathed.

  “That family has a lot of pull in this county,” Tinkie continued.

  “In this state. Actually, they have national juice.”

  “Jansen could be in their pocket.”

  When I’d first come home to Sunflower County, I’d wondered about Coleman’s integrity as a lawman. The good ole boy, pork barrel political system was by no means exclusive to Mississippi—corruption was everywhere, from the top to the bottom of every ballot. With that in mind, I’d sniffed around trying to catch a whiff of stink on Coleman, but he’d come out clean. He was the Matt Dillon of the Delta.

  Professional law enforcement was not always the rule in other counties and states. People kowtowed to wealth, because riches equated to power. I had no proof Police Chief Jansen was anything other than an upright lawman, but the Wellingtons were strongly tied to a company supplying outrageously expensive goods—some of them so inferior as to be worthless—to our overseas troops. I was merely keeping in mind that Jansen might not be a city officer version of Coleman.

  “If Jansen is in their pocket, things won’t go well for Hedy,” I said. “A conviction . . . she’ll never see her kid again.”

  Truer words were never spoken. Was I cynical enough to believe Marcus would have two innocent girls murdered to frame Hedy? You bet. I relayed to Tinkie what I’d discovered from Babs.

  “So she was behind the roaches.” Amusement glinted in her eyes. “I’m not surprised, but I really thought Karrie had done it to herself.”

  “And Babs feels pretty certain Karrie retaliated by putting the pepper in her hair spray. It would appear these incidents are not related to the murders.”

  “Two wrinkles ironed out.” Tinkie went to the closet and sorted through the many items hanging there. She’d brought an outfit change for every occasion. “I’ve wrangled us tickets to the barbecue tonight.” She hung a frilly outfit on the back of the closet door.

  “I won’t ask how.” The tickets to any of the beauty pageant/cook-off events had become hot items. Murder brought an increased level of celebrity to the events. “Is Cece coming?”

  Tinkie looked like the cat who’d swallowed the canary. “And Millie. We’ve arranged for Zinnia’s famous restaurateur to be one of the local expert judges for the barbecue.”

  I could only nod. Tinkie had her ways, and with Cece’s power as a newspaper reporter thrown in, the two were potentially lethal. “Perfect.”

  “The only fly in the gravy is Madame Tomeeka. Cece tried to get her to join us tonight, but she wouldn’t consider it.”

  “Did Madame Tomeeka ever make her predictions about who would win the pageant title?” I’d almost forgotten all about Tammy’s promise to handicap the competition, and I hadn’t had a chance to thoroughly read the newspaper.

  “Cece was annoyed, but Tammy wouldn’t say anything specific.”

  “She wouldn’t even guess?” That didn’t sound like Tammy. I’d never known her to tout her abilities with claims to predict specific events, but once she told Cece she’d do it, she wasn’t the kind of friend to fudge on a promise. Especially since Cece had promised her readers. “What did Tammy say?”

  Tinkie tossed several pairs of shoes over her head. They thunked on the plush carpet beside the bed. “Only that a black shadow hung over the whole competition, and red seeped around the edges. She said she couldn’t se
e the end of the pageant because a bad energy obscured the view. It was all very vague and unsatisfying. Tammy advised all of us to leave this pageant alone and ‘let the forces of darkness battle each other.’ ”

  “Did she say there would be more murders?” The thought made me sit upright.

  “No, she didn’t. She only said she couldn’t predict anything and she wasn’t pretending she could. She sort of hurt Cece’s feelings, but not deliberately.” Tinkie closed the closet door and faced me, suddenly serious. “Speaking of hurt feelings, Graf called me, Sarah Booth.”

  Anger was my first reaction. Not at Tinkie, but at Graf. “Why did he call you? To report me for some infraction of the”—I made quote marks in the air—“ ‘serious relationship rules.’ ”

  “He said you wouldn’t answer your phone.”

  “Not true.” It hadn’t rung, because I turned it off whenever he called.

  “Call him.”

  “I will.”

  “Sooner rather than later.” She gave me a look. “Learn from my mistakes and don’t let something like this fester. No good will come of punishing him by not speaking to him.”

  She was right. I knew it even as she spoke, but Taureans are immovable at times. Graf had hurt me, and when I was wounded I had only two modes of conduct, and neither involved rational thought. I attacked like a wild shrew or I withdrew. Talking reasonably was too adult for me.

  “Take off your astrological bullhorns and call the man. He made a mistake. He wants to apologize. Let him.”

  I nodded. “Give me a little while to let my feelings calm down.”

  “May I tell him that?”

  She was damn persistent. Like Chablis, once she had hold of something she didn’t let it go come hell or high water. “By all means, call him. Tell him we’ll talk later tonight after he’s done shooting and I’ve finished the barbecue competition. But Tinkie, don’t hedge. If he asks if we took the case, tell him the truth. I won’t sugarcoat things to salve his ego.”

  “Heaven forbid you sprinkle a little sugar on bitter truth.” She flipped her fingers in the air. “Now that I’ve salvaged your love life, let’s get back to the case. Why don’t we track down Karrie and see what she has to allow.”