“She comes in late on Wednesdays and Fridays because of a thing with one of the kids.”

  “What, are you best friends?” Joshua’s sour tone echoed through the shop.

  His issues would have to wait, because as Hayley opened her mouth to tell him that she and Laney had never fallen out the way he and Laney did, a piercing scream split the air of Sausalito.

  Before Hayley could even figure out what was happening, Peter sprinted out the door. A flash of his uniform through the entrance was followed by metal against metal as the door slammed shut behind him.

  “What the hell was that?” Joshua asked.

  “Don’t know.” Hayley was already rounding the counter and heading for the exit. Joshua, his long strides giving an unfair advantage, caught up and held the door for her as she bolted out. He had the wherewithal to lock the door behind him as Hayley whipped her head up and down the mildly busy street.

  It was early still; the ferry delivering tourists from the city hadn’t landed yet. The folks driving down from farther north were trickling in. The bicycle tourists were still making their way across the bridge in the fog. Maybe two-dozen people wandered on the business side of the street, with as many across the street on the walkway that meandered along the marina past the boats rocking in the Bay.

  Peter’s voice bounced off the brick wall to her right. Hayley turned in that direction, one beat behind Joshua. They both moved haltingly toward the one place they’d vowed never to go—Baker Dan’s.

  Chapter 3

  Dark and still, the brick building wasn’t bathed in light from large front windows the way Hayley’s place next door was. With the overhead lighting out, everything stood in shadowy silhouette, including Laney James. Both hands gripped her mouth, now silent. The vibration of her terrified body shimmered across the room as Peter approached her.

  Laney’s location, just to the side of the big front counter, blocked Peter’s view of the cutaway that allowed entrance to the area where staff stood to help customers choose their sweet delights.

  The counter was strewn with cookies not yet nestled in their places under the glass. The cash register stood quiet and dark with a tightly closed drawer.

  When he reached Laney, Peter settled his hands gently on her shoulders. She jumped, twirled around, glanced at his face with wide, red eyes, then quickly buried her head in his chest.

  Peter peered over Laney’s smooth, straight brown hair. On the floor, just inside the staff area, lay the body of Dan Springs. Peter gently bent down, reaching out one hand. Laney merely moved with him, her sobs muffled by his starched blue shirt. In this awkward position, Peter managed to get two fingers over Dan’s carotid artery. Not only was it still, but definitely too cold for any CPR to be of assistance.

  “Okay. Let’s get out of here, Laney, shall we?”

  “He’s dead. I checked.” Laney snuffled into his shoulder.

  Peter and Laney had trained together to work with the local Red Cross, and he knew her assessment was as good as his. There was nothing either of them could do for Dan Springs now.

  Peter moved Laney out of the building. As soon as sunlight hit them, he saw Joshua Cutter running their way. Laney and Joshua might have a rocky past, but it wasn’t because Joshua had been unkind. Right now, a friend like Joshua might be the perfect thing for Laney.

  Laney didn’t object when Peter moved her to Joshua’s arms and asked him to take her home. Hayley also didn’t object when Peter asked her to keep the quickly gathering curiosity seekers away from the bakery while his backup made their way through the winding streets of the hilly, coastal town.

  With the competent Cutter siblings handling things outside, Peter ducked back into the bakery. Pulling out a pair of gloves, he quickly covered his hands. The small pouch the gloves came in also contained a set of sanitary booties, which he stuck on over his shoes. He took a deep breath and hit the light switch.

  With the advantage of the bright overheads, the bakery appeared like a still frame of mid-preparation. In addition to the cookies on the counter, more blue-and-white-striped boxes sat in stacks along a redwood shelf lining the back of the little galley-style area. He knew, without peering over the counter, that Dan’s body lay there, on his back, hand on chest, among a sprinkling of cookies gathered around his head like a bizarre halo.

  Missing from the scene was broken glass, knocked-over displays, crumpled cookie boxes, or a plundered cash register. With the exception of the dead man and the cookie art on the floor around him, everything was in its place.

  “Whoa. What’s going on here?” Tarak Patil stopped in the doorway, his detective instincts strong. He immediately began to gear up the way Peter had done.

  “Not sure. The ME coming?”

  “Yeah, she’s on her way from San Rafael.” With booties in place, Tarak carefully made his way across the linoleum floor to stand beside Peter. Together they gazed down at the dead man. “This the guy that just showed up from the city to screw with Hayley? Dan something?”

  Peter rubbed his chin, the latex glove sticking on his stubble. “Yeah. He’s the guy.” Knowing he’d need to tell his story a thousand more times today, he gave Tarak the rundown of events. “I came by at ten fifteen to buy cookies. The door was locked, and the lights were out. I went next door instead. I was over there maybe ten minutes when Laney James screamed. Don’t have her story yet. I sent her home for now. Pretty sure she used her key to get in. Other than checking for a pulse, neither Laney nor I touched him.”

  “I gotta say, Chief, with his hand over his chest and the lack of any signs of a struggle, it looks like a pretty clear case of a heart attack.”

  “Yeah. But let’s make sure, huh?” Peter squatted down to get a better look at the cookies ringing Dan’s head. No question about it, they were the very cookies that had become the greatest contention between Dan and his neighboring bakery.

  “What are they?” Tarak asked.

  “Macaroons.”

  “Wait. Did this dude actually sell macaroons? That’s Hayley’s specialty!”

  Peter nodded, surprised Tarak wasn’t up on the cookie drama. But then again, he was a busy detective with an active home life; maybe cookies weren’t as high on his radar as they seemed to be for Peter. Or perhaps it was cookie makers who really grabbed Peter’s attention. Either way, the history could wait. It wasn’t relevant right now.

  As the door of the bakery opened again, Peter rose to his feet and went to greet the rest of the newcomers. There was a lot to be done.

  ****

  Peter stood in Dan Springs’ small office. Across from him, lounging like a tired teenager, sat Jill McFadden. He knew the look of a person who got up in the middle of the night to wrestle dough into submission. The bluish-purple semicircles under her light hazel eyes sat atop gaunt cheeks and chapped lips.

  As the sole baker for Baker Dan’s, Jill had been up and laboring for close to nine hours now. Even though he was anxious to meet up with Laney James, who was no doubt nervously awaiting information, this interview needed to happen before Jill went to sleep. He would drag her memories now, and again later, to see how they compared. But that would only work if he could keep her attention.

  Jill stared at the kitty calendar tacked to the wall beside her, absentmindedly chewing on her thumbnail. Her eyes roamed over the numbers in jerky movements. She was probably in shock. She’d just walked past the linen-draped body of her boss after all.

  “So what time did you come in this morning?”

  “Eight o’clock. Same as always.”

  Peter wished he could snap his fingers in front of her face without coming off as a complete jerk. He wanted her to look at him. But she just kept her eyes on the fluffy grey kitty balanced on a pumpkin.

  “Was Dan here when you came in?”

  “No.” Jill raised her hand toward the calendar. She flipped the page up and peeked at the next month. “This calendar is still on October. We’re halfway through December now.”

  “Um. I think it’s best if we leave everything as it is.”

  Finally, Jill turned to face him. She dropped the calendar page and snapped her eyes to his. “Oh, right.”

  “So he wasn’t here when you dropped off the cookies this morning?”

  “No.”

  “Is that unusual?” Peter worked to keep his tone even. Upset people were frustrating. It wasn’t their fault.

  “No.”

  Peter let out a breath, careful to keep it slow and steady. “Okay. So how did this usually work?”

  “I come in at eight and leave the cookies. Laney or Dan shows up in time to get them in the cases before we open at nine. I come back with a fresh batch around eleven.”

  “So you didn’t see Dan at all this morning?”

  Jill shook her head.

  “What can you tell me about the cookies you delivered?”

  Jill’s eyes grew wide. She stared at him for a long beat, surprise jumping across her features. “The cookies?”

  “Yes. Tell me about the cookies. Were they the same as always?”

  “Yeah. There are fourteen varieties currently, almost all Christmas themed. Plus the new ones.”

  “The macaroons.”

  “Yeah.” Jill bit her lip. “It wasn’t my idea. I even told him not to do it.”

  Peter held up a hand. “Just tell me about the cookies.”

  “That’s it. I had fourteen kinds. I can tell you how many boxes of each if we go back…”

  “Can we?” Dan’s body was still in the main part of the shop as everything was being processed. Peter didn’t want to lose Jill to shock again, but he wanted every detail he could get now.

  Jill nodded and rose. She led Peter out of the tiny office, ducked around the corner, and waltzed right up to the lump under the sheet. She reached toward the shelving behind him but stopped midmotion. Her arm outstretched, Jill stared at the ground, right where the sheet covered Dan’s head. “What is this?”

  Peter lurched forward, prepared to stop her from lifting the sheet. But she was too quick. Jill squatted abruptly, bouncing down and back up again with ease. When she rose, she held a cookie in her hand.

  Pushing the cookie toward Peter she asked again, “What is this?”

  “Um. I believe it’s a macaroon. Didn’t you make it?”

  “No. This macaroon…” Jill tore the gooey cookie in two and stared at its innards. “This is gluten free.”

  “Aren’t all macaroons gluten free?”

  Jill’s light eyes hit Peter’s like the laser site on a gun. “Not ours. That was the thing. Nothing in the store could be GF. So Dan had me make a macaroon recipe up with wheat flour. It changes the consistency. That’s how I know. I didn’t make this cookie.”

  Jill held it up to her nose and took a delicate sniff. “Smells weird.” Her head shot up again, mouth agape. “You don’t suppose…”

  Peter was trying to catch up. This was getting a little strange. “What?”

  Jill’s eyes were big and round. “That he was poisoned?”

  Chapter 4

  Never, in the sixteen years they’d known each other, had Peter ever asked Hayley to help with a police thing. Even when she’d offered her opinion about the bike thief in town or who she thought had been stealing all the doggie bags out of the holders, he’d blown her off. Now he wanted her assistance.

  Exactly what was going on wasn’t really clear. Hayley turned her back to the brick shop. She wasn’t alone on that sidewalk. People were starting to gather. More were crossing over from the other side of the street, all called by Laney’s piercing scream and the sight of a racing police officer.

  Peter had ducked back into the shop after asking Joshua to take a stricken Laney home. Closing the door behind him, he left Hayley to work on crowd control until more police arrived.

  She was so busy trying to negotiate with the pedestrians, bicyclists, and even people in cars stopping in the middle of the road to shout out an inquiry that she didn’t notice the cavalcade of police, sheriff, and California Highway Patrol pull up around her little pink, vinyl-sided bakery and the stark red brick one next door.

  Hot and exhausted, Hayley gladly handed the duty over to a CHiPs officer with an unfriendly expression and a perfectly stern voice. He was clearly better suited for the job. Few people were interested in listening to the short woman in the dusty apron tell them she had no idea what was going on, but that the police had asked her to keep them away. Apparently, it was less than credible with most people.

  The chaos in front of Baker Dan’s was intensely over-stimulating. Men and women dressed in three different-colored uniforms came in and out of the dark brown door of Dan’s three-week-old bakery. Hayley couldn’t see Peter among the blur of blue, silver, and black.

  The crowd of tourists—necks stretched as they balanced on tiptoes trying to get a glimpse of what was happening past the grouchy ChiPs officer—packed the sidewalk, blocking the front entrance to her shop. So Hayley ducked between the two buildings, using the six-foot-wide strip of gravel and weeds to head toward the small three-car lot in the back. Seeing that Joshua’s car was still gone, and his spot had been taken by a Marin County Sheriff’s vehicle, she pulled her keys from the front pocket of the lightweight hoodie she wore beneath the apron and headed to the battered wooden door that served as the delivery entrance to the bakery.

  The quiet of the shop’s interior was stark compared to the cacophony of activity outside. Hayley leaned against the counter. Deep breaths billowed in and out of her lungs. Her mind ran over everything she’d witnessed in the last thirty minutes: Laney’s terrified scream, Peter’s face, the sheer quantity of law enforcement in and out of Dan’s bakery, and the whispers about not bothering to call an ambulance, about it being too late, about something being seriously wrong. What the hell had happened in that building next door?

  The ringing phone snapped her out of her daze. Glancing at the screen in an action of pure habit, she didn’t pause before answering. “Mom?”

  “Your brother says he’s over at Laney’s house, and she just saw a dead body. What the hell is going on?”

  Since reopening was probably out of the question today, Hayley set the phone on the counter, hit speaker, and began cleaning up the kitchen. She clasped onto a vain hope that the routine movements would calm her nerves. But it was an uphill battle with her mother on the phone.

  “Honestly, Mom, I have no idea. Joshie probably knows more than I do.”

  “He literally picked up the phone, told me he was at Laney’s. I asked him why since she still hates him as far as I know. He mumbled something snotty, then said she’d seen a dead body, told me he loved me, and hung up.”

  “Well, you know more than I do.” Hayley scrubbed at a bit of stuck almond paste and let the realization sink in. All the pieces could easily be put together. Baker Dan was dead.

  “Is Peter there?”

  “Here? No.”

  “I mean where the dead body is. I assume it’s in town somewhere. Near the bakery?”

  “Why do you assume that?” Every once in a while being vague kept Tilly Cutter from panicking.

  “Because I know Joshua was at the bakery, and he drove Laney home after she saw a dead body, hence the dead body must be somewhere in the vicinity of the bakery.”

  Damn. The analytical mind of her chemist mother didn’t seem to be at all affected by excited panic. “I think it’s the guy next door,” Hayley admitted.

  “Oh my God! The jerk who’s trying to put you out of business?”

  “The very one.” Could they say that still? I mean, if the guy was dead, were they allowed to speak ill of him, even if it was true?

  “I bet it was a heart attack.”

  Hayley had assumed the same thing, though the police presence was a little overblown for a heart attack, even in Sausalito. Rather than get further down that muddy road with her mother, she changed the subject. “I think I’m going to close up for the day. It’s kind of crazy over here.”

  “What about the cookies you baked this morning?”

  Hayley frowned and looked out at the cases of Christmas sugar cookies in festive shapes, intricately decorated gingerbread men and women, and her signature cookie, the chocolate-striped lumps of shredded coconut that were a fan favorite—her macaroons.

  How had the lumpy, cheap treat whose name was often confused with the fancy and expensive macarons from France, unexpectedly become her signature cookie? The reason was perhaps simple. It was a naturally gluten-free cookie. So when she’d opened the shop, she’d been able to lure people in with the macaroons. It was the one cookie they knew would taste exactly as they remembered Grandma making.

  Once they were in the door, Hayley would offer them free samples of her other gluten-free cookies. One taste and they were sold. When it worked, Hayley had realized the dream she thought was lost the day she was diagnosed with celiac disease. She remembered her mother telling her she’d be the best gluten-free baker in the world. At fourteen, she’d believed her and grasped onto that dream.

  Fifteen years later, Hayley had made it happen. She’d opened a gluten-free cookie bakery that, thanks to the magical macaroon, had become a success. With a second store in the works, things were looking rosy. That’s when Dan Springs had entered the picture.

  Hayley shook off her macabre thoughts and answered her mother. “I put some of them in the fridge, and we’ll sell them at a discount over the weekend. I’ll take the rest to the shelter.”

  “Tell Kenna I said hello.” Her mother blew a kiss over the line and hung up.

  Her best friend, Kenna, was usually super busy at the homeless shelter she ran by this time of day, but she’d be up for a delivery. And she’d probably want to hear about Dan. By now the news was surely burning through town like wildfire.

  Shoving the phone into the pocket of her hoodie opposite the keys, she set to work transferring the cookies from the shelves to the fridge, keeping her eyes away from the windows showing the packed sidewalk and the missed customers. She wasn’t about to be the person who took advantage of tragedy to sell cookies, no matter how tempting.

 

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