Lipstick On A Pig

Chapter 16

“We have to be careful,” I told Sophie, grabbing her arm as she headed toward the two men.

“Well duh,” she replied, rolling her eyes.

“No, I mean, I’ve already been caught spying on Lester Forrester. When he was talking to their other brother, the PR guy, Gary. I don’t want him to catch me again.”

“Fine, then make us invisible,” Sophie said. “But it looks like they’re talking about something important, and I think we should hear.”

“Ok, come back here,” I motioned, heading behind a bunch of shrubs at the front of the church, behind a gate. We would be hidden from view while I cast the spell.

“Nonvideroa,” I whispered, pointing to Sophie. She disappeared suddenly, and I did the same for myself.

“Where are you?” Sophie hissed a second later.

“Right here, I haven’t moved, where are you?”

“I haven’t moved either.”

“Well then where on earth are you?”

“How are we so bad at this? We could see each other literally thirty seconds ago.”

“I blame you.”

“You would. This is so your fault.”

“How is it my fault?”

“You’re the one who cast the spell.”

“I know you can’t see it, but I’m rolling my eyes at you so hard right now.”

A minute later we had fumbled our way into grabbing each other, and I took Sophie by the hand so we wouldn’t get separated. We agreed to meet back there if we got split up for whatever reason, and then we quickly made our way back out to spy on the two lawyers.

“I don’t have any idea what we’re going to do about this,” Andrew Forrester started off.

“I know, damn it. I know Gary is onto things, but the police aren’t stupid, and goodness knows small town police stations leak like a sieve when it comes to information.”

“You need to trust Gary. He’s our brother. He’ll take care of everything.”

“And what if the police start calling? What then?”

“Then you’re going to tell them that we were together that night.” Andrew turned to his brother and grabbed him by the arm, his eyes boring into him. “We were together. You need to remember that. As long as we stick to that story, the police can’t prove otherwise.”

“Fine. What were we doing?”

“Watching the Mariners play the Orioles. The Mariners won. You don’t remember what the final score was. Got it?”

“Fine. Yeah, fine, I’ve got it. We were together, we watched baseball, Seattle won.”

“Good.”

“Now what are we going to do about Jon?” Les asked.

“Let Gary take care of that. There’s only so much we can do for him. But remember, he has that airtight alibi from the first murder, so they can’t establish a pattern of behavior. If anything, that makes him even less of a suspect in this murder. Don’t worry. We’ve been through this once before.”

“Yeah, and the last time we had to move the firm back to Portland because of the fallout.”

“That was with Chicago media all over us. Portland is smaller. This will blow over pretty quickly, especially since with Gary’s help none of us should ever be suspects.”

I instinctively looked over at where Sophie should be, even though I couldn’t see her, and raised my eyebrows. I could practically feel her doing the same thing to me.

“We had damn well better not be. With the solid alibi, it shouldn’t be in question. Why couldn’t that moron just keep it in his pants?” Les asked dejectedly.

“Because for some reason you didn’t realize when we were in law school just how much of a moron that guy was when it came to his personal life.”

“Hey, you can’t deny he’s an excellent lawyer, and the reason we’re both rich.”

“I’m not denying that. But I’m saying while he might be good at his job, he’s awful at his life.”

“Well, I can’t argue with that.”

“You shouldn’t. You should have known something was up when he made that bet in college to get people to pay him based on the number of girlfriends he could juggle at once without getting caught.”

Wow, Jonathan Cork certainly seemed like a winner.

The two men started back toward the church and began talking about another big case the firm was potentially going to take on. I drew back behind a car with Sophie and reversed the spell, after making sure there was no one around who could see us, and a minute later we were visible once more. We walked back out from behind the car, heading in the same direction as the two men, since I wanted to chat with Jason a bit before we left, and I knew he would most likely still be at the church conducting interviews.

“Well, I think we have main suspect number one and main suspect number two,” Sophie said casually as we walked back.

“The question is, how do we prove it?”

“Well, we could start by destroying their fake alibi.”

“How though? We can’t exactly admit that we were eavesdropping and that the two men admitted to us that they completely made everything up.”

“No,” Sophie said slowly. “You’re right, we can’t.”

Suddenly, her face lit up. I looked over and saw Taylor, her boyfriend, standing over to the side, watching over the funeral. He was dressed in civilian clothes, just casually watching the different groups of people chatting outside the church. I saw Antonia deLucca in one corner, enthusiastically talking to a man I didn’t recognize.

“Hey, honey,” she said as she made her way over to him. I followed. His face lit up when he saw her; I smiled. Sophie had always been a serial dater, the type to have six different boyfriends in six months. But ever since she and Taylor started dating, which had to be at least four months ago now, Sophie seemed to finally be content in a long-term relationship. For her, four months was practically marriage.

“Hey, how’s my favorite vet tech?” he asked, giving her a quick kiss and nodding at me. I smiled hello.

“Good! We’re just checking out the funeral,” Sophie told him. “How about you? What brings you out to this part of the county?”

“Chief Gary has me out here, we figured maybe there was a long shot that the person responsible would come to the funeral.”

“Long shot,” I said. “So that means you don’t really have a lot of clues to go on?”

Taylor gave me a searching look. “You know I can’t speak about an open investigation. But the two of you had better not be here trying to figure everything out for yourselves,” he warned, giving Sophie a stern look. She fluttered her eyelashes at him, giving her best “what, me?” innocent look to Taylor.

“Of course not, honey,” she said. “We would never do that.”

“That’s funny,” he said, sticking his tongue out at her. “I’m pretty sure you’ve done exactly that multiple times now.”

“Those were just flukes.”

“Of course they were.”

Just then, I spotted Jason on the other side of the courtyard.

“Hey, I’ll leave you guys to hash this out if you don’t mind. Sophie, when do you want to meet to head home?”

“Oh, I’ll go back with Taylor,” Sophie said, rummaging through her purse and tossing me her keys. “You take the car back.”

“Sure,” I replied with a smile, waving goodbye to the happy couple and heading over to my own boyfriend.

“Hey, Angie,” Jason said, breaking out into a smile when he saw me. I could never get over just how good that man looked when he smiled. The little dimples in his cheeks made my knees go weak every time I saw them.

“How’s the interviewing going? I bet you I have a better scoop than anything you’ve come up with,” I teased, a twinkle in my eye.

“Well, that’s certainly not hard to do,” Jason admitted. “So far all I have is people who asked me if their names can be in the paper, and they’ve all just given me stories about how they grew up with Jessica, and they were her best friend, and she was the best person ever.”

“Maybe they’re not entirely lying?” I suggested.

“One of them had a strong Australian accent and a tan that’s physically impossible to obtain in Oregon,” Jason replied, and I giggled. “So what did you find out?” he asked, and I relayed to him the conversation Sophie and I had overheard.

“And how exactly did you manage to hear this?” Jason asked, his eyes gleaming with excitement.

“We possibly eavesdropped. What? It’s not like we didn’t do exactly the same thing!” I argued. Jason laughed.

“That’s true. Either way, that’s some pretty interesting information there. I wish one of them had actually admitted that they’d killed her.”

I let out a sigh. “Me too. Right now, while I definitely think they are our prime suspects, I don’t know if the murder was committed by just the one, or if they were both in it together. What do you think?”

“I think you’re definitely on the right track. But I agree, it’s too early to call which one did it or if they partnered up to do it. We’re going to have to dig deeper into this.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sophie and I think we should break their alibi apart, but we have no idea how.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll come up with something. Do you want me to come by later and brainstorm with you?”

“Sure,” I said with a smile. “That sounds good. As long as you can put up with the craziness of Sophie and Charlotte and I all talking about the murder again.”

“I grew up in New York City, you guys are pretty much saints compared to a lot of the stuff I saw there,” Jason replied, and I stuck my tongue out at him.

“Enjoy your interviews,” I told him as I headed off toward where Sophie had parked the car on the way in.