Review to a Kill Read online

  I tapped Kate’s folders. “Let’s try to forget about Tricia for a day and focus on the upcoming weddings.”

  Kate put her phone on the floor. “You’re right. I feel like we might have neglected some of them because Tricia sucked up so much time.”

  “Yoo-hoo!” Leatrice called out, and I could tell she was already inside my apartment.

  “Maybe if we’re quiet enough she won’t know we’re back here,” Kate whispered.

  “Impossible,” I told her. “She has superhuman hearing.”

  Leatrice appeared in the doorway wearing a beige trench coat belted at the waist and a matching fedora. “There you are. I thought I heard two voices back here.”

  “Told you,” I said to Kate then smiled at Leatrice. “What’s up?”

  “I finally did it.” She held up a handful of papers. “I found all the reviews that your bride wrote.”

  Kate raised an eyebrow. “That must have taken a while.”

  Leatrice walked over to my black office chair and sat down, her feet, clad in old-fashioned black lace-up heels, dangling a few inches above the floor. “It did. I was up half the night.”

  “This didn’t involve any hacking, did it?” I asked. I’d felt guilty after Detective Reese had seen all of the documents that Leatrice’s hacker friends had pulled off the police computer system, so the fewer illegal actions taken on my behalf, the better.

  She shook her head. “Just lots of searching. Luckily the bride used her real name or some variation of ‘TriciaandDaveattheHay’ for all her user profiles, so her reviews weren’t tough to track down. She must not have cared who knew she wrote them.”

  “I’m sure she wanted people to know who wrote them,” Kate said. “I’ll bet that was part of the fun for her.”

  Leatrice tilted her fedora back. “Well, she was the only one having fun. There wasn’t a nice review in the bunch, and there were hundreds.”

  “Hundreds?” I’d had no idea our bride’s poisoned pen had been so prolific. I made a mental note to do a better job of researching our clients before we signed on. A decent Google search could have avoided a year’s worth of suffering on our part, not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t have been named a person of interest in a murder investigation.

  Leatrice handed me the stack of papers. “I put them in chronological order with the most recent ones, the ones from the wedding, on the top. But they go back eight years.”

  Kate whistled. “That’s a lot of hate mail.” She slid closer to me so she could read over my shoulder. “There’s ours.”

  I didn’t have the stomach to read it again, so I put Tricia’s review of us facedown on the floor. I flipped through the review of Buster and Mack, one of the hotel, and then reached one of the bridal salon where Tricia had bought her wedding gown. I scanned the text and shook my head. “She ripped Caroline’s boutique to shreds.”

  “What?” Kate snatched the review from my hands. “But those women bent over backwards for her. They even sent gowns to her house. When have you ever heard of a salon doing that?”

  “None of her reviews were justified,” I reminded Kate. “Just remember the one she wrote about us. Nothing but lies.”

  Kate threw the paper onto the floor. “I know, but it just makes me so mad that people think nothing of tearing apart something that someone’s worked so hard to build. If Tricia wasn’t dead already, I’d want to wring her neck.”

  Leatrice patted her on the shoulder. “Good thing someone beat you to it, dear.”

  I continued to page through the reviews. “And here’s one for her rehearsal dinner restaurant.”

  Kate’s mouth dropped open. “She panned Charlie Palmer? Come on, it’s a DC institution.”

  “And we recommended it,” I said, feeling bad the moment I remembered that we’d been the ones to talk up the steak house. “I guess we owe the manager an apology.”

  “From the looks of it we owe a lot of apologies.” Kate gestured to the pile of papers in my hand then ran a hand through her blond hair. “Is there any vendor we recommended that didn’t get trashed?”

  “I would say Fern, but we didn’t recommend him. And the only reason he missed being a target was because he threatened to shampoo her with Nair.”

  “Goodness.” Leatrice put a hand to her own violently burgundy locks. “That’s a scary thought.”

  “Wait a second.” Kate snapped her fingers. “Didn’t Fern recommend us for the wedding? Isn’t he the reason Tricia called us?”

  I tried to think back to a year ago when we got the wedding. “I’d have to look in my lead log, but you may be right. But I’m sure Fern didn’t know about the reviews or that things would turn out this way.”

  “I guess so.” Kate slumped back. “And if we get mad at Fern he may shampoo our hair with Nair.”

  “I don’t think the two of us being bald would help the situation,” I said.

  “But if that ever happens, you’re welcome to my wig collection,” Leatrice said. “I mostly use them for undercover surveillance, but I’m happy to share.”

  I didn’t want to know what type of undercover surveillance Leatrice meant, and I scanned my memory to see if I could recall any extremely short women following me.

  “So what are we going to do with these reviews?” Kate asked. “Give them to the police?”

  Turning them over to the police wasn’t my first instinct, but I knew I should be trying to let them handle the investigation. I also knew that giving Detective Reese any evidence would only convince him I was meddling again. And telling him that Leatrice gathered them might send him over the edge.

  “This is our list of people to visit,” I said. “You were right when you said we owed a lot of apologies. And I think we should do it in person.”

  Kate narrowed her eyes at me. “Are we going to apologize or question them? Because this feels a lot like what we’d be doing if we were trying to investigate the murder on our own.”

  “You’re so suspicious. I think Leatrice is rubbing off on you.”

  Kate gave me a dirty look, and Leatrice beamed.

  Even if I wouldn’t admit it to Kate, I knew that we’d be able to learn things from our wedding colleagues that the police never would. And even Detective Reese couldn’t fault me for wanting to commiserate with my fellow wedding vendors and victims of Tricia’s poisoned pen. Especially if he never found out.

  Chapter 16

  “Tell me again why this isn’t a terrible idea.” Kate closed the passenger door to my Volvo and walked around to my side. “And are those the same black pants you wore yesterday?”

  I glanced down at the black pants and pink button-down I’d thrown on before we left. “No,” I lied. “I own lots of black pants.” That part was true. But what was also true is that I’d grabbed this pair—the same I’d worn the day before—from where I’d draped them over the chair in my bedroom the night before.

  “That, I believe.”

  It had taken less than thirty minutes to drive from my Georgetown apartment to the DC suburb of Potomac, which meant we’d been very lucky and traffic had been unusually light. The bridal salon Love held a prominent spot in a row of high-end shops and boasted something DC salons could never claim—free parking and lots of it. I’d found a spot directly in front of the salon and reveled in the fact that I hadn’t been forced to circle the block or try to wedge my car into a quasi-legal space on the street. I might adore living in Georgetown, but the ’burbs had their perks.

  “How could commiserating with a colleague ever be a bad idea?” I asked.

  Kate studied me. “I want to believe you, but I feel like we’ve been down this path before, and it always ends up in us getting busted.”

  “Busted?” I laughed, but it sounded manufactured, even to my own ears. “The police can’t get angry at us for visiting friends. And Caroline Love is a friend.”

  Kate hiked her pink Kate Spade purse onto her shoulder. “Whatever you need to tell yourself but I still say we’re biki
ng up the wrong tree.”

  “That I would like to see,” I said, but Kate didn’t catch my meaning. If I was honest with myself, the visits were as much about my need to get myself off the potential suspect list for Tricia Toker’s murder as they were about reaching out to our wedding colleagues. I’d had enough dealings with the police to know they wouldn’t be as motivated to find an alternate suspect as I would be, and they didn’t know the wedding industry like we did. Anyway, visiting wedding friends was not the same as hacking into police computers so, as far as I was concerned, this was a step in the right direction.

  I followed Kate as she led the way up to the tall glass doors. The entire front of the salon featured floor-to-ceiling glass. Flanking the double doors were rows of couture wedding dresses suspended by transparent wires, giving the effect that the dresses floated in midair. When we opened the doors, a white half-moon receptionist’s desk sat underneath a massive sign that read “Love” in swirling white letters on a dove-gray background. The salon extended in both directions with racks of gowns covering the walls interspersed with full-length mirrors.

  “Kate? Annabelle?” A slender woman with glossy brown hair that fell straight to her shoulders came from behind the desk. “Do you have a bride coming today?”

  “Not today.” Kate reached the salon owner first and gave her a quick hug. “This is a social visit.”

  I extended the box of pastel, French macarons we’d picked up on our way. “We’re here to commiserate.”

  Caroline Love took the box and gave me a hug. “I’m assuming you mean about that horrible girl.” She waved us into the back of the salon, and we followed. Several cream-colored tufted couches clustered around a small stage surrounded by mirrors. This was where brides came to model the gowns they tried on and where their family and friends watched. We each took a spot on a couch around the empty stage.

  “You saw the reviews,” I said more as a statement than a question.

  Caroline opened the box of macarons, removed a pistachio-green cookie with a white filling, and passed the box along to Kate. “I only read ours. Then I had to shut down my computer before I threw it out the window.”

  Kate selected a pink macaron and slid the box over to me. I passed the box back to Caroline without taking one. Even though macarons were stylish and pretty and seemed to be omnipresent in weddings and bridal styled-shoots, I’d rather save the calories and have a chocolate chip cookie any day of the week.

  “You didn’t miss anything,” I said. “They were all equally awful.”

  “What makes me furious is that we bent over backwards for that woman. We took dresses over to her house. We’ve never done that before.”

  “I know.” I felt a twinge of guilt remembering that I’d set up the appointment and worked with Caroline to have a selection of gowns delivered along with a dress consultant to assist the bride. “You and your staff were amazing.”

  “I should have known when I heard how she treated her mother and maid of honor.” Caroline craned her neck toward the door to the back rooms. “Elaine, do you remember that sickly bride?”

  A middle-aged woman with short dark hair popped her head out of the door. “The mean one who couldn’t get out of bed?”

  She had a slight accent that made it sound like she was singing all her words.

  “That’s the one,” Kate said.

  “Elaine is our top seamstress.” Caroline beckoned the woman to come out and join us. “You remember Annabelle and Kate from Wedding Belles.”

  We all nodded to each other in greeting.

  Caroline patted the space next to her on the couch. “Tell them what happened at the final fitting with the bride.”

  Elaine sat but kept her hands folded in her lap. “I don’t normally talk about our brides, but after I read what that woman wrote about us . . .“ The smile dropped from her face.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “She trashed all of us, so you won’t get any judgment here.”

  Elaine looked to Caroline, who nodded. “What she wrote online about us ruining her alterations was completely false. When I went to her house for the final fitting, she didn’t fit into the dress because she’d gained weight.”

  “That’s a change,” Kate said. “Usually brides get so nervous before the wedding day that they forget to eat and drop weight.”

  “Not if you have everyone running around and doing things for you,” I said. “Tricia didn’t lift a finger for her wedding despite claiming in her review that she was stressed.”

  Kate grinned. “I’ll bet she wasn’t happy she’d put on some pounds.”

  “She blamed me for altering the dress wrong even after her mother reminded her that she’d been eating ice cream every day,” Elaine said. “Then when I said I’d have to let the dress out, the bride threw a tantrum.”

  “I’m glad we missed that one,” I said to Kate, even though we’d witnessed our share of Tricia’s meltdowns.

  “At you or at her mom?” Kate asked.

  “At her mother and her girlfriend,” Elaine said.

  “Must have been the maid of honor, Madeleine,” I said. “She didn’t have any other friends.”

  Elaine nodded. “Yes, Madeleine. That’s the one. Well, the bride accused her of being jealous and trying to upstage her at the wedding. Screamed that Madeleine blamed her for everything and was out to ruin her special day.”

  “By force-feeding her Ben & Jerry’s?” Kate rolled her eyes. “That bride was a loon.”

  “Her mother tried to calm her down, but the bride turned on her and said that it was her mother’s fault that her father was dead.” Elaine pressed her hands together in her lap. “I’d started to sneak out with the dress by this time, but the last thing I heard was the bride yelling over and over to her mother, ‘You killed him. And I’m going to tell everyone what you did.’”

  “She accused her mother of killing her father because her dress didn’t fit?” I knew that the bride’s very wealthy father had passed away just over a year ago, not long before the bride had gotten engaged, but I’d never heard even the slightest whisper that the death hadn’t been from natural causes.

  “This was no normal bride,” Caroline said.

  She made a good point. “Did it sound like she meant it when she accused her mother or do you think she was just blowing off steam?”

  Elaine raised her eyebrows. “I’ve never heard anyone ‘blow off steam’ by accusing them of murder, but after reading the lies she wrote about us, I believe she’d say anything to hurt someone.”

  I wondered if Tricia’s accusations were another instance of her being horrible or if there was truth behind them. Did Tricia’s mother have a reason to silence her own daughter?

  Chapter 17

  “That’s ridiculous,” Kate said after I’d told her my theory of the bride’s mother as murderer. “Tricia’s mother was devoted to her. Too much, if you ask me. She never would have killed her only daughter.”

  We’d left Potomac and were heading to Charlie Palmer restaurant, one of Washington, DC’s iconic power-lunch spots and the site of Tricia’s rehearsal dinner. I’d rolled down the car windows after we’d merged onto the GW Parkway to head back into the city. The tree-lined road was a welcome respite after the beltway traffic, and I breathed in the cool air scented by evergreens as I mulled over what we’d learned at the bridal salon.

  “But what if her only daughter was about to expose her for killing her husband?” I rested my elbow on the open window and held up my hand to be buffeted by the breeze as I accelerated on the open stretch. Driving helped me think, as long as it wasn’t bumper-to-bumper traffic. Unfortunately, uncrowded roads in DC were getting harder and harder to find.

  Kate brushed her hair off her face and switched on the radio, flipping through the stations until she found the perky pop music she favored. “I think she’d go to jail.”

  Maybe Kate was right. It was tough to imagine Mrs. Toker doing anything to harm a hair on her daughter’s spoiled hea
d.

  “But why would Tricia accuse her mother of killing her father?” I asked as we rounded a bend and the Potomac River came into view below us with rowing teams cutting across the dark blue water. “Doesn’t it seem suspicious that she blurts it out during a wedding meltdown and then ends up dead a few days later?”

  “You mean after she writes horrible reviews about half a dozen businesses and treats every person she comes in contact with on her wedding day like garbage?” Kate tapped her fingers to the sounds of Katy Perry. “What’s suspicious is that she survived as long as she did. I hope you’re not going to share this idea with Reese.”

  “Of course not.” I wasn’t going to tell Reese because to tell him I had a theory would be admitting that I’d been gathering evidence, even if I could claim it was inadvertent. In addition, I felt like my theory was falling apart by the second.

  My phone began ringing “Pachelbel’s Canon,” and I reached a hand behind me to dig it out of my purse.

  “You have got to change that ringtone,” Kate said. “Isn’t it bad enough that every other wedding sends their bridesmaids down the aisle to that song?”

  “At least I changed it from ‘The Wedding March.’” I glanced down at my phone before I answered it. “Hi, Richard.”

  “Are you at home?” he asked.

  I looked to my left and could see the buildings of Georgetown across the Potomac River, a single church spire jutting up from the rooftops. I was close to my Georgetown home even if I wasn’t going there. “Why? Is it time to walk the dog again?”

  “Dog?” Kate said. She knew Richard’s feelings about pets as well as the rest of us did.

  I put a finger to my lips to quiet her and put my phone on speaker so I could hear without holding the phone to my ear. Then I dropped the phone in the cup holder.

  “Is that Kate in the background?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’re in my car.”