Feeding Frenzy Page 5

  Vern threw up his hands. “So you’re saying I did it?”

  “You stayed out of the water. That’s what I’m saying,” Kyle told him.

  Good point.

  “Kyle, you were sitting right next to David at the L.A. contest,” Douglas said softly, eyes on his feet.

  “What?” Kyle exploded.

  “You were sitting next to him. You could have done something to his food if you wanted to,” Douglas mumbled.

  “Wait, you were in L.A. too!” Kyle accused. “Those girls in the surf shop were talking about your sister being in a surfing competition there last Friday. There’s no way you were in L.A. the weekend of the eating contest without going. That’s how you know where I was sitting!”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Douglas protested. “I just watched.”

  Was that true? I wasn’t sure. Douglas being at the competition when David died made him a strong suspect.

  “You both were in the SUV with Jordan’s surfboard. Who knows—one of you might have even carried it out of the shop,” Angie pointed out. “Either of you could have put that vibrating thing on it.”

  “You were in there too,” Kyle said. “All of us were. And we all carried stuff out to the SUV.”

  True. And all of them had a motive for murder.

  7

  Flying Hardy Brothers

  “So we can eliminate Jordan as a suspect,” I said. Joe and I were sitting on the balcony of our hotel room. We’d decided to skip the pool and spend the time going over the case.

  And, okay, neither of us was all that excited about getting in the water again. Even highly chlorinated, fairly shallow, no-way-a-shark-could-be-in-here water.

  “Yeah. Maybe a killer would stage an attack on himself so he would look less guilty. You know, ‘Hey, I’m not the murderer, because somebody tried to murder me’,” Joe said. “But nobody would stage an attack involving a great white. It’s not like you can hand one a hundred and say, ‘Make it look real, but no teeth marks.’”

  “Jordan never seemed to have quite as strong a motive as everyone else, anyway,” I commented.

  Joe took a long swig of his soda and propped his feet on the balcony railing. “You mean because he seems a lot more interested in the Super Bowl than in the eating competition?”

  “Yeah. It’s like he wanted to win the qualifying competition so he could come to the game. He didn’t need David dead for that—they were in separate regional contests.”

  “And Jordan’s here now. He’s going to see the game no matter what. He’s got what he wants. He probably wants to win the competition, too—who doesn’t want to win? I want to win myself!” Joe said. “But he doesn’t seem like somebody who wants to win bad enough to kill for it.”

  I tilted my head back and let the sun beam down on my face as I thought. “Everyone in the competition could have gotten to this level whether or not David died except—”

  “Except Kyle,” Joe finished for me.

  “Right,” I said. “He might have beaten David. But David had won a lot of other competitions.”

  “David had a good chance of mopping the floor with Kyle,” Joe added. “No matter how much Kyle talks about how he’s the best gurgitator ever born.”

  “And Kyle was sitting right next to David during the competition. Easy access to his food,” I reminded Joe.

  “Kyle could definitely win a Top Suspect contest.” Joe drained his soda and picked up another can. His fourth.

  “Aunt Trudy wouldn’t approve,” I said.

  “Do you see Aunt Trudy around?” Joe shaded his eyes and stared in all directions. “Besides, I’m stretching my stomach for tomorrow.” He popped the top of the can. “Douglas is a good runner-up for the Top Suspect prize. He was at the contest where David died too. Not quite as close, but there.”

  I took my laptop off the little table next to my lounge chair and flipped the lid up. “I wonder if anyone else from the group was in the vicinity when David died.”

  Joe moved his chair closer to my lounger so he could look over my shoulder. I went to YouTube and quickly found a bunch of clips of the L.A. contest. I love YouTube. There’s almost nothing somebody hasn’t posted a clip of.

  I clicked on the first one. And we were back inside that red-and-white-striped tent. “You watch the left side of the crowd. I’ll watch the right,” I told my brother.

  I started at the top row of spectators I could see and methodically moved my eyes from left to right, taking in each little face. I’d definitely need to play the clip again, but it was better to go slow and be thorough. Especially because the killer might have worn some kind of disguise. Would have if they were smart. And I gotta say, that vibrator device on the surfboard—very smart.

  “Oh, man!” Joe exclaimed.

  “What? Did you see someone?”

  “Oh, yeah. Look at her.” Joe tapped the screen. “Wow. Now I’m starting to understand that song Dad sings in the shower. ‘I wish they all could be California girls.’”

  In age, my brother isn’t that much younger than I am. In maturity level—we’re hardly even the same species.

  Joe here. I’m not letting that go by. My brother’s problem is that girls scare him. They scare him because they make him stammer and blush and look like an idiot in pretty much any way possible.

  Out. This is my part of the story.

  “Joe, let me remind you of a couple of things. The eating contest is tomorrow. Somebody is trying to eliminate the competition. That means that somebody else could die—before tomorrow—if we don’t stop them,” I said, slowly and carefully. “So do you think you could look for our suspects instead of cute girls?”

  “So you admit it—you think she’s cute?” asked Joe.

  “Joe, the people in the crowd are so small, I don’t know how you could see enough to get one of your crushes.” I restarted the clip from the beginning.

  “I saw long blond hair,” Joe said. “And she had her legs stretched out on the seat in front of her. The hair and those legs had to belong to a cute girl.”

  “You’re quite the detective,” I muttered as I continued my examination of my half of the crowd.

  We didn’t spot Vern, Angie, or Jordan in any of the clips—and with all the clips combined, there were shots of everyone in the tent. We did see Douglas near the front of the crowd, almost directly behind David. But we didn’t catch him doing anything suspicious. It looked like he was taking notes. We didn’t spot Kyle doing anything suspicious either.

  Also, for the record, Joe “almost completely confirmed” that the spot on his California girl’s stomach revealed by her low-rise jeans was “an adorable little tattoo.”

  “Okay, so as far as we know, only Douglas and Kyle were at the scene of David’s murder and Jordan’s attempted murder,” Joe said. “Whaddaya say we tie them up and beat a confession out of them?”

  I ignored him. Sometimes that’s all you can do with Joe.

  “Okay, okay. So, whaddaya say we find a way to get them out of their rooms and search for evidence?” he asked.

  I laughed. “Great idea.” I powered down the laptop. “So how do we get them out?”

  “Maybe we could tell them Mr. Poplin wants to meet with them,” Joe suggested.

  He was on a roll. “There are a bunch of little conference rooms on the second floor. Let’s give the guys notes telling them to meet him in one of them.” I stood up and headed inside. I got a couple of sheets of hotel stationery from the little desk in the corner. “Mr. Poplin doesn’t seem too formal, does he?” I asked.

  “Formal? Have you forgotten those shorts he had on today? They could have put out somebody’s eye, they were so bright,” Joe answered.

  “True.” I grabbed a pen and sat down. Hi, Douglas, I wrote. We need to have a quick chat. Meet me in the—I looked over at Joe. “What’s the name of one of those rooms?”

  He flipped through the leather folder with all the hotel info in it. “Manatee,” he told me.

 
Manatee Room, I wrote. Second floor. 4:30. See you then. Edward P. I wrote an identical note for Kyle. Well, identical except for the “Hi, Douglas” part. Then Joe and I took them down to the lobby and gave them to the woman working the front desk.

  “How do we get in?” Joe asked as we crossed the lobby back to the glass elevators. “We’ll be too exposed trying to pick the locks in the hallway. There are always people around.”

  “I have a plan,” I told him.

  “We had to be on the seventeenth floor,” Joe muttered as he used one hand to swing out from our balcony and his other hand to catch the railing of the next balcony over.

  “It’s not like you’d break fewer bones if you fell from the thirteenth floor,” I told him.

  “Hotels don’t have thirteenth floors,” Joe said as I started my swing. “Too many people don’t want to stay on them. So they skip from twelve to fourteen. Is fourteen still unlucky then? ’Cause it’s still the thirteenth even though it’s not called that.”

  I hoisted myself over the balcony railing and landed in a crouch. “I don’t think thirteen is unlucky anyway.”

  We monkeyed our way over two more balconies. Lucky for us it was February, so it was already starting to get dark. Otherwise a lot more people would be sitting outside. “This is it. Kyle’s room,” said Joe. Fortunately for us, all the balconies in sight were empty.

  I pulled out my lock pick and got to work on the sliding glass door. It was no problem. ATAC had trained us on all kinds of locks. “We need to get this done fast. Who knows how long Kyle will wait for Mr. Poplin?”

  “Since it’s Mr. P., he’ll probably wait for a while,” Joe said, already moving toward the dresser. I headed to the closet. Nothing in there but clothes. I felt the pockets. Nothing.

  “He has this log book of his training,” Joe said, as I began searching under one of the beds. “It’s intense. He’s scheduled every minute of every day—down to two minutes for brushing his teeth after each meal. If this is accurate, the guy hasn’t watched The Simpsons, or gone online, or played b-ball or anything that’s just for fun in months. That’d make most people crack.”

  “Yeah.” I hadn’t found anything under the beds or under the mattresses or in the pillowcases. I started on the nightstand. Just books. The art of War. In It to Win It. Meditation for Dummies.

  “I found a major stash of bran and bottled water, but nothing like evidence yet,” Joe announced. He got up on a chair and started feeling inside the light fixtures. I felt the hems of the curtains to see if anything had been slid inside. Checked the toilet tank. Checked the trash.

  Joe checked for any loose carpet. Ran his hands over the backs of the furniture. Opened the mini-fridge. Took some macadamia nuts. Mr. Poplin had said we could eat anything in them, so …

  “So we got nothing,” he said, chomping on the nuts. “Just verification that Kyle takes the competition incredibly seriously.”

  “Let’s get to Douglas’s room,” I answered. We walked back out to the balcony. I slid the door shut behind us and relocked it.

  Getting to Douglas’s room was going to be a little trickier. It was on the sixteenth floor. I leaned out over the railing of Kyle’s balcony as far as I could. “I don’t think anyone’s out on the one below us,” I told Joe softly.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said. He grabbed the top of the railing with both hands, then swung his legs over to the outside. He couldn’t drop straight down. Otherwise he’d—drop straight down. All the way to the ground.

  So he swung his body out and back, like he was doing a move on the parallel bars. Out and back. Out and back. Getting momentum. Out and—he let go. Angling his body in toward the balcony. When I heard him land with a thump, I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding.

  My turn. I rubbed my hands on the front of my khakis to make sure they were absolutely dry, then I grabbed the railing and launched my legs over. The weight of my body pulled on the tendons of my arms.

  Don’t just hang there, I ordered myself. Get moving.

  I imitated Joe, swinging my legs back and out, then in again. Trying to get higher with each repetition. On the third swing I was high enough to see the balcony below me. I pointed my toes toward it. And I let go of the railing. A second later Joe was hauling me to my feet.

  “I was thinking if we get tired of ATAC, we could join the circus. The Flying Hardy Brothers,” he said.

  “Douglas’s room is one to the left,” I told him. The climb between balconies on the same floor seemed a lot easier this time. And we didn’t even have to pick Douglas’s door. He’d left it unlocked. “Guess he didn’t think anybody would be crazy enough to climb in way up here.”

  “He doesn’t know the Flying Hardy Brothers,” Joe said, leading the way inside.

  Douglas’s room was a lot messier than Kyle’s, which made it a little harder to search. For starters, his clothes were scattered all over the floor, not hung in the closet, so that made my pocket search slower. I had to make sure to leave everything positioned exactly as it had been, even though I thought it was really unlikely Douglas would notice.

  “Ew,” said Joe.

  I jerked myself up from the floor, where I’d just begun my under-the-bed investigation. “What?”

  “Douglas has his mini-fridge filled with mayo. I’m talking filled. There’s nothing else in there,” Joe told me, his face screwed up in an expression of disgust.

  “I guess that explains that.” I pointed to the large spoon covered with crusty white gunk sitting on his nightstand.

  “Oh, man, he eats it straight? I’m going to go search the bathroom, since I may have to puke.” Joe hurried off.

  I got back on my stomach to check under the bed. I found another mayo-crusted spoon. But I scored big when I looked under the mattress. “Our boy keeps a journal,” I called to Joe.

  “Excellent. Read me the highlights,” he said, reappearing from the bathroom. “Nothing in there, by the way.” He moved on to searching for any loose patches of carpet or baseboard.

  I opened the journal. It never feels right to look at something so private. But the information in here could save someone’s life. “The first entry is about his sister,” I said. Then I started to read. “‘I wonder what would happen to Candi if she ever lost at anything. I think it might be like popping a hole in a helium balloon. I think she’d just shrivel up until she was this piece of trash.’”

  Joe snorted. “Nice.”

  “Here’s another one. ‘Candi brought home another trophy. Does she even get that that’s why Mom and Dad pay so much attention to her? Or does she think that it’s actually about her? Like the actual her? If she stopped winning, she’d see. They’d treat her like they do me.’”

  “Douglas acts like he’s practically invisible,” Joe commented. “He talks so quietly. And he’s almost always looking down. Maybe it’s because he feels … it sounds like he feels worthless.”

  “It also sounds like the only way he thinks he’d be worth anything is if he handed his parents a trophy,” I added. “That’s a pretty strong motive.” I continued to flip through the journal, skimming. “There’s some stuff about school. About how his homeroom teacher hasn’t even figured out his name and the year’s half over. Lots more Candi and parents stuff. A little bit about his dog. He seems to like his dog, at least, and seems to think his dog likes him.”

  I slid the journal back under the mattress. “Well, we don’t have to do any more balcony climbing. We can just check the hall through the peephole and go out the front door when it’s clear.”

  “I’m almost done. I only have to check the back of the dresser.” Joe pulled it away from the wall and ran his fingers over it. “Clean,” he announced. “Let’s—”

  We both froze as we heard the click of the keycard being swiped. Joe shoved the dresser back into place, and we bolted. At least we didn’t have to worry about relocking the door.

  Douglas’s curtains were partially shut, and they blocked us as
we swung our way over to the next balcony.

  We were safe.

  Until Joe backed up a step and bumped into a large ceramic planter with a little palm tree in it. It teetered. I grabbed for it, but it went down. And it shattered.

  The noise was horrible.

  The next sound was worse. A voice from the shadows.

  “I guess I need to call security.”

  8

  Caught!

  We were caught!

  I took a step forward. Then I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Yeah, we were caught. But we were caught by a girl. Even in the dark I could see she was super cute in her cutoff shorts and bikini top. With her long blond hair falling almost to her waist. If you’re going to get caught, that’s the way to get caught. Am I right?

  Frank didn’t seem to think so. He looked like he was considering jumping. That’s the way he gets around girls, especially girls of the super cute variety.

  “Shouldn’t I be calling security? Is there a reason not to?” the girl asked in this Southern accent that somehow multiplied the cuteness factor. Her words were sort of a threat. But the way she was looking at Frank wasn’t. Obviously, she liked what she saw.

  I kicked Frank in the shin, then gave him a big smile. I was hoping he would take the hint and smile at the girl. Maybe do a little flirting. I would be happy to do it. But she wasn’t looking at me the way she was looking at Frank.

  Frank blinked a few times. Then he seemed to process the situation correctly. It’s a good thing it was dark, because I knew he had to be blushing. “Um, hi. Uh, no. There’s no … you don’t need to call security. We’re harmless.” He smiled at her.

  I could almost see her getting melty around the edges. It was kind of sickening.

  “Harmless, huh?” S.C., as in Super Cute, asked. She took a step closer, and a band of light from her room angled across her stomach. She had the cutest little bumblebee tat next to her belly button. And with her closer, I could smell something minty and fruity. I didn’t know if it was a mix of shampoo and perfume or what, but I liked it. “What is a harmless guy doing sneaking around a balcony that isn’t his?”