Tangled Web: A Small Town Romance (The Cortell Brothers Book 6) by Giulia Lagomarsino (an ebook reader txt) 📕

“I don’t know,” I said incredulously. “Her son-in-law hired me to dig into her. He thinks she’s a black widow.”

“Wait, how many times has she been married?”

“Once, but the other deaths are very suspicious.”

“And what about the other times you said she might have tried to kill you?”

“Well, she came to my apartment and she brought me flowers.”

Kat flinched back, her hand pressed to her chest. “No! Flowers? I can’t believe it.”

I rolled my eyes at her mocking tone. “They were lilies, funeral flowers. Now, if that’s not a hint, I’m not sure what is. And she brought me pastries from Mary Anne’s. I think she was going to poison them. And then she told me to make sure I took my pills!”

“You mean the ones you’re supposed to take so that you’re not in pain?”

“Exactly!” I pointed at her. “Tell me that’s not suspicious.”

“So, she brought you food and flowers and made sure that you had your pills.”

I nodded vigorously. “And she put a bag of frozen vegetables on my foot. I don’t know what the hell to think of that.”

Kat nodded. “For sure. She definitely sounds like a killer.”

I stared at her in annoyance. “You don’t believe me.”

She laughed a little and shrugged. “Look, I definitely agree that it looks suspicious, but I think the wrench and the tub were just an accident. And as for the flowers—“

“The death flowers,” I corrected.

“They’re just flowers. I would guess that nine times out of ten, women wouldn’t be able to tell you the meaning of a flower. Maybe if it was the 1950’s. I’m not sure that women nowadays even like flowers.”

“Really? Why not?”

“Well, they’re pretty, and yes, they do send tingles down our spines, but in the end, they’re just flowers.”

“So, you want fancy shit.”

She shook her head. “I would be happy with a new Dyson vacuum cleaner.”

“Seriously?”

“Hey, they’re really nice, but they’re expensive. If I got one for Christmas, it would probably be the best day of my life.”

“Right, not the day you give birth or the day you marry my brother.”

“If I were talking to him? Yes, it would be one of those two days. But between you and me, the vacuum wins hands down every time.”

Sure that I was missing something, I decided to start digging deeper into these past two victims. If Kat was right, and maybe, by some very small, infinitesimal degree, Lorelei wasn’t a killer, I needed some kind of proof. So, I started digging into the background of this eighteen year old kid from West Virginia.

The kid was a normal eighteen year old. He started working at the age of sixteen, probably to help support his family. That wasn’t unusual. Hell, even around here, kids found jobs to help pay for their own clothes and shoes. Small towns were notorious for not having a big job market, and unless you lived closer to a big city, jobs were scarce for adults. The area this kid grew up in was even worse. Jobs were sorely lacking and it looked like he held a steady job at a grocery store. The pay was shit, which probably didn’t help, but I couldn’t see anything else that would have caused extreme stress.

Looking at his medical records, it appeared that he died from what’s called Broken Heart Syndrome. Basically, there was so much stress on his heart that the heart muscles weakened until he had a heart attack and died. I looked up drugs that could induce heart failure, and there were actually quite a few. Everything from diabetes medication to NSAIDs.

My little black widow could have taken drugs from anyone in town and drugged the kid. There was no autopsy on this kid either. What the hell was it with this town that no one requested an autopsy? An eighteen year old kid dies and no one wants to know why? They just trust what the doctor suggests he died of? Unless, of course, it was something obvious like a gunshot wound or a pole through the chest. This whole thing was looking more and more shady by the minute.

I moved on to her fiancé, thinking I might find some answers there. Murray Claybourne, CEO of a financial firm. He founded the company at the young age of twenty-five. He was at least closer in age to Lorelei. He died when he was thirty, which meant Lorelei would have been about twenty-five or twenty-six at the time. I was shocked to see that Lorelei actually had her picture taken quite a bit with this guy. They were always attending charity events, and she appeared to actually like the guy. But then I remembered Barty’s words, that Lorelei was very convincing at making people think that she was in love with his father.

I leaned back in my chair and stared out the window. So, what made Lorelei suddenly turn on Murray and kill him off? I had to agree with Barty, if anyone was in the car with Murray on the day he died, it had to be Lorelei. The police report very clearly showed erratic tire tracks all over the road. This was not as simple as him losing traction and crashing. Someone was purposely trying to kill Murray, and if my black widow was in the car with him, there had to be a reason she was trying to kill him.

But as I searched through his records, there wasn’t a trace of any financials that tied the two together. She didn’t get anything upon his death, and they didn’t share any bank accounts. There wasn’t even a bank box that had her name on it. I searched for hours, but I came up with nothing. So, why did she kill him?

I thumbed through the files again, sure I was missing something. Murray had made exactly three trips to Lorelei’s home town in West Virginia, twice before Matthew died and once after. He must have found out that Lorelei killed the kid.