Model Suspect Read online

  We all raced off in the direction of the shouts. Right around the corner from where we were was a huge, open-sided thatched building that I guessed must be the resort’s main dining room. It held dozens of rustic wooden tables, large and small, with tropical centerpieces and woven placemats. In the center of the room was what appeared to be a small dance floor. At the moment about a dozen people, most dressed in resort uniforms, were milling around there, and a few puffs of smoke were drifting up toward the high ceiling where they were dissipated quickly by the overhead fans.

  “What’s going on?” Madge called out, pushing past us to hurry forward.

  The crowd parted, revealing a familiar figure—a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a blond buzzcut and a sheepish expression. “Hey look, it’s Bo,” George commented.

  I was a little surprised, though I shouldn’t have been. Bo Champion had been one of Vic’s Daredevils costars and was now one of his closest friends. He’d also been a member of the wedding party. Speaking of parties, Bo was the type of guy who never missed one. It was no wonder he’d decided to tag along to Cayo de Oro, especially now that it seemed half the wedding party was invited. Still, his unexpected presence made me wonder….

  “Sorry about that, everyone,” Bo called out. He glanced down and stomped on a spark smoldering on the jute rug at his feet. “I was just, uh, showing Lainie here my excellent fire-juggling skills, since she never saw the episode of the show where I did it.” He laughed and shrugged. “Guess I’m a little out of practice.”

  “Figures. He’s been showing off for her all week,” someone muttered just behind me.

  Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that it was the Daredevils cameraman who’d been filming Akinyi’s photo session. “Really?” I asked him. “You mean Bo likes that girl?” I glanced at the pretty young woman he’d called Lainie, vaguely recognizing her as one of the makeup artists from the production crew. She had a cheerful smile, thick strawberry blond hair, and a distinctive mole on her chin.

  The cameraman looked startled, as if he hadn’t expected to be overheard. “You didn’t hear it from me, all right?” he said. Then he shouldered his camera, hit the on button, and hurried forward to film Bo as he continued to apologize.

  “It’s okay, Bo,” Lainie was saying. She giggled and tossed her lush, shoulder-length hair back over one shoulder. “Your demonstration was very impressive.”

  Bo grinned back at her, suddenly seeming unaware of the watching crowd. I hid a smile.

  “Did you hear what the camera guy said?” I murmured to my friends. “Sounds like we might have a little side romance going on here.”

  “Cute,” Bess declared. “I just hope they’re not snagged by that same clause that got Pandora and Dragon in trouble.”

  “Doubtful,” I replied. “I’d have to look at the exact language again, but I’m thinking that only applies to relationships that existed prior to or during the filming of the season in question. Since Bo’s been off the show for over a year now, and is presumably just now getting involved with a crew member, they should be okay.”

  George laughed. “Spoken like a lawyer’s daughter,” she joked. “Carson would be proud.”

  The excitement over, most of the crowd was already drifting away. A couple of employees turned up with brooms and dustpans and began cleaning up the charred remains of whatever it was that Bo had accidentally set on fire, which appeared to be a palm frond from one of the flower arrangements and the corner of a rug.

  Just then another familiar figure appeared, this one tall and lanky with a head of short black spikes. “Vic!” Bo called out. “Yo, dude, you missed all the fun.”

  “I heard.” Sydney’s husband strode toward his friend, a grin on his thin, handsome face. “Trying to burn down my honeymoon, bro?” He glanced over at Lainie and winked. “Or were you trying to start another kind of fire?”

  Lainie blushed. “Excuse me,” she said. “I was only supposed to be on a fifteen-minute break. I’d better get back to work.”

  She hurried off, disappearing around the corner. “Come on,” I told my friends. “Let’s go talk to Vic. He probably knows where Syd is.”

  “Hey there!” Vic greeted us as we approached. “You made it! Thanks so much for coming down—Sydney will be relieved to see you.”

  “You’re welcome.” I smiled at him, then turned to Bo. “Long time no see. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

  Bo chuckled. “Hey, I’m always up for a vacation,” he said. “When I heard the private honeymoon was turning into a party, I decided to cancel my other plans and fly down.”

  That was pretty much what I’d just been thinking. Still, I couldn’t help wondering if we’d been overlooking Bo as a suspect all along. True, it was hard to imagine Vic’s good-natured, easygoing buddy being behind the jet fuel incident or the other terrible stuff that had happened—or what kind of motive he might have for doing any of it, for that matter. On the other hand, he’d been around for most of the mischief, and easily could have pulled most of it off….

  “So where’s your beautiful bride?” Bess was asking Vic. “We just got here, so we haven’t seen her yet.”

  “She’s at the spa.” Vic sighed. “Needless to say, she’s, uh, a little tense, so she decided to get a massage while she was waiting for you to get here.”

  I nodded. “So have you figured out anything about what happened?”

  “Um, not exactly. I mean, I think Sydney can explain when you see her.” Vic glanced over my shoulder.

  Looking back that way myself, I saw that Butch and the other cameraman were back there filming away. It figured. Vic probably couldn’t so much as poke his nose out of his bungalow without being on camera. After all, he was the star of this show.

  At that moment Jamal hurried into the dining hall. “Hey, there you are,” he greeted the other two guys. Then he blinked, suddenly noticing my friends and me standing there. “Oh, hello.” He shot a slightly nervous glance at the cameramen, then returned his attention to us. “Uh, welcome to Cayo de Oro. Good to see you again.”

  “Same here,” Bess said politely.

  It didn’t take a detective to see that the guys didn’t want to talk about the situation while the cameras were rolling. Neither did I.

  “Okay, um, see you later,” I said, trying to act casual. “Guess we’ll, um, go say hi to Syd, um, now.”

  What can I say? I’m a detective, not an actress.

  Vic glanced at the two cameramen, who appeared to be holding a whispered discussion. I winced, guessing that they were deciding which of them would stay with the guys while the other accompanied us to film our reunion with Sydney. As far as I knew, they had no idea why we were really there. But that wouldn’t stop them. I was pretty sure they were under orders to film any encounter with either member of the main couple.

  Before I could figure out what to do, Vic spoke up again. “Yo, dudes,” he said to Bo and Jamal. “I was just thinking, it’d be fun to play a little game of extreme dodgeball with a coconut instead of a ball.” He shot a wicked grin and wink in the direction of the cameras. “Might leave some bruises, but that just makes it easier to tell who won. You guys up for it?”

  “You bet!” Bo said immediately.

  Jamal laughed. “Come on, V. Let’s show him how we play—Jersey style!”

  The three of them raced off, whooping and hollering. The cameramen muttered a few more words to each other, shot us an uncertain look, and then rushed off after the three guys.

  Whew! I guessed the prospect of getting extra angles on the nutty action of the impromptu game had overruled the potential value of our quiet spa moment with Sydney. That had been quick thinking on Vic’s part. He might come across on TV as nothing more than a brainless, attention-starved daredevil, but in real life he had a lot more than that going for him. No wonder Sydney had fallen for the guy.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here before Madge sends another camera to follow us,” I told my friends.

  Bess nodded
. “I saw a sign for the spa on our way here—I think it’s this way.”

  It didn’t take us long to find the resort’s spa. Like most of its lodgings, it was located in one of those private thatched huts on the warren of wooden walkways set out over the lagoon’s glassy shallows.

  “Wow,” George muttered as the three of us entered the plush, carpeted lobby of the spa. “This place is pretty fancy. A little too fancy, if you know what I mean.”

  I knew what she meant. The place was superposh. It takes a lot to intimidate me, but I have to admit I felt kind of underdressed and grubby as I looked around.

  Luckily Bess never feels that way, even when she’s just disembarked from an international flight. “Excuse me,” she said, striding right up to the reception desk. “We’re looking for Sydney Marvin—er, Marvin-Valdez. We heard she might be here.”

  The impeccably dressed woman behind the desk nodded. “Yes, of course,” she said. “Ms. Marvin-Valdez is expecting you. Right this way, please.”

  “You’re here!” Sydney sat up straight when we entered her treatment room, almost knocking over the petite young woman who’d been busily massaging her face with some kind of green goo. “Oh, thank goodness! This is such a nightmare….”

  “Um, could you excuse us for a second, please?” Bess shot an apologetic glance at the facialist. The young woman nodded and melted away, leaving us alone with Sydney.

  There was a flurry of hugs, some of which involved the transfer of Sydney’s green facial goo to various bits of our clothing. But even Bess didn’t seem to mind that.

  “So,” I said after a moment, settling back against the woven bamboo countertop beside the massage chair. “What’s going on, Syd?”

  Sydney shot an anxious look toward the door. “Not here,” she whispered, reaching for a tissue and starting to wipe the goo off her face. “These walls are made of paper—pretty much literally. We should find someplace private to talk.”

  She had a point. The interior walls of the spa appeared to consist mostly of bamboo and paper screens. “Okay,” I said. “Should we go to your bungalow?”

  Sydney shook her head. “I have a better idea….”

  Soon the four of us were drifting on the lagoon’s crystal-blue waters. The boat we were in was pretty cool—it was a four-person glass-bottomed paddleboat with big, rubber inflatable pontoons. It made it easy to observe the busy and colorful underwater world of fish and coral.

  But I was trying not to get distracted by any of that. We weren’t there for a vacation, and I wanted to hear what we were up against. The saboteur had already all but ruined Sydney’s bridal shower, bachelorette party, rehearsal dinner, and wedding day. I was going to do all I could to make sure he or she didn’t ruin her honeymoon, as well.

  “Do you think we’re out far enough now?” George panted, allowing her legs to slow on the paddleboat’s pedals.

  I shot a look back toward shore. Vic and his friends were romping around on the white-sand beach, lobbing coconuts at one another and laughing uproariously. It also appeared they’d set up a boom box to serve as a soundtrack to their game—driving hip-hop music was faintly audible drifting out over the water.

  Sydney nodded, seeming satisfied that we wouldn’t be overheard. “This is horrible,” she blurted out, lifting her feet from the pedals and sort of flopping against the side of one of the pontoons. “I was so looking forward to this honeymoon, but it seems like everything just went wrong from the start!”

  It was clear that she was on the verge of tears. Bess reached over and took Sydney’s hand in her own. “Deep breaths,” she advised gently. “Just tell us.”

  Sydney gulped in a lungful of air. “Well, to start with, there was the stuff about the TV crew coming along.” She glanced back toward the beach, where Butch and the other camera operator could be seen filming the guys’ antics.

  “Yeah, we figured that one out right away,” George said. “Couldn’t you just have said no to that whole plan? It’s not your fault Pandora went all wacky—well, wackier—and got herself arrested.”

  “I suppose.” Sydney bit her lip. “But Vic thought it’d be helpful to the production if we went along with it, and it’s only for the first week….”

  “Never mind,” I said, shooting George a look. The last thing we needed at the moment was to get Sydney even more upset! “It’s done now. So what happened?”

  “I thought Vic and I would at least get some privacy on the flight down,” Sydney tapped her fingers nervously on the rubber pontoon beside her. “But the producers insisted on switching us onto the private plane they’d chartered for the crew so they could film on the way down. Then we couldn’t even enjoy arriving here in this gorgeous place, since Madge made us disembark from the plane, like, forty times trying to get that right shot. And then did the same thing with getting out of the limo when we got here….”

  “Bummer,” George said succinctly.

  “Anyway, Vic managed to talk them out of filming some kind of carrying-me-over-the-threshold scene after that, since they’d already done that back home at the hotel after the wedding. So we actually got to head over to the bungalow on our own.” Sydney drew in a long, shuddering sigh. “But when we got there, we found that mess I sent you in the picture!”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, seeing that her blue eyes were filling with tears once again. “We’ll get to the bottom of it. But listen—were Akinyi and Jamal and Bo on that chartered flight too?”

  “Bo was,” Sydney said. “But not the other two. They ended up taking our original first-class seats on the regular flight—just one more way for us to apologize, you know?” She shrugged. “Anyway, they were lucky. They got here a few hours before we did, so they actually had a chance to enjoy it before the crew arrived.”

  She shot another sour look toward the cameramen back on shore, giving me a chance to take in what she’d just said. So Akinyi and Jamal had been at the resort for several hours before Sydney, Vic, and the others had arrived. Interesting.

  I opened my mouth to ask another question, but I never got the chance. A loud, sharp retort rang out from somewhere in the direction of the shore, echoing off the water and the trees. A second later came the thunk of something hitting one of our boat’s pontoons.

  “Duck!” George cried, diving for the floor. “I think someone’s shooting at us!“

  DANGER IN THE WATER

  There was a moment of panic. We all hit the floor and covered our heads as another shot rang out. With my face pressed against the glass bottom of the boat, I had an excellent view of several brightly colored angelfish drifting by beneath us, their gently waving fins showing their complete lack of concern for the predicament of the humans up top. I could feel Bess shaking beside me and hear the sound of Sydney sobbing.

  Now what? I thought desperately, casting my mind around for something to do. Should we dive into the water and try to swim away? Or—

  “Hey,” George said. “Is that it?”

  I lifted my head, realizing that at least ten or fifteen seconds had passed and no additional shots had followed those first two. Was that it? Had the shots been some kind of accident or something?

  “Oh, no!” Sydney sat up. “Look—they hit both our pontoons!”

  I gasped, realizing she was right. No, those shots had been no accident.

  “Come on.” I hoisted myself out over the rapidly shrinking pontoon and kicked off my shoes. The lagoon was fairly shallow, but still a bit too deep to stand up in where we were. “Guess we’d better swim for shore before the shooter decides to come back for more target practice.”

  Soon all four of us were doggy-paddling toward shore. The water was calm and it was pretty easy going even dressed in the clothes we’d worn on the flight down. “Don’t let your feet touch any of the coral,” Bess warned us. “Some of it might be poisonous.”

  “Good point,” George said.

  I didn’t respond. It was difficult to tell which direction the shots had come from—sound ca
rried differently over water than it did over land, especially since the lagoon was basically a big bowl surrounded on three sides by tree-lined slopes leading up to the mountains at the center of the island. But based on where the holes had appeared in those pontoons, I was pretty sure the shooter had been somewhere in the thick jungle off beyond the beach to the north.

  As I swam, I scanned the shoreline in that direction. Unfortunately the sun had started to sink toward the horizon and we were swimming almost directly into it, making it tough to see much in the shadowy trees along the shore. I squinted toward a jumble of large boulders. Had something moved behind there, or was it my imagination? Even if it wasn’t, how was I supposed to tell from here if it had been a bird, a monkey, an innocent hiker … or the wedding saboteur?

  Just then I felt my toe scrape against something. Luckily it was just a rock and not coral, but I decided I’d better pay more attention to what I was doing, especially since the water was now shallow enough for us to walk upright. I wasn’t likely to see anything useful on shore anyway—anybody could be hiding anywhere in that jungle.

  “Hey!” a shout came from the beach.

  Looking up from picking my way among the coral formations, I saw that a small crowd had gathered there while we were swimming. Vic was at the front, standing calf-deep in the water, staring our way.

  “We’re okay, Vic!” Sydney called breathlessly, waving to him.

  “Yeah,” George added. “We—ow!”

  I glanced over to see her dancing on one foot in the water, which was about waist-high by now. “You okay?”

  “I’ll live.” She peered down at her foot. “I hope there are no sharks around here, though. I think I’m bleeding a little.”

  We pushed forward through the shallows. Vic rushed in to grab Sydney and sweep her into his arms. She hugged him around the neck.

  “What happened, babe?” he asked, hugging her back and then gently pushing her bedraggled red hair out of her face with one hand. “Trouble with the boat?”

  Someone had turned off the boom box by now. But I realized its loud music must have masked the sound of those shots.