How to Murder a Millionaire (Movie Club Mysteries, Book 3): An Irish Cozy Mystery Read online

  HOW TO MURDER A MILLIONAIRE

  MOVIE CLUB MYSTERIES, BOOK 3

  ZARA KEANE

  BEAVERSTONE PRESS LLC

  CONTENTS

  About This Book

  A Note On Gaelic Terms

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Recipe for Blue Margaritas

  The 39 Cupcakes (Movie Club Mysteries, Book 4)

  Also by Zara Keane

  About Zara Keane

  HOW TO MURDER A MILLIONAIRE

  (Movie Club Mysteries, Book 3)

  Murder. Millionaires. Mankinis.

  Armed with her newly issued private investigator's license, Maggie Doyle is on the case…of a sheep that went missing twenty-two years ago. When she trips over a dead body on the first day of the investigation, Maggie realizes there’s more to this cold case than a fight over lamb chops.

  An invitation to spend the weekend with her grandmother’s oldest friend and her family, the super wealthy Huffingtons, gives Maggie the perfect excuse to sniff out the killer. After the family patriarch is electrocuted in the swimming pool, Maggie finds herself embroiled in yet another murder inquiry.

  With the body count rising, can Maggie catch the killer before they strike again?

  Join my mailing list and get news, giveaways, and a FREE Movie Club Mystery story!

  http://zarakeane.com/newsletter2

  A NOTE ON GAELIC TERMS

  Certain Gaelic terms appear in this book. I have tried to use them sparingly and in contexts that should make their meaning clear to international readers. However, a couple of words require clarification.

  The official name for the Irish police force is An Garda Síochána (“the Guardian of the Peace”). Police are Gardaí (plural) and Garda (singular). Irish police are commonly referred to as “the guards”.

  The official rank of a police officer such as Sergeant O’Shea is Garda Sergeant O’Shea. As the Irish frequently shorten this to Sergeant, I’ve chosen to use this version for all but the initial introduction to the character.

  The official name for the Whisper Island police station would be Whisper Island Garda Station, but Maggie, being American, rarely thinks of it as such.

  The Irish police do not, as a rule, carry firearms. Permission to carry a gun is reserved to detectives and specialist units, such as the Emergency Response Unit. The police on Whisper Island would not have been issued with firearms.

  Although this book follows American spelling conventions, I’ve chosen to use the common Irish spelling for proper names such as Carraig Harbour and the Whisper Island Medical Centre. An exception is the Movie Theater Café, which was named by Maggie’s American mother.

  1

  Whisper Island, Ireland

  WHEN I ROLLED out of bed at the butt crack of dawn, I had no idea my day would start with a missing sheep and end with a dead dude in a crotchless mankini.

  Averting my gaze from the dead guy’s man junk, I kneeled beside the body and felt for a pulse. As I’d expected, there was none. The man’s skin was cold to the touch, indicating he’d been dead a while. I stood and scanned the barn for clues, but the cause of death was obvious: the rake sticking out of his chest was hard to miss.

  I swore under my breath. How the heck could this be happening to me again? In the five months since I’d swapped my cheating ex and crumbling career in the San Francisco PD for life on a remote Irish island, I’d stumbled into two murder investigations. Becoming involved in a third was not on my to-do list.

  Swallowing a sigh, I reached for my phone and hit speed dial.

  My neighbor, and not-so-secret crush, answered on the second ring. “Sergeant Reynolds, Whisper Island Garda Station.”

  His deep rumble and Irish accent affected me like a comforting blanket. “Liam, it’s me. You’re not going to believe what I’ve just found.”

  “Maggie?” He groaned. “Aw, no. Why didn’t I check caller ID?”

  “That’s a lovely way to greet the woman who cooked you dinner last Saturday,” I said indignantly. “You could muster up a little enthusiasm.”

  “When said woman only contacts me at my work number to report finding dead bodies, I have good reason to be wary.”

  “Well, actually…” I let the words hang in the air a moment.

  “No way.” There was the sound of a chair scraping the floor on the other end of the line. “Don’t tell me you’ve found another one.”

  “It’s not like I plan to find dead people. It just sort of…happens.” I didn’t add that this particular corpse happened to be wearing a lime green mankini that hadn’t been designed with swimming in mind. I’d let Reynolds enjoy that sight when he got here.

  He muttered something in Gaelic that I was pretty sure I didn’t want translated. “Tell me who’s dead and where you are, and I’ll get over there right away.”

  “Jimmy Wright is our vic.” I rattled off the address of the Wright farm. “It’s a thirty-minute drive from the station, give or take.”

  “I know the place. That’s where I had to arrest an animal activist a few months ago. You sure Jimmy’s dead?”

  I regarded the rake sticking out of the farmer’s chest and the pool of blood staining the straw beneath his body. I tasted bile, and my grip on the phone tightened. “No doubt about it. All he’s good for now is fertilizer.”

  “Once a cop, always a cop, right down to the black humor,” he said in a bone-dry tone. “I’ll be there in forty. If no ambulance is required urgently, I’ll swing by the Whisper Island Medical Centre on my way to the Wright farm and get Dr. Reilly to join me.”

  “You do that. And bring a forensics kit,” I added as an afterthought. “It looks like murder.”

  “Why am I not surprised? You have a magnetic attraction to people who die unnatural deaths.”

  I tried to muster some righteous indignation, but failed. He had a point. I did have an uncanny nose for murder. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “Wait a sec, Maggie.” Reynolds’s voice deepened a notch. “Promise me you won’t touch anything. Your P.I.’s license doesn’t give you permission to trample all over crime scenes.”

  Trample all over the place? What did he take me for, an amateur? “Sure thing, Sarge,” I drawled. “I’ll stay out of the barn.”

  I disconnected before Reynolds’s sharp mind guessed my intentions and ordered me off Wright’s property.

  Shoving my phone into my purse, I exited the barn and jogged across the farm courtyard. Although it was gone eight-thirty in the evening, the sun still shone brightly and would do so until around ten o’clock. Just as I’d had to get used to the longer hours of darkness during an Irish winter, I had to adjust to the longer hours of sunlight now that it was June.

  When I reached my new car, I pulled my keys from my pocket. I say “new,” but the vehicle w
as my cousin’s cast-off. Julie had sold it to me for a steal when she’d upgraded to an SUV last month. I opened the passenger door of the MINI, trying to ignore the wobbly door handle. There was a reason the car had been cheap, but I’d spent the last of the money from my successful investigation into the Whisper Island Hotel hauntings on rent, equipment for my new profession, and my day-old private investigator’s license. Besides, the MINI was an improvement over the last rust bucket I’d driven.

  I reached under the passenger seat and grabbed my mini detective kit. In the glove compartment, I located a pair of disposable rubber gloves, plastic overshoes, a cover for my hair, and a can of pepper spray. The latter was probably overkill—experience told me Jimmy’d been dead a while. I didn’t think his killer was lurking on the farm, but I wasn’t taking any risks.

  I glanced at my watch. I had around thirty-five minutes before Reynolds arrived. I could spend it sweating in the barn with Jimmy Wright’s earthly remains, or I could sneak into his house and start the investigation I’d been sent here to conduct. As long as I didn’t have to pick the lock, I was golden.

  I hurried toward the farmhouse and slipped on my protective gear. On instinct, I tried the back door first. Bingo. No breaking and entering required. I pushed open the unlocked door and stepped inside.

  A small mudroom separated the back door from the kitchen. I surveyed the scene. Wright was a tidy man. Each shoe, boot, and coat was arranged on its respective shelf or hanger. When I ventured into the kitchen, it was a similar story. The dishwasher gurgled gently as it cleaned its load. A bushy tortoiseshell cat meowed at me from her vantage point in front of the dishwasher.

  “Hey, there.” When I bent down to pet her, she purred and nuzzled my arm. As a newly minted cat owner, I checked to make sure she had food and water in her bowls before I searched the premises.

  The kitchen revealed nothing of interest. I moved from room to room, rooting through drawers, shelves, and closets. When I reached the reluctant conclusion that the first floor held no clues, I headed up the creaky staircase. My feline friend followed, meowing a message I couldn’t decipher.

  “If you saw Jimmy’s murderer, you can’t tell me.” Pity. I’d have paid good money to see Reynolds’s face when I presented him with the cat as a potential witness.

  On the landing, the cat made straight for a bedroom. A quick glance around the neat room told me it was Jimmy’s. My preliminary research indicated that he was divorced and lived alone. He ran the farm with the aid of two employees, neither of whom had been in evidence since my arrival.

  A couple of photographs adorned the nightstand. They were the first photos I’d seen in the house, so I checked them out. The first depicted a young Jimmy on his wedding day, beaming with pride at his new bride. The second photo was of a kid on a trike. I examined the clothes. Mid-Eighties was my guess. I replaced the frame on the nightstand and turned my attention to the drawer underneath.

  I was leafing through papers when my phone buzzed with an incoming call. I glanced at the display and groaned. With a good fifteen minutes before Reynolds was due to arrive, I had time to take the call, even if I didn’t want to. After a moment’s hesitation, I hit speakerphone. “Hey, Paddy. What’s up?”

  “Have you found her?” my client demanded. “Have you found my Nancy?”

  I rolled my eyes. Why had I let my aunt talk me into accepting Paddy Driscoll as my first client? I’d known it was a bad idea the moment he’d marched into my newly furnished office in his Sunday best—semi-clean gumboots, and a stained checked shirt. I’d had the feeling that the assignment wouldn’t be one I’d want to take, and my instinct had been correct.

  “Nancy’s been missing for more than twenty-two years,” I said, moving to Wright’s bedroom closet, “and I’ve been on the case for less than twenty-two hours. You can hardly expect me to find her that fast.”

  “You don’t seem to care, Maggie. Your aunt assured me you’d give my case the same consideration you’d give any other.”

  Gee, thanks, Noreen. “Listen, I’m doing my best, but you’ve got to admit that finding a missing sheep after two decades is a long shot.”

  Paddy grunted. “I don’t expect her to be alive. I’m not a fool. I just want to know what happened to her. I’ve always suspected foul play was involved.”

  And, according to what Paddy had told me in my office this morning, he’d always suspected Jimmy Wright was the culprit. I paused in my perusal of Wright’s clothes, and the unpleasant suspicion that Paddy had killed Wright in a fit of anger flashed across my mind. But if Paddy had murdered Jimmy, why would he draw suspicion upon himself by sending me over to the Wright farm? The guy had a temper, but he wasn’t stupid.

  I closed the closet and moved to the next room, Jimmy’s cat at my heels. “I told you I’d try to find out what happened to Nancy, and I meant it. But you’re going to have to be patient.”

  “Patient?” the man roared. “I’ve waited twenty-two years for answers. Neither Sergeant O’Shea nor the fool who had the post before him took me seriously. And now this young fella—what’s his name again?”

  “Sergeant Reynolds,” I supplied.

  “When I asked Reynolds to reopen the case, he looked at me like I’d sprouted horns. I came to you because I was desperate.”

  Not exactly a ringing endorsement of my detective skills, but I took no offense. Paddy was grumpy at the best of times, and today was definitely not his day. His lousy mood would nosedive when he found out Jimmy was a dead end—literally.

  The next room I entered was a home office. I paused in the doorway, and Paddy’s litany of complaints faded from my consciousness. In stark contrast to the rest of the house, Jimmy’s office was a hot mess. Papers lay strewn across the floor, and drawers had been emptied of their contents. Someone had been in here—maybe the killer—but had they found whatever they’d been looking for? For the first time since I’d entered the house, a shiver of unease snaked down my spine.

  On the phone, Paddy droned on about the failure of the Whisper Island authorities to take him seriously, and my shortcomings as a P.I. I held the phone in place with my neck while I rifled through the mess of papers. “You can’t expect me to solve the mystery in a day.”

  “Have you at least spoken to Jimmy Wright?”

  A vision of Wright’s body loomed before me, and a giggle surged up my throat at the reminder of the lime green mankini. And then I thought of the rake and the blood… “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” Paddy snapped. “Either you have, or you haven’t.”

  “Questioning Jimmy is proving to be difficult,” I hedged. Reynolds would not be pleased if I blabbed about Wright’s murder before he’d had a chance to examine the body.

  “Wright knows something,” he muttered. “I’m sure of it.”

  Whatever Jimmy Wright had known was unlikely to come to light now, but I refrained from sharing this observation. “I’ll call you tomorrow evening with an update. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds like you’re fobbing me off,” Paddy retorted with his customary tact. “If you want me to pay your ridiculous fee, you’d better work for it.”

  The charge I’d quoted him was a one-time first-client deal and well below my usual fee, but I had neither the time nor the desire to argue with the man. “As I said, I’ll call you tomorrow. Bye, Paddy.”

  I slipped my phone back into my bag and made a last-ditch effort to rifle through Jimmy Wright’s papers. A glance at my watch told me to give it up as a lost cause. The clock was ticking. If anything relevant to the murder was in this room, the intruder had probably found it, and I highly doubted Jimmy had kept info relating to Paddy’s missing sheep, assuming he’d had anything to do with her disappearance.

  The cat and I left the office and walked down the upstairs hallway. Under my feet, an uneven floorboard creaked. I stopped in my tracks. Could it be…? I tested it again, shifting my weight back and forth. My heart rate kicked up a notch
. I stepped off the board and rolled back the strategically placed rug.

  Sure enough, one of the wooden floorboards underneath was slightly out of alignment with the others. I took my flashlight out of my detective kit and shone it along the edges of the rogue floorboard. I slid a ruler into the gap and eased up the board. I shone my light inside the exposed space underneath. The space was larger than I’d anticipated. I lay on my stomach and peered inside. My stomach performed a dance worthy of an acrobat. Wedged in the space, I spied some papers and a laptop. In the distance, I heard Reynolds’s siren.

  I whipped out the laptop and flipped it open. My heart sank at the sight of the demand for a password, but it was hardly surprising. If Jimmy Wright had gone to the trouble of hiding his laptop, he’d password protect it. My mind whirred. What could Wright have used as a password? A super-complex one like Lenny insisted I used? Or something simpler and easy to guess? The cat rubbed against my leg and jogged a memory.

  I reached for the red collar around her neck. Engraved on the metal tag was the name, Mavis. “Perfect.”

  My fingers flew over the keyboard. On my third attempt, I struck gold with Mavis2014. Heart pounding, I pulled the external hard drive from my backpack and contemplated my options. Cloning a murder victim’s laptop was a major no-no, but then, searching his house before the police arrived wasn’t exactly within the parameters of the law.

  I stared at the external hard drive with longing. I’d been dying to try it out ever since Lenny had talked me through the steps of computer cloning, but common sense prevailed. With a sigh, I shoved it back into my bag. My first day as a private investigator was a little soon to get stripped of my license.

  Instead of trying out my new tech skills, I performed a cursory check of Jimmy Wright’s files. I didn’t know what I was expecting to find relating to a sheep that had disappeared so long ago. Probably nothing, but I just might turn up something that related to his murder. I’d been the one to find his body, after all. It was only natural for me to take an interest in the case.