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  CHOPPING SPREE

  “Davidson dishes up another hit.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Lively… fun to read.”

  —Bookstreet USA

  “Chef de cuisine of culinary crimes, Davidson is as fresh as a bunch of cilantro in Chopping Spree…. There’s no shortage of suspects, or of food, so fire up the oven and start reading.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “[As] delectable as any other dished up by Davidson.”

  —The State, Columbia, SC

  “Laugh your way through this fun-loving catering romp and make sure to keep it handy in the kitchen for all the recipes.”

  —The Star-Ledger, Newark, NJ

  “Readers will have a hard time deciding what is better: the mouthwatering descriptions of various recipes or the fast-paced, compelling storyline. Diane Mott Davidson has once again constructed a clever and complex mystery starring a congenial heroine and her equally enjoyable friends.”

  —The Midwest Book Review

  “Impressive.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  “Another irresistibly tempting tale … This delightful read will leave you with a smile and a longing for a rich cup of chocolate (preferably Godiva) or better yet a freshly brewed espresso.”

  —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  “Especially delicious.”

  —Commuter Week, NJ

  More Five-Star Praise for the Nationally Bestselling Mysteries of Diane Mott Davidson

  “A cross between Mary Higgins Clark and Betty Crocker.”

  —The Sun, Baltimore, MD

  “Diane Mott Davidson’s culinary mysteries can be hazardous to your waistline.”

  —People

  “The Julia Child of mystery writers.”

  —Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph

  “Davidson has found the recipe for bestsellers.”

  —The Atlanta Constitution

  “Mouthwatering.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Delicious… sure to satisfy!”

  —Sue Grafton

  “If devouring Diane Mott Davidson’s newest whodunit in a single sitting is any reliable indicator, then this was a delicious hit.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “You don’t have to be a cook or a mystery fan to love Diane Mott Davidson’s books. But if you’re either—or both—her tempting recipes and elaborate plots add up to a literary feast!”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Mixes recipes and mayhem to perfection.”

  —The Sunday Denver Post

  “Davidson is one of the few authors who have been able to seamlessly stir in culinary scenes without losing the focus of the mystery…. [She] has made the culinary mystery more than just a passing phase.”

  —Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, FL

  “Goldy and her collection of friends and family continue to mix up dandy mysteries and add tempting recipes to the readers’ cookbooks at the same time.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  Also by Diane Mott Davidson

  Catering to Nobody

  Dying for Chocolate

  The Cereal Murders

  The Last Suppers

  Killer Pancake

  The Main Corpse

  The Grilling Season

  Prime Cut

  Tough Cookie

  Sticks & Scones

  To Julie Wallin Kaewert,

  a black-belt shopper, brilliant writer, and invaluable friend

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to acknowledge the assistance of the following people: Jim, J.Z., and Joe Davidson; Jeff and Rosa Davidson; Kate Miciak, an insightful editor; Sandra Dijkstra, an enthusiastic agent with a superb staff; and Susan Corcoran and Sharon Propson, wonderful publicists.

  For help with legal insights, I am indebted to Hal Warren, Assistant County Attorney, Adams County, Colorado, for answering questions about building procedures; and Natalie Frei, attorney-at-law, for insights into criminal law procedures.

  In addition, I am thankful to Liz Hudd, biology teacher, Evergreen High School, Evergreen, Colorado, whose anatomy class performs the same tasks as the one described in this book (but Liz’s students behave much better); Katherine Goodwin Saideman and Shirley Carnahan, Ph.D., instructor in Humanities at the University of Colorado, for their close readings of the manuscript; Lee Karr and the group that assembled at her home, for support and advice; Julie Wallin Kaewert, Ann Wallin Harrington, Carol Devine Rusley, and Cheryl McGonigle, for more support and advice; Triena Harper, Chief Deputy Coroner, Jefferson County Coroner’s Office, Jefferson County, Colorado, for information on cadavers; Julie Brown, Office Manager, Elk Ridge Family Physicians; John William Schenk and Karen Schenk, JKS, for their freely shared culinary expertise; Nick LeMasters, General Manager, Cherry Creek Shopping Center, Denver, for insights into mall management; and as usual, for insights into law enforcement, Sergeant Richard Millsapps, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, Golden, Colorado. For insights into the psychology of compulsive buying, I am indebted to the book I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self, edited by April Lane Benson, Ph.D., published by Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, New Jersey.

  Finally, this book could not have been written without the knowledge and insights of my wonderful brother, William C. Mott, Jr., Vice President, Investment Banking, Goldman Sachs and Company, New York, New York. Bill’s training as an architect and his business expertise in the area of mall management were invaluable at every stage of the book. Along with all of my family, I am exceedingly grateful not only for him, but for the fact that he was safely evacuated from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, by the New York Police Department. Thank you.

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

  Little we see in Nature that is ours;

  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

  —William Wordsworth,

  “The World Is Too Much With Us”

  PRINCESS WITHOUT THE PRICE TAG JEWELRY-LEASING EXTRAVAGANZA

  Elite Shoppers’ Lounge - Westside Mall

  Monday, April 11

  6 to 8 in the evening

  Hors d’Oeuvre Buffet

  Crown of Cheeses: Brie, Gorgonzola, Gruyère, Sharp English Cheddar, Camembert

  Herb Brioche, Crostini, Homemade Crackers and Corn Chips

  Tiaras of Strawberries, Raspberries, Blueberries, and Star Fruit with Creamy Fruit Dressing

  Empress Empanadas with Guacamole and Sour Cream

  Sweethearts’ Swedish Meatballs in Burgundy Sauce

  Golden Shrimp Rolls with Spicy Sauce

  Diamond Lovers’ Hot Crab Dip

  Shoppers’ Chocolate Truffles

  Cocktails, Premium Wines and Beers

  Coffee, Tea, Chai, and Espresso Drinks

  CHAPTER 1

  Success can kill you.

  So my best friend had been telling me, anyway. Too much success is like arsenic in chocolate cake. Eat a slice a day, Marla announced with a sweep of her plump, bejeweled fingers, and you’ll get cancer. Gobble the whole cake? You’ll keel over and die on the spot.

  These observations, made over the course of a snowy March, had not cheered me. Besides, I’d have thought that Marla, with her inherited wealth and passion for shopping, would applaud the upward leap of my catering business. But she said she was worried about me.

  Frankly, I was worried about me, too.

  In mid-March I’d invited Marla over to taste cookies. Despite a sudden but typical Colorado blizzard, she’d roared over to our small house off Aspen Meadow’s Main Street in her shiny new BMW four-wheel drive. Sitting in our commercial kitchen, she’d munched on ginger snaps
and spice cookies, and harped on the fact that the newly fantic pace of my work had coincided with my fourteen-year-old son Arch’s increasingly rotten behavior. I knew Marla doted on Arch.

  But in this, too, she was right.

  Arch’s foray into athletics, begun that winter with snow-boarding and a stint on his school’s fencing team, had ended with a trophy, a sprained ankle, and an unprecedented burst of physical self-confidence. He’d been eager to plunge into spring sports. When he’d decided on lacrosse, I’d been happy for him. That changed when I attended the first game. Watching my son forcefully shove an opponent aside and steal the ball, I’d felt queasy. With Arch’s father—a rich doctor who’d had many violent episodes himself—now serving time for parole violation, all that slashing and hitting was more than I could take.

  But even more worrisome than the sport itself, Marla and I agreed, were Arch’s new teammates: an unrepentant gang of spoiled, acquisitive brats. Unfortunately, Arch thought the lacrosse guys were beyond cool. He spent hours with them, claiming that he “forgot” to tell us where he was going after practice. We could have sent him an e-mail telling him to call, Arch protested, if he only had what all his pals had, to wit, Internet-access watches. Your own watch could have told you what time it was, I’d told him, when I picked him up from the country-club estate where the senior who was supposed to drive him home had left him off.

  Arch ignored me. These new friends, he’d announced glumly, also had Global Positioning System calculators, Model Bezillion Palm pilots, and electric-acoustic guitars that cost eight hundred dollars—and up. These litanies were always accompanied with not-so-tactful reminders that his fifteenth birthday was right around the corner. He wanted everything on his list, he announced as he tucked a scroll of paper into my purse. After all, with all the parties I’d booked, I could finally afford to get him some really good stuff.

  And no telling what’ll happen if I don’t get what I want, he’d added darkly. (Marla informed me that he’d already given her a list.) I’d shrugged as Arch clopped into the house ahead of me. I’d started stuffing sautéed chicken breasts with wild rice and spinach. The next day, Tom had picked up Arch at another friend’s house. When my son waltzed into the kitchen, I almost didn’t recognize him.

  His head was shaved.

  “They Bic’d me,” he declared, tossing a lime into the air and catching it in the net of his lacrosse stick.

  “They bicked you?” I exclaimed incredulously.

  “Bic, Mom. Like the razor.” He rubbed his bare scalp, then flipped the lime again. “And I would have been home on time, if you’d bought me the Palm, to remind me to tell the guy shaving my head that I had to go.”

  I snagged the lime in midair. “Go start on your homework, buster. You got a C on the last anatomy test. And from now on, either Tom or I will pick you up right from practice.”

  On his way out of the kitchen, he whacked his lacrosse stick on the floor. I called after him please not to do that. I got no reply. The next day, much to Arch’s sulking chagrin, Tom had picked him up directly from practice. If being athletic is what success at that school looks like, Tom told me, then maybe Arch should take up painting. I kept mum. The next day, I was ashamed to admit, I’d pulled out Arch’s birthday list and bought him the Palm pilot.

  Call it working mom’s guilt, I’d thought, as I stuffed tiny cream puffs with shrimp salad. Still, I was not sorry I was making more money than ever before. I did not regret that Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right! had gone from booked to overbooked. Finally, I was giving those caterers in Denver, forty miles to the east, a run for their shrimp rolls. This was what I’d always wanted, right?

  Take my best upcoming week, I’d explained to Marla as she moved on to test my cheesecake bars and raspberry brownies. The second week of April, I would make close to ten thousand dollars—a record. I’d booked an upscale cocktail party at Westside Mall, a wedding reception, and two big luncheons. Once I survived all that, Friday, April the fifteenth, was Arch’s birthday. By then, I’d finally have the cash to buy him something, as Arch himself had said, really good.

  “Goldy, don’t do all that,” Marla warned as she downed one of my new Spice-of-Life Cookies. The buttery cookies featured large amounts of ginger, cinnamon, and freshly grated nutmeg, and were as comforting as anything from Grandma’s kitchen. “You’ll be too exhausted even to make a birthday cake. Listen to me, now. You need to decrease your bookings, hire some help, be stricter with Arch, and take care of yourself for a change. If you don’t, you’re going to die.”

  Marla was always one for the insightful observation.

  I didn’t listen. At least, not soon enough.

  The time leading up to that lucrative week in April became even busier and more frenetic. Arch occasionally slipped away from practice before Tom, coming up from his investigative work at the sheriff’s department, could snag him. I was unable to remember the last time I’d had a decent night’s sleep. So I suppose it was inevitable that, at ten-twenty on the morning of April eleventh, I had what’s known in the shrink business as a crisis. At least, that’s what they’d called it years ago, during my pursuit of a singularly unhelpful degree in psychology.

  I was inside our walk-in refrigerator when I blacked out. Just before hitting the walk-in’s cold floor, I grabbed a metal shelf. Plastic bags of tomatoes, scallions, celery, shallots, and gingerroot spewed in every direction, and my bottom thumped the floor. I thought, I don’t have time for this.

  I struggled to get up, and belatedly realized this meltdown wasn’t that hard to figure out. I’d been up since five A.M. With one of the luncheon preps done, I was focusing on the mall cocktail party that evening. Or at least I had been focusing on it, before my eyes, legs, and back gave out.

  I groaned and quickly gathered the plastic bags. My back ached. My mind threw out the realization that I still did not know where Arch had been for three hours the previous afternoon, when lacrosse practice had been canceled. Neither Tom nor I had been aware of the calendar change. Tom had finally collected Arch from a seedy section of Denver’s Colfax Avenue. So what had this about-to-turn-fifteen-year-old been up to this time? Arch had refused to say.

  “Just do the catering,” I announced to the empty refrigerator. I replaced the plastic bags and asked the Almighty for perspective. Arch would get the third degree when he came down for breakfast. Meanwhile, I had work to do.

  Before falling on my behind, I’d been working on a concoction I’d dubbed Shoppers’ Chocolate Truffles. These rich goodies featured a dense, smooth chocolate interior coated with more satiny chocolate. So what had I been looking for in the refrigerator? I had no idea. I stomped out and slammed the door.

  I sagged against the counter and told myself the problem was fatigue. Or maybe my age—thirty-four—was kicking in. What would Marla say? She’d waggle a fork in my face and preach about the wages of success.

  I brushed myself off and quick-stepped to the sink. As water gushed over my hands, I remembered I’d been searching for the scoops of ganache, that sinfully rich mélange of melted bittersweet chocolate, heavy cream, and liqueur that made up the heart of the truffles.

  I dried my hands and resolved to concentrate on dark chocolate, not the darker side of success. After all, I had followed one of Marla’s suggestions: I had hired help. But I had not cut back on parties. I’d forgotten what taking care of myself even felt like. And I seemed incapable of being stricter with Arch.

  I scanned the kitchen. The ganache balls, still wrapped, sat pristinely on the marble counter. Next to it, my double boiler steamed on the stovetop. OK, so I’d already taken them out. I’d simply forgotten.

  I hustled over to my new kitchen computer and booted it up, intent on checking that evening’s assignment. Soon my new printer was spitting out lists of needed foodstuffs, floor plans, and scheduled setup. I may have lost my mind, but I’d picked it right up again.

  “This is what happens when you give up caffeine
!” I snarled at the ganache balls. Oops—that was twice I’d talked to myself in the last five minutes. Marla would not approve.

  I tugged the plastic wrap off the globes of ganache and spooned up a sample to check the consistency. The smooth, intense dark chocolate sent a zing of pleasure up my back. I moved to the stovetop, stirred the luxurious pool of melting chocolate, and took a whiff of the intoxicatingly rich scent. I told myself—silently—that everything was going to be all right. The party-goers were going to love me.