Read Online Grilled Cheese Murder: Book 4 in The Darling Deli Series by Patti Benning - Free Book Online Page B

at least for the night until they could get a lawyer to figure things out. Somehow—by that point, Moira was beyond exhausted and was still battling a headache—David managed to convince the police that he would watch Dante and bring him back in the morning. By the time they left the station it was late, but she didn’t want to go home without hearing the full story. Since David and Dante both seemed to be willing, she called up Candice and Darrin and asked them to meet her at the deli.
    Once she had made five cups of coffee and Darrin had dragged an old space heater out of the back to make the chilly front room bearable, she turned to Dante, who was looking at the broken window with a guilty expression.
    “I’m glad you’re okay,” she began.
    “Thanks. I’m glad you are too. I never wanted any of you to get hurt.”
    “I know. And I know you’re probably exhausted… but I think we all need to hear at least the gist of what happened. How about you start with the guy that kidnapped me?”
    “That was Stephan,” he said. “It’s a long story… but the short version is that some of my family—my aunt and uncle—got in over their heads with some really bad guys. I was pretty young when it happened, but I know that there was a lot of money involved, and drugs.” He paused, taking a sip of his coffee and closing his eyes as he remembered. “I guess my aunt and uncle owed the drug dealers some pretty significant funds and tried to back out. As punishment, this gang sent someone to punish them. Since dead men don’t pay, instead of killing my uncle and my aunt, he targeted their family—my parents. I watched them get killed when I was ten.”
    Candice and Darrin looked shocked and Moira said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, Dante,. You don’t have to go on if you don’t want to.”
    “No, I should,” he said. “I think it’s good to talk about it after not telling anyone for so long.” He took a deep breath. “Obviously, the cops showed up, and a lot of confusing stuff happened. I ended up testifying in court, and I managed to identify the man who killed my parents. He made some sort of plea bargain—in exchange for giving up the other people in his gang, he got a shorter sentence. After that, I went into foster care and ended up moving a few towns away.”
    “How did you end up here?” she asked. “And how did you manage to fudge the background checks? David found out that you used to have a different last name.”
    “Oh, that.” He gave a slightly embarrassed grimace. “Well, once I heard that Stephan was getting out of prison soon, I took my life savings and got a fake ID—nothing fancy, it was probably a really terrible job in fact. The guy I went to was pretty shady. I just wanted to make it harder for Stephan to track me down. I had a feeling he’d be pretty mad at me for getting him sent to prison, so I ran. I came here because my parents had once rented a cabin in the area when I was younger, and I liked it. I probably should have chosen somewhere I’d never been to, but I fell in love with this place.”
    “Why didn’t you go to the police?” David asked. “And how was your cousin involved in all of this?”
    “I guess my cousin sort of got sucked into the same sort of life that my aunt and uncle lived,” Dante said. “I never really heard from him much until he showed up at my door in a panic, telling me to run because Stephan was coming to kill me. A moment later Stephan himself showed up. He called my cousin a traitor and shot him. I was lucky to escape. And as for the police…” He shrugged. “That’s not how I grew up. For my family, the police were the bad guys.”
    “I hope you don’t think that anymore,” the private investigator said.
    “No sir, I don’t.” her employee replied. “I’m just grateful that they gave me a chance to tell my story.”
    “Thanks for repeating it to us,” Moira said, offering him a gentle smile. “I know it can’t have been