All Murders Final! by Sherry Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

CSI shows. It’s fascinating. Are you okay?”
    â€œAs okay as anyone can be after finding someone you know dead.”
    â€œHow’d it happen? They didn’t say anything on the news last night.”
    â€œI can’t say.” I finished my coffee to keep myself from adding anything else and tossed the cup in a trash bin.
    Laura didn’t press me. “Fine. I get it. This is going to sound shallow, but she promised us a Cartier watch to auction off. No way we’ll be able to come up with another one.”
    â€œHow well did you know her?” I asked.
    â€œI saw her at a lot of events. You know, charity balls, silent auctions, military functions.” Since Laura’s husband was the wing commander for Fitch, they got invited to a lot of functions. “I’ve been to tea at her house a number of times.”
    â€œDid she go with someone to the events? I read her husband has been dead for five years.”
    Laura stopped in front of the storeroom door and sorted through a set of keys. “There was one man I saw her with a few times.”
    â€œMess dress or tux?” Mess dress was what the air force called the uniform that was formal wear. CJ had worn his mess dress to our wedding and had looked oh, so very handsome.
    â€œTux.”
    â€œSo not military.”
    â€œProbably not.”
    â€œWhat did he look like?”
    â€œA bit younger than her. Nice looking, but nothing that really made him stand out in a crowd.”
    â€œDo you remember his name?”
    â€œNo. What is this? An inquisition?”
    â€œSorry. I blame it on CJ’s influence.”
    â€œMaybe you should go into law enforcement.”
    â€œNo thanks. I’d never make it through the academy. I can barely do one pull-up. And garage sales are a lot less scary. So did Margaret and the man seem like a couple?”
    Laura pursed her lips. “Not really. But the last time I saw them, they had some sort of argument. He stormed off, and Margaret’s face was bright red. A couple of her friends rushed over to her, and they all disappeared for a while.”
    â€œWhen was that?”
    â€œA couple of weeks ago.”
    â€œInteresting.” Maybe it was interesting enough that I needed to tell someone at the Ellington Police Department.
    Laura unlocked the storeroom and threw open the door. The space was dimly lit and musty smelling. We could barely see into the dark corners.
    I pointed to the round tables stacked to the left. “Those won’t work. They’re too hard to stand behind and sell from.”
    â€œHow about the rectangular ones?” Laura gestured toward the right.
    â€œYes. Those look perfect.” I whipped a tiny tape measure out of my pocket, measured the tables, and jotted the dimensions in the note section of my phone.
    â€œLadies.”
    Laura and I jumped, screamed, and turned almost simultaneously.

Chapter 6
    James stood there, holding his beret. Because of military regulations, he had to take his beret off inside and wear it when he was outside.
    â€œWhoa. Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” James was a cop for the security forces on base. He always introduced himself as “James, not Jim,” so most people called him Not Jim. I stuck with James because I knew he liked it better. But I’d noticed the few times I’d seen him since he returned from his deployment last October that people were calling him James instead of his jokey nickname. He’d returned a harder man than he’d been when he left last spring. It worried me.
    â€œI saw the door open, and then I saw Sarah’s Suburban, so I thought I’d stop and say hi.”
    â€œDon’t sneak up on people,” Laura said, patting her chest.
    â€œI didn’t mean to, ma’am. I apologize.” James’s light brown eyes had a few wrinkles around them. I’d like to think they were laugh lines, but I wondered if they were stress