Fatal Fairies (Renaissance Faire Mystery Book 8) by Joyce Lavene, Jim Lavene Read Free Book Online Page B

Detective Almond nodded to Grigg. “Another funny coincidence, Mr. Manhattan. The ME thinks whoever killed the fairy was a big, strong man like yourself. I’d say we have plenty to talk about.”
    Chase didn’t offer any resistance to accompanying the police officers to their car. Grigg didn’t put handcuffs on him. Detective Almond instructed Canyon to go through Chase’s personal possessions and his jousting armor to search for anything that went along with the fairy’s death.
    “Yeah,” Canyon complained when the police were gone with Chase. “Almond doesn’t even have a search warrant. Guess who that will land on if Chase decides to press charges.”
    “I’m sure Detective Almond will get a search warrant for you.”
    What was I going to do to help Chase?
    “Why were you up here while all this was going down, Jessie?” Canyon asked.
     “I was on my way to work.” I held up my small bag of clean clothes and didn’t tell him that I was planning to work for Chase. I hoped he’d still have me when he got back. There was no doubt in my mind that the police wouldn’t find anything to hold him.
    “Good idea. I heard Paul was looking for you. The Main Gate will be open soon. In the meantime, I get stuck going through someone else’s drawers.”
    Canyon asked me again about lunch. I turned him down again, though I planned to sneak back to the Dungeon and take a shower while he was busy. Getting naked with him there didn’t sound like a good way to prepare him for our coming breakup.
    Residents of the Village kept stopping me on the way to the Dungeon. They weren’t interested in my love life anymore—they wanted to know if Chase had been arrested and what my part in it had been. I pushed away questions from everyone, including Merlin, who was also secretly the CEO of Adventure Land. He just liked living here.
    I considered there might be some way to use that information to my advantage. Only a handful of people knew Merlin’s true identity. Could I blackmail him into helping Chase?
    A hundred thoughts fluttered through my mind like butterflies. Fairies and fire jugglers smiled at me as I walked by them. Mary, Mary Quite Contrary was selling vegetables from a cart along the way. Wandering minstrels were playing flutes and mandolins in the grass.
    Finally at the Dungeon, I sneaked inside and ran up the stairs to the apartment. I locked both doors and got in the shower.
    I thought about Chase and how we’d met, how we’d fallen in love. There had to be something in that knowledge that I could use.
    It finally came to me. Detective Almond had taken me in for questioning in that other life. Chase and I had been friends but not yet lovers. He’d come to the police station to get me out of trouble.
    Of course, he was a lawyer, if only a patent attorney. But no one had questioned that at the time. They’d believed he was my lawyer, and I’d left the station with him.
    Could I pull that off?
    It wasn’t like Chase had ID that said he was a lawyer, right? He’d just had the panache to get in there when I needed him. I’d known him for a long time. But I hadn’t known until then that he was a lawyer.
    After my quick, hot shower, I rummaged through the drawers until I found my things. I had one good black suit and black heels that I’d always worn back to the university in Columbia when the summer was over. I found a pair of dark-rimmed glasses with only plain glass in them. I didn’t recognize them so they might belong to Canyon. I took them anyway.
    When I was dressed, I made sure my usual fly-away brown hair was under control, slicked back and professional-looking. I used a lot more makeup than I usually did and put the dark glasses on my face.
    Wow. I didn’t even look like myself. Could I convince Detective Almond that I was Chase’s lawyer? I wouldn’t know until I tried.
    Dressed to kill, I walked down the cobblestones uncomfortably in my heels, stumbling every other step, focused on bringing