Hollywood Lust by M. Z. Kelly Read Free Book Online

I asked.
    Leo removed his glasses, braced himself on one knee, and then stood up. “Let me take my engine off cruise control before I answer your question.” He smiled, putting his glasses in his pocket. “I might need glasses, but my hearing’s still pretty good.”
    I glanced over at Alex who still had Selfie cornered, lecturing her about something. “I know he’s not my monkey, but, just in case you had any doubt, he’s as dumb as an ape.”
    Leo laughed loud enough to cause Alex to turn in our direction. The big detective then turned back to the crime scene photographs lying on the ground. “We can check with the coroner, see what he says, but I think our suspect was left handed.”
    “What makes you think that?”
    He motioned to the photos of the body, the blood spray on the grass next to it. “I think our victim was turning away, trying to ward off a blow that was coming at her right side. She turned when she was struck and the blood spray went in that same direction.” He pointed at the photographs. “A right-hander would have caused her to have the opposite reaction.”
    I took a moment, examining the photos and the blood spray. “I think you could be on to something.” I glanced back at him, smiling. “Not bad for a piece of dead wood.”
    “Let’s go see what the coroner thinks, and then let’s talk to the victim’s mother. Maybe Mom can give us something more to go on.”
    We were walking back toward Selfie and Alex when Leo said, “By the way, thanks for sticking up for me.”
    I whispered to him as we got closer to our colleagues. “You watch my back, I’ll watch yours.”
    ***
    Carla Hodge’s mother lived in an apartment complex in Long Beach. Alex told us the detectives that had done the original interviews with her had done a good enough job. He said it wasn’t worth his time to talk to her and he was heading back to the station to try and put something together on the case, whatever that meant.
    Anna Hodge was in her late forties with mousy brown hair and deeply set blue eyes. She was wearing sweat pants and a T-shirt that had food stains on the front. Her apartment was dark and cluttered. She looked like a woman that had spent the last couple of days in mourning and hadn’t bothered to take care of herself or her apartment.
    After introductions, I asked our victim’s mother about her daughter. “It looks like Carla had gone jogging the night she was killed. Do you know if that’s something she did on a regular basis?”
    She wiped her tears on the sleeve of her shirt. “All the time. She was always worried about gaining weight. It was part of her disease.”
    “Are you talking about anorexia?”
    Hodge stood up. “Let me show you something.” She returned a couple of minutes later with a couple of photographs in picture frames. She handed one of the photos to me as Leo and Selfie also came over to take a look. “This was Carla the year after she graduated from high school.”
    The smiling girl in the photograph was attractive. She had that vital look that young people with most of their life ahead of them have.
    “She was so pretty,” Selfie said.
    Hodge nodded and handed over the second photo to me. “This is Carla a year later.”
    Selfie gasped and then said, “Sorry.”
    In this photo Anna Hodge’s daughter looked like she was well under a hundred pounds. Her face was sunken and the bones in her arms and legs were almost visible. She looked like she was wasting away.
    “It took her years, but Carla was doing better,” Hodge said. “But she still exercised constantly and weighed herself at least ten times a day. It was a compulsion.”
    I handed the photographs back, at the same time thinking about what Molly had said earlier that morning about Carla possibly being gay, something that I’d mentioned to Leo on the way over.
    “Was Carla involved with anyone recently?” I asked.
    Hodge shook her head. “She wasn’t…she was very shy. When she wasn’t working,