Lucky Catch by Deborah Coonts Read Free Book Online

nothing to do with the amount of rainfall.
    Coming full-circle, I paused at the steps leading into the truck and leaned in. Several technicians were wedged into the small space, hunched over the body, plucking, dusting, and bagging. I never got used to the indignity of death, which transformed a living, breathing being into a thing. I watched for a moment, not really thinking, trying not to feel. Although the techs blocked some of my view, I caught glimpses. The body contorted, the hands pulled behind and bound. The feet, also bound, were brought up to the hands and somehow trussed together, pulling the body into a backward bow. I couldn’t see much more than that . . . and I didn’t really want to. Death was never pretty.
    Romeo stepped behind me and leaned over my shoulder. “What are you doing?”
    “Trying not to look, but I can’t help myself. How was she killed?”
    “I told you, with a Saf-T-Smoke. It sorts looks like a gun thing that you use in cooking.”
    I shot Romeo a look. “If you have the smoking gun, then your job’s done, right? Piece of cake.”
    He didn’t smile. “I said a smoking gun-like thing, not the smoking gun, a subtle but important distinction. You’ve been watching too many old movies. Actually, the smoking thing didn’t kill her, the plastic around her head did .”
    After weighing my options for a nanosecond, I took the bait. “What, then, is a Saf-T-Smoke, exactly?”
    “Apparently, it is a device that chefs use to impart smoky flavor to various foods, cheeses and the like. It looks like a large plastic handgun with a reservoir for the wood chips and a nozzle the smoke comes out of. You cover the food you want to smoke with plastic, then stick in the nozzle.” He gave me a knowing look. “But this brings a whole new meaning to the concept of ‘smoked.’”
    I could picture the poor woman, her head wrapped in plastic, suffocating, while someone imparted a mesquite flavor to her flesh . . . or perhaps they preferred her apple-smoked. A shudder of revulsion rippled through me. Blinking rapidly, I shook off the visuals. Once again, I leaned in to catch another glimpse of poor Fiona—I don’t care how awful she was or wasn’t, suffocating was a terrible way to die . . . not that any of the options were all that great.
    “Like Hannibal Lecter, but with a discerning palate,” I said, instantly regretting the words . . . sort of.
    “I’m going to pretend you didn’t really say that.” Romeo wasn’t completely successful at keeping the grin out of his voice.
    A daily dose of death required a morbid sense of humor for psychological survival. Cops had it, doctors, too. And, apparently, so did I, but mine was born from panic welling up inside me.
    An odor caught my attention. Tentatively, I pulled in air through my nose, testing, identifying. “Smell that?”
    Romeo leaned over my shoulder and sampled the air. “Death.”
    “Yes, but beyond that.”
    Like a lion testing the wind, he closed his eyes and sniffed. Breathing deeply, he ticked up a corner of his mouth in a half-smile. “Truffles.”
     
    * * *
     
    “We’ve got a problem,” Miss P., my second-in-command, said as I burst through the office door. As usual, she was sitting behind her old desk in the outer office instead of occupying her new digs in my former office—I’d been booted up to vice president, and Miss P. had filled my former Head of Customer Relations shoes—a game of corporate musical chairs that effectively changed nothing.
    When I’d walked in, I’d caught her in the act of dialing the phone. Slowly, she replaced the receiver in its cradle as she blinked at me. As usual, her golden hair was spiked, her makeup subtle. Her eyes held the embers of after-glow—no doubt a gift from her much younger lover, the Beautiful Jeremy Whitlock, Las Vegas’s primo PI.
    The whole cougar thing had me a bit envious. But with my heart so recently splintered on the shoals of love, prudence dictated that I wait a