Nice Girls Finish Last by Sparkle Hayter Read Free Book Online Page A

so unfair. That was the old me.
    If Bigger was now on this case, that meant it was going to be even harder to get information, as Detective Richard Bigger was not media-friendly. He hated the media, but he especially hated me. Maybe because he had once been in my apartment on police business and had come in contact with my poison ivy plants. How was I to know he had a poison ivy allergy that made him suffer doubly the effects of the plant?
    By the time I came back from lunch, the Kanengiser murder had been eclipsed by breaking news, company rumors, and other urgent things, such as Franco’s hairy ears, which everyone was now starting to notice.
    The “exclusive” videotape that security had shot at the murder scene was on my desk with a note. Jerry wanted a tape log on his desk by the end of the day. The last thing I wanted to do at that point was look at a murdered man, but it was my job, so I popped the tape into the deck and sat back in my chair, a yellow legal pad propped in my lap.
    The tape had been shot from the doorway into Kanengiser’s inner office, where the body was found.
    â€œDon’t go in,” said a voice off-camera. It sounded like Pete Huculak.
    â€œWhy not?” said another voice, that of Hector.
    â€œDon’t disturb the crime scene.”
    The camera panned around the room, fixing on Kanengiser’s body, a side view. Sure enough, Kanengiser’s hands were cuffed behind his back, and he was fully clothed. Hector panned around the room some more, zooming in on some papers scattered around, a tipped-over paper-clip dispenser, some litter on the floor.
    The camera was still rolling when the police arrived—Detective Ferber, two uniformed officers who both looked old enough to be his father, and a doctor, who said, “He’s dead.”
    Ferber put on rubber gloves and began picking stuff up with tweezers, dropping items into plastic and paper evidence bags held by one of the uniforms, while the other tried to pick the lock on Kanengiser’s handcuffs.
    â€œOne nickel, one dime, one matchbook—a place called Anya’s,” Ferber said. He was behind the chair when he said it, so I didn’t get a clear view.
    A few minutes later, the tape ended.
    The connection to Anya’s seemed pretty tenuous at best. Kanengiser might have bummed those matches off of someone else—although, in connection with the handcuffs, it did look bad. On the other hand, the biographical information faxed over by the American Gynecological Association made him sound like citizen of the year. He had graduated from Harvard Med, did his residency at Columbia-Presbyterian, was active in independent politics on the district level, and had served a term on his community board. At first, I thought that community board thing might lead somewhere, but it turned out the most controversial proposal the board had passed was a rezoning initiative to open certain residential buildings to on-site day-care centers.
    A Lexis-Nexis search turned up a few brief mentions of Kanengiser in local stories about district zoning meetings and the institution of a beefed-up neighborhood watch program. There were a lot of stories about doctor killings, however. I weeded through them and came up with three other unsolved homicides: a neurosurgeon killed in a Seattle mugging, a doctor who performed abortions killed in Kansas, and a doctor of physics killed in a carjacking in California. None of them seemed connected to Kanengiser, unless Kanengiser had performed abortions at one time, although nothing in the AGA information indicated that was the case.
    So much for my serial killer theory. But the Lexis-Nexis search wasn’t completely fruitless. Under the slug “Doc-Killing” was a story that was completely unrelated to Kanengiser, and yet extremely significant to me.
    It was the story of Cecile Le Doc of Nice, France.
    â€œA lovely woman,” was the unanimous opinion of her