Get a Clue(51)
“What do you think I want?”
“To know if I have an alibi.”
“Okay,” he said. “What were you doing between last night and this morning?”
“Sleeping.”
Not exactly the truth, he knew. She hadn’t been sleeping, she’d been doing Patrick. “When was the last time you saw Edward?”
“When he was screaming his lungs out at Shelly yesterday before either you or Breanne arrived.”
“Why was he doing that?”
Lariana already looked as if she was sorry she’d said it. “I do not know.”
“What was Shelly doing?”
She shrugged.
Cooper sighed. “Fine.”
“Really? Because you don’t seem like it’s fine.”
“Lariana, we have a dead man in the cellar. I just want to know everything there is to know.”
“I suppose you cannot help yourself.”
“I suppose not,” he said with a ghost of a smile. It was true, he couldn’t. Questioning, investigating, was just a part of him. Always had been. As a kid he’d sought to find the hidden mysteries in things. As an adult he’d gone into criminal science with a head for ferreting out the scum of the earth. He’d ended up in vice and had stayed there, even as it had slowly sucked the soul right out of him. The last case, a drug traffic ring, had taken him six months to crack, and at the end, in a fateful shootout he’d never forget, he’d had to decide which of two perps to shoot. The one he hadn’t gone for had spun around and killed another cop.
That had been when he’d walked away before going under.
And yet, even now, he had no idea how to stay out of things. “Where’s Patrick?”
Lariana’s expression didn’t noticeably change, though she got up and turned her back to Cooper, rinsing her brush out in the sink. Watching her, he hoped to hell she wasn’t washing away evidence.#p#分页标题#e#
“There’s too many people in this house for Patrick,” Lariana said. “He’s off somewhere alone.”
“But it’s only you and the other staff, and two guests.”
“Which for Patrick, the king of the unsociables, is five too many.”
“Six.”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“It’s six. You, Dante, Shelly, Breanne, myself. And Edward.”
Lariana said nothing, and he eyed the way her knuckles had gone white on the brush. “You said he yelled at Shelly,” he pressed. “Did he yell at you, too?”
She went back to rinsing.
“I’m trying to help,” he said quietly. “Tell me about him.”
She shrugged. “He hired us. He was the direct contact to the owner.”
“Go on.”
“He dealt with the guests and the Web site, and handled all the public relations and advertising.”
“And?”
She turned off the water and shook her hands dry. “And . . . what?”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
She put her hands on her hips. “That he was a horrible, crotchety old man universally hated by all of us. There. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“No. I want to know who killed him.”
Cooper found Breanne right where he’d left her, in front of the fire. Curled up on the couch, she was entering something into her Palm Pilot while nibbling on her lower lip, a lip he happened to know was most excellent to nibble on.
It was insane how just seeing her made something within him leap. Definitely a physical reaction, but unsettlingly, it was more than that, a phenomenon that hadn’t happened to him in a long time.
His job hadn’t made it easy to meet women, much less keep one. There’d been Annie, and she’d been soft and sweet and giving—and had hated his job with a passion that had made it personal. From her, from countless others before her, he’d learned to hold a big part of himself back. He didn’t want to do that anymore.
But he couldn’t deny that just standing there, looking at Breanne, made him want to try again.
Hearing him enter, she lifted her head, eyes wide until she focused on him, not relaxing but no longer showing fear.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey back.” She hugged her Palm Pilot to her chest. “Did you just hear that? A moment ago?”
“Hear what?”
Her shoulders sagged. “Nothing. I’m hearing things again. I wish I could say I’m also just seeing things, but I’m pretty sure there is really a dead body downstairs.”
“Yeah,” he said regretfully.
Behind him, the fire crackled loudly, and Breanne jumped as if she’d been shot, dropping her digital unit.
Scooping it up for her, he glanced at the screen. Last will and testament.