5 Bodies to Die For Read online

  The cat sprang up onto the table, walked over to the cloisonné Oriental vase and rubbed against the textured metal surface, her contented purr sounding like the coo of a homing pigeon.

  Irrational anger toward the cat seized her. “Get down!” Carlotta said, waving her arms. Startled, the cat hissed at her, jumping back and bumping the vase. Carlotta lunged for the container, but it was top-heavy and it slammed down on the table. The lid flew off and a powdery substance spilled all over the wood surface, then was sucked up in the draft created by the overhead ceiling fan and scattered all over the room…and all over her.

  Carlotta pushed to her feet, blinking and sputtering, her arms raised in futility. “Ew, what is this stuff?”

  As if there was someone to hear her. The cat had high-tailed it out of the room.

  She hurried to turn off the ceiling fan, but accidentally increased the speed, creating a sandstorm. Finally, she managed to switch off the fan. When the dust settled, a film of white coated everything in sight like a fine layer of snow.

  Peter was obviously more of a smoker than he let on if he kept a container of sand on hand. She didn’t see any cigarette butts, but what else could it be?

  Then a horrific alternative slid into her mind: Angela had been cremated. Had Peter replaced the silk flower arrangement on the table with an urn containing his wife’s ashes?

  It made perfect, awful sense.

  Carlotta swallowed hard at the revelation, then gagged at the bitter taste of something foreign in the back of her throat. In fact, her mouth was full of grit. Ew.

  In full-panic mode, she scrambled for her cell phone and called the only person she could count on to help in a situation like this one. “Hannah,” she shouted into the phone when her friend’s voice mail kicked in, “you have to come help me. I think I accidentally scattered Peter’s wife all over the house.”

  Hannah called back in less than a minute. “I thought Peter’s wife was dead.”

  “She is,” Carlotta said. “And I think she was sitting on the kitchen table—‘was’ being the operative word.”

  “I’ll bring my Shop-Vac.”

  Carlotta disconnected the call and counted her blessings. When a person offered to come and help you clean up someone’s cremated remains, it had to be genuine friendship.

  She debated taking a shower in the interim to wash Angela off of her, but reasoned it was better to wait until they got the rest of Angela cleaned up. She stood at the counter, alternately fighting tears and bouts of hysterical laughter as she surveyed the damage she’d unleashed. She hadn’t thought she could top totaling Peter’s Porsche.

  Minus one hundred.

  True to her word, a few minutes later, the phone rang and Hannah was at the entrance gate, waiting for Carlotta to buzz her in with Peter’s code. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Carlotta told Hannah to come around to the right side of the house, through the pool area, to the sliding glass door.

  “I’m afraid to come to the front door,” she said into the phone, looking down at her dusty house shoes. “I don’t want to track Angela all over the place.”

  Soon she heard Hannah’s van pull in to the driveway, then the heavy clomping of boots on the walkway leading around to the side of the house. Carlotta deactivated the door and window alarms, then opened the sliding glass door to admit her friend, who was holding a small-canister Shop-Vac.

  “Wow,” Hannah said, looking her up and down. “This is fucked up, even for you.”

  “Thanks,” Carlotta said, brushing powdery stuff off her shoulder. “It was an accident.”

  Hannah glanced over the white-coated great room. A hazy film still hung in the air. “What the hell happened?”

  “The cat jumped up on the table and knocked over the urn.”

  “What cat?”

  “A stray Persian that just might be Angela Ashford reincarnated.”

  Hannah squinted. “Are you high?”

  Carlotta sighed. “No, but I wish I was. I didn’t even know Angela’s ashes were sitting on the table. I thought it was just a vase.”

  “Setting them on the kitchen table is just plain tacky,” Hannah said. “And weird, even for the South.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “Uh…don’t sneeze?”

  “Helpful,” Carlotta said sarcastically. “Seriously, should I call Peter and confess, or do you think we can salvage this…er, her…before the housekeeper gets here?”

  Hannah reached forward and swiped her finger across Carlotta’s nose, then winced at the pale gritty residue. “How much time do we have?”

  “About two hours.”

  “I’ll start vacuuming, you get the broom and dustpan.”

  Remarkably, within an hour the room started to look familiar again. Carlotta walked to the urn to transfer the contents of the dustpan into it for the umpteenth time. Hannah turned off the Shop-Vac and came to empty the machine’s dust bucket into the urn, as well.

  “We’re probably contaminating her ashes,” Carlotta murmured.

  “How do you contaminate ashes? It’s not like someone’s going to eat them.”

  “Still, you know what I mean.” Carlotta studied her friend, then pursed her mouth. “You didn’t say anything about Peter’s house.”

  Hannah glanced around and nodded. “Nice place.”

  “You’ve been avoiding me.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Hannah said, but she didn’t make eye contact.

  “You’re not mad at me over getting fired?”

  “It wasn’t your fault. Besides, I’ll find something else. Thank goodness the one thing Atlantans have in common is eating.”

  “Have you seen Wesley lately?”

  Hannah’s back stiffened. “Wesley? What makes you think I’ve seen Wesley?”

  “Maybe because he said the same thing, in the same fake tone, when I asked him if he’d seen you.”

  Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She flipped on the Shop-Vac and went back to work.

  Carlotta scratched her nose with her knuckle. Something was up with those two.

  After two more passes with the broom and the vacuum, Carlotta and Hannah admitted they’d recovered all of Angela they possibly could.

  “So this is what’s left after they cremate you,” Carlotta said, peering into the urn.

  “I read somewhere they have to sift out bone chips and teeth.”

  Carlotta made a face. “It doesn’t look like much. What if Peter notices some of the ashes are gone?”

  “If you’re worried about it, we could add filler.”

  “We’re not going to add filler!” Then Carlotta narrowed her eyes. “What kind of filler?”

  “You said something about a cat. Do you have kitty litter?”

  Carlotta gasped in horror.

  Hannah scoffed. “Spare me the self-righteous outrage. You blew the man’s wife onto the chandelier.”

  She glanced up at the dusty light fixture they hadn’t been able to reach. “Okay…maybe just a little filler.”

  She went into the mudroom and pulled out the bag of kitty litter they’d had to buy for the Persian. When she held a scoop of the sandy gray mixture next to the ashes in the urn, she frowned. “The kitty litter is coarser and darker.”

  Hannah headed toward the kitchen. “There’s gotta be cornstarch here somewhere…or flour.”

  “Christ, this is turning into a science experiment.”

  Hannah was opening and closing cabinets. “Where’s your blender?”

  “It’s Peter’s blender,” Carlotta murmured, then walked to the cabinet where it was stored and pulled it out.

  “So,” Hannah said casually, emerging with a canister of flour, “have you two had sex yet?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Carlotta sighed. “We tried.”

  “Don’t tell me Richie Rich couldn’t get it up.”

  “He got it up fine. But…he was nervous, and…”


  “He shot the pearl jam before he put it in the ma’am?”

  Carlotta frowned. “I hadn’t heard that particular medical phrase, but yeah.”

  “You gonna try again?”

  “I don’t know. I think we’re both under too much pressure.”

  Carlotta plugged in the blender, then tossed in a couple of scoops of kitty litter. Hannah added two scoops of flour, then pulsed the mixture until it was evenly combined. She lifted the lid for a peek. “Looks like a match to me.”

  Carlotta agreed and they dumped the contents into the urn.

  “Do you think it looks like a whole person’s worth of ashes?” Hannah asked.

  “I think so.” Carlotta put the lid back on top and slid it to the middle of the table with a sigh of relief.

  “What’s this?” Hannah asked, gesturing to the notebook Carlotta had been writing in prior to the incident.

  “Just random notes I’ve been keeping on The Charmed Killer.”

  Hannah turned the pages, skimming them. “Wow…you got your own little investigation going on here.”

  “Not really. I promised Peter I would…stay out of it.”

  Hannah gestured to the sketches of the charms in the margins. “Yeah, I can see that you’re not into this at all.”

  “Randolph’s name came up as a potential suspect.”

  “Wow, I’m sorry.”

  “I haven’t said anything to Wesley.”

  Hannah set down the notebook. “You and Wesley keep a lot of things from each other.”

  Carlotta’s head came up. “Is Wesley keeping something from me?”

  Hannah pressed her black lips together.

  “Hannah, do you know something?”

  “Just that he seems a little manic to me, and his hands shake a lot. Are you sure he’s not on something?”

  Carlotta’s heart raced, but she tried to keep her voice steady. “He stole two prescriptions I had left on my pain pills. And I found a generic Oxy Contin tablet on his bathroom floor. But he told me he only took those because of what that animal The Carver did to his arm, but that he’d quit.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Besides, he has to give urine samples when he sees his probation officer. He gets tested for drugs regularly.”

  “Sweetie, there are additives to mask drugs in urine samples, and people who do drugs know all about them.”

  Carlotta turned away, feeling like an idiot.

  “I don’t know anything for sure,” Hannah added lamely.

  “How could you have noticed it and I didn’t? Am I that blind?”

  Hannah hesitated, then exhaled. “Okay, I’m shagging Fat Boy.”

  Carlotta’s eyes went wide. “You’re sleeping with Chance Hollander?”

  “Technically, we’re not getting much sleep.”

  “You give me a hard time about sleeping with Peter, and you’re climbing on top of that mountain?”

  Hannah shrugged. “He’s sweet, okay? He fucking worships me. And he’s hung like a goddamn mule.”

  “But…Chance Hollander?”

  “Forget it, okay? It won’t last. It never does.”

  Carlotta sobered. “Does Chance think Wesley is hooked on something?”

  Hannah chewed the side of her mouth. “He…might have intimated something to that effect.”

  She thought she was going to be ill. “What drug?”

  “Oxy.”

  Carlotta exhaled. “It’s rich that Chance is worried about him. He’s probably the one who sells it to him.”

  “He says he’s been trying to warn Wesley off.”

  “From one druggie to another?”

  “Chance is a pothead, but that’s it as far as I can tell. Most dealers know to stay away from the stuff.” Hannah sighed. “For what it’s worth, I think Chance really cares about Wesley. I probably shouldn’t have said anything, but I thought you should know.”

  “Thanks,” Carlotta said past a tightened throat.

  “And maybe it’s nothing.”

  “How am I supposed to know? Wes has already lied to me.”

  “You might look into one of those over-the-counter drug tests. For some of them, all you need is fingernail clippings, or hair. At least you’d have proof.”

  Carlotta nodded—one more thing to add to the list. “Thanks for the advice. And for helping me clean up.” She glanced at her watch. “I have to get ready for work. Christ, I’m going to be late again.”

  “Okay, I’m outta here. Call me.”

  “I will. And Hannah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Be careful. There’s a guy out there doing horrible things to women.”

  Hannah face softened. “You, too.”

  She let Hannah out, and waved goodbye, her chest tight with affection for her friend, and her mind reeling over new revelations about her brother. She kept hoping Wesley would turn a corner, that spending time with Coop had been a positive experience for him. But now it seemed that Coop was also losing his way…

  Carrying a heavy heart, she climbed the stairs. When she went into her room, she saw the bed skirt move and her mood took another dive. “Ah, so this is where you’re hiding, you bad, bad kitty.”

  The Persian’s fluffy head appeared.

  “Do you know how much trouble you caused?”

  Meow.

  Carlotta thought about her comment to Hannah, that the cat was the reincarnation of Angela. The timing of the stray showing up, the destructive behavior toward Carlotta, the fixation on Peter…it was all so bizarre.

  Carlotta wet her lips and looked around the room to make sure she was alone, then crouched toward the cat. “Are you Angela?”

  The cat simply looked at her and blinked.

  “Are…you…Angela?” she asked, enunciating slowly, in case the cat had trouble understanding her.

  The Persian opened its mouth and Carlotta waited, breathless and prepared to levitate if the cat started talking.

  Instead, the cat yawned widely, then licked its chops.

  Carlotta frowned. “Fine. But I’m putting you on notice—there isn’t room in this house for two pussies, do you understand, you little furball?”

  She peeled off her pajamas and stuffed them in the garbage can along with her house shoes. Even if she got them clean she wouldn’t be able to wear them again without thinking about what had happened.

  She shuddered anew and stepped into the shower where she quickly scrubbed her skin and hair. Then she jumped out and dressed in record time, choosing skinny-leg black jeans, a teal-colored swing tunic and long striped scarf. She stuck her feet into the Prada pumps she’d set at the end of the bed, then made a face. Something was in the right one—something squishy…and brown.

  She pulled out her foot and from the stench, it was clear what had been deposited in her shoe. “Ewwwwww!”

  She glared at the Persian standing next to the door, tail high, almost smiling. Carlotta launched the shoe at the cat, but she darted safely out into the hallway and down the stairs.

  And Carlotta could swear the beast was laughing.

  27

  “Earth to Wesley.”

  He blinked Meg into focus. “What?”

  She sat across a worktable, twirling the end of her blond ponytail. She was chewing gum and blowing little bubbles. Every time the tip of her tongue appeared, his pants got tighter.

  “I said I’ll be running the job to extract test data from all the databases later this week.”

  “What’s the holdup?”

  She blew a bubble and it popped. “What’s the hurry?”

  “No hurry,” he said, then shifted in his seat.

  “You’re juiced.”

  Wesley used his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “No, I’m not.” He hadn’t had an Oxy hit since waking up…and he was suffering. “I think I’m coming down with something.”

  “Too bad. I was going to ask you to go somewhere with me.”

  He blinked. “Where?”

  Sh
e studied her blue fingernails. “It’s an industry-reception thingy my dad is hosting, and I have to go. I thought if you went with me, it would be less brutal.”

  He swallowed hard. “Sorry, I can’t.”

  Meg frowned. “I didn’t even give you a date.”

  “Oh. When is it?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “Sorry, I can’t.”

  “You can’t, or you won’t?”

  He scratched his temple. “Yeah, see…I’m not good with the whole parent thing.”

  She nodded. “So you thought you’d just date me and we’d screw and you’d never have to face my dad?”

  Wesley squinted. “We’re dating? And screwing?”

  “Apparently not.”

  He held up his hands in a T. “Okay, time-out. You’ve been ignoring me for days.”

  She shrugged. “My time of the month…I’ve been moody. Besides, you were an ass about my friend Mark.”

  “You mean your gay boyfriend Mark with the prissy shorts?”

  “See? That’s assy.”

  His mind was chugging to catch up to her passive-aggressive logic, but he gave up. “I’m lost.”

  “Never mind, you wouldn’t have fit in anyway.”

  Wow, that hurt. He pursed his mouth and nodded, then started loading his backpack to leave. It was true, but…damn.

  “I mean, everyone there will be older. You’d be bored to death.”

  He zipped up his bag and swung it over his shoulder.

  “But why don’t you come anyway?” she asked.

  Wes looked up at her and that was his undoing. Meg was smiling a sexy smile, her cherry-red mouth shiny and plump. He wanted to kiss that mouth. Her eyes challenged him…and she was still twirling her hair. He wondered briefly what she would look like with her hair down and loose around her shoulders.

  He considered blurting that her father had hired a P.I. to follow him, and would likely nix the invitation anyway. That if Wesley made it as far as the door of the reception, Dr. Vincent would have him booted out post introductions.

  The idea actually cheered him a little. What a gas it would be to meet the great Dr. Vincent, for the man to realize the thug he’d had investigated was smart enough to sneak into his hoity-toity lecture.

  “Suit yourself,” Meg said with a shrug.