supposed to look like a mob hit.
It didn’t. But Brittney still might have gotten away with murder if she hadn’t taken that cat. She thought she’d cleaned the penthouse thoroughly of any trace of Thumbs, but she never found the grooming brush deep in the cabinet. That brush and one rooted hair on Christina’s body were enough to turn the investigation toward her.
Brittney had to fight DNA from three separate sources. There was the cat DNA, which proved she had the victim’s cat. Also, a crumpled tissue was found in the guest bathroom wastebasket. Brittney had blown her nose and left her own DNA at the scene. On the same tissue were small amounts of Christina’s blood. The police found Christina’s blood and hair in a wheeled trash can at Brittney’s home and in the battered gray car.
Still, the reporters thought Brittney would not be convicted. “A Kleenex, a cat hair, and three people who barely speak English isn’t much of a case,” one of the pundits said. Joe testified, too, as part of a deal for a reduced sentence, but he was dismissed as a “lying goombah.”
Most reporters secretly felt Brittany would go free because she was so beautiful. The men on the jury could not stop staring at her. They could not take their eyes off her lovely face.
But to everyone’s surprise—except Helen’s—Brittney was found guilty.
The foreman told reporters why the jury voted to convict her: Brittney showed no emotion throughout the trial.
Join Helen Hawthorne on her next dead-on funny adventure in
Murder Between the Covers
A DEAD-END JOB MYSTERY
by Elaine Viets
