Quickstep to Murder

“Hello?” I called. “Anybody here?” I was pleased my voice didn’t tremble. “Hello?” I said again, louder. Nothing.

The rooms opening off the hall still lay in semidarkness, with the small studio, the powder room, and my office to my left and the ballroom running the length of the house on my right. Standing in the hall, I reached my right hand around the jamb of the small studio door and felt for the light switch. The overhead fixture sprang to life, illuminating the emptiness of the wood-floored room with its windows that looked on to my courtyard. Gaining confidence, I marched down the hall to the powder room and turned on the light. Small mosaic tiles in white and blue, white ceramic sink and toilet-that needed cleaning, I noted-framed dancing prints on the wall, humming fridge. Nothing out of place.

As I approached my office, a thin whistling raised gooseflesh on my arms. I slowed my pace and peered around the corner of the short hall that led to the stairs. The door to the outside stairs gapped slightly and a breath of wind soughed through. With shaking hands, I pushed it closed and turned the dead bolt. Could Maurice have forgotten to lock up? I leaned back against the door for a moment, then pushed away to continue my search. I was confident by now that there was no one here… no intruder waiting to jump out at me. It just didn’t feel like there was anyone here.

I scanned the office: desks, chairs, computers, Oriental rug I’d bought in Turkey-all untouched. The brightness of the lights I’d left on as I progressed toward the front of the house infused me with courage and I entered the ballroom without a qualm. What is it in our DNA that seeks light, feels safer in the glare of sunlight than hidden in dark crannies? Maybe because we relied on our vision and had lost our senses of smell and hearing, relatively speaking. Our ancestors could see the saber-toothed cat stalking them but couldn’t smell or hear it. Although if the tiger house at the National Zoo was anything to go by, any Neanderthal downwind should have smelled the big kitty coming. I shook my head at the goofy direction in which my thoughts had drifted.

The glow from headlights and streetlights out front illuminated the northern end of the room and a trickle of moonlight from the back windows cast shadows along the south side. A broad stripe of light fell into the room from the hall. My eyes went to the stereo system; if someone were going to rob Graysin Motion, it was about the only thing worth stealing. Present and accounted for. About to return to my office to wait for Rafe, I sniffed. Something didn’t smell right. I gazed around the room more deliberately, scanning each section in turn.

Nothing by the front windows. The curtains were too sheer for anyone to hide behind. Nothing in the center of the floor. The odor grew stronger as I stood there and my legs started to tremble. Beneath the southern windows, one of the shadows was strangely static, not shifting as clouds and tree limbs skipped through the moonlight. I groped for the switch on the wall, my eyes never leaving the immobile shadow.

Light drenched the room and I slid down the wall until I squatted on my haunches, unable to approach Rafe where he lay under the window. I felt like I’d just plummeted into a death drop, but Rafe was not there to catch me. The beach ball-sized pool of blood congealing like a macabre halo around his shattered head told me it was too late for bandages or CPR. Too late for kissing and making up. Too late for… Forcing myself to move, I crabbed sideways on my hands and feet until I reached the door. Pulling myself up by the doorknob, I staggered into the bathroom and threw up.

Chapter 3

The police arrived within minutes of my 911 call, in a swirl of strobing lights, staticky radio transmissions, and general confusion. A quick inspection of Rafe’s body and the first two officers on the scene called for detectives and crime scene investigators. One of the patrol officers escorted me downstairs and waited with me in my living room while the other looped yellow crime scene tape around the house and kept gawkers away. I watched the goings-on from the front window, my hands laced around a mug of hot tea liberally dosed with honey and a shot of bourbon from a bottle Rafe had left behind. An unmarked car parked illegally out front, and two men I assumed were the detectives strode toward the stairs. My ears tracked their progress as they clomped up the stairs and walked heavily into the studio where Rafe’s body lay, just above my head. When I realized the cop-Officer Suarez, I read from his name tag-and I were staring at the ceiling, I wrenched my gaze away.

At least an hour passed before the thumpings and noises overhead slowed. I’d drunk two more mugs of tea, skipping the bourbon but going heavy on the honey.

I’d read somewhere that sugar was good for shock. Officer Suarez resisted my attempts at conversation and I moved from feeling sick and shaky to feeling sad and worried. Sad about Rafe’s fate, worried about my own. It hadn’t taken much thought to realize I would be suspect numero uno. Maybe numero only. I might not have any legal training, but I’d watched enough Law & Order episodes to know the spouse or significant other was always a suspect. Especially if he or she had recently caught the deceased cheating, had broken their engagement, and had fought-sometimes loudly-about business disagreements. Double especially if he or she had something to gain from the death: Unless Rafe had changed his will after we broke up (I hadn’t yet changed mine), I’d inherit his share of Graysin Motion.

A knock on the door broke into my thoughts. Officer Suarez answered it and returned a second later to usher in two men before rejoining his partner outside. The one in the lead looked like a fifty-year-old geek with an attitude. His head seemed too heavy for his scrawny neck and was capped by thinning, dishwater-colored hair. He had stretchy, too-red lips and gray eyes behind blackrimmed glasses Clark Kent might have worn in the 1950s. An incongruous cluster of freckles spattered the bridge of his nose, his cheeks, and even his earlobes. He wore a navy suit with a spotless white shirt and precisely knotted navy-and-green-striped tie.

“I’m Detective Lissy,” he said, shaking my hand briefly. “This is Detective Troy.” He nodded at the other man, a stocky bodybuilder type in his midthirties.

Detective Troy also shook my hand, his palm callused, his brown eyes taking in the details of my appearance. I didn’t want to think what I looked like, clad in a vomitflecked blue T-shirt and stretchy exercise pants-Officer Suarez had refused to let me change-with my hair straggling out of its ponytail and my feet bare. I gestured for them to be seated on the lavender velvet-covered settee my great-aunt Laurinda had placed by the marble fireplace. When she’d left me the house and its contents in her will three years ago, I’d planned to replace most of the fusty furniture, but I hadn’t had the time or money to do it yet, so sitting in the living room felt like emigrating to the 1930s. I returned to the wing chair by the window and sat, curling my feet up under me. Cold, I rubbed my hands together, but then thought it might make me look nervous and forced them to be still in my lap.

Detective Troy plopped onto the settee, releasing a puff of dust from the fabric, and pulled out a notebook. Detective Lissy remained standing, his back to the fireplace.

“Tell us about your relationship with Mr. Acosta,” he said, his voice neutral, his gaze roaming the room, lingering on the faded drapes, the tarnished silver-plated bowl on the end table, the portrait of Great-aunt Laurinda done when she was a seventeen-year-old debutante in 1923. He crossed to the painting and tapped it with his forefinger to straighten it.

When he returned to his post by the fireplace, I said, “We were partners.”

“In the business sense or the romantic sense?”

“Business,” I said firmly. Maybe too firmly.

The line between his brows deepened slightly.

“We used to be engaged,” I admitted in reluctant response to that semifrown, “but we broke it off a while ago.”

“When?” he asked, his gaze returning to the tarnished bowl.

I half expected him to whip out some silver polish and have a go at it. “Four months ago.” My eyes slid to Detective Troy, but he didn’t look up from his note-taking.

“Tell us what happened tonight,” Lissy said. His gaze fixed with unnerving intensity on my face and I realized his eyes weren’t gray as I’d originally thought, but the palest blue.

I told him about Rafe and me planning to meet, about hearing the noises upstairs, about running up to investigate.

“You thought there was an intruder upstairs and you went up on your own?” No skepticism sounded in his voice, but those speaking brows rose a fraction.

“I wasn’t sure it was an intruder-I thought it might be Maurice”-I explained who Maurice was-“or Rafe showing