Curiously she stepped outside, wondering if Carrie was standing out in the heat talking to someone else. No one was there. Carrie’s car, and her own, were the only vehicles still in the parking lot.

She stepped back inside, frowning. Was Carrie in the ladies’ room? Had she gotten a ride with someone else and just left her car in the lot to collect later? Why would she do that? Not that it was beyond the realm of possibility, but it would’ve been common courtesy to at least stop by the office and let her know everyone was gone, and that she was leaving her car there for a few hours while she went out for a drink with a friend, perhaps.

Carrie had never shown any common courtesy, though, to anyone. Not only that, it was doubtful she had any real friends. Given that, Melissa hoped Carrie was off with an acquaintance who passed as a friend, and not lurking in the restroom, priming herself for another confrontation. She seemed to thrive on them. Melissa did not thrive on confrontation. The idea of being Carrie’s next target was enough to make her stomach clench in dread. She hadn’t been present for all the meetings today, but she’d checked in often and had seen enough—more than enough.

She braced herself, just in case, and went into the reception hall to clean up the mess Carrie had left behind. The table was cluttered and there were even piles of fabric on the floor; she could see a bit of it though the long tablecloth blocked much of the view. Even if Carrie was still here she wasn’t the type of person who cleaned up after herself.

As soon as she entered the room she caught a whiff of something unpleasant. She stopped, her head lifting and her nose wrinkling as she took a deeper sniff. Oh, dear. That smelled as if one of the toilets had overflowed. The restrooms were down the hallway, though, and she hadn’t smelled anything when she’d passed them. The farther she walked into the reception hall, the stronger the odor became. Had a sewer line ruptured?

Her steps slowed, and she brought up her hand to cover her nose. Her heart began to race. Something was wrong. Something felt very wrong. The hairs on her arms lifted as chills roughened her skin. She moved forward another three steps, and her breath caught in her throat, strangling her.

That wasn’t a pile of fabric on the floor behind the table, it was Carrie Edwards, staring back at her open-eyed and oddly blank through the fine net of the veil that had been draped over her face. Her blood pooled on the floor; kabob skewers—some still skewering shrimp and beef—stuck out of her body at odd angles.

Melissa vaguely heard a strange shrieking sound, and after a moment realized it was she who was making the noise. She had a reputation for being able to handle any crisis with aplomb, but other than a funeral, she’d never seen a real dead body before, and this was different from seeing one on television. Aplomb went out the window. Dear God! The smell, the congealing blood, the complete lifelessness of the woman on the floor, were all too gruesome and too real.

The end of a scream caught in her throat and she took a step back, her eyes still on the body. There was no reason to check for a pulse. She might never have seen a dead person before, but she didn’t have any doubt Carrie was doornail dead. No way was she going to touch her.

Okay. Okay. What should she do? She couldn’t just stand here and stare at a dead woman. Nor could she do what instinct said, which was lock the door, go home, and leave her lying there for someone else to handle. There was no one else to handle it.

She had to call someone—911. That’s it. She should call 911.

She turned and ran for her office, the administrator in her abruptly taking charge. There was an event planned for the weekend, a twenty-fifth high school reunion. Surely this wouldn’t interfere with that; surely the police would have the mess cleaned up by then, and her nice, orderly reception hall would be in shining order again. She wasn’t certain of that, though; even to the very end, Carrie Edwards had a gift for screwing up other people’s lives.

And then another thought intruded. What if the murderer was still in the building? Watching her, maybe waiting around the next corner, armed with skewers and cake knives and floral sticks. Melissa faltered, then kicked off her high heels and picked up the pace, turning the corner and sliding like Tom Cruise across the floor into her office. She slammed the office door and locked it behind her, then glanced frantically around the small room to make sure she was truly alone before she lurched for the phone.


Chapter Eight

THE HOT, LATE-AFTERNOON SUN WAS SHINING DIRECTLY into his eyes as Eric searched for enough room on the crowded street to park his car. The parking lot of the reception hall was a tangle of patrol cars, a medic truck, even a fire engine, though he couldn’t imagine why the fire engine was there. All of them had flashing lights, adding to the visual chaos. Okay, the patrol cars in the streets needed their lights on, but why the hell didn’t the rest of them turn them off? Across the street, news trucks were already parked, round satellite dishes blooming on their roofs. Eric found enough room to nose his car off the street and got out, nodding to a couple of patrolmen as he ducked under the crime scene tape.

Hopewell didn’t have many murders; the town was mostly upscale, no gang activity, and even their drug cases tended more toward prescription drugs than meth or crack. That didn’t mean the police department was inexperienced in handling murder cases, just that it wasn’t an everyday occurrence. When he’d been on the Atlanta force, between the gangs and drugs and everything else thrown in, the violence had seemed unending. It had been like working in a war zone. Even better, with its tax base, Hopewell could afford to pay its police department well, meaning they had good people, good services, and good equipment, which in turn translated to a high solve-rate.

The lieutenant and sergeant were already there, which upped his level of alertness. He’d already spent time with the lieutenant that morning, because the media had seized on the foiled convenience store robbery as something out of the ordinary and had contacted the department wanting an interview with him. He’d declined, because who had time for that shit, but the lieutenant had deemed otherwise. In a brief meeting beforehand, Lieutenant Neille had given him a curious look and asked, “By the way, why didn’t you use your weapon? Why throw something at him?”

“Paperwork,” Eric had replied, earning an expression from Neille that was both understanding and admonishing. “Besides, I’ve played baseball since I was four; I knew I could hit him.”

The reluctantly given interview hadn’t gone quite as smoothly. The same question had been asked, and he’d given the same answer. Then the reporter had said, “The suspect is hospitalized with a concussion, which brings up the question of whether or not you could have thrown something that wasn’t as heavy as a quart of oil.”

“Sure,” he’d replied. “But I wasn’t standing in the soup aisle.”

That remark had earned him a growled comment from Sergeant Garvey, something along the lines that one day his mouth was going to overload his ass and he’d end up in a lot of trouble. So what else was new?

Garvey moved to intercept him, his expression grave. “The manager has identified the victim as Carrie Edwards, the fiancée of Sean Dennison, the son of State Senator Douglas Dennison.”

“Shit,” Eric said. He hated high-profile cases, because as often as not the family caused problems and actually hindered the investigation with their demands, not to mention that the increased media attention also ate into their time. As luck would have it, Franklin, the older, more experienced detective who would likely have drawn the case because it was high-profile and he was more diplomatic—a huge understatement—than Eric, was on vacation at Disney World with his family. Like it or not, this case was his.

“The victim’s family is being notified, so her name hasn’t been released to the media yet,” Sergeant Garvey continued as they walked into the reception hall. The crime scene guys were already at work, taking pictures, combing the area for trace evidence. Eric put his hands in his pockets and approached close enough that he had a better view of the body, but not so close that he got in the way. Garvey stayed at his side.

The victim lay sprawled on her back in a pool of blood, one shoe on and one lying several feet away. A veil was draped across her face. Protruding from her body were several long, thin—

He blinked, to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.

“She’s kabobed.”

Behind him, stifled laughter escaped from a couple of the patrolmen who heard the remark. Garvey put on his long-suffering expression, but not before he had to control the grin that threatened to crack his face. “For God’s sake, Wilder.”

Eric squatted so he had a better view of the body, looking it over from head to toe, his sharp gaze noting every detail. “What else would you call it?”

“Stabbed. The term is stabbed. Remember that, especially when you’re talking to her family or the media.”

He grunted, continuing his visual. As far as he was concerned, “kabobed” was on the money. Metal skewers protruded from the corpse at different angles, and even from a distance he could tell that a couple of them had gone very deep, while others had barely punctured the skin. There were more puncture wounds than there were skewers; the killer had stabbed her repeatedly, maybe even using both hands, because of the difference in angles. The one that had apparently punctured her heart was buried damn near to the hilt, where a piece of blood-drenched meat dangled, along with what looked to be a pearl onion.