Chapter 1
A cold flush of shock and panic caused Harper Jane Evans’s throat to close up and her blood to coagulate in her toes. Dizzy and unable to move, she just stared, gaped really, at the surreal sight at her feet.
“Gerald?” For a moment, nothing in her world made sense. Was this real or some early Halloween prank? “Gerald?”
No response. It wasn’t a prank. Her stomach sank.
She fished for her phone in her oversized bag.
Harper had known she was making a mistake the second she stepped into the hotel suite and smelled beer and sweat filling the confined space. Her boss was likely drunk off his butt and ready for a confrontation. The man was a surly drunk with none of the affability to make him amusing or easy to handle.
She should have backed out first thing, but curiosity moved her forward. If her boss was passed out on the bed, the good and bad sides of her would have warred with pulling a sheet over him and letting him sleep it off, or taking a quick unflattering pic with her phone and sharing it with her friends for a giggle.
She knew doing so would be immature, but he was such a colossal jerk. A candid pic on social media would serve him right, and produce a satisfying amount of revenge.
But not this. Never this. She pressed a hand to her head.
Where was that phone?
Her mind worked through the last few minutes. She was in the center of a crime scene. Had she seen something that could help the police?
Start from the beginning.
“Gerald,” she’d called softly as she’d stepped over the threshold. The room was still.
With squared shoulders, she’d moved farther into the room. Calling out to him again, she received no answer. Not making a run for it at that moment proved to be her second mistake of the day.
She’d come to Gerald’s hotel suite to protest the proposed new cheerleader uniforms, when her instincts told her she should have met him in the lobby. The door had been propped open with the room’s Bible and that had her instinct to flee up and running. After all, Gerald was a slimeball like his uncle Willard and couldn’t be trusted.
He could be naked for all she knew. Gross.
Still, onward she’d gone, forgetting all her mother’s lectures about trusting your gut.
Filled with righteous anger over the largely see-through fabric with only gold tassels for nipple coverage, she’d been spoiling for a confrontation, built up during the fourteen hours he’d been out of town boinking his mistress, Sharla. She didn’t want to wait another minute until he sobered up.
Rather than leave the argument for later, instead, she found Gerald, all three hundred plus pounds of him, lying on the carpet behind the suite’s desk, bare-bellied up, wearing nothing but a pair of tighty-whiteys, and staring blankly at the ceiling with a pair of filmy eyes.
Dead.
And she was alone.
“Oh, hell,” she whispered and all her confusion fled. A large knife protruded from his chest and excluded natural causes as the manner of death. She hadn’t seen anyone fleeing the room and she wasn’t helping by standing there staring at his lifeless body like a panicked raccoon in the headlights.
She knew enough about crime scene investigations from TV shows not to touch anything. After all, there was nothing she could do for Gerald anyway. That was obvious. There was no point searching him for a pulse.
Snapping into head cheerleader mode, she found the phone tucked under her wallet and backed away from the body. “I need the police.” Talking out loud kept her from freaking out and helped her think. “Lots of police.”
It took two tries for her shaking hands to swipe the phone open and pound out 9-1-1. It took another few seconds to realize she had no bars to make the connection. “Shoot.”
A chill swept through her.
“Concentrate,” she urged herself as she waved the phone over her head looking for bars. A concerning thought jumped forward and made her hesitate.
Last night, after receiving the prototype of the new uniform from Gerald’s put-upon young assistant, Kimmie, and cursing him back to his knuckle-dragging ancestors—many of them still suffered from that condition—she’d spent the better part of the evening drinking Fuzzy Navels and telling everyone within earshot that if he didn’t rethink the uniforms, she intended to kill him and dump his body parts in Lake Michigan.
Her heart sunk as memories came back to her of a dark bar with noise from several sporting events blasting in the background.
Oh, no.
“Not your finest moment,” she said and closed her eyes against the crush of worry. At least a dozen football players and cheerleaders had been at that large table celebrating the game win when she’d inserted a flip-flop covered foot into her mouth and made threats. There was no way any of them hadn’t heard.
“You made yourself suspect number one, dummy.”
She paused for just a half a second before ignoring the feeling that the walls were closing in. Gerald was dead. She could worry about herself and her big mouth later.
Moving closer to the door, she finally found service. Two bars appeared.
Harper tapped out 9-1-…
The chance to be a good citizen vanished when the sound of shuffling outside the door and a deep and authoritative voice called out, “Police!”
The cracked-open door swung inward and a pair of officers rushed in the door, guns drawn, faces hard. She felt a rush of relief that lasted about two breaths. They appeared to have been expecting trouble. Odd. She’d just found the body a minute ago. And there was no sign any Good Samaritan had gotten there before her. Double odd.
Her stomach tightened.
Had they known about Gerald before she showed up? How? Her call hadn’t gone through. Something was wrong here.
Her mind went blank.
“Get down on the floor!” the first officer demanded. He was well over six feet tall and had a menacing face marred by childhood acne scars. The second brushed past her, holding his gun up in case of danger.
Terrified, Harper dropped to her knees. “I didn’t do anything.” Her tight voice shook.
The protest was ignored. Cop one stepped forward and his gun came very close to her face. She blew a brown curl out of her eyes and fought to settle her shaking body.
“Hands up,” the cop said.
Her phone slipped out of her hand and bounced off the carpet when her arms went up. Just like in the old mystery movies she’d watched with Gramps, she’d been found bent over the body with the knife in her hand. Figuratively, of course.
“We have a body,” officer two said from behind her, more in confirmation than surprise. “It looks like a murder.”
The first officer stared down at her as if mentally practicing his witness statement when he testified against her in court. This was probably his first murder.
There was a faint and disturbing glint in his eyes. “Lady, put your hands behind your back.”
Harper whimpered. And complied.