Dirty Little Misery (Miss Misery) Read Online Free PDF Page B

can call me Andre. I’d shake your hand and all that, but as you can see…” He held up hands covered in gloves. “Come on in, and let’s find a pair for you.”
    I followed him into a high-ceilinged foyer and wrinkled my nose. Alcohol, stale sweat maybe, and something fouler lurked in this house. “Please tell me that’s not the smell of dead bodies.”
    Andre handed me a pair of gloves from a box by the door. “No, decomposing bodies smell much worse. Trust me. I think you’re sniffing the food the owners had sitting out all night. You been briefed on what the cops found?”
    I wiggled my fingers around in the gloves. They were way too big. “I’ve been briefed on precisely nothing.”
    “Fantastic. And you’ve never done anything like this before?”
    “Nope. But I read a lot of mysteries. I suppose that doesn’t count, huh?”
    He snorted. “You’re in for some fun then. Come watch, learn, and don’t touch anything. They haven’t taken the bodies away yet because we’re still collecting evidence, so you’ll get to see this insanity for all it’s worth. Just try to stay out of the way.”
    I’d have done a much better job of staying out of the way if I could have been brought in later and allowed to sleep, but I kept the thought to myself.
    Andre led me through enormous room after enormous room until we reached a door off a blindingly stainless steel kitchen. The source of the house’s odor was plain, and as Andre had indicated. A couple pizza boxes, ripe with garlic and sausage, sat on the center island next to several wine and liquor bottles. The booze was gone, but the pizza was untouched.
    Another cop was holding a door open as a photographer came up a set of stairs. The officer gave me a curious glance.
    “Basement?” I asked.
    “Yes, and what a basement it is.” Andre paused, taking the door from the cop. “You are going to be okay seeing dead bodies, right?”
    I swallowed and adopted my best nonchalant expression. Judging by the undercurrent of anxiety I picked up from the more seasoned people here, this was one hell of a group of dead bodies. Then again, I’d experienced some truly awful stuff thanks to Victor Aubrey and the furies, like people whose hearts had been removed. My stomach was tougher than I’d have thought. “I’ll be okay. How many bodies are we talking?”
    Andre seemed to consider the truthfulness of my response, then shrugged. “Nine.”
    “Damn. Did someone slaughter a party? What was going on here?”
    He started down the stairs. “Something like that. Come see for yourself.”
    A bit lightheaded from all the diffuse anxiety I was sucking in—and probably a lack of breakfast—I headed downstairs. Something told me I was just as well off not having eaten. Andre might have been right about the smell of decomposing bodies, but the stench down here was nonetheless worse than the kitchen reek. And decidedly different.
    He stopped on the landing at the bottom of the stairs and held up a hand. “Whatever jokes you want to make about stiffs? Don’t. I’ve heard them all already from the cops.”
    “I think I’m too much of a newb to make jokes about—” My words died on my tongue and my brain seized up. Andre had stepped aside, revealing a scene that was nothing like my imagination would have conjured if given a hundred years.
    I’d expected something horrific given the way everyone was feeling—blood everywhere, hacked-up limbs, stab wounds. You know, your typical gruesome murder scene. But that’s not what I found. And while not finding something that could have come from a B-slasher flick was a relief, my brain had a hard time understanding what I did find because it was so not right.
    “Tell me I am not looking at some kind of dead people orgy?”
    My eyes didn’t know what to take in first. There were nine naked people, and given their positioning, they hadn’t died in some peaceful post-coital state. They’d died right in the middle of having a