Killer Commute Read Online Free PDF Page A

I mean, I was in and out carrying groceries and then sat out there to eat a sandwich. I’d have seen anybody around the Trailblazer, except when I was putting the food in the cupboards and changing clothes. He was still dripping blood, so it doesn’t seem likely he was already dead when I got home.”
    â€œMaybe he killed himself.” Libby had showered, her hair still wrapped in a white towel that contrasted with the even, light tan of her presently flawless skin. Dark eyes mocked the older women, and she flashed the perfect smile for which Charlie had payed the orthodonist dearly. “And, Mom, do you actually know how long people drip blood after they die?”
    â€œNot really.”
    â€œListen to us, talking blood dripping, and the poor man’s murdered.” Mrs. Beesom looked toward the end of the table where Jeremy had usually pulled up a chair from the dining room if they’d all gathered at once.
    They looked in that direction as if expecting him to appear, to right the imbalance his sudden death had created in the concept of home.
    â€œI feel as bad as you do, Mrs. Beesom. I was probably closer to him than anyone, but I didn’t realize until that Maggie cop asked me directly how little I knew about him.” Maggie the attorney, like Charlie, was still in her sweats and dishabille. Mrs. Beesom still wore her housecoat and sleeping cap that kept her thin, white curls safe between bimonthly visits to the hairdresser. Three different generations of women here around this table. Only the youngest seemed to be coping with things. “That never bothered me when he was alive. Now it does. But we need to talk this out, no matter how crass it seems. We can’t let it fester.”
    â€œAll I know about him really is he liked to work out and he had a weakness for girls young enough to be his daughter,” Charlie said. “Neither is an unusual personality trait in the business I’m in.”
    Now they were all looking at Libby.
    â€œHey, don’t worry there. Jeremy wasn’t that dumb.” The willowy girl/woman cut her sweet roll in half. “He knew there was one person in our complex capable of murder if he fooled around with me. And who’d hear any naughty suggestions if he even whispered them.”
    Now they were all looking at Charlie. “What, you think I would kill somebody if he—”
    â€œThreatened your kid in any way? Yes,” Maggie Stutzman, Charlie’s best friend, said with no hesitation whatever.
    Charlie’s kid, all five-foot-nine of her, slithered out of the booth with her half of a frosted cinnamon roll and sashayed off to the hair dryer before her hair set-dried into permanent snarls. The cat on the refrigerator jumped to the counter and then to the floor to follow his buddy, sounding like a falling elephant with each landing.
    Now they all stared at the remaining half of Libby’s cinnamon roll.
    Maggie and her butt won (maybe lost) as she reached for it first.
    â€œOkay, what’s the back story here?” Charlie finished up the scrambled eggs. “Why did Jeremy electrify the compound? Did he have enemies? Something worth stealing?” And why hadn’t it occurred to Charlie to worry about him noticing Libby before now?
    Betty Beesom scraped up the crumbs and melted frosting from the cinnamon-roll pan and licked them off her butter knife. “What I want to know is who called the police last night, Charlie? It wasn’t us, and it wasn’t either of the cats. I say it was the murderer of Jeremy himself.”
    â€œMaybe he had his cell phone in the Trailblazer with him and made the call as he was dying,” Maggie offered. “Maybe he knew he was in danger so that’s why he wanted the compound wired. So how did the murderer get in, then?”
    â€œMaybe one of Jeremy’s young lovers had a card to the obelisk,” Charlie said. “Maybe her father found it and got in to