Killer Hair Read Online Free PDF

boots.”
    “Too bad.” Brooke had only met Trujillo once, but the memory lingered. “So what about you, Lace? Any prospects?”
    “Sorry. Long dry spell. No rain in sight.”
    “What about the one who got away?”
    “He got away.”
    “I hate when that happens. At any rate, I think it’s time for a new salon, Lacey. Crazy hairstylists. Crazy hair killers. You don’t need the aggravation. And that Stella’s a little strange.”
    “Yeah, but it’s hard to get rid of your hairstylist. Especially when she knows where to find you.”
    Brooke fingered her own blond locks. She treasured her hair, which she wore in a long French braid when she went to court. “You know, if a crazy haircutting killer were out there, not only would you be dead—you’d be bald too!”
     
    After Brooke left, Lacey lingered outside to admire the view. Gazing south down the Potomac, it was easy to forget the city and the noise. Spring was stealing over the landscape, creating a hush of green along the riverbanks. In just a week or two, the trees would be full and bushy, but she loved warm days like this when the first sign of green signaled that the long, dull winter was conquered at last.
    Ah, spring in Washington—and pheromone jammers. It’s such a good explanation, it should be true. Lacey wondered if she could still attract a man. Maybe if I lived somewhere else.
    Lacey had a face that a man had once told her belonged on the cover of a pulp-fiction magazine. Pretty, but a little exaggerated, a little extreme for comfort. There were even men who had called her beautiful.
    She didn’t kid herself about her looks. She knew she was attractive, but she’d never be the most beautiful, the thinnest, or the most sought-after woman. She was five-foot-five with a curvy build that she fought to keep on the slim side. Her hair was good: thick, manageable, and slightly wavy. She wore it a couple of inches below the shoulder, long enough to wind into a French knot on bad-hair days. As a package deal, she figured she was pretty good. But the package was still on the shelf.
    Her thoughts paused on one man from her past, but she told herself to forget him. After all, he was merely a footnote in her romantic history, a footnote that would take volumes to explain, even to Brooke. The last she heard, he had left Sagebrush, Colorado, but that’s where the trail ended. Just another tumbleweed tumbling through. Like her.
    Before she moved to Washington, Lacey was used to feeling strange, an outsider, an observer. When she was little, she had always considered herself a swan, and her family of ducks never knew what to make of her. Her mother often said she had no idea where Lacey came from, and she apparently was not implicating the mailman. Rose Smithsonian suggested that it was likely a caravan of gypsies had dropped in one night, stolen the real baby Smithsonian, and left Lacey as a little joke. The real baby Smithsonian would be perky and have cheerleading genes and wear what Mother wanted.
    The real baby Smithsonian would have grown up and found a man by now. She’d be tied down to a house, kids, and meatloaf once a week.
    Lacey let her eyes sail down the verdant Potomac. My pheromones may be jammed, she thought, but at least I’m a swan on my own river.

Chapter 3
    It’s probably a character flaw that I am more concerned at the moment with what to wear to the funeral than whether it was suicide or murder, Lacey thought. She figured she’d give herself time and some fragment of noble character would emerge. The darn job was turning her into a shallow caricature. She told herself that she had values. Somewhere.
    Now that she wrote “Crimes of Fashion” everyone expected her to look totally put together all the time. Only Lacey knew how far below that ideal she fell. Like the memorial service: People always think they know what to wear to a funeral, but in fact they have no idea, and neither did Lacey. The “little black dress,” for instance,