Steamed (A Maid in LA Mystery) Read Online Free PDF

real killer.”
      “Fine.  Let’s go.”
      “Hold a minute.  Let me get my purse.”  I shut the door in his face.
      I looked at the huge mess. 
      I was going to come home and clean it, whether or not I felt like it.  I was a maid, which meant I had a certain cleanliness standard to uphold.  So I’d clean before I started my own investigation into Mr. Banning’s murder.
      I hurried back out the door, shut and locked it, then turned to the detective.
      “Okay, where do you want to go?” I asked.  “I’ll meet you there.”
      “Why don’t you ride with me?”
      “Why do you want me to ride with you?  Because you’re afraid I’ll escape?” 
      “No,” he said, then in a softer tone he muttered, “You’re absolutely driving me insane.”  His voice rose again as he finished, “I thought you could ride with me because it will simplify things.”
      Now it was my turn.  I sighed one of my big you’re-driving-me-nuts-as-well sighs.  I normally reserved them for my ex-husband or the boys, but I didn’t figure they’d mind me using one on Detective Parker. 
      “Fine,” I said.
      I sucked in my stomach and started down the stairs.  I stopped at the bottom, gripped the rail hard.  I felt sort of light-headed.
      He turned.  “Are you okay?”
      “Fine,” I said again, but I lied.  I didn’t feel fine at all.  I felt shaky at best.
      Detective Parker gave me a hard look.  Not the sort of oh-baby look he probably gave other women.  This was an assessing sort of look.  He’d given me those before and I recognized it.
      But even if it wasn’t designed to, that look made my knees feel weak in a way that had nothing to do with my light-headedness.
      “When’s the last time you ate?” he asked.
      I thought about it.  It’s never a good sign when you have to think about when your last meal was.  “This morning.”
      “Lady, you need a keeper.  Come on,” he grumbled and took my elbow.  It wasn’t a police hold, but more of a supportive sort of thing.
      He mumbled to himself about ditzy women who cleaned up murder scenes and couldn’t even remember to eat.
      I should have felt insulted—I am many things, but I am not ditzy—but the day had been too bizarre for me to feel anything but sort of numb.
      He tucked me into a very plain looking dark sedan and got in on the other side.  I was thankful to find myself in the front seat, not the back, although his car didn’t have that plastic police barrier and the back seat looked rather normal from where I was sitting.
      I glanced from the normal back seat I wasn’t in, to the man driving.  “What’s your name?” I asked.  “I don’t like referring to you as Detective Parker.  It reminds me that you want to send me up the river.  Or is it down the river?”
      “I don’t want to send you in any direction on any river.  To be perfectly honest, I want to finish this interview, clear you, then get as far away from you as I can.”
      “Yeah, men tend to have that reaction to me.”  He hadn’t told me his name, and I wasn’t about to ask again.
      I had my pride.
      We drove a few minutes in silence.
      I jumped when he said, “It’s Caleb.  You can call me Cal.”
      “Cal.  That’s nice,” I said. 
      It was a good solid name.  The name of someone you could count on. 
      “You can call me Quincy,” I added.
      “I’d planned to.”
      That was sort of rude, but I didn’t comment on his lack of manners.  Instead, I asked the question that had been burning away at my brain.  “Hey, Cal, do you know if California has the death penalty?”
      “What?” he asked.  He took his eyes off the road and glanced at me.
      “Watch the road,” I scolded.  I didn’t need a traffic accident on top of everything else that had happened today. 
      “I mean,” I said, when he’d turned his attention back to the road, “I just want to know if you convict me