Sweetheart in High Heels Read Online Free PDF Page B

hug goodbye along with a reminder that tomorrow was the Viewer’s Choice Awards, and we had 9 AM appointments at Fernando’s for our hair. I promised I’d meet her there, then headed home myself. On the off chance that Ramirez might come home for food and a nap again tonight, I decided to have a nice home-cooked meal ready for him. Taking stock of the ingredients I had on hand, then searching through AllRecipes.com’s database, I came up with pot roast. I chopped, spiced, boiled, and simmered all afternoon, and by the time I heard Ramirez’s key in the lock, I had to admit, it smelled pretty good in there.
    “Hey,” he said, throwing his keys on the kitchen counter. “What smells so good?”
    “I made pot roast,” I said, beaming with domestic goddess pride.
    He raised an eyebrow. “ You made it?”
    I swatted him with a dishtowel. “Watch it, buster.”
    He grinned. “All right, I give in. Hand me a plate. But, I have to make it quick. I gotta get back down town in an hour.”
    “That’s it? All you get is an hour?” I asked, doing my best to hide my disappointment as I dished him up a serving.
    “ME’s report came in on Peach. We need to get back to the CSU lab.”
    “Why?’ I asked, my ear perking up. “What was in the report?”
    “Lots.”
    “Very funny. Care to elaborate?”
    “Well, guess how she died,” he said, leaning back on his heels, a small smirk of I-know-something-you-don’t-know playing on his lips.
    “Um, stabbing? Or bleeding out or whatever you guys call that,” I guessed, stating the obvious.
    He shook his head. “Nope. Turns out the stabbings were post mortem.”
    I frowned. “Wait – post? That means she was already dead?”
    “Yep.”
    “Why would someone stab her if she was already dead?”
    Ramirez shrugged. “That’s a great question. Could be they didn’t know she was dead. Or maybe they were trying to make the murder look like something it wasn’t. Could be they were even trying to get rid of evidence by confusing the crime scene. Hard to tell at this point.”
    I pondered this. Dana and I had been going on the theory that the murder was personal based on the stabbing. But if Peach had been killed another way, maybe someone was trying to make it look like it was more personal than it really was. Which begged the question…
    “So, how did she really die?” I asked.
    “Asphyxiation.”
    “She was strangled?”
    “Or suffocated. We didn’t find any obvious ligature marks on her neck, but the ME did say she had the telltale petechial hemorrhaging around the eyes that indicated lack of oxygen.”
    “So, someone suffocates Peach, then stabs her multiple times?” I shook my head. “Kinda seems like overkill.”
    “You’re telling me. Double the wounds, double the missing weapons, double the paperwork. Which,” he said, “is why I only have an hour to eat and get back out there.” He stabbed at a piece of beef and brought the fork to his mouth. He chewed, paused, did a kind of grimace, then slowly swallowed.
    “What do you think of the roast?” I asked hesitantly.
    He looked down, finding a piece of lint on his shirt inordinately interesting. “It’s good.”
    “You can’t look me in the eye and say that, can you?”
    “Do I have to?”
    “No.” I sighed. “Go grab a burger.”
    Ramirez grinned. “And that’s why I love you.” He leaned in and gave me a quick peck on the cheek. Then he grabbed his keys and called, “Don’t wait up,” over his shoulder before shutting the front door behind him,
    Leaving me alone for the evening.
    Again.

    * * *

    While I would have liked to follow up with a couple of our suspects, the following day was, as Dana had reminded me, the Viewer’s Choice Awards, which meant a morning of visiting the hair stylist, the make-up artist, and the nail artist, and then finally squeezing ourselves into Spanx and skin tight dresses in order for our limos to be outside the Kodak Theater in Hollywood to walk the red carpet