The Zen Man Read Online Free PDF

in the pool. Otherwise, it was so quiet…too quiet…
    Marvis whined.
    “Shh, girl…”
    The person’s head was resting on one of the flat rocks that lined the pool. So still, no movement. Laura was going to feel like a fool bothering the guest if they were simply trying to enjoy a quiet moment…
    But they didn’t move.
    So still.
    Maybe they’d fallen asleep…or had passed out.
    Needed to roust them, get them out of the water. Stepping off the rock path, she crossed a patch of ground. Closer, the yellow lantern light was brighter, revealing the pale mounds of a woman’s breasts breaking the water’s bubbling surface. The face was turned away from her, the hair spilling over a rock.
    “Ma’am?” asked Laura, “are you all right?”
    A breeze shuddered past, carrying the scent of sage, and something else. Wine. Too much to drink. Just as she’d thought. Passed out.
    Mavis paced the edge of the pool as Laura kneeled next to the woman.
    “Ma’am, wake up. I need to get you out of this pool.”
    Damn. Wished she’d remembered her cell phone so she could call Rick, get him here to help. It wasn’t going to be easy lifting a drunk out of the water. She touched the woman’s face. Strands of wet hair clung to her fingers as she gently grasped the woman’s head and turned it.
    Laura gasped.
    Deborah’s dark, unblinking eyes stared at her.

Five
     
“The murderer is right in this room. Sitting at this table. You may serve the fish.”
—Nick Charles
     
    “D eath brings out the voyeurs,” I muttered.
    “As though none of them haven’t seen it before,” added Sam, his voice wooden, distant. He shivered, mindlessly buttoned his suit jacket.
    It was ten-thirty at night, but the high-pressure sodium lamps made it look like high noon around the pool where Wicked’s body lay. The well-meaning Jefferson County coroner types had erected monstrous blue plastic sheets to afford her some dignity from scrutiny, but there were gaps between the sheets. Like chinks in the law, the CrimDefs had found them. They stood in clusters talking and smoking, their vantage points providing surreptitious peeks at her naked, waxy body, her eyes forever staring at the night sky.
    “Assholes,” Sam mumbled, crinkling a plastic package. He held it toward me. “Gum?”
    I helped myself.
    “Christ, she’ll be half-boiled by the time they get her to the coroner’s.” Sam set the gum into his mouth as though it were a communion wafer.
    Al Benning, the Jefferson County Sheriff, had arrived twenty minutes before William Lashley, the new coroner for Jefferson County, and none of us, especially Benning, had been happy with his tardiness. While waiting, Benning had ordered his deputies into action, stringing the yellow crime tape, taking video, scouring the area for footprints. They’d also found the possible murder weapon, a knife, in some bushes near the pool. Later, the medical examiner would determine if that type of weapon had caused the wound to her heart.
    Now some deputy coroners, their hands in latex gloves, were lifting Wicked’s fat, limp body from the water. That brassy blond hair that she loved to curl and tease stuck in wet clumps around her face. She had a startled look, probably the one she’d had the moment she’d faced her murderer.
    I felt bile rising in my throat. I spit out the gum.
    Sam laid a hand on my arm. “Want to go inside?”
    “No.” In the surreal lighting, Sam’s stricken face looked as though the blood had been drained from it. “You?”
    “No.”
    “I mean, she’s my ex. But the two of you…”
    He waved off my comment, looked around. “Where’s Laura?”
    “Damage control.” She’d been circulating among the CrimDefs, asking if they wanted coffee, making arrangements for refunds, avoiding questions about what she’d seen when she stumbled upon Wicked’s body. The latter I’d warned her about, although she had enough common sense to know better.
    The deputy coroners finally hoisted