To Die For Read Online Free PDF Page B

means it’s pretty damn fast.
    I put one pot under the spout and used the other pot to pour in the water. While the coffee was making, I got out a supply of polystyrene coffee cups, creamer, sugar, red plastic stirrers, and arranged them beside the coffeemaker.
    Very shortly Detective Forester followed his nose into my office, his sharp gaze noting the coffeemaker as soon as he entered.
    “I just made a fresh pot of coffee,” I said as I sipped from my own cup, which was a nice cheerful yellow with the words “FORGIVE YOUR ENEMIES—IT MESSES WITH THEIR HEADS” emblazoned in purple around the bottom. Polystyrene is hell on lipstick, so I always use a real pottery cup—not that I had on any lipstick, but that’s beside the point. “Would you like some?”
    “Has a cat got a tail?” he asked rhetorically, moving toward the pot.
    “Depends on whether or not it’s a Manx.”
    “Not.”
    “Then, yes, the cat has a tail. Barring any unfortunate accidents, that is.”
    He was smiling as he poured himself a cup. Cops must use telepathy to pass along the word that there’s fresh coffee in the vicinity, because within minutes there was a steady stream of both uniformed and plainclothes peacekeepers coming to my door. I put the first pot on the warmer on top, and began making a second pot. Soon I was switching pots again, and the third batch of coffee was brewing.
    Making coffee kept me busy, and made the night a little less miserable for the cops. I actually got to drink a second cup myself. I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep that night anyway, so why not?
    I asked Detective MacInnes if I could I call my mom, and he didn’t say no, he just said he’d appreciate it if I waited a while, because if he knew mothers, she’d come rushing down and he’d like to get the crime scene wrapped up first. Put like that—he was a man who understood mothers, all right—I just sat at my desk and sipped my coffee and tried to stop the trembling that kept seizing me at unexpected moments.
    I should have called Mom anyway, so she could rush down and take care of me. The night had been bad enough already, right? Well, it got worse.

Chapter
Three
    I should have known he’d show up. He was, after all, a lieutenant with the police department, and in a fairly small town like ours—sixty-odd thousand people—murders weren’t an everyday occurrence. Probably most of the cops on duty were there, and a good many who weren’t.
    I heard his voice before I saw him, and even after two years I recognized the deep timbre, the slight briskness that said he hadn’t spent his entire life in the south. It had been two years since I’d last seen the back of his head as he walked away from me without so much as a “Have a nice life,” and still I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach as if I were riding a Ferris wheel and just beginning the downward arc.
Two damn years
—and still my heartbeat speeded up.
    At least I was still in my office when I heard his voice; he was just outside the door talking to a knot of cops, so I had a moment to prepare myself before he saw me.
    Yes, we had a history, Lieutenant J. W. Bloodsworth and I. Two years ago, we had dated—three times, to be exact. His promotion to lieutenant was fairly recent, no more than a year ago, so then he’d been Sergeant Bloodsworth.
    Have you ever met someone and every instinct, every hormone, sat up and took notice and whispered in your ear,
“Oh, my God, this is it, this is the real thing, grab him and do it NOW!”
? That was the way it had been from the first hello. The chemistry between us was incredible. From the moment we met—we were introduced by his mother, who belonged to Great Bods at the time—my heart literally fluttered whenever I saw him, and maybe his didn’t flutter, but he zeroed his attention in on me the way guys do when they see something they really really want, whether it’s a woman or a big-screen plasma TV, and there was that flare of heightened