Wicked Business Read Online Free PDF Page A

battle your evil forces. Stand back now while I take my leave, and thou willst give up these cupcakes.”
    He stiff-armed his sword in our direction, grabbed the tray of cupcakes, turned, and ran out of the kitchen. A car motor cranked over in the parking lot, and there was the sound of squealing tires on the pavement.
    “He needs a pill,” Clara said.
    Glo shouldered a cookie tray. “I think he’s kind of cute. He’s just a little misdirected. I might be able to find a spell to help him. I’ll have to look in Ripple’s tonight.”
    Oh boy, as if Hatchet wasn’t crazy enough, now Glo was going to help him.
    “What’s so special about this key?” Clara asked.
    “It’s the Lovey key,” Glo said. “Remember how I was saving up money so I could buy a book of sonnets, but someone bought it ahead of me? Well, there’s a little key that goes with the book, and Carl found it and gave it to Lizzy. And the guy who bought the book, Gilbert Reedy, is dead.”
    “His death was on the news last night,” Clara said. “They said someone broke his neck and threw him off his balcony.”
    At one o’clock, Diesel showed up. He ambled into the kitchen, slung an arm around my neck, and kissed me on the top of my head.
    “What’s that about?” I asked him.
    “I like you.”
    “And?”
    “I’m hungry.”
    “For lunch?”
    “Yeah, that, too.”
    “There are some ugly meat pies in the fridge. Sausage, beef with curry, and roasted vegetable.”
    When a pie or a pastry didn’t turn out to be perfect and wonderful, we labeled them ugly and made them available for employee consumption. Diesel grabbed an ugly sausage pie and stood at the counter, eating it cold.
    “I haven’t read through everything yet,” he said, “but a couple interesting things have turned up. Shortly after Reedy got the Lovey book, he joined a dating service. He chose four women from the service because he felt they were looking for true love.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I found a list in the miscellaneous folder. Reedy called them True Love Seekers and sometimes Key Seekers.”
    “That sounds very adventuresome.”
    Diesel went back for a second pie. “The list was scribbled on the back of a professional paper written in 1953 promoting the hypothesis that the stones holding the seven deadly sins were originally virtuous. Gluttony represented joy for all things. The bearer of pride had an industrious spirit.…”
    “And lust?” I asked him.
    “Supposedly the Luxuria Stone was originally the stone of true love. The author of the paper theorized that at some point in time, the stone was corrupted and turned sinful. There was an addendum to the paper speculating that a key might exist to find the stone.”
    “The Lovey key!” Glo said. “I bet Reedy was looking for his true love.” She clapped a hand over her heart. “That’s so romantic.”
    “Yeah, and he’s so dead,” Clara said.
    Ten minutes later, I was out of my chef clothes, following Diesel to his car.
    “I don’t understand why you feel compelled to talk to the four women,” I said to him. “It’s not like Reedy was in a relationship with any of them. How could this possibly help you find the stone?”
    “It’s a place to start,” Diesel said. “I’ve got home addresses and work addresses for all of them. Cassandra McGinty is the first on the list. She lives in Lynn, and she waits tables at a restaurant in Salem. I called the restaurant, and they saidshe doesn’t come in until four, so I thought we’d see if she’s home.”
    Lynn is on the North Shore, south of Marblehead. It’s a diverse seaside town with a sketchy history and a hardworking population. Cassandra McGinty lived in a big clapboard house on the west side of Lynn. The house had been converted to apartments, and Cassandra’s was on the third floor.
    I huffed and puffed up the stairs and stood back while Diesel knocked on the door. A woman with enormous breasts and short, punked-up white blond hair