Homicide in High Heels (2 page)

Then without missing a beat, he spun and
launched himself at me with air kisses. "Maddie, my dahling, how
are you this morning?"

"Fabulous, thanks for asking." Which, after
my night celebrating the Stars' seven-to-four win with my husband,
was the truth. "Planning another party?" I asked, gesturing to his
Bluetooth. In addition to manning the phones and schedules at Faux
Dad's salon, Marco had started a part-time business party-planning
to the stars. Or at least the D-listers. So far he'd done Britney
Spears' sister's son's birthday party, the afterparty for the
warm-up band at Daughtry's last concert, and a charity event for
the Rihanna Look-alikes of West Hollywood.

Marco nodded vigorously. "I am. And it's
going to be to-die-for."

"Who's the client?" I asked as I browsed the
rack of colored nail polish along the wall.

"You!"

I almost dropped a bottle of Ravenous Red.
"Me?"

Marco bobbed his head up and down, his spiky
black hair not moving an inch. "Surprise!"

"Uh, but it's not my birthday…" I hedged,
not sure I was in the market for a surprise where the flowers ran
into the "ouch" realm.

"Of course it's not, silly," he said, waving
me off. "It's for the twins. You didn't think I'd let their first
birthday go by without a signature Auntie Marco party, did
you?"

Honestly? I'd kinda hoped. "Oh, wow. That's…
really nice of you. But they're just babies. They don't need
anything big."

"Nonsense. It's their
first
birthday."

"Right. Which means they won't remember it
anyway. Really, just some cake and they'll be happy."

"Oh, honey, I have cake! Three tiered,
fondant covered, from Duff's Celebrity bakery!"

I blinked at him. "You know they have a
combined total of six teeth, right?"

But Marco was on a roll, completely ignoring
me. "I also have a waterslide, a pony, a candy bar, and I'm working
on booking an ice skating rink where I'll have Johnny Weir do a
personalized ice dance for the twins!" he said, ticking off items
on his fingers.

"You're joking right?"

Marco frowned. "Babydoll, I never joke about
figure skating."

"Exactly how much is all of this going to
cost?" I asked, a headache brewing at my temples from the
conversation that I now realized was with
my
florist.

Marco pursed his lip and shook his head.
"Oh, Maddie. You can't put a price on something as precious as your
babies' birthday."

I was pretty sure their father would
disagree.

"I'm not sure—" I hedged.

But that was as far as I got before Faux Dad
came bustling up from the back of the salon.

"Maddie, love, how are you?"

"Good," I told him, giving him a hug.
"Better once I get this fixed." I held up my cracked nail.

Faux Dad gasped. "Oh, honey. Tragic!"

While I'd had my doubts about Faux Dad's
heterosexuality before he and my mom had married a few years ago, I
had to admit that it was nice to have a man in the family who
understood.

"I know, right?" I agreed.

He clucked his tongue. "We'll get you fixed
up in a jiffy. Come on to the back. I've got Petra waiting for
you."

I followed him through the salon, currently
decorated in a Greco-chic motif with large, ornate chandeliers
hanging above cut and color stations, a gilded mirror and dainty
vanities at the blow dry bar, and flocked wallpaper in a rich
burgundy covering the walls.

"So, how did the tragedy occur?" Faux Dad
asked, gesturing to my ruined manicure.

"Ball game," I responded. "I caught a foul
ball."

Faux Dad shook his head and did more tsking.
"Sports and shellac do not mix."

"Amen," I agreed. "But thanks, by the way,
for the tickets. Ramirez had a blast."

"Happy to help," he told me. "When Lacey
gave them to me, I didn't know what I was going to do with them.
It's not as if I was going to the game myself," he said, chuckling
as if that were the most absurd thing he'd ever thought of.

"Well, be sure to thank Lacey for me the
next time you see her."

Faux Dad nodded. "I can do one better. She's
in the back getting spray-tanned now. You can thank her
yourself."

"Oh, I don't want to bother her…" I
started.

But Faux Dad waved me off with a swift flick
of his tanned wrist. "No bother at all. She's just drying now.
She's a hoot. You'll want to meet her."

Actually, I'll admit that her semi-celebrity
status had me curious. I did kinda want to meet her.

I followed Faux Dad through a door at the
back which led to private tanning booths. Each room was equipped
with a stall that looked a lot like my shower at home. Only these
had several nozzles where tanning solution was sprayed out in a
fine mist to evenly cover all the exposed skin. Usually patrons
would hit a button, spin slowly in the tanning cloud, then allow
themselves to air-dry for a few minutes before clothing and
reemerging from the room.

Faux Dad stopped at the second door on the
right and did a small knock. "Lacey, doll? It's Fernando."

No answer.

"Are you decent?" he asked.

Again, nothing.

Faux Dad frowned. "That's odd. I know she's
in there."

"Maybe she can't hear you over the spray?" I
offered.

Faux Dad put his ear to the door. "No, the
jets are off. Lacey, honey, everything okay in there?" he asked,
knocking again. He tried the handle, but the door was locked.

I could see the frown increasing.

"Wait here," he instructed me. "I'm going to
get the key from Marco. Be back in a jiffy."

I did, standing awkwardly outside the door,
checking my watch. As much as meeting Lacey sounded fun, I only had
an hour before I had to relieve my cousin of the twins. I needed to
get to Petra and that manicure, stat.

Luckily Faux Dad was true to his word, and
one jiffy later he was back, a small, brass key in hand. He did one
more repeat of the knock-and-call before slipping it into the
handle and turning the lock.

"Lacey, love?" he asked, gingerly pushing
the door open.

Then he froze, and I heard him suck in a big
breath of air.

I craned to see around him, pushing my way
into the small room.

Then I did a repeat of his gasp.

Lying on the floor of the tanning stall was
a young woman with thick brunette hair wearing a pair of teeny tiny
bikini bottoms and nothing else. Her skin was streaked in uneven
brown and pale lines, her body twisted inward on itself at an
awkward angle, and her eyes dilated, staring straight up at the
ceiling in a glazed, unblinking stare that could only be achieved
by one type of body.

A dead one.

There are some people who have all the luck.
When I was eight years old it bugged me to no end that my arch
nemesis, Melinda Masters, seemed to be one of those people. Not
only did she always have her name picked from the second grade
good-behavior ticket jar, she was always the rock-paper-scissor
elected dodge ball team captain, and the "randomly chosen" line
leader at recess. But as I've grown into adulthood, I have come to
realize that I have a certain kind of luck all my own. Dead body
luck.

I'm ashamed to admit that Lacey was not the
first dead body I had ever encountered. In fact, my friends have
started to joke that I'm kind of a dead body magnet. Not that I
actually
cause
anyone to die, but I seem to have an uncanny
knack for finding the recently deceased. Some people would say it's
a fortunate thing that my husband is a homicide detective.

Those people have never faced the business
end of my husband's Bad Cop glare.

I sat in a plastic chair in the lobby of
Fernando's, where the responding officers had corralled the entire
staff as they scoured the salon with fingerprint dust, luminal
spray, and a bunch of other chemicals that I feared would cause a
fire bomb reaction when mixed with the dyes, straighteners, and
other hair products already hanging heavily in the salon air.

When Faux Dad and I had run from the back
room and told Marco what we'd found, the ensuing screamfest had
pretty much alerted the entire patronage of the salon that
something was up. And as soon as they'd figured out just what that
something was, they'd bolted, some still mid-color in their foil
wraps. I feared there would be over-bleached hair-dos all over
Beverly Hills this week.

Faux Dad was pacing the lobby floor,
muttering to himself and shaking his head. The three stylists on
shift today where huddled together, whispering in hushed tones. My
two favorite nail ladies were in the corner, talking in rapid
Vietnamese. Marco sat on the plastic chair beside me, patting my
shoulder, and murmuring, "there, there," at comforting intervals.
And I was taking deep breaths, as if the act of pulling air in and
out of my lungs could somehow erase what I'd just seen.

Marco shook his head, clucking his tongue.
"It's just tragic."

"Did you know her?" I asked, trying to block
the image of her crumpled body from my brain.

Marco nodded. "Only in passing. She was a
new client, but she came in regularly for tanning, nails, hair, the
works."

I glanced toward the back of the salon where
crime scene techs were pulling bottles of every chemical under the
sun out of the storeroom. It was sadly ironic that she'd put so
much care into her appearance then had ended up a spray-streaked
mess.

"Uh-oh, here comes trouble," Marco
mumbled.

I looked up, and froze. Marco was right.

Ramirez walked through the glass front
doors, gaze cool and assessing, posture stiff and intimidating, jaw
set in a tight line. His eyes scanned the assembled group, and even
before they honed in on me, I could feel him seeking me out. He
knew Fernando's was my stepfather's place. He'd probably had the
entire car ride over to seethe about the fact that I was once again
at his crime scene.

I thought about ducking behind Marco, but
the fact that he underweighed me by about twenty pounds wasn't
going to afford me much shelter from the brewing husband storm.

Instead I took a deep breath, reminded
myself that luck—whether it's over being a second grade line leader
or finding dead people—is never a person's fault, and stood to face
the music.

Ramirez's eyes hit me immediately.

"Hi, honey," I said, bravely marching up to
him on legs that felt like Jell-O.

"Hi." It was his deadpan cop voice, one that
gave zero hint of emotion.

I cleared my throat. "So, we've had a little
incident," I told him, doing my best to downplay the obvious.

His expression didn't change, but I'd swear
I saw amusement flit across his eyes. "'Little' incident?"

I nodded. "In the back. Tanning
accident."

His eyes cut to the crime scene techs.
"Hmph," he grunted.

"You can take my statement now, or I can
give it to Charlie," I said, gesturing to one of the uniforms.
"Blake's already taken my fingerprints," I waved to the CSU guy
near the reception desk, "and Alex took a hair sample."

Ramirez paused. "Wow. You really know the
drill. It's like you've done this before."

"Ha, ha. Very funny."

"Oh, I'm not laughing," he said, back to the
deadpan. "In fact, I don't see anything remotely funny about my
wife being in the same vicinity as a dead body. Again."

I swallowed hard. "Hey, it's not as if I
wanted to see her like that, you know."

He paused, his eyes softened a touch, and he
cocked his head at me. "I know. You okay?"

I felt tears back up behind my eyes as the
image of Lacey's crumpled body came flooding back to me. But I
bravely sniffed them back, nodding vigorously to convince myself as
much as my husband. "Yep. I'm fine."

He shot me a look. "Really?"

"No. But I will be."

He reached a hand out and gave me a little
squeeze on the shoulder. "Tell me what happened," he said.

I took a deep breath and did, giving him the
sparse details I had.

"Did you know Lacey?" he asked when I'd
finished.

I shook my head. "No. But she's the one Faux
Dad got our baseball tickets from. She was dating Bucky Davis."

That got his attention, both of his eyebrows
heading north. "That should make things interesting with the press.
Okay, you wait here. I'm going to go talk to the responding
officer."

I nodded, happy to be out of Bad Cop's
clutches with only the minimum of interrogation.

I watched as he spoke to a guy in uniform,
then made the rounds, talking to various CSU, slipping into the
back to see the victim, then slowly making his way back out to the
lobby to see me.

"So?" I asked. "What killed her?"

He paused, his eyes going over the assembled
group of Fernando's employees as he answered. "We're not sure.
We're waiting for the ME to arrive and weigh in."

I bit my lip. "But if you had to
guess…natural causes?" I asked hopefully.

Ramirez sighed. "I wish. But if I had to
guess? No. The body didn't show any obvious signs that would point
to a natural cause. She also didn't display any signs of outward
trauma."

I felt a frown pull between my brows. "Which
means?"

"If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say death
was due to some kind of poisonous substance."

I glanced up at the CSU taking bottles from
the supply closet and realized that they were all jugs of tanning
solution.

"Oh, no," I said. "Don't tell me it was
something in the tanning spray?"

"We'll know more when CSU gets their
collections back to the lab," he said, dodging a direct answer.

But the unreadable Cop Face he'd so neatly
slid into place again told me he already had his own suspicion.

Death by tanning. I suddenly felt infinitely
glad I'd decided to go with the "pale is the new tan" motto this
summer.