Deadly Nightshade Read Online Free

buttocks shook.
    Victoria looked down from her perch on the dock. She counted six people altogether, not including the harbormaster, her granddaughter, and herself. Lights circled around and around on top of the three vehicles—two police cruisers and an ambulance. Victoria thought of strobe lights in the disco she had once gone to with Elizabeth and her granddaughter's now ex-husband. People seemed to flick in and out of visibility, red, blue, red, blue. Someone moved a vehicle to light up the scene with headlights, illuminating the launch and Elizabeth, the body and its exposed bottom.
    Victoria watched Elizabeth untie the body from the thwart. The medics and police waded into the water to turn it over. She supposed so they could load it onto the stretcher they had wheeled next to the shoreline. She couldn't see what they were doing because their backs shielded the body from her sight. She heard a splash. They must have turned it over, she realized. At the same instant, she heard mingled shouts, curses, grunts. She saw Elizabeth stand up in the boat, then sit down again quickly. Elizabeth leaned over the side of the launch, the side away from the corpse, put both hands on the port gunwale, and vomited into the harbor, over and over. She continued to heave even after nothing more came out.
    Victoria stood up and walked stiffly down the dock, stepped down onto the boardwalk that crossed the sand, stepped off into the sand, and headed toward the group. Domingo blocked her way.
    “No. You don't want to see this,” he said. “You don't want to see what they did to him. No, sweetheart. Sit on the boardwalk until they load him into Toby's hearse. Then you'd better take care of my assistant back there. She needs you.” He jerked his head toward the launch. “We've got a long evening ahead of us.”

Chapter 2
    "I've put a password into the computer program/' Howland Atherton peered down his nose at Elizabeth, who was sitting who was sitting next to him in the harbormaster's shack. Sunlight reflections danced off the water, glistened on Howland's high cheekbones, and flickered on the computer screen.
    It was two days after Victoria, Domingo, and Elizabeth had found Bernie Marble's disemboweled, emasculated corpse floating in the harbor. Elizabeth was back at work, although nothing seemed normal to her anymore.
    She could tell by Howland's expression – his turned-down mouth and the way he sneered at the computer – that he was irritated, probably with himself.
    “Domingo pretends he's Denny the dunce.” Howland leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair, silvery on the sides, dark on top. “Then when you agree to help the poor guy, he springs the trap – snap – and you're caught up in whatever scheme he's got going.” He keyed in a few numbers with his two forefingers. “And I fell for it. I did exactly what he wanted. He wanted to computerize the harbor.”
    Elizabeth shook her short hair off her forehead. She was dealing out a handful of receipts like a deck of cards.
    “I'm sorry I got you involved in this job”, Howland continued. “He can't be much fun to work for.”
    Elizabeth looked up from the receipts in surprise. “I love working here. It's what I needed after getting rid of my creepy husband.” She returned to the receipts. “Domingo's hard to take sometimes, but I like him, sort of.”
    Howland's smile made his mouth turn down, not up. 'Two mature people, you in your thirties, me in my fifties, groveling before a Latino tyrant.”
    Elizabeth laughed. “You didn't know my ex.”
    The harbormaster's shack, set high on pilings driven into the harbor floor, moved gently in the tidal current. Water swashed past clumps of seaweed on the shack's footings.
    The two worked quietly. After several minutes, Howland said, “If it weren't such a challenge to design this program, I'd be tempted to walk away.” He moved the monitor slightly to cut glare from the harbor. “It's more