Dipped, Stripped, and Dead Read Online Free Page A

interest in that. People rescue stuff out of Dumpsters, so much the better for . . . for landfills and all. You were . . . climbing the Dumpster?”
    “Yeah,” I said, and was glad I was blushing anyway. I looked away. “I put my hand on a bag, and the whole thing fell.” I took a deep breath, which was a bad idea, because I got a big noseful of the smell. I swallowed hard and said, “And then I went to put them back and I saw . . . I saw . . .”
    I became aware that my voice was shaking. He nodded. “The first one is always bad.” He shrugged. “Weirdly, this one is not that bad, because it doesn’t really look human. Or not at first glance.”
    “No,” I said. I rubbed my nose because I felt like I was about to cry. “I thought it was a mannequin. I only knew it was human by the hair. And the top of the forehead, you know?”
    He nodded. “Well, that’s about it,” he said. “You didn’t do anything else we need to know about, right? Removed something, or put something extra in the Dumpster?”
    I shook my head. I was not going to tell him about the table, even if this had started to have the feel of when I went to explore the construction site without telling my parents. It was impossible that the table had anything to do with the body. The corpse hadn’t been bludgeoned with a table, and I was not about to lose my find for the sake of bureaucracy.
    “And you gave us your address,” he said. “You’ll be at two-sixteen Quicksilver today?”
    “I’m always there,” I said. “Well, unless I’m out, you know, delivering furniture or . . .” I shrugged. “You have my cell phone.”
    “Right. And I’ll get back to you on this. Sorry you had such a shock. Try to take it easy today, okay? Have a quiet
day with the munchkin back there. Don’t think about any of this.”
    A likely idea. First, the quiet day with the munchkin would get cut short, as I had to hand him back to All-ex tonight to stay till Tuesday evening at his dad’s place. Second . . . second—I thought of Ben’s messages on my phone, as yet unlistened to—this was not shaping up to be a quiet anything.
    “Do you have any idea who she was?” I asked.
    At first I got back a slight stare, then an intent frown. “She?” he asked.
    “The . . . corpse . . .”
    Suddenly the very hot guy with the laid-back manner was replaced by the eagle eye of the law. His eyebrows seemed to struggle to go up, while he kept them stubbornly on a level, and he spoke in a voice that was too deceptively calm. “How do you know if it’s a woman?”
    “The hairstyle,” I said. “I’ve seen that short, blond, frosted hairstyle in magazines. Must be very expensive.” I sighed. “I could never afford it, and there’s no way I could do it to myself. The one time I tried to cut my hair . . .” I was not going to tell my life story to a stranger. “It didn’t end well.”
    He looked curious, and something like a sparkle ran through the gray eyes, making them seem, momentarily, bluish. He seemed to be considering something. “I’ll try to give you a call later. To see how you’re holding up.”
    Like that, he offered me his hand again, and I squeezed it. He wasn’t wearing gloves. That probably meant that he hadn’t been physically handling the body. For some reason that made me feel better.
    He fished in the pocket of his pants and brought out a business card. “If you think of anything, or anything seems strange, give me a call, okay?” His business card read Cas Wolfe, Goldport Police Department, Serious Crimes Unit . “Call my cell phone. If you call the department
they’re as likely as not to put you through to the other investigator, Rafiel Trall, and he won’t know anything about this. At least not unless it gets really bad and we need to bring in every available person.”
    I nodded. E waved at him as he turned to say, “Bye, little one. See you later.” Even if E didn’t trust him enough to talk, the wave was a big honor. E