Murder Plays House Read Online Free Page B

back. These photographs were also signed with the same indecipherable scribble.
    A bulletin board hung crookedly on the wall, and I winced at the hole I was sure the nail had made in the thick, creamy plaster. The board was full of what appeared to be fan mail, much of it in the ornate curliques of young girls’ handwriting. I stood up on my tiptoes to read one of the letters, but Kat stopped me.
    “Come on,” she said. “Don’t be so nosy.”
    I flushed. That’s certainly one of my worst qualities. Or best, if you consider my job.
    “She must be an actress,” I said.
    “Probably.”
    “With a knack for self-promotion. And a really good website.”
    Kat shrugged, not particularly interested, and led the waydown the small hallway next to the kitchen. We walked into a surprisingly large bedroom, with French doors opening to the garden. Dappled light shining through the windows illuminated the piles of clothes and gave the veneer of dust on every surface a golden luminescence.
    “Pig,” Kat said.
    “Yeah, but it’s a gorgeous room anyway, don’t you think?”
    “Hmm.”
    “Is that the shower running?” I asked, but Kat had already pulled open the door to the bathroom and begun to scream.

Two
    A LICIA Felix’s was not the first dead body I’d ever seen, but I think it would take years of experience in crime-scene investigation before one became inured to the sight of a naked woman slumped against the wall of her bathtub, her chest and belly defaced with a scrawl of stab wounds. I reached the bathroom door in time to catch Kat as she tottered backwards. I held my friend up with one arm as I stared at the grim scene in the small, white-tiled room. Kat sagged against me, her face buried in her hands, her chest heaving. I looked at the dead woman for only a moment, but what I saw seared itself into my memory. This was a hideously violent murder. The poor woman’s torso had been hacked and torn, nearly shredded. Her wide-open eyes had a milky quality, as though a haze had lowered over them as life seeped away. Her body looked rigid, almost like a grotesque statue, particularly around the neck and jaw. Her skin was mottled; above the flesh was white and waxy, but what Icould see of the bottom was purple, the color of a deep bruise. Postmortem lividity, the pooling and settling of the blood in response to gravity. The shower was still running, washing her body with a constant stream, and thus there was very little blood spilled anywhere at all. I could see only the smallest smudge just underneath the woman’s shoulders and neck, which were bent to one side by the protruding taps of the shower.
    What made the starkest impression on me, however, was not so much what had been done to her, although that was certainly awful, it was rather the
shape
of the woman’s body. She was, in a word, emaciated. Her legs were long and horribly thin, withered as if by a wasting disease. Her knees bulged larger than her thighs, contrasting starkly with her skin-draped femur and tibia bones. Her ribs and the gullies between them were clearly visible even despite the stab wounds. Her clavicles stood out from her neck, nearly framing her bony jaw. The only hint of fleshiness about her body was the one breast, the right, that had not been horrifically mutilated. It sat, perfectly round, obviously fake, in the brutalized expanse of her chest.
    I slowly backed out of the doorway, pushing Kat behind me. I settled her on the edge of the bed, but then remembered that the room was a crime scene. The whole house was one, and Kat and I had wandered through it freely, stomping across the floors and carpets, handling everything, probably obliterating all signs of the murderer. I grasped Kat more firmly around the shoulders, heaved her off the bed, and together we stumbled out to the courtyard. I sat her down in one of the wrought-iron lounge chairs in the garden. She leaned her head back on the white muslin cushion, her eyes still closed. I