Nice Girls Finish Last Read Online Free

“Yesterday was an unusually bad day, a record homicide day. My partner’s in the hospital, she has to have some tests, and I’ve been working solo since six this morning. … I think I will have that soft drink.”
    We were bonding. I blew some dust out of a glass and poured him some seltzer. “So what are we up to so far this year, for homicides. We’re over seven hundred, aren’t we?”
    â€œLast figure I heard was seven hundred seventy-two,” he said.
    â€œDid they ever catch that ninety-four-year-old man who killed his ninety-two-year-old brother in the Bronx?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThe guy is ninety-four and he has arthritis, how far could he go?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œWhat about the drifter who killed the woman who took him in? Her name was Felice something, she met him in Madison Square Park and it was love at first sight …”
    â€œYeah, I know that case. Haven’t caught him yet either.”
    â€œYou probably already know this, but there was a very similar case a few years ago, same MO. That victim was also killed with selenium in her coffee.”
    â€œYeah, the Freddy the Freeloader case,” Ferber said. “You know your murders.”
    â€œWell, as I said, I used to be a crime and justice reporter and I’ve had other brushes with murder …”
    â€œYou’d be surprised,” he said. “It’s not that common to meet women who like to talk about murder.”
    Boy, he was adorable. He reminded me very much of this guy I had a crush on back in high school, a guy with the same dogged, doe-eyed good looks. With that fresh face, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, which is young for a detective, I think. But then, they seem to get a touch younger every year, which worries me a little. I work in television, and it ages you quickly.
    By now I was feeling more Blanche DuBois than Mrs. Robinson. It was all I could do not to offer him some milk and cookies and ask him if he’d ever seen a grown-up woman naked. I was going to invite him to look at my scrapbooks—I’d kept scrapbooks of unusual murders for years—but I figured he had other places to go and people to see.
    In fact, he had. As soon as he finished his seltzer, he got up and thanked me for my time.
    I walked him to the door and when we exchanged cards I noted he didn’t wear a wedding ring. Man, I was getting bad. When the moon was full, I was like a she-wolf with her nose in the wind. Maybe it was because the only man in months who had come close to touching me in an intimate manner was now dead, shot in the heart in his office.
    â€œHope you catch the killer,” I said.
    â€œYeah, me too,” he said. “By the way, you know there’s a guillotine in front of your building?”
    â€œGuerrilla art. We get a lot of it down here.”
    â€œWeird,” he said.
    Yeah, that’s what I thought when I saw the guillotine, but now it seemed like the least weird thing about my day. What a day. It had just been one thing after another, culminating with news of the murder of someone I knew oh so slightly. Well, where’s the bright side to murder, smart girl? I asked myself. That’s a toughie, but you know, I found a bright side. At least I wasn’t the one who was dead.
    When I spoke to my friend Claire Thibodeaux later, she found another bright side. I often fall in love during murder cases. I’d never thought of it before, but she was right. I’d met my ex-husband during the murder trial of mobster Lonnie Katz. I’d fallen for my ex-boyfriend Eric, who always insisted on calling himself my “transitional” man, during the Griff murder case. In fact, shortly after a big murder case in my hometown, when I was a kid, I kissed my first boy.
    I don’t know why that is. My karma, I guess. Anyway, given my record in things romantic, I wasn’t sure