Two Cooks A-Killing Read Online Free

O’Rourke and Hagen probably nearly busted their budget. And Em apparently has a very special idea about the script as well. He swore they were the only ones needed.”
    â€œInteresting,” Angie murmured, more curious than ever about what the script would reveal.
    Suddenly, she shivered. “Why is it so cold? It feels as if all the air-conditioning in the house is concentrated in this room.”
    â€œI don’t know,” Mariah answered. “It’s always this way.”
    â€œIt’s much warmer in the hallway.” Angie stepped out. “Whose child was that?” she asked, pointing toward the stairs.
    Mariah joined her. “There’s no child in this house.”
    â€œBut I saw…” What had she seen? It was a child, wasn’t it? Perhaps carrying the luggage up two flights of stairs had been harder on her than she’d thought. “My mistake.”
    â€œYour key’s on the bureau.” Mariah pointed to the bathroom, third door on the right, as she crossed the hall.

Chapter 2
    The block-long Hall of Justice dominated that section of San Francisco where the rough, rundown South of Market district butted up against the ugliness of the Central Freeway. A utilitarian gray concrete slab with all the artistry of an old Soviet government building, the Hall did nothing to beautify the area.
    Inside, the Homicide bureau on the fourth floor was even shabbier, with mismatched desks, file cabinets, bookcases and shelves, antique computers, and (some swore) even a rotary dial phone or two. As part of the Bureau of Inspections, the homicide inspector had a jurisdiction which covered the entire city and county, all forty-nine square miles, with its population of two million people by day and about eight hundred thousand at night when the commuters went home. An ever-present number of tourists helped fill the sudden void of humanity on evenings and weekends.
    Despite the hundreds of thousands of additionalbodies that routinely descended on the city, it was usually the residents themselves who kept the homicide inspectors, like Paavo Smith, busy.
    He hit the print command on his computer. The report he’d just finished would send the murderer of a young gas station attendant to San Quentin for life. Paavo and his partner, Toshiro Yoshiwara, had been on the case for three weeks. When they found the killer, a druggie out of his mind from methamphetamine, they made sure they did everything by the book, taking no chance the guy would walk. Paavo had talked with the D.A. that morning and confirmed that the case was clean and solid.
    He reached for the phone, then stopped. Normally, he would have called Angie and gone out tonight to celebrate. This case deserved it. His hand dropped to the desk. She was probably already on her way to Napa County.
    Leave it to Angie to end up working on a Christmas show in April! It didn’t make any sense to him. Hollywood and what went on there were as foreign to him as Bangladesh. When he thought about television and movie portrayal of police work, he knew the people involved understood him as little as he understood them.
    Still, to him, Angie and Christmas went hand-in-hand—both full of warmth, hope, and love.
    He only wished Sal Amalfi hadn’t been involved in getting her the job.
    Although Angie hadn’t picked up on it at all, he understood why her father had urged her to spend time living in a rich man’s house, with eligible bachelors close by.
    Sal Amalfi didn’t know his daughter well if he imagined an opulent setting could influence her or affect her heart. At the same time, he didn’t blame Sal for trying. If he were Angie’s father, he wasn’t sure how happy he’d be about her engagement to a poor homicide cop. As that poor cop, he was ecstatic.
    â€œCan I help you?” Inspector Bo Benson stood at the doorway and spoke to an unseen person. Benson was the fashion plate of Homicide, today