Page 82 of The Body in the Backyard

“Who is it?” Lily called sweetly from within the wall.

“Pipe down! We’re supposed to be hiding, remember? It could be the bad guys knocking,” Fred said loudly.

“Right! I forgot. Nobody’s here but us house ghosts,” Lily said. “Wooooooooooo.”

“Buncha amateurs,” Mrs. Penny muttered.

“Please remain calm…and much quieter,” Gabe said.

Riley sighed and swung the hutch open to reveal the secret staircase.

Lily, Fred, and Mr. Willicott were playing cards on the stairs using potato chips for money. Gabe was eating the rest of the chips that hadn’t become currency. Billy the prodigy lawyer had loosened his dinosaur tie and was drinking a Dr Pepper with shaking hands.

Mrs. Penny took a slurp of the bourbon in her glass. “I was here the whole time,” she announced.

“What in thename of all fuckery is going on here?” Jasmine demanded, shoving aside the crime scene tape and holding a hand in the face of the cop who dared to stand in her way. “Not today, junior.”

Riley excused herself from the officer who was trying to take a statement from all her roommates at the same time and hugged her best friend.

“What the hell happened here?” Jasmine demanded, returning the tight squeeze before releasing her.

“Oh, you know, the usual. Griffin was being chased by two men with guns, so of course he drove straight here, endangering everyone and crashing his car into my Jeep. Then Nick and Kellen returned fire until a tree branch mysteriously crushed the bad guys’ car and they were forced to surrender.”

“Mrs. Penny shoot down the branch?” Jasmine guessed.

“Yep. But we’re pretending it was Mother Nature. You look good,” Riley observed.

Jasmine wore a red pantsuit with a lacy white tank and beige stilettos that looked as if they could be used as weapons. Her bangs were ruler-straight and as glossy as the rest of her jet-black hair.

“I had to take a deposition today. Some dirtbag son tried to bleed his parents’ estate dry while keeping them locked up in a basement in-law suite. If the trial goes anything like today, I’ll have him crying on the stand in less than five minutes.”

“I believe in you,” Riley said. Making men cry in fear was a specialty of Jasmine’s.

“This is an active crime scene, not Sunday brunch. You need to leave,” Weber announced, stomping over to them.

“Don’t even start with me, Detective Dick,” Jasmine challenged. “I already eviscerated one man today. I wouldn’t add myself to that list if I were you.”

“I’m a homicide detective. Pain-in-the-ass attorneys don’t scare me.”

Jasmine stepped closer until the pointy tips of her shoes were touching Weber’s boots. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” he growled.

“It’s so nice to see you two getting along,” Riley said.

21

12:11 p.m. Saturday, November 2

Nick navigated his way around the cops still littering his front yard in search of Riley. Other than a few bleeding scrapes from broken glass that still stung, he’d survived the shootout remarkably unscathed.

A wrecker added its flashing lights to the chaos, squeezing into the driveway between cruisers and SUVs. Radios squawked. Neighbors gawked along the property line, probably gossiping about how they always knew there was something funny about the couple that lived in that house. Cars on Front Street eased by to rubberneck.

He spotted Sergeant Mabel Jones muscling one of the shooters into the back seat of an SUV with a hand on top of his shaved head. There was something nagging him, and he hoped to hell he was wrong about it.

“They say anything yet?” Nick asked when she shut the door.

“Not a word. They just keep doing this creepy, smug smiling thing that makes me want to punch them,” she said.