Deadly Deceptions

“I could find out if he’s sleeping with her,” Justin said.

“Justin,” I answered, “don’t help.”

He grinned. “It’s not like I don’t have time on my hands,” he reasoned. “I could help you solve the case, too.”

“How?”

“By spying on people. I’m invisible to most of them, remember. That could come in very handy.”

“I’ve got a better idea, Justin,” I said. “Go home.”

“I can’t. My mom’s too sad. It’s a bummer.”

“That isn’t the home I was talking about.”

“I have to wait for Pepper,” he told me decisively. “He’s old and he might get lost or something. It won’t be long, and I might as well make myself useful in the meantime.”

My throat closed and my sinuses clogged up instantly.

“Do you think they let dogs into heaven?” Justin asked. “Because I’m not going if they don’t.”

I started to cry.

Justin blipped out.

Alive or dead, men can’t stand tears.

JOLIE ARRIVED while I was rooting through the cupboards looking for something that could reasonably be expected to morph into lunch.

“You look terrible,” she said after letting herself in.

“Do you think dogs are allowed in heaven?” I asked.

“Sit down,” Jolie ordered. “You’re a train wreck.”

I slumped into a chair at the kitchen table.

Jolie washed her hands at the sink—a good thing, since she’d probably been dropping pieces of Alex Pennington into evidence bags all morning—and opened a can of soup. “Greer’s not back from shopping yet?” she asked, getting out a saucepan.

I shook my head.

“It will be interesting to see how she reacts to the news,” Jolie said, plopping the contents of the soup can into the saucepan. “Do you ever buy groceries?”

I ignored the grocery gibe. Jolie cooked. It made sense that she had a fixation with supermarkets. To me, they were just places where I ran into crazy stalkers and dead people. “Greer,” I said evenly, “did not riddle Alex with bullets and leave him to rot in the desert.”

“Don’t be so free with the gory details, okay? I could get fired if anybody finds out I called you from the crime scene.”

Guilt washed over me. I bit my lower lip. Who needs collagen when you can get the plump look by gnawing on yourself? “I might have let something slip to Tucker,” I confessed.

Jolie stared at me, her eyes going huge and round. She was beautiful, even clad in khaki shorts, a Phoenix PD T-shirt and hiking boots. Her long hair, done up in about a million skinny braids, was tied back with a twisted bandana. “Mojo Sheepshanks,” she said, “you didn’t tell him I told you about Alex?”

“He guessed,” I said.

“Right,” Jolie snapped, glaring.

“Not to worry,” I said, holding up two fingers pressed close together. “He and I are like that.”

Jolie swirled an index finger around one temple. “You and Tucker are like this. Both of you are crazy!”

“Tucker isn’t,” I said.

Jolie turned back to the soup, her spine rigid.

“You’re going to have to sit with Greer tonight,” I told her. “So I hope you don’t have any plans.”

Jolie didn’t look at me. “And where will you be?”

“I have some investigating to do.”

Jolie muttered something I didn’t quite catch, but I thought I heard the words real job in there somewhere.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said. “And how hard can it be to hang out with Greer for a couple of hours?”

Jolie rounded her eyes at me.

Just then the front door crashed open, and Greer came in. She went immediately to the cupboards and started ripping through them, a one-armed marauder. She found a package of Oreos—Nick liked to smell them, and even though I seriously doubted he’d ever be back, I kept them around just in case—and started stuffing them into her mouth, two at a time.

I figured a size-twenty-two wardrobe might be one of the dark secrets hidden in my foster sister’s mysterious past.

“Alex is dead,” she said, spewing crumbs. “He’s dead!”

Jolie and I exchanged glances.

“Sit down, Greer,” I said as Jolie pulled back a chair and pushed her into it. Greer looked up at us, her mouth rimmed with cookie dust.

“What?” I threw in when nobody spoke, hoping it sounded as if the news had come as a shock.

“The bastard isn’t off boinking some floozy,” Greer informed us, wild-eyed. “He’s a cadaver!”

“Calm down,” I said, “and tell us what happened.”

Greer’s eyes filled with tears. She opened her mouth, shoved in three more Oreos and tried to talk around them. “I just got a call from the police,” she said, the words garbled. “Some hikers stumbled across Alex’s body in the desert this morning. He’d been shot.”

I tossed Jolie a See? She’s surprised kind of look.

Jolie took the soup off the burner and set the saucepan aside.

“What am I going to do?” Greer asked.