Free Web of Evil by J. A. Jance Page B

someday. She’s gorgeous but not exactly the brightest bulb I ever met. The same goes for some of the bodybuilding pals she likes to hang out with. I wouldn’t call them the salt of the earth, either. April’s bachelorette party the other night was wild enough that the cops had to be summoned to quiet things down—and that’s with her about to give birth.
    “Ted’s worried that when some of the more disreputable wedding guests who’ve been staying at the house pack up to go home, some of Paul’s precious objets d’art might end up going home with them. Grantham is lobbying for you to demand a full inventory of the contents of the Robert Lane house—an immediate full inventory.”
    “In other words,” Ali said, “Ted’s rooting for the old will over the new one because he expects to hand the whole mess over to me and maybe get paid faster besides. But if the old will is still in effect and I’m the primary beneficiary, doesn’t that give me a clear motive for wanting Paul dead? Doesn’t it make me look that much worse to the cops?”
    “That just about covers it,” Victor agreed. “What’s good for Ted could be bad for us.”
    “I still don’t like the fact that we’re having the will read now,” Ali said after a pause. “It seems rude and pushy.”
    They had come to a stop at a light on Sunset. Victor sought Ali’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “It probably is rude and pushy,” he agreed. “But let me remind you, this is a homicide investigation, Ali—possibly even capital murder. With your life at stake, you by God better believe we’re going to be pushy.”
    “All right,” Ali conceded finally. “Fair enough.”
    Robert Lane was only a few blocks long and sat on top of a steep hill just up from Sunset Boulevard; it was a winding, narrow, and supposedly two-way street. Whenever Paul and Ali had thrown parties—which they had done often—they had rented the parking lot from a neighboring church down on Sunset and then hired one of the local parking valet firms to ferry guests’ cars up and down the hill.
    Since the wedding and reception had both been scheduled to take place at the house, Ali assumed the parking arrangements would have been canceled once the wedding was called off. The sides of the street were full of illegally parked vehicles, most of them bearing media insignia. When Victor pulled up to the gate, Ali was surprised to see that it was wide open. She was even more surprised to see the parking valets very much in evidence although most of the newsies had chosen to disregard the valet parking option.
    “Keep your cool, Ali,” Victor advised as he turned in at the gate. He maneuvered his Lincoln into a narrow parking place between a catering truck—if the wedding had been canceled, why a catering truck?—and an enormous RV garishly painted an overall red and blue plaid pattern. On the side was a picture of a muscle-bound, bare-chested man wearing little more than a kilt. Beside him, printed in huge gold letters, were the words TEAM MCLAUGHLIN. SUMO SUDOKU.
    Ali had a passing knowledge of sudoku. In fact, the waitresses at the Sugar Loaf had become sudoku addicts and experts, spending their break times working the puzzles in discarded newspapers left behind by customers who weren’t so afflicted.
    Puzzles of any kind had never really appealed to Ali, but she had learned enough to understand that sudoku was a game of logic played on a square containing eighty-one boxes divided into nine smaller squares. It was similar to a crossword puzzle only with numbers rather than words. The object was to fill in all horizontal and vertical lines with the numbers one through nine without ever having the same number appear twice in any of the lines. Each of the smaller boxes was also supposed to contain the numbers one through nine with no repetition. Ali assumed that Sumo Sudoku was more of the same, only bigger.
    “Your husband’s death is a big story, and everybody is covering