Free A Clean Kill by Leslie Glass

bailed for good. He retired from the Department and went somewhere far away with the wife he always said he'd never much liked. He and Eloise didn't keep in touch anymore.
    After a fruitless search in her drawer for the missing pens, Eloise finally gave up looking. Hagedorn was still offering the one from his pocket, so she took it. "Thanks."
    "What does she want?" he asked about the Woo conversation.
    "Oh, she wants us to investigate the Peret case, find out where he went, how he got in, who served him booze. And of course where he got the blow."
    "This doesn't sound like our kind of case. Are we going after the clubs?" Charlie said excitedly.
    "Not clear." Eloise didn't know what else to answer.
    "It sounds pretty clear to me. Lieutenant Woo went downtown this morning. The chief has her on something." He rubbed his hands together. "This is great. We've been too easy on these creeps. The plastic trail should make a good start. We could shut them down."
    "Right," she said quickly. She was new to the job. She had no idea what he was talking about. Did precinct units do club raids?
    "Also his cell phone. His incoming and outgoing calls might place him inside one of the clubs, or more than one. We could get lucky there." Hagedorn was already on it.
    "Check," she said. "You work on the credit cards, and I'll see what we can do about that phone."
    Charlie returned to his computer, and Gelo tapped her fingers on the pen, wondering when Woo might get back to the shop and tell her what was going on.

Eleven
    C ome on, little girl. Make it easy on yourself.
    These are your knives, aren't they?"
    Remy shook her head. The detective with the crappy diet was now calling her "little girl." She hated this guy. She'd already told him they weren't her knives.
    "They belong to the kitchen," she said wearily.
"Cam-onnn." His New York accent was an assault from which there was no retreat. "Cam-onnn, answer the question. Are they all here, or are there more?"
    "I ... don't . . . know," she said very slowly. "This is Wayne's kitchen. I don't keep track of everything he brings home."
    And that was another thing that was upsetting her. Why wasn't Wayne here? Why wasn't he answering these questions? A pile of plastic bags covered the long kitchen counter. Each one had a knife in it. There were seven cleavers of varying sizes, ten butcher knives. Six carving knives of different lengths, some of them very long. More than a dozen paring knives, with and without serrated edges. They were his knives, so why did she have to answer for them? Frankly Remy was shocked by how many there were. She'd known there were a lot of knives in the house. It was certainly clear that Wayne was a fanatic about them. He had his own sets, one at home and one in his car, that he wouldn't let anyone else use. In addition to those, manufacturers sent him new knives to test out in hopes of getting an endorsement. Sometimes he brought these home, too. Altogether it turned out to be a big number to account for.
    She made a disgusted noise. Until today the knives had always been beautiful tools to her. Just that morning after she'd washed up the breakfast dishes, the stainless steel blades had been shiny and the handles as dry as she'd left them the night before. She liked things clean. Since then, all the knives had been removed from the various drawers and locations where they were kept. They'd been labeled and bagged, and she knew they were headed for a laboratory somewhere to determine who had touched them and if there were traces of Maddy's blood on any of them. They all had Remy's fingerprints on them—that was a given.
    "I told you I was in here the whole time. No one would have been able to come in and put them back," she said irritably.
    Sergeant Minnow cleared his throat. "What did you say your duties are, little girl?"
    "I told you a dozen times. I'm the cook." Remy wasn't changing that story.
    "I thought you were the babysitter."
    "I look after the kids sometimes, but