Free A Clean Kill by Leslie Glass Page A

that doesn't make me a babysitter."
    "You took them to school this morning."
    "Yes."
    "Did you do that to be with Mr. Wilson?"
    "Please." She made an impatient gesture.
    "I asked you a question."
    "I went with him because he asked me to," she said sharply.
    "Do you do everything Mr. Wilson asks?" Minnow said this with a straight face and a suggestive tone.
    Remy didn't see it corning. She didn't see a lot of what he said coming. She closed her eyes.
    "Would you do anything he asked you?" he repeated.
    She scratched the side of her nose. "No," she replied.
    "Oh, what wouldn't you do?"
    "He wouldn't ask—" she started to speak, then shut her mouth. She didn't want to say any more about what Wayne wouldn't ask. He'd asked her to make up with Maddy and to keep quiet about their relationship. She didn't want to talk about him.
    "Okay, little girl, play it your own way. But we're going to find out everything anyway. We're going to rip this thing wide open, so you might as well come clean."
    She didn't say anything.
    He softened his voice. "So you're the cook and you don't know how many knives are in your kitchen. Cam-onnn. You expect me to believe that?"
    Finally Remy spoke. "Look, this is a kitchen for a bigger staff. There are duplicates of everything. Wayne brings knives and other equipment home to test. We got a lot of stuff here." She shrugged.
    He wanted to talk about knives. She could talk about knives.
    "Well, look at them carefully."
    She looked at the awesome array. "I've never seen some of these," she murmured truthfully.
    "Which ones?"
    She sat back, putting distance between them. She didn't want to poke at the blades inside their little plastic cases. She wished she could shut down against this whole stupid barrage. Her body ached to close in around itself and seal off the trauma. Her eyelids drooped. "Give me a break," she muttered.
    "A nice lady died here in a very shitty way. She fought hard for her life. Nobody gave her a break." The detective started cracking his knuckles loudly. He sounded mad enough to start breaking hers.
    "I found her. I wish I hadn't. But I don't know anything else." Remy held back her tears.
    She'd been dog-tired a thousand times in her life. Fatigue was an old enemy. Anybody who'd ever manned a grill or a fry station during peak hours in a popular restaurant knew the dangers of fatigue. People got hurt when their attention wandered. Every line cook had to fight it, and everyone had his own way to cope. Cocaine, alcohol, amphetamines were the commonest combatants. Or coffee. Diet Coke, Cigarettes. They were all addicted to something. Remy's thing was Coke, the liquid kind. Since the cops started taking turns with her hours ago, she'd swallowed down almost a case of Diet Cokes. But the caffeine hadn't helped her. She didn't feel a kick, a buzz, anything. The questions kept coming, and she didn't want to give' in just because she was tired. She knew Wayne hadn't done it, and didn't think Derek could have, so who else was there?
    "How about these?" he demanded.
    White lights flashed in her eyes as Minnow pushed the plastic bags aside and added six more to the collection on the marble counter. These, Remy knew, were hers. Her precious knives, which she'd bought before she met Wayne, had cost over a hundred dollars each. They'd been removed from their newspaper wrapping, and like the others, they'd been bagged and labeled. The sight of her beloved tools, hostage to a murder investigation, was more than a little frightening. She had a sinking feeling that she wouldn't be seeing them again anytime soon. "They're mine," she admitted miserably.
    Behind her, the wall phone kept ringing. She'd been told not to pick it up, but she wished someone would. Her head was spinning with all the noise and activity in the house. It made her so nervous how police were working the house, packing things up in boxes and taking them out. She didn't know what they were taking. They kept moving her around so she