Free Predator by Patricia Cornwell Page A

slut, aren’t you?” he asks, his small, dark eyes looking at her. “If not, I’ll ask somebody else. This hell scene requires a slut.”
         “You don’t need someone else.”
         “Oh, really.”
         “Really,” she says.
         She turns around, glancing at the shut door as if worried that someone might walk in. He doesn’t say anything.
         “We could get in trouble,” she says.
         “We won’t.”
         “I don’t want to get kicked out,” she says.
         “You want to be a death investigator when you grow up.”
         She nods, looking at him, coolly playing with the top button of her Academy polo shirt. She looks good in it. He likes the way she fills it.
         “I’m a grown-up,” she says.
         “You’re from Texas,” he then says, looking at the way she fills her polo shirt, the way she fills her snug-fitting khaki cargo pants. “They grow things big in Texas, don’t they.”
         “Why, are you talking dirty to me, Dr. Amos?” she drawls.
         He imagines her dead. He imagines her in a pool of blood, shot dead on the floor. He imagines her naked on the steel table. One of life’s fables is that dead bodies can’t be sexy. Naked is naked if the person looks good and hasn’t been dead long. To say a man has never had a thought about a beautiful woman who happens to be dead is a joke. Cops pin photographs on their corkboards, pictures of female victims who are exceptionally fine. Male medical examiners give lectures to cops and show them certain pictures, deliberately pick the ones they’ll like. Joe has seen it. He knows what guys do.
         “You do a good job getting killed in the hell scene,” he says to Jenny, “and I’ll cook dinner for you. I’m a wine connoisseur.”
         “You’re also engaged.”
         “She’s at a conference in Chicago. Maybe she’ll get snowed in.”
         Jenny gets up. She looks at her watch, then looks at him.
         “Who was your teacher’s pet before me?” she asks.
         “You’re special,” he says.

    Chapter 13

         An hour out from Signature Aviation in Fort Lauderdale, Lucy gets up for another coffee and a bathroom break. The sky beyond the jet’s small oval windows is overcast with mounting storm clouds.
         She settles back into her leather seat and executes more queries of Broward County tax assessment and real-estate records, news stories and anything else she can think of to see what she can find out about the former Christmas shop. From the mid-seventies to the early nineties, it was a diner called Rum Runner’s. For two years after that, it was a fudge and ice-cream parlor called Coco Nuts. Then, in 2000, the building was rented to a Mrs. Florrie Anna Quincy, the widow of a wealthy landscaper from West Palm Beach.
         Lucy’s fingers rest lightly on the keyboard as she scans a feature article that ran in The Miami Herald not long after The Christmas Shop opened. It says that Mrs. Quincy grew up in Chicago, where her father was a commodities broker, and every Christmas he volunteered as a Santa at Macy’s department store.
         “Christmas was just the most magical time in our lives,” Mrs. Quincy said. “My father’s love was lumber futures, and maybe because he grew up in the logging country of Alberta, Canada, we had Christmas trees in the house all year round, big potted spruces decorated with white lights and little carved figures. I guess that’s why I like to have Christmas all year round.”
         Her shop is an astonishing collection of ornaments, music boxes, Santas of every description, winter wonderlands and tiny electric trains running on tiny tracks. One has to be careful moving down the aisles of her fragile, fanciful world, and it is easy to forget there are sunshine, palm trees and the ocean right outside her door. Since opening The Christmas Shop last month, Mrs. Quincy says there has