Free The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery by David Bishop Page B

very moment, staring at Maddie, asking, “Are you good enough to catch this butcher?”
    Maddie’s mother would probably call Abigail Knight a gold-digger, that her rich husband and her fancy clothes didn’t change that, but who would say she still didn’t have a right to life.
    The living room was busy with leather furniture and glass-topped tables sitting on thick southwestern area rugs over a travertine stone floor. A large window overlooked the backyard and a spillover pool with a five-foot waterfall. The landscaping, alive with small runs of rainwater, gave the appearance the world was melting before her eyes and running down some unseen drain at the bottom of the earth.
    Maddie changed her focus to the individual droplets of rain hitting the window pane to move choreographed by the wind until joining with other drops to form mini rivers in a mad dash toward the bottom sill. It was the kind of day that made her want to sit back and ponder things too complex to resolve. The world was now short two women. Would their abrupt departure somehow tilt everything that followed, or were we all significant only in the way we touched those around us who would be left to carry on after we’d been carried out?
    Bill Molitor’s crew had not been able to match the moisture ring on Abby’s nightstand to anything in the house, so one thing Maddie hoped to do was locate whatever had made that ring. On the one hand, it seemed a trivial item, but Maddie had so little to go on that until she knew it was trivial she would assign it some importance. She searched every cabinet in the kitchen and the pantry, without success, then the garage and found no possibles. Whatever had made that ring must have been taken by the killer, perhaps brought there as well.
    She entered the laundry room off to one side of a hallway leading to their four-car garage. The room had a front-loading washer and dryer topped by a black granite counter and backsplash. Next to the machines was something Maddie had in her working-class home, a slop sink, although the Knights had likely preferred the Parisian name: évier de slop, if Maddie correctly remembered her high school French. The upstairs laundry chute ended in this room and was, like the washer and dryer, empty of clothes.
    “That’s it! Clothes! ” Maddie said excitedly to the empty room.
    Marta, the maid, said she had picked up the clothes Abby had worn before changing into her bathing suit. And what Marta had not laundered, she had taken to the cleaners. Abby would have had to put on something to meet her friends for a shrimp cocktail that Thursday afternoon before her death. Whatever she had worn, she would have hung up, tossed down the chute or, according to Marta, dropped on a chair or the floor until Marta came in on Friday.
    Maddie took the stairs two at a time.
    Abby’s friends who had seen her in the afternoon on the day she died, had all agreed that she had worn a sleeveless, light-blue silk dress. But they hadn’t agreed about her shoes. One friend remembered Abby wearing tan strapless heels with a cloth top and leather sides, while the others said she always wore her calfskin boots with that dress. Maddie quickly found the strapless heels in the master closet, but not the boots. Feverishly, Maddie worked Abby’s clothes across the cedar hanging rod, finding nothing that made her pause except for a pair of leather pants that matched the leather fainting couch in the bedroom sitting area, but no blue dress.
    The closets in the second and third bedrooms were empty. The fourth had a large closet stuffed with nainsook bags containing clothes that were all the wrong styles and fabrics for a lady with an unlimited clothing budget to wear during an Arizona summer, but still, no blue dress.
    The marble, brass, and beveled mirrors of the master bath sparkled like a jeweled box. The room scented by lemon-grass soap in a crystal bowl. Two large hampers sat next to a double-sized jetted tub. Plugged