Free Dying in Style by Elaine Viets Page A

she’d put Danessa’s photo on the dartboard on the bedroom door. She stuck it to the cork with a dart through Danessa’s forehead.
    It didn’t help. Josie still felt Danessa’s own darts, when she’d called her a liar, a slut and a bribe taker and declared Josie unfit to work at her store. Oddly, the one that hurt the worst was when Danessa said Josie would need a loan to buy one of her purses.
    Probably because that charge was true.
    About midnight, Josie had decided it was time to quit hurting herself and start hurting Danessa. She began thinking of ways to kill Danessa. It beat counting sheep.
    First, Josie pushed Danessa off a cliff. Then she pushed her under a bus.
    She stabbed Danessa with her own witchy black stiletto heels. Then she strangled her with that dead dragonfly necklace.
    She kidnapped Danessa and made her wear a pink polyester pantsuit until she died of shame.
    She spent an hour deciding whether to shoot Danessa neatly with a .22 or blow her to hamburger with a .357 Magnum.
    By two o’clock, she’d decided not to shoot Danessa after all. Josie wanted the personal satisfaction of a hands-on death. Danessa should die slowly and painfully.
    Josie fell asleep sometime around three a.m., as she was force-feeding Danessa buckets of General Cheeps chicken. Danessa had been strong-armed into a tube top and tube socks.
    Now Danessa was really dead. Yesterday Josie would have howled in gleeful triumph. Today, confronted with the actual fact, she was dazed, numbed and curiously flattened. Under the numbness, she felt fear. It was a faint fear, a tiny smoldering fear fire, but Josie knew it would soon be raging out of control.
    John P. was still talking on the TV. “Danessa Celedine was found dead in the stockroom of her upscale Plaza Venetia store last night,” he said.
    We had our fight at the office that afternoon, Josie thought. Omigod. Mom’s right. I could be the chief suspect.
    The tendrils of panic smoke burst into little flames. Josie tried to tamp them down. You don’t know how Danessa died yet, she told herself. Danessa could have been mugged, carjacked or shot by a jealous lover. The police may already have a suspect in custody.
    “The police officials have not released the cause of the deaths, pending the autopsies,” John P. said.
    Now an important-looking police officer was talking to a horde of reporters shouting questions. “Were both murders committed by the same person?” a hair-sprayed man asked.
    “I can’t comment on that at present,” the police official said.
    “Do you have any suspects for these murders that rocked the city?” a hair-sprayed woman asked.
    “No comment,” the cop said.
    They’re going to get me, Josie thought. I’ll wind up in prison. Amelia will be raised by my mother. She’ll wear pajamas to bed and eat soy burgers and work at the bank. I’ll see her on visiting day once a month.
    “Josie, are you watching this, or are you staring into space?” her mother said.
    Josie turned back to the TV and John Pertzborn’s report. “In a bizarre twist, Serge Orloff was found dead at the couple’s palatial West County home at eleven thirty last night, when homicide detectives arrived to inform him of Danessa’s death. The Russian-born Orloff was Danessa’s longtime companion.”
    The tape showed a small herd of police, plain clothes and uniform, standing around looking serious. The brass preened for the TV cameras. Yellow crime-scene tape swayed in the wind. Two uniformed attendants opened massive dark wood doors and wheeled a gurney down the stone stairs. The black body-bagged mound on the gurney was not as big as Josie expected.
    Serge Orloff had been larger in life.
    The camera pulled back to show Serge and Danessa’s home. It was a palace. Actually, it looked like it had been put together from palace spare parts. There were turrets, balconies, bay windows, Spanish tiles and French doors.
    John P. looked so earnestly at his TV audience that Josie was