Free Button Holed by Kylie Logan

of fingerprinting dust that coated the window like sand in the desert, and when I was done, I picked up a pile of buttons at my feet. “Nothing was touched. The cops didn’t find any fingerprints at all, none except Brina’s and mine, of course.”
    “Dang.” Stan scraped a hand through what was left of his hair. “The whole thing about the murderer coming in through the window, that sure would have cracked open this case. And that would have shown them, huh? Civilian!” He had a steel-trap mind, and not being acknowledged as on a par with the cops at the scene was one insult he was never going to forget. “I was on the job when most of those guys were still in elementary school. They got a lot of nerve.” He pushed away from the window, his eagle-eye gaze sweeping the room. “How about secret passages? Is there an old dumbwaiter that’s been walled over? Or a secret room?”
    “No. And no.” He knew all this, of course. Stan had insisted on checking out the area before I signed the lease. He wanted to be sure the neighborhood was safe, he’d said, and that Emilie, upstairs, was trustworthy, and that the brownstone was as secure as it could possibly be. Apparently, secure hadn’t been secure enough, but I wasn’t going to point that out. I knew that Stan being Stan, he was just trying to cover all his bases. “You heard what the cops said. Whoever killed Kate must have followed her here.” A shiver snaked up my spine. “I just wish . . .”
    “Baloney!” He waved away my concerns. “You wish you woulda been here so that maybe you coulda been a victim, too? Stop beating yourself up over something you can’t change, Josie. Yeah, sure—” Like the street-corner traffic cop he’d started his career as, he stuck out a hand to stop what he knew I was going to say. “Sure, if you were here, the killer might not have tried anything. But I know how these guys think. This one? He wanted Kate the Great dead plenty bad. The force of that stab wound proves that much. If he didn’t kill her last night, he just would have done it some other time, some other place.”
    The phone rang again, and just in case it was an actual customer and not a reporter or a photographer or a macabre fan looking for details about Kate’s death I was never, ever going to provide, I piled the buttons I was holding on the desk. “Some other place is sounding pretty good right about now,” I said. I answered the phone with an efficient “The Button Box,” and I was all set to launch into my I-have-nothing-to-say-and-I’m-sticking-to-it story when I was cut short by a familiar voice.
    “Talk about taking this whole famous thing to a new level!”
    It was enough to get me grumbling all over again. “What do you want, Kaz?”
    “Hey, a guy can’t call and check on his favorite button collector?” The tone of his voice told me he was smiling. “You’re all over the news, Jo. What kind of husband would I be if I didn’t call to see what was up?”
    “An ex-husband?”
    He chuckled. “You always said you were going to be the most famous button dealer in America. I guess you’re on your way, huh?”
    I shifted the phone to my other ear. “What do you want, Kaz?”
    “You’re having a bad day.”
    Understatement.
    I didn’t point it out. He didn’t press.
    In fact, Kaz breezed right on. “I had to call. You know, after I saw your picture on the front page of the paper this morning.”
    It was the first I remembered that Mike Homolka had met me outside the evening before. I’d been so busy being shocked—not to mention grossed out and scared silly—when I found Kate’s body, I’d forgotten all about the machine-gun fire of camera flashes. Come to think of it, I didn’t recall Homolka being there when the cops arrived. But then, I guess the photographs he took before anyone else even knew Kate was dead were worth a premium. He would have wanted to get them into the hands of the highest bidder, ASAP.
    I could only