Free Sprayed Stiff by Laura Bradley Page B

broken.”
    “I’m glad to hear that.” Scythe flashed a devastating grin. For a moment, the world fell away. It took me another moment to catch my breath. I’d have to start wearing some sort of protective sunglasses around him. Some of his expressions were just too much for me to think through logically. We walked out of the bedroom, down the hall, past the crime scene techs bustling around with their bags of equipment and cameras. Chief Ferguson crossed the massive foyer and looked up at us.
    “Chief, I’m taking her downtown,” Scythe said, trying a little too hard to act like he was a hard-ass. “I’ll be back shortly.”
    Ferguson threw me an apologetic look. “Is that really necessary?”
    “Is what necessary? Him coming back?” I quipped.
    Ferguson failed to hide a grin.
    “Yes,” Scythe said tightly, ushering me down the stairs. “It is necessary to book her.”
    Ferguson shrugged and followed a crime tech into the kitchen. Scythe opened the front door and led me to a Terrell Hills Police Department sedan. He opened the back passenger-side door.
    “You’re really going to make me ride in the back?”
    “We have to do this by the book.” His cocked his head toward a second-story window, where Harland, Manning, and half the crime scene techs were gathered, gawking. They scattered when I looked up. I got in the damned car. It smelled like athlete’s foot meets a week-long Thunderbird drunk. “You really need to start wearing deodorant, Lieutenant,” I said.
    Grinding his teeth without answering, Scythe fiddled with the handcuffs for show but didn’t put them back on. Then he slammed my door shut, slid into the front seat, locked the doors, and turned over the ignition.
    He drove out the gate before breaking the silence. “If you are so intent on helping your friend, tell me all you can about Alexandra.”
    I began chronologically, which most of my tales do, but I digressed as bits of information floated to the top of my mind like a chaotic computer screen saver. I told him about Lexa’s drive to irritate her mother, how I learned this after she started coming to get her hair done at Transformations. How this showed me how ambitious she was, but how misguided that quality was and how I longed to redirect it to more fruitful pursuits. About how basically she was a good person, fun-loving, with a quirky sense of humor. How she rebelled against her parents by driving an orange Pinto instead of the year-old Mercedeses they tried to hand down to her and refusing to go to law school because she didn’t want to be an attorney, even though she was plenty bright enough. Yet, she was proud of her mother’s accomplishments and her father’s success. It was obvious when she spoke of them.
    “It’s enough,” Scythe said more to himself than to me.
    “Enough? You don’t want to hear any more?”
    “No, go ahead. It’s just enough to motivate her to murder her overbearing mother.”
    “Come on. Lexa wouldn’t murder anyone, especially her mom.” I employed my pop psychology. “They were too codependent.”
    I expected an eye roll, but instead Scythe bought into my theory and turned it to his advantage. “Maybe Lexa finally was ready to be free. It’s probably a lot easier to pull a trigger to cut the cord than stretch it emotionally.”
    Uh-oh. “Prove it.”
    “That’s not my problem. It’s the district attorney’s.”
    “You just used me to make your case against Lexa!”
    “Get used to it. It’s what cops do. Plus, it’s better than trying to make a case against you, which would probably be a helluva lot easier.”
    “Oh, yeah? What would my motive be? Maybe I thought by killing a famous society matron and doing her hair postmortem, I’d get some extra business from all those crime scene photos….”
    “You are sick.”
    “I’m ambitious. Others could testify to that. You might be able to sell that story. Okay, you come up with something more plausible.”
    “Maybe you and Lexa