Free Mischief 24/7 by Kasey Michaels

nose and mouth. She didn’t wear foundation or powder. She didn’t even bother with face creams or sunscreen. And it showed.
    She was only eleven months older than Jolie, and Jolie looked a good five years younger.
    Where was the young, carefree Jade, the girl she had been? Where was the well-loved woman she’d seen in the mirror at Court’s hotel the morning after their first night together? Where had that woman gone?
    Was there any way to get her back? Any way to get back what she’d lost?
    “It doesn’t matter,” she told her reflection. “Nothing matters now but proving Joshua Brainard murdered Teddy. Nothing and no one can matter. Not me, not Court, not the past and not the future. Just the
now.
You got that?”
    Jade turned away from the mirror, unable to lie to herself face-to-face.
    Changing her mind about the shower, she returned to the bedroom to pull on cotton-knit shorts and a sleeveless top, and headed down to Sam’s exercise room, intent on running a couple of miles on the treadmill.
    If only the treadmill was a time machine, andthe faster she ran, the more the calendar flipped backward, until she’d returned to those first days after she’d met Court. Then, this time, she could move forward without making all the same dumb mistakes.

SOMEWHERE ALONG BOATHOUSE ROW
    J ADE’S RIGHT running shoe found a shallow, slushy puddle as she was forced to move to the edge of the trail by a quartet of joggers decked out in brand-new jogging gear and iPods, and carrying containers of take-out frou-frou coffees.
    Joggerettes, Jade called them, not really here for the exercise, but just to see and be seen. The four women had fanned themselves out across the running trail of the east bank of the Schuyl-kill River, along historic Boathouse Row, paying more attention to the men jogging by in the opposite direction than on where they were going.
    “Amateurs,” Jade muttered under her breath as, avoiding any more puddles, she redirected her attention to the asphalt. She touched her gloved right hand to her left wrist to check her pulse, and picked up her pace.
    It was cold this morning, typical Philadelphia winter weather, but the sky seemed higher than it had when she first got to Fairmont Park, sochances were that the snow the TV weatherman had warned of earlier wouldn’t come.
    She was good on time, her routine telling her that if she’d just passed the Vesper Rowing Club boathouse, she’d be able to get in at least most of her usual run before meeting Teddy at the diner to discuss how they were going to approach their latest insurance case.
    Their client was convinced that their insured’s employee, one Maude Landers, was faking the debilitating back injury that had them paying through the nose for the past two years. Insurance companies were like that, all of them believing that if a PI just hung out up a tree with a video camera at the ready, he’d be sure to discover the so-called injured party bench-pressing a Buick in their backyard.
    Since Teddy was the glad-hand part of the Sunshine Detective Agency, a little too old for scut-type field work, Jade was left to be the one hanging out in that tree.
    Jade didn’t realize it, but her feet were pounding the trail harder as her frustration made its way down her body and out through them. Not that she hated her job or hated working with her father. But at times it all seemed so… Stupid wasn’t the right word, but it was close.
    She knew she was good at her job. She simply didn’t have the same drive Teddy had, feel the same joy at that
gotcha
moment when a straying husband was caught on tape, or a computer backgroundcheck showed up an undisclosed DUI arrest, or a devastated mother had to be told that it was a beloved son who had copped her family-heirloom silver to feed his meth addiction.
    There were exceptions. Serving Harvey What’s-His Name the other night had been one of them. The guy had been ducking process servers for six weeks, leaving behind his