Free MalContents by Randy Ryan C.; Chandler Gregory L.; Thomas David T.; Norris Wilbanks Page B

sprawled across the bathroom floor, her back bracing the doorway of the stall, blood running down the front of her Jeter Diletti original, one boob and nipple exposed and pixilated, no longer looking real or human in the close-up photo.
    They cut her out of the gown, which was ruined anyway, not that she planned to ever wear the thing again. Intravenous, antibiotics, poking, prodding, and the suturing that took place left another image in her head, one even more difficult to ignore: that of Sunny Weir, naked on a stainless steel platter, cut up and served like so many of the dishes she, herself, had prepared for the cameras.
    Joseph was still in his tuxedo. Apart from a deepening in his five o’clock shadow, he appeared as pristine and crisp as when they’d walked out to meet the limo that would whisk them to Skyview, the prestigious function hall occupying the entire fifty-first floor of the Prudential Tower in the heart of Boston. That bit of prickle added to the overall picture. Joseph was beyond handsome, with cowlicks and intentional bed-head, his eyes so green they looked like emerald gemstones, with the body of a professional athlete that had once played baseball through two seasons before an injury permanently sidelined him. He hadn’t been benched long before the same broadcast powerhouse that owned YUM! and the big sports network brought him into the studio to call games, and not just baseball.
    He was handsome, painfully so, but at that moment, she resented him. She’d been stabbed. He was probably flashing those perfect white teeth and a dimpled smile for the media covering the book and bake ware launch at the moment she was being drilled, right in the mamms.
    The police detective, Deschler, said, “I can only imagine the pain you must be suffering, Miss Weir.”
    Sunny snorted a humorless laugh and tipped her eyes toward the myriad of bags hanging off the two sides of the mechanized IV push. “That’s where you’re wrong, Lieutenant.”
    “Do you feel up to hearing what we know this far?”
    “I’m not sure this is a good time,” Joseph started.
    “Yes,” Sunny snapped. “I’d like to know why some crazed catering woman assaulted me in the ladies’ room during my party. My goddamn, happy let’s-celebrate-my-new-book-and-cookware party.”
    Deschler exchanged a look with Joseph, which didn’t go unnoticed, and Sunny’s resentment grew. It wasn’t Joseph’s chest taped back together after getting split open. She loved him, her big, strong he-man, but for one blinding instant, she also hated him.
    “Hello, I’m here, in the hospital bed,” she said.
    “Sunny,” Joseph admonished.
    It wasn’t him , she reminded him with a harsh look, her body language impossible to misread. This had happened to her.
    Deschler coughed to clear his throat, then spilled. “Her name was Rona Bustamante. Does that sound familiar to you?”
    It didn’t. “No, should it?”
    “Ms. Bustamante applied last season to be a contestant on your show, Slice and Dice .”
    “ Slice isn’t my show,” Sunny said. “I’m just on the judge’s committee. Wait, you said ‘was’.”
    “We found Ms. Bustamante in the town of Lovell Green. She rented an apartment above a garage. We tracked her there through the catering company’s records. At this point in the investigation, we believe she acted alone. We guess that the woman had a hell of a grudge against you, and she signed on with the caterers as a way to get close enough to you to let you know it.”
    “Yes, I told you—while she was trying to hack me into tartar, she said I stole one of her recipes. Only you can’t copyright a recipe, therefore you can’t plagiarize or steal one. And even if she did apply to the show, I don’t cast the contestants. I don’t know her, and I didn’t steal anything from her, no matter what she says.”
    “ Said . By the time the Lovell Green police got there, Ms. Bustamante had taken her own life.”
    Sunny choked down a dry