Free Saints and Sinners: (A Geeks and Things Cozy Mystery Novella #5) (Geeks and Things Cozy Mysteries) by Sarah Biglow Page A

the toe. Said shoe was still attached to a woman’s slender foot. Kalina moved between the two headstones to find a young woman, a few years younger than herself, laying between the graves with an angry red pool of blood congealing on her chest. Her eyes were still open, frozen in a look of what Kalina could only describe as curiosity. Whoever this woman had been, the fatal blow had not come as a shock. Beyond her designer footwear, she was dressed in an impeccable knee-length summer dress. It clung to her curves even as she lay sprawled on the ground in death. Her hair was still pinned up on the side of her head. Only a tiny trickle of blood marred her pale pink lips.
    The shock of the discovery finally hit Kalina a minute later and she backpedaled as fast as possible. This wasn’t the first dead body of unknown but definitely suspicious causes she’d seen in the last year. In fact, she’d seen more than she’d ever cared to in her thirty-four years of life. But that bug that bit her every time something like this happened in town took hold of her thoughts as she searched for her phone. This was going to be her last case. After the baby was born, she wouldn’t have the time to go running off digging up clues. Her priorities needed to change and she’d accepted that. But this one intrigued her and she knew herself well enough to admit that she wasn’t going to let this beautiful woman go. She finally found her phone and hit the first number on the speed dial: her husband.
    “Hey honey. Is everything OK with the baby?”
    “The baby’s fine. But you need to get down to the cemetery and bring a coroner. I just found a body.”

 
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    Kalina kept a tight grip on her phone while she waited for Chris to arrive. The sun continued to beat down, making the scene even more unpleasant. She studied the woman’s face in an effort to avoid looking at the bloody wound in her chest. Something about her eyes and the way her hair swooped down from her hairline made her look familiar. Sure, being the proprietor of the only shop that sold all things nerdy meant she came into contact with a large portion of the town, but that didn’t mean she knew everyone. Still, something about this woman tickled a faint memory at the very edges of Kalina’s memory.
    She longed to check the woman for ID to sate her curiosity but she was a cop’s wife and she knew better. Instead, she walked the perimeter around the gravestones, noting shoe depressions in the damp grass. Whoever had done this had been here recently, which likely meant she hadn’t died long ago. It was bold, killing someone in broad daylight, even in a cemetery. As she rounded the second headstone, she noted a few flecks of red marring the pale granite stonework. She’d been killed here. Rubbing her lower back as she came to stand back where she’d started, she took note of whose graves bookended the dead woman’s body.
    Abigail and Harrison Fischer.
    The names, much like the woman’s face, rang a distant bell in her memory but it was so far buried she couldn’t grab hold of it and bring it forward. A breeze picked up and tugged at the hem of her shirt and the stray hairs hanging out of the messy bun on top of her head.
    “Kal!”
    She turned toward the sound of her name and a broad grin broke out on her face. Chris trudged toward her, a few uniformed officers lagged behind him. She stayed put and waited for him. How had he known where to find her?
    “How’d you find me?”
    “GPS on your phone.”
    “You are tracking me now?”
    “Only so I know where you are in case something happens with the baby.”
    She laughed. “You do realize that’s kind of stalker behavior, right?”
    “I was kidding. I called Clinton Mason to check the surveillance video to find where you were.”
    “There’s surveillance cameras in the cemetery? Isn’t that a little creepy? Watching people mourn their loved ones. It’s supposed to be private.”
    “We had some