Free Dead is the New Black by Christine DeMaio-Rice

they passed Jeremy’s working office with the yellow crime scene tape across the door, she remembered why she had been on the production side of the company in the first place. For the TOP hem. She held the Mardi dress up and looked at the hem.
    “What?” Tiffany asked.
    Laura didn’t have the heart to explain why a perfectly even hem was a bad thing.

CHAPTER 8.

    “It was perfect,” Ephraim said, the sound of his cold audible over the phone. “I’m sorry, Laura. I told the police the same thing. The shipment was perfect when I left on Friday, and it was perfect when I put it on the truck this morning.”
    “Are you sure, Ephraim?” Laura had called the floor manager at the 40th Street factory as soon as she saw the hem. “Maybe half of it was wrong, and the other half looked good?”
    “Miss Laura,” he said, and Laura suddenly realized she had stepped on yet another set of toes. “I look at the whole shipment. Every garment. We have the best garment makers in New York working this floor, so please.”
    “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to be thorough.” She rubbed her head. This wasn’t going well. “You run the best floor in the city; everyone knows that.”
    “I run the only floor left in the city.” He was right.
    Ruby beeped into the call, saving Laura from yet another apology. “Are you going to Mom’s tonight for the laundry? I want to go over these sketches with you guys. Michael gave me a budget, and I don’t know if I’m going to make it.”
    Laura eagerly agreed to spend the evening talking about someone else’s problems.
    “I can do it.” Mom took bags of vegetables out of a fridge she had found on the street sometime in the nineties. “I’ll dig out my crochet needles.”
    “I’d really appreciate it.” Laura folded her laundry into a neat cube. “André won’t drop this group Jeremy said to drop, and I feel like I can’t do what Jeremy asked me to do. So if you come, it’ll be like I actually did something right.”
    “He’s going to get out soon.” Mom rinsed a bouquet of leafy greens as she talked. “So, it’s not going to matter if André puts that group back or not.”
    “I don’t know.” Laura glanced at Ruby, who hovered over a sketchpad, taking fourteen yards of fabric out of her wedding dress sketch. “I found the TOP that was supposed to prove his alibi, and it doesn’t.”
    “How does a TOP prove an alibi?” Ruby didn’t even look up from the black paper she used to sketch with white chalk and pencil. “You can’t put it up on the stand or anything.”
    “Jeremy said he was in the factory all night trimming the hems on this shipment because he saw a bad TOP on Saturday. But we can’t find the bad TOP, only a good one. With no bad TOP, it just looks like everything was perfect in the first place.”
    Mom shook off the salad, while the kitchen sink popped and whined, shaking the pipes so hard it seemed like the wall would burst in a spray of plaster and lath. Mom made it a habit to crawl under there with a monkey wrench and a rag, and nothing had burst. And even if it had, the landlord wouldn’t have fixed it without a subpoena.
    “Have you considered that he might have done it?” Mom asked, matter-of-factly.
    “Yes,” Ruby said.
    “No!” Laura shouted.
    “Well,” Mom started, as she slid into her tiny, handmade kitchen nook with the girls. “He did have a lot to gain from her death, what with her having so much control of his business.” Mom made many statements that were ridiculous and poorly informed, mostly because she watched the news all day.
    “So, he strangled her in the office with a zebra-printed silk swatch? How does that make sense? If he wanted to kill her to help his company, he would have made it look like an accident or a robbery or something.”
    “So you think it was a crime of passion?” Ruby blew eraser crud off her paper. “Like he killed her in a lover’s rage?”
    “He’s gay,” Laura said