Ding Dong Dead - By Deb Baker Page 0,3

her head and peered out searching for Matt. She saw a small circle of people looking at something on the ground. A woman squatted over what must be a body. The medical examiner?

Matt wasn’t in the circle. He was about thirty feet from the spot where the team worked on the body, and he was aiming a flashlight at a grave marking.

What was he looking at? Should she take one little peek to find out? She had twenty minutes before her mother would arrive. After all, she wasn’t a child. Why should she wait in the car?

Gretchen slid out, closed the door as quietly as possible, and stopped behind a gravestone for a few moments. Shadows played through the cemetery, and wind stirred the evergreen leaves at the top of a palm tree. She moved to the tall tree, treading quietly over the red clay earth.

The old part of the cemetery was tucked way at the back and didn’t have the uniformity of the newer section. Graves weren’t lined up in neatly spaced rows. Even the headstones were more varied.

She heard the murmur of voices. They reminded her of the hush of a funeral visitation, low and respectful tones. Several people bent over the deceased. No one noticed Gretchen. She crept closer to Matt, sliding along the side of the crime scene at an angle. He hadn’t moved from the headstone. From her position slightly behind the detective, she could see what held his attention.

Thick writing on rough granite, the words Die, Dolly, Die.

All as red as the color of blood. Please no, don’t be blood, Gretchen thought, even as she realized that it looked thicker, brighter. Lipstick? It had to be. Gretchen knew lipstick.

Matt spoke without turning around. “You were supposed to wait in the car.”

Gretchen’s first impulse was to duck down and crawl away. She quickly weighed the odds of retreating without making a fool of herself. They weren’t good.

“How did you know it was me?” she asked.

“Mathematical deduction. Simply a matter of determining how long it would take you to disobey a direct order from a law enforcement official. By my calculations, you’re right on schedule. A little behind really.”

“I thought maybe I could help.”

“You can help by not touching anything. Help by not getting involved.”

“Okay.”

“Gretchen.” He stared at the grave marker. “You have a bad habit of tripping over trouble.”

That was an understatement. She’d had more than her share of difficult situations recently, but she couldn’t see how any of them might have been handled differently. It wasn’t her fault that trouble followed her around.

“Let’s not have a repeat of past disasters,” he said.

“Is it lipstick?” Gretchen asked.

“Probably.”

“A woman’s body then?”

“Yes.”

When he looked at her his face was hard and his eyes were angry. He wasn’t a man she’d want to cross paths with if she had committed a murder. “The woman crawled from here over to there,” he explained. The flashlight beamed along the ground between the headstone in front of them and the site where the group of professionals hovered over the body. “See those dark spots? Drops of blood.”

Gretchen shuddered, staring at the ground. “What about the words?”

“Rage.”

He turned and called out to the team hovering over the body. “Did you find a tube of lipstick?”

“No purse,” replied the woman who Gretchen had pegged as the ME.

“How about checking the area?”

“We’ll take a look,” a cop said.

Gretchen stayed close to Matt.

“Can’t you cooperate?” he said to her. “Can’t you wait in the car like I asked?”

“I’ll go in a minute.” His car was parked in darkness. She needed light.

Matt’s flashlight beam cast eerie shadows along the sides of the headstone. Others with flashlights were scanning the ground in the vicinity of the body. “No ID.” Then the same woman’s voice. “You need to see this.”

“I’ll be right over,” Matt said.

He strode toward the murder victim’s dead body. At the moment, as far as he was concerned, Gretchen had stopped existing. The intense beam from a floodlight came on, revealing more of the scene.

What are you doing? Stay back.

Gretchen ignored her inner voice and moved closer. This was her chance to understand Matt’s passion. She wanted to stop feeling like she was in competition with his career. Two emergency workers partially blocked her view. They shifted positions.

The dead woman had been wearing flip-flops, but they were no longer on her feet. She wore black capris, and her white halter top was stained with blood, her long blonde hair matted with it.

So much blood, puddling