Scoop to Kill: A Mystery a La Mode - By Wendy Lyn Watson Page 0,2

our baby girl, stood beneath the harsh fluorescent lights, face the color of chalk, her prim white cotton dress shirt covered in blood.

“Bryan,” Alice gasped. “It’s Bryan.”

She raised one frail arm to point an accusatory finger, bone white and smeared with gore, toward the open doorway at her side. She looked like a grim apparition from a Shakespearean tragedy, a ghost come to torment the guilty and the damned.

My first thought was that this Bryan person had better run like the wind, because when Bree got her hands on the boy stupid enough to hurt her baby girl, she’d tear him limb from limb. Then Alice took one stumbling step before finding her sea legs and bolting down the hall into her mama’s arms. That’s when I realized that the blood streaking Alice’s shirt was not her own.

By then the guests from the Honor’s Day festivities, along with a hodgepodge of black-robed faculty and disheveled-looking students, had crowded into the hall around me. A few brave souls, including both Finn and Emily Clowper, rushed forward to peer into the office from which Alice had emerged. A bright red placard with gold lettering hung beside the door: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE.

“Someone call 911,” Finn yelled, as Emily staggered back and slumped against the corridor wall.

A bluff man in a Kelly green golf shirt and a navy blazer, surely the proud dad of one of the honored students, pushed past me. “I’m a doctor,” he declared.

Finn held out a hand to stop him. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” he said. “And I don’t think the police would want us mucking up their crime scene.” He looked past the good doctor’s shoulder and caught my gaze.

It seemed murder had come to Dalliance, Texas, once again.

chapter 2

It may be blasphemy to say it here in Texas, but if William Travis and his men had defended the Alamo the way Bree defended Alice that day, General Santa Anna would have scooted back to Mexico with his tail between his legs. I’m telling you, Bree was a sight to behold: half naked in her skimpy pink sundress, her hair teased seven ways from Sunday, purple-painted toenails peeping from three-inch-high strappy silver sandals, and a look in her eyes that could have brought a grown man to his knees.

If, that is, that grown man had been anyone other than Detective Cal McCormack. He’d heard the call come in over the scanner—that twenty-six-year-old doctoral student Bryan Campbell had been bludgeoned to death, apparently with an industrial-sized stapler— but he wasn’t on the case. The victim, Bryan, was Cal’s nephew, his older sister Marla’s boy.

Cal and I go way back, back to summer games of kickball and capture the flag. We weren’t close anymore, but I knew Cal McCormack as well as anyone. Laid-back, laconic, law-abiding Cal. That afternoon in Sinclair Hall, though, I saw a side of Cal McCormack I’d never seen before.

He was incandescent with fury.

“What the hell happened here?” he bellowed, towering over Alice as she huddled in the shelter of her mother’s arms.

Bree angled her body between Alice and the colossal cowboy and raised her chin to stare him in the eye. “Don’t you take that tone with my child, Cal McCormack.”

The Cal I knew would be chastened by a Southern woman asserting her motherly credentials, and would have tipped his hat (metaphorically speaking) and begged pardon. But this new Cal spun like a force of nature.

“Back off, Bree,” he barked. “Your child is covered in Bryan’s blood, and she’s going to tell me why.” He took another ominous step, crowding Bree and Alice against the wall. “Now.”

I recognized the mulish expression on my cousin’s face. Irresistible force had met immovable object, and nothing good could come from that. I decided I ought to wade in to prevent further bloodshed.

Carefully, I placed a gentle hand on Cal’s arm. His muscles vibrated like a tuning fork beneath my fingers.

“Cal,” I whispered.

“Not now, Tally,” he growled.

“Cal,” I said more forcefully. “You’re not going to get anywhere like this. Why don’t you walk with me a minute?”

He shook my hand off, but he backed away from Bree and Alice.

I followed as he stalked down the hall a few yards, then stopped and dropped onto one of the low benches that lined the walls. He scrubbed his face with his square, long-fingered hands.

“Christ a-mighty,” he sighed. “What am I going to tell Marla?”

I sat next to him, perching gingerly on the edge of the