Page 15 of To Die For

Dad answered, of course. The telephone was on his side of the bed because Mom didn’t like answering it. “Hello.” His voice was a sleepy mumble.

“Dad, it’s Blair. There was a murder at the gym tonight, and I wanted to let you know I’m all right.”

“A—what? Did you say murder?” He sounded much more awake now.

“One of the members was killed in the back parking lot”—I heard Mom in the background saying fiercely,“Give me the phone!”and I knew his possession of the phone was numbered in seconds—“a little after nine, and I— Hi, Mom.”

“Blair. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I wouldn’t have called, but I was afraid someone else would, and I wanted you to know that I’m okay.”

“Thank God you did,” she said, and we both shuddered at what she might have done if she’d thought any of her children had been hurt. “Who was killed?”

“Nicole Goodwin.”

“The copycat?”

“That’s her.” I might have complained about Nicole a time or two to my family. “She was parked in the back parking lot, waiting for me—we had a slight altercation this afternoon—”

“Do the police think you did it?”

“No, no,” I soothed, though for a while I had definitely been Suspect Number One. Mom didn’t need to know that, though. “I had just stepped outside tonight and locked up when this man shot her, and he didn’t see me. He left in a dark sedan.”

“Oh, my God,you’re a witness?”

“Not really,” I said ruefully. “It was dark and raining, and there’s no way I could ever identify him. I called nine-one-one, the cops came, and that’s all I know. They have just brought me home.”

“What took them so long?”

“The crime scene. It tookforeverfor them to go over everything.” Not to mention I probably would have been home a couple of hours earlier if it hadn’t been for a certain lieutenant.

“Um . . . they brought you home? Why didn’t you drive?”

“Because my car is inside the area they have taped off, so they wouldn’t let me go back there. An officer is supposed to bring it to me in the morning.” Morning meant some time after daylight, because technically it was already morning. I expected to see my car between eight and ten, and I would besolucky if an officer and not Wyatt delivered it. “Great Bods will have to be closed for a couple of days, too, maybe longer. I think I’ll go to the beach.”

“That’s a great idea,” she said firmly. “Get out of Dodge.”

It’s scary sometimes how my mom and I think alike.

I reassured her again that I was okay, that I was going to bed because I was exhausted, and hung up feeling much better. She hadn’t made any there-there noises, which is so not my mom, but I had headed off any well-meaning gossips who would have upset her.

I thought about calling Siana, but I was too tired to remember my list of grievances off the top of my head. After I’d had some sleep, I’d write them all down again. Siana would get a kick out of my run-in with Lieutenant Bloodsworth, because she knew about our past connection.

There was nothing I wanted more than sleep, so I turned off all the lights except for the dim sconces that lit the stairs; then I climbed up to my bedroom, where I pulled off my clothes and collapsed naked in my cloud of a bed. I groaned aloud with relief as I stretched out—then I ruined the moment of bliss by imagining Wyatt naked and stretching out on top of me.

The damn man was a menace. Before my wayward imagination went any further, I made myself recall and go over every detail of our last date, when he had acted like such a horse’s ass.

There. That worked.

Feeling peaceful, I rolled over and went to sleep. Lights Out, Blair.

Chapter

Six

He’d remembered that I drank Diet Coke.That was the first thought on my mind when I woke at eight-thirty. Lying there in bed blinking sleepily at the slowly whirling ceiling fan, I tried to decide whether the Diet Coke was significant. The romantic in me wanted to believe he remembered every little detail about me, but levelheaded me said he probably just had a very good memory, period. A cop had to have a good memory, right? It was part of the job description, reciting Miranda and all of that.

So the Diet Coke thing wasn’t important. For all I knew, he just assumed a woman would drink a diet soft drink, which was a really sexist thing to assume, never mind that he’d be right most of the time.

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