Page 82 of Bad Seed

“Is there somewhere else for you to stay tonight?”

Justine panicked and sat up. “I don’t have any money. I don’t have any friends here. This is home. Why would I have to leave?”

“The techs from the crime lab are still—”

Justine came off the sofa like she’d been launched. “Crime lab? My mother’s death is a crime? I didn’t kill her! I didn’t kill her! I just cooked supper. Oh my God! Oh my God!”

She started screaming and crying incoherently, to the point that other officers came running.

“What the hell happened?” the detective said.

The officer was flustered. “I was just asking her if she had somewhere to go, and this happened.”

“Exactly what did you say to her?” he asked.

“That as long as the crime lab techs were here, she—”

“You called this death a crime? We don’t know that. And at this point, I have no reason to believe it was. The coroner will figure out why she died. We’ll figure out the rest. Dammit it, Officer. You know better than this.”

“Yes, sir. It was just a slip of the tongue. I didn’t mean to infer that she’d killed her.”

“But she’s obviously taken it that way. Has anyone called her father?”

“I asked if we could call him for her, and she said it was no use. He didn’t want her. Her mother is the one who went after her and brought her home.”

“Well, she’s an adult, and if she doesn’t want to communicate with him, she doesn’t have to. We found out Karen Beaumont has been divorced from Justine’s father for years. So, there’s no law that says he must be notified.”

The officer nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Then there’s no law that says she can’t be here. The end. Go tell her. She’s had enough shocks for one day, dammit.”

“Yes, sir.”

In the end, it was the detective that delivered the news. After that, Justine crawled back onto the sofa, pulled the blanket up over herself, and watched in wide-eyed horror until every person had left the property.

Then she lay there for an hour or so longer before going to the kitchen. They’d carried off the casserole dish, the pan she made the food in, the bowl the salad was in, and half the food in the refrigerator, and tracked stuff all over the kitchen floor.

She started gathering up the mess in a garbage bag, carried it out the back to the garbage can, and then got a mop and a broom and went to work, removing every trace of the police presence in the house, made sure everything was locked up, set the security alarm, and then went to take a bath.

She was exhausted, both physically and emotionally.

Murder was hard work, after all, but the guilt would never fall on her shoulders because the grocery receipt for those cheap-ass buttered croutons had been part of the contents of the garbage they’d taken. And they’d been paid for with Karen’s own credit card, along with the rest of the food she’d bought two days ago on her way home from work—while Justine had been logged onto her laptop, filling out job applications.

It had been nothing short of fortuitous that Justinehad noticed something about the croutons that Karen had not. They’d been deep-fried in peanut oil for extra crunch before the artificial butter flavor had been added. The way Justine looked at it, the rest was nothing more than Karen’s karma for being such a cheapskate.

***

Liz made sure that Harley’s suite at the hotel had been sealed until her return. She didn’t want Larry slipping in with a passkey to nose around. She knew Harley had added her own password to the hotel computer, so there was no chance of anyone else snooping, either. For now, she was still registered as a guest in that room, and no one had any further need to go inside.

But the next morning, bright and early, Larry was knocking on Liz’s door and waving his phone in her face about Brendan’s message.

“He’s taken off work to be with that woman…that auditor.”

“I know. He copied the same text to me. Didn’t you see?”

Larry frowned. “No, I guess I didn’t notice. But that doesn’t change the fact that we no longer have a boss in the bakery section.”

“Yes, we do. Anthony. He’s Brendan’s second-in-command and has been for almost two years. The team is well trained. They’re efficient. We’re fine. How’s Justine?”

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