Page 22 of Wild Justice

Tell me about yourself, Dana. Tell me your story. I need to know you.

She started in the kitchen, looking through cabinets and the refrigerator. Like her own home, Dana didn’t look like she cooked much for herself. The freezer had some single entrees and the obligatory pizzas. The refrigerator had a few cartons of yogurt, some apples, and the usual condiments. Stuffed in the back of the lowest shelf was a twelve-pack of root beer.

There was a box of cereal in the cabinets, along with a half-empty pasta container, an unopened marinara jar, a bag of dark chocolates, and some tea bags. No coffee? There was no coffeemaker on the counters.

Apparently, Dana wasn’t a coffee drinker. But she liked a treat of chocolate now and then, something that Lulu totally agreed with. If she did cook, it looked like Dana favored low-effort meals with easy clean-up.

The tiny living room was neat and rather sparse. A couch sat against a wall facing the television. There was an end table with a lamp, remote control, and a paperback book -Pride and Prejudice, marked at page sixty-one.

The bedroom, on the other hand, was a different story altogether. Clearly, this was where Dana spent most of her time when at home. The queen-sized bed was covered with a brightly colored quilt and stacked with about a dozen cozy pillows in complementary colors. A fuzzy royal blue throw hung from one post of the headboard. The side tables were stacked with multiple books, candles, pens, and notebooks.

The dresser was strewn with perfume bottles, hair ties, scarves, socks, and a few framed photos of Dana with her friends and family. This room looked lived-in, with Dana’s personality coming out more than the kitchen and living room.

The closet and bathroom were more of the same. Like so many people with a busy schedule, Dana seemed to keep her favorite things at close hand. Her makeup was stacked on the bathroom vanity, and her most worn sweaters and jeans were folded in a stack at the bottom of her closet.

Going back to check into the dresser drawers, Lulu found what she’d expected to see. Clothes, bras, underwear, and socks. Then she pulled open the bottom drawer to find what she’d call the “single woman’s stash” or something like that - a vibrator - tucked under a few sweatshirts. Since she was wearing gloves, she reached out to flick the “on” switch, but it didn’t hum to life.

Batteries were dead.

I’m not weird. Something doesn’t seem right here. It’s not logical.

Levering up from her spot on the floor, Lulu checked the two drawers in the side tables. A flashlight, a bottle of lube, a couple of phone chargers, bottles of nail polish, and an emery board.

Am I being picky? Why would she keep her vibrator across the room hidden under clothes? I would keep it next to the bed. Right? There’s plenty of room in these drawers, and that’s where the lube was located.

Unless…she had someone coming that she didn’t want to know that she had sex toys? Her mother? A friend? A…lover? But she left the lube…

And it was a dead vibrator at that. How long have these batteries been dead? Did she not replace them because she didn’t have to? Because she had a sexual partner?

Lulu had let her own sex toys languish for months at a time when she was seeing someone. Not that she was out shagging men left and right, but she wasn’t a virgin either.

A girl’s got needs.

If Dana had been seeing someone, Lulu needed to talk to that person as soon as possible. Was her ex-husband Jay Bradford that person? He was next on the list to get a visit.

Dana, what secrets have you taken to the grave?

6

“She’s upstairs,” Deputy Joe said to Kai when he walked into the sheriff’s station. “Technically, she’s off duty for lunch, but I won’t stop you from going up there. Freedom of the press, and all that.”

That wasn’t what “freedom of the press” meant. It didn’t mean that Kai could invade the private home of a person just because he wanted to.

He didn’t, however, pause to discuss the First Amendment to the Constitution with Joe, instead climbing the stairs to the apartment above the station and knocking on the door. He wanted to talk to Lulu, and privately sounded like the way to go, although her friend Henry would probably be there.

The door opened, and Lulu stood on the other side with a frozen pizza in her hand. She didn’t appear surprised or put out that he’d shown up without a call first. He should apologize, of course. His mother would be scandalized at his gauche behavior. She was a stickler for etiquette - murder or not.

“I’m sorry for bothering you. Joe said you were at lunch, but I was hoping to get some quotes from you. I’m going to run a special edition of the newspaper.”

Normally, he barely had enough to fill the weekly edition, and rarely did he have anything that was time-sensitive.

“Extra, extra. Read all about it?”

“Something like that,” he replied.

“You know the local television news will cover this, right? You don’t have to do a special edition. Honestly, that sounds pricey.”

It was expensive. Lulu didn’t know his financial situation, though. Or his maternal grandparents. They’d left him a truckload of money, and he could have fucked around instead of buckling down, going to college and then law school, working in a huge law firm about eighty hours a week.

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