Sole Witness

by Jenn Black

  He was about to find out.

  With a sense of intense satisfaction, she twirled in place to face him, swinging her hand across her body toward the wall. The butt of the gun smashed into the center of his grinning photograph, sending a shower of shattered glass across the room.

  He yelped and jumped back as shards of glass glittered to the floor. Fear clouded his eyes for a brief second before his ego kicked back in and his gaze turned calculating.

  “Oh, baby, don’t be mad,” he said, and grinned. “There’s plenty of Tommy to go around. I can probably give you a little taste before she gets here.”

  He glanced down to fumble at his fly and Amber hefted the gun in both hands. Before Tommy had a chance to finish unzipping his jeans, her arm was steady and the Glock pointed directly at his face.

  “No thanks.” Amber smiled. “I’ve got other plans.”

  She wasn’t sure which she heard first when she pulled the trigger—the satisfying blast of the bullet barreling into Tommy's forehead or a hideously sweet voice calling out, “Tommy?”

  He hadn't been lying.

  Unbelievable. Amber fired a second shot into his crotch for good measure and turned on her heel to chase after the woman who’d spoiled all her well-made plans.

  She reached the sidewalk just in time to watch the taillights of a hot pink monstrosity careen around the corner.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered. What was this girl, Barbie?

  Barbie or not, Tommy belonged to Amber and she didn’t play well with others. She’d seen him first, claimed him first, owned him first. No supermodel hussy was going to stop her from getting what she wanted.

  She stalked back inside and stared at the lifeless body draped over the wooden coffee table. The room reeked of blood and gunpowder. With his glassy eyes and gaping fish mouth, Tommy looked like a moron even in death. She should’ve aimed for a higher class of sugar daddy to start out with.

  Careful not to step in the growing pool of blood, Amber filched his wallet out of his back pocket and flipped it open. Packed with bills. Excellent. She dropped the leather wallet and the warm gun into her open purse and wiped the door handle free of fingerprints with her sleeve.

  Gross. Didn’t he ever clean this thing? Now her favorite white blouse was ruined.

  Fuming, Amber strode out to her car.

  Lord knew she’d put in her time. She deserved a better life.

  Tommy had owed her. The world owed her. Little Miss Supermodel owed her.

  And… what if the living Barbie doll had seen her?

  Amber plopped into her Camry and gunned the engine before the cops decided to pay a visit. Lori Summers would rue the day she decided to make this particular booty call.

  Ducking her head to light a cigarette, Amber considered the ramifications. She doubted Tommy had spoken of her to other women. He was too much of a player.

  So even if Lori-the-slut tattled, she couldn’t name names. But if she could identify her from a lineup or describe her well enough…

  The size-zero bimbo would have to be silenced.

  Amber bared her teeth in a distorted parody of a smile and eased away from the curb. She would triumph. She always triumphed.

  Lori Summers must die.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Davis Hamilton straightened the piles of paperwork rising from his desk like stalagmites. He glanced around the station. For as relatively few city employees as worked in the Isla Concha P.D., everyone was oddly busy. Dispatchers shouted into phones, lawyers interviewed witnesses, cops grilled suspects—probably meant the day was about to get longer.

  His own partner had the desk across from him, and if he held still for much longer, she was bound to look up and rip him a new one. Tonda Carver had a quick wit, indeterminate ethnicity, and a belly so pregnant Davis was surprised she could reach over it to touch her desk.

  As if he’d caught her attention with the power of his mind, she glanced up and impaled him with her gaze.

  “Don’t just sit there running your fingers over your hair, hot stuff. It’s too short to get messy. Or are you afraid you’re going bald?”

  “I’m not going bald,” Davis bit out, forcing himself not to touch his head to make sure.

  “Not yet, anyway. But if you had hair like mine, you’d wish you were.”

  Carver shook her head. Tiny black spirals sprang out in all directions in a cross between a porcupine and Shirley Temple. Her deceptive cuteness was all Shirley, but when she opened her mouth—pure porcupine.

  She tossed the empty Chinese cartons from their rushed supper into her trashcan and flicked a stray piece of rice at his desk. How she could find anything on a desk that messy was beyond him. She fished a cough drop out from her desk drawer, unwrapped it, and popped it in her mouth.

  “Sick?” Davis asked.

  “Fruit drop. Vitamin C. I feel a cold coming on. Hey, have you got a Kleenex?”

  Davis slid open his top desk drawer. Pens, pencils, sticky notes, a well-worn page ripped from a magazine, folded so he wouldn’t be able to stare at her face…

  “No. Sorry.”

  Carver rolled her chair backward and stood up. “That’s okay. I’ll go get some. Oh—Chief is waving like a madman. I’ll find out what he wants.”

  Davis nodded and tried to concentrate on the ever-growing mounds of paperwork. There was so much to do, so many cases open at once. Because Isla Concha was a small town, the police force was ridiculously light, leaving them all with too much on their plates.

  He’d finished sorting through one towering stack and had been about to dive into the next when Carver wobbled back, a strange expression in her eyes.

  “What is it?” he asked warily.

  “We’ve got a live one. Or, rather, a dead one.”

  “Ours?” Nice. He couldn’t even make it through his current mountain of paperwork.

  Carver nodded and leaned one hip against his desk.

  “Big?” he asked.

  “Huge. This is going to be high profile.” The orange lozenge clicked between her teeth.

  Davis sighed. “Who is it?”

  Carver watched him expectantly. “Tommy Turner.”

  “Who?” He rummaged through his notes.

  She snorted. “Could you be any less cool, Hamilton? Tommy Turner. T2, of the T2 Crew.”

  Davis blinked. “The rapper?”

  “Yeah. He took a couple bullets. EMT called it at the scene.”

  A dead rap star. Nice. That’s all he needed. “Any witnesses?”

  “One. You’re going to love this—well, if you’ve ever heard of her.”

  A strange feeling prickled across his back. “Who?”

  “Lori–”

  “Summers,” he finished. There was no reason at all for her name to be the first to his mind—except that her face often plagued his dreams.

  Twin dimples puckered Carver’s cheeks. “You have heard of pop culture after all.”

  Heard of her? Lord. Davis didn’t have to unfold the tattered magazine page in order to envision her face, her body, the timbre of her voice, the scent of her skin…

  But all he said aloud was, “Yeah.”

  “I seen her in T2’s video, which sucked by the way, but Chief says she’s also an ‘action swimsuit model.’ What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means she was primarily known for doing daredevil water sports in diamond-studded g-strings.”

  “Was? What happened?”

  Davis gritted his teeth. What did happen? “I don’t know,” he answered, maintaining a neutral tone of voice. “For a while there, if you saw a spiky-haired model on a beach, it was probably Lori. She’s been photographed swimming, snorkeling, wake-boarding, sunbathing, and surfing killer waves—all in equally killer bikinis.”

  “Man. How do I get a job like that?”

  “You have that kid first. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition has yet to do a centerfold with pregnant cops.”

  Carver let out a bark
of laughter. “Prejudiced jerks. Well, if I don’t come back after maternity leave, you’ll know where to find me.”

  Davis pushed himself back from his desk and stood up. “For now, let’s check out our crime scene.”

  By the time they pulled up to the studio it was nearly eight o’clock. Flashing lights and gawking onlookers lined the block.

  No parking lot. Perp had to use a meter. No way he could get clearance for running prints on the thousands of quarters crammed into the machines.

  Davis helped Carver under the yellow crime tape. The studio was a big stucco-on-concrete-blocks building. No windows—probably for soundproofing purposes. Two doors, one in front and a fire exit in back. Davis slipped on his gloves and boot-socks and held open the door for Carver.

  Techs crawled the room, taking samples of God-knew-what. There were always fibers and fluids and any number of flecks and specks and crumbs of identification.

  That was the first rule drilled into a cop’s head. Every time somebody enters a scene, they bring something in. Every time someone exits a scene, they take something out. Not just the investigating officers, but also the perp. Whoever he was.

  Davis walked over to the medical examiner kneeling by the body. “What do you have?”

  “He’s been dead from two to three hours. The 911 call came through about two hours ago and we were on the scene within fifteen minutes.”

  “Witness call from the studio?” Davis flipped open his pocket notebook.

  “No, I think cell phone. From her car.”

  “So she didn’t come inside. Didn’t see all… this.” Something like relief warmed Davis’s cold fingers. Civilians shouldn’t have to see all the crap that cops saw. Especially civilians like Lori Summers.

  “Who knows? She can use her cell phone after whacking someone just as easy. Our star witness might have a little explaining to do,” Carver said with a sardonic smile. “Ain’t that how it always goes? Good thing she’s coming over first thing in the morning to give her statement.”

  He frowned.

  No way was Lori Summers involved in this. Right?

  “Hamilton. Did you hear that? Wake up.” Carver snapped her fingers in his face. “The band members got sent home early because Tommy was expecting a ‘hookup’.”

  The M.E. looked up. “That jibes with the wounds.”

  “What do you mean?” Davis asked.

  “Cause of death is a bullet to the brain. Another entered his groin.”

  “That one wasn’t to kill,” Carver interrupted, wrapping her arms around her belly. “It was personal. You think this was a breakup gone bad? Maybe Miss Summers has more explaining to do than we thought.”

  Davis shook his head.

  When Lori had disappeared and later reemerged as the mouth-watering half-naked supermodel, he’d curled his lip and forced himself to admit that maybe his parents had been right about her all along.

  But even if she’d turned bimbo… could she have turned killer?

  * * *

  The luminescent dashboard clock glowed 11:45. The day was finally over. Thank God. Lori couldn’t wait to get home and—oh. Kimber. She was not going to take the lack of autograph well at all. Crap. All Lori wanted was some peace and some privacy, but if she didn’t bring Kimber home some kind of offering, high drama would rattle the walls.

  Head pounding, she stopped at the first grocery store she passed, headed straight for the frozen foods section, snatched a pint of Karmel Sutra from the freezer and strode to the self-checkout lane. Ben & Jerry’s cured just about anything.

  She beeped the ice cream and set it in a bag, then opened her purse. One dollar. Great. She fished her Isla Concha debit card from her wallet and swiped it through the machine.

  The display flashed, “Card unreadable. Please try again.”

  Seven tries later, Lori was about to cry with frustration. Positive the Karmel Sutra was turning into Karmel Soggy, she picked up the bag of dew-covered ice cream and stomped into a line with a live person.

  If a customer showing up with her grocery item pre-bagged bemused the cashier, he made no comment. When the debit card didn’t swipe for him either, he simply typed the digits into the register, handed Lori her receipt, and sang out, “Have a nice evening!”

  Too late for that.

  Lori lugged the ice cream out to her Mustang. For once, even her car’s vivid pinkness failed to restore her good humor. What she needed was a nice, long bubble bath.

  That thought firmly in mind, Lori headed straight home and parked her car on the side of the street.

  The house was old, but she’d bought it before she’d made it big, and it was home. No basement, but then few in Florida had basements. Small, but she was single and didn’t need much space.

  Until Kimber moved in.

  Now, what was once comfy seemed crowded. But being Kimber’s best friend meant she had to suck it up sometimes, because that’s what friends do. Lori slipped her key in the lock and sighed when the door swung open without turning the key or the handle. Bad enough Kimber never locked anything, now she couldn’t even close the door all the way?

  Lori stepped into her once-pristine living room. The hardwood floors were littered with Kimberley’s clothes and the black leather couch lurked under a pound of cat hair.

  As she had every day since Kimber’s cat moved in, Lori sneezed.

  Where was the little monster?

  Chucking her purse onto a stack of magazines—the cleanest place in her post-Kimberly living room—Lori’s heels clicked across the wood as she walked into the kitchen. She tossed the now-soupy ice cream into the freezer.

  Where was Kimber?

  She’d better not have left the house with the front door cracked open. Best friend or no, some basic logic had to prevail.

  With visions of bubble baths dancing in her head, Lori closed the (open!) sliding glass door leading to the patio and headed down the hall to her room. Kimber lay atop her bed and the cat stretched across Lori’s pillow.

  “What are you doing in here, Kimber?”

  Kimber looked up, her round face surrounded by a tangled mass of hair. “Watching TV.”

  Thank you, Captain Obvious. “There’s a TV in the living room.”

  “I know, but this one’s got a VCR. I wanted to tape something.”

  “The TV in the living room has Tivo.”

  Kimber shrugged and returned her eyes to the screen. “I totally don’t get Tivo.”

  Lori stared at the layer of fur covering every surface of her room. “What’s your cat doing in here?”

  “Watching TV with me. What’s your problem, Lori?”

  “You know I’m allergic to cats! You promised to keep him out of my room.”

  “Oh yeah. Sorry.”

  Sometimes, Lori could imagine why it didn’t work out with Kimber’s boyfriend. She was a great friend—fun, funny, upbeat, honest to a fault. But man, was she a rotten roommate.

  Deciding not to take a bath for fear she’d drown herself, Lori turned and headed for her office. Maybe it was a good thing Kimber had overtaken the bedroom. If she had been in here on the futon, Lori wouldn’t have been able to do any career planning.

  Taking a dog-eared entrepreneurial how-to book from the shelf, Lori crossed over to her desk. She flipped to chapter seven—logos and slogans.

  What would be a good name for the talent agency? Summers’ Models? No, that was stupid. Models by Summers? No, that sounded like cologne. Models Etc? But there was no et cetera. Just models. Boy this was hard.

  Lori turned on her computer. Before she had time to do more than log in, Kimber appeared in the doorway, clad in oversized flannel pajamas and cuddling her cat.

  “Come watch TV with me, Lori. Afternoon soaps are on. I’ll put Mr. Giggles outside.”

  Mr. Giggles. Yeah, that cat was a laugh a minute.

  “All right. Don’t forget to shut the door.”

  Kimber rolled her eyes. “I won’t. Besides, he goes out the sliding glass d
oor.”

  “Don’t forget to shut that one, too.”

  “What are you, my mom? How’s he supposed to get back in if the door’s shut?”

  For a moment, Lori indulged herself in the brief fantasy that Mr. Giggles wouldn’t get back in.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Kimber padded off.

  Pages fluttered in the open book as the air conditioning kicked on, and Lori sighed. Her future would wait for another day. She stood and walked to her room. Sitting on the edge of the dander-covered bed, she hunted for the remote control. No luck.

  Kimber returned sans cat, but with the remote in her hand. Sneaky girl. Lori opened her mouth to make a comment when the commercial cut to a newsbreak and the announcer’s voice filled the room.

  “The T2 Crew is no more. Earlier this evening, Tommy Turner of the T2 Crew was gunned down in his studio. He was working on his new album, to be released in four months. Here, live, is–”

  With a loud gasp, Kimber clapped her hands to her chest in horror. She turned wide eyes to Lori and breathed, “Too bad you didn’t get my CDs signed. They’d be worth a fortune now.”

  Lori gawked at her. “For Pete’s sake, Kimber. How morbid. I can’t even wrap my head around the idea that he’s dead, and you’re thinking about making money off it?”

  “I’m just saying. How much money do you think it would get on eBay? Signed the night he died. Think about it. Mega bucks.” Kimber flopped onto the bed, propped up by pillows.

  “I don’t want to think about it. I wish I wasn’t there.”

  “It’s not like you saw it or anything. Don’t make it out like a big deal.”

  Lori fought for calm. “It is a big deal. He’s dead.”

  “I know he’s dead! Nobody cares more than me. I love him.”

  “You didn’t love him. You had a boyfriend of your own.”

  Kimberley muted the television. “And T2 came between us.”

  “What?” Lori twisted to stare at her friend. “You didn’t even know him. How could he possibly cause the breakup?”

  “Marco was jealous of him. He’s not fair. I mean, I dressed in slutty nursewear for him. Why couldn’t he pretend to be T2 for me?”