by Nancy Warren
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Other Books by Nancy Warren
About the Author
FROSTED SHADOW
A Toni Diamond Mystery
Book 1
Nancy Warren
Copyright 2011 Nancy Weatherley Warren. All rights reserved.
Discover other titles by Nancy Warren at www.nancywarren.net
License Notes
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Chapter One
I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough.
What do you want, an adorable pancreas? —Jean Kerr
Some people are born beautiful. Obviously, not that many or cosmetics wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar industry and Toni Diamond wouldn’t be giving her rah-rah speech to the new sales recruits for Lady Bianca cosmetics.
“I believe in the power of Lady Bianca makeup, to transform, to inspire, to bring out a new woman,” she told the thousand newbie delegates at the national conference in Corvallis, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. They felt the same according to the enthusiastic applause that greeted her.
“I believe in the right of every woman to look her best.” While Toni paused to sip water, another tsunami of applause swept the packed ballroom of the convention hotel.
Toni sold Lady Bianca Cosmetics the way old time preachers sold a revival. With passion, fire, and a healthy dose of fear of the consequences of remaining on the path to ruin.
You committed the sins of smoking, working too hard, eating junk food, drinking too much, or -- God forbid -- sunbathing and there would be retribution. Premature aging. Wrinkles. Dull, lifeless skin, eyes with no sparkle. Lips sucked dry of youth and passion.
“We sell the best cosmetics on the market today, and we should be proud of what we do.” Toni figured that rebirth of the soul was between a woman and God. But during that gal’s time here on earth, Lady Bianca cosmetics could offer the skincare sinner salvation in a five-step regimen followed by a full line of paints, powders and creams to pretty up that refreshed skin.
“We brighten tired eyes, breathe youth into lifeless lips, dew onto leathered skin. When we are done with a makeover, our customer is born again – cosmetically, anyway.”
Here she stood, a cosmetics evangelist in her purple power suit sparkling with diamond buttons. There were diamonds on pretty much everything Toni owned, from her sunglasses to her shoes. “Branding” they called it. Every time a woman saw a diamond she wanted that woman to think of Toni Diamond and then consider whether she didn’t need a few more cosmetics from her favorite Lady Bianca rep.
“Are you proud to be running your own business? Let me hear you. Are you proud to be empowering women?”
Now the hand clapping was thunderous. There were some hoots and wolf-whistles thrown into the mix. These gals were pumped. She loved the new recruits, loved their enthusiasm, their hope and energy. They were the future of the company gazing up at her like sunflowers reaching for the sun.
They were young, middle aged and old. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian and every possible combination. They came from all backgrounds, but they had one thing in common. With varying degrees of desperation, these women wanted to make money in the beauty business and they were looking to her to show them how.
Personal success stories were big at the Lady Bianca convention and hers was a pretty good one. Who didn’t love a Cinderella-from-the-trailer-park tale? “I remember sitting in this room fifteen years ago. I was a teenaged single mom. Broke, desperate and close to homeless.”
Hallelujah.
“My story starts out like a country song. My man done me wrong, left me and the baby, and then the truck died.”
Laughter floated up to the stage, but everybody here had her own story, some a lot sadder than Toni’s. “The one thing my seventeen year old husband left me,” -- since she considered the baby all hers and one unexcitingly delivered sperm did not a father make -- “was his glitzy last name. In this life you have to take your treasures where you find them. And no feminist on earth was going to stop me trading Plotnik for Diamond.
“Well, me and my fancy last name were picking over the bruised apples at the grocery store one day when a beautifully-dressed woman came up to me and offered me a free makeover.” She grinned down at her rapt audience. “I must have looked like I’d been ridden hard and put away wet. You can imagine—” She was interrupted by a scream. Not a you go girl holler either, but a heart-pounding scream of panic.
A rustle of apprehension rippled through the crowded room.
“A Lady Bianca rep’s been murdered,” a woman yelled.
“What?” Toni’s voice boomed through the mic.
Panic swept through those happy sunflowers like a brush fire. Women jumped to their feet and fell over their conference bags, their high-heeled shoes and each other stampeding for the exits.
“Hey, calm down,” she commanded through the microphone.
“Don’t panic. This is probably just a crazy rumor. Take your time heading out and show me the Lady Bianca spirit.”
Murder? At a conference on beauty, female empowerment and success? Impossible. But Toni knew she’d been hopelessly upstaged and there was no point continuing for the few remaining women who had the sense to stay in their seats.
When Toni emerged into the main hallway, she was struck by the hushed atmosphere.
Two thousand women in a hotel conference lobby and nobody was gabbing? Mostly women were rooted to the carpet, not sure whether to go or to stay. If they had to talk, they whispered.
She and her cohorts fell equally silent as though their vocal chords had been vacuumed up like dust bunnies.
“Can you see what’s going on?” she whispered to a tall woman standing near her.
“A rep was found dead in Longhorn C. Somebody said she’d been stabbed to death.”
“Stabbed!” The word burst from her, and several people turned to stare. “At a Lady Bianca conference?” The last thing a convention based on positive thinking and beauty needed was some sordid murder in their midst.
“Any idea who the victim was?” she whispered to the same woman who’d given her the first information. She was over six feet tall and wore glasses so it was like standing beside the guy on ship up in the crow’s nest with the telescope.
She shook her he
ad, but leaned down to murmur, “Lot of activity and cops hanging around.”
Toni stepped forward, squeezing her way through the crush of well-dressed, well-coiffed, well-made-up women. As a fairly senior member of the organization she felt she might be needed. Besides, she was dying to see what was happening.
She ‘scuse me’d her way through the crush of women until she could see. The small conference room, Longhorn C, was where a dozen people could enjoy a breakout session or a meeting. Yellow crime scene tape stretched across the entrance way but a further half circle of emptiness engulfed the doorway as though an invisible rope held everyone back. By craning her neck she could peek into the room. A flash went off as a guy with a camera took a picture of something on the floor. A technician was dusting the table for fingerprints. Another operated what looked like a black shop vac. His back was to her, his jacket said Crime Scene Investigation.
While she stood there, a woman of about forty in a linen business suit, with her dark hair in a take-me-seriously chignon, emerged from the room. In a low voice, she gave her name to a uniformed officer standing near the door. All Toni could hear was “D.A.’s office,” and then she signed her name on a form held onto a metal clipboard, ducked under the tape and walked briskly toward the escalator. The Lady Bianca reps parted for her the way the Red Sea had parted for Moses.
Inside Longhorn C, a stretcher on wheels stood beside a clump of people in cop uniforms, plain clothes and one portly man with white hair in a black jacket that read Coroner. There was a shift of bodies and a sudden gap and she saw that they were sliding the victim into a body bag. She only saw the bottom part of the dead woman. Legs in Capri pants, open-toed sandals. Feet in crying need of a pedicure. As they maneuvered the body, a Birkenstock sandal fell off the woman’s foot and a hand wearing a surgical glove picked it up and dropped it into the bag.
She watched a hand zip up the bag but couldn’t hear it over the sound of the vacuum. They hoisted the body onto the gurney and then it rolled slowly out toward the hundreds of silent women, almost like a preview of the funeral procession. If Toni had been wearing a hat she’d have removed it; as it was she tried to think of a suitable prayer or even a bible verse as the body rolled by.
Two young uniformed cops -- one male and one female -- wheeled the gurney in her direction. Behind them walked the coroner wearing a suitably serious face. He sported a white moustache and the erect way he carried himself suggested to her that he’d once been in the military. Walking beside him, talking quietly was a guy in plain clothes who might as well have been in uniform. He had cop written all over him from his short haircut to his watchful eyes to his upright stance.
The black shape passed by where she stood and as she gazed toward it, she realized something obvious.
“That’s not a Lady Bianca rep.”
Chapter Two
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another. —William Shakespeare
Toni didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud – and that she still had her volume turned high enough to pump up a thousand women -- until the watchful eyes of the lone wolf cop zoomed in on her. He broke off his conversation with the coroner and addressed her directly.
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘That is not a Lady Bianca rep.’”
His expression didn’t change and he didn’t move quickly, but suddenly he was at her side. “Would you come with us, please, ma’am?”
Pleasant, but with the steel of command beneath. Exactly the tone she used at her weekly meetings with her sales associates.
“Of course, Detective.”
He shot her a weird look like she might be psychic, but he looked exactly like the kind of actor who gets cast as a detective.
Mid-thirties at a guess. He had dark hair that wanted to curl, dark brown eyes and a muscular build. Everything about him was emphatic. His eyes weren’t just brown; they were brown, damn it, the color of good cocoa beans, the kind with a sheen. His hair was the same rich, dark brown and he had the muscular physique of a wrestler or a gym jock. He wasn’t a whole lot taller than Toni in her heels. Five-eleven or so. But there was so much testosterone packed into that body she could feel it the way you can feel body heat coming off a person. The gurney bumped along and now she was following along too. It was becoming a parade.
She realized they were headed to the service elevator and wasn’t given the option of not joining the ghoulish group.
The detective waited until the jaw-like gate creaked down on them then asked, “Why did you say she’s not with Lady Bianca?”
“Her shoes. The woman was wearing Birkenstocks. Lady Bianca representatives wear closed toed shoes at all times, along with skirts or dresses and hose. This woman is wearing sandals, no hose, cropped pants and her toenails aren’t even polished. Definitely not Lady Bianca.”
“Really,” said the lone woman on the team.
Toni smiled at her. “We sell beauty products. It’s important to look well-groomed and feminine while we do so.” And, if anyone wanted Toni’s opinion, that woman might find her work a little less grim if she wore a brighter shade of lipstick and made more of her big, dark eyes.
“And you are?”
“Toni Diamond. I’m a national sales director. I’ve been with the company for fifteen years, so I know pretty much everyone.”
“And you can tell she’s not in your organization by her shoes?” the detective asked.
“I only caught a glimpse of her legs. I don’t have anything else to go on.”
The detective hesitated. “Would you recognize her if you saw her face?”
Her gaze snapped to his. “I might.”
The elevator creaked and cranked its way down. He glanced over at the coroner who shrugged and said, “Your call.”
He reached over and unzipped the top part of the body bag. Toni moved closer to look, torn between fascination and horror. She tried to imagine this was a sleeping bag and the woman inside it was merely napping. But the face was too pale to keep up the fiction.
“Oh, poor thing. She’s so young.” The dead woman was in her early to mid thirties with flyaway blond hair. A pale blue T-shirt could be seen and the edges of a dark red blood stain on the left side, above her heart.
Her left hand rested on her chest as though she’d reached for the wound as she died. Toni quickly moved her gaze to the woman’s face and experienced a quick burst of relief on finding the woman was a stranger.
“I’ve never seen her before.” But Toni was too honest, or maybe too outspoken, to leave it at that. “She’s wearing Lady Bianca makeup though. And it’s a nice make up job,” Toni said, studying the face which would have been pretty in a nondescript way in life. In death that makeup stood out like a mask.
“She didn’t know enough to brace her elbows when she applied her lip liner.” She glanced at the only other woman in the elevator who was still living. “That’s why it’s wavy around the edges.”
“You can recognize Lady Bianca makeup?” the detective asked. His tone made it sound like a pretty unimpressive talent.
“I’m almost positive. The shadow trio on her eyelids is from our fall collection. Pumpkin spice, mulled cider and hickory liner.” She was genuinely puzzled. “Her make-up’s Lady Bianca, but the rest of her doesn’t match. Not the shoes. Not the T-shirt. Not the hands.”
There were ink stains between the dead woman’s thumb and forefinger, like she’d taken notes with a leaky pen.
“See how she hasn’t taken care of her hands? The nails are bitten, no polish, and her skin is rough. This woman hasn’t had a manicure in months. If ever.” In comparison, Toni showed them her own hands, smooth of skin and shiny of nail. Her daughter might think that the tiny half moon of sparkles where the white part of her French manicure met the pink part was over the top, but then, at sixteen, Tiffany thought everything her mother did was over the top. Including breathing.
She wore a small colle
ction of her prize rings, including the two-carat diamond she’d won when her sales team had the highest sales in the country three years ago. The dead woman wore a single silver ring with a Celtic design on it that badly needed cleaning.
“I’ve never known a sales rep who didn’t come to convention with a fresh manicure.”
“But the woman is wearing Lady Bianca make-up,” the cop reiterated.
Toni’s brows pulled together in a frown that she automatically smoothed, determined to keep her face a Botox-free zone as long as possible. “I’m pretty sure she is, but other than that she doesn’t look like one of us.”
The elevator bumped to a stop. “Thank you for your help.” The detective pulled out a card and handed it to her. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, call me.”
She read the name on the card aloud. “Detective Sergeant Luke Marciano. Major Crimes Unit.”
Before they filled their hands with gurney, she pulled out a few of her own cards and handed each person one, starting with the woman who could certainly use Toni’s help in the cosmetics department.
“Let me give you all my card. Give me a call and I’ll be happy to give you or someone special in your life a complimentary makeover.”
With varying expressions of disdain they all pocketed the card. Didn’t matter. She was used to disdain and was philosophical about it. Of course, she’d never tried to market make up over a corpse before, but she wasn’t one to let any opportunity slip away.
She stayed inside the yawning cage of the elevator as the group wheeled the dead woman away, her gaze fixed on the female cop, already envisioning her in better make up and hair.
The wheels of the gurney were bumping their way into the basement area of the hotel where the loading dock would be. As the group passed an industrial trash can the young male officer tossed her card in the garbage.
Okay. So no free makeover for his wife.
Even as the word makeover passed across her mind, the obvious truth hit her. Her gasp was louder than the creaking elevator. She dashed out after them, her heels clacking on the bare cement. “Wait. I figured it out. She must have had a makeover.”
