by Mary Marks
I lived with my orange cat Bumper in a friendly residential area of the San Fernando Valley. Directly behind my house stood a fenced off baseball field. A ritzy private school, whose nearby campus had run out of room, had muscled their way in and built a large new stadium on parkland right behind our quiet street.
On the far side of the field, less than two hundred yards distant, the Los Angeles River flowed east through the San Fernando Valley crossing Glendale to downtown LA and out to sea at Long Beach. I planned to walk around the perimeter of the field to the bank of the river and back again. What a mistake.
In the summertime, the air can sizzle by noon. At eight o’clock this morning in late August, the temperature had already reached seventy-nine degrees. Gravel crunched under the rubber soles of my new shoes as I ambled along a dry path just outside the tall chain-link fence around the baseball field and onto the river bank. No bushes were allowed to grow on the near side, the private school side of the river. Only small weeds and grasses parched in the heat. But thick coyote brush, deer weed, and cottonwood trees topped the far side of the riverbank.
Concrete covered the bottom of the river, and the slopes were sprayed with stucco courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers. In the wintertime, rainwater from the mountains transformed the LA River into a raging swift water death trap. Someone managed to drown in it every year. And after the rainy season ended, the river dried to just a trickle. This day in late August, only a thin thread of brown water inched downstream.
I heard something scuttle through the dense brush on the far side of the river and looked up to see the fluffy brindled tail of a coyote just before he disappeared into the landscape. I also made out bits of color hidden beneath the larger bushes, flashes of metal and plastic. I could barely identify a couple of sleeping bags and what looked like a cooking pot. I knew those bushes sheltered the homeless almost year round. I just couldn’t detect anyone there at the moment. The homeless knew how to become invisible.
As I walked on I spotted a large heap of clothing about ten yards ahead. At first I thought someone used this isolated spot to dump their trash. But when I walked closer I saw the body of a man tangled inside the dark jeans and maroon and gold baseball jersey. The dark red ground underneath his battered head crawled with ants and flies. His jaw hung open at an unnatural angle and I didn’t need to check his pulse to know he didn’t have one.
The shaking started somewhere in my knees, and my stomach pushed up toward my throat. This was the second time in four months I’d discovered a dead body. My head started to float away—déjà vu all over again.
The first time I’d been with my quilting friends, Lucy Mondello and Birdie Watson, when we discovered the murdered body of another quilter. I was the one who eventually figured out the identity of the killer. The guy who worked the case was Arlo Beavers, a tall, hunky LAPD homicide detective with a white mustache.
Beavers and I have been dating since then, which is kind of surprising since we started off on the wrong foot. He kept warning me to stop poking around the investigation. In the end he was right. Because I refused to stop searching for answers on my own I was thrown in jail and almost killed. After that, I promised myself and my friends I’d just quilt like a normal person and leave the policing to the pros.
And now, I would have to tell him I just stumbled on what was obviously another murder. I wondered how he would react. Still staring at the dead man, I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket with badly shaking hands. Thank goodness Beavers was on speed dial.
“Arlo, it’s me. I just found a dead body.”
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2014 by Mary Marks
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-9205-6
First Kensington Mass Market Edition: January 2014
eISBN-13: 978-0-7582-9206-3
eISBN-10: 0-7582-9206-6
First Kensington Electronic Edition: January 2014
