Read Annie Seymour 01-Sacred Cows for Free Online Page B

line. I wasn’t Barbie, and I wasn’t about to get sucked in by my mother’s feeble matchmaking attempts.
    “You know I’m seeing Tom.” She had never met Tom and didn’t consider him a viable catch. She kept telling me if he was going to marry me, he would have already asked. I didn’t tell her I didn’t need to get married. I enjoy living alone. I make my own hours, I don’t have to think about anyone but myself; it’s not a bad gig. I was old enough to be so set in my ways that if I did meet someone I wanted to cohabitate with, it would be more annoying than anything else.
    “Do me this favor, please, Anne?” I knew she was serious when she didn’t call me “Annie.” “It will be a lovely evening, and you don’t have enough of those.”
    How did she know? I fought back the urge to say something snide. Too bad I couldn’t do that when I was talking to Marty about Dick.
    “Okay, okay. I’ll see you then.”
    I hung up and turned back to my pizza. It was only moderately cold and still damned good, with a lot of garlic. It was probably a good thing Tom wasn’t coming over, he wouldn’t be able to stand the smell of me.
    T HE PAPER SCREAMED death the next morning on the doorstep. I scanned the story, everything was in order, no editor had screwed anything up. I hate it when that happens. My eyes rested on Melissa’s picture. I hadn’t seen it, Dick had gotten it somehow, I hadn’t even asked. She was pretty, very pretty. I could see how the girl at Atticus would have envied her. Long, sweeping dark hair pulled away from her face to accentuate bright eyes, straight nose, wide mouth that sported straight white teeth. Her neck was long, swanlike, like Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina.
    I rubbed my own short neck absently as I put the paper down. Having a face to go with the name was important, but it made my job harder. I was going to have to ask the questions no one wanted to hear about a lovely young woman who had a secret life.
    While I ate my bowl of Cheerios, I thought about what I needed to do to follow up. The McGee Corporation was first and foremost. I had to find out what that was, who the guy was Melissa saw that night, and what had gone so wrong. I also needed to get it on the record how she really died.
    Tom’s revelation about Melissa’s death was only preliminary; the autopsy was scheduled for this afternoon and the cause of death would be made official in the medical examiner’s report.
    I shuddered, thinking about the autopsy. When I die, I don’t want some doctor sawing into my body, taking me apart. I only hope I go naturally, when I’m very old and senile enough not to have any sense of what’s happening.
    I took another look at Melissa’s picture. The indignity of what they were going to do to her body was second only to the indignity someone had already wrought. I could only hope that she fought, fought hard, and managed to break some skin.
    Dick was sitting at my desk when I got in. I scowled at him. “What are you doing?”
    “My terminal crashed.”
    “So reboot.”
    “No, it really crashed. The hard drive went.”
    Our computers were several years old, the software not much newer. We played musical chairs as keyboards, monitors, and hard drives were replaced. This was the first time someone landed in my space, and just my luck, it was Dickie Boy.
    “Just because we’re working on this story together doesn’t mean you can sit at my desk,” I snapped, maybe a little too harshly, but he didn’t seem to notice.
    “I talked to New York about the McGee Corporation.”
    When, I wanted to ask. I had barely had enough time for my cereal this morning, and we had both worked late last night. Maybe Dick had more hours in the day than the rest of us. Or maybe had less of a life. No, that couldn’t be it. No one had less of a life than me.
    “I have a friend in Albany,” he continued, and that answered my question. Good to have friends in convenient places. Maybe Dick wasn’t going