Read Most Likely to Die (A Kate Jasper Mystery) for Free Online

Gonzales.
    Detective Sergeant Gonzales was the only officer on the scene who wasn’t in uniform, a tall, dark, and handsome man with a Clark Gable mustache. In fact, he looked a bit like Clark Gable, on a morose day. And he was cool. Cool, thorough, and intelligent. He questioned me quietly and efficiently, establishing among other things that Hot Flash was my pinball machine. After about twenty minutes, he finished up with the one question I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask.
    “Ms. Jasper, in your opinion could Mr. Semling’s death have been an accident?”
    I clasped my hands together and took a quick breath. I wasn’t going to lie. But I wasn’t going to give him a straight “yes” or “no” either.
    “I don’t think so,” I told him finally.
    And then they let me go.
    Wayne reached over and squeezed my leg as I drove home from Sid’s. The squeeze seemed to say, I love and adore you and will always stand by you despite our differences. Then again, maybe it was just a squeeze. I reached over and squeezed back just in case.
    Communications got even better after we arrived home. Well, at least after we checked for feline marauders. Lately, neighborhood cats had been coming in through the cat door I had so expensively and laboriously installed for my own cat, C.C., coming in to spray the house. Desks, papers, towering bookshelves, a jungle of houseplants, pinball machine legs,
    swinging chairs. They had marked them all. I wasn’t sure if this was a war with C.C. or a war with us. But it was war. So when we came home, we always sniffed.
    C.C. came ambling in from the kitchen as Wayne and I were doing our bloodhound act.
    “Well, C.C.—” I began and then saw the orange streak of an enemy cat retreating through C.C.’s door.
    I sprinted out the front door, shaking my fists and making threatening noises as the orange cat loped across the redwood deck and over the fence. When I came back, panting for breath, C.C. just looked up at me, her smooth black coat unruffled, the little white patches of fur resembling a beret and goatee, respectively, in place. Then she squinted her eyes serenely and opened her little lizard lips to demand food.
    “You need assertiveness training,” I growled at her.
    “Unlike your mother,” Wayne muttered.
    I turned on him.
    “Unlike your mother who is brave and intelligent as well as beautiful and funny,” he went on quickly. Then he opened his arms.
    Ah, nonverbal communication.
    We held each other for what seemed like hours but was probably only minutes, feeling each other’s heat and heartbeats and smelling each other’s scents. When Wayne ran his gentle hand down my back I began to cry. And then I began to think. Always a mistake, thinking when you’re crying.
    “Craig,” I snuffled.
    “What?” Wayne objected, releasing me so suddenly from the warm enclosure of his arms that I would have fallen backwards if not for a quick back step I’d learned in tai chi. I wondered for an instant if the Master had ever used the back step for a similar purpose.
    “Craig.” I repeated my ex-husband’s name stubbornly, watching Wayne’s brows lower over his eyes like curtains.
    Rock curtains. “He knows more about pinball machines than any other human I know. He’ll know if Hot Flash could have malfunctioned.”
    Wayne straightened his shoulders, closed his eyes completely, and took a long, cleansing breath. As I watched, part of me wanted to scream at him for his attempt to return to reason and another part of me wanted to hug him some more because he was trying. And this was the man I was going to marry.
    “Fine,” he said finally, his voice low and unemotional. “Why don’t you call him?”
    “All right,” I answered and reached out to hold him again.
    But he had already turned and walked away.
    “Hot Flash, huh?” Craig said thoughtfully a few minutes later over the phone. I’d told him everything I could remember of the machine’s behavior from the time it left my closet