Read The Dead and the Beautiful for Free Online

couple more and she was at the open doors. A cop on the pool patio talking to another moved slightly and Nikki saw what held everyone’s attention.
    Another dead body. Her fourth, but who was counting?
    A now all-too-familiar tightness gripped her chest. She saw the back of Ryan’s head over the top of a lounge chair; he had nice hair. She took another step, then another. She heard Alison go out the front door. She needed to go with Alison. She needed to be with her. But she couldn’t help herself. She walked out the glass doors, right past the cops.
    Ryan Melton was lying on his back in a lounge chaise, facing the pool, his back to the French doors leading into the house. He was shirtless and wearing a pair of surfer-type swim shorts. Just lying there, sunbathing. There was even an icy glass of something on the table beside him. And a laptop. A pair of Oakley sunglasses on the white stone, paved deck, near his chair. There was a second lounge chaise on the other side of the table. A white towel lay folded on top of it.
    Someone had begun to put up little sign tents to mark evidence in the photographs that would be taken of the crime scene.
    Nikki stared at Ryan’s face. The only indication that he was dead was his unseeing blue eyes. No one had closed them yet.
    â€œWhat the hell are you doing out here?”
    Nikki felt Dombrowski’s hand grab her wrist at the same time that she heard his voice.
    â€œDon’t you know the definition of a crime scene by now?” he asked irritably, dragging her across the deck, through the open doors into the living room.
    â€œHe didn’t drown,” she said, feeling a little light-headed. It was a relief to know that just because she’d already seen a murder victim up close, she wasn’t immune to it. “How was he killed?” she asked softly, already going over in her mind what she had seen. The details. It was all in the details, she’d learned: the drink in the glass, still cold, the sunglasses on the deck, the laptop and scattered magazines.
    â€œYou know I can’t tell you that. We haven’t even finished with the crime scene yet.” He halted at the front door. “Go home, Nikki.”
    She frowned. “I’m going.”
    Alison was sitting in her van, hands in her lap, staring out at nothing. Nikki snapped out of her another-dead-body fugue, confirmed that Alison was okay to drive, and promised she’d meet her at Jeremy’s. Hopefully, he’d be finished with his patient soon and be able to come home. Then she took Stan and Ollie, still on their leashes, to her own car. She put them both in a single kennel in the back; neither of them was happy with her. “Just a quick stop at Jeremy’s,” she told them. “Then home.” She gave each a scratch behind the ears, closed the kennel door and then the hatchback.
    Nikki was just climbing into the driver’s seat when her phone vibrated, yet again. She knew who was calling her. Only one person dialed her again and again until she answered. Then she realized the call might be important, given the circumstances here on Mulholland. She fumbled for her phone in her bag, found it, and raised it to her ear. “Mother?”
    â€œIt’s about time, Nicolette. I called you twice already.”
    Nikki got into her Prius. “I was kind of busy. You still on the set?” It was only three-thirty in the afternoon. Even though Victoria was always on set by six a.m. the days she was shooting, she was rarely home before six p.m. She barely had time to eat and had to go to bed so she could be back up by four a.m. the next morning. Which was exactly why Nikki had been against her mother taking this part to begin with. It was too much.
    â€œWe shut down early today. Drama on the set.”
    Nikki gripped the steering wheel with her free hand. She had a pretty good guess what the drama was about, although that might not have been the word she