3 Requiem at Christmas Read Free Page A

to look in the back, just in case
there was another person or perhaps an injured dog. In the backseat on the
passenger side there was a leather satchel and sticking out of it was a musical
score. She couldn’t see the full title but it began with REQU. There was also a
Las Vegas newspaper, and a torn bag in thick creamy
paper that said Winter’s Candies and
Confections and a few pieces of red and green rectangular foil on the seat
and floor, and the odor of chocolate in the air which blended sickeningly with
the smell of blood. The dead man must have had quite a sweet tooth and no
regard for his upholstery, because some of the wrappers had left chocolate
smears on the leather. Indeed there seemed to be some chocolate wafers on the
floor and seat. What had he been doing? Unwrapping his
chocolates to eat them all at once? Or opening and then dropping them if he
didn’t like the flavor?
    That was crazy. No one would be playing with candy while
having a knife fight in a blizzard. There had to be some other explanation but
she couldn’t think of it. Couldn’t think period. Her
pulse was beating so hard that she feared her eyeballs might actually leave
their sockets.
    Juliet shivered and it wasn’t just with cold, though that
was getting to be a danger all its own since she was losing feeling in her
extremities.
    She shouldn’t interfere with a murder scene but…. Juliet
reached in and switched off the engine. There was no smell of gasoline but why
take chances on there being a fire if there was some damage to the car that she
couldn’t see? And the man was past caring about the weather. A part of her
wanted to look for a wallet, to put a name to the body, but the dead man was
very bloody and there was gore all over his sporran, the only place where he
might carry a wallet on his person.
    Instead she forced the door closed and tried to think what
to do. Her brain seemed frozen and she wondered if she was slipping into
hypothermia.
    For starters, she would get her gun. Then she would try
calling for help. She had been warned by Garret that reception was spotty up in
the mountains, but that was the first thing to do.
    With the wind at her back, she made good time back to her
car, but the driver-side door refused to open. She ended up going around to the
passenger’s side of the car and, after digging away some of the snow, managed
to get the door open far enough to crawl inside. The heat was a benediction and
after a moment her teeth stopped chattering though her eyes continued to tear.
That might not have been because of the cold.
    Even with gloves, her fingers were numb and barely able to
open her purse, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t get a signal on her phone.
She also had her “baby Glock” but admitted her hands were so cold that she
probably wouldn’t be able to release the safety catch, let alone fire it, even
if danger knocked on her door.
    And she really, really needed to go to the bathroom. She
wanted that more than she did her next breath.
    “W-w-well h-h-hell.”
    The Jaguar was blocking the road. The keys were in it, but
if it had been possible to pull it back onto the lane, surely the killer would
have taken the car, even if it meant being encumbered by a corpse. Or he could
have tossed the body in a ravine. Whatever, he surely would have taken the car
instead of risking death in the storm had it been possible to move the car.
    Assuming she managed it, going off and just leaving the body
didn’t feel right, but Juliet did not want to be encumbered with a corpse
either. Especially not a bloody one that didn’t have an
official death certificate explaining that the knife wasn’t hers. The
police got upset when people were murdered and you took the body with you. They
often blamed whoever had the body in their possession until something better
came along.
    Of course, they also blamed people who left the scene
without making a statement, she thought groggily. Not that she had any chance
of getting