Hot Money Read Free Page A

curved arm of driftwood. As the light skimmed across the surface and back again, Molly’s heart suddenly began to thud.
    “There,” she whispered. “Move it back a little. See?”
    What at first seemed to be no more than seaweed moved sensuously on the water’s surface. It was a distinctive three-carat diamond that finally caught the light, broke it into a hundred shimmering rays and removed any lingering doubts about the exact nature of Molly’s discovery.
    “Oh, my God,” Molly whispered, her gaze fixed on the glittering ring that she herself had once coveted at a charity auction. Though her stomach was pitching acid, she forced herself to look again, just to be sure.
    Michael’s arm circled her waist. The flashlight wavered in his grasp and the light pooled at her feet, instead of on the water. “Are you okay?” he asked.
    “As well as anyone would be after discovering another body,” she said in an aggrieved tone. “For someone not even remotely interested in signing on for homicide investigations, I have a nasty suspicion I’ve seen almost as many murder victims as you have in the past few months.”
    “Don’t you think you’re jumping to conclusions? We have no way of knowing whether the woman was murdered until we get the body out of there.”
    “Trust me,” Molly said. “Tessa Lafferty would never willingly ruin her hairdo, to say nothing of her designer gown. If she felt ill, she would go home, send the dress to the secondhand store on consignment, and then climb between her two-hundred-dollar sheets and die. If she’s in that water, it’s because someone heaved her into the bay.”
    “I know that name. Wasn’t it on the invitation to this shindig?” Recognition spread across his face, then dismay. “Isn’t Tessa Lafferty the woman Liza described as an idiot?”
    She glared at him. “What are you suggesting?”
    “Nothing. I’m just asking, purely for purposes of clarification, if it’s the same woman.”
    “It is,” Molly conceded, then jumped to her friend’s defense. “But Liza would never kill her just because she didn’t want some Latin singer that Liza has the hots for to sing at this bash.”
    “Did I say she would?”
    “No, but I know how you think.”
    “Do you really? How is that?”
    “Like a cop.”
    “Then I suppose you won’t mind obeying an official police request.”
    She regarded him warily. “Which is?”
    “Go into the house and call the police.”
    “You are the police.”
    “Not here. Will you just go make that call?”
    “Only if you promise that Liza will not be on the list of suspects you turn over to the Miami police.”
    “Sweetheart, you and I are on that list of suspects. Now move it.”
    Molly didn’t waste time arguing that they provided tidy alibis for each other. She was more concerned with warning Liza that inviting a homicide detective to a charity function was just about the same as inviting trouble.

CHAPTER
TWO
    With Michael’s hand clamped firmly around her wrist, Molly was more or less obligated to leave the murder investigation in the hands of the proper authorities, members of the Miami Police Department who arrived with sirens blaring. Damn the man, beyond insisting that everyone remain on the grounds and seeing to it that the security guards enforced the rule by barricading the routes to the parking lot, he didn’t ask a single question of anyone himself.
    “It’s not my jurisdiction,” he said for the tenth time when Molly mentioned that a few casual inquiries surely wouldn’t offend the Miami police.
    What she didn’t say was that asking a few questions would help to keep her mind off the image of Tessa’s body being untangled from the mangroves, then placed rather indelicately on the bank awaiting further examination by the medical examiner before its removal from the grounds. Tessa hadn’t been in the water long enough for her body to be distorted or ravaged by fish as it might have been had she remained