If Looks Could Kill Read Free Page B

long. Everybody knew that Chris wrote at night. It seemed appropriate, after all, a mystery writer keeping such odd hours. And it wasn't like you couldn't get hold of Chris during the day if you really needed to. She was usually up and around the town bright and early. Girl just never had needed sleep much, from all accounts.
    Sometimes she kept the shades up so that neighbors could tap a hello on the way by. Sometimes, like tonight, she kept them down to signify that she was preoccupied.
    She was preoccupied all right. She just wasn't writing.
    Chris was pacing. From one end of the open, hardwood floor to the other as the stereo gave forth Metallica and the seagull-and-Cessna mobile that hung from the balcony swung lazily above her head, she measured her steps as carefully as she did her thoughts.
    The sense of relief at the chief's news hadn't lasted long. Even if he hadn't exactly hand-delivered disaster to her door, the danger was still there.
    She was going to have to call that St. Louis cop in the morning. She was going to have to call her editor, who had evidently gotten the notice about the possible murder even before Chief MacNamara, and had been leaving frantic messages on the machine for the last twenty-four hours.
    Trey Peterson didn't handle that kind of surprise well. Come to think of it, Trey didn't handle any kind of surprise well, which was why his voice had sounded so panicked on the answering machine.
    If he'd been thinking, he'd have realized that from a purely mercenary standpoint, if someone really had decided to act out one of Chris's books, it would do nothing but boost Chris's sales. The public relations department at Helm Carlson Publications would express public dismay, and then party when the doors were closed. Trey would be interviewed as a stand-in for his reclusive author, and the world would never question the distress in the handsome young editor's eyes. And within ten minutes the order would go out to reprint every one of Chris's back titles, with particular attention paid to the lucky winner of the atrocity look-alike contest.
    And Chris, her privacy so religiously protected through seven surprise best-sellers, could very well find her anonymity a quaint footnote in history. The press that had so long wondered about the mysterious author would have a great excuse to camp out at the St. Louis police headquarters, looking for leaks, casting about for C. J. Turner like diviners in search of water. Research departments would chug into high gear digging up every bit of trivia they could find about the mysterious recluse to go with the unfolding story. Eventually somebody would find his way to Pyrite.
    To her.
    Damn it, anyway.
    Chris took a turn through to her kitchen to pop a can of soda, and then headed back out into the living room to raise the sound level just a little on the CD player. She was overreacting, she knew it. It was just one call. One possible murder. One detective with maybe an overactive imagination.
    After all, Chris couldn't think of any reason someone would want to pull a stunt like that. She wasn't exactly Elvis, with impersonators showing up at nightclubs everywhere. The press usually relegated her to the eccentrics and oddballs file, and her readers had never struck her as the type to be quite so slavishly devoted they'd flatter her with imitation—at least, she didn't think so.
    The vast majority of letters she got from readers were sane, mostly polite, and often enough complimentary. Not one, even the ones from state penitentiaries, had ever expressed a desire to emulate her work. A few wanted to have her baby, and one particular man had expressed a desire to smell her shoes, but that wasn't exactly a class A felony. At least in most states.
    All right, so some of the people in her life weren't exactly running on all eight cylinders, but that didn't put them into the psychopathic pool either.
    The morning was going to come, and she was going to call that detective up in