K Is for Killer

freezing. Her sandals were the type that always drive me insane, with thin leather straps coming up between the toes.
    She moved out onto the glassed-in porch, where she busied herself with a swaddled infant, which she lifted from a wicker carriage. She brought the infant to the kitchen table, sliding onto the bench seat. She bared her quite weensie left breast, deftly affixing the baby like some kind of milking apparatus. As far as I could tell, the child hadn't made a sound, but it may have emitted a signal audible only to its mother. Jack, the toddler, was probably off somewhere finger painting with the contents of his diaper.
    "I was hoping to see Lorna's cabin, but I didn't know if you had tenants in there at this point." I noticed Leda watched me carefully while I talked to him.
    "Cabin's empty. You can go on back if you want. There hasn't been a way to rent it since the body was found. Word gets out and nobody wants to touch it, especially the shape she was in." Burke held his nose with exaggerated distaste.
    Embarrassed, Leda said, "J.D.!" as if he'd made a rude noise with his butt.
    "It's the truth," he said. He opened the butcher's packet and took out a pillow of raw ground beef, which he plunked into the skillet on top of the sautéed onions. He began to break up the bulk meat with his spatula. I could still see the densely packed noodles of beef where the meat had emerged from the grinder. Looked like worms to me. The hot skillet was turning the bottom of the bulk ground beef from pale pink to gray. I'm giving up meat. I swear to God I am.
    "Can you remodel the place?"
    "Right now I don't have the bucks, and it probably wouldn't help. It's just a shack."
    "What was she paying?"
    "Three hundred a month. Might sound like a lot unless you compare it to other rentals in the area. It's really like a one-bedroom with a wood-burning stove I finally took out. People know a place is empty, and they'll steal you blind. They'll take all the lightbulbs if nothing else."
    I noticed that in typical landlord assessment, the "shack" had been elevated to a "one-bedroom apartment."
    "Did someone live there before she did?"
    "Nope. My parents used to own the property, and I inherited when Mom died, along with some other rentals on the far side of town. I met Lorna through some people at the plant where she worked. We got talking one afternoon, and she told me she was looking for a place with some privacy. She'd heard about the cabin and asked if she could see it. She fell in love with it. I told her, 'Look, it's a mess, but if you want to fix it up, it'd be fine with me.' She moved in two weeks later without really doing much."
    "Was she a party person?"
    "Not to my knowledge."
    "What about friends? Did she have a lot of people back there?"
    "I really couldn't say. It's way back in the back. There's like this little private dirt road going in off the side street. You want to see it, you probably ought to drive your car around and come in that way. Used to be a path between the two places, but we don't use it anymore, and it's overgrown by now. Most of the time, I didn't see if she had company or not because the foliage is so dense. Winters I might catch lights, but I never paid much attention."
    "Did you know she was hustling?"
    He looked at me blankly.
    "Turning tricks," Leda said.
    J.D. looked from her face to mine. "What she did was her business. I never considered it my concern." If he was startled by the revelation, it didn't show on his face. His mouth curved down in a display of skepticism while he poked at the cooking beef. "Where'd you hear about that?" he asked me.
    "From a vice detective. Apparently, a lot of hookers work the classy hotels where the high rollers hang out. Lorna had done out-call, but she upgraded to independent."
    "I guess I'll have to take your word for it."
    "So as far as you knew, she didn't bring clients here."
    "Why would she do that? You want to impress a fella, you'd hardly bring 'em back to some little shack in the woods. You'd be better off at the hotel. That way he'd get stuck for all the drinks and stuff."
    "That makes sense," I said. "I gather she was careful to keep her private life private, so she probably didn't like to mix the two, anyway. Tell me about the day you found her."
    "Wasn't me. It was someone else," he said. "I'd been out of town, up at Lake Nacimiento for a couple of weeks. I don't remember the exact timetable offhand. I got home, and I was taking care of some bills