Love Can Be Murder

friends had turned on her under interrogation. "Why doesn't anyone believe me? I didn't kill Deke—there's a murderer out there somewhere! And B.J. found a .38 slug in a tree near where I was running."
    "The slug could have been there for ages," Maynard said calmly.
    "Someone left a snake in my bed last night."
    "Chief Davis informed me of your report."
    "And?"
    He sighed. "Frankly, Ms. Francisco, you could have planted that snake yourself to divert attention from you as a suspect."
    Her mouth watered to mention Jimmy Scaggs, but at this point, she was afraid it would only lead to the fact that she'd pushed Sheena into the street, and where would that leave her? Besides, Jimmy didn't have a motive for killing Deke...not as much as some other people ... not as much as she did.
    "Let us do our job, Ms. Francisco. I'm convinced as soon as the forensic results are back, we'll be making an arrest. My guess is that'll be happening about Friday. Do you have any plans for Friday, Ms. Francisco?"
    "N-no."
    "Good. Meanwhile, stay away from Mona Black. You've got enough trouble as it is."
    She disconnected the call with trembling hands and wondered if she had gone a little mad. Maybe the trauma of finding Deke and attending the funeral was just now catching up to her.
    Her phone rang, and it was B.J. She answered and tried to inject a note of normalcy into her voice.
    "What's up?" he asked. "How did it go with your ex-mother-in-law?"
    She told him what had happened at Mona's and the conversation with Maynard.
    "Are you sure of the meaning of this rattle?" he asked, sounding dubious.
    "Jules told me that the ason is used only by priests and priestesses."
    "Maybe in the old days," he said. "Now you can probably buy them online."
    "It would explain some other things," she argued. "Like Deke's aversion to animals, for instance—maybe he saw her behead one too many chickens. And then there's Mona's general weirdness."
    The silence on the line told her that her argument was weak, at best. "Maybe Maynard's right," he said casually. "Maybe you should just lie low for a few days. Go to work, stay out of your mother-in-law's way." He cleared his throat. "Or maybe you should go home and get some rest."
    "Are you forgetting that someone put a snake in my bed?"
    He was quiet again. "Look, I've been thinking. Maybe Chief Davis is right about how the snake got into your bedroom...it could happen."
    Her heart bumped against her chest. "Okay." So he thought she was nuts, too.
    "Try to relax and I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"
    "Sure," she mumbled, then disconnected the call. She felt ridiculously let down that he didn't believe her, although she wasn't sure what she was asking him to believe. She hugged herself and headed toward the store, her rock in the storm. If Maynard made good on his threat, she had only two days of freedom left to get her affairs in order.

Chapter Twenty-seven

    The taste might come back to haunt you...

    BY THE TIME SHE LEFT the store the following day, Penny was starting to think that B.J. wasn't coming back to Mojo. He hadn't called, nor had he returned her calls. Her mind began to weave wild stories—maybe he was working undercover for the cops, building a case against her. Or maybe he was like Marie's "Kirk," a phantom too-good-to-be-true con man who went from town to town looking for adventure and easy women, then moved on when things became too complicated.
    The latter seemed far more likely.
    She took a circuitous route home and wound her way through the voodoo festivalgoers, ever watchful for a stray news camera. Tomorrow, Friday, would be the last day of the festival—thank God. Not that things would be getting back to normal, not for her anyway.
    Gloria had called her with one bit of good news: The DNA from the blood spatters on her clothing had come back as animal blood—chicken blood, to be exact. As soon as she heard Gloria say the words, Penny remembered having walked by the peristil when an unlucky chicken had been getting its head whacked off. In the darkness, she hadn't realized that she'd been sprayed with the blood. She shuddered, still sure that it had been Mona behind the eerie skeletal mask.
    But, Gloria had added, with Penny's fingerprints on both murder weapons, the link to the voodoo doll, and the fact that she'd found the body...
    "I have the names of some good criminal attorneys," Gloria had said quietly. "You should prepare yourself."
    And Penny was trying to; she did, after all, have