Dipped, Stripped, and Dead Read Online Free

at what must have been my look of total, bewildered surprise, he explained. “I did that to my mom till I was three.
People thought she was crazy. She recorded me speaking, and Dad said it was her doing voices.”
    I groaned. I could imagine E doing this to me for another six months or more.
    “Can he have the Sprite?”
    “Sure,” I said, and he opened the can and gave it to E. Considering that E and I had mostly been drinking water with our pancakes, a Sprite was a rare treat and if E didn’t say thank you, he graced the policeman with a broad grin.
    “So, you’re Ms. Dare?” he said, turning to me, after a final smile at my son.
    “Dyce Dare,” I said.
    “Like . . . playing dice?”
    “No, like Candyce . With a Y . I was . . .” I was not about to tell a total stranger the story of my birth. “I was born in a candy store. Unexpected. Mom went into labor.” I wasn’t about to explain that Mom and Dad had had such a huge fight after the ultrasound showing I was a girl that Mom had left Dad and they were meeting in the candy store to discuss making up. Nor that the fight had been about names, because Mom wanted to call me Agatha and Dad wanted to call me Sherlockia. Nor would I, even under torture, reveal that my middle name was Chocolat. Only Ben knew that, and only because my mom had told him. “So Mom wanted to call me Candy, but Dad added the C and the E , and I go by Dyce.”
    He made a face, half grimace, half grin. “My father called me Castor. I go by Cas.” He offered me a massive, square hand. “Cas Wolfe. I’m one of two senior serious-crimes investigators in Goldport.” He nodded toward the Dumpster. “We don’t get many of these. Not this bad.”
    I shook his hand. It was hard and firm and squeezed enough to let me know he could crush my hand—without his actually doing it. “It is . . .” I said. “It is a murder, then?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It may very
well be just inappropriate disposal of a corpse, but when people go to this kind of trouble . . .” He shrugged.
    I nodded. “Like those corpses thrown into the shark aquarium last year,” I said.
    “Exactly like that,” he said.
    “Turned out some woman was pushing guys she seduced into the tank, didn’t it?” I asked, dimly remembering the solution of the case that had kept the pages of the local paper full of lurid and unlikely pictures. I confess I always skimmed murder news, mostly because Mom and Dad discussed every case from the moment the first signs of crime were discovered. Normally I was tired of the whole thing long before the murderer was caught.
    “Something like that,” Officer Wolfe said, with a sin-inducing grin. “Though my team wasn’t on that case.”
    I became aware that he was almost bent over to talk to me—to keep his head at a level with mine. I gestured vaguely toward the passenger seat. “If you want to sit down.”
    Once more I was graced with the expressive, mobile grin that made the blush start again, upward, on a path from my belly button to my cheeks. Oh, pipe down, Dyce , I told myself. Man like that will be drowning in girls from the college every weekend—and maybe during the week, too. What would he want with the almost-thirty-year-old, divorced mother of one who is the queen of pancakes?
    By the time I’d talked myself down—or a convincing counterfeit thereof—he had walked around the car, opened the passenger door, and gotten in. “Thank you,” he said. “Not that I have much more to go over.” He looked over the clipboard. “Officer Giles seems to have asked you all the relevant questions. You were . . . looking for furniture?” he said.
    “It’s not illegal,” I said, defensively. “I refinish it. It’s what I do for a living.”
    He shrugged. “I’m sure if I dug through the books I’d
find some ordinance against looking through Dumpsters for discarded furniture. Probably a public health measure. But the thing is that I have no