08 - December Dread by Jess Lourey Page A

than me, spoke. “We were just remembering how all three of us and Natalie received orange begonia plants from a secret admirer five summers ago. We were saying we’re grateful there was no orange begonia killer back then.” She looked at her shoes in embarrassment and then darted a glance toward the coffin. “Probably in poor taste to mention it. Events like this bring out my black humor.”
    “Remember how embarrassed we were to even tell one another about the flowers?” The woman speaking pushed her jeweled glasses up her nose. “We didn’t want anyone to know we were into online dating, and then it turned out all four of us were!”
    The short woman nodded. “What was that online service called? E something. E-love?”
    The third woman, who had been silent until now, smiled. “E-adore. It’s how I met my husband.”
    “Not me,” the woman with glasses said. “The most I got out of it were some lousy dates and that orange begonia.”
    “Tina, it wasn’t that bad!”
    The woman called Tina shrugged. She seemed to think it had been exactly that bad.
    “Did you ever find out who sent the flowers?” I asked, insinuating myself next to Mrs. Berns. I’d kept quiet until now, though I’d wanted to comment on the name of the dating service. E-adore sounded like a Winnie the Pooh character, not an online human grocery store.
    “No, though after we got to talking, we realized we’d all been matched with pretty much the same guys. There’s not a lot of choices in this part of the world. We figured we got the flowers from some guy who’d come across a begonia sale and was hedging his bets, but we never found out for sure.”
    Mrs. Berns nudged me. I followed her glance. Lynne Bankowski, Natalie’s fruity co-worker, was two feet away, staring down at the top of the coffin and seemed to be inching sideways toward us. “I’m really sorry about your loss,” I told the three women. “Could you do me a favor? Could you call me if you think of anything else out of place, something that might shed light on why Natalie was targeted?”
    They nodded and each accepted a piece of paper with my name and my mom’s phone number scribbled on it. Mrs. Berns and I turned to leave before Lynne reached us and pinned us in another odd conversation. We hadn’t gone three feet before I found myself face to face with Adam De Luca.
    “Hello,” I said.
    He screwed up his mouth in a distant, puzzled way, and then he placed my face with a name. “Mira! The one who told Briggs he was unformative. I told my editor the story when I called her later that night. Gave her a good laugh.”
    Chagrined, I introduced him and Mrs. Berns and then axed the small talk. That orange begonia story had gotten my blood humming. You can find out a lot by being in the right place at the right time, or by knowing who to talk to and simply asking. My encounter with Kent today was proof of that. So maybe Mrs. Berns was right, to a degree. Maybe we could uncover some helpful information without putting ourselves in danger or getting in the FBI’s way. We would be conduits of facts rather than investigators. “We heard today that the police believe Natalie knew the killer. Have you heard anything about that?”
    He scratched his chest absently. “I’ve heard that theory. I think it’s unlikely, unless it was a copycat killer and not the actual Candy Cane Killer who targeted her. The odds of one man knowing all of these women, across three states … ah shit.” He suddenly ducked his head like he didn’t want to be recognized.
    We turned around. Lynne Bankowski was staring at us, a short ten feet away.
    “Watch out for that one,” Mrs. Berns whispered to Adam. “She’s as sharp as a marble.”
    “She’s a death hound,” Adam said in agreement. “You encounter that animal in this line of work, unfortunately, people who are close to tragic death and want to profit off of it. Not in terms of money, of course, but fame. I’ve already