Strike a Pose

A campaign shoot was supposed to be a celebration. By Wednesday morning, it was a crime scene.

I called in a forty-year favor to get Bruno Marchetti behind a camera again. He had not shot a campaign in eleven years, and I wanted him for Lawrence Jung's comeback, because a young man who has been cleared of murder three times deserves a photographer who does not care what the newspapers said. Bruno said yes before I finished asking. That should have told me something.

By the end of day one, Bruno had pulled the entire collection off the rack and told Lawrence, in front of the whole crew, that his work had no point of view. I was four feet away behind a garment rack. He saw me and kept going.

By day two, Bruno was dead on the studio floor.

Detective Moreno has a building full of people who wanted to be somewhere else that night. A digital tech. A messenger. A stylist who was humiliated in front of eleven people. A man from Bruno's past who walked in for eleven minutes and left him hollowed out. Every one of them has a reason, and every one of them has a story. And every story, I noticed, has been arranged just so.

I have solved four murders by letting people mistake me for a deaf old woman who cannot find the elevator. I know what a coincidence feels like. This is not one.

Somebody has spent a long time putting my life in order for me, one funeral at a time. This time, the price of finding out may be somebody I am not prepared to lose.

Pippa and I intend to pay it anyway.

Strike a Pose is Book 5 of the Royal Griffen Hotel Mysteries. Clean, witty, and best read in order, starting with Haute Mess.