Read Online Cold Cut Murder: Book Three in The Darling Deli Series by Patti Benning - Free Book Online

saw it happen and called an ambulance. They guy who attacked him ran away when they shouted.”
    “Does anyone know who stabbed him or why?” she asked, her mind racing.
    “No. The person was wearing a ski mask, and Marcus was too out of it to say anything.”
    “Was there a red rose at the scene of the crime?”
    “Well… yes,” Martha said after a pause. “The guy dropped one when he ran away. How did you know that?”
    “Because David got attacked by a man in a ski mask the other day, and the guy left a rose there as well,” she said grimly. “Which means that the attacker must be the same person.”
    “Is he okay? What happened?”
    Moira related the story, and then asked her friend to give her best wishes to Marcus, and to let her know when he was out of surgery. She was still in shock when she got off the phone, and lay in bed for a long time without closing her eyes. Someone had attacked David and Marcus and had killed Jason Platte. All three were men that she knew to varying degrees, but in such a small town, it could be coincidence. Especially since as she owned the only deli in town, she’d seen most people at least once.
    Unable to sleep, she got up and wandered down to the kitchen for a midnight snack. She worried about David and Marcus, and couldn’t help feeling that she was somehow responsible for the fact that they had both been attacked. As she raised a glass of water to her lips, she glanced out the kitchen window and froze. Under the streetlight in front of her house a car was idling. She could see its exhaust rising in steamy plumes.
    She didn’t recognize the car and it was impossible to see who was in it from this angle, but something about it made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Even though there were plenty of other houses on the street, she couldn’t shake the feeling that whoever was in the car was watching hers.
    Moira shut off the kitchen light and pulled a chair up to the window, confident that no one would be able to see inside her dark house from that far away. Water and cookie forgotten, she watched the car, her discomfort rising with each minute that passed. No one would just sit there and waste fuel for that long without a good reason, would they? Even if someone was watching her house, it couldn’t be so terribly interesting as to justify them sitting there for so long in the middle of the night.
    Should I call the police? she wondered. As far as she knew, it wasn’t illegal for whoever was in the car to just sit there. For all she knew, it was someone on a road trip who had simply pulled onto a quiet street to take a nap before continuing on in a few hours. The police wouldn’t appreciate the waste of their time, and the car wasn’t really hurting anyone, so once her eyes began to droop she left her vigil at the window and trudged upstairs to bed.
    In the morning she had a couple of texts from Martha telling her that Marcus was out of surgery and was recovering well. Glad that he was going to be okay, she sent a text back asking if it would be all right to call him at the hospital later. Then she phoned David, who sounded much better this morning than he had the day before, though his cheery mood didn’t last long when she told him what had happened the night before.
    “I’ll call the detective that’s working my case and let him know as soon as we get off the phone,” he told her. “Though I’m sure he’s aware of it, it won’t hurt to cross-check the facts that we have. Whoever is doing this has proved their willingness to kill, and I don’t want to have to find out the hard way who they have their sights on next.”
    This reminded Moira of the car that had been watching her house the night before. It seemed like a foggy dream now that it was morning with sunlight streaming in the window, and she thought that she had probably been overreacting last night. She hadn’t exactly been in her right mind, after all. She didn’t tell David about it, but