A Body to Spare (The Odelia Grey Mysteries) by Sue Ann Jaffarian

had no doubt it was about Zach Finch and my involvement, since every now and then one of them would look my way. Had Clark not been in the mix, I would have thought for sure that Dev and Fehring were discussing me as the top suspect. I also wondered if Clark was picking up anything useful. He might once have been a cop and he might be a close friend of Dev’s, but the bottom line was that he was no longer law enforcement in the legal sense. Whatever they told him would only stretch so far.
    “So what was that pow-wow about last night?” I asked Clark as I placed a mug of fresh coffee in front of him.
    “What pow-wow?” Clark asked before taking a large gulp of the hot coffee without so much as a flinch. His palate must be made of the same stuff used to line oven mitts.
    I grabbed a mug of my own and joined him at the kitchen table. “I saw you, Dev, and Fehring clustered together in a corner last night.”
    “Just swapping war stories, sis.” He looked around the kitchen. “Got any eggs on ya?”
    I blew over my coffee and took a small sip before getting up. “If you wanted breakfast, you just had to ask,” I told him. I went over to the fridge and pulled out a carton of eggs. “Omelet? Fried? Scrambled? Name your poison.”
    “Scrambled with some onions and mushrooms, if you’ve got them.” He gave me a wide smile. “Any bacon in that fridge?”
    I turned to my brother. “Did you see a Denny’s sign in front of this house?” Instantly, I was reminded of Special Agent Shipman’s snotty remark to me about Starbucks. Oh well, what can I say? I’m a plagiarist.
    In response, Clark’s smile turned upside down. “Mom only has high-fiber cereal and soy milk on hand for breakfast.”
    “And that’s why she’s skinny and we’re not,” I shot at him as I grabbed a few veggies, bacon, and some cheddar cheese from the fridge to go along with the eggs. “Sourdough good for your toast? And we only have turkey bacon.” Clark nodded and winked at me. He knew I wasn’t really peeved at being pressed into service as a short-order cook. I loved spending time with my half brother, even if it did mean wielding a spatula. I chopped some onion and sliced a couple mushrooms, throwing them into a skillet sizzling with a bit of butter and crushed basil. Before I cracked an egg into a bowl, I zeroed my eyes in on Clark’s. “Eggs for information.”
    “What information?” he asked.
    “What were you, Dev, and Fehring talking about last night?” I tapped the egg gently on the side of the glass bowl, emptied its contents into it, and grabbed another egg. “Two or three eggs?”
    “Just two, sis.” He patted his middle. “Gotta watch my girlish figure.” My brother wasn’t skinny, but neither was he fat. When we first met, he was battling a hefty bulge around his middle. Since then he’d lost his gut and had settled into a stocky but solid physique that he maintained with regular exercise and semi-healthy eating. “Oh, what the hell,” he said, “let’s live dangerously. Make it three.”
    I gave the cooking veggies a stir and beat the eggs with a little milk, hot sauce, salt, and pepper. The bacon was the precooked microwavable kind. I placed a few slices on a paper towel and slipped it into the microwave. As soon as I had the eggs in the pan, all I had to do was poke the button to get it going.
    A few minutes later, I placed Clark’s breakfast in front of him, refreshed his coffee, and joined him again at the table. While I’d been cooking, Muffin came in from the bedroom, where she’d been having her first nap of the morning, and said hello to Clark. The small animal loved attention and my brother, and she had whined until he’d put her on his lap and stroked her until his food came. When he put her back down on the floor, she went in search of a suitable place for her next nap. Being a much-loved and well-fed cat in our house was exhausting business requiring no fewer than a dozen long naps a