"Everyone sit down and shut up!" The command reverberated throughout the tastefully decorated room, immediately silencing the ungodly racket. It was seven a.m. on Saturday, June 5th, and Barrie Carpenter was pissed. Pissed that her beeper had gone off fifteen minutes before. Pissed that she'd had to roll out of a nice warm bed that was still occupied by her amorous significant other. To make it even worse, look what she was here for.

Four scantily dressed females and one tuxedo-clad man stood in an angry gaggle, the combined smells of liquor, stale perfume and nervous sweat creating a noxious cloud around them and clashing horribly with the Laura Ashley decor. They stopped arguing long enough to gape at the woman standing in the doorway to the family room, then turned back to each other once again, fingers pointing and accusations flying--a well-oiled family unit.

The two responding uniforms were standing off to one side of the melee, watching with barely contained laughter. It was quite an amusing scene, but not one that should have denied her Saturday morning nookie.

"Shit. Why me?" Barrie rolled her eyes skyward, then stepped into the fray and saw why she'd been called, her six foot three height advantage giving her a quick look at the dead man sprawled over the tasteful cherrywood dining room table in the adjacent room. Pushing apart two of the women, she inserted her body into the center of the disturbance, propelling each of the five into a seat in the casual sofa grouping that graced the room.

Cherree Harkness, a tiny brunette with a voice that eerily resembled a chimpanzee's primal scream, opened her mouth, ready to launch into another diatribe, but was silenced by a dark look from the amazon policewoman looming over her.

Pinning each one into their seat with that same look, Detective Barrie Carpenter stepped over to the dining room, checking out the semi-nude body of the man laid out upon it. While the detached part of her "cop" brain cataloged the dead body and it's obvious lack of trauma, the female part of her wept in remorse. They just didn't build guys that looked like this anymore, and it was a damned shame that Bobby Winter, Coulterville's most infamous resident, had become a rapidly cooling corpse.

She turned back to the room, motioning in the medical examiner with a wave, then turned to the two uniforms. With a few short questions she gleaned the obvious. There had been a party the night before, with Bobby Winter as the starring attraction. The question on the officer's minds right now was how in the hell he'd ended up dead in an overdecorated Victorian dining room.

Returning to the living room she faced her five suspects, five people that she had known and despised most of her life. "All right, where is she?"

They all knew who "she" was. Amanda Jenkins was supposed to get married today, but judging by the four half-drunk bridesmaids, one cooling corpse, and a very sober groom, there might be just a tiny hitch to the pending nuptials. The four women clammed up admirably, their previously angry expressions replaced by a bitchy iciness. They'd never narc on their best, most favorite friend, and especially not to someone like Barrie. Women like Amanda and Cherree didn't even recognize women like Barrie Carpenter, much less deign to speak to them. It was something that Barrie had gotten over long ago, but obviously that was not true of the twenty-five year old ex-cheerleaders.

Barrie smiled. This might be fun after all. She turned to Bob Argento, respected real estate mogul and groom-to-be. "Well Bob, where is she? We've got a dead stripper on our hands…and in your house, no less. I think I saw in the papers that your wedding was supposed to begin at ten. Any ideas?"

Bob smiled slowly, his icy gaze resting on each of the socialites. "There won't be any wedding. Ever. Whether she comes back or not." He shifted his eyes to Barrie.

"Just take them downtown Barrie. I don't want them sullying my home any longer. And get that piece of trash out of my dining room as soon as you can."

Barrie thought his control would hold, thought he'd be able to contain the anger that obviously hummed through his body. Then he smashed a fist down on the coffee table. "How dare she bring a stripper into my house. How dare all of you." The table rattled in the aftermath of his bout of rage.

Humming thoughtfully, Barrie surveyed them all. The bridesmaids were obviously holding something back…something big. As for Bob, well, he might just be protesting a tad too much. A little jaunt to the station might just do all of them some good.

And, she thought with a wicked little smile, it would get Captain Ross out of bed at this blasphemous hour too.