LITMIR.BIZ

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left the table and examined the holes in the walls from the bullets that had gone through Jan Elzner. Two holes. One wide and jagged, struck by a misshapen, nearly spent bullet that had passed through too much tissue or bone. The other hole was as circular and neat as if it had been made by a drill bit, from the bullet that had made it through to the next apartment and led to the discovery of the bodies.

      Standing there in the kitchen, Quinn felt something stir deep in his gut. The crime scene didn’t feel like murder-suicide. The roughly outlined positions of the bodies, the half-finished mundane task of putting away groceries. No foresight or even rudimentary planning was evident here.

      Hubby was supposedly the shooter. If the wife had been interrupted by sudden, violent death while putting away groceries, her body probably wouldn’t have dropped where it had. And Hubby wouldn’t have been in such a rush to kill himself that he’d knock a can of tuna off the table.

      Of course it was all possible.

      But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like murder. And an unlikely, perhaps senseless one. An unsuspecting couple living out their domestic lives, and some evil bastard decided they’d had enough and ended it for them, maybe for no reason other than so he could watch them die. Evil. It wasn’t a word Quinn shied away from, because he’d learned long ago it was a palpable thing that never quite left where it visited. And it was here, in the Elzners’ kitchen, his old and familiar enemy.

      Do something about this. You can do something about who did this if you don’t screw up.

      Quinn realized he’d turned a corner and was assuming the killer wasn’t Martin Elzner.

      It was the kind of gut assumption any old cop knew not to ignore.

      Quinn went into the Elzners’ bedroom. Everything was neat in there except for the unmade bed, obviously slept in by two. There was a set of women’s pink slippers on the floor near the bed, the kind without heels that you could slide your feet right into. Mules, he thought they were called. But maybe not.

      He made a mental note to check and see if Jan Elzner’s corpse had bare feet. If so, it suggested she might have awakened suddenly, maybe heard something in the kitchen that alarmed her, and hurried out there, in too much of a rush even to step into her slippers. Which would mean she’d been in bed alone at the time, or she would have alerted her husband.

      Interesting, the slippers.

      Mules?

      Quinn nosed around in the bedroom some more, then the bathroom, finding nothing of use or interest.

      He returned to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The usual. A carton of milk, now gone bad. Some half-used condiments, a six-pack of diet Coke, two cans of Budweiser. In the door shelves were a bottle of orange juice, an unopened bottle of Chablis, a jar of pickles, and two plastic Evian bottles, one of which was opened and half-empty. And something else: a jar of the same kind of gourmet strawberry jam that was on the kitchen table.

      Quinn used a dry dish towel wadded on the sink counter to open the jar. It was almost full of jam.

      After screwing the lid back on and replacing the jar, he shut the refrigerator door and tossed the towel back on the counter, near a glass vase containing a small bouquet of neglected yellow roses that had died not long after the Elzners. Then he opened the freezer compartment at the top of the refrigerator.

      Three frozen dinners—free-range chicken. How free were they, really? Some frozen meat wrapped in white butcher paper. A rubber-lidded dish containing chocolate-chip cookies. Quinn leaned forward and peered into the icemaker basket—full of cubes.

      The apartment was warm and the cool air tumbling from the freezer felt good, but he shut the narrow white door and heard the refrigerator motor immediately start to hum. A couple of decorative magnets were stuck to the door—a Statue of Liberty, an unfurled American flag—but there was nothing pinned beneath them. No messages. Such as, who might try to kill us.

      Quinn figured he’d seen enough. He left the apartment, locking the door behind him and replacing the yellow crime scene tape. He was glad to get away from the smell. Even dry, so much blood had a sickly sweet coppery scent that brought back the wrong kind of memories. Too many crime scenes where death had been violent and gory. Years of cleaning up the worst kinds of messes that people made of their lives and other lives. The woman in Queens who’d slashed her sleeping husband’s throat with a razor blade, then mutilated his nude body. The Lower East Side man who’d shot his wife’s lover, then three members of her family, then himself. So many years of that kind of thing. What had it done to him that he hadn’t noticed? Didn’t suspect?

      And why did he miss it so?

      What had made May leave him so soon after he’d been discredited and lost his livelihood? Had she doubted his innocence from the beginning? Or had she seen something in him that was beyond his awareness?

      While he was waiting for the elevator, he examined his reflection in its polished steel door. He looked okay, he decided, with his fresh shave, white collar, and dark tie. A homicide cop on the job.

      Except for the shield. There wasn’t one.

      The elevator arrived with a muted thumping and strumming of cables.

      When the gleaming door slid open, a uniformed cop Quinn knew as Mercer stepped out into the hall. A big, square-shouldered guy with squinty eyes and a ruddy complexion. Quinn had only been in the man’s company a few times, years ago, and wasn’t sure if he’d be recognized.

      Mercer nodded to him and politely stepped aside so Quinn could enter the elevator. Quinn nodded back, studying Mercer’s eyes.

      They were good cop’s eyes, neutral as Switzerland.

      7

      Marcy Graham absolutely and without a doubt had to try on the soft brown leather jacket, and that was what led to the problem.

      She knew her husband, Ron, was arguing against buying the jacket not because he disliked it, but because he disliked paying for it. All this talk of it putting weight on her was absurd. Her image in the mirror of Tambien’s exclusive women’s shop confirmed it. The tapered cut of the three-quarter-length jacket made her look slender. Not that I have a weight problem. And the price was unbelievable. Half off because it was out of season.

      But later in the years, when the weather was cooler, she could wear such a coat anywhere. What she liked about it was its simplicity. She could accessorize it, dress it up or down. With her blue eyes, her light brown hair, and her unblemished complexion, the soft color of the leather was just right.

      “It makes you look ten pounds lighter,” whispered the salesclerk when Ron wandered away to deposit his chewing gum in a receptacle that had once been an ashtray. “Not that you need it, but still….”

      Marcy nodded, not daring to answer, because Ron was already striding back to where she and the clerk were standing before the full-length mirrors that were angled so you could see three of yourself.

      The salesclerk was a slight, handsome man in a blue chalk-striped suit of European cut. He had brown eyes, with long lashes, and black hair slicked back to a knot at the base of his neck. He also wore rings, gold and silver, on two fingers of each hand, and a dangling diamond earring. Marcy knew the earring and rings were enough for Ron not to like him.

      “Look at yourself from all sides,” the salesclerk urged, nudging Marcy closer to the triptych mirrors. “The coat lends you a certain curvaciousness, doesn’t it?” He winked not at Marcy but at Ron.

      “Don’t try including me in bullshitting your customers,” Ron said. He was smiling, but Marcy, and probably the salesclerk, knew he was serious.

      The clerk smiled at Marcy. “It’s the truth, of course, about what the jacket does for you.”

      “It’s a subjective thing,” Ron said.

      “Or it’s the lines of the jacket complementing the lines of the woman. Or maybe the other way

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