LITMIR.BIZ

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detectives the ability to work in isolation. The high wall kept the dead woman’s situation from both offending the delicate sensibilities and feeding the prurient interests of neighbors, media, and onlookers. A mourning dove sat in the branches above them, cooing a morose sigh to complement the scene.

      From the woman’s ice-cold body and complete rigor, she had apparently lain there all night, unseen, until staff had arrived to escort her to her first appointment of the day and had found her.

      The woman’s own home had killed her. Someone had cut the extralong cord to the squat kegerator, then peeled the wires inside the cord away from one another. A black-coated one had been snaked up the side of the metal screen door as far as it would reach, about three-quarters of the height. Its end had been stripped to the bare wire and wound firmly around one of the curlicues—quite visible in the daylight but tough to see in the dark, and Maggie assumed it would have been dark. The clothing told her the woman had come from work or some professional event, and the days had grown short. Tired, approaching her own door in the night, she would not have noticed the black wire.

      Maggie noted the motion-sensor floodlight over the door, but it either wasn’t functioning or had a light sensor so that it didn’t come on during the day, because it didn’t light up now.

      From this same plug cord, the killer had taken the white-coated wire and connected it to a metal grate with the proportions of an undersized welcome mat. This he placed on the concrete slab in front of the door.

      Then all he had to do was plug the cord back into the wall . . . and wait.

      Jack Renner, homicide detective with more secrets than most of his suspects, had materialized at her elbow without a sound. It made her start, but not as much as it used to. Jack was tall, dark, decidedly not handsome, and a killer. She knew that and yet told no one, a fact that, even after six months, still astounded her when she woke to it each morning. “I get it,” he said aloud. “When she stepped on the grounded plate and then touched the handle, her body completed the circuit.”

      His partner, Thomas Riley, stared down at the body. “I’d expect more . . . more. Wouldn’t she, like, burst into flames?” Maggie raised one eyebrow at him, and his fair skin colored until he protested: “Well, we had a guy on a construction site who got tangled in a live wire, and he wound up practically cut in half.”

      “She’s got the mark on her hand, and she’ll probably have a similar scorch on one or both of her feet,” Maggie said. They couldn’t move or examine the body until an investigator from the Medical Examiner’s office arrived. “That’s fairly typical. Electrocutions can vary quite a bit, depending on how much power and where it goes. Frankly, it seems like an iffy method of murder.”

      Jack said, “Maybe. Wearing those probably helped.” He gestured to the woman’s fashionable shoes. “Thin soles, no rubber. Plus it rained last night.”

      Maggie examined the grate and the concrete slab without touching it, though the fire department had already pulled the plug from the outlet. The surface had sagged over the years, caving until grime accumulated in its shallow depth, providing the perfect resting spot for the grate. “It was already dirty, so she didn’t notice the grate against the dark area. He could have even brushed some leaves over to disguise it. But wouldn’t it have been, like, humming? How did it not set the house on fire?”

      “They’re not touching—the screen door and the grate.” Riley stepped closer and pointed to the door’s sill, two inches above the ground. “Each one alone is static, perfectly safe until—”

      “Until she grabs the screen door handle and completes the circuit.”

      “Exactly. Then she dies, gravity takes over, her body falls back, her hand pulls away. The circuit is broken, and the door goes back to being a mere door. No fire, no sparking, no wildly zinging electric meter. Kind of ingenious, really.” He caught her look. “Don’t glare. It’s, um, definitely different. Iffy, like you said. If that light worked and she noticed the wires. If the leaves blew away so she wondered why there was a metal grate in front of her door. If she had been wearing tennis shoes, or felt some static just before she touched the latch, or if some unlucky UPS guy came to drop off a package—assuming she left the outer gate unlocked during the day, anyone could have wandered in here—or if the outlet had a ground fault interrupter, it might not have worked.”

      Maggie glanced toward the covered outlet under which the cord lay among the scattered leaves. After nearly being blown up a few weeks earlier, she knew everything she had ever wanted to know about ground fault interrupters. “Frost-free refrigerators don’t plug into outlets with GFIs because of the freezing-warming cycles. And aren’t they two-twenty?”

      “A small one like that, I don’t know,” Riley said. “Even one-ten could have killed her, what with the wetness, thin shoes, no gloves, and at her age her heart might not be that great any more. She’s sixty-two, eight years older than me, and my doc’s already giving me a hard time about cholesterol and coronary arteries. So electrocution might have seemed a pretty safe bet, as methods of murder go.”

      “Please don’t sound so admiring,” Maggie said without meaning it. By now, she knew Thomas Riley better than that.

      He continued as if she hadn’t spoken, still thinking the scenario through. “Even if it didn’t work, he wasn’t out a lot of work or effort. He didn’t have to enter the house or bring anything with him except wire strippers and this metal grate, which—correct me if I’m wrong, Miss CSI—doesn’t seem to have a spot on it wide enough to get a decent print from.”

      Maggie looked again at the latticework of metal strips, none more than perhaps an eighth inch wide. “Probably not, no, especially after the rain.”

      “Or the plug?”

      “Rubber covered and exposed to the elements? Unlikely. I’ll swab for contact DNA, but if he wore gloves—”

      “And he’s an idiot if he didn’t. So he doesn’t set up a slam dunk but then he doesn’t leave us any clues, either. Unless our dead lady has surveillance cameras set up, and I don’t see any. Or if the neighbors saw someone dipping into this yard, and they haven’t even poked their heads out to see what all the cop cars are for, so I’m not too optimistic.”

      “The perfect murder?” Maggie wondered.

      “There’s no such thing,” Jack said. And he, of course, would know.

      * * *

      Within a half hour both the ME investigators and the search warrant arrived. It never ceased to amaze Maggie how finding a dead body on the stoop was not considered sufficient probable cause to enter a home, but there it was, and in any case she had been too busy with the scene to be in much of a hurry.

      The kegerator fridge did not yield any fingerprints, not even with superglue—only a lot of water marks and dirt. Ditto for the outlet and the decorative grill of the screen door, where the black wire had been attached. The white one had been snaked along the edge of the house in the crack between the foundation and the concrete stoop, and accumulated dirt in the crack helped hide the white rubber coating. In terms of fingerprints, the dirt scarcely mattered, since the wires were too narrow for any usable latents, but she collected the length anyway, planning to take a much closer look at it in her lab. She did the same with the metal grate. The blanket of leaves, charming in their reds and browns and golds, made her nervous. The killer could have dropped his glove or his wallet or his business card on his way out and they might miss it in all that debris. But she didn’t particularly want to rake the entire yard, either.

      Meanwhile the detectives took the keys from the dead woman’s hand and confirmed that the fob did, indeed, unlock a newish sedan parked at the curb. The front seats were tidy, but the rear ones held a variety of papers, folders, and brochures, all having slid around willy-nilly until no order could be detected. Three empty paper coffee cups, each rimmed with the same dark red lipstick as on the face of the victim, sat on the floorboard in front of the passenger’s seat. The trunk held only a spare tire and an unopened set of jumper cables. Maggie photographed all of this but left it

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