LITMIR.BIZ

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him to give up all hope and just apathetically end his life.

      “I wouldn’t,” Logan said flatly.

      “Good to know,” his father murmured. “But if you did, if you put yourself in the place of someone who’d lost all hope and given up wanting to live,” Sean proposed, “how would you slash your wrists?”

      Logan honestly didn’t know what his father was getting at. “The usual way,” he answered with a careless shrug.

      “Show me,” Sean urged. Taking a pen out of his breast pocket, he handed it to Logan. “Pretend this is a knife. Show me how you’d go about ‘slashing’ your wrists if you were committing suicide.”

      With another, somewhat more pronounced shrug, Logan took the pen from his father and then, holding it in his right hand, traced a slightly slanted line from left to right across his left wrist. And then, changing hands, he took the pen into his left hand and reversed the process, “slashing” his right wrist from right to left with the imaginary knife. Both times the lines he created were slightly slanted, going from higher to lower.

      “Okay, consider them slashed,” Logan said, handing the pen back to his father. His curiosity had been piqued. “Now what?”

      “Now you’d bleed out,” Sean said matter-of-factly. “All right, keeping your methodical procedure in mind, I want you to take a look at Paula’s wrists,” he told both his son and his assistant. “What do you see?”

      Each wrist had a long, deep cut going across it. “Slashes,” Logan answered.

      Destiny narrowed her eyes, distancing herself from the actual person in the bathtub and focusing only on the victim’s wrists. She looked intently at the cuts that had caused her sister to die.

      After scrutinizing the two cuts, she felt no more enlightened than she had been at the outset.

      Shaking her head, she said, “I don’t—”

      “Look carefully,” Sean repeated, cutting her off.

      “I did,” she protested.

      And then she saw it, saw what Sean was trying to point out without actually physically doing it. Her eyes widened and she looked at him.

      “The slashes are both going in the same direction!” But there was more than just that, she realized. “And they’re both upside down.”

      Instead of slanting slightly at the top and then dipping down as it reached the opposite side, each cut seemed to go from the bottom to the top, left to right, on both wrists.

      “This is too awkward,” Destiny concluded, her excitement growing. And then she repeated what she had been maintaining all along. “Paula couldn’t have done this to herself. Someone else had to have done it to her.”

      He could see his father trying to spare his assistant and make her feel better, but there were other matters to consider, Logan thought.

      “There’s no sign of a struggle,” he pointed out, then continued, “There’s no huge amount of water along the perimeter of the old-fashioned tub, leaving the actual tub low, as if there’d been a wild, last-minute struggle. There are no outstanding bruises visible on the victim’s body, and her long, salon-applied nails all seem to be intact. They wouldn’t have been if she was fighting for her life.”

      “There wouldn’t be any struggle if the victim was drugged,” Sean told his son, his voice as mild as if he were discussing the garden section of the Sunday paper. Turning, Sean pointed to the wine goblet he had already photographed and that now stood, bagged, on the bathroom floor exactly where he had found it. “A simple analysis can tell us about that.”

      Logan still didn’t see that as proof. “A lot of suicides build up their courage with a drink first. Maybe the victim wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t experience a last-minute surge of regret that might cause her to stop what she was doing.” He looked at his father. “Despondence can do that to you.”

      “Maybe to you,” Destiny fired back. “But not to Paula. She did not kill herself. I’d stake my badge on it,” she insisted.

      “Besides,” Sean interjected, “there are the cuts to her wrists. Our killer obviously slipped up there.” Returning the items he’d taken out previously, as well as packing up the samples he’d taken into his case, Sean glanced at Destiny. “Are you absolutely sure your sister never mentioned this man’s name? Dropped a hint, used initials? Something like that?”

      To each suggestion, Destiny could only shake her head no. Each time she did so, she felt her frustration growing larger and larger.

      “No.”

      The truth of it was that despite her initial concerns, she’d been really hopeful that Paula was finally looking to settle into a lasting relationship. And due to that, she hadn’t wanted to cause any waves by hounding her sister for details.

      “And you didn’t press her?” Logan asked incredulously. What kind of a woman didn’t ask for details? he couldn’t help wondering. Was it because she was too wrapped up in her own love life? Was there some guy she was going to go running home to, to cry on his shoulder?

      From out of nowhere, Logan felt just the slightest prick of jealousy. He shrugged it off, thinking he was just frustrated because he’d had to break his date with Stacy.

      Destiny could only shrug impotently. “I figured she’d tell me when she was ready.”

      He couldn’t help staring at her. Was she for real? If this had been one of his sisters, the other two would have been all over her until she finally broke. The life expectancy of a secret in the household where he’d grown up had been about a day and a half—if the one with the secret was in a coma.

      “Wow, a woman with no curiosity,” he marveled, only half in jest. “I thought that was like, you know, an urban myth or something. Kind of like a unicorn,” he tagged on.

      If nothing else, the man was mixing his metaphors. He was also being colossally annoying.

      “Unicorns don’t wander around urban areas,” she pointed out, irritated at the detective’s flippant manner and not bothering to hide the fact, even if he was Sean’s son. Maybe he was adopted, she thought. Her eyes narrowed as she pinned him with a glare. “Are you going to take this seriously or not?” she asked.

      “I’m officially ruling this a murder,” Sean announced, interrupting what appeared to be an argument in the making—he knew for a fact that Logan didn’t like being challenged. “Don’t worry. He’ll take it seriously now,” he assured his assistant with a note of finality in his voice.

      She was overreacting. Her sister’s murder—just finding Paula this way—was making her lose her perspective. If she continued down this road, then she really would wind up being thrown off the case.

      And soon.

      At the very least, she wasn’t any good to anyone if she unraveled this way.

      Destiny took in a deep, shaky breath, getting herself back under control. Her spine snapped into place, ramrod straight.

      “Sorry,” she said to Sean.

      “You have nothing to be sorry about,” Sean told her warmly. Placing a fatherly arm around her shoulders, he gently escorted Destiny from the room.

      The sound of fresh activity was heard coming from the living room. The M.E.’s team had just arrived, pushing a gurney between them.

      Nodding at the duo, Sean said, “The victim’s in the bathtub. She’s had a preliminary workup and is ready to go.”

      “It’s a suicide, right?” one of the men asked, looking at the sheet attached to his clipboard. The latter was lying on top of the gurney.

      “No, it’s a homicide,” Logan corrected, answering for his father.

      He wasn’t oblivious to the

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