the floor in a pool of congealing blood, face up but with her legs bent awkwardly to the side. Her grey pants were soiled from waist to knee, and her loose-fitting white blouse was drenched in blood so that it was hard to tell where the material bunching around her abdomen ended and her brutalized flesh began. The woman’s suit jacket lay crumpled and stained just beyond reach of her outstretched hand. Her head was cocked to the side and her lips were open, as if her final voice had fallen into silence as the door was closed, her eyes fixed in the direction of her assailant’s departure.
Miranda strode over to the telephone, stepping carefully past the blood and what seemed like a spreading sheet of water on the hardwood floor. She called in, then turned to Morgan, who was crouched beside the body, trying to avoid the seepage while he groped at her neck for a pulse.
“Not likely,” said Miranda. He twisted around. Catching the direction of his quizzical stare in her direction, she challenged, “What are you looking at?”
“There’s something moving under the desk.”
In spite of herself, Miranda flinched, then bent low and peered into the shadows at a mass of gristle and red throbbing against the wet floor. For a moment she could taste her own heart.
On her knees, careful to avoid blood and shards of broken glass, she crept forward, scooped her hand around a fish about the size of a large salmon fillet, and slid it forward into the light. It had leathery skin and the eyes were dull, but its mouth grasped at the air and its gills opened and closed in a deliberate rhythm. Whatever energy it might have had to thrash about was spent, but it was far from dead.
“It’s a Showa, Doitsu. No scales.”
“Good, Morgan. Here, put it in the bathroom sink or the toilet or somewhere.”
He took the red-and-white fish from her as if he were someone not used to holding a baby, resting its weight against his palm and forearm, while his other hand hovered, prepared to grasp firmly if his charge slid off to the side. “I’ll put it in the pond,” he said.
She rose to her feet. “No, not yet. It might be important here. Isn’t this a tidy mess? Literally. Blood all over, but neatly contained — carnage arranged with precision.”
“Miranda, I was downstairs when this happened! I should save the fish.” He glanced at the koi, which lay very still, resigned to its fate.
“No one thinks you did it, Morgan.”
“I was down in the cellar, I was in the den —”
“I’ll be a character witness if you need one.”
“I didn’t hear anything. Look at her. The woman was alive an hour ago.” He gazed at the fish lying listlessly in his hands. “It was eerie, how empty and quiet it was —”
“It’s not your fault, Morgan. “You’re not the guardian of the world. Do something with the damn fish before it dies on you, too.”
“My goodness,” he said as if his responsibility for the Showa’s mortality had only now sunk in. “Here.” He held the fish out to Miranda. “I’ll get a tub of pond water. Tap water would kill it. Chlorine and all that chemical stuff.”
“You look after it.” She surveyed the room for something to remove the slime from the Showa on her hands, which was more imagined than real since the fish had been virtually dry when she picked it up. She reached over and wiped her hands on Morgan’s shirt sleeve, over his bicep.
Morgan tightened his grip on the fish. Holding it directly in front of him, he backed out the study door and descended to the den, strode out the French doors, and found a blue plastic tub in the portico. He edged it with his feet over to the pond, set the Showa down on the grass, and filled one-third of the tub with pond water, then picked up the fish and gently deposited it in the tub. It seemed to revive immediately, indicating its revitalized condition by hovering perfectly still in the lucent water, moving only its pectoral fins in a slow, fanning motion, almost imperceptibly passing water in and out through its gills.
He carried the tub back into the den and placed it on the floor by the wingback chair, then sat in the chair so he could keep an eye on the fish and waited for activities to commence upstairs. He would listen, see what he heard.
After a few minutes, he realized he should be doing something. He could check the front door for forcible entry — no, he and Miranda had come in that way. He could check other rooms for signs of violence, but it was clear that the murder had occurred in the study. He walked back up the stairs with the Showa held out in front of him. How could a woman die such a grisly death two storeys above him? He looked up, he looked down. Maybe the old ceilings and floors were so thick that the drum rolls of hell would be muffled.
When he returned to the crime scene, Miranda was sitting comfortably in a leather desk chair, contemplating her surroundings.
Apart from a broken aquarium, everything in the room seemed in place. Morgan figured the fish must have been there, away from the pond, for observation. Maybe it was sick. If so, it was lucky they hadn’t put it back in the pond. Or maybe it was a bonding thing, and Griffin kept it in the study for company.
Morgan stared at the dead woman’s eyes, wishing he could capture what they had last seen, that he imagined was burned into her retinas, seared into the dead flesh of her brain. Despite the violence of the tableau presented by her seeping corpse, he thought she looked remarkably composed.
“What do you make of it?” he asked.
Miranda, too, was staring at the corpse. There wasn’t much either of them could do until the forensic team and the coroner arrived. A siren wailed in the distance. When Miranda called in, she had said the woman was dead, but there were sirens and flashing lights, anyway — the full regalia of murder.
There was no rug on the floor. Miranda remembered there had been a small rug between the desk and the door. She found it rolled neatly with its pad in the closet. When she spread it out in the hall, half expecting a clue of some sort, there was nothing.
Returning to the study, she squatted close to the corpse. She peered at Eleanor Drummond’s garish midriff. Taking a pen from the desk, she leaned over and drew soaked linen a little away from the torso. There was angry bruising around what she recognized as a sucking wound — deep, gaping, inflicted with considerable force, yet the blouse wasn’t torn, as if it had been carefully pulled aside.
“What do I make of it? Don’t know,” she answered at last.
Morgan asked Miranda for the keys to the car out front and walked away so abruptly, holding the blue tub with the Showa in front of him, that she didn’t think to inquire about where he was going.
Left alone with the dead woman, Miranda shifted in her ruminations to consider what she felt about Eleanor Drummond. Yesterday Griffin’s mistress had appeared so in control, entering a murder scene as if it existed to offset her own subtle elegance. She seemed as shallow as invisible makeup. Now, as a corpse, she was infinitely more complex.
Gazing at her, sprawled awkwardly with her legs twisted under as if she had been kneeling, with the wound in her gut leaking viscera and blood, Miranda was struck by the absurd poise the woman projected. Her hair wasn’t in the least dishevelled, her face was a tight mask of what could almost be taken for serenity, her hands from having clutched at her wound were smeared with blood, but her nails were perfectly manicured, not a cuticle askew. Miranda felt herself warming to Eleanor Drummond.
She
