floor near Martin’s right arm. That’s what I heard fall. It must have rolled off the table.
She heard herself utter Martin’s name as she took a step toward him.
She wasn’t surprised—not really—when a dark figure straightened up from behind the cooking island and moved toward her. It was more like a confirmation of what her terror had already told her. Something in his right hand. A gun? No. Yes! A gun with something attached to it. A gun with a silencer.
“Please!” She saw one of her hands float up in front of her face. “Please!” Not me! Not me! Not yet!
She barely heard the sput! of the gun as the bullet ripped through tissue and bone, between her breasts, into her heart, a leaden missile tumbling and tearing through her world, her life, ending her past, her future, everything.
She was still alive on the floor, beyond pain but not horror, as the man with the gun momentarily bent over Martin, then delicately stepped over her, careful not to get blood on his shoes, and continued toward the door.
For an instant she glimpsed the expression on the face of the monster who had taken all that she had and was. Him! He was so calm, smiling contentedly, like a simple workman who’d accomplished a routine and necessary task.
He glanced down at her with faint curiosity, then obviously dismissed her as dead.
He wasn’t wrong, only a few seconds early.
2
Flash!
Fedderman blinked as yet another photo was shot and the auto winder on the camera whirred like a miniature blender. The crime scene unit was all over the apartment, photographing, luminoling, vacuuming, plucking with tweezers.
The Elzners didn’t seem to mind the intrusion. Or the carnage in the kitchen. Not even what had been done to them.
Sudden death did that to people. In the midst of all the horror he’d seen during his time in the NYPD, Fedderman had often thought that was the single mercy.
“About done with these two?” his partner, Pearl, asked the ME, a self-important, meticulously groomed little man named Nift, who, if his life had taken another direction, might have had a film career playing Napoleon. He’d been fussing over the bodies for the last fifteen minutes, giving Pearl and Fedderman some first impressions.
“Sure. You can diddle with them awhile now. Just be sure and zip up when you’re finished.”
A nasty Napoleon.
Fedderman watched Pearl step hard on Nift’s instep, perhaps deliberately, as she moved toward Martin Elzner’s body. Those comfortable-looking black shoes of hers, with the two-inch heels to make her appear taller than her five-foot-one stature, could be dangerous.
Nift winced and jerked backward, almost kicking away the tuna can on the kitchen floor.
“Try not to step in any blood,” Pearl said.
Then she ignored Nift entirely as she bent down and gingerly pried a Walther semiautomatic handgun from Elzner’s dead fingers, then used a pencil inserted in the barrel to transfer the gun to a plastic evidence bag.
Nift glared at her and made for the door, taking his sick sense of humor with him and not looking back. One thing Fedderman knew about Detective Pearl Kasner was that she didn’t take any crap from anybody, not even Napoleon. It was the character trait that had gotten her into trouble and sidelined her career. It was why Fedderman liked her but figured she wasn’t going to be his partner much longer. Probably this time next year she’d be driving a cab or demonstrating perfume in Macy’s.
She was a looker, Fedderman thought, with the great rack and nice ass, and could be an actress or model if she were taller. Searching dark eyes, wavy black hair, turned-up nose, a way about her. Fedderman sometimes mused that if he were younger, unmarried, didn’t have trouble getting it up sometimes, didn’t have bad breath, a chronically upset stomach, and wasn’t balding and thirty pounds overweight, he might make a play for her.
Pearl handed one of the techs the evidence bag with the gun, glancing at Fedderman as if she knew what he was thinking.
She knows. They were partners. Had been for months, since Pearl’s troubles began. Neither of them was getting a bargain, and they both knew it. That was the idea. If they got tired of each other’s company, that was tough shit. Like with the couple on the kitchen floor.
Homicide had been called in after the radio car uniforms arrived at the scene, called by a next-door neighbor who noticed what looked like a bullet hole in her kitchen wall. When the super had let them in, they discovered the hole was indeed made by a bullet. It had gone through Jan Elzner, then the wall separating the Elzner apartment from the adjacent unit. The uniforms backed out and secured the scene.
Pearl and Fedderman had questioned the tenants on either side of, and above and below, the Elzners. None of them remembered hearing anything like a gunshot, but then Nift had said the killings occurred sometime between two and four in the morning. Sleep was deepest then. Or was supposed to be. Fedderman knew that when people were awake at that time, for whatever reason, terrible things could happen.
He glanced around at the carnage, feeling his stomach kick even after all the years, all he’d seen. He looked at the kitchen table. “How do you figure the groceries? It looks like one or both the Elzners had just come back from shopping and they were putting away what they bought.”
Pearl gave him one of her sloe-eyed dark looks. “At three in the morning? In their pajamas and nightgown?”
“It doesn’t make sense now, I know. But maybe they shopped earlier and forgot to put stuff away, then remembered and got up and were finishing the job when they started arguing. Hubby got the gun and did Wifey, then himself. It could happen in the real world.”
“That would be our world?”
Fedderman didn’t want to get into some kind of metaphysical conversation with Pearl. “So whadda we tell Captain Egan, murder-suicide?”
“I don’t like telling the prick anything.”
“Pearl…”
“Yeah, yeah…that sure looks like what it was, murder-suicide. Stemming from the pressures of the big city and what comes of marital bliss.”
Fedderman breathed easier. She wasn’t going to buck the system and cause problems. He had enough problems.
“But it isn’t complete.”
“Nothing’s ever complete,” Fedderman said, “but we gotta go with the evidence. Two dead bodies. And what will no doubt be the weapon still in Hubby’s hand, powder burns around the hole in his head. It appears he shot the wife, realized what a shit deed he did, then killed himself. The honorable thing. Murder-suicide. Crime solving being on a kinda assembly-line basis with new crimes always demanding our attention, we chalk this one up and move on to the next problem coming down the line.”
“Move on but not up,” Pearl said.
Fedderman knew what she meant. Even if somehow she kept her job in the NYPD, she wasn’t going any higher. Promotions were not for Pearl.
She
