T. Parker: Red Light

“How does he know what his partner touched?”

“He goes with the obvious.”

Merci followed this one as far as she could. One path, many forks, one fork at a time. “Nobody plans a murder but leaves his fingerprints on the silverware. If we find a load of good prints, that means two guys, not working together. Two sets of footsteps. Two guys. Just like Coates said.”

Zamorra looked down at the body outline like he’d never seen it before. He cocked his head like one of Mike’s bloodhounds. Uncocked it, kept staring.

“What.”

“I’m pulling out walls, putting in windows.”

She said nothing. She figured it was like Hess seeing things that weren’t there.

“You know,” he said, “just trying to get past my own bad ideas.”

“I know about that.”

“Two guys. Just like Coates said,” he repeated her words verbatim. Something in the tone told her he was lending credence to their earwitness for the first time.

Stoned or not.

“But why?” he asked. “Why kill her?”

“I’ve been thinking about that ever since I saw the money wallet. In fact, I wondered if that might be part of the answer.”

“You lost me.”

“He’s aware of us. He left the money to make us wonder.”

“That’s far-fetched.” Zamorra looked at her uncomfortably, then away.

She felt the rage blast through her, clear and clean as the winter sun coming through the slider.

She didn’t say it, but what she was thinking was: I got my partner killed because I thought a psychopath was too stupid to come after me. Far-fetched. Bastard used my gun on Hess. Almost got myself killed, too, and sometimes I still want to trade places with him.

With his back still toward her Zamorra shook his head, then said something she didn’t hear.

She tried to keep the anger from her voice, something she was never much good at. “Say it again, Paul. I’m a big girl. We can’t work together if we can’t talk.”

“I said you were right,” he said gently. “Nothing seems far-fetched from a guy who just shot a girl in the heart.”

She could see him in profile against the window, looking at her from the side of his bloodshot eye.

“Sorry,” said Merci.

“Accepted. I am, too.”

“I’m sorrier.”

“No, I’m much, much sorrier.”

She was relieved he actually got her joke. She smiled to herself and sighed. “Sometimes I think I got problems, until I look at the cases I work.”

“Me, too. Then I look at Janine.”

Janine was his wife.

They stood between the kitchen and the dining room, Merci reading her notes on the Coates interview. “This bothers me,” she said. “Some kind of struggle here, according to Coates. First a thump, then another, but a sustained one. He said it was a minute or two later. I figure the first thump was Aubrey hitting the floor. If a struggle ensued, who the hell was it between?”

“Coates said it was like furniture being moved.”

The cabinet under the sink was open, the door handle screws were half torn out of the wood. The second drawer was all the way out, the runners were bent so bad it wouldn’t close.

Merci knelt, looked at the damage. “Lots of strength, to pull screws and bend metal. But Aubrey’s peacefully laid to rest twelve feet away, two minutes earlier, if we believe Coates. No visible bruises or abrasions, nothing under her fingernails, nothing on the body that points to a fight. So who’s our killer fighting with in here, his conscience?”

“There’s our two Man Friends again.”

“The Man Friends weren’t here at the same time, if Coates is right.”

Zamorra looked at her long, then shrugged. “What he says doesn’t fit the evidence. The thing is, you get loaded and your time-space judgment goes straight to hell. You think twenty minutes is going by while you have meaningful thoughts. Really, five seconds went by while you tripped out.”

Merci considered the distance from body to kitchen. “Even if Coates was off, even if the struggle happened right after the first thump, it wasn’t Aubrey in a struggle. Shot in the heart and fighting for her life, she doesn’t lose one drop of blood on the kitchen floor?”

“Where’s that leave us? Someone else up here when Man Friend Number One left?”

“It’s possible.”

“A third guy. Wasn’t invited to dinner. Nobody heard him come or go. Hid in the bedroom? Jumped out to rescue her when she got shot?”

Merci was listening but didn’t answer. She was flipping through to the CSI report, looking for reference to a good shoe print that Lynda Coiner found on the kitchen floor. There were three prints left by the same shoe, with a back-slanting series of treads that looked to be like big commas. The tails tapered toward the heel. The heel had a central circle with spokes leading outward to the edge.

O’Brien had photographed it in reflected light, then lifted a big print using fingerprint dust and a sheet of white paper. They could match an impression if the detectives could come up with a suspect shoe. It looked to be a size twelve, probably not a dress shoe due to he pronounced tread pattern. And very likely a soft sole and not a hard one because of the clarity of the print left on the hardwood floor.

Zamorra was on the same page. “This shoe print,” he said. “It doesn’t fit with what Coates said either. The big guy, the size twelve, was supposed to be a hard-soled shoe or boot. Mr. Snappy-Dressed Businessman coming home to his family. I think our earwitness little too stoned to keep things straight.”

“He liked her,” Merci said. “He’s trying to help her by helping us.”

“If he wants to help us he could just admit he’s a little foggy on some of this. You know, a half-assed witness is worse than none at all sometimes.”

Merci just shook her head. “I know that. But I want to know happened here. I mean I really want to know.”

Zamorra knelt and looked at the loose handle of the still-open sink cabinet, then to the drawer that was pulled out and stranded on its bent runners.

“I do too,” he said, almost like it surprised him.

Merci wondered what it must be like to investigate a murder while your wife was dying. There was a time when she had believed she could use her will to keep people from dying, but now she didn’t. Zamorra didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d believe in that. It was naïve.

What she came up with was that Paul must want to run away times, to make his own hurt stop. When Merci was in her greatest pain — after Hess and her mom died, after a monster named Colesceau had almost killed her, right after Tim, Jr., was born — she pictured a small house on a Mexican beach, with bright purple bougainvillea potted on the deck and herself sitting there in the shade.

She imagined that beach house in Mexico now, then she was in Aubrey Whittaker’s kitchen. What did Aubrey Whittaker picture, when the paying guys were doing their thing? A house with a beach? Eternal fire?

“The fingerprints,” Paul said, like he’d come to a conclusion. “And her little black book. There’s going to be a straight line in there, somewhere. And it’s going to point right at this creep.”

Merci sat with Tim on her lap and let Clark clear the dishes. The house was cold this December, and she could feel the draft on her ankles through her socks. Past the windows she could see, in the beams of the yard lights, the big patio with the baby’s trike and the barbecue, the cats on the wall and the orange trees beyond. The lot was surrounded by the grove and the grove was surrounded by housing you couldn’t see until you walked right up to them. She’d rent house for its privacy, and because it was cheap.