Dressed to Kill by Campbell Black

with her this morning. I could have gone to the museum. Then to lunch.
    And none of this would have happened and I wouldn’t be sitting here, sitting here trying to think of anything else in the world except that one godawful fact, her death, the way she died . . .
    “I’m really going to try,” Marino said.
    The boy caught a scent of some kind of deodorant mingled with sweat. He rubbed his forehead. It was so damned hot in this precinct office. Maybe somebody could open a window, turn the thermostat down, something. A current flows through the gas from electrode to electrode, forming an arc. He shut his eyes a moment against the overhead lights. Thinking electrodes won’t bring her back. Thinking tungsten and argon atoms won’t bring her back from wherever she is.
    Both of them are dead.
    It hadn’t occurred to him before, and now it did with something of a start. Both of his parents were dead, which meant there was only Mike. Mike. But Mike didn’t like him and he didn’t like Mike. That equality, like a well-grounded formula, pleased him for a second. Then he thought what Mike would be going through at the morgue and he felt sorry for the guy.
    He stared at Marino. “You got any leads?”
    The cop hesitated, then shrugged. “We’ve got a witness, I think.”
    I think, Peter wondered, what was that supposed to mean?
    “Who?” he asked.
    “That young lady over there.” Marino pointed across the desks of the central office. “She claims she saw the killer.”
    Peter looked over the room. The young woman was still leafing through the books, laboriously turning pages. She appeared pale, nervous, finishing one cigarette only to light another. He watched her for a time. The third kind is called instant-start. Right. He had it. He remembered it. But then the other thing intruded again, assailed him, and he had to turn his face away from the cop and shut his eyes and grit his jaw. The cop touched the sleeve of his jacket.
    “Listen, I can get somebody to take you home, Peter. You don’t need to wait around here.”
    “I’ll wait,” Peter said.
    “Yeah. I guess your father won’t be much longer.”
    “He’s not my father,” Peter said. Tears formed in his eyes. He tried to blink them away, wondering why he was betrayed by his own physical responses. “He isn’t my father.”
    “No?” Marino looked puzzled a moment.
    “He’s my mother’s husband. There’s a difference.”
    “Your stepfather, then.”
    Peter said nothing. Stepfather seemed like a dirty word to him, like something out of a fairy tale, something soaked in a terrible cruelty. But Mike wasn’t cruel, just uncaring. Just cold and distant and numb.
    “You sure you don’t want a Coke?” Marino asked awkwardly. “We got this ancient machine that still dispenses Cokes in bottles. You hardly ever see them like that these days. Cans, always in cans. It doesn’t taste the same to me unless it comes in a bottle.”
    Peter understood. The cop was trying to make him feel easy, trying to divert his mind from the fact of the murder. It was a gesture, a kind one, but meaningless anyhow. Peter shook his head and said, “I’m not thirsty.”
    Marino got up from the bench. He patted Peter on the shoulder. Cheer up, that was what the touch meant. Oh, Christ, the boy thought. Sweet suffering Christ, why did this have to happen? And then the pain came up from below again, a black thing moving through him like a cancer shadow. Absently, he looked across the room, watching Marino wander from one desk to another, talking with some cops. One of them was laughing at something, a gesture, a sound, that struck Peter as being all wrong, out of place. He stared back towards the girl. She was sitting with her head in her hands now, a cigarette burning on her lips, her purse hanging from the back of her chair. No more pain, he thought. Being sad is useless.
    She’d told him that once and he remembered it now. The day they knew his father had been killed in