Time of Death by Shirley Kennett Page A

from the box on the front porch. After slipping them on—a process accompanied by grunting on Schultz’s part as he bent over far enough to reach his feet—they went into the house. The front door had been knocked off its hinges. He noticed that the lock on the door was a lock in name only. It looked capable of keeping out a lamb, and that was probably stretching it. In the living room, a uniformed officer sat next to a distraught man on a tired couch that dated from the 1950s. Schultz and Julia, his ex-wife, had bought one exactly like it secondhand when they had furnished their first apartment. Next to the couch there was a blonde wood end table with spindly legs set out at an angle.
    Check. Had that one, too.
    Schultz looked around for the starburst wall clock and the green bubble glass hanging lamp.
    Must be in other rooms.
    The officer came over to them.
    “Detective Schultz,” the woman said. “I guess you caught another one.”
    “Yeah,” Schultz said. The officer was a new face. “Name?”
    “Officer Ran Suhao, sir.”
    “Officer Ran, bring me up to speed.”
    “This is George Huber, the deceased’s fiancé. He’s the person who discovered the body. Mr. Huber visited the deceased tonight and later returned because he’d forgotten a book he meant to borrow. Marilee Baines is in the bathroom.” At the sound of Marilee’s name, Mr. Huber whimpered and buried his face in a handkerchief.
    Schultz pulled on gloves for the search. “Here,” he said, offering a pair to PJ. “Put these on. Keep your hands to yourself anyway.”
    Gloves appeared in her hand. “I carry my own now, thank you.” She headed down the hall and he scurried after her, frowning.
    Woman’s getting uppity.
    The officer followed them only as far as the bedroom door, so that she wouldn’t have to let Mr. Huber out of her sight. “The ME isn’t here yet, but the victim’s been dead less than an hour, if my opinion’s worth anything,” she said as they approached the bathroom.
    Schultz maneuvered himself in front of PJ. It wasn’t to protect her from viewing the unpleasant scene, but he didn’t want her accidentally messing with evidence. Just because she carried her own gloves didn’t mean she was one hundred percent reliable at a scene.
    The body drew his eyes the way the corpses always did. A naked woman was slumped to the floor of a shower stall. A wood-handled kitchen knife was buried to the hilt below her sternum. The ring finger on her left hand was missing, the whole length of it. Long wet hair was plastered to her skin, covering most of her face. The victim hadn’t gone to her death easily. There were bloody smears on the opaque shower door and on the fiberglass walls, where the water from the showerhead didn’t make contact. She’d tried to escape, but she was cornered.
    An attacker coming at her and nowhere to go.
    He closed his eyes for a moment, testing his intuition, letting the thread that would eventually connect him to the killer grope around blindly in the dark. There was a little tug on the line, but nothing he could grasp.
    “Ran, did anybody turn the water off in here?” Schultz said.
    “No, sir. It was off.”
    “Bathroom and shower doors open or closed? How about that bedroom window over there?”
    “All open when we arrived. Be sure to look at the back of the bathroom door, sir.”
    Schultz swung the door closed. On the back, in blood, there was a crude diagram of a heart with a knife stuck into it.
    “That’s obviously why we got the call on this murder,” PJ said. “It’s a direct reference to Arlan Merrett’s death. The knife in the heart, that’s the holdback.”
    “I’d say that’s jumping to conclusions. It could just as easily be a broken heart because of a jilted lover that has nothing to do with Arlan. This leads me to Mr. Huber, the fiancé out there.”
    PJ shrugged, as if to say he was entitled to his opinion, even though it was wrong.
    “Mr. Huber,” he said sharply. The