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to. She had been, and would remain, dead in his heart. But his father…
    Winnifred didn’t count either. He’d plannedto marry her, but he didn’t love her. He had hoped that they would get along splendidly. After all, he could find no fault with her. She was beautiful, refined, and she would make a fine mother for the children they would have. But in truth, she was little more than a stranger. But his father…
    “…obvious suicide,” he had heard next, then: “There’s even a note.” And the “note” had been shoved in front of Damian’s face.
    When he was able to focus on the words, he read, “I tried to get over it, Damian, but I can’t. Forgive me.”
    He had snatched the note out of the policeman’s hand and read it again…and again. It looked like his father’s writing, if a bit shaky. The note also looked like it had been stuffed into something—a pocket, or a fist.
    “Where did you get this?” he’d asked.
    “On the desk—in the center of it, actually. Hard to miss.”
    “There is fresh stationery in that desk,” Damian had pointed out. “Why would this note be crumpled if it was written just before…?”
    He’d been unable to finish the sentence. The policeman merely shrugged.
    But another suggested, “He could have been carrying that note around for days while he made up his mind.”
    “And brought his own rope, too? That rope didn’t come from this office.”
    “Then obviously he did bring it along” was the easy reply. “Look, Mr. Rutledge, I know it ain’t easy to accept when someone you know takes his own life like this, but it happens. Doyou know what it was that he couldn’t get over, as the note says?”
    “No. My father didn’t have any reason to kill himself,” Damian had insisted.
    “Well…looks like he felt differently.”
    Damian’s eyes had turned a wintery gray, pale as shadowed snow. “You’re just going to accept that as fact?” he demanded. “You’re not even going to look into the possibility that he was murdered?”
    “Murdered?” The policeman had been condescending. “There’s easier and much quicker ways to kill yourself than dangling from a rope. Know how long it takes to actually die from hanging? It ain’t quick unless the neck snaps, and his didn’t. And there’s easier and much quicker ways for murder to be done than by hanging.”
    “Unless you want it to look like suicide.”
    “A bullet in the head would have done the trick if that were the case. Look, do you see any signs of struggle here? And there is nothing to indicate that your father’s hands had been tied so he couldn’t prevent the hanging. How many men do you think it would take to hang a man his size if he didn’t want to be hung? One or two wouldn’t have managed it. Three or more? Why? What motive? Did your father keep money here? Anything of value missing that you can see? Did he have any enemies who hated him enough to kill him?”
    The answers were No and No and No, but Damian hadn’t bothered to say so. The policemen had drawn their conclusions based on the evidence at hand. He couldn’t blame them forsettling for the obvious explanation. Why should they dig any deeper just on his say-so when they could finish their paperwork on this crime and go on to the next one? Trying to convince them that this was a crime that needed further investigation would be a waste of his time and theirs.
    Still, he had tried. He’d spent two more hours trying, until the coroner had shown up and each one of the policemen had come up with an excuse to leave. Sure, they’d look into it, they had assured him, but he hadn’t believed it for a minute. A sop for the grieving relative. At that point they would have said anything just to get out of there.
    It had been midnight before Damian had entered the town house he shared with his father. It was a huge, old mansion, too big for just the two of them, which was why Damian had never moved out when he had come of age. He and his