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maybe I’d had three or four beers with my friends, so I guess I was a little buzzed and might have flown off the handle a bit. Hey, what married couple doesn’t go at it now and then?”
    “But you said earlier that you patched things up right away after you let some angry words fly, right? That you and your wife exchanged heated words for—what? Less than five minutes?”
    “Not even,” Alex said. Then he covered his mouth with one hand and nodded agreement. He had to bite down hard on his forefinger to keep from crying out or shouting with joy.
    Jesus Christ! I can’t believe it! The bitch is finally through fucking up my life!
    “When we first got married, you know, one promise we made to each other was we’d never go to bed angry at each other. No matter what problems we were dealing with, we promised to stay up—all night, if we had to—so we could work it out. So—yeah, I was pretty mad there for a moment, but once I calmed down and apologized, we made up.”
    “And that’s when your wife went to get some wine glasses from the cupboard? That’s when she fell?”
    Again, Alex nodded. He thought back on how he had arranged everything in the kitchen before calling the rescue unit and the police: the flipped-over chair, the broken wine glasses, the skid marks on the floor, and the position of Debbie’s body. He couldn’t help but wonder if there was anything he had overlooked, some tiny, telling detail which the cops, with their high-tech investigation equipment, would eventually discover.
    She had… had heated up some pizza for me. In the microwave. And we were going to have a glass of wine together, to—to—”
    He covered his face with his hands and once again feigned deep, wrenching sorrow. His shoulders shook as he wailed and uttered nearly incoherent words about how horrible things had turned out, how while he had sat at the kitchen table and started eating the pizza she had cooked for him, Debbie had dragged a chair over so she could reach down her special crystal wine glasses, which she kept on the top shelf in the cupboard so the kids wouldn’t get them. He told Detective Murray—again—how Debbie had leaned too far forward and had started to lose her balance, how the chair legs had skidded on the linoleum, and she had started to fall; how he had jumped up from the table and tried to catch her, but he had dropped his pizza on the floor and had slipped on it and fallen down, missing her; how she had fallen and banged the side of her head hard against the counter top; and how by the time he had gotten to her and cradled her head in his lap— See? There’s a big splotch of her blood here on my pants! —he had known she was already dead.
    By the time he had finished sputtering out these details again, he was shivering with forced tears and faked emotion. He wiped his eyes viciously on his shirt sleeves and stared long and hard at the detective, letting his vision shimmer with tears.
    “So can I go home now?” Alex said in a voice that was soft and trembling, twisted with emotion. “I… I want to be with my kids. I have to… be there to… to tell them… to explain to them why… why their mommy… isn’t… coming… home… anymore…”

Chapter Two
     
    Suspicions
     
    T hroughout Debbie’s funeral, Cindy Toland sat next to Harry, her husband, leaning against him and grasping his hand so hard that at times he had to shake off her grip and flap his own hand to restore the circulation. The cloying smell of flowers and the somber organ music were stifling her, choking her with tight waves of claustrophobia bordering on panic. There was a heavy, muffled pounding deep inside her head, and she knew, tonight, once this was all over, it would blossom into a full-blown headache. Since first learning of her sister’s death, she had cried so long and hard, day and night, that today, the day of her funeral, a typically humid June afternoon in Nebraska, she felt as though she no longer had any