out.’
‘You got it.’
Langer walked over and looked down at his reflection in the surface of the coffee table. ‘This isn’t right.’
McLaren joined him and studied the table for a long moment, frowning. ‘Okay, I’ll bite. I see a nice shiny coffee table, no gouges, no blood, no big smeary fingerprints. So what am I missing?’
‘The books on the floor. They’re supposed to be on the coffee table.’
‘So? Are you telling me that every little thing in your house is exactly where it belongs all the time?’
‘Lord, no, not in my house. But in this one? I think so. Take a look around this room. They’re the only things out of place, Johnny.’
McLaren gave the room the once-over, considering. ‘Gotta admit, the damn place looks like a magazine picture, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘Except for the sofa.’
‘And the books on the floor.’
McLaren sighed and shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Okay, then maybe they got knocked off the table in the struggle.’
Langer shook his head. ‘If that happened they’d be scattered, at least a little. Look at them. These things are in an almost perfect stack. Someone lifted them off the table and put them there.’
‘Someone being the shooter.’
‘That’s what I’m thinking.’
Jimmy Grimm’s head popped up from behind the sofa, startling McLaren and putting a lie to the general consensus that Grimm never heard a thing when he was working a crime scene.
‘Jesus, Jimmy, I forgot you were even here. What the hell are you doing hiding back there?’
‘I got an exit hole in the fabric I’m lasering up with the entrance in that front cushion. Looks like we’re going to find a slug in that bookcase somewhere.’ He peered over at the coffee table, then grinned up at Langer. ‘Nice call on the books, Langer. I’ll bag them as soon as I finish this, put them on the top of the list at the lab.’
‘Thanks, Jimmy.’
McLaren scratched at the red haze of whiskers sprouting along his unshaven jaw. ‘Still doesn’t make sense. You walk into this place, pop a guy sitting on the couch, then you turn around and take a stack of books off the coffee table and set them on the floor. Now why the hell would you do that?’
‘Good question.’
Gertrude Larsen was obviously long past retirement age, and she looked pathetic, wrapped up in a sagging, faded cardigan and shivering in the backseat of the squad in spite of the sun warming the car’s interior. When Langer approached the open door she looked up with bleary, narcotics-glazed eyes. A few tears traveled the wrinkled valleys down her cheeks, but there was no emotion attached to them.
Langer had seen the look many times, on tranquilized survivors of murder victims, on kids flying on their parents’ Valium, but the shivering concerned him. He knelt down next to the car and touched the elderly woman’s arm. ‘How are you feeling, Ms Larsen?’
She smiled weakly and raised a quaking, arthritis-curled hand to cover his. He couldn’t imagine this work-worn woman still scrubbing and sweeping and keeping a house. ‘A little better.’
‘Did you take something?’
She nodded, a little embarrassed, and handed him a small plastic prescription bottle. ‘One of those pink ones.’
Langer opened the bottle and raised his brows when he looked inside. There were pink pills, blue pills, yellow pills, and a dusty cluster of Tums. The pink ones looked like Xanax, but he couldn’t be sure.
‘I take one of those if I get really upset,’ she explained.
‘I understand.’ Langer made a note of the clinic address on the bottle and handed it back to her. She tucked it in a little-old-lady purse with a metal clasp at the top. ‘Are you feeling well enough to answer a few questions for me?’
She nodded slowly, dabbing at her eyes with a damp handkerchief with a lace border.
Langer was exceedingly gentle with the old woman, and it was a slow-motion interview, but eventually they learned that
Robert Asprin, Eric Del Carlo