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handkerchief between his bare feet.
    “Holy shit,” he said. His face was drawn.
    Neither of them said anything for a moment as Burtell stared down at the handkerchief.
    “I went out there tonight—”
    “Out there?” Burtell interrupted, his eyes still on the handkerchief. “He did this at home?”
    “No. He’d parked in an empty field near the runways at Andrau Airpark. A patrolman just happened to see it and checked it out.”
    Burtell hadn’t moved. “How?”
    “He shot himself.”
    Silence.
    “In the head?”
    Graver nodded. He was watching Burtell closely. The two men were good friends. They didn’t socialize all that often outside their professional relationship, but they were closer than most within that context. Graver almost felt like an older brother to Burtell who was a decade younger, and the feeling was reciprocated. They each knew how the other’s mind worked, and both of them probably invested more of themselves in the intelligence game than was healthy for their marriages. They were kindred spirits and knew it.
    “In the mouth?”
    An odd thing to want to have clarified, but sometimes a person’s curiosity about suicide, the precise activity of it was as unexpected as the act itself.
    “His right temple, Dean. He used his own gun.”
    Burtell’s eyes were still fixed on the handkerchief. “Suicide,” he said.
    Graver heard the flatness in Burtell’s voice and found his preoccupation with the handkerchief between his feet a curious behavior. Graver noted that Burtell was actually wan, seemingly nauseous.
    “Well, that’s what it looks like. That’s not official yet There was no note, not there with him, anyway.” Graver spent a few minutes telling Burtell how the evening had unfolded, all of it just as it had happened. When he stopped, Burtell looked up.
    “What about Peggy?”
    “She doesn’t know yet,” Graver said. He hesitated. “1 hate to ask you this, Dean, but I’d appreciate it if you’d break it to her.”
    “Jesus Christ,” Burtell said. He reached down and picked up his handkerchief and tossed it on the table beside the glass. “Sure,” he said, sinking back on the sofa. “Sure, it’s fine. I don’t mind. It ought to be me. I know that” He looked at Graver. “Is that all there is to it? That’s all you know?”
    “I’m afraid so.”
    Burtell frowned incredulously, but when Graver didn’t elaborate Burtell’s eyes drifted away. “What in the hell did he think he was doing?”
    “I was really hoping you could give me some insight into that,” Graver said.
    Burtell’s eyes jerked back to Graver. He seemed taken aback.
    “You probably knew him better than anyone,” Graver reminded him.
    “Look, I don’t… I just…” He paused, then, doing what he did best, he collected his thoughts, organized his thinking. “Okay,” he said, raising his opened hands, palms out, a gesture of calming himself, starting over. “We weren’t
that
close, for Christ’s sake, Marcus…” He thought about it, staring past Graver, out to the blackness through the windows, shaking his head slowly.
    “God, I don’t know… uh, at home,” he began. “I can’t imagine anything going on at home, between him and Peggy anyway, that was eating at him… enough… you know, for this. Honest to God, I don’t. Their marriage was… I don’t know,” he cleared his throat “It would seem boring I guess to some people. Art wasn’t… he didn’t play around. He didn’t hang out with a bunch of guys even. Peggy wasn’t a sports widow, anything like that. He went to work; he went home. They pretty well did everything together.
    “They didn’t have any obvious troubles, serious ones anyway. Art was content with going to Peggy’s cat shows, helping her with that kind of shit That was actually their big ‘outside activity,’ her cat shows.”
    He paused, his thoughts straying for a moment before he caught himself and shook his head. “I just don’t see anything there