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this city.”
    Sandra nodded. “You don’t kill cops in any city. Not unless you’re nuts…” She paused. “You got a time of death yet?”
    “The uniforms are telling me just after ten o’clock,” McKenzie replied. “The lady next door called 911 at ten-fifteen. She says she heard a big thump and a gunshot. When she got her nerves back together enough to crawl out from under the table, she called.” He thought about it. “It took her like maybe an hour to get her nerve back…”
    The police had already cordoned off the door. Sandra and McKenzie worked their way through the throng toward the apartment doorway, which was guarded by one uniform, a young woman with a flat blue stare. At the door, McKenzie paused, irritation plain on his beefy features. He turned and faced the gawkers, who stared back at him with barely suppressed excitement.
    Blood lust, McKenzie thought, disgusted.
    “Show’s over, folks!” he shouted. “Get back to your apartments. We have everything under control out here, so go on home. Please!” He lowered his voice and aimed a quick aside at the uniformed officer. “Get them outta here. Escort them to their doors if you have to. This is ridiculous.”
    “Yes, sir.” The beat cop began pushing people away from Madrone’s apartment door.
    Sandra ducked under the yellow tape, crossed the threshold, and looked around. Something immediately struck her as familiar, but she couldn’t pinpoint it.
    She was still a little groggy. It was always a pain to wake up, get dressed, and leave a warm bed to come look at a dead body at this god-awful hour. But the captain had called her personally. It looked, he told her, like her man had struck again. One glance at the corpse confirmed why he thought so. Hole in the chest, heart on the floor. That pretty much said it all. Same as her prime-time case of the moment, the campus security guard, Baxter.
    Crouching down, she examined the wound. She pulled a pen out of her purse and used it to peel back the bloody edges of the dead man’s torn shirt. The edge of the wound was marked by several sharp incisions. Where the marks intersected there was a hole about five inches in diameter, straight through the rib cage. Fragments of Madrone’s shattered ribs were visible below the skin and in the pool of congealing blood at the bottom of the hole, like bits of white teeth peeping from diseased gums.
    Same thing as Baxter, she thought, same exact thing . She could only hope they could keep the circumstances of this murder as quiet as they’d kept Baxter’s death. She could imagine the headlines if the story got out. Not one, but two now. A serial killer with a taste for blunt heart surgery. The media would go nuts.
    But Jack Madrone had been a cop. That made it hot, hot and juicy, and somebody would drop a dime to a tame news hound. Somebody, somewhere. There wasn’t a prayer of keeping it under wraps, even though the department would keep the actual details as confidential as it could. But stuff like this was so sensational, sooner or later somebody would leak even the most intimate trivia, let alone a hole the size of a baseball in a dead homicide cop’s chest. And his heart like a lump of liver ten feet from the body…
    She sighed and stood up. The crime scene forensics guys were still crawling all over the place like nearsighted, intense cockroaches. Most stuff was bagged and tagged, though the evidence was still in place. A flicker of light from the direction of the kitchen told her the shutterbugs were still hard at work, taking digital pictures of everything even remotely interesting.
    Madrone’s gun was lying some distance from the body, as though it had been thrown there by Madrone or the killer. Madrone’s right hand was bruised, several of the fingers broken and swollen. It appeared there had been a struggle for control of the weapon.
    And Madrone lost, she thought, an ugly quiver growing in her belly. She saw a lot of death, but a cop was