Read John Lutz Bundle for Free Online

avoided. He drank too much and thought too much, and spent too much time alone. His wife and his own daughter were afraid of him.
    It isn’t fucking fair!
    He turned again toward the mirror and drew back his fist, thinking of smashing his ruined image, cracking it into fragments so it resembled his broken life.
    There again was his sad smile. And his own sad eyes staring back at him. Movie shit, punching mirrors. Heavy-handed symbolism. In real life it accomplished nothing and meant nothing.
    Self-pity was his problem. Self-pity was like a drug that would pull him down as surely as any of the drugs on the street.
    He went to the closet and rooted through his clothes. Whatever he had, it would have to do until he got an advance on his salary from Renz.
    Bum’s clothes. Goddamned bum’s wardrobe!
    Or maybe it wasn’t that bad. He didn’t have a decent suit but could put together what might loosely be called an outfit. A wrinkled pair of pants, a white dress shirt that had long sleeves and would be hot as hell this time of year, and a blue sport coat that wasn’t too bad if he kept the ripped pocket flap tucked in. Shoes were okay, a black pair, which he’d bought years ago, that weren’t too badly worn and were actually comfortable.
    A shave, a reasonable taming of his unruly hair—starting to gray—and he could still look enough like a cop.
    Which he was, damn it!
    He was a cop.
     
    A lot of blood.
    That was the first thing that struck Quinn the next morning after he’d unwrapped crime scene tape from the door-knob and let himself into the Elzner apartment with the key Renz had taped to the back of the murder file.
    The Elzners had died in their kitchen. Though it wasn’t so evident in the crime scene photos, it looked as if the wife, Jan, had dragged herself a few feet before expiring and left some bloody scratches on the freshly painted white door. Quinn didn’t think the scratches were an attempt at writing a dying message, more the result of death throes.
    Stepping around the crusted dried blood on the kitchen floor, Quinn made his way to the table. The groceries were still there. The can of tuna that had been on the floor near the body was now next to one of the two small, unmarked plastic bags. There were some oranges, a loaf of wheat bread, a jar of peanut butter. Nothing perishable other than the oranges, according to the file. Also there were two jars of gourmet strawberry jam.
    Quinn didn’t touch anything as he leaned down to peer at the price tags on the jam jars. Expensive.
    He left the table and examined the holes in the walls from the bullets that had gone through Jan Elzner. Two holes. One wide and jagged, struck by a misshapen, nearly spent bullet that had passed through too much tissue or bone. The other hole was as circular and neat as if it had been made by a drill bit, from the bullet that had made it through to the next apartment and led to the discovery of the bodies.
    Standing there in the kitchen, Quinn felt something stir deep in his gut. The crime scene didn’t feel like murder-suicide. The roughly outlined positions of the bodies, the half-finished mundane task of putting away groceries. No foresight or even rudimentary planning was evident here.
    Hubby was supposedly the shooter. If the wife had been interrupted by sudden, violent death while putting away groceries, her body probably wouldn’t have dropped where it had. And Hubby wouldn’t have been in such a rush to kill himself that he’d knock a can of tuna off the table.
    Of course it was all possible.
    But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like murder. And an unlikely, perhaps senseless one. An unsuspecting couple living out their domestic lives, and some evil bastard decided they’d had enough and ended it for them, maybe for no reason other than so he could watch them die. Evil. It wasn’t a word Quinn shied away from, because he’d learned long ago it was a palpable thing that never quite left where it visited. And it