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uncomfortably, then
    She felt the rage
blast through her, clear and clean as the winter sun coming through the slider.
    She didn't say it,
but what she was thinking was: I got my partner killed because I thought a
psychopath was too stupid to come after me. Far-fetched. Bastard used my gun on
Hess. Almost got myself killed, too, and sometimes I still want to trade places
with him.
    With his back still
toward her Zamorra shook his head, then said something she didn't hear.
    She tried to keep the
anger from her voice, something she was never much good at. "Say it again,
Paul. I'm a big girl. We can't work together if we can't talk."
    "I said you were
right," he said gently. "Nothing seems far-fetched from a guy who
just shot a girl in the heart."
    She could see him in
profile against the window, looking at her from the side of his bloodshot eye.
    "Sorry,"
said Merci.
    "Accepted.
I am, too."
    "I'm
sorrier."
    "No,
I'm much, much sorrier."
    She was relieved he
actually got her joke. She smiled to herself and sighed. "Sometimes I
think I got problems, until I look at the cases I work."
    "Me,
too. Then I look at Janine."
    Janine
was his wife.
    They stood between the
kitchen and the dining room, Merci reading her notes on the Coates interview.
"This bothers me," she said. "Some kind of struggle here,
according to Coates. First a thump, then another, but a sustained one. He said
it was a minute or two later. I figure the first thump was Aubrey hitting the
floor. If a struggle ensued, who the hell was it between?"
    "Coates
said it was like furniture being moved."
    The cabinet under the
sink was open, the door handle screws were half torn out of the wood. The
second drawer was all the way out, the runners were bent so bad it wouldn't
close.
    Merci knelt, looked
at the damage. "Lots of strength, to pull screws and bend metal. But
Aubrey's peacefully laid to rest twelve feet away, two minutes earlier, if we
believe Coates. No visible bruises or abrasions, nothing under her
fingernails, nothing on the body that points to a fight. So who's our killer
fighting with in here, his conscience?"
    "There's
our two Man Friends again."
    "The
Man Friends weren't here at the same time, if Coates is right."
    Zamorra looked at her
long, then shrugged. "What he says doesn't fit the evidence. The thing is,
you get loaded and your time-space judgment goes straight to hell. You think
twenty minutes is going by while you have meaningful thoughts. Really, five
seconds went by while you tripped out."
    Merci considered the
distance from body to kitchen. "Even if Coates was off, even if the
struggle happened right after the first thump, it wasn't Aubrey in a struggle.
Shot in the heart and fighting for her life, she doesn't lose one drop of blood
on the kitchen floor?"
    "Where's that
leave us? Someone else up here when Man Friend Number One left?"
    "It's
possible."
    "A third guy.
Wasn't invited to dinner. Nobody heard him come or go. Hid in the bedroom?
Jumped out to rescue her when she got shot?"
    Merci was listening
but didn't answer. She was flipping through to the CSI report, looking for
reference to a good shoe print that Lynda Coiner found on the kitchen floor.
There were three prints left by the same shoe, with a back-slanting series of
treads that looked to be like big commas. The tails tapered toward the heel.
The heel had a central circle with spokes leading outward to the edge.
    O'Brien
had photographed it in reflected light, then lifted a big print using
fingerprint dust and a sheet of white paper. They could match an impression if
the detectives could come up with a suspect shoe. It looked to be a size
twelve, probably not a dress shoe due to he pronounced tread pattern. And very
likely a soft sole and not a hard one because of the
clarity of the print left on the hardwood floor.
    Zamorra
was on the same page. "This shoe print," he said. “It doesn't fit
with what Coates said either. The big guy, the size twelve, was supposed to be
a hard-soled shoe