The Murderers (Badge of Honor 6)

“It looks like a needle could have been in here,” he said. “It’s discolored.”

“The maid said there was a syringe in her arm,” Captain O’Connor said. “And the district sergeant saw one, and some rubber tubing, on the floor in the corridor upstairs. He put chairs over them.”

Bernie Potter nodded. Then he put Penelope’s arm back beside her body, tugged at the nightgown so that it covered the body again, replaced the blanket, and stood up.

“OK,” he said. “Now let’s go see the bedroom. And the needle.”

Chief Coughlin led the procession upstairs.

“There it is,” Tom O’Connor said when they came to the chairs in the middle of the upstairs corridor. He carefully picked up the chairs Officer Wells had placed over the plastic hypodermic syringe and the surgical rubber tubing and put them against the wall.

Bernie Potter went into his bag and took two plastic bags from it. Then, using a forceps, he picked up the syringe and the tubing from the carpet and carefully placed them into the plastic bags.

Coughlin then led him to Penelope’s bedroom. Potter first took several photographs of the bed and the bedside tables, then took another, larger plastic bag from his bag and, using the forceps, moved the spoon, the candle, the cotton ball, and the glassine bag containing a white crystalline substance from Penelope’s bedside table into it.

“OK,” he said. “I’ve got everything I need. Let me use a telephone and I’m on my way.”

“I’ll show you, Bernie,” Chief Coughlin said. “There’s one by the door downstairs.”

As they went down the stairs, the door to the dining room opened and two uniformed police officers came through it, carrying Penelope’s body on a stretcher. It was covered with a blanket, but her arm hung down from the side.

“The arm!” Chief Coughlin said.

One of the Fire Department EMTs, who was holding the door open, went quickly and put the arm onto the stretcher.

The policemen carried the stretcher outside and down the stairs from the patio and slid it through the already open doors of a Police Department wagon.

Chief Coughlin pointed to the telephone, then walked out onto the patio.

“Just don’t give it to anybody,” he called. “It’s for Dr. Greene. He expects it.”

“Yes, sir,” one of the police officers said.

Coughlin went back into the foyer.

Bernie Potter was just hanging up the telephone.

“Thanks, Bernie,” Coughlin said, and put out his hand.

“Christ, what a way to begin a day,” Bernie said.

“Yeah,” Coughlin said.

It would have been reasonable for anyone seeing Inspector Peter Wohl leaning on the trunk of his car, its right wheels off the pavement on the sidewalk, his arms folded on his chest, a look of annoyance on his face, to assume that he was an up-and-coming stockbroker, or lawyer, about to be late for an early-morning appointment because his new car had broken down and the Keystone Automobile Club was taking their own damned sweet time coming to his rescue.The look of displeasure on his face was in fact not even because he was going to have to tell Matt Payne, of whom he was extraordinarily fond—his mother had once said that Matt was like the little brother she had never been able to give him, and she was, he had realized, right—that the love of his life was dead, but rather because it had just occurred to him that he was really a cold-blooded sonofabitch.

He would, he had realized, be as sympathetic as he could possibly be when Matt showed up, expressing his own personal sense of loss. But the truth of the matter was, he had just been honest enough with himself to admit that he felt Matt was going to be a hell of a lot better off with Penelope Detweiler dead.

It had been his experience, and as a cop, there had been a lot of experience, that a junkie is a junkie is a junkie. And in the case of Penelope Detweiler, if after the best medical and psychiatric treatment that money could, quite literally, buy, she was still sticking needles in herself, for whatever reason, that seemed to be absolutely true.

There would have been no decent future for them. If she hadn’t OD’d this morning, she would have OD’d next week, or next month, or next year, or two years from now. There would have been other incidents, sordid beyond the comprehension of people who didn’t know the horrors of narcotics addiction firsthand, and each of them would have killed Matt a little.

It was better for Matt that this had happened now, rather than after they had married, after they had children.

The fact that he felt sorry for Penelope Detweiler did not alter the fact that he was glad she had died before she could cause Matt more pain.

But by definition, Peter Wohl thought, anyone who is glad a twenty-three-year-old woman is dead is a cold-blooded sonofabitch.

He looked up as a car nearly identical to his flashed its headlights at him and then bounced up on the curb. Detective Jesus Martinez was driving. Detective Matt Payne, smiling, opened the passenger door and got out.