She raised one shoulder in a small shrug of concession.
“Well, good,” he said on a gust of breath that overstated his relief. “In that case I don’t see why we’re limiting our entire county fair experience to a single dance. Not that it wasn’t great. It was. It’s been ages since I enjoyed a dance that much.”
She raised her head and gave him a retiring look.
“Hmm,” he said. “I’m dorking out, right?”
“Totally.”
He broke a wide grin just because she was so goddamn attractive and because it was okay with her that he was flirting like he hadn’t flirted in twenty years. “Then how’s this? I’m sorta footloose this evening, and I haven’t been this unscheduled—”
“Is that a word?”
“It suffices.”
“That’s a fifty-cent word.”
“All this to say that unless you have dinner plans…?”
She indicated with a shake of her head that she didn’t.
“Why don’t we enjoy the rest of the fair together?”
* * *
Rory Smilow, staring into Lute Pettijohn’s dead eyes, asked, “What killed him?”
The coroner, a slightly built, thoughtful man with a sensitive face and soft-spoken manner, had earned something extremely hard to come by—Smilow’s respect.
Dr. John Madison was a southern black who had earned authority and position in a consummately southern city. Smilow held in high regard anyone who accomplished that kind of personal achievement in the face of adversity.
Meticulously Madison had studied the corpse as it had been found, face down. It had been outlined, then photographed from various angles. He had inspected the victim’s hands and fingers, particularly beneath the nails. He had tested the wrists for rigidity. He had used a tweezers to pull an unidentifiable particle from Pettijohn’s coat sleeve, then carefully placed the speck in an evidence bag.
It wasn’t until he had completed the initial examination and asked assistance in turning the victim over that they uncovered their first surprise—a nasty wound on Pettijohn’s temple at the hairline.
“Did the perp hit him, you think?” Smilow asked, squatting down for a better look at the wound. “Or was he shot first, and this happened when he fell?”
Madison adjusted his eyeglasses and said uneasily, “If it’s difficult for you to talk about this, we can discuss it in detail later.”
“You mean because he was once my brother-in-law?” When the medical examiner gave a small nod, Smilow said, “I never let my private life cross over into my professional life, and vice versa. Tell me what you think, John, and don’t spare me any of the gory details.”
“I’ll have to examine the wound more closely, of course,” Madison said, without further comment on the relationship between the victim and the detective. “However, my first guess would be that he sustained this head wound before he died, not postmortem. Although it’s certainly ugly. It could have caused brain trauma of several sorts, any one of which could have been fatal.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“Truly, Rory, I don’t. It doesn’t appear that traumatic. The swelling is on the outside, which usually indicates that there’s little or none on the inside. Sometimes I’m surprised, though.”
Smilow could appreciate the coroner’s hesitancy to commit to one theory or another before an autopsy. “At this point, is it safe to say that he died of the gunshots?”
Madison nodded. “But that’s only a first guess. Looks to me like he fell, or was pushed or struck before he died.”
“How long before?”
“The timing will be harder to determine.”
“Hmm.”
Smilow gave the surrounding area a quick survey. Carpet. Sofa. Easy chairs. Soft surfaces except for the glass top on the coffee table. He duckwalked over to the table and angled his head down until he was eye-level with the surface. A drinking glass and bottle from the minibar had been found on the table. They had already been collected and bagged by the CSU.