O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,51
room, but still she looked around as though someone might be watching. Satisfied that there weren’t any one-way mirrors or cameras about, she leaned across the table and slowly turned the folder over so that she could see the label with its messy purple writing. After listening to make sure that no one was coming, she swiftly lifted the cover and found a stack of handwritten notes. They were practically illegible, but she flipped through anyway, looking for recognizable names or details. Once she saw “Sherry Kimball” and in another place the name “P. Wentworth.” The word “Alibis” popped out at her, scrawled in red marker on another sheet of paper. Cooper, or whoever it was, had written a list of names in a column headed by the word “Insufficient or Susp.” There was Patch, Britta, Willow, Anders, Gwinny, Carl Thompson and Sabina Dodge. In another column, this one headed by the word “Firm,” were the names Rosemary Burgess, Electra Granger, Gally and Trip Wentworth, Sherry and Charley Kimball. Sweeney thought back to the conversation about alibis at dinner the night before. What was it Sabina had said? Something about how if she’d actually been the murderer, she would have come up with an alibi for herself. Well, she hadn’t.
Sweeney listened for a moment, then opened a manila envelope at the back of the folder. Inside was a stack of crime scene photos.
She had seen them in movies, large format, black-and-white pictures shown fleetingly over the shoulders of silver screen detectives.
But nothing had prepared her for these stark images of death. The gray-haired, slightly stocky woman was a dark stain against the snow. Dressed in what looked like a long skirt, boots, and a bulky parka, she lay on her back, legs folded beneath her body. She’d obviously fallen to her knees and then back, her arms outstretched as though she’d been making angels in the snow.
Half clasped in her right hand was a dark object that Sweeney recognized as a handgun. In a close-up, farther down in the pile, the barrel pointed toward the woman’s bare head and forced Sweeney’s eye to her face, or the dark mess where her face had once been.
For all the time she had spent amongst the dead, she had never seen an undoctored photograph of a body before, much less a real corpse. Her whole being recoiled at the sight of stilled life, and something deep within her wanted to turn away from the picture of the glistening wound. In that instant she remembered everything she’d ever read about superstitions related to corpses, Kenyan tribesmen who refused to be anywhere in the vicinity of a dead body, Egyptian beliefs about preparing corpses. But still she stared, overcome by a combination of repulsion and fascination.
When she heard Cooper at the door, she barely had time to put the photos back and close the folder. As he entered the room, she was busy rooting around in her purse for a stick of gum which, thankfully, she found, a bit mashed, at the very bottom. She slipped it from its wrapper and folded it into her mouth, trying to calm her jangled nerves.
“Sorry,” he said, sitting down again. “Where were we? Oh, yes. You were asking me if there was a possibility that Ruth Kimball didn’t commit suicide. I’ll be frank with you, Miss St. George. It’s not as clear-cut as one might think. It’s a very simple matter to place a gun in a dead person’s hand following a murder, hold it to the head, let the arm fall naturally. The thing that frequently gives such an act away is the absence of fingerprints or the presence of strange ones, but in this case . . .”
Sweeney saw where he was going. “She was outside. She was wearing gloves,” she finished.
“Exactly. So we look at other aspects of the crime. The angle at which the bullet entered the body, the distance at which the gun was fired.” It struck her that he was enjoying explaining the intricacies of police work to her. “I’ll get to the point. At eight this morning I heard from the medical examiner. He’s calling this shooting a homicide. So now I’m investigating this as a murder and if there’s anything you know that you haven’t told me, this would be a good time to speak up.”
Sweeney, shocked, just looked back at him.
“I want you to understand the possible seriousness of the situation. If there is anything that comes to your