defensively. He noticed Nancy taking notes and asked nervously, “Who’s she, your secretary?”
“Special Agent Lipinski,” she said, waving her notebook at him sweetly. “Could I get your first name, Detective Chapman?”
Will suppressed a smile.
Chapman wasn’t inclined to get territorial with the feds. He’d rant and rave, waste his time and wind up on the losing end of the proposition. Life was too short. “All right, everybody!” he announced. “We got the FBI here and they want everyone out, so pack up and let them do their thing.”
“Have them leave the postcard,” Will said.
Chapman reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a white card inside a Ziploc bag. “I got it right here.”
When the room was clear, they inspected the body with the detective. It was getting toasty in there and the first whiffs of decay were in the air. For a gunshot victim, there was surprisingly little blood, a few clots on her matted gray hair, a streak down her left cheek where an arterial gush from her ear had formed a tributary that tracked down her neck and dripped onto moss-green carpet. She was on her back, a foot from the floral flounce of her unmade bed, dressed in a pink cotton nightdress she had probably worn a thousand times. Her eyes, already bone dry, were open and staring. Will had seen innumerable bodies, many of them brutalized beyond recognition of their humanity. This lady looked pretty good, a nice Puerto Rican grandma whom you’d think could be revived with a good shoulder shake. He checked out Nancy to gauge her reaction to the presence of death.
She was taking notes.
Chapman started in, “So the way I figure it—”
Will put up his hand, stopping him in mid-sentence. “Special Agent Lipinski, why don’t you tell us what happened here?”
Her face flushed, making her cheeks appear fuller. The flush extended to her throat and disappeared under the neckline of her white blouse. She swallowed and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. She began slowly then picked up the tempo as she assembled her thoughts. “Well, the killer was probably here before, not necessarily inside the apartment but around the building. The security grate on one of the kitchen windows was pried loose. I’d have to take a closer look at it but I’ll bet the window frame is rotted. Still, even hiding in the side alley, he wouldn’t have gambled on doing the job all in one night, not if he wanted to make sure he hit the date on the postcard. He came back last night, went into the alley and finished pulling the grate off. Then he cut the window with a glass cutter and undid the latch from the outside. He tramped in some dirt from the alley onto the kitchen floor and the hall and right there, and there.”
She pointed to two spots on the bedroom carpet, including one smudge that Chapman was standing on. He stepped away like it was radioactive.
“She must’ve heard something because she sat up and tried to put her slippers on. Before she could finish he was in the room and he took one shot at close range, through her left ear. It looks like it’s a small-caliber round, probably a .22. The bullet’s still in her cranium, there’s no exit wound. I don’t think there was a sexual assault here but we need to check that. Also, we need to find out if anything was stolen. The place wasn’t ransacked but I didn’t see a pocketbook anywhere. He probably left the way he came in.” She paused and scrunched her forehead. “That’s it. That’s what I think happened.”
Will frowned at her, made her sweat for a few seconds then said, “Yeah, that’s what I think happened too.” Nancy looked like she’d just won a spelling bee and proudly stared down at her crepe-soled shoes. “You agree with my partner, Detective?”
Chapman shrugged. “Could very well be. Yeah, .22 handgun, I’m sure that’s the weapon here.”
The guy doesn’t have a fucking clue, Will thought. “Do you know if anything was stolen?”
“Her daughter says her purse is missing. She’s the one who found her this morning. The postcard was on the kitchen table with some other mail.”
Will pointed at grandma’s thighs. “Was she sexually assaulted?”
“I don’t have any idea! Maybe if you hadn’t kicked the M.E. out we’d know,” Chapman huffed.
Will lowered himself onto his haunches and used his pen to carefully lift her nightdress. He squinted into the tent and