“You’d be Mr. Nice Guy, and then you’d become so with-drawn—like no one was home inside—and then you’d start with the belligerence. But the past few years: what a difference! You’re as solid as they come. Trust me. You don’t have to worry.”
“No. I always have to worry.”
“Wrong. But you know what? Your not being complacent is a sign of wellness.” That’s what happens to a guy after twenty-four credits at the State University at Stony Brook.
“Actually,” he went on, “what I meant by stability was a fire in the hearth. Good company. A nice bowl of soup. We need something normal, healthy to come home to after what we have to look at.” Twenty-four credits couldn’t entirely knock out Carbone’s basic common sense.
A technician from ID elbowed his way past us, knelt down beside Sy, and slipped bags over the lifeless hands. (Paper bags. In movies, they use plastic. Scary when the camera moves in close, those lifeless hands wrapped like last week’s Oscar Mayer pimento loaf. Very visual. But very phony: we never use them.
8 / SUSAN ISAACS
Plastic traps moisture and screws up any chance of doing an FDR test, to see if the victim fired a weapon.)
“What did you find inside?” I asked Ray.
“Nothing. No signs of robbery, no violence. Sy had packed a carry-on bag to go to L.A. for some meetings. There was an unmade bed in the guest room. He could have taken a nap.” The button on Carbone’s too-snug suit jacket popped open. Not counting his midsection, he was thin. But his clothes were always a size too small for his basketball of a belly. “The cook was downstairs the whole time,” he continued. “Nice lady. She gave me a bowl of clam chowder, the red kind. She’s making something now for all the guys. All she heard were the shots. Nothing before that.”
“Nothing after?”
“No. She looked out the window, saw Sy, ran out to him, saw he was dead. The way his head was turned, she could see that one eye, open.” We both glanced down. The hood of Sy’s bathrobe was pulled back far enough that you could see his quarter profile and a bit of his hair: short, tight gray curls, cut middle-aged-gladiator style. The one eye that was visible was wide open. Because of the position of his head, the eye stared downward, as though it had found a hideous flaw in one of the fancy fish tiles. “She called the village police.”
“From the portable phone?”
“No. She said she knows not to touch anything near a murder victim. She went into the kitchen.”
Okay, I thought, what kind of homicide do we have here?
Not a heat-of-the-moment crime of passion, a murder arising out of jealousy or a family quarrel. And so far there was nothing to indicate a felony murder, a killing that occurs during the commission of another crime, like a burglary.
MAGIC HOUR / 9
I knew I should hang on for forensic results—the autopsy report with photographs and videos, the toxicology and serology reports—but there I was, itching to figure out what kind of a guy/gal (I’m an equal-opportunity detective) the perpetrator was.
Well, it was easy to figure out that this killer wasn’t some impulsive jerk who, in a moment of madness, grabbed a stake from the flower garden and turned Sy into a human shish kebab. No, this killer was extremely well organized, bright enough to plan the murder, bring his own weapon and take it away with him. His getaway had been slick too: completely uneventful. From the lack of any physical evidence so far, he hadn’t gotten rattled.
Another thing that struck me—from the first minute I saw Sy—was that although the killer had a brain, he had no heart.
I always notice how the perpetrator treats the victim; it tells so much. This one didn’t seem like any psychopath. I knew I’d have to wait for the autopsy, but it didn’t seem like there would be mutilation—no sicko ritualistic marks, no deranged slashing. So he was heartless but no sadist; there was no need to terrify, no gun shoved in the victim’s mouth or gut or genitals. Sy had been shot from a distance, from behind, impersonally.
But just as there were no indications of cruelty, there were no signs of decency either: no concern, no remorse. The killer had not covered Sy’s face, or closed that awful, staring eye, or picked a flower and tossed it toward the body.
Of course, it could be a stranger murder, a nut case unknown to Sy. “You hear about anybody else getting taken out this way?” I asked Carbone. I did my homework if I was in the mood; he always did his. If there was a serial killer operating within fifty thousand miles of Suffolk County, he’d have read about it.
10 / SUSAN ISAACS
“Rich people? Movie people? People shot from a distance?”
“I’ll check with the FBI, but I don’t think so. Unless this is number one.”
“We’ve got a cool cookie here,” I observed. “An organized fucker.” We’d wait for the post-offense behavior, to see if it was a Son of Sam-type wacko who’d want to declare his genius to the police. “Good shot too. Got to give him credit.”
“So what do you think the weapon was?”
“Low-gauge rifle?” I asked the ballistics guy, who was standing a couple of yards away, opening his case.
He nodded. “Looks like a .22.”
Carbone muttered: “Damn. That’s not going to make our life easy.”
He was right. Here on the South Fork, .22s were a dime a dozen. Everybody had one; locals used them for target practice, small-varmint shooting. Or anything. If a farmer wanted to kill a pig, he’d get out his .22; my father had owned one.
“What background were you able to get
