“Yeah,” Quirk said. “That bothered me too. If some fruitcake runs amok with a framing hammer and assaults a random victim, why was his aim so good? Head only. Except where he seems to have missed once and badly bruised her left shoulder.”
“Seems more like premeditation,” I said. “If you’re going to murder somebody with a hammer, you don’t waste time hitting them in the body.”
“I know,” Quirk said. His hands were perfectly still now, one resting on top of the other. “It bothered us too. But things always do in a homicide. You know that. There’s always stuff you can’t account for, stuff that doesn’t fit exactly. Homicide cases aren’t neat, even the neat ones.”
“You think this is a neat one?”
“In one sense,” Quirk said. He looked at the pictures on the plastic cube while he talked. He was not so much weary as calm. He’d seen too much, and it had left him with that cop calm that some of them get-not without feeling, really, but without excitement.
“We have an explanation for it that works. It’s not laying around loose-except that we don’t have the perpetrator.”
“Perpetrator,” I said admiringly.
“I been watching a lot of those reality cop shows,” Quirk said.
“Her husband wants the guy caught,” I said.
“Sure he does,” Quirk said. “Me too.”
“You can’t find a motive,” I said.
Quirk shook his head.
“This broad is Mary Poppins, for crissake. Mother of the year, wife of the decade, loyal friend, good citizen, great human being, dedicated teacher, accomplished cook, and probably great in the sack.”
“Never is heard a discouraging word,” I said.
“None,” Quirk said. “Nobody had a reason to kill her.”
“Almost nobody,” I said.
“The crazed-killer thing still works,” Quirk said. “It happens.”
“Husband checks out?”
Quirk looked at me as if I’d asked him his sign.
“How long you think I been doing this? Who do we think of first when a wife is killed?”
“Cher chez la hubby,” I said.
“Thank you,” Quirk said.
“No problems between them?”
“None that he’d mention.”
“He doesn’t have a girlfriend?”
“Says he doesn’t.”
“She doesn’t have a boyfriend?”
“Says she didn’t.”
“You able to confirm that, as they say in the papers, independently?”
“Cops aren’t independent,” Quirk said. “Hot dogs like yourself are independent.”
“But you looked into it.”
“Far as we could.”
“How far is that?”
Quirk shrugged.
“These are powerful people,” Quirk said. “They have powerful friends. Everybody I ask says she was a candidate for sainthood. And he is a candidate for sainthood, and the kids are a couple of saintlettes. You push people like this only so far.”
“Before what?”
“Before the commissioner calls you.”
“And tells you to desist?”
“And tells me that unless I have hard evidence, I should not assume these people are lying.”
“And you don’t have hard evidence.”
“No.”
“You think there’s something there?”
Quirk shrugged.
“That’s why you sent Tripp to me,” I said.
