The first red flag for the ME was George Hayward’s head wound. When a person decides to put a bullet into his brain, he tends to press the barrel against the temple. At the hairline, usually. Or, if the gun is not actually touching the skin, it’s still pretty close: A suicide is either a contact or a near-contact wound. Besides, a person’s forearm is only so long; you really can’t aim a gun at your temple from a distance of greater than six or seven inches, and most suicides bring the gun a lot closer than that. The result is that most of the powder is driven into the skin and there is a dense deposit of soot. When a pathologist washes away that soot, he is likely to find abrasions and stippling, all those burning bits of powder embedding themselves into the flesh. The farther the gun is held from the bullet’s point of entry, the less pronounced those marks will be. In David’s opinion the bullet that killed George Hayward was certainly not a contact wound and-based on the negligible amounts of powder and stippling and soot-not even particularly close. The gun might have been fired from as much as a few feet away.

Second, there was the pattern of the blood and bone and brain that had sprayed the living room: the remains that people like the Reverend Drew and Alice’s best friend had cleaned up on the screen and the china cabinet, and had tried and failed to remove from the couch. David thought it was possible that the spatter was the result of a bullet pulverizing the skull in a suicide. But from the moment he had entered that room, he told me later, a part of him had wondered at the angle.

Finally there was George Hayward’s right hand. There was residue on it from the gunshot, but not a lot. And while no one puts a great deal of stock in gunshot residue these days, he still thought there might have been more if Hayward had indeed pulled the trigger. (The fact that there were traces meant nothing: In a small room, residue can be anywhere once a gun is discharged.)

Toxicology-the blood and urine tests-would take two or three weeks, but David suggested that a lot more could be inferred right now with another look at the gun. Just how severe was the blowback? Or, to be blunt, how much of the bastard’s brains were up the gun barrel? (Make no mistake: Though it seemed possible now that George Hayward was a murder victim, he was still a complete and total bastard.) David also suggested that after the weapon had been examined, someone in the crime lab should conduct a series of test fires with the same load to offer a baseline on the stippling it was likely to elicit. Once we did that, we could get a fairly precise sense of the distance the gun had been from Hayward’s temple.

Now, none of this would have led me to start wondering what sort of involvement Stephen Drew might have had with the deaths of either George or Alice Hayward if the guy hadn’t gotten out of Dodge the second the bodies had been shipped to New York and New Hampshire for burial. Had he stuck around, it might have taken considerably longer before any of us in the state’s attorney’s office would have turned our eyes upon the local pastor. One of my associates, for instance, conjectured that the murders might have been an attempt to cover up a robbery and the burglar had known of George’s history of domestic abuse. In other words, someone had murdered the pair of them and then made it look like it was George’s handiwork. And there was also the possibility this was all some sort of horrible thrill killing, not unlike the 2001 murders of two Dartmouth College professors in their own home: Perhaps someone had strangled Alice while George had watched and then offed him. But why make that look like something it wasn’t? And when the house once more was viewed as a crime scene and thoroughly investigated, there was no indication that anything had been stolen and no reason to believe that either of the Haywards or their teenage daughter had had some sort of secret life as a drug dealer.

What we did find, however, were a variety of clues that Alice Hayward had been receiving more than mere pastoral counsel from that minister who’d fled Haverill hours after conducting her funeral service.

AFTER I READ the autopsy report for the first time, I rang David Dennison. He was expecting the call.

“I had a feeling the word pending would pique your interest,” he said.

“Are you just trying to make my caseload completely suck? The Hayward mess wasn’t supposed to have any effing complications.”

“Has anyone told you that you have the mouth of a teenager?”

“Teenagers don’t say effing. No censorship there. And Paul says I sound more like a sailor, thank you very much. And he spends his life around teenagers: I think if I sounded like one, he would have told me by now.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think it all seemed so simple when we were at the house that day.”

“It did look nice and neat.”

I glimpsed once more the photos of Alice Hayward that had been taken at the scene. Her eyes, starved for air, were bulging, the whites dotted with burst blood vessels, and her mouth was forever fixed in a rictus of agony and fear. “No it didn’t, David. It looked horrible.”

“You know what I mean,” he said, his voice not really defensive. Then he shared with me his suspicions about what might in fact have occurred, given the way portions of George Hayward’s brain were sprinkled liberally across the wall and the couch. When he was done, he added, “And I expect more serious questions when we get back the blood and urine work in another week or two.”

“What do you think the lab will find?”

“That George Hayward was too drunk to kill himself. This is all preliminary, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if as many as four hours separated the two deaths.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Good God, did you count the beer bottles?”

“I did.”

“The guy smelled like a frat basement on a Saturday morning.”

“I tried to avoid fraternity basements, thank you very much.”

“And his dinner was all but digested. Mush. Hers? I could have counted the string beans and peas. So here’s one scenario. He strangles her around eight or eight-thirty. Then, filled with remorse or panic, he drinks. Well, drinks some more. A lot more. And finally he passes out. Then, around midnight, someone shoots him.”

“Sounds a little far-fetched.”

“Wait till we have the blood-alcohol numbers. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re talking the neighborhood of point-three or more. Alcohol poisoning. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out he was flirting with lethal.”

“But you can’t be that precise on the times of death. Plus or minus two hours, they both could have died around ten,” I said.

“Possible. But gastric emptying time is about four hours. People lie, but stomachs don’t. Assuming they ate dinner together-say, seven or seven-fifteen-she’s dead before eight-thirty. Him? Could be closer to midnight.”

“Of course, if Hayward was that drunk, it’s also possible that he didn’t kill Alice, either.”

“Well, yes,” he agreed, and I didn’t have to verbalize what both of us were thinking. Sometimes none of us has the slightest idea what really goes on in a house when the shades are drawn and the doors are closed. There are the postmortem realities-how a body decomposes or cools to room temperature, how it stiffens or putrefies or lets loose with one last bowel movement-but what that body was doing in the moments before it died is often unfathomable. And, in the case of a homicide, often freakish and weird. There might have been things going on in that Cape that were emphatically beyond our wildest conjectures and people passing through whose presence would have astonished the neighbors.

And passing through with the Haywards’ welcome complicity: There had been no indications of forced entry at the house on the hill. The doors were unlocked, and the windows-though filled with screens-were open.

Yet we did know this: George Hayward would beat the living crap out of his wife when the spirit moved him. That pastor had said so, that pal named Ginny had said so, and the couple’s one kid, the teenage girl, had said so. And this meant that whoever had killed the one or the both of them had been aware of George Hayward’s nasty little hobby. When we found Alice’s body, her rear end and lower back were flecked with two-and three-day-old contusions and welts, which meant that George had beaten her the weekend she was baptized. David said her kidneys were so badly bruised that she’d probably been peeing blood on the day that she died.

“Had she had sex that day?” I asked. “Consenting or otherwise?”

“No indications. No semen in the vagina.”

“Well. At least it isn’t a rape.”

“Small consolation when you’ve been strangled.”

“True.”

“And I do think George murdered Alice.”

“You do?”

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