which appeared to be a paring or boning knife with a long, thin blade.
“Murder-suicide,” Nift said.
Quinn nodded. “Looks that way, Detective Nift.” He glanced at Pearl and Fedderman and made a slight sideways motion with his head to signal they were leaving. “We’ll give you a while, then get back to you about exact time and cause,” he said to Nift.
“It’ll all be in the autopsy report,” Nift said. He looked down at Marcella Graham and shook his head sadly. “Damned shame, great rack like that.”
Quinn didn’t look at him as he left the bedroom, Pearl and Fedderman following. They made their way through the techs who were busily luminoling the living room, nodding to a few they knew, then went into the kitchen.
“Some blood on the soap,” said one of the techs, a curly-haired guy about Nift’s size, leaning over the sink. He was slipping a small bar of white soap into a plastic evidence bag. “Looks like somebody washed up here. There’ll be more blood residue in the drain.”
“If any of it’s the killer’s blood, we got this asshole’s DNA,” Fedderman said.
“Then all we’d need is the asshole himself,” Pearl said, “and we’d have a match.”
“Knife come from there?” Quinn asked, nodding toward an open drawer above one of the base cabinets.
“Probably,” said the tech. “That’s the drawer where the knives were kept, and it was open like that.”
Quinn walked over and peered into the drawer. It had one of those plastic dividers. He saw an elaborate wine cork puller, spatulas, a long-tined fork, and lots of knives with wooden handles. Like the knife in hubby’s hand.
He turned away from the drawer and looked at the refrigerator. It was large and appeared to be fairly new. There was a big clear bowl on top, probably for salads, and next to the bowl a slender glass vase with a yellow rose in it. “Fridge been dusted?”
The tech nodded. “Not that it matters. The way the prints are smeared and overlaid, I can tell you somebody was in here recently wearing gloves.”
“Why would Ron Graham have worn gloves?” Pearl asked Quinn and Fedderman.
But it was the tech who answered. “I’ve seen this before, when it was somebody in the kitchen doing cleaning while wearing rubber gloves. Some women protect their hands that way.”
Everybody’s a detective, Quinn thought. But the tech was right. Not too much could be made of the gloves. Still…
“Found any rubber gloves in here?” he asked the tech.
“Not so far.”
“Uh-huh.”
Quinn went to the refrigerator and used two fingers to open it. Pearl and Fedderman crowded close to peer inside with him.
“Nothing unusual,” Fedderman said in a disappointed voice, feeling cold air spilling out around his ankles as he looked at milk and juice cartons, condiment jars and bottles, soda and beer cans.
Pearl, who’d been standing very close to Quinn, opened the meat drawer, then the produce drawer.
“Cheese,” she said, as if about to be photographed.
Quinn and Fedderman looked where she was pointing, near a head of lettuce. There were four large wedges of white cheese there, identical except that one of them was half gone, with the plastic wrapper tucked around it. The labels said the cheese was NORSTRUM GOURMET and it was imported from the Netherlands.
“Look at the price of this stuff,” Fedderman said.
“That’s why it’s gourmet,” Pearl told him. “It’s probably delicious.”
“Four wedges. Or almost four. Stuff must last a long time, and it’s pretty costly to be buying it four wedges at a whack.”
“And there’s no sign the Grahams were planning a party.”
Quinn was listening to them, pleased by their acumen and absorption. They were into the case all the way now, as he was. It was much more than a job.
“Dust the cheese for prints,” he said.
The tech grinned. “You kidding? Cheese doesn’t-”
“The wrappers,” Quinn said. “Dust the plastic wrappers.” He nudged the refrigerator door shut and glanced at Pearl and Fedderman. “Let’s go downstairs.”
He didn’t say anything while the three of them were in the elevator, waiting till they were outside on the sidewalk and out of earshot of anyone in the building.
“I think it’s our guy,” he said.
“Yeah,” Pearl said. “Making it look like murder-suicide.”
“But he used a knife this time instead of a gun,” Fedderman pointed out. “Does that add up?”
“If it doesn’t touch on his core compulsion,” Quinn said.
“Or if he’s read the literature on serial killers,” Pearl said, “and knows enough to alter his methods.”
There was a break in traffic, so they crossed the street to where the unmarked was parked in bright sunlight.
When they were seated in the car-Fedderman behind the steering wheel with the engine idling and the air conditioner on high-Pearl, in the backseat, said, “Nift’s gonna go with murder-suicide, and it might wash. The weapon still in hubby’s hand, no sign of a break-in…”
“It won’t wash for long,” Quinn said. “It can’t. There was a chair pulled out from the kitchen table as if somebody’d been sitting there. And there were skid marks on the floor near the bed. Somebody’d been hiding under there and dragged dust with him when he slid out.”
“Maybe the husband, hiding and waiting for the lover to show,” Fedderman suggested.
“But he was in his underwear,” Pearl said. “I think the killer was hiding under the bed. He thought he saw his chance, got out, and was about to leave, maybe out the window, and he heard the Grahams coming and made for the closet.”
“Where would the Grahams be coming from?”
“I don’t know. The kitchen, maybe. They might’ve both been awake and gotten up for a snack.”
Fedderman was quiet for a moment, trying to work out a scenario that made sense where the husband might have slid under the bed in his underwear. Part of a plan. It was difficult if not impossible.
“And there’s the cheese,” Pearl said. “How many people buy something that expensive four at a time?”
“It happens,” Fedderman said. “The rich are, you know…different.”
“The Grahams weren’t the Rockefellers.” Pearl looked out the side window, across the street toward the apartment building they’d just left: red brick above a stone facade, green awnings, ivy growing up one corner out of huge concrete planters. No doorman, but a security system with a keypad, buzzer, and key-activated inner door. It wasn’t the best building in the neighborhood, but it was a good one. It would be interesting to find out what the Grahams were paying in rent.
Fedderman put the car in drive but didn’t pull away from the curb. “We haven’t had breakfast, and looking into that refrigerator made me remember I was hungry.”
“Maybe there’ll be some prints on the cheese wrappers,” Pearl said in a hopeful voice.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Quinn said. “Our guy must have known whatever he bought for his potential victims might be examined, so he probably wiped everything he carried into the apartment. He’s smart.”
“So are we,” Pearl said from the backseat.
“A cheese omelette doesn’t sound bad,” Fedderman said.
Quinn smiled, then said, “Drive.”
After lunch, while Pearl and Fedderman were questioning the Grahams’ neighbors, Quinn sat on a bench in a pocket park on East Fiftieth and called Renz on the cell phone Renz had furnished. It was supposedly a secure line, or nonline, less likely to be tapped than a regular wire connection. Easier to listen in on with a cheap scanner, perhaps, but no one knew Renz had the phone.
“You’ve solved the Graham case,” Renz said when Quinn had identified himself.
“Taken the first step,” Quinn said. He had to speak somewhat loudly because of an echo effect and the constant trickling sound of a nearby artificial waterfall. “We can be pretty sure both Grahams were murdered.”
“What’s that noise?” Renz asked. “You calling me from a men’s room?”
“Maybe you didn’t hear-”
