Copyright © 2003 Megan Powell. All rights reserved. 

    When you've been in this business as long as I have, you get feelings, and if you're smart you learn to trust them. Staring down at Stewart Livingston's body, I had a definite feeling.

    He was in the kitchen, lying face down in a pool of blood. He'd been stabbed several times; eventually the M.E. would say exactly how many times, and with what sort of weapon. But it appeared to be six or seven times, with a big kitchen knife. I looked around the kitchen, which was so pristine (except for the bloody corpse) that I wouldn't have dared to cook on any of the surfaces. My own kitchen's about a third the size, and six times as dirty. I don't cook much there either.

    All the pots were stacked, placed (not shoved) into cabinets; there were no labels on the shelves, but I got the feeling those pots were always shelved in the same exact place. The pans hung from one of those ceiling racks above the island, organized in order of size. Dishes were sorted by pattern, with the fine china in a display cabinet. There were several drawers of silverware - the everyday set, a slightly nicer than everyday set, the good silver, cooking utensils, serving utensils. The Henckels knives all matched.

    Eyeballing the knives, I identified a couple that might have been the murder weapon. If any had been missing from the set, in this obsessive-compulsive kitchen, I was sure I'd have noticed the gap immediately. They all looked as sanitized as the rest of the kitchen, but the guys at the lab can turn up samples of blood and fiber that can't be seen by the naked eye, so I had the knives bagged. But I had a feeling the lab guys wouldn't find anything.

    I surveyed the kitchen once more. The side door was open, though it hadn't been forced. The tearful wife had cried murder and robbery - she'd come home after running errands and found hubby dead on the kitchen floor, and if only she hadn't gone out for the afternoon maybe this wouldn't have happened, and so on. I left Greg with her in the living room. I've got very little patience for hysterics, especially when something feels wrong.

    There were a limited number of options on the weapon front. Either the killer had brought a weapon into the house, or the killer had used a weapon already here. Pretty simple, huh? Then the killer either cleans and replaces the weapon, or takes it out of the house to dump or cherish. Again, pretty straightforward. But neither option felt quite right.

    Ever watched a movie where somebody's psychic? Where they experience insight in the form of quick-cut montages? I think I'd like to be psychic like that. I could put up with the headaches, night terrors, and psychotic stalkers that, according to the movies, go along with such gifts. It'd help me do my job. But no, I just get feelings.

    I left Mr. Livingston on the floor, and went to talk to his wife.

    Claire Livingston was about thirty-five, twenty years younger than her husband. She was gorgeous, but beginning to fray: a little too much makeup to cover her crows feet, the beginnings of sag around her breasts and butt. In a couple of years, she'd hit the plastic surgeon, and most likely make it a recurring habit. I knew the type. Her hair color wasn't real, but it was a good dye job. Most men probably didn't notice, but I did. I dyed my hair once, but I could still tell it was supposed to be mousy brown, not blonde. Claire Livingston was a natural brunette, but her original shade was doubtless closer to my own than the luxurious chestnut mane she currently sported.

    Greg was being solicitous. If I hadn't known him, I might've thought he was considering hitting on her, laying the groundwork, so to speak, as the sympathetic ear. But Greg Harvey's never been anything but professional--if he wasn't so nice, he'd be called a suck-up--and I was pretty sure Claire Livingston wasn't his type. I'm not quite sure what his type is, though I've ruled out enough females that I'm starting to wonder if he's gay.

    "This is Detective Mills," Greg said softly, even though we'd already been introduced. Mrs. Livingston smiled through her tears, the sort of smile that the wealthy don't seem to realize is condescending.

    I did the whole very-sorry-for-your-loss spiel, which I wasn't very interested in, and then had her recap the events of the afternoon. I wasn't particularly interested in that, either, still thinking about the murder weapon. Mrs. Livingston said she didn't remember if they had locked the side door - it was a nice neighborhood; sometimes they forgot. I found myself thinking that was very convenient.

    Ever heard of Occam's Razor? If you find the simplest solution to a problem, it's probably the right one. If you've got a murder, you look at the family, friends, business associates. Sure, it's always possible that a random cokehead burglar did the deed. But before I try to track down every cokehead burglar who might have been in the vicinity, I'm going to look at the family. Specifically the wife, who gets the insurance money, the house, the stock portfolio...

    Of course, I didn't have those details yet. For all I knew, Mrs. Livingston was independently loaded, Mr. Livingston was uninsured and had left all his money to Save the Whales. But again, I get feelings, and the rocks that Mrs. Livingston wore suggested that hubby had been generous with the cash. There are some pieces of jewelry rich women don't buy for themselves: it's not a question of how big a diamond they can afford, it's a question of how big a diamond they can convince someone to give them.

    Greg had gotten the names of a couple family members (cousins, as the deceased had no siblings or children) and business associates, and left a card with his extension and instructions to call if she thought of anything or wanted to talk. Mrs. Livingston seemed appropriately grateful.

    "I don't like her," I said in the car. "She's lying about something."

    Greg sighed. "You always say that, Janice."

    "And they always are."

    Greg had no reply; he might be idealistic, but he knows when he's beat. He's really in the wrong line of work, much too nice a guy to deal with criminals all day.

* * *

    I was right; there was nothing on the knives. Contrary to what most people think, I don't feel like I have to be right all the time. If being wrong would make life easier for me, I'd take it.

    The canvassing didn't turn up much of interest - some people remembered Claire Livingston screaming her head off after she got home and found the body. Nobody seemed to remember Stewart Livingston making a sound, but then, Crescent Place was a nice street in a nice neighborhood and people tended to keep to themselves.

    So far, no murder weapon had been found. If I was a nicer person, I'd feel bad for the guys detailed to go through other people's garbage in hope of finding a bloody knife. But there was a reason I worked my way up through the ranks; I didn't want to deal with crap like that. I take crap of an entirely different sort, so I figure I'm doing my part.

    The M.E. had confirmed we were indeed looking for a knife, probably a big chef's knife. Just like the one the lab boys had established wasn't the murder weapon, but they weren't exactly difficult weapons to come by. I don't cook and I've still got one. Mr. Livingston had died shortly after Mrs. Livingston left to run errands. Or perhaps shortly before she left - the M.E. didn't say as much, but her time of death estimate made it a possibility.

    Not surprisingly, Mrs. Livingston's errand alibis were checking out. The hairdresser, the bank, the boutique; there were transaction records, and people remembered seeing her. If she had killed her husband, she'd at least made sure she didn't go out in public splattered with his blood.

    Greg was looking into the business associates, and working through the legal implications of Mr. Livingston's death. As I'd assumed, wifey was getting everything. Wifey wasn't specifically given the money in the offshore accounts we discovered, and neither was anyone else, by which even Greg inferred that hubby hadn't been aware of said accounts at the time he made his will, most likely because wifey had been the only one making the deposits.

    I like money as a motive. It can be easy to trace, and it's easy to understand. Very few jurors are so well off that they can't see where a payoff of a few million bucks might tempt otherwise law-abiding citizens to forget their morals.

    So, at least as far as I was concerned, we had motive and opportunity. It was just method that was giving me headaches. When I got off shift, I locked my gun and car keys in a box, and dropped the key into the toilet tank; all part of the nightly ritual. Then I poured myself a nice big glass of Jack Daniels. It wouldn't make my headache go away, but it'd make me care a whole lot less for a few hours. I turned on the TV; there's nothing like infomercials as an accompaniment to Jack Daniels.

    I wished I was psychic, that I could just walk into a room and know what happened, get one of those clear flashes of inspiration. But that just doesn't happen in the real world. And anyway, it wouldn't be admissible. So I was down to feelings, which in this case were pretty limited. I didn't think the murder weapon had come from outside, but it also didn't feel like it had belonged to the house, either. A weapon--and murderer--from outside would have left some trace in that pristine house (aside from the bloody corpse in the kitchen). But if anything the Livingstons owned had been out of place, I was sure I would have noticed immediately.

    Great. A lot of help that was. It's why I never call my feelings hunches--a hunch implies that you've got a positive image, some idea of exactly what did happen, as opposed to a vague idea of how it didn't go down. I've had very few hunches in my life.

    And then, I got a clear flash of inspiration. But it wasn't from my head, it was from the TV.

* * *

    My hangover didn't seem so bad the next morning, and I didn't even mind fishing the key out of the toilet tank. By the time I got to work, I was actually whistling, which surprised my co-workers to no end.

    I was so sure of my feeling--my bona fide hunch--that I didn't bother asking Greg for phone records or credit card purchases. Claire Livingston didn't look like the sort who normally did her shopping over the phone, and she might have been smart enough to obscure her transaction somehow, just as she'd been smart enough to run errands on the day her husband died. She really had gone to the hairdresser, the bank and the boutique--but she'd also shipped a package, returning items she'd bought recently. Instead of dumping her murder weapon, she was planning on having it restocked.

    "Ginsu knives," I told Greg, dialing the number.

    "Ginsu knives?"

    "Satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back," I clarified, and then talked to a brain-dead customer service representative who had a difficult time grasping the concept of "police investigation." Eventually I got to talk to a couple of managers and someone in Shipping & Receiving, and assured them that I'd follow up my requests with faxes on department letterhead and other trappings of officialdom. But in the meantime, under no circumstances were they to touch the set of knives that Claire Livingston had returned the day of her husband's death.

    In that package, I would find the only knife I'd ever need to convict Claire Livingston.

END