Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

not good with a lot of blood.”
    “Call this in. Get everyone out here,” Wedmore said. “This scene is fresh.”
    Gibson went outside to make the calls.
    Wedmore did a slow circle around the room, studying everything, looking for anything. She went into the kitchen and saw the pot of tea that was still warm to the touch, and the single mug that had been waiting to be filled.
    “This was looking pretty simple up until about five minutes ago,” Wedmore said to herself. The Ellie Garfield case had appeared to be a totally domestic affair. Daughter kills mother, father covers it up. Everyone—victim, perpetrator, accomplice after the fact—related. A family tragedy from beginning to end.
    But this, well, this had the potential to change everything. Garfield’s death broadened the circle. Melissa couldn’t have done this, because she’d been in police custody the last couple of hours. Wedmore didn’t need a forensic examiner to tell her this murder was less than two hours old. And Garfield—or at least someone claiming to be him—had phoned the station little more than an hour ago, asking for a progress report in the search for his wife.
    A shrewd move, Wedmore thought. A nice way to deflect suspicion. Not that his cleverness made much difference now.
    She came back to the living room, stood once again over Garfield’s body. A woman’s bathrobe was tossed onto the couch, but the matching sash was on the carpet, just beyond the pooling blood.
    Interesting.
    Then, studying the body again, looking at the blood that had saturated the man’s shirt, something else caught Wedmore’s eye.
    “Hello?” she said under her breath. “What’s this?”

Nineteen
    Kirk Nicholson was on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, having breakfast. Or an early lunch. Brunch maybe. Whatever meal it was, it consisted of a bottle of Budweiser and a cream-filled Twinkie sponge cake. He had the TV tuned in to
Family Feud,
where a family of fucking inbreds, in Kirk’s estimation, was trying to guess how one hundred people had responded to the question: “What part of your body do you sometimes forget to wash when you have a bath?”
    Kirk shouted: “Behind the ears!”
    He was pretty good at
Family Feud
. It was his favorite game show because, unlike, say,
Jeopardy!
or
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
, you didn’t actually have to know anything, you just had to be able to guess what people
thought
the answer was. That meant Kirk often shouted out the correct response, which made him feel very good about himself.
    He needed to feel better about himself these days.
    Often, his gaze would move from the television to the shelf he’d set up on the adjoining wall to display the mag wheels he was going to put on his truck when the snow melted. These were 20-inch Mamba wheels, the M3 model, with eight spokes, finished in machine black. Normally, a set of four cost as much as two grand, but he’d managed to get these for three hundred off.
    As much as these wheels were a sight to behold now, they were going to look awesome once they were installed. It turned out to be a blessing Keisha didn’t have a garage with this pipsqueak little house of hers. If she had, he wouldn’t be able to admire them every single day, and he didn’t have to worry about someone breaking into a garage and stealing them. What he did have to worry about was that li’l fucker, as he now thought of Matthew, going over and touching them, getting his greasy little fingerprints on them, maybe even knocking them off the shelf and breaking the little bastard’s foot.
    That made him think of his own foot, which was feeling much better, thank you very much. Not that he wasn’t still limping around Keisha. He wanted to keep the sympathy going for as long as possible.
    Anyway, back to that little bastard. That
was
the operative word. Keisha hadn’t been married when she’d had the boy, and the dad was long gone, so he felt well within his rights to call the kid a bastard, but the fact was, he liked li’l fucker better. Kirk expected the kid was going to be better behaved in the future, not touching the wheels or anything else of his, after the recent talk he’d had with him. No ten-year-old kid wanted to get sent to a military academy for pre-teens, and that was what Kirk had told the kid his mother was considering if he didn’t keep his nose clean and stay out of Kirk’s way.
    But it was their little secret, Kirk told him. Your ma doesn’t know I’ve