Bride & Groom

was going to pick out coffee mugs.
    As I fed Rowdy and Kimi, checked my E-mail, made then bed, tidied up, and contemplated the trip to the mall, an! unhappy image came to me. Rita and I had gone to the same mall before. Its stores were too pricey for me, but Rita had hauled me along to advise her about selecting a present for my cousin Leah. What I now saw in my mind’s eye wasn’t the shop-lined interior with its glittering escalators and lush tropical vegetation, but the adjoining three-story concrete parking garage. In contrast to the one at The Charles Hotel, the mall’s garage was above ground. Still, it was undeniably a parking garage and almost certainly darker and emptier than the bright, popular, well-patrolled garage beneath the hotel. If only the stupid mall allowed dogs, we could park anywhere we pleased. As it was, we’d have to avoid the garage and use the parking lot instead.
    By the time I was ready for my second cup of coffee, the paper had arrived. The murder of Dr. Laura Skipcliff was reported in a section called New England News Briefe and consisted of only a couple of paragraphs. According to the paper, Dr. Laura Skipcliff, fifty-seven, a nationally renowned anesthesiologist from New York City, had been staying at The Charles Hotel while she attended a medical conference at which she’d been scheduled to speak. She had apparently driven her rental car into the hotel’s garage at 10:42 P.M. The body had been found by another hotel guest at midnight. Authorities were questioning hotel employees and conference participants, including Dr. Skipcliff’s ex-husband, Dr. Dominic DiTomasso. There followed the usual statement that the police were investigating all possible leads, as if they’d consider doing otherwise. Knowing Kevin Dennehy as I did, I felt certain that one of the leads he’d vigorously pursue would be the presence in Boston of the victim’s ex-husband. Kevin’s experience in law enforcement had taught him to see marriage principally as an institution designed to create motives and opportunities for violence. It seemed to me that the first frustration Kevin would encounter in investigating the murder of Laura Skipcliff would be the aggravating fact of her divorce: Kevin would be irked that Dr. Dominic DiTomasso was Dr. Laura Skipcliff s ex -husband.
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    The dossier on Laura Skipcliff, M.D., like the other four dossiers that eventually came into my possession, consisted of a neatly labeled letter-size manila folder that contained pages I printed from the World Wide Web. Laura Skipcliff’s name had appeared on many web sites; hers was a thick folder.
    The first page of her dossier showed the results of a search using InfoSpace, a popular “people finder,” as such sites are called, a superduper internet phone and address directory. According to InfoSpace, “Skipcliff, Laura” lived on East Eighty-third Street in New York, NY 10021. Her phone number began with the familiar Manhattan area code: 212. Beneath the directory listing, InfoSpace offered the options of getting a map of the area, finding nearby businesses, and  adding Laura Skipcliff to an address book. Three lines followed:
    Find out more about Laura Skipcliff.
    Find Laura Skipcliff on Classmates.com!
    Send flowers to Laura Skipcliff.
    The next page was similar to the first, but came from another people finder, Any Who. Its listing was for “Skipcliff, Laura, MD,” and specified the street number. The line below the directory information offered the opportunity to get a map and directions to her address, and asked, Did you go to school with Laura MD Skipcliff?
    The next three pages showed pictures of Laura Skipcliff, photos printed in black and white. The first, which had come from her hospital's web site, was a small close-up of her face, together with a paragraph about her. Her skin was deeply lined, and she had prominent pouches under her eyes. I wondered whether cosmetic efforts had backfired; perhaps makeup had sunk into the creases of her skin, thus highlighting the signs of age. Her hair suggested a woman who’d cared about her appearance. It was dark and cut in an attractive, youthful style, shoulder length and smoothly straight. The second photo was an enlargement of the first. The quality of the original graphics file must have been poor. The blowup blurred Laura Skipcliffs features and grotesquely exaggerated her haggardness. On the following page, however, printed from the web site of a