Death Before Facebook

beige Mercedes sedan—do you see one?”
    She didn’t. She handed out her card, told everyone to call immediately if they saw or heard from Reed and Dennis, then said good-bye and went into the house.
    The district officers who’d checked out Reed and Dennis’s, and Dennis’s parents’ house, reported no sign of any member of the Foucher family. Skip put out a bulletin for them and their car, asking any officers who spotted them to contact her immediately.
    Because it was her case, it was her job to stay with the body till the coroner took it away. She was standing in the dining room, staring at the carnage, when Paul Gottschalk joined her. “What do you make of it?”
    “I give up. You?”
    “Well, I’ve got a theory. We’ll have to see if it checks out, but here’s what I think. He was shot first in the right leg—in the groin, actually, and the bullet hit his femoral artery. Blood spurted all over the floor and the impact threw him back and twisted him toward the right, toward the wall, where he touched his hand to the wound, then to the wall to steady himself.” He pointed to the handprint.
    “Then more blood spurted all over the wall—that’s why it looks like a knife fight in here. And then he turned around, he might have even walked a couple of steps, and that time he got shot in the chest.”
    Skip nodded, about to say something, but Gottschalk, strange bird, simply walked away looking satisfied.
    When the body had been removed, Skip called Sugar to come examine her house. Nothing was missing.
    The last step was to canvass the neighbors, a task she dreaded. People in the Garden District, with its mansions and its private patrol service, were probably the most frightened of crime in the whole city. She didn’t want to look at their dilated eyes and tight lips as they pressed her for details, as they wrung their manicured hands and begged her to tell them how to protect themselves.
    She didn’t have the least idea how to reassure them, and right now she didn’t have time either.
    As it happened, the neighbors on the right were on vacation, according to their own right-hand neighbors. The ones on the left had been out at the time of the shooting, and the ones across the street had been closeted in their air-conditioned house.
    Two doors down, however, on the Heberts’ side of the street, a Mrs. Gandolfo did think she’d heard a shot, had even peeked out through her curtains. She called her neighbors, the Heberts’ left-hand ones, and, getting no answer, dialed the Heberts. A young man answered, and said everything was fine and he hadn’t heard a thing. Reassured, she’d given up.
    “When you peeked out,” Skip said, “did you notice any cars parked in front of the Heberts’ house?”
    “Not really,” said Mrs. Gandolfo. “No more than usual, anyway. Maybe a beige one, I guess, or white. And there might have been another one, but I really can’t remember anything about it You know how your mind registers something, but you don’t necessarily know what?”
    “Can you say anything else about the beige one?”
    “No. No, I can’t Except it might have been kind of small.” A Mercedes sedan was at least middle-sized, in Skip’s view.
    Pulses pounding a wild tattoo in her ears, the wheel slick from her sweat, Reed drove the Mercedes like a sports car, finding it clumsy on the turns.
    My fault, she thought. Dennis could do this better. Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, anybody could
.
    Blind with her own tears, she tried not to think, just drive. Oddly, the streets were nearly deserted, or the Tercel might have hit another car. She might have as well; a cop might have stopped either one.
    But it was a lazy night in the Big Easy—everyone was home from work and staying in, it looked like.
    She thought she could remember these words: “If anybody follows me, I’ll shoot them through the head, I swear to God I will.”
    But she wasn’t sure. At the time, the words hadn’t even registered. Nothing had. Thought had taken a holiday. Reed simply acted on automatic pilot.
    Her feet had worked. It was that simple.
    She had given chase, seen Sally thrown roughly into the Tercel, as if car seats hadn’t been invented, and gotten there too late. The car door was locked.
    Reed was getting flashbacks of the scene, as if they were part of a dream. In her mind, she saw herself, as she couldn’t have in real life: tearing out the door, nearly falling down on the front steps and pausing to right herself,