Final Option

shallow, little gasps. That’s how my mother had always described Hexter, her tone of voice somehow implying that that was the very worst kind. The morning paper, soaked right through, lay near his head.
    I do not know for how long I stood looking at the body, transfixed by the tableau before me. I know that I felt a great, mixed-up, paralyzing surge of emotions. Fear, revulsion, and the pure adrenaline rush of shock. But underneath it all there was a vast well of detached curiosity. Some drama had been played out here to a bloody conclusion. One part of me wanted to know how it was that Bart Hexter had come to be here, shot dead at the end of his own driveway.
    By the time I heard the whine of the police sirens they were practically upon me, with lights flashing and tires squealing—two squad cars, an ambulance, and a plain white sedan. I stood there, frozen, like a deer caught in the headlights. Since I had not been able to see Bart Hexter’s car from the street, I wondered who had called them.
    “Stand away from the car,” barked an amplified voice as the doors of the various vehicles were flung open. Policemen swarmed out, guns drawn. “Get your hands in the air.’" Startled, I looked behind me. It took me a second to register that it was me who was being addressed. One of the officers came up to me at a sprint. It wasn’t until I was made to “assume the position” against the hood of my car and roughly patted down for a weapon that they got around to asking questions.
    “Who are you?” demanded a beefy sergeant, his voice high and loud from tension.
    “Kate Millholland.”
    “What are you doing here?'’
    “I had a meeting with Mr. Hexter,” I stammered.
    “What kind of meeting?”
    “Business. When I got here I saw his car had gone off the road. I went to see if anything was wrong. He’s, he’s, he’s been shot.”
    “Shot dead?”
    “I think so, yes.” My voice, my power of speech was failing me. I was down to words of one syllable and little more than a whisper.
    “What time did you get here?” he barked.
    “I’m not sure, my meeting was at eight. I think I was a few minutes early.” I looked at my watch. It read close to 8:15.
    “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”
    I nodded mutely and allowed myself to be escorted to one of the squad cars for questioning. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a red-haired man climb slowly out of the unmarked car and amble toward the Rolls Royce, his casual bearing in marked contrast to the taut energy of the police officer at my side. The patrolman opened the door of the squad, and I slid into the backseat. It was a Caprice that looked too clean and new to be a real police car, not like the battered Chicago blue and whites that bounce on shot shocks through the streets in my neighborhood. Metal mesh separated the front seat from the back, and before I knew it, I was left alone with the squawk of the police radio. I checked the door. It was locked.
    Shock, I decided after a few minutes of quiet contemplation, had turned me into a moron. It was, to say the least, disconcerting to arrive for a meeting at your client’s home only to find him shot. But I hadn’t even mustered the presence of mind to wonder who, if anybody, had killed him. I thought about it for a while, letting the implications sink in. Why did I automatically assume that someone else had pulled the trigger when suicide was much more likely? In futures markets the payoffs can be profanely high, but the downside is equally steep. If he’d killed himself, I reasoned grimly, Bart Hexter wouldn’t have been the first trader who’d found himself sitting on a time bomb of bad trades and eaten a bullet rather than wait for it to go off.
     
    I waited for close to an hour, growing impatient, angry, and finally bored, locked in the back of the Lake Forest police car. Finally the door was opened by a red-haired man in his late forties wearing a shiny blue suit and a tie that was about an inch too wide. He had a thick build, running to fat, and he tapped his blunt fingers impatiently on the roof of the car while I climbed out.
    “I’m Detective Ruskowski,” he said, not extending his hand to be shaken. He was, I figured, maybe an inch under six feet. We looked at each other eye to eye. There were deep lines in his freckled face, and his ginger hair was liberally sprinkled with gray. On second thought, I decided he must be older than my original estimate; either that, or