Final Option

feet,” replied Elliott. “You probably didn’t see it because you weren’t looking for it. I bet your eyes were glued to the body.“
    “But if they found a gun in the car wouldn’t that point to suicide?”
    “From what Dad says, the cops think the killer just dropped the gun in the open window of the car after he was done.”
    “How can they be so sure?”
    “For one thing, Hexter was right-handed and he was shot in the left side of his head. People tend to do things in characteristic ways. Right-handed people generally shoot with their right hands.” Elliott made his hand into a gun and wrapped his arm across his face, stretching to prove how difficult it would be to shoot himself on the side opposite his gun hand. “Also, there was gunpowder stippling—flecks of gunpowder lodged under the surface of the skin—on his face and on the back of his left hand where he tried to shield his face just before he was shot. That’s pretty common with head wounds. The guy sees it coming and instinctively tries to protect himself.”
    “Pretty gruesome.”
    “The irony of it is, whoever whacked Hexter didn’t need to go to all the trouble. Seems like Bart had some heavy heart trouble. The ME says his ticker was in such bad shape he wouldn’t have made it through the summer.”
    “How do you know all this stuff?”
    “Cops talk more than old ladies at the beauty shop. People always assume that police work is so exciting, but ninety-five percent of the time it’s deadly dull— routine calls and reports in triplicate. When something like this happens, it’s like the Super Bowl; the cops can’t resist talking about it. What I want to know is how you got mixed up in this.”
    “I was there right after he was killed. I represent his company, Hexter Commodities. The CFTC is getting down on them for some trading infractions. I was supposed to have a meeting at his house the morning he was killed. What I find amazing is that on the basis of that coincidence, the police are treating me like a suspect. All my files on Hexter have been subpoenaed; someone from the Lake County DA’s office was at my bank this morning going through my financial records, and I just had a charming visit with one Detective Ruskowski of the Lake Forest Police Department, who has it in his head that I was having an affair with Hexter.”
    “Rusty Ruskowski?” interjected Elliott.
    “Do you know him?”
    “He used to be in my dad’s squad a couple of years ago. Rusty was a boil on Dad’s backside the entire time he was under his command.”
    “Was he incompetent?” I asked with a sinking feeling in my stomach.
    “No. He just lacked imagination. You know, had to do everything by the book. The trouble is, you don’t catch killers in triplicate. Dad always said that Ruskowski was a terrific detective as long as the solution to the crime was obvious.”
    “So how did he end up in Lake Forest?”
    “Politics. He got chewed up over the Shawana Morton murder. Remember it?”
    “You’d have had to have been in a coma to have missed it. Eleven-year-old girl, abducted on her way home from school, found three days later, raped and strangled. It was on the front page for months.“
    “Ruskowski was the lead detective. To do him credit, by all accounts he worked the case hard, but after a year there was no arrest. The mayor was looking for a fall guy, and Ruskowski seemed the obvious choice. He took it pretty hard. He did some serious drinking. I think his wife split before he got himself cleaned up.“
    “No wonder he seems like such an angry guy,” I remarked unhappily.
    “I’m sure that when Lake Forest went looking for a cop with homicide experience, Ruskowski looked like a bargain.”
    “What I don’t understand is why the Lake Forest PD has a homicide detective in the first place. I thought the extent of violent crime up there was guys getting mad and hitting their caddies.”
    “You probably don’t remember the Leslie Fassbinder murder.”
    “It doesn’t ring a bell,” I confessed.
    “It didn’t get much coverage in the Chicago papers. Leslie Fassbinder was a high school junior who sneaked out of her house one night to meet her boyfriend, a classmate named Peter Wishburn. At about three in the morning a neighbor made a 911 call about a woman screaming. When the police got there they found Wishburn covered with blood, crying over Leslie’s body, which had been stabbed a dozen times. So being geniuses, they took one