PI On A Hot Tin Roof

there should have been a lot of fine spray, what Grissom calls high velocity blood spatter.”
    “You’re saying someone shot a dead man? Like, he had a heart attack or something—
then
they shot him?”
    “Hear me out. And then there was the absence of a weapon. They thought he might have dropped it, but they dived for it, and they couldn’t find it. Also, Buddy did have a gun, but it was still in the drawer of his bedside table.”
    “With the sex toys.”
    “Oh, yeah?” Jane was vaguely interested. “No secrets from the maid, huh?”
    “What else?”
    “Lots. It wasn’t a contact wound. See, if you put a gun to your head and fire, the skin rips in what they call a stellate, or star pattern. This hole was clean.”
    “Don’t remind me,” Talba said.
    “The bullet was still in his head, by the way. Anyhow, on a contact wound, there’d also be tattooing from gunpowder and stuff Grissom calls ‘other artifacts of oxidation.’ There wasn’t a lot of that, like he was shot from a few inches away. Right away, Grissom gets suspicious. So he tests Buddy’s hands.”
    “That’s standard,” Talba said wearily. “Paraffin tests.”
    “Uh-uh to both. First of all, paraffin’s so five minutes ago—they’ve got much better stuff for GSR now—‘gunshot residue’ to you. Lead, barium, and antimony. Second, did you know it can cost a thousand dollars to run those kinds of tests? NOPD rarely does them. But Buddy’s kind of high profile, and anyhow, Grissom can’t be stopped. There’s whole bunches of tests you can do, like with nitrites, alternate light sources, lots of stuff—sounds like they’ve got their choice, on the rare occasions they pop for them. Anyhow, Grissom does one, gets nothing. But he’s not satisfied, so he sprays the hands with something called Ferrotrace, which’ll turn them purple if the victim’s handled a blue steel weapon. Now, granted, not all weapons are blue steel, but this one comes up negative, too. So Grissom can’t really find anything to substantiate suicide.”
    “But why would you shoot a dead man?”
    “Here’s a better question—how’d the guy get dead? Grissom saw something else on Buddy’s head—I mean, besides the bullet hole. A line on the tissue that the gunshot wound didn’t obscure, like there was a subdural hemorrhage. Where something hit him, maybe.”
    “You’re losing me.”
    “Autopsy’s not in yet, but Grissom thinks he was bludgeoned to death—or somehow hit his head—and someone shot him later.”
    “I repeat—why shoot a dead man?”
    “Okay. That’s the million-dollar question. Maybe it was the coup de grace—whoever killed him didn’t know he was dead. Pushed him off the dock, maybe, then shot him to make sure.”
    “Uh-uh. The way Buddy was sort of half-sitting, half-lying wasn’t haphazard. If he didn’t shoot himself in the boat, somebody very carefully placed him in it.”
    “Okay, then. First they hit him—or he falls—then they shoot him and put him in the boat.”
    “But why?” Talba repeated.
    “Why don’t you ask your buddy Langdon?”
    Langdon wasn’t going to give her a damn thing unless she got something back.
    “Who” was a better question than “why.” And Talba still wasn’t off the hook. If her investigation had brought one of Buddy’s many enemies out of the woodwork, she was still responsible. But at least she felt a little better about writing Lucy the sympathy note she’d been contemplating, but hadn’t had the nerve to compose. She made it a poem:
    Day Cat
    Death is a feral cat that comes in the night.
    And a friend is a daytime beast
    That prowls your dusty corners
    And destroys you
    Unwittingly.
    An enemy is an accident,
    Or circumstance itself.
    And appearances cannot be trusted.
    But magick is real,
    And transformative.
    A daytime cat is only an animal
    Blind to the future
    And it grieves to lose its own friend
    As a child does, to lose her father.
    But magick transforms.
    Blessed be, my daytime cat.
    The last line was a reference to something she’d seen in Lucy’s witch book. She wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but she took it at face value. If Adele saw the note, she’d flush it down the toilet, and Royce would probably come after her with a machete, but Lucy had a subtle mind. There was an outside chance she’d see it as the expression of grief for her own actions that Talba meant her to. And it was the only way she knew to apologize. As she expected, she never