Rough Trade

concluded that this was consistent with his body having lain for some time on the floor of his office. Moreover, the direction of the fibers seemed to indicate that the body had, at some point, most likely been dragged along the carpeting, as well.
    The medical examiner had found no evidence of defensive wounds on the dead man’s body—no bruising on his arms and no evidence of skin having been trapped under his fingernails, which one would expect if he’d made an effort to fight off his attacker.
    There was a lot of techno jargon—notice taken of the compromised state of the dead man’s cardiovascular system, not to mention the sorry state of his liver after a lifetime love affair with the whiskey bottle. Much was also made of the fracture of the hyoid bone, which was offered as conclusive evidence of strangulation. Other fractures and contusions noted on the body were all apparently made postmortem, either to disguise the strangulation or in consequence of the fall down the stairs.
    There was a lot of other stuff about lividity, morbidity, and internal body temperature, and the weights and condition of all of his internal organs were also noted. His last meal, apparently, had been an Egg McMuffin with cheese.
    I took a deep breath and steeled myself to look at the photographs. I flipped through the autopsy shots as quickly as possible and set them aside. It wasn’t just squeamishness. I honestly had no idea what I could possibly learn by examining a close-up of Beau Rendell’s liver. Instead, I turned to the crime scene photos and carefully laid them out. As Elliott had indicated, there were two separate crime scenes and therefore two separate sets of photos— one of Beau’s body at the bottom of the stairs, which I turned to first, and the second set, showing his office, the place from which he had presumably fallen.
    Beau’s body lay in shadow in a crumpled heap on the concrete floor of the stadium. His body was folded up on itself, making him look much smaller than I remembered. In death, he looked more like a pile of old clothes dumped in a dark corner than the difficult and mercurial owner of an NFL team.
    There were also at least a half a dozen shots taken of Beau’s office, including one that showed the safe-deposit key on the far side of the desk as if Beau had slid it across toward whoever sat opposite him. I cursed myself silently for having forgotten my promise to myself to go to the bank and look at the contents of the box. Without Cheryl to hold my hand I really was completely hopeless.
    Then something else caught my eye. Glancing through the photos, I was struck by something incongruous, not on the desk, but on the floor. I flipped through the glossies until I found the shot that presented the best view, including the stretch of carpeting on the opposite side of the desk where a visitor might have stood.
    It was a newspaper. Nothing particularly sinister. Just a copy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel lying on the carpet as if it had just been dropped by someone who’d then forgotten to pick it up. I flopped back onto the pillows of the bed, thinking.
    No matter who had dropped it, its presence was significant. Not because of what it said necessarily, but merely because it was there. Beau Rendell was a man with white carpeting in his house and who balanced his checkbook even though he had no money. In short, a neat freak. I was absolutely certain there was no way that he would have tolerated a dropped newspaper on the floor of his office for even one second while he was still alive.
     

CHAPTER 25
     
     
    The last thing I expected to be doing was rooting through old newspapers in the middle of the night—certainly not in Chrissy Rendell’s freezing cold garage. But there was no way I was going to be able to sleep without knowing what, if anything, was in that newspaper. Somehow I was certain that it was important. It didn’t help that I was plagued by a vague sense of uneasiness, a feeling of not exactly deja vu, but of having covered the same ground before and having missed the significance the first time.
    From the time I was a little girl my mother used to tell me that I had a one-track mind. She did not intend it as a compliment, but she was right. As a lawyer, my greatest strength is my willingness to give myself over to a case wholeheartedly and without reservation. Perhaps, I thought ruefully to myself, dragging the recycling bin over to the spot left vacant by the absence of