“Not to your face,” Ruddy said. He turned to me. “Are his hands…Klammy?” He laughed some more. He cracked himself up.
I gave Ruddy flat eyes. He just kept chortling away. He seemed about fifty years too old for this. “What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Hanson.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Why?”
“I once dated a guy with that last name.”
He grinned. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, I did.” I looked him up and down. “He had a really small…appetite.”
Klamm snorted.
“Can’t hear the name Hanson without thinking of it,” I said. “I mean, it was tiny. Like a bird.” I looked him up and down again. “Or a kitten.”
Hanson crossed his arms over his chest. He wasn’t laughing anymore. But Klamm was.
“Can you show me around the grounds, Officer Klamm?”
Hanson started to say something, but Klamm interrupted. “I don’t see why not,” he said.
Thirty-nine
“You shouldn’t let him get to you,” I said to Klamm as we trudged through weeds around the back of the house. “I mean, the whole thing is stupid anyway. It’s not like you came up with your last name yourself.”
“I know, right?” he said.
“Honestly? I know a guy named Carll and he spells it with twol’s. He chooses to do that. Corrects people when they spell it the way it’s supposed to be spelled. To me, that’s a hell of a lot weirder than a last name you were born with.”
Klamm nodded. “Hanson can be kind of a jerk.”
“Don’t need to convince me.”
The weeds were tall. I reminded myself to do a tick check at the first opportunity. Gnats hovered around our faces. The sun was just starting to set, but it was still so hot and humid thatthe air around us felt like breath. “So, Officer Klamm,” I said, “were you here for the initial response?”
“Yeah,” Klamm said. “I was here when the ME came. I helped bag evidence.”
“Anything strike you as unusual?”
“That’s hard to say,” he said. “I mean, I’d never been at a murder scene before.”
“First one’s rough.”
He nodded. “I gotta tell you, I don’t think I was prepared.”
“No one is ever prepared,” I said. “The blood…”
“It wasn’t just that…” Klamm stopped walking. “The killer shot her in the back of the head with a .45. The back of the head. She wasn’t even facing him, and he blew her skull apart.” He cleared his throat.
A warm breeze ruffled my hair, bringing with it a pasty scent. Wild lilies. Just like yesterday, when Melanie Joan and I had stood at the front door of this house, waiting to meet Book Babe face-to-face.
“Or her,” Klamm said. “I didn’t mean to say ‘him.’ The killer could have been a woman, I don’t know. But who does that? Who shoots a lady in the back of the head?”
I remembered Leila standing there facing us, her slim frame and her hard eyes and herI Think, Therefore I ReadT-shirt. Leila Donnelly, alive and breathing.
