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“Katz was right-handed. The print of his we found on the beer bottle was from his left hand.”
“Well, that’s weird. You didn’t see that before?”
“No, actually I did. But I didn’t place any great importance on it because sometimes you hold a drink in your other hand. We’ve all done it.”
“But now?”
“But now I’m looking at everything that doesn’t seem to fit.”
“And what does that tell you, looking at it that way?”
“That someone could have pressed his hand on the beer after he was dead, but used the wrong hand.”
“To make it look like he was drinking beer? Why would that matter?”
“I don’t know.”
Mars looked at Decker nervously. “And if there was almost no beer in his stomach, that wasn’t a red flag?”
“Should have been,” admitted Decker. He looked down at the floor. “But if Katz didn’t drink the beer, who did?” He eyed the kitchen sink. “Maybe it went down there.”
“To make it look like he’d drunk most of what was in the bottle?”
“If that was their plan, they didn’t know how postmortems work. Not that it made a difference since I completely missed that because I didn’t fully read the PM report.” He slammed his fist against the wall and then rubbed the cut the blow had produced. “The fact is, everything changed when we found the fingerprint, Melvin. I was really eager to get the person who’d done this. And that print led directly to Meryl Hawkins. Nothing else mattered at that point.”
“I get that, Decker. And I know you want to beat yourself up over this, and maybe you’re right to do it. But you got another chance to get it right, so clear your head, get rid of the guilt, and focus. I know you can do this, bro.”
Decker took a couple of deep, calming breaths. “Okay, the problem has always been, how did the killer or killers get here? They had to come down that one road and pass the other houses. No one saw them. There was no trace of another car, and there would have been.”
“Maybe they came on foot.”
“They had to have come to the houseafterthe rain started. Yet there was not a single trace of that in the house. They might have been meticulous in cleaning up, but to not leave a single mark?” Decker shook his head in disbelief. “Not going to happen.”
“Well, what if the killers were in the housebeforethe rain started. Then they ambushed Katz when he came in. And killed everybody else.”
Decker thought about this. “That means they would have come to the house in broad daylight with no rain to give them cover. Someone would have seen them coming down the road.”
“Maybe they came from behind the house and not down the road.”
“And waited hours to kill everyone? Why?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Mars. “Maybe they were trying to get some information from them before they murdered them.”
“That’s a possibility, Melvin. And an intriguing one.”
“So the only car found here was Katz’s?”
“That’s right. Susan Richards had one car and the other was in the shop for—”
Decker froze as another image dropped from his cloud to rest atop another.
“What is it, Decker?” asked Mars.
Decker came out of his reverie and said slowly, “Don Richards and his son, Frankie, were shot once in the chest, both through the heart. Nonsurvivable. But Katz was different. He was shot in the head,twice. Temple and the rear of the skull.” He looked over at Mars. “Why would that be? Why change the scenario for Katz?”
“Maybe he struggled with them or he ran off, and they had to shoot him in the head. Got him in the back and then in the temple.”
“The order of the wounds was actually the reverse of that. Temple first, then the back of the head. The temple shot undoubtedly would have been fatal. He would have fallen to the floor. Why shoot him again in the head when they knew he was already dead?”
