Angel Interrupted Read Free Page B

behind her in thick, chocolate waves, luxurious in a way that seemed obscene in the face of death. Her skin was pale and she was dressed in the floral scrubs of a nurse. She had not voided, as so many others do in death, and I was glad for that small dignity.
    Her mouth was slightly open, as if she were waiting for a kiss that would never come. Snow White without her prince. Her eyes stared up at the ceiling, as if looking through infinity and beyond. In her right hand she clutched a small, gray pistol. It was a delicate weapon that looked like a toy. But she was proof the gun was real. A bullet hole bloomed neatly in the center of her right temple, as precisely defined as if a surgeon had drilled a hole there. It seemed impossible that such a tiny opening had taken her life in an instant, but I had seen such deceptively neat wounds before. I knew they had the power to obliterate all.
    As I grew accustomed to the heaviness of death, I sensed the undertones beneath it. Emotions filled me, giving me a glimpse of what her final moment had been like. I felt, strangely, a strong vein of deep love but, most of all, betrayal of the most terrible sort.
    What had happened here?
    Blood had seeped out in a halo around her head, staining the carpet beneath. A patrolman was kneeling by the body, examining it with the curiosity of someone confronting death for the first time. He touched her left arm, then lifted it by the wrist and checked for a pulse, even though she was clearly gone. He let the arm flop back down, out of place, and then moved to her right side. He touched one of her fingers, curled around the gun, checking it for rigor, pushing it away from its original position without realizing what he had done.
    I had been careless like that once, I knew. But I still wanted to take the gun out of the dead woman’s hand and shoot the guy right then and there for maximum stupidity.
    “What the hell are you doing, Denny?” a voice cried out from across the room. Excellent—maybe I wouldn’t have to shoot the dumb bastard after all. Maybe his partner would do it for me.
    An outraged black woman in uniform stood at the edge of the carpet glaring down at the wide-eyed patrolman. “Get away from the body,” she ordered him. “Go stand over there by the door and remember exactly what she looked like when you first got in this room, because Gunn is going to lay you out.”
    Gunn? My heart skipped a beat. Maggie was on her way.
    “I didn’t touch anything,” the patrolman mumbled.
    “I saw you touch her hand.”
    “I was checking to see if she was breathing,” he said defensively.
    “I ought to do the same for you. There’s no blood getting to your brain. Get over there.” The cop shuffled, ashamed, to a corner of the room. He mumbled something as he passed her, but his partner was in no mood to hear it. “Hell, no,” she said to him. “You’re going to tell them yourself. Look at the body, you dumbass. You might have just screwed up evidence we needed to tell us whether this was murder or suicide.”
    She was right. There was something odd about the curve of the dead woman’s right arm and the way she held the gun. I’d seen many an unhappy human blown to the other side by a self-inflicted gunshot. They dropped like rocks in a pond, arms flopped out in instantaneous surrender to death. I’d never seen a suicide with an arm curved as gracefully as a ballet dancer’s. Something was off.
    I tried to read the emotions lingering in the room more closely, but the emotions of the living interfered. Already, crime scene specialists had started to flood into the house, including several I recognized. Peggy Calhoun, an older woman just a few years from retirement, had arrived, even though she usually stayed in the lab to supervise her less-experienced colleagues. Her cat’s-eye glasses dangled from a chain looped around her neck and, as always, she had orange lipstick smeared on her teeth.
    “What are you doing here?” the