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Joe.
    â€˜Yeah,’ answered O’Donnell as they reached the house. ‘A narrow garage at the rear.’
    â€˜Schiff,’ said O’Donnell, turning to the older of the two officers moving with them. ‘I need you to keep those people back.’ He gestured at the ‘audience’ with his thumb. ‘The ME’s technicians can’t fit their truck around the back entrance. We are going to have to bring the body out front and I don’t want these people gawking . . .
Oh shit
,’ said O’Donnell, now noticing the hubbub from above. ‘Helicopters,’ he said, craning his neck to look beyond the roof. ‘Our job is hard enough without all these parasites breathing down our necks.’
    â€˜Who the hell is this guy?’ snuffled Frank McKay at last, as Schiff and Reno waved off and made their way back down the footpath. Frank had a heavy chest cold and O’Donnell instinctively moved a foot away so as not to catch his breath.
    â€˜Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m on leave as of Monday and the missus will kill me if I’m sneezing my way through Florida. We’re taking the grandkids on vacation – me at Disney World, if you can believe that.’
    O’Donnell took a breath. It was an old cop coping mechanism Joe knew, reminding anyone in earshot that life went on beyond the gruesome catastrophes of their profession. O’Donnell was a little shaken, Joe sensed, which meant this one must be worse than the usual. Not that the usual was ever actually anything near usual in your average guy’s stretch of the imagination.
    â€˜Jeffrey Logan,’ said O’Donnell, back on the beat, answering Frank’s original question. ‘As in Doctor Jeff, TV psychologist extraordinaire.’
    â€˜The relationship guru with the talk show?’ said Frank. ‘Jesus, my wife loves that guy.’
    â€˜I thought the vic was a female?’ said Joe, getting them back on track as they took the sandstone front steps of the three-storey Beacon Hill brownstone two at a time. The crime scene traffic was thick and fast, the echo of police radios beeping and scratching beyond the front entranceway.
    â€˜Sorry,’ said O’Donnell. ‘She is. She’s the doc’s wife. One Stephanie Tyler. She’s an attorney – works from home.’
    â€˜A lawyer,’ said Mannix, the name ringing a bell.
    â€˜Yeah, graduated magna cum laude of BC if the certificate on her office wall is anything to go by.’
    And then he remembered.
    They pushed into the hallway.
    â€˜So what’s the story?’ asked Joe, trying to visualise the small-framed redhead he had met briefly a mere three months ago. His eyes danced over the expensively decorated rooms around him: the original artwork on the walls, the antique rugs under their feet, the European furniture, subtle lighting, heavy drapes and flower-filled vases.
    O’Donnell flipped open his notepad. ‘Stephanie Tyler, thirty-eight. COD single gunshot wound to the chest. The weapon was a Mark VDGR, the calibre a .460 Weatherby Magnum.’
    â€˜DGR?’ asked Frank.
    â€˜Dangerous game rifle,’ replied O’Donnell.
    â€˜So not for rabbits,’ said Frank.
    â€˜Not unless they have a trunk and a pair of long ivory tusks to go with it.’
    O’Donnell, Mannix and McKay put their backs to the hallway wall, allowing two crime scene guys to shuffle past with a nod. Joe noticed the looks on their faces. This one
was
bad, he could smell it.
    â€˜This way,’ said O’Donnell, leading them towards the back of the house. ‘Vic was shot at the kitchen table while drinking a Shiraz and reading an old issue of
Vanity Fair
. The wine was one of her family’s, by the way. Tyler was the heir to the Rockwell Winery fortune.’ O’Donnell let this little fact hang, not attaching it to anything as yet, most likely because he was not too sure where,