Killer Stuff: A Jane Wheel Mystery (Jane Wheel Mysteries) by Fiffer Sharon

Author:Fiffer, Sharon [Fiffer, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2009-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

14

Bruce Oh did not know if he looked his age. He was forty-nine and felt neither happy nor unhappy about it. It was what it was. When people made remarks about feeling young or old, he had no idea what they were talking about. People who struggled to appear younger, to knock off five years by punishing themselves in a gym or a tanning salon, either amused or annoyed him, depending on their zeal and vanity. He believed in a moderate diet, exercise for health, and daily meditation.

He walked early in the morning, just as the sun was rising, wearing a Walkman and listening to the news or shutting it off and simply wearing it so none of his neighbors, also walkers, would suggest they chat. He needed the isolation, the mindless activity in which he could immerse himself and sort out the day.

Since he kept track of his exercise by the clock and not by the mile, he couldn’t tell anyone how much distance he covered. He only knew that when he laced his shoes and slipped on his Walkman, he checked his watch, and after striding purposefully for thirty minutes away from his prairie-style bungalow on the south side of Evanston, he turned around and walked just as briskly back home.

Claire kept buying him journals in which to record his mileage. For his last birthday, she had given him a pedometer. He could not convince her that he didn’t care about the distance. That wasn’t his measurement.

“My dear,” he would say, “I don’t wish to acquire miles, to count them up.”

Oh knew that Claire did not understand this. Her life was gathering things, stuff. Just like Mrs. Wheel. She believed that the story of their lives came from the things people saved, while he believed that a life story began only after all the stuff was stripped away. Once, when Claire was especially frustrated with him, she’d told him that he only cared about those who were murdered. Not true, of course, but perhaps he did listen more carefully to the story of a person’s life after they were gone. Death made an eloquent storyteller, if one had the patience to listen.

Because of the memorial service and a lengthy call with Munson, he had missed his sunrise walk this Wednesday morning and was now walking, late afternoon, toward a setting sun, thinking about Jane Wheel or, more specifically, Jane Wheel’s neighbors, Jack and Sandy Balance. He let his mind drift to Kankakee and David Gattreaux. He and Detective Munson had put up the proper front, an amiable working relationship, two departments cooperating to solve two murders that might be linked. But Munson had resented Oh’s involvement and had made it clear that he felt this was a crime of passion, that it was a home-grown crime of passion at that, and it had nothing to do with the Balance murder.

“Gattreaux lived what we would call a pretty risky life style,” Munson had told Oh, “lots of partying, lots of sex partners, lots of people, some of them not so nice, who didn’t like him much.

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