The Favor by Nora Murphy

Author:Nora Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

NOW

MONDAY, MAY 13

Detective Jordan Harrison

The key was to catch them by surprise. It’s why I never called first. Not before I stopped by McKenna’s house on Saturday, to let her know that the autopsy of her husband’s body had been completed. The cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. The manner of death a homicide. No surprises there.

I hadn’t called first yesterday, either. Mostly, I’d wanted to catch her in action. I’d wanted to see if she was still home. What would a woman whose husband had been murdered be doing in the house where it had happened? Neither her appearance, nor that of the house, had afforded any clues.

She had assured me, as we sat down in her living room on Saturday afternoon, that, just like the night her husband was killed, she had spent the previous night at her brother’s house and intended to return that evening.

“Why come back here at all?” I had asked. “Why not just stay at his place the whole weekend?”

“I don’t want to impose on them twenty-four hours a day,” she had replied. “Besides, it’s good for me to be here. I’m getting used to my husband being gone. I’m processing.” Her blue eyes had flashed, daring me to question her further on that topic.

I chose to let it go for the time being.

On Sunday morning, I’d shown up with an update on the results of the fingerprint tests and footprint analysis, which had been expedited and came back in record time.

A prominent and successful psychiatrist is gunned down inside his home in an affluent suburb mere feet away from his pretty, white, blond wife? If that didn’t garner the most expedient processing and analysis of the evidence, or lack thereof, collected at the scene, I didn’t know what would.

McKenna had taken the news about the lack of physical evidence well. Too well? I wasn’t sure. Her manner was stilted and cold. I had a talent for reading people. I had to. It was part of the job. But she was a challenge.

I’d felt the same way when I had stopped by on Saturday. I had told her that the autopsy had been completed—again, the case was a priority, especially in a county that usually only saw one or two murders a year—and the death had been formally ruled a homicide. It was only May, and already the county had met its murder total from last year, before the weather had even heated up.

The first had been a domestic disturbance turned deadly. A murder-suicide late last month. A husband had shot his wife and himself in their five-thousand-square-foot house with a circular driveway and a pool, while their two kids were away at college. It had shocked the community.

The wife had managed to call the police before she had been killed. Detective Mallory Cole and I had responded to the house. I would never forget what had happened there. My partner was still in the hospital. She was yet to wake up.

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