“The window’s locked, right?”
“Not sure.”
“The police report says no sign of forced entry.”
“The room’s clean, pristine. Katherine is an immaculate housekeeper.”
“Do you look in the bathroom?”
“When I realize what’s happened, I go in there, not to look. To be sick. Before I call the police.”
“But do you see anything else in the bathroom? Unusual or out of place?”
“No. I just go in and get sick and flush it and come out to call the police.”
“Do you see anything unusual in the bedroom? Is there anything else that strikes you as odd?”
“I see nightstands on either side of the bed. Nothing unusual about them.”
“Katherine and Walt are on the bed, holding hands?”
“Yes. They are.”
“You’re facing the foot of the bed from the doorway, right?”
“Yes.”
“Where are Walt and Katherine?”
“On the bed.”
“No, their relative position from where you’re standing.”
“Katherine is on my right, Walt on my left.”
“Can you see the gun?”
“No, no... yes.”
“Where are you standing now?”
“I’ve walked around to Walt’s side of the bed.”
“Is that Walt’s usual side?”
“What?”
“Is that the side he usually sleeps on? Or is that something you don’t know?”
Kay was thinking, and then her eyes popped open.
Jordan asked, “What is it?”
“They were on the wrong side of the bed. I never thought about it before...”
“Keep going.”
“Walt always slept on the other side of the bed, near the phone, to take work calls that could come in at all hours. He was left-handed. Katherine slept on the opposite side from where I found her, near the alarm clock. Even as a little girl she always slept next to the clock.”
“How long had they been married?”
No hesitation: “Seventeen years.”
“Can you think of a reason why, after seventeen years of sleeping together, that they would change their accustomed sides of the bed on the very day they decide to kill themselves?”
“Well, of course, there isn’t one,” Kay said, excited. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“What about this for a reason — Kay had no need for a clock, and Walt wasn’t concerned about a work call. Not at the end.”
“Jordan, that’s just stupid. That’s silly. Habit would override such thoughts, even if they had them.”
“I agree. Yet that’s the only explanation for it — a bad one.” She scrolled down the screen. “The police report says they were both shot in the right side of their heads.”
Kay, shaken by the wrong-side-of-the-bed information, didn’t pick up on the significance of Jordan’s comment.
Jordan tried again: “Why would a left-handed man shoot himself in the right side of the head? The gun in his left hand doesn’t preclude him from shooting his wife on her right. But... was Walt ambidextrous?”
“No,” Kay said firmly. Her expression turned oddly hopeful. “Does that mean Walt didn’t do this thing?”
“Not necessarily. Not definitively. But it is definitely weird. And I don’t see any gunshot residue test in this report, which would tell us which hand he used.”
“That’s sloppy police work, isn’t it?”
“I would say so, but with investigators who didn’t realize that Walt was left-handed? And that he and his wife were on the wrong sides of their bed? They would just see the convincing surface of a murder-suicide.”
“Jordan, this is a breakthrough. You’re wonderful.”
She ignored that, scrolling farther. “The report says that the pistol was unidentified, serial number removed. Says here your brother-in-law was a parole officer.”
“Yes.”
“Dangerous work. Did Walt carry a gun?”
“No. He didn’t own a gun, not a licensed one, at least. The police said he probably bought that from one of his... uh... clients after he decided to...”
Jordan would ask Levi if there was a way to track when the gun was stolen and from where. Nothing in the report on the Gregory “murder-suicide” indicated the police had tried to pursue that.
“Wrong side of the bed, right-hand wound by a left-handed man,” Jordan said. “There are things here that simply don’t add up.”
Kay looked hopeful. “Enough to get the case reopened?”
“Possibly,” Jordan said. She shook her head. “Where’s the motive? If it’s not health or an affair or money.”
Kay shrugged. “There just isn’t one.”
“There’s nothing in the report about motive, other than ‘Male victim known to have suffered depression.’ What did the police say on that score?”
“They found an old bottle of Xanax that Walter had in the medicine chest. He’d been treated for anxiety attacks once, and his doctor gave him that for it. An officer named Grant, I think it was, told me ‘confidentially’ that the police assumption was that Walt had been deeply depressed and didn’t want to live, and Katherine didn’t want to live without him.”
“And you’ve never bought into that?”
“It’s ridiculous. Walt wasn’t ever depressed — anxiety attacks aren’t clinical depression! Jordan, I’m a nurse at a women’s health clinic. They would have talked to me. They would have gotten help.”
The doorbell rang.
“Excuse me, won’t you?” Kay asked, rising, dabbing away tears and straightening her blouse and skirt.
Jordan gave her a small nod. While Kay disappeared to the front door, Jordan continued studying the police report. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but they’d already found enough out of whack to keep reading.
Voices at the front door were too muffled and faint to be audible, but Jordan sat up straighter as she heard the screen door open and someone enter the house. The door closed, and Jordan rose as she heard two people approaching.
Kay’s voice grew louder as she said, “Coincidentally, I was just discussing my sister and brother-in-law’s case with a friend... Jordan! This—”
“I know who it is,” Jordan said, looking into the blue eyes and boyish smile of Detective Mark Pryor. “Detective, we were just discussing the inadequacies of the Cleveland PD.”
Kay, at Mark’s side, looked from one to the other in surprise. “You young people know each other?”
She gave him a smile that had her upper lip curling over bared teeth. “I thought we had an understanding that you were gonna stop fucking following me?”
“Oh dear,” Kay said.
Freezing in midsmile, Mark’s eyes went almost comically wide, though Jordan remained unamused. “No, Jordan, please. I... I was coming to see Ms. Isenberg.”
That slowed her momentarily, then she went on the attack again. “Why?”
“Why do you think?” he said. “To talk about her case.” He shook his head. “When I saw your scooter parked at the curb, I knew I should have come back another time...”
“That’s right. You should have known that.” She was in his face, and not in the way he might have hoped. “What happened to Kay’s family happened long before you made detective — how did you even know about her case?”
Obviously, Mark didn’t like being on the wrong side of flying questions. “I heard about it from a source.”
“What source?”
“A confidential source.”
Kay said, “You two should get a room.”
That stopped them; they both turned to her.