Love You to Death by D.J. Reid (reading list .txt) 📕

/> My mouth twitched as I suppressed a smirk. “She would have gone back to clean off the hearth, which was the only spot in the room that seemed a likely place to crack one’s head. There were no fireplace tools because they didn’t use the fireplace. But it had been used in the past. Some soot had fallen into the empty firebox. I asked myself why. What had dislodged it? The chimney was handy. Where else could she put her bloody clothes so they probably wouldn’t be found? Hoffman shoved her clothes into the chimney flue. Simple, huh?”

“Sure, sure. Simple. Okay,” Foster continued. “So Hoffman then runs to the bathroom, comes through to the bedroom, and locks the hall door. Then she goes back to the bathroom and showers. Even at a run, that takes a few minutes. When she finishes the shower, she throws on a robe, breaks down the bedroom door, and crosses the room to lock on the bathroom door. The illusion is complete. Both doors appear to have been locked when Trish was shot."

Newkirk continued, “When we confronted Hoffman, she broke down and confessed to everything. If she had stonewalled and if you hadn’t suggested looking in the chimney for her bloody clothes, we probably would have been forced to label Vanderark’s death a suicide.”

“No. There was something else.”

Foster Newkirk’s dark eyebrows rose.

“In her panic, as much as she was able to create the scene as she wanted it, she still made one mistake,” I said.

I blew across my cup, but it was just for effect.

“Well?”

I took a sip of lukewarm coffee. “I didn’t realize it until I went to the Dixie Diner. Do you remember where the gun was?”

“Sure. In the Vanderark girl’s hand. What’s that got to do with the Dixie Diner?”

“Which hand?”

Foster looked into the air above my head to picture the scene. Finally he said, “The right. Yeah. Sure, of course. Her right hand.”

“The card Bubbles showed me, the one that Trish had written... it was obvious from her handwriting that Vanderark was left-handed. You do anything as drastic as shoot yourself, you’re going to use your dominant hand.”

Foster held up his hand to protest. “Hoffman would have known that.”

“Sure. But when she was facing Trish, Darla’s left-hand side was Trish’s right. Even you had to think about it for a moment. In a panic, it was an easy mistake for Hoffman to make. She put the gun in the wrong hand.”

-END-

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Publication Date: 09-05-2009

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