Deadly Fall by Ann Bruce

still made the front page and took up most of the second page.” He opened a deep side drawer and withdrew a folded newspaper. “Um, here. Take a look.”
     
    Augusta took the neatly folded paper from him. She braced herself, telling herself that she had been expecting this. Anyone with half a grain of sense could see this coming a mile away. A wealthy man is murdered. The logical suspect would be the wife, estranged or not. It was always a family member, and the closer the connection the better, since greed was a great motivator.
     
    But that little prep wasn’t enough. A glance and she couldn’t seem to drag enough air into her lungs. She simply couldn’t. They were constricted. And the oxygen already in her lungs seemed to grow heavier as the picture in front of her blurred. However, it wasn’t the picture alone that turned her insides to lead. It was the picture and the headline that went with it. It was her wedding to Drew all over again, Augusta thought, only worse. Much, much worse.
     
    “Augusta?”
     
    Augusta had never heard such soft concern in Hayes’ voice before and it made her blink. Her vision cleared immediately.
     
    “I-I’m fine,” she said quietly, not looking up from the paper. “I just need a second. Or two.”
     
    “Estranged Wife Top Suspect in Andrew Langan’s Murder,” the headline pronounced, accompanied by a black-and-white photo of an unsmiling Augusta, looking somewhat shady in her slick suit and head lowered, being personally escorted by a grim Detective Nick Markov from the Nineteenth Precinct.
     
    * * * * *
     
    Nick took two steps away from the door, stopped, scrubbed his face with his hands and made a low sound of frustration in his throat.
     
    A hand landed on his shoulder. “Hey, partner, you going to be okay?”
     
    Nick inhaled deeply and exhaled through his teeth. “Yeah. Just give me a moment.”
     
    Ethan Murtagh studied his partner as the other man stalked to his desk. It hadn’t been good. From the moment they had stepped into the squad room, it hadn’t been good. There was the usual frantic orderliness that was customary for the precinct, or any precinct in the city. Noise from the arguments, deprecations, orders and any and all exchanges was at a moderate level, or for the Nineteenth it was. None of the noise, however, was from officers calling around for leads on Andrew Langan’s murder. Not anymore. Over two hundred calls had been made in the first forty-eight hours. It was roughly three days since Andrew Langan skydived to his death, and the chances of catching the perpetrators decreased dramatically. Slim to none, came to mind. Historically, if no arrests are made within forty-eight hours, more likely than not no arrests would be made at all.
     
    His lieutenant and captain, whom they had been talking with earlier, knew this. Perhaps talk wasn’t the right word. They had been subjected to a diatribe about the importance of the case, the victim and how the chief had city hall breathing down his neck and the chief, in turn, had been breathing down the captain’s neck since Ethan had called in the homicide in the wee morning hours on Wednesday. However, they could no longer assign so many people to the case.
     
    The situation, much to Nick’s disgust, was salvageable, they had said.
     
    Augusta Langan was the key.
     
    Everyone was demanding an arrest. And the most…convenient suspect was “the wife.” It had taken considerable effort on Nick’s part not to lose it then and there.
     
    Ethan perched himself on Nick’s desk. His expression promised more of that they’d heard earlier.
     
    “They have a point.”
     
    Nick’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you start. She didn’t do it.”
     
    “How do you know? She has motive, opportunity and no alibi.” There was a frustrated edge in Ethan’s tone.
     
    “My gut says so.”
     
    Ethan was off the desk. “Your gut? Or is it something lower?”
     
    Nick gave his partner a look that