Moonlight Falls
there’s nobody who wanted to go with the suicide more than me. Christ, I was the last man to sleep with her. The only physical connection to Scarlet’s death. If they were to find one, it wasn’t going to be Jake, it was going to be me. Don’t you see? I had no choice but to investigate in order to clear my name. Because if a Prosecuting Attorney and I.A. suddenly got involved and demanded a full-blown investigation, then suicide or no suicide, they were going to get to the bottom of her death. That happened, all forensic fingers would point to me.”
    Stocky agent presses his lips together, shoots another glance to his partner, nods sympathetically.
    “Now let me get this straight,” he continues. “They wanted you to sign off on a suicide, but they had no suicide weapon.”
    “Here’s this brutally cut up woman whom I had only just slept with. She’s supposedly cut herself up bad, and yet, where’s the blade? She didn’t just get up, wash it off, return it to the drawer, get back in her bed to die.”
    “Could it be that her husband disposed of it?”
    “I could only assume he took it, did something with it. Hid it.”
    “Which would point to him as a murderer, potentially.”
    “Or as somebody who was so upset at the sight of his mutilated wife, he just had to dispose of the means of the mutilation.”
    “People do fucked up things at fucked up times. Isn’t that right, Divine?”
    Stocky agent raises his right hand, makes like a pistol with forefinger and thumb, presses the pretend barrel against his temple. When the thumb falls, he mouths the word, “Boom.”
    I smile, but there’s nothing to smile about.
    “Listen, I could have done exactly what they wanted me to. But how could I live with myself after that? I’d slept with the deceased. My semen was inside her. I’d left residual evidence lying around the house. Not just fingerprints, but footprints on the back lawn and a beer bottle with my name on it. Christ knows what they would have found just by taking a close look at the bedsheets. Hair follicles, D.N.A., who knows what else.”
    “But this wasn’t all about you,” the agent continues, voice raised an octave or two. “Just like your old pal Mitch Cain said, you did go ahead and grow a conscience.”
    Stamping out my cigarette, I sit back in my chair, look directly into the face of the agent. In my right hand, the pins and needles begin taking over once more, until I grab hold of it with my left.
    “I was having a hard time accepting the fact that Scarlet would kill herself, let alone self-mutilate her body with a razor or a kitchen knife or however it was done. Plus I knew Jake and Mitch were not beyond manipulating a crime scene to suit their own purposes.”
    Stocky agent’s face lights up; he busts out laughing.
    He says, “Corrupt fucking cops. Well there’s something different.”
    “Listen,” I say, “she wasn’t just another dead body. She was no rapist or drug dealer who was about to tie up a court system. Scarlet was a nice, lonely kid.”
    “You’d grown attached to her.” A question the agent poses just when he’s beginning to calm down. “That why you got a masseuse license? To meet women?”
    I didn’t answer the question. Because he wasn’t all wrong.
    “Not attached,” I said instead. “But then not unattached either. She deserved better than what the head cops wanted to give her, whatever their reason, whatever their motive. As the independent field man in charge under Cain’s thumb, I knew I had at least some opportunity to control three things: first, keeping my name cleared of any and all false charges.”
    “Second, Mr. Divine?”
    “Finding out just who or what might have been responsible for her killing. Even if in the end, I had no choice but to call it a suicide. Just like the bastards wanted.”
    “And finally?”
    “By destroying any evidence that might prove the unthinkable.”
    “What’s the unthinkable?”
    “That I killed her, and

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