Anything that cut short her much-needed personal time was sufficient to raise her Irritation Quotient considerably; but when the interruption was a homicide, then maintaining an image of official cool became something she had to work at. A bigwig, the captain had said. Tread carefully. Marian Larch had recently moved into a new apartment; she’d spent the day putting up bookshelves and performing other similar laborious tasks, and she was tired. But man’s inhumanity to man rarely paused long enough to accommodate the constabulary’s need for home improvement, so Marian was back on the job a few days earlier than she’d planned. Arson and a fatal stabbing, same time, same place, find the connection. All Marian had was a name and address, somebody called A. J. Strode off Park. No parking place, of course. She left the car a block away and jogtrotted back to the mansion marked by police cars and an ambulance and a few uniformed officers there to hold back the crowd of onlookers that for the most part had failed to materialize.
