The second story held two bedrooms, each with its own bath. The master bedroom had its own deck and its own cerulean view. The bed was a king and dressed with white lace pillows piled high over a white down-filled comforter. Very serene except for the black powder all over the walls and bed frame, not to mention the dead body smashed up against the wall. It spoiled the Zen effect.

Decker stared at the corpse. Dee was semi-upright, the angle of her limbs obscured by a flowing pink peignoir. She resembled strawberry sauce falling over a sea of vanilla ice cream. Her head was tilted to the left, blood dripping from her nose and mouth. Beside him, a gray-haired, four-foot-ten, seventy-pound grandma was snapping pictures.

Grandma aimed and fired, Dee sitting perfectly still for the camera. “A perfect waste of good lingerie.” She looked up and saw Decker’s stoic face. “Haven’t you ever heard of black humor?”

“How’d you get into this business?” Decker asked.

“I’m seventy-seven,” she replied. “How many bar mitzvah pictures can I take in a single lifetime?” She removed the lens from her Nikon. “I’m done here. That should give you a little more breathing room.”

“Thank you,” Decker said.

“You’re welcome,” Grandma answered. “I know I’m cute. You don’t have to hold back the smile, sir.”

Decker smiled. She was cute, but murder wasn’t. Dee’s death had been the cop’s road to the void—suicide through the mouth, severing the brain stem—an instantaneous death. Unusual for an amateur, who usually chose the temple, but maybe Dee had seen enough detective movies to go that route. What was unusual was where they found her—on the floor beside the bed instead of on the bed. True, she could have fallen off the bed to the floor, but the splatter marks didn’t bear that out.

The coroner was several feet from the body, holding up a vial of blood to the light. He was young and moved with a jerky rhythm. Vanilla skin was stretched over broad cheekbones. He had a wide smile and big teeth and a dab of the Occident, rounding his Asian eyes. He had broad shoulders and a lean frame. His name was Chuck Liu.

“A little neat to be suicide.” With gloved hands, Liu wrote something down on a label, stuck it on the tube of plasma, then bagged it in plastic. “But I heard it through the grapevine that her husband was found in a compromising position with a teenager—a male teenager.”

Decker made a noncommittal gesture.

Liu said, “Was she the jealous type?”

“I don’t know anything about her except that she and her husband were in the same profession and worked out of the same office.”

“That’s always a recipe for disaster. What do you think?”