Death Notice

“Someone from the Gazette is here,” she announced. “I put him in the break room. He’s been waiting for almost two hours. Says he needs to talk to you about George Winnick.”

Kat sighed. “If it’s Martin Swan, tell him I don’t have time to make a statement. I’ll give him something as soon as I get a chance.”

“It’s not Martin, Chief. It’s Henry Goll. The obituary writer.”

The name sounded familiar to Kat, although she couldn’t come up with a face to match it, which bothered her. Perry Hollow was a small town, and although she didn’t personally know all of its residents, she at least had an idea of what most of them looked like.

“He said it was important,” Lou added.

Kat switched directions again and marched into the break room. Seeing her, Henry Goll stood rigidly, arms folded across his sizable chest.

“Henry? I’m Chief Campbell.”

The reason Kat couldn’t match Henry Goll’s name with a face was because she had never laid eyes on him before. She would have remembered it if she had. He was tall—over six feet—and powerfully built. When he stepped toward her, his muscles moved smoothly beneath his khaki pants and black polo shirt.

His facial features were strong, too—square chin, Mediterranean nose, a thick head of black hair. He could have been a real looker, Kat thought, it if wasn’t for the massive scar that sliced diagonally across the lower half of his face. The upper part was also marred, dominated by a large burn mark covering his left temple and most of his forehead. His skin was pale—startlingly so—making the defects stand out all the more.

Kat extended a hand. When Henry shook it, she willed herself to look him directly in the eye and act as if everything about him was normal. Because of James, she understood the importance of treating someone different just like everyone else.

She smiled when she spoke. “I hear you have something that might interest me.”

Henry didn’t smile back. “Is there someplace private we can talk?”

Kat glanced at her watch and saw that she had five minutes. She needed to keep the conversation short, but Henry Goll appeared to be in no rush.

“I apologize,” she said, “but I need to run out for a little bit. Family matter. Could this wait until later?”

Henry pulled a creased sheet of paper from his pocket and thrust it into her hand. Kat scanned the page, seeing George Winnick’s name and little else.

“Is this his obituary? It’s pretty skimpy.”

“It’s a death notice,” Henry said. “Not an obituary.”

“What’s the difference?”

“An obituary contains details—the person’s family, his career, his hobbies. A death notice is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a notification to the world that someone just died.”

Kat glanced from the paper to Henry and back again. “So this is George’s death notice. I’m still not sure what the issue is here.”

“The issue,” Henry said with maddening calmness, “is that it’s a fake.”

“How do you know that?”

“Just read it again.”

Kat obliged, eyes sliding across the humble sentence. When she got to the mention of George’s time of death, her heart skipped a beat.

“Now look at the top left corner,” Henry instructed.

Her gaze drifted to the top of the page. There, she saw what Henry was referring to—a time and date printed in minuscule letters. She had discovered George’s body at about eight that morning. The time printed on his death notice said he died at quarter to eleven the night before. Yet the time stamp on the fax indicated it had been sent at ten fifteen—thirty minutes before his death.

“This is impossible.”

“I told you it was important.”

Kat eyed her watch again. She needed to leave immediately, and there was only one solution she could think of.

“Do you feel like going for a drive?” she asked. “I need to pick my son up from school. On the way there, you can tell me everything you know.”

FIVE

Henry didn’t know where to begin. It wasn’t easy sounding sane while telling someone a killer faxed you his victim’s death notice before the murder occurred. But he was determined to try.

He also didn’t know what to make of the woman sitting next to him. Kat Campbell seemed to inject everything she did with relentless drive, whether it was marching out to her patrol car or buckling her seat belt. That quest for efficiency extended to her facial features. Her sharp chin jutted forward while her lips formed a grimace.

Yet Henry noticed small attempts at femininity peeking through her determined personality. Light pink gloss coated her lips. Tiny gold hoops hung from her ears. And some salon-produced highlights colored her obviously darkened hair. All that, coupled with shapely curves that couldn’t be erased by a severely starched uniform, made her look both tough and vulnerable—a soccer mom heading into battle.

And she drove like a maniac. Careening out of the station’s parking lot, they barely missed hitting a fire hydrant and had to swerve out of the way of an approaching car.

“First thing,” Kat said, steering through an alley that would take them onto Main Street, “when did you receive the death notice?”

“It was sitting in the fax machine when I got to my office this morning.”

“And what time was that?”

Henry clutched the dashboard as Kat jerked the steering wheel, making a sharp right onto Main Street. “Nine.”

“I found the body just after eight. I’m certain word trickled out to enough people for someone to send it before you got to work.”

“That doesn’t explain the time stamp,” Henry said. “And before you ask, yes, I already checked the fax machine to see if its date and time are set correctly. They are.”

“What about the fax number it was sent from?”

Henry knew what she was talking about. On every fax, the sending number appeared next to the time stamp.

“I don’t recognize it. Which means it wasn’t sent by a funeral home I regularly deal with. Or even by a funeral home at all.”

“So who do you think sent it?”

“If I had to guess,” Henry said, “I’d say it was sent by whoever killed George Winnick.”

On Main Street, traffic was plentiful. A UPS truck idled in the middle of the road, forcing all vehicles behind it to inch their way past. Kat huffed in frustration, her knuckles turning white as she tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

“Have you told anyone else about this?” she asked.

“No. I thought it was best to keep something like this quiet.”

Kat no longer appeared to be listening. Instead, she glanced in her rearview mirror before snapping her head toward the window, her hair whipping across her cheek. With her jaw set and the nostrils of her pert nose flaring, she said, “Hold on.”