A Slow Death (Max Drescher Book 1) by James Craig Read Free Book Online Page A

chair, Max lifted his hands behind his head. ‘So, how about the ex-husband went crazy with rage, shot them all,’ he postulated hopefully, ‘and left his bloody fingerprints all over the house, along with a forwarding address?’
    Michael shook his head. ‘Sadly not. Tobias Semin, husband number one, is not a likely suspect.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘He’s a professional golfer on the US PGA circuit.’
    ‘And golfers can’t kill?’ Max asked, not wishing to dismiss his initial idea so quickly.
    ‘He has a decent alibi; he was playing the second round of the Los Pollos Hermanos Texas Open in El Paso at the time of the killings. He shot a 78, apparently. Missed the cut.’
    Max grunted. ‘He could still have hired someone to do it.’
    ‘By all accounts,’ Michael responded, ‘Semin had a cordial enough relationship with his ex-wife. They had been divorced for well over ten years.’
    ‘People change.’
    ‘For the moment at least,’ Michael said firmly, ‘Semin is not a suspect. He was on the other side of the world, he got on with his ex- and why would he kill his own kid?’
    ‘Okay,’ Max reluctantly agreed with his sergeant’s assessment.
    ‘Anyway,’ Michael continued, ‘the whole thing was way too spectacular for a simple domestic. All of the victims were shot at close range by some kind of semi-automatic. There was no sign of a struggle from any of them. There was no sign of a forced entry. And the place was tossed – whoever did this, they were looking for something.’
    Max raised an eyebrow. ‘More than one guy?’
    ‘One shooter.’
    ‘A professional hit?’
    ‘Professional hit.’
    ‘But not ordered by the ex-husband,’ Max mused, cautiously coming back to his original thesis like a dog returning to his own vomit.
    ‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Michael said patiently. He was familiar with his boss flogging his theories to death. ‘We’re still looking into it but, as far as I can tell, Semin had no motive. The El Paso police interviewed him; they say he seemed pretty distraught.’
    ‘But he’s a golfer,’ Max persisted. To his mind, this was clear evidence of extreme moral turpitude and the possibility of homicidal leanings.
    Michael just shrugged. ‘It’s not against the law.’
    ‘Maybe it should be,’ the Kriminalinspektor harrumphed.
    ‘What have you got against golfers? Bernhard Langer’s great.’
    ‘Semin doesn’t sound much like Bernhard Langer,’ was all that Max could come up with by way of response.
    ‘That doesn’t necessarily make him a killer.’
    ‘Okay, okay. So we don’t think the wife is the key to this.’
    ‘There’s nothing to suggest that, so far,’ Michael agreed.
    ‘So the guy who got whacked, what was his name?’
    ‘Carl Beerfeldt.’
    ‘Carl Beerfeldt.  What about him? Does he have any ex-wives? Ex-girlfriends?’
    ‘No ex-wives. Nothing about any ex-girlfriends has come up, so far.’
    ‘Anyone pissed off enough at him to waste his whole family?’
    ‘Someone was, obviously.’ Michael took another sip of his beer.
    ‘But who?’ Max persisted, trying to build up a bit of momentum, bit of enthusiasm. ‘Did he have any shady dealings? Was he a crook?’
    ‘Not as far as we know.’
    Max began picking the label off his beer bottle. ‘Not as far as we know?’
    ‘He ran a bookshop.’
    ‘What kind of bookshop?’
    Michael shrugged. ‘Just books, all different kinds, I think.’
    ‘Porn? Sport? Politics? Crime?’
    ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I know.’
    ‘Okay.’ Max chugged on his beer. ‘Even in this city, no one is going to get so annoyed by a bookshop that they take out the owner and his whole fucking family in a hail of bullets.’
    ‘I guess not.’
    ‘So maybe the bookshop was just some kind of façade. What was Carl Beerfeldt really up to?’ Max gave his sergeant a sly look. ‘That’s what we’ve got to find out. Maybe he had some kind of double life.’
    The window directly above Michael’s