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Frank left the stunned group and walked over to the bed to get a closer look. Each of the others tentatively followed him. He used the barrel of his pistol to move the shiny red hair off of Jennifer’s face. Michelle gasped and stepped back when she saw the bloody blue and purple gash on the right side of Jennifer’s head. A large red smile had been drawn on the face that extended from each side of her mouth all the way up to her ears. It gave her the perverse look of half-weeping, half-smiling, circus clown. Frank rubbed his finger along the unreal smile and showed the red mark to Bennie.
“Blood,” he said quietly.
Lying across her body from her shoulder to her knee was what each of the five had already presumed to be the murder weapon. Frank supported their assumption when he pushed up on the head of the golf club with his gun barrel and the candle light shone on its bloody titanium face.
Officer Levinson walked around the bed carefully, trying not to knock over any of the candles. He aimed his flashlight beam at the sheet.
“Chief, take a look at this.”
All four walked around the naked body, now in the advanced stage of rigor mortis, and stared down at a crude drawing of a red heart on the white sheet. Like the obscene smile, it was drawn with Jennifer’s blood. Inside the heart were the letters, F.P.D.
Frank jerked when his cell-phone unexpectedly vibrated in his shirt pocket. He opened it and read the text message:
“Isn’t she beautiful?”
Bob Wilson stepped back instinctively against the bar, Branson’s gun still pressed against his stomach. As the gun barrel moved higher up his chest, Bob resigned himself to his inevitable death at the hands of his diminutive assassin. Suddenly,a gray blur flashed by his face and the gun fired three times in rapid succession causing him to jerk his head to the right. As the bullets whizzed by his ear, a mirror shattered and fell to the barroom floor.
He dropped down next to a barstool and crawled away from Branson and his gun. He looked up to see Roger Poe lifting Buddy Branson about two feet above the bar. As Roger shook the man, the gun knocked loose from Branson’s grip and fell onto the parquet floor. Like a lion shaking a baby antelope, Roger smashed Branson repeatedly against the counter. Each time Branson’s body hit , the unmistakable sound of breaking bones could be heard over the screaming of the bar patrons and Branson’s moans. In one final effort, Roger threw Branson across the counter and into the broken mirror frame. The
